Stephanie Zacharek

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Film.com, Movieline, Salon, Time, Village Voice
For 2,397 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 1 point 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: 1,335 out of 2397
  2. Mixed: 871 out of 2397
  3. Negative: 191 out of 2397
2397 movie reviews
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    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Stephanie Zacharek
    Two of Us
    Two of Us keeps you guessing where it’s headed until the very end. But it’s not giving too much away to say that it’s about the unconscious dance steps a person takes as she moves toward the person she calls home.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Stephanie Zacharek
    Malcolm & Marie
    Levinson has ripped quite a few rock ’em-sock ’em pages from the John Cassavetes tradition, as well as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But if the couple’s fighting is amusing at times, it’s mostly lacerating and circular in a way that courts boredom rather than sympathy or any other deep, honest response.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Sparks Brothers
    If you’ve only sort-of heard of Sparks, The Sparks Brothers is a great place to begin. If you’re already a fan, you’ll go nuts for it. And if you’re like me, you’ll never lose track of Sparks again.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    Passing
    Passing is a beautifully rendered story that may be first and foremost about racial identity, though it enfolds so many ancillary reflections within its petals—on the power of longing and jealousy, and on the truth that we all make choices that define us as individuals—that anyone can respond to it.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Dig
    The Dig—set in Suffolk, England, in 1939 and based on a true story of buried treasure—is a restorative escape, a smart, gentle picture whose transportive qualities should not be underestimated. It’s the cabin-fever-relief movie of this bleak midwinter.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    The White Tiger
    There’s poverty in every country, and in every country there are people yearning to do better for themselves. But The White Tiger—especially Gourav’s performance, marvelous in its intensity and shifting tones—captures that drive in a specific and persuasive way.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Stephanie Zacharek
    Promising Young Woman
    This is lip-gloss misanthropy packaged as feminist manifesto, clever but not smart, cynical without being perceptive or particularly passionate. Women are angry for good reason. They also deserve better movies than this one.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    One Night in Miami
    The actors, all terrific, serve as able guides through the material.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Dissident
    The Dissident feels essential. This is a somber piece of work; it’s not likely to cheer anyone up. But if the details of the Khashoggi case aren’t for the faint of heart, facing the facts squarely is at least somewhat cleansing. And as the story of a man who put his life on the line for his ideals, it’s as bracing a narrative as any novelist could invent.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Stephanie Zacharek
    Pieces of a Woman
    Movies about tough subjects don’t need to be torture, and if Pieces of a Woman proves anything, it’s that too much is sometimes also not enough.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Stephanie Zacharek
    Herself
    There’s a great deal of slow story buildup until the last 10 minutes or so, at which point about three movies’ worth of plot hit at once. This gives the picture’s ending a rushed feel that’s vaguely unsatisfying. It’s not that you want things to be harder for Sandra; but her challenges—particularly her emotional conflicts—might have been explored in a little more depth.
    • 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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Stephanie Zacharek
    Wonder Woman 1984
    As an amusement designed to take the world’s mind off its problems for a few hours, Wonder Woman 1984 is perfectly suitable. But it’s also OK to wish for less noise and more wonder, especially in a world that’s filled with the former and sorely in need of the latter.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Stephanie Zacharek
    Black Bear
    Your enjoyment of Black Bear will depend on your tolerance for cerebral game-playing for art’s sake. But if the movie is sometimes a little too hung up on its somewhat tortured premise, it still offers some subtle, dusky pleasures. Chief among them is Plaza’s performance.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Stephanie Zacharek
    Hillbilly Elegy
    Hillbilly Elegy isn’t as terrible as the trailers make it look, but as an enterprise it’s just all-around sad, a movie that courts sympathy for its characters yet ends up only as a requiem for itself.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    Small Axe: Mangrove
    Mangrove, too, tells a sometimes harrowing real-life story. Yet it has a lightness of touch that McQueen hasn’t shown before. Mangrove, as is all of Small Axe, is personal for McQueen — he is of West Indian descent himself — and his affection for these characters, as well as his passion for their cause, ignites his telling of their story.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Life Ahead
    The surprises of The Life Ahead are the gentle kind: There are no wild revelations or transformations, no hyper-dramatic turnabouts. But the movie has a quietly enjoyable power.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Stephanie Zacharek
    Mank
    For all its intelligence, Mank isn’t anything close to a masterpiece; it’s more a pleasurable feat of derring-do, a movie made with care and cunning and peopled by actors who know exactly what they’re doing.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    On the Rocks
    There’s no tortured drama, no grand revelation. The movie is funny in the gentlest way, and how could it not be? Coppola’s script is built around Murray’s deadpan savoir faire, with Jones’ forthright radiance as a foil.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Stephanie Zacharek
    Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
    If Borat Subsequent Moviefilm makes you laugh, what does your laughter say about you? My laughter told me — reminded me — how angry I am. As 2020 rounds to a close, I have zero sympathy for white Americans who are happy to show kindness to a stranger — just as long as that stranger, too, is white.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Stephanie Zacharek
    Rebecca
    Wheatley — who specializes in thrillers with a macabre vibe, like "Kill List" (2011) and "High-Rise" (2015) — overhandles and overworks the dough of Du Maurier’s basic story. His movie is sometimes dumb, sometimes dull and sometimes entertaining; it just doesn’t know what it wants to be, and that lack of vision drains its potential power.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    Bruce Springsteen's Letter to You
    With seamless grace, Zimny matches vintage footage of Springsteen and the band with their current-day versions; we see how the young faces have blended into the old. Aging, because it means surviving, is the best.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Stephanie Zacharek
    David Byrne’s American Utopia
    A work of great joy and expressiveness, a tower of song with room for everybody.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Forty-Year-Old Version
    It’s a love letter to the gorgeous, disorderly patchwork that is New York. It’s also a story about how we all need to reinvent ourselves as we age, and part of that is to be more forgiving of ourselves.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Stephanie Zacharek
    Charm City Kings
    Charm City Kings lands on an elegiac, bittersweet note rather than a happy one, and doesn’t feature as many crazy, exhilarating bike stunts as you might hope. But in its view of a world where kids make their own fun and also, sometimes, their own bad choices, it rings true. Sometimes becoming a man is the hardest stunt to pull off.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Stephanie Zacharek
    Dick Johnson Is Dead
    Johnson and her father share a sense of humor, and the bond between them informs the finest moments of Dick Johnson Is Dead. Yet I can’t stop thinking about the friend crying, alone, in the church, so verklempt he forgot he was in a movie — one place where this documentary’s joyful dark humor isn’t as amusing as it should be.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Stephanie Zacharek
    Save Yourselves!
    Save Yourselves! was completed well before the pandemic hit—it played at Sundance in January — but it’s one of those works that has magically landed at the right time. It takes itself just seriously enough, but not too seriously.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Boys in the Band
    The Boys in the Band is anything but a relic. This version, produced by Ryan Murphy and performed by the same cast that appeared in the play’s 2018 revival on Broadway, is like an unusually strong telescope, giving us a clear and vivid view into a not-so-distant past.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    Kajillionaire
    Its thoughtfulness somehow shines through its heavy-duty stylistic quirks. And it has a breezier, more relaxed vibe than either of July’s earlier movies thanks to one glorious, effervescent performance: when Gina Rodriguez appears, she turns the picture around — it begins to truly breathe — and she carries it along straight to the end. If you see Kajillionaire for no other reason, see it for her.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Stephanie Zacharek
    The Trial of the Chicago 7
    Sorkin takes a rather dense, complicated court case—one peopled with figures who clung to stubborn differences even in the context of their shared ideals—and keeps it aloft every minute, as if he were following the aerodynamic principles of hang-gliding rather than moviemaking. Best of all, he brings out the best each actor in this enormous ensemble cast has to offer; every character is rendered with jewelers-loupe clarity.
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