Tasha Robinson

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Polygon, The A.V. Club, The Dissolve, The Verge
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 1.1 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. Positive: 479 out of 807
  2. Mixed: 262 out of 807
  3. Negative: 66 out of 807
807 movie reviews
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    • 65 Metascore
    • 79 Tasha Robinson
    High-Rise
    Wheatley's past films —€” the dark comedy Sightseers, the genre-defying slasher Kill List, the weird black-and-white micro-project A Field In England —€” come together in this film, which is crazed and violent, strange and appalling, image-driven and a moral lesson, and just plain strange. But Hiddleston's combination of placid calm and seething, hidden rage gives it all an anchor.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 57 Tasha Robinson
    A Hologram for the King
    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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 76 Tasha Robinson
    Elvis & Nixon
    Elvis & Nixon is at its best when it sticks to what-if whimsy and the enjoyable fantasy of worlds colliding, with all the outlandish possibilities that crossover stories suggest.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Tasha Robinson
    Sing Street
    Carney’s emphasis is more on performance than craftsmanship. His camera lovingly covers the actual act of bringing music to life, and he makes being in the middle of a band look like the most revitalizing and rewarding place on Earth.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 69 Tasha Robinson
    The Jungle Book
    Favreau and Marks’ version is surprisingly daring in its use of violence, and its physical and emotional darkness. It’s also creative, occasionally in bizarre and colorful ways.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 62 Tasha Robinson
    The Boss
    The script glosses over everything that's important to the characters, which makes them vague and poreless. Some sense of specificity, about virtually anything, would be helpful for making them seem less like bare story functions and gag-delivery systems.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Tasha Robinson
    April and the Extraordinary World
    It's a rousing, thrilling adventure, beautifully animated in rich, deep hues with a look that meets neatly between the flow of hand-drawn cels and the smoothness of digital animation. But it's also a powerfully emotional piece, about family and friendship, about betrayal and disappointment, and about first love and old enmities.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 36 Tasha Robinson
    Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
    Batman v Superman addresses Man Of Steel's problems in words without learning anything from it in tone. Instead, the new film doubles down on the grimness, the ugliness, and the indifference to human life.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 73 Tasha Robinson
    Krisha
    For a first film, made on a shoestring with a largely non-professional cast, Krisha is remarkably textured.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 83 Tasha Robinson
    Midnight Special
    The film moves effortlessly, with plenty of tense thrills and surprise reveals. It’s relentless, but rarely rushed. The action is terse, and in one unexpected case, breathless and terrifying.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 73 Tasha Robinson
    Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
    It's a frequently funny film that comes packed with the thrills of real combat, with real consequences for the characters. But the basic premise does make one question its priorities.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 56 Tasha Robinson
    Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny
    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.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 44 Tasha Robinson
    Zoolander 2
    Where the first film was content with straight-faced silliness, Zoolander 2 tries to blow the same silliness out to epic, world-spanning proportions, and it just winds up feeling overstretched. Like Stiller with his ridiculous characters and stylized performances, it's consistently trying way too hard.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 72 Tasha Robinson
    Race
    Race is exactly the kind of film the Academy loves to honor: bland, uplifting, respectable, engaged with historical social issues, but not too controversial or directly tied to the present.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 72 Tasha Robinson
    Deadpool
    This humor could be profoundly ugly, given how it's aimed at reducing other people's grotesque deaths to punchlines. But first-time director Tim Miller keeps the tone light — in his hands, Deadpool is more a snickering, naughty nut than an authentic sociopath.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 76 Tasha Robinson
    Hail, Caesar!
    Hail, Caesar! is immensely entertaining, but it's also frustratingly discursive, with so many incomplete sidelines and distractions that it suggests an overcrowded but exciting TV pilot more than a self-contained film.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 62 Tasha Robinson
    The Finest Hours
    This isn't just an action film; it's a multi-pronged assault on the heartstrings, with plenty of wide-eyed, apple-cheeked Norman Rockwell Americana saturating the pounding digital waves.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 32 Tasha Robinson
    The 5th Wave
    The action is frequently too chaotic to register, and the performances are monotonal. There's no personality in this story, or the way it's told.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 55 Tasha Robinson
    13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
    [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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Tasha Robinson
    The Hateful Eight
    The Hateful Eight is a feature-length battle between thoughtful sophistication and the filmmaker's sloppiest and most self-indulgent instincts.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Tasha Robinson
    Son of Saul
    It's dizzying and tremendously sad, but simultaneously exhilarating due to Nemes' complete control of his environment, and complete merging of his narrative and compositional elements. It isn't just a unique story, it's a unique execution.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 75 Tasha Robinson
    Sisters
    Not every joke works, on paper or on screen. But Fey and Poehler at least look like they're having fun, and they make it easy to get pulled along for the ride, no matter how awkward it gets.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Tasha Robinson
    In the Heart of the Sea
    Howard shows his viewers what happened to these sailors, but he rarely offers any sense of who they were, or what it felt like to face their situation.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 85 Tasha Robinson
    The Big Short
    McKay's film is coated in sugar to make it go down easy, but at its center, it's a bitter pill to swallow.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 35 Tasha Robinson
    Joy
    Joy has neither comedy nor nuance going for it. Every character feels like a half-sketched first draft, awaiting development that never comes.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Tasha Robinson
    The Revenant
    While the style may outpace the substance, that doesn't make the style any less magnificent. And when it comes to sheer customer satisfaction, The Revenant checks nearly every box, up to and including the man vs. wild throwdown. It just makes a jarring, memorable statement about how often the wild is likely to win that uneven fight.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Tasha Robinson
    Miss You Already
    Tonally, Miss You Already is a slapdash mess of achingly sincere moments and tasteless jokes.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 67 Tasha Robinson
    Trumbo
    Trumbo’s writing was so terrific, the film emphasizes, that it outweighed his caustic personality, his unfashionable politics, and the career-threatening dangers of working with him.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 67 Tasha Robinson
    Extraordinary Tales
    Each of the shorts has a markedly different visual approach, and they feel radically distinct in terms of pacing and editing as well. In spite of the common source material and tone of oppressive psychological horror, these shorts feel like they could be the work of five different people.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 42 Tasha Robinson
    Rock the Kasbah
    It’s "Ishtar" with the passion and sincerity replaced with a surface-level shrug.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
    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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Meet the Patels
    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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 67 Tasha Robinson
    Welcome to Leith
    A solid documentary feeling of “you are there” isn’t always a substitute for “…but here’s what happened when you left, and here’s what it all meant.”
    • 51 Metascore
    • 25 Tasha Robinson
    A Walk in the Woods
    Even when the film isn’t dealing with women, it’s contemptuous of the world in a way that rapidly becomes one-note and tiresome.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Tasha Robinson
    Grandma
    It’s an artful, funny, endlessly surprising little acting and writing showcase that shows just how far it’s possible for writers to take tired, clichéd characters, by treating them as human beings and caring what goes on underneath the surface of the easy jokes.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 58 Tasha Robinson
    Learning to Drive
    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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Tasha Robinson
    Zarafa
    Everything about the way this story is rendered makes it feel much bigger than the characters and their limited travails can make it.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Tasha Robinson
    Stray Dog
    The film lacks the narrative tightness, stark beauty, and gripping intensity of Granik’s feature-film work. But it has much of the nuance, and the emotional impact.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Tasha Robinson
    Batkid Begins
    Batkid’s story is fun in part because it’s so joyously frivolous. He’s cute because he’s a tiny version of a big thing. Trying to blow him up into something bigger than he is spoils some of what makes him special.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Tasha Robinson
    Gabriel
    Culkin’s terrifically effective performance and Howe’s pitch-perfect writing and directing make Gabriel the kind of insightful, empathetic project that makes cineastes feel good about feeling bad.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Tasha Robinson
    Inside Out
    Inside Out has a rich, unpackable story. But like all Pixar’s best films, it’s fleet and accessible, trusting the audience to keep up with an adventure that unfolds at a breakneck pace.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Tasha Robinson
    The Wolfpack
    For all its rough, unfinished edges, The Wolfpack is absolutely mesmerizing.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Tasha Robinson
    Charlie's Country
    Charlie’s Country is sincere at the expense of nuance, and tragic at the expense of variety: It tends to hit its points over and over, with blunt, on-the-nose sincerity. But Gulpilil’s performance keeps it from crossing too far into hand-wringing preachiness.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Tasha Robinson
    San Andreas
    San Andreas doesn’t have much interest in the lives lost during its sequence of catastrophes, but it does dole out plenty of the large-scale spectacle that matters in disaster films of this type.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Tasha Robinson
    When Marnie Was There
    It’s a quiet film of modest narrative ambitions and simple shifts. But its technical and visual ambitions couldn’t be higher. It’s as if Ghibli is still trying to raise its own bar, so that even if it’s going out, it’s reminding viewers what they’d be missing.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Tasha Robinson
    Tomorrowland
    Tomorrowland comes across as a grinning rictus of a movie, a desperate door-to-door evangelist trying to force its foot into the door and push its salvation by any means possible.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Tasha Robinson
    Slow West
    Slow West often feels like the Coen brothers’ rendition of True Grit, if they’d brought Wes Anderson in as a collaborator. It’s a shaggy-dog story full of colorful characters and aimless but diverting narrative byways, all delivered with Andersonian solemnity, against a backdrop of deeply saturated colors and meticulously dressed sets.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Tasha Robinson
    I'll See You in My Dreams
    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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Tasha Robinson
    Iris
    Iris isn’t groundbreaking doc filmmaking, but it’s amiable and jovial in a way rarely seen in the field, which tends more toward drama, trauma, and forwarding big causes. Maysles doesn’t seem to have an agenda, beyond capturing Apfel as she is in this moment, as a complete, highly specific, and thoroughly charming character.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    The Sisterhood of Night
    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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Tasha Robinson
    Ex Machina
    None of Ex Machina’s broad strokes are surprising: The story falls out so predictably at every stage that it can be frustrating. It’s the details that are surprising, and purposefully alarming.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Tasha Robinson
    Manos Sucias
    The beginning of the film is purposefully surprising in many little ways, but the rest of the film is a gorgeously shot, heart-in-throat wait to see whether the payoff can dodge expectations nearly as well. The journey is more important than the destination, but Wladyka makes enough daring choices to make both worthwhile.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Tasha Robinson
    Woman in Gold
    Director Simon Curtis and first-time screenwriter Alexi Kaye Campbell constantly push too hard and too forcefully, laying on schmaltz where none is needed.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Tasha Robinson
    White God
    In some moments, White God is a fast-moving thriller... At other times, it’s a standard-issue slasher movie... But when Mundruczó pushes the camera in close on Lili or Hagen, it just becomes a family drama, and a portrait of longing—for freedom, for emotional reciprocity, for comfort.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Tasha Robinson
    Chappie
    It never winds up with anything particularly interesting or effective to say about life, intelligence, religion, the nature of consciousness, or any of the other big themes it deliberately evokes. It does, however, blow up a lot of stuff.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Tasha Robinson
    Wild Tales
    There’s a good deal of the sick-and-twisted element of The ABCs Of Death here, but managed with better pacing, more maturity, and more room to build each segment.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Tasha Robinson
    Fifty Shades of Grey
    Choosing to ignore any conventional sense of drama, progression, or resolution is, in its way, a memorable choice. But while Fifty Shades Of Grey is a memorable and society-shifting cultural event, it’s in no way a memorable movie.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Tasha Robinson
    The Voices
    It’s a ready-made cult movie, complicated and weird and grotesque and distinctly silly, and best when not taken remotely seriously.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water
    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.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Tasha Robinson
    The Devil's Violinist
    Garrett’s performance lacks any nuance or fire. When he’s playing, he’s a powerhouse. When he’s talking, he’s a half-presence with a vaguely Tommy Wiseau-esque accent, and sleepy eyes to match.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness
    Like Ghibli’s features, Kingdom is a friendly, elegiac, approachable movie. But it lacks the studio’s well-polished sense of energy and commitment.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Tasha Robinson
    Human Capital
    What makes Human Capital a worthwhile experience is the way [Virzí] focuses on understanding his characters’ desires, rather than deriding them as unworthy.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Tasha Robinson
    Unbroken
    Unbroken just piles on the misery without tonal shift, any sense of rise and fall, or any interest in Zamperini’s inner life, beyond his catchphrase, “If you can take it, you can make it.”
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Tasha Robinson
    The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
    At 144 minutes, Five Armies is the shortest and the least bloated and discursive of the Hobbit films. It’s also the one that relies least on filler material and extra character business, and the one that most earns its moments of outsized, dire drama.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Tasha Robinson
    Remote Area Medical
    Reichert and Zaman don’t editorialize, which keeps Remote Area Medical from being preachy, forceful, or didactic, but also leaves it feeling shapeless.
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