Steve Macfarlane

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Slant Magazine
For 113 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 35% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 63% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 6.5 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Steve Macfarlane's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 59
Highest review score: 100 Level Five
Lowest review score: 0 Third Person
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 66 out of 113
  2. Mixed: 18 out of 113
  3. Negative: 29 out of 113
113 movie reviews
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    • 49 Metascore
    • 38 Steve Macfarlane
    7 Days in Entebbe
    The conflation of historical complexities makes for cheap pathos throughout, complete with weeping mothers and the seemingly endless dredging up of the terrorists' obvious moral equivalence.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 38 Steve Macfarlane
    All Eyez on Me
    The tension between verisimilitude and economy of storytelling dictates everything in All Eyez on Me.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 12 Steve Macfarlane
    Les Cowboys
    Never content to suffice as a mediocre thriller, Les Cowboys is a wellspring of embarrassment for all parties involved.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 12 Steve Macfarlane
    Survivor
    This is the kind of filmmaking that gets touted as "workmanlike" when it's really straight-laced to the point of tepidness.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 25 Steve Macfarlane
    Playing It Cool
    As characters endlessly digress on the differences between rom-coms and real life, the film evinces a schizophrenic relationship with its own inside-baseball cynicism.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 38 Steve Macfarlane
    The Tribe
    The film is more interested in performance and symbolism than in the meaning of its characters' words or their substitutive gestures.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 25 Steve Macfarlane
    Before I Go to Sleep
    It's hard to tell if the film is hampered or helped by the performances of its three stars, because it's so amateurishly written and directed that their participation beggars belief.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 38 Steve Macfarlane
    Camp X-Ray
    Peter Sattler's film feels quintessentially Sundance: an expensively mounted treatise on important issues that's terrified to dig in obsessively, yet so ramrod-stiff with indignation that it never comes anywhere near compelling entertainment.
    • 12 Metascore
    • 12 Steve Macfarlane
    Left Behind
    Left Behind is one of those films so deeply, fundamentally terrible that it feels unwittingly high-concept.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 25 Steve Macfarlane
    Hector and the Search for Happiness
    It culminates in a weepy climax that verifies its status as a proud hunk of propaganda from America's massive self-help industry.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 25 Steve Macfarlane
    Affluenza
    The film is like an episode of Gossip Girl that's mistaken itself for one of the great satires by Evelyn Waugh.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 0 Steve Macfarlane
    Third Person
    If the glue holding Crash's arcs together was Paul Haggis's belief in the power of racism, this time it's love.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 38 Steve Macfarlane
    Draft Day
    The cruelly obvious third act congeals the film as a wet-eyed monument to the Kevin Costner character's particular brand of American manliness, one that values gut instinct, it's implied, over cold and ruthless calculations.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 25 Steve Macfarlane
    300: Rise of an Empire
    Noam Murro gives the film nothing so much as a hit-refresh on the same glistening, impossibly golden and gray flecks of pixel-barf that have invaded the frames of every tent-pole studio release since the Bush administration.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 12 Steve Macfarlane
    Jamesy Boy
    The movie adds up to little more than an interminable bildungsroman, sunk early and often by the desperately miscast Spencer Lofranco.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 38 Steve Macfarlane
    Lone Survivor
    Like his prior "The Kingdom," Peter Berg's film pretends to dabble in a frothy moral ambiguity, swiftly betraying its true aims with trigger-happy jingoism.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 12 Steve Macfarlane
    Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here
    The research that went into the film seems a largesse, but it's compromised at every turn by filmmaker Amei Wallach's sloppy, pedantic delivery.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 38 Steve Macfarlane
    Inuk
    The film can boast of an exotic locale and rare potential, but in Mike Magidson's hands the filmmaking is disappointingly shopworn.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 38 Steve Macfarlane
    Salinger
    An outsized A&E Biography episode coursing with the strident urgency typical to anyone convinced they have something new to say on a long since played-out topic.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 38 Steve Macfarlane
    Paranoia
    Robert Luketic's supposedly down-and-dirty corporate espionage thriller undercuts itself at nearly every turn by shunning any potential relevancy.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 38 Steve Macfarlane
    Assault on Wall Street
    Uwe Boll's insistence on plugging genre tropes into his imagined idea of populism returns us to the same cynical place as Postal, except with none of the sizzle.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 38 Steve Macfarlane
    American Meat
    Despite the intensity of its scope and research, American Meat is a decidedly soft-hitting display of an overweening good faith that, frankly, just can't jibe with the times.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Steve Macfarlane
    Renoir
    A long string of picnics, portrait sessions, elaborate dinners, and countryside rituals, filtered through a svelte aesthetic pleasantness that ultimately corrodes its larger interests.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 38 Steve Macfarlane
    Stars in Shorts
    Generally, these shorts do little to advance their own arguments, but then again, they don't need to; if the short film is the arena of students, amateurs, and small-timers, then these are overdogs from frame one, coming off every bit as expensive and banal as their makers allow them to be.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 38 Steve Macfarlane
    The Condemned
    It adds up to a methodically bland, intellectually sluggish exercise in guilt-tripping that's nonetheless still more interested in its rich and sexy characters than the supposed unfortunates.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 25 Steve Macfarlane
    Would You Rather
    A shrill Indiewood torture porn that, despite promised shocks and revulsions, doesn't even have the conviction to hold its camera on the story's most appalling twists.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 25 Steve Macfarlane
    Lay the Favorite
    Hollywood celebrities romping around in a candy-colored Alexa-shot criminal underworld, pretty much as a means of passing time.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 12 Steve Macfarlane
    Café de Flore
    It's a pretty tired proposition to complain about movies being manipulative, but Café de Flore sets the bar especially low.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 38 Steve Macfarlane
    Damsel
    It's well established by now that the mythic Old West was always a trope written and controlled by men, and that there's really no bottom to which men won't stoop when women are a scarce quantity. In its mad rush toward performative allyship, the film exhausts every possible means of conveying those bombshells.

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