Stephen Hunter

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Baltimore Sun, Washington Post
For 1,039 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 47% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 51% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 7.5 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Stephen Hunter's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 58
Highest review score: 100 The Simpsons Movie
Lowest review score: 0 Simply Irresistible
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 518 out of 1039
  2. Mixed: 275 out of 1039
  3. Negative: 246 out of 1039
1039 movie reviews
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    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Stephen Hunter
    Apocalypto
    Gibson may not be much of a deep thinker, but he's a heck of a storyteller. Apocalypto turns out to be not a case of Montezuma's revenge but of Gibson's: It's something entirely unexpected, a sinewy, taut poem of action.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Hunter
    Chopper
    It's a great style, it's a fabulous performance, but it never quite finds what it's searching for.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Hunter
    The World's Fastest Indian
    As the movie's tag line has it, it's based on a hell of a story. Too bad they didn't just tell it.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Stephen Hunter
    Batman Returns
    This baby takes place in Tim Burton's id. It's a great place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Hunter
    The Edukators
    What makes the film so affecting, however, is its matter-of-fact evocation of character. Each person in the four-character cast is vivid and specific and believable.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Hunter
    Pulse
    Like the best horror movies, it doesn't beat you over the head, splatter you, or fold, spindle and mutilate you. Rather, slowly and subtly, it creeps you out. You may go home and throw out your computer and lock the doors.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Hunter
    Bread and Tulips
    Nicely done, sweet, delicately comic and a complete delight.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Hunter
    The Bourne Identity
    As for Damon, this may not be a performance so much as an appearance. But he cares so utterly, it works.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Hunter
    Why We Fight
    Memo to left-wing anti-Bushies: Stories like this work. Don't lecture. Tell stories! Much better!
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Hunter
    Son of the Bride
    Even the digressions are funny.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Stephen Hunter
    My Cousin Vinny
    It's hardly brilliant. But it's easygoing and occasionally quite funny and ultimately satisfying.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 30 Stephen Hunter
    X2: X-Men United
    Of the many comic book superhero movies, this is by far the lamest, the loudest, the longest. Good Lord, what an epic sit. My rear end deserves a medal...I wish I could say it wasn't so, but for most of us, this "X" marks a splat.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Stephen Hunter
    Dear Diary
    It's a small, amusing movie that's long on charming affability. [03 Feb 1995]
    • Baltimore Sun
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Hunter
    Notting Hill
    So the film has this weird postmodernist taint: It has a self-aware script that cleverly plays off the reality of its own cast and their famous real-life contretemps. It's smart and knowing.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 30 Stephen Hunter
    Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
    It's too bloody to be funny and too silly to be dramatic and too self-indulgent to be anything other than what it is, one more bad movie.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Stephen Hunter
    Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
    For my generation, Revenge of the Sith is a brilliant consummation to a promise made a long time ago, far, far away, in a galaxy called 1977.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Hunter
    The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
    Andrew Dominik's long and bizarre movie about the American outlaw appears to stick close enough to the facts so that historians won't be able to complain. But it languishes toward torpor.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Hunter
    Fracture
    The good part about this okay, but way less than great, thriller is that you won't notice how cheesy it is until the heartburn from the popcorn has eased. In these jaded times, that's a bargain.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Hunter
    One Day in September
    The film, built of interviews with participants, is fast-paced, utterly absorbing and ultimately tragic.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Hunter
    The Italian Job
    For two hours, the bliss of the brainless fluff is yours for the asking. It cheerfully puts the escape back in escapism.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 30 Stephen Hunter
    Gladiator
    Friends, Washingtonians, countrymen, I come not to praise Gladiator but to bury it.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Hunter
    An Ideal Husband
    Parker stays with and even streamlines Wilde's clever manipulations of betrayals and lies and plots and counterplots. Yet the film never feels stagy.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Hunter
    Charlie Wilson's War
    This movie probably gets the Washington process better than any since Otto Preminger's underrated "Advise & Consent" in 1962. It's not about men of virtue doing the impossible, but men of flaws doing the doable, but just barely.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Hunter
    The Business of Strangers
    After an hour of brilliant, bitchy dialogue and deceit, it simply runs out of energy; or possibly the budget ran out.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Hunter
    Young Adam
    It's a diversion, well crafted by Mackenzie from a book by Alexander Trocchi, but little more than that.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Hunter
    Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont
    It's all expectable, it's all enjoyable: British theatrical professionalism at the highest pitch.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Hunter
    Open Range
    It's a fine, old-fashioned 2 1/4 hours at the Bijou.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Hunter
    Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
    A considerable kick, though it would have helped if one of the boys had wiped off the lens of the camera once in a while.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Stephen Hunter
    Deep Cover
    Deep Cover is good fun.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Stephen Hunter
    Reality Bites
    The best -- the brilliant -- bits of Reality Bites etch in epigram, anecdote and brittle, dazzling dialogue the inner life of young people who want desperately to believe but haven't decided in what. It loves them but it doesn't pity or sentimentalize them. It's tough as nails.
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