Steve Persall

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Tampa Bay Times
For 1,125 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 65% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 33% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 1.5 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Steve Persall's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 Vertigo
Lowest review score: 0 The Last Airbender
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 708 out of 1125
  2. Mixed: 310 out of 1125
  3. Negative: 107 out of 1125
1125 movie reviews
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    • 66 Metascore
    • 58 Steve Persall
    Restoration
    Hoffman's eye for detail isn't matched by his jolting way with a narrative, which an extra year's preparation and editing from its original planned release didn't help. One comes away with the suspicion that Restoration should have been a longer movie, and feeling somewhat relieved that it isn't. [02 Feb 1996, p.5]
    • Tampa Bay Times
    • 90 Metascore
    • 50 Steve Persall
    Blue Is the Warmest Color
    Kechiche's doting on entwined limbs, thrusting pelvises and oral stimulation, all carefully posed and continued longer than necessary to get his point across, races beyond titillation to creepy voyeurism.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 58 Steve Persall
    Phantom Thread
    Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread is passionless window-shop cinema, each static tableau lovingly arranged for display and easy dusting. Its centerpiece is a mannequin, albeit played by Daniel Day-Lewis, whose gift for keeping anything interesting is seldom so necessary.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 58 Steve Persall
    Life Is Sweet
    Leigh's characters merely act in a goofy and irritating fashion until their dramatic pay-off scenes. This uneven style cheats fine actors out of the chance to shade their roles rather than rely upon black-and-white emotions. [6 Mar. 1992, p.10]
    • Tampa Bay Times
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Steve Persall
    The Hero
    Every fallen-star cliche director/co-writer Brett Haley employs goes down smoother with Elliott's baritone and unforced cool. He has deserved a spotlight role for years and now deserves a finer one.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 58 Steve Persall
    Kubo and the Two Strings
    Kubo and the Two Strings is lovely to behold, if viewers manage to keep their eyes open. It's an animated doozy and drowser at once, an uncomfortable mix of Miyazaki-style imagination and generic dullness.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Steve Persall
    Arthur
    Brand is amusing, in a nutty "Get Him to the Greek" sort of way, while Moore delivered one of the funniest performances ever.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 42 Steve Persall
    How Do You Know
    A terrible title for a not-much-better movie, missing a grammatically correct question mark and most of the point with romantic comedies.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Steve Persall
    Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
    Wright is an insanely funny filmmaker (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) yet only the front half of that description carries over to Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Steve Persall
    Out to Sea
    Out to Sea is nothing more than a puffed-up Love Boat episode sailing on risque gags that wouldn't be amusing at all if they weren't recited by old folks. [02 July 1997, p.1D]
    • Tampa Bay Times
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Steve Persall
    The Post
    Steven Spielberg’s The Post is a fake news movie, a true story told phony to further an agenda.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Steve Persall
    The Age of Adaline
    Like its heroine, The Age of Adaline is afraid of its emotions, and stuck flat-footed in time.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Steve Persall
    Coco
    It’s so respectful that vibrancy suffers. Coco is a bright pinata of a movie that breaks and nothing falls out.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Steve Persall
    The Big Short
    McKay's frustration about the financial crisis is obvious, his instinct of how to engage viewers less so. Buyer beware.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Steve Persall
    The Last Word
    MacLaine keeps things interesting, snapping off one-liners with precision that comes only through experience.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Steve Persall
    Fifty Shades Darker
    Fifty Shades Darker is what you'd expect from encoring a regrettable one-night stand. Not a keeper, but nothing to gnaw off your arm about.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Steve Persall
    It Comes at Night
    It Comes at Night lays down a heavy layer of dreadful promise and doesn't follow through. Edgerton's fine performance is overshadowed by a title and ad campaign springing a bait-and-switch scam on horror fans.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 58 Steve Persall
    Chungking Express
    Chungking Express essentially tells two muted love stories set in a bustling locale, without fully involving the audience in either. [3 May 1996, p.5]
    • Tampa Bay Times
    • 78 Metascore
    • 58 Steve Persall
    Zootopia
    Good intentions don't always make for good movies. Case in point: Zootopia, a Disney film with more on its mind than animated fun and fuzzies. So much, in fact, that it loses track of what audiences expect, what they're being sold.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 42 Steve Persall
    Sugar Hill
    Sugar Hill is a movie that manages to be as self-destructive as its two central characters, Harlem drug-runners Roemello and Raynathan Skuggs. Like those two desperate (and disparate) brothers, Leon Ichaso's film ultimately wastes its potential and our time. [26 Feb 1994, p.7B]
    • Tampa Bay Times
    • 77 Metascore
    • 58 Steve Persall
    Calvary
    Calvary becomes a lurid Agatha Christie yarn with something important to say about the church and Ireland that McDonagh can't fully articulate. Pulp keeps getting in the way.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 42 Steve Persall
    Pain & Gain
    The movie's best performance — and worst defamation — belongs to Tony Shalhoub, playing the first victim as a conniving, egotistical jerk who deserves to be kidnapped, maimed and ruined financially.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 58 Steve Persall
    Dave
    A comedy that moves as slow and uncertain as a bill through Congress. [07 May 1993, p.8]
    • Tampa Bay Times
    • 76 Metascore
    • 58 Steve Persall
    Margin Call
    At least the latest movie about the financial meltdown doesn't make the same mistake as the last one. It also doesn't prove that a fictional film can explain the downturn's causes and effects better than a documentary.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 58 Steve Persall
    Hello, My Name Is Doris
    Field's eager-to-please performance makes [Showalter's] shovelfuls of sugar go down easier.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 42 Steve Persall
    Man on a Ledge
    Man on a Ledge makes bigger leaps of logic than Nick will if he fails a gravity test. If the transparent sting springing him from Sing Sing doesn't roll your eyes, then wait for the climax when Nick becomes a kind of plainclothes Spider-Man.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Steve Persall
    Thor: The Dark World
    Poor Thor. Dude can't even hold center stage in his own movie. He's the Asgardian god of stolen thunder, upstaged at each ab turn by Loki, malarkey and Odin's eyepatch.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 50 Steve Persall
    Fifty Shades Freed
    There is nowhere logical for the story to go since it wasn’t intended to run this long. Sex is everything in this movie because nothing emotional or thrilling registers beyond the moment.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 58 Steve Persall
    Darkest Hour
    Gary Oldman may finally get that Oscar he has long deserved for Darkest Hour, a movie that seems constructed to do little else.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Steve Persall
    Beauty and the Beast
    With each musical reprise and imitated frame, Condon continues a fight of comparisons he can't win. Either imitate a classic faithfully or leave out the songs and make your own version. Or just leave perfection alone.
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