Stephanie Zacharek

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Film.com, Movieline, Salon, Time, Village Voice
For 2,389 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 53% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 45% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Stephanie Zacharek's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 65
Highest review score: 100 Paper Tiger
Lowest review score: 0 The Hunt
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,329 out of 2389
  2. Mixed: 869 out of 2389
  3. Negative: 191 out of 2389
2389 movie reviews
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    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Stephanie Zacharek
    Soul
    Overall, the movie is so ambitious—so intent on reminding us, every minute, that it really is a work of Big Ideas—that it ends up subverting its own charms. The Pixar masterminds often seem to think complicated is better, or at least just deeper. But to paraphrase Thelonious Monk, they’ve been making the wrong mistakes.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Salt of the Earth
    The movie Wenders and Juliano have made is a tribute that feels both grand and modest in scale: Just as Salgado's photographs do, it extends the notion of friends and family to include every citizen of the world.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    Sing Sing
    To watch this movie’s actors, many of them playing versions of the men they used to be not so long ago—to see them incorporating classic pop-locking moves into their swordplay, or tinkering with the phrasing of Hamlet’s soliloquy until it rings true to their experience—is to witness a cautious but joyful reawakening.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Replacement Killers
    The Replacement Killers has a plot -- barely -- but no story.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    Raising Victor Vargas
    A modest and tightly focused picture, and its very directness makes it piercingly intimate.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Stephanie Zacharek
    Avatar
    It is a very expensive-looking, very flashy entertainment, albeit one that groans under the weight of clumsy storytelling in the second half and features some of the most godawful dialogue this side of "Attack of the Clones."
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    20th Century Women
    This picture has a more melancholy, resonant edge. And as with "Beginners," there’s an extraordinary performance at its heart: Bening is terrific, getting at the way middle-aged loneliness and contentment can be so intermingled that it’s almost impossible to tell which is which.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    Pina
    What's remarkable about Pina is how democratic it is, how casual it is about opening up the world of modern dance to people who know, or perhaps care, little about it.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    Hugo
    Hugo states, in its adamant, straightforward poetry, that old things do matter.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 87 Stephanie Zacharek
    Gloria
    I recently heard someone describe Gloria as a midlife-crisis drama, which stunned me. In the most convenient terms, I guess that’s what it is. But what Lelio and Garcia pull off here is so delicate and sturdy that it defies such easy categorization.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    Drag Me to Hell
    Unlike so much contemporary horror, it's devoid of sadism and mean-spiritedness. The looseness Raimi allows himself here results in an especially joyous kind of filmmaking, the sort where the filmmaker's delight in scaring us (and making us laugh) becomes part of the movie's fabric.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    Quills
    It's an unapologetic dazzler, which is why it's never overwhelmed by its themes.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Stephanie Zacharek
    Up in the Air
    Comes off not as topical but as opportunist. The picture is brushed with a fine glaze of slickness, a product sealed in a blister pack. It's like airplane air -- it has a packaged freshness that isn't really fresh at all.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    One Night in Miami
    The actors, all terrific, serve as able guides through the material.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    Moonage Daydream
    The beauty of Brett Morgen’s velvet-and-facepaint collage Moonage Daydream is that it doesn’t try to be definitive. Instead, it’s a glide through Bowie’s career, hardly complete yet somehow capturing both the spirit and the genius of this most enigmatic and alluring artist.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    BlacKkKlansman
    BlacKkKlansman is both hilarious and exquisitely direct, and had it been made before November 2016, you might call Lee’s approach a little alarmist. But if anything, he’s restrained. This is an angry film as well as a hugely entertaining one, and Lee has complete control over its shifting tone, minute by minute.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Stephanie Zacharek
    Janet Planet
    This is a child’s-eye view of a parent rendered without a sheen of nostalgia—it feels less like a story being told by a thoughtful adult looking back than one springing directly from the fierce, untamed mind of a child.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    Under the Skin
    Very little in Under the Skin is clear at all. Its secrets unspool in mysterious, supple ribbons, but that's part of its allure, and its great beauty.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Post
    Even if its goals are lofty, the movie is so fleet and entertaining that you never feel you’re being lectured to. This is a superhero movie for real grownups.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Stephanie Zacharek
    Footnote
    What Cedar captures here is the way a father and son can be bound so tightly they almost choke the air out of one another. You can't exactly call it affection; it's that far more complicated thing we call kinship.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
    Watching The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, it struck me that weaving a touching little tale about a death-camp friendship is actually a pretty bad way to teach kids about the Holocaust.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    Palm Springs
    The movie is so light on its feet that it never feels forced or didactic, even when it asks us to confront piercing truths about love and the elusive meaning of happiness.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Stephanie Zacharek
    James White
    When James White really digs in, it's an affecting portrait of grief and of feeling lost in life.
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