Tasha Robinson

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For 807 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 57% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 41% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 1.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Tasha Robinson's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 64
Highest review score: 100 Son of Saul
Lowest review score: 0 Sydney White
Score distribution:
  1. Negative: 66 out of 807
807 movie reviews
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    Seen today, The King And The Mockingbird doesn’t have the tight pacing or propulsive narrative of modern animated stories, or the consistency of a film made to a specific house style. It’s recognizably the work of an idiosyncratic artist dealing in bizarre caricature, and exploring weird ideas... But its visual design and movement are striking, and its story beats are intriguingly unpredictable.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    Part of the point may be how trauma simplifies life by stripping away everything inessential, but just as there’s little satisfaction in watching Daisy pursue an unworthy goal, there’s little satisfaction in watching a specific, colorful, keenly felt portrait become such a familiar story.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    Unlike so many "Seven" followers, it makes its missteps memorably, and offers a variety of stylistic rewards by way of compensation.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    A gorgeous film, framed with an eye that makes every country seem beautiful in one way or another. It's probably fitting that the human element seems fragile and flat by comparison, but the contrast leaves Beautiful Country fairly bland.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    By establishing some of the Glade’s castes, rituals, and personalities, the writers make an incredibly contrived scenario seem a little more tangible. But once that high gear is engaged, the IQ and ambition drop precipitously.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    While Black Nativity often lacks polish and restraint, at least it never lacks for soul.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    It's all innocuous, forgettable fun, but it's firmly aimed at those who find underwear endlessly funny.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    Sometimes too pat and sometimes ragged with omissions and confusions, but it's still a fascinating look outside of that familiar world and into a harsher one.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    Like Ghibli’s features, Kingdom is a friendly, elegiac, approachable movie. But it lacks the studio’s well-polished sense of energy and commitment.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    The lack of plot coherence is a lingering irritant in a film that otherwise seems to be trying to improve on its cinematic-series forebears.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    Reichert and Zaman don’t editorialize, which keeps Remote Area Medical from being preachy, forceful, or didactic, but also leaves it feeling shapeless.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    Three Of Hearts seems like an unwieldy mating of two films: one a glossy documentary about the fictionalized perfection that three lovers and a director wanted to believe in, and another about the all-too-human truth.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    It's daring and it's different.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    Despicable Me 2 has its charms, in its spritely pacing, a rapid-fire gag-delivery system that hits as often as it misses, and especially in its innovative, expansive use of 3-D space.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    Yes
    Like Potter's "Orlando" and "The Tango Lesson," Yes showcases a craft and a hushed, vibrant intensity that prove compelling even when the story loses its focus.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    Third Person’s considerable strengths generally come from the actors.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    It’s amiable goofiness, delivered at an emphatic, feverish pitch. Inevitably, what works fine in 11-minute episodes becomes strained over 90 minutes on the big screen, especially during a grating musical number about teamwork.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    It's all too easy to dismiss the characters' troubles as entirely of their own making. But the cast's fearless, evocative performances help a great deal.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    It’s hard to fight the feeling that The Hobbit simply isn’t an epic story, and the efforts to expand it into one leave it feeling like an anvil crammed into a sock: The sock is taking on some weird shapes, and it’s being stretched awfully thin.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    Marquis herself rarely comes off as less than fascinating, in spite of her cheaply titillating material.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    It isn’t just that Gilliam’s ragged, wild style is easily recognizable after nearly four decades of feature films, it’s a sense that Zero Theorem recycles its tone, visual design, and plot points directly from his past work.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    It's important to go in knowing the central secret of the movie: Nothing exciting is going to happen. Ever. Armed with that knowledge, viewers should be able to settle down and enjoy the extremely low-key, melancholy character study that plays out between a handful of excellent actors.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    The many-threaded approach makes it feel narratively rich and sophisticated, but it also shorthands and shortchanges some of the most interesting characters.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    Not everything Perry's voices say seems relevant to his central thesis, but they speak fervently and colorfully, and their intensity is compelling even when their message is lacking.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    Given the talent on display in Sinbad, and the winning brio it dredges out of questionable material, it's easy to wonder what Dreamworks' animation department could accomplish if it stopped following Disney's lead and started forging new paths of its own.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    There are no surprises in Dreamer--except that for all its visible and unselfconscious schmaltz, it's actually pretty enjoyable.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    As silly as it is, Sisterhood is smart as well, about the modern draw of victimization and attention, and how people (not just girls, and not just teenagers) who live life on a perpetually scrolling online stage can become starved for validation in any form.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    Shou focuses on a meaty subject, and he has an insider's access to the world he's exploring. But his behind-the-scenes film doesn't spend nearly enough time behind the scenes.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    Riddick taps into a primal well of audience wish-fulfillment, but over the course of its unrelieved, monotonous length, it does its best to suck that well dry.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    Greenstreet's film at least serves as a reminder of how useless public debate becomes when everyone's screaming and no one's listening.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    It's unclear whether Frederick's an awful actress or a tremendous one pretending to be awful, but either way, it's hard to pity her nasal, pushy, babyish Iowa girl.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Trouble is, it's too rambling and digressive to feel focused, yet too calculating to feel as observational and natural as a good Altman flick.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Trouble is, most of the major changes took place inside her head and heart, which makes her story a natural fit for a book, but an awkward one for a film.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    The Da Vinci Code isn't terrible. Brown's novel presented its concepts seriously, as food for thought; Howard's glossy version is more of a snack, designed to be taken only slightly more seriously than "National Treasure," and with the much the same sense of a puzzle-based thrill ride.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Brick Lane comes far too late to be groundbreaking, and tries to do too much to be fully coherent, but its talent for avoiding obvious choices on all fronts, narratively and stylistically, make it worth a look.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    While the content is colorful and the actors seem up for the task, a flawed script and Oristrell's unemphatic direction let all the impact dribble away.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Hotel Transylvania is occasionally the kind of fast-moving, gag-a-second film that relies on quantity of humor rather than quality.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    The middle scenes, where the foreground and background don't always integrate, and footage, voice talent, visual design, and characterizations are heavily recycled from earlier Disney movies, leave a queasy impression.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Identity Thief establishes its priorities: Expansive character business is front and center; actual character-building is in the margins, almost off the map.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    At least "Elegy" has some passion. Learning To Drive has harmless sweetness, many revealing speeches about life, and a Kingsley performance that shades strongly into a “Robin Williams as a straight-faced foreigner” routine.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Far too much of the film is devoted to eye-rolling pop-culture gags and long montages set to recycled Elton John songs.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Eastwood's prim, respectful biography presents Hoover in turn as a muddy political metaphor, a lesson in self-mythologizing, and a case history in repression, but never particularly as a man.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Water is gorgeously composed and beautifully shot, with a dogged emphasis on water imagery and symbolism, and a luscious sense for color. It's often profoundly beautiful. But its distanced, calculated attempts to draw sympathy, from its wide-eyed child protagonist to its sad-eyed, personality-free lovers to its fairy-tale ending, all blunt the meaning behind that beauty.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Francine is so minimalist that it has to rely almost entirely on Leo for solidity, and it would be a far stronger film if it supported and framed her more effectively.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Meet The Patels does offer a light, hearty overview of a subculture and a family, with plenty of disarming humor. And it perfectly captures the paradoxes of family relationships—the way affection, respect, resentment, and exasperation can all blur into each other inside a close-knit family.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Puncture excels in the smaller touches, from Shaw's quiet performance to the woozy, unrushed motel idylls where the hard-driving Weiss finally slows down for a few breaths.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    It comes across as unintentionally comic, because Scorch Trials is basically "Fleeing In Terror: The Movie." After more than two straight hours of running and screaming, screaming and running, no wonder Thomas is tired. Even marathoners gotta rest sometime.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    First-time director Mark Palansky is trying for a deft, hip, modern fairy-tale feel, but the odd material, sprawling story, and complicated tonal balancing act get away from him, and the film winds up as a poorly paced tug-of-war between sweet quirk and sloppy camp.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Tries tremendously hard to win audiences over with manly derring-do, exciting action, and impossible-obstacles-overcome uplift. And it's undeniably compelling for minutes at a time
    • 74 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    At times, Higher Ground feels like a lower-stakes "Welcome To The Dollhouse" for adults: It's a systematically built portrait of disappointment and despair, centering on a perpetual underdog looking for affection and surety in any possible form. But while Higher Ground is less painful than Dollhouse, it's also less passionate.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Only those already predisposed to love a TMNT movie that at least LOOKS edgy are likely to care.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    A harmless feel-good movie that tries to tell audiences what it's like to be a victimized immigrant, and mostly winds up telling them what it's like to have their heartstrings yanked, gratuitiously and often.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Like the big shiny sphere at its center, the film is fairly pretty, but there's no real sense that there's anything inside it.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Unfortunately, the story rarely rises above cookie-cutter kids'-fantasy tropes.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    In the early going, though, Waititi manages to keep the tone light and the humor surreal enough to avoid too much association with the real world. But as his story devolves into melodrama, the comedy curdles.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Many of Flowers' individual performances and scenes are striking and masterful, but taken as a whole, it's less a film than a rallying cry of "Our people feel more deeply than yours."
    • 41 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Lightning is a funny, fast-moving movie, packed with barbed one-liners, goofy hyperbole, and all the oversized exasperation of teen angst. But it's too acid, particularly where Colfer is concerned.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Poe was a flawed figure, but his greatest strength was in avoiding convention, or reinterpreting it to create something new. The Raven aspires to both, but abandons those ambitions to lie limply on the floor - only this, and nothing more.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Wasikowska doesn't seem much changed from her "Alice" role, and she trips through Jane's adulthood as though it were a fantasia instead of a moody suspense story.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    With its simple-goal-driven plot, its wordy, cutscene-like interludes, and its stiffly modeled characters, it wouldn't even make for a particularly high-end videogame.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Unique as an inspirational personal-achievement film in the way it focuses on the protagonist not merely as a bastion of strength, but as part of a supportive community and family.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Like so many underdog movies, Joyful Noise will go over best with those who show up hugely eager for it to be exactly what it looks like, and to tell them exactly what they want to hear.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    For a film that pads out such broad slapstick with toilet humor, obnoxious-child antics, and even cute-animal business, Only Human is surprisingly enjoyable, thanks to the filmmakers' relatively low-key, Pedro Almodóvar-style approach.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Like its early predecessors, it's a nominally fun trip, but it's tissue-thin and instantly forgettable.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    In spite of its predictability, it's a nifty story in the abstract, and Davis certainly makes the most of the opportunity to examine the world from an ant's-eye view.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    The handful of songs are catchy, and the whole film feels pleasantly airy. But this is a dark story with a heavy message, and it's been transformed into a harmless, pretty confection. In defanging it for comic effect, the filmmakers have done Seuss as much of a disrespectful disservice as if they'd laid on the fart gags.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    The Host is a step up from the endless metaphorical lectures and gaping plot holes of Niccol’s last film, In Time, but its muffled emotions, delivered with Twilight-esque blank-eyed calm, put it in the same category of a creative idea hamstrung in execution.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Unknown White Male has flashes of brilliance: Murray stretches out the dramatic tale of Bruce's first terrifying hours of recall, and Bruce's raw misery as he recounts those events is deeply affecting.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    The filmmaking is prosaic, the pacing sleepy. It's a solid but unremarkable experience, perfect for insomniacs watching the History Channel late at night, but not nearly as satisfying as simply re-reading Lee's book.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    It's rarely tedious, but it's also rarely insightful or propulsive, and since there's nothing new to discover about the characters or their world, much of the film feels like a protracted, contrived pause, as everyone waits for Rapace to finally get back into the game.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    As a sheer visual experience, Puss In Boots makes a great theme-park ride, a thrill-a-minute feast for the eyes and the semicircular canals.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    While Broom largely isn't a broad comedy, it still rarely goes for restraint in anything but tone.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 57 Tasha Robinson
    The place the story ends doesn't necessarily fit with where it began, which leaves Hologram feeling like a fractured and uncertain oddity. But at least by the end, it's a beautifully melancholy oddity. It's inconsistent in its intentions, but at least some of those intentions are good ones.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 57 Tasha Robinson
    Given that The Mummy only barely works as a movie on its own account, the question becomes whether it works as a franchise-starter. And the answer is that while its franchise elements are foregrounded, they still aren’t terribly compelling.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 56 Tasha Robinson
    It's a little unfair to any sequel to use its predecessor as a yardstick rather than considering it on its own merit, but in this case, it's impossible to put the original movie aside. Not just because of the title, but because Sword Of Destiny mimics its predecessor in so many clear and frustrating ways.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 55 Tasha Robinson
    [Bay's] tremendous sentimentality is a major issue, bogging down his efforts at realism in flag-waving, tear-jerking scenes that try to make every heartfelt emotion land with mortar-fire force.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 52 Tasha Robinson
    Miller’s Girl is a luxuriant meal for [Ortega], a chance to play a variety of facets of the same girl while finding the connections between them. For everyone else, though, it’s short rations, and more than a little underbaked.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 51 Tasha Robinson
    While it's admirable that Guest is enthusiastically rooting for his characters, there's nothing particularly funny about it.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 51 Tasha Robinson
    The film feels clumsy, hurried, and above all, like an admission of creative defeat.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 51 Tasha Robinson
    Café Society is an incredibly pretty movie, and a generally unobjectionable one. But like so many Allen films, it feels like it was made primarily for his therapist, and letting the rest of the world in to see it and make their own diagnoses is an afterthought.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 51 Tasha Robinson
    To the degree that Love Hurts feels like a movie at all, it’s because Quan puts so much heart into his work, and so much squeaky-voiced comedic talent, paired with the speed and flexibility that makes a fight scene thrilling.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 51 Tasha Robinson
    The film never comes up with a mission statement or a message that might tie together its wandering scenes, or explain its vague melancholy.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Tasha Robinson
    Austenland embraces convention, and the result is a romantic comedy in which the ending seems not just foreordained, but promised via contract from the first moment of the film.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Tasha Robinson
    The script is always shakier than the performers trying to bring it across, and by the third act, it lets them down completely.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 50 Tasha Robinson
    Fantastic Fear leaps all over the place narratively and conceptually, servicing the comedy of every individual scene without considering or linking the others. Some of those individual scenes are marvelous, though.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Tasha Robinson
    A film that veers between caustic comedy, melodrama, and heartstring-tugging, without finding the spark of sympathy that would hold the film together around its disparate tones.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Tasha Robinson
    The stories Pérez-Rey's subjects tell are shocking, even moving. But they're also narrow, limited, and staid, and so is the film that contains them.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Tasha Robinson
    It’s all tasteful and polished to a fault, but it feels like exactly what it is: an abbreviated version that preserves the high points, zips past the rest, and never approaches the depth of the full text.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Tasha Robinson
    As trivial as the micro-budget documentary My Date With Drew may seem, it has novelty on its side, and even when that flags, it coasts along on sheer personality.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Tasha Robinson
    Haley and co-writer Marc Basch have their hearts in the right place.... But while they’re steering clear of so many pitfalls, they don’t give the impression that they’re steering in any specific direction. The film is a parade of barely connected events, presided over by a barely connected protagonist.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Tasha Robinson
    It's a tastefully managed, passionless melodrama, full of brooding looks and reasonably sweet moments, but typified by a scantly characterized central couple who bring no sense of engagement to their relationship.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Tasha Robinson
    The ultimate end of the story reveals that it's all about Sturgess' suffering, which just isn't that compelling a topic. Given its lack of center and balance, the film might more appropriately be called "One Dude."
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Tasha Robinson
    The film's daring, honest ending helps redeem the uneven drama, but the road there may occasionally try the patience of even the most sympathetic armchair revolutionaries.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Tasha Robinson
    Not that anything in Judy Moody is meant to be taken seriously - or could be, even if it was meant to - but even for sugary neon fluff, it's awfully lightweight.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Tasha Robinson
    Apart from Cruz, who throws herself lustily into her tough-seductress role, the actors give negligible performances, with McShane, Rush, and Keith Richards in a repeat cameo all playing nigh-identical smug glowerers.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Tasha Robinson
    It's artless, obvious, and at times insultingly exaggerated. And yet the real-life story of Chinese ballet dancer Li Cunxin, based on his autobiography, is often dramatic enough to win its way past the silly trappings.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Tasha Robinson
    Theoretically, the "Bring It On" model can be applied to any remotely performative art. All it takes is a certain level of sass, some eye-catching performance showcases, and a plot where a talented outsider livens up a moribund group with some fresh ideas. Pitch Perfect slaps that stencil onto college a cappella singing groups, with a smattering of success.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Tasha Robinson
    Ten years from now, Beowulf may look like the groundbreaking project that helped kill live-action movies, but for the moment, its uncomfortable jokes and fakey rendering of life leave it wedged firmly in the uncanny valley. (Insert your own joke about Jolie's astonishing animated anatomy here.)
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Tasha Robinson
    Kingsley is one of very few lively things about Polanski's plodding, by-the-numbers Oliver Twist. And in this dreary setting, he comes across more as a desperate clown than a saving grace, which makes it all the more awkward that no one else is clowning along with him.

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