Tom Russo

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Boston Globe
For 366 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 55% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 42% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 7.4 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Tom Russo's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 58
Highest review score: 100 Richard III
Lowest review score: 25 The Food of the Gods
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 200 out of 366
  2. Mixed: 113 out of 366
  3. Negative: 53 out of 366
366 movie reviews
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    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    Machete Kills
    Rodriguez does a fair job of keeping the zaniness coming: Vergara’s machine gun bra, Gibson delivering exposition in a “Star Wars” prop, bad guys offed by helicopter blades in dementedly creative ways. It’s enough that you’ll hope Rodriguez makes good on that new faux trailer — for “Machete Kills Again . . . in Space.”
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    The Mechanic
    An intermittently arresting, mostly standard action entry that deals death noisily more than cleverly - a lot like the original.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    Lucy in the Sky
    It’s a deep-thinking character study that’s provocatively if imperfectly presented — at least until the story devolves right along with its subject’s state of mind.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    Brick Mansions
    The thematic stuff, while well-intentioned, is also clunky, and ultimately beside the point. Action, obviously, is what you’re after.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)
    The title might trumpet Harley Quinn’s emancipation, but she again feels like a character trapped in a movie that’s mediocre at best.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    Rio 2
    It’s fun in stretches, but also busily forced.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    Fist Fight
    The movie works best when it finds a balance between flatly familiar and over-aggressively unexpected.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    Beyond the Lights
    Unfortunately, as the story builds toward tenderness, it’s undercut with slathering tongues and bare-chested stud-muffin shots.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2
    It’s another brightly rendered effort, but, as the title indicates, a lot of the real creativity seems to have been used up the first time around.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    Vox Lux
    After a point, we’re left wondering whether we’re watching a character study or caricature. Either way, the portrait gradually morphs from intriguing to tedious.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    Metallica: Through the Never
    The guys in Metallica are here to remind us that there’s a band behind the rage rock. The IMAX 3-D release Metallica Through the Never is all about reasserting their relevance, loudly.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    Minions
    You’ll have to appreciate what fleeting cleverness you can here.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    The Transporter Refueled
    Director and Team Besson member Camille Delamarre (“Brick Mansions”) speeds us from one action sequence to the next with a style that alternates between routine, clunky, and modestly inspired.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    Jem and the Holograms
    To Chu’s credit, he does work hard not only to legitimize 30-somethings’ halcyon recollections, but also to make the material relevant to a new generation.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    The Choice
    In the end, though, the film disappointingly, even lazily, shies away from being anything more than you’d expect.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    Phantom
    The crew doesn’t much look the part either, save for Schaech’s Stalin ’stache. Yet the movie does show the ability to get past this, even with the weight of all its narratively risky conspiracy theorizing. It’s a shame the intrigue has to get torpedoed by elements that mostly feel correctable.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    Goon
    The movie's unlikely sincerity can't completely offset its ugliness for less bloodthirsty viewers, but it helps, and it does smooth over some narrative rough edges.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    The Angry Birds Movie
    What starts out as a lowbrow gag very typical of a pedestrian ’toon gradually balloons into absurdity that Mel Brooks would probably love. Here, at least, the Angry Birds fly.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    Rabid
    A characteristic early offering from horror icon David Cronenberg, rough production values and all. [30 May 2004]
    • Boston Globe
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    God's Pocket
    Best, probably, to appreciate the movie for what Slattery, Hoffman, and the cast do most effectively: craft a pervasive atmosphere of tired people trudging through tired circumstances that only seem to grow more, well, tiring.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    Penguins of Madagascar
    It’s a movie content to stay within the show’s comfort zone, changing things up mainly with flashier, 3-D visuals, a couple of which are dazzlers, and a theme that doesn’t connect in any notable way.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    Ice Age: Continental Drift
    It makes you wonder if the series' animators, who took time out for "Rio" just before this, aren't so secretly yearning to sail different creative waters.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    Dredd
    Pretty clearly determined to deliver the antidote to Stallone's movie, the filmmakers take their cues from Christopher Nolan's Batman filmscape, dropping Dredd into a fictional concrete sprawl (actually South Africa) that's relentlessly grounded, visually and dramatically. In a generic way, the environment works.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    Dylan Dog: Dead of Night
    Some entertaining inventiveness, before nagging limitations finally drag it down.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    Bullet to the Head
    It's a surprise that Stallone is as funny as he is playing a hit man paired with a cop in Bullet to the Head. He's man-cave witty in a way that his "Expendables" movies have strived for but haven't really managed.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    In the House
    After all the mesmerizingly illicit buildup, the film’s willful lack of a payoff is almost as strange as one of those essays.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    Don't Breathe
    An original thriller about a home-invasion robbery gone wrong. To clarify, that would be “wrong” as in “not according to plan” – but also “wrong” as in “so dementedly repugnant, it just isn’t right.”
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    Daddy's Home 2
    Returning director Sean Anders strings together mayhem-filled moments that just aren’t the howlers that they’re clearly scripted to be, never mind the fatherly foursome’s chemistry, or the tobacco-stained guffaws Gibson keeps busting out to sell these bits.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    Black Rock
    It’s all a fair attempt, but Aselton isn’t going to make anyone forget Kathryn Bigelow.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Tom Russo
    The LEGO Ninjago Movie
    A sharper script would have been the real ultimate weapon.
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