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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    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Steve Macfarlane
    Web Junkie
    Without a frame of footage nor a single interview presented from outside the camp, the documentary shows a capitalist nightmare that accords its victims zero wiggle room.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Steve Macfarlane
    The Almost Man
    The script is perspicacious in making Henrik's bad choices understandable enough emotionally, but also nudges the audience toward wishing the man would wise up.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Steve Macfarlane
    Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater
    Between their wildly different bodies of work, a shared appeal emerges: to stop, look, listen, and consider not just what's in front of you, but also where it came from and where it might be going.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Steve Macfarlane
    Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
    This is a summer blockbuster contingent on grand bargains, tactical retreats, and a ferocious, inevitable shock-and-awe campaign.
    • 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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Steve Macfarlane
    The Rover
    Robert Pattinson's stare is almost thousand-yard enough to make the film's sense of tragedy feel downright Greek.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Steve Macfarlane
    Cyber-Seniors
    The film is too standard-issue in its making to probe beyond the rough outlines of a success story.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Steve Macfarlane
    Sol LeWitt
    What first feels like a neurotic avoidance of Sol LeWitt the man instead becomes a kind of mirage of his life, as though he managed to evaporate into his body of work.
    • 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.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Steve Macfarlane
    The Unknown Known
    Viewers' tolerance for Errol Morris's apparent sheepishness will hinge on their prior appreciation of the filmmaker's investigative acumen.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 63 Steve Macfarlane
    Cesar Chavez
    Not unlike Michael Peña's prior supporting roles, Chavez is marked by an explosive anger kept under a cherubic, sweet-natured mask, providing the surprise lacking in the story's text.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Steve Macfarlane
    Obvious Child
    Whatever your foreknowledge of low-budget Brooklyn dramedies, it's impossible that Gillian Robespierre's film won't lob you at least a few curveballs.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Steve Macfarlane
    Cheap Thrills
    The film's clearest winner is Pat Healy, whose depiction of a man willing to corrode his entire life to provide for his wife and kid feels true despite the script's silliest moments.
    • 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Steve Macfarlane
    About Last Night
    Kevin Hart turns an essentially crude wingman into the conscience of the film's torturous, nettled discourse on romance.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 75 Steve Macfarlane
    Love Is in the Air
    The film is knowingly sarcastic in its self-awareness without falling back on the gawky meta-squealing of its American rom-com counterparts.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Steve Macfarlane
    Generation War
    The perverse thrill of seeing less-than-popular considerations of Nazism on screen fades hurriedly to the old ache of seeing any kind of questions about Nazism answered noxiously.
    • 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.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Steve Macfarlane
    Grudge Match
    It will come as a surprise to none that Grudge Match is so wantonly clichéd that to watch it is to explore the outer perimeters of one's own tolerance for a specific type of feel-good sports film.
    • 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.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Steve Macfarlane
    The Last Days on Mars
    The film's visual construction is spare, drawing power from its locations and quietly matted miniatures, though ultimately it succumbs to powering a series of cheap thrills.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Steve Macfarlane
    Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?
    A magnificently quizzical diagram of two ceaselessly inquiring minds in perfect tandem, like a raw X-ray of atomized creativity.
    • 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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Steve Macfarlane
    Capital
    Costa-Gavras's new film is more a funhouse-mirror panegyric (albeit on an exhausted topic) than the staid thriller promised by its press materials.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Steve Macfarlane
    Enzo Avitabile Music Life
    Even if the film never transcends its subject matter, Jonathan Demme's light touch adds up to a charming portrait, only rarely fumbling into hagiography.
    • 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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Steve Macfarlane
    Herb & Dorothy 50X50
    Dorothy Vogel is less the soft-spoken housewife from the first film than a businesswoman both shrewd and mousy, and her trajectory affords the film its closest semblance to a story.
    • 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.
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