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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    • 49 Metascore
    • 63 Stephen Hunter
    Coneheads
    Occasionally quite amusing, it just doesn't build.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 20 Stephen Hunter
    Herbie Fully Loaded
    Here, by its cooperation with the Disney factory, NASCAR says it's also warm 'n' cuddly, and that if you love your magic bug, it'll repay you with victory. Why does it allow itself to be co-opted by a story that diminishes the skills, experience and talent it takes to win?
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Stephen Hunter
    The Blue Angel
    The Blue Angel it's clear to Von Sternberg, and to us, that he's connected with some pure being of cinema, whose power to ignite an audience was unstoppable. She became a great star.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Stephen Hunter
    Shakespeare in Love
    The movie becomes something quite rare and magical: a text about a text that is also full of life. In other words, it's a true first: It's both postmodern and fun!
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Hunter
    Metroland
    The movie is bittersweet, adult, with a fair eye toward men's eternal spirit of the infantile, and knowing. Possibly it's too slick, but in some awkward way it sums up the true essence of adult life, which is just sort of getting along without doing too much harm. [30 Apr 1999]
    • Washington Post
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Stephen Hunter
    Lake Placid
    It's like a summer stock "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," with the proviso that occasionally a giant snaggle-tooth monster slobbers onstage and eats George or Martha.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Hunter
    Eight Legged Freaks
    This is postmodern folk art, a tricky transaction in which the work isn't just a story, it's a genre survey, a homage, a meditation, a parody and, oh yeah, while it's at it, still a pretty good story.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Hunter
    The Constant Gardener
    Isn't quite a great espionage movie or a great Africa movie, but in a summer of heat and wind, it's the next best thing.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Hunter
    Anywhere But Here
    So closely observed, so funny and so true to the junk that is everybody's real--as opposed to movie--life that it comes to feel like some kind of a miracle.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Stephen Hunter
    Igby Goes Down
    A dead-on sense of how rich kids live and talk today, a sense of the melancholy of a dysfunctional family, and some great dark laughs.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Stephen Hunter
    She's the One
    By contrast, the most amusing character is the ever-affable John Mahoney as the patriarch of the wayward Fitzpatrick clan. He gives consistently terrible advice, which his sons follow, which messes up their messy lives even more. I like that in a father.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Hunter
    54
    The movie is almost completely uninteresting on the story level but fascinating as a work of imagined reconstruction and anthropology and as a study of the theory and practice of Studio 54.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Hunter
    Stateside
    So unexpected and unpredictable and so full of tiny grace notes that its ultimate collapse seems almost irrelevant.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Hunter
    The Lost World: Jurassic Park
    For the first half-hour, the movie is pretty crummy. Even Spielberg appears bored with the script's lame setup, its quick evocation of the first movie and its wan establishment of human villains and heroes. Like any 50-year-old adolescent, he can't wait for the dinosaurs. And when he gets to them, the movie ceases to bear any relationship to conceits of narrative and becomes a sheer adrenalin spike to the brain stem.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Stephen Hunter
    All the Real Girls
    The movie may take five extra minutes to end and could do with one less sunset but . . . other than that it's damned near perfect.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Hunter
    Grindhouse
    The films are bloody, stupid and buoyant in a kind of infantile way, celebrating mayhem, flesh and gore. Planet Terror is by far the livelier.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Hunter
    Terror's Advocate
    The result is a panorama of European radicalism. Depending on your politics, you may think "long live the revolution" or "curse the day the CIA ended its assassination program."
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Stephen Hunter
    Thunderheart
    So much of "Thunderheart" is so good and its intentions are so noble that it pains me to reach the ultimate judgment that the movie is a mess.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 20 Stephen Hunter
    Wonderland
    Overblown, overheated, overdirected, overacted, overlong.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Hunter
    Lost in La Mancha
    The documentary is fascinating, but hardly enjoyable. It's like watching ants eat an elephant.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Stephen Hunter
    Curse of the Golden Flower
    Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower is a kind of feast, an over-the-top, all-stops-pulled-out lollapalooza that means to play kitschy and grand at once.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Hunter
    Solaris
    It could hardly be called rip-roaring. I should report that it drives about a quarter of the audience out of the theater before it is half over. That's because it's slower than molasses in Siberia.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Hunter
    Fugitive Pieces
    Everyone in the movie, from Dillane to (especially) Serbedzija down to the child actor Robbie Kay (as young Beer), is fabulous, and Podeswa has an ability to distill history into a few powerful images. The movie, however, is circular in structure and keeps reiterating points it has already made. For some, it will be a long sit.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 20 Stephen Hunter
    Double Jeopardy
    Beginning with an intriguing premise, which it manages to squander in record time, it turns out to be a thinly imagined, thinly acted, silly exercise in car crashes, chases and nasty outbursts of generic violence.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Hunter
    Love & Basketball
    This one has crossover hit written all over 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.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Hunter
    Wild Things
    The movie is as tawdry as someone else's lingerie, yet not without a certain prurient watchability.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 Stephen Hunter
    Titan A.E.
    It continually crashes and burns on its own banality.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Hunter
    Nacho Libre
    Is it funny? Now and then. Stupid? Very. Racist? Possibly. Ugly? Profoundly. Wild? Undeniably. Singular? Completely.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Hunter
    The Ghost and the Darkness
    The movie has considerable intensity, particularly when it views hunting as a form of counter-guerrilla warfare, with the gunboys wandering into the thickets, daring the big cats to come bite them and get a bullet for their trouble. It's best trick, though, is a straight steal from "Jaws" in which the lion -- I couldn't tell if it was "Ghost" or "Darkness" -- slides across the savannah in the high grass, just a form in the seething stalks, its tail alone visible, like a fin in the glassy water. There's a primordiality, a natural human fear of things with teeth and fangs, really provoked by that image. Too bad the movie couldn't have checked into that vein more often. [11 Oct 1996]
    • Baltimore Sun
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