Zachary Barnes

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Wall Street Journal
For 102 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 2.7 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Zachary Barnes' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 68
Highest review score: 100 Silent Friend
Lowest review score: 10 Flight Risk
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 58 out of 102
  2. Mixed: 40 out of 102
  3. Negative: 4 out of 102
102 movie reviews
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    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Zachary Barnes
    The Substance
    The result is impressively if overbearingly grotesque, boasting an ecstatic surface of blood, guts and deformities. But it’s all in service of obvious ideas about the intertwined pressures of sexism and the spotlight, themes too little developed to sustain the nightmarish, queasily satirical fantasia splashed and spattered atop them.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 30 Zachary Barnes
    My Old Ass
    When it comes to taking this premise in interesting directions, however, Ms. Park proves inept.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Zachary Barnes
    His Three Daughters
    No doubt this would flounder spectacularly without gifted actors, but Mr. Jacobs is lucky enough to have three.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Zachary Barnes
    Merchant Ivory
    The documentary gets by on its interviews, archival footage and fascinating subjects, who in some respects always seemed like stalwarts of a fusty tradition.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Zachary Barnes
    Close Your Eyes
    Now age 84, Mr. Erice has made what is unmistakably an old man’s movie, and I mean that as a high compliment. Close Your Eyes moves with the serious, searching energy of a great artist through a cold and cloudy sea of memory, loss, grief and regret, pausing in the patches of warmth it finds in longtime friends and humble pleasures.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Zachary Barnes
    Red Island
    The director’s best-known film, “BPM,” drew from his later experience as an AIDS activist, and whereas that was an insular, immediate and impassioned portrait of a movement, Red Island takes a lusher, more leisurely approach to its mix of history and memory.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 Zachary Barnes
    Good One
    It feels mostly believable but a bit too obvious, as the meaning of the movie seems to shrink in its final minutes to fit a theme. Still, as a debut, “Good One” is good enough, a sensitively performed drama of a journey into the wild.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Zachary Barnes
    Only the River Flows
    As Only the River Flows follows its winding course, the movie seems to lose its grip not merely on the mystery but on its protagonist, becoming less psychologically penetrating and more haphazardly hallucinatory. Looking for clues, we find only the fragments of a fractured mind.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Zachary Barnes
    Last Summer
    Last Summer is a provocation and a melodrama, and yet in Ms. Breillat’s hands these characters are precisely rendered humans—in their sensitivities, their wants, their vile follies.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Zachary Barnes
    Janet Planet
    One of the virtues of Ms. Baker’s spare style is the profundity that lurks in every line, which here comes out at its most clearly and movingly distilled.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Zachary Barnes
    Just the Two of Us
    The drama is by turns rushed and overplayed, but it has a haunting core and moments of slippery, surprising cinematic style that make the movie linger in the mind, if only for a little while
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 Zachary Barnes
    Robot Dreams
    It’s a feel-good fable of companionship that is just a little too simple, in both its sadness and its sweetness.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Zachary Barnes
    Hit Man
    Advancing toward its end, Hit Man becomes the least predictable of romances and the most oddly riveting of thrillers, managing all the while to deconstruct the Hollywood fantasy invoked in its title even as it indulges in a yet more timeless one: that of two gorgeous people falling in love.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Zachary Barnes
    Babes
    Babes is the kind of comedy that makes you wonder what jokes are, exactly, and if what you just saw contained any.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 50 Zachary Barnes
    I Saw the TV Glow
    There’s an affected, self-mythologizing solemnity to the storytelling that can’t quite disguise some flaws in the fundamentals.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Zachary Barnes
    Terrestrial Verses
    It is a modest, methodical movie-in-vignettes that demonstrates the far-reaching, constrictive force of Iran’s regime and the society it has created. It is also a canny representation of the kind of straight-faced authoritarian illogic that creates its own delusional reality, which is then forced upon a people.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Zachary Barnes
    Stress Positions
    The movie has its funny moments, and even some halfway-poignant ones, but it occasionally gives one the feeling of watching a bawdy New York-set sitcom and listening to a segment of “This American Life” at the same time.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Zachary Barnes
    Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill
    While it contains little for the devoted in the way of outright revelations, it’s an affecting film around which admirers and newcomers alike can gather to bask in the unique beauty of her work, and to follow the similarly distinctive trajectory of her painful and abbreviated life.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Zachary Barnes
    The Beast
    The Beast has sequences of such insidiously effective suspense and arresting, even moving strangeness that the film could only have come from exactly those to whom it pays singular tribute: thinking, feeling humans.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Zachary Barnes
    La Chimera
    The past can be fetishized, commodified, dreamed of, but it can never fully be returned to—a stubborn impossibility that “La Chimera” dramatizes with playful, peculiar grace.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Zachary Barnes
    Limbo
    Written, directed and edited by Ivan Sen and shot (also by Mr. Sen) in black-and-white, the film is spare, sunbleached and serious in its study of people long neglected and abused. Yet the drama is thin, and the mystery halfhearted.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Zachary Barnes
    Much Ado About Dying
    Mr. Chambers presents an attentive, sometimes painful and admirably unsentimental study of the everyday struggles of senescence and caretaking alike.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Zachary Barnes
    Love Lies Bleeding
    Ms. Stewart, who has maintained an impressively adventurous career since her “Twilight” days concluded more than a decade ago, helps keep the film upright, beautifully blending a moody exterior with the care of a lover and the anxiety skittering beneath it all as Lou tries to keep her world from coming completely apart.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 100 Zachary Barnes
    Problemista
    Problemista is a brilliant comedy of the surreal and the absurd, and it finds no shortage of either in the bureaucratic processes of immigration.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 40 Zachary Barnes
    Io Capitano
    Mr. Garrone seems so desperate to create a powerful humanist plea that he has neglected to provide his movie with the detail and artistry that would give it force, and he conspicuously concludes his story just before it would have started to become more contentious—and more interesting.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Zachary Barnes
    Perfect Days
    Though not a bad movie, exactly, Perfect Days is a bit too much like a ready-made rendering of a good one, replete with a number of great songs that give scenes a semblance of emotional force.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Zachary Barnes
    Tótem
    Tótem is neither tragedy nor tearjerker, exactly, though tears will probably be shed. It is an expression of life, deepened by death and rendered with an unusual and unerring sensitivity.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Zachary Barnes
    Disco Boy
    To his latest picture, Giacomo Abbruzzese’s Disco Boy, Mr. Rogowski brings his typically deep interiority—one that tends to break out into the world in unpredictable ways. The film isn’t equal to his talents, but it gets by on style, vigor and some big ideas.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 80 Zachary Barnes
    Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
    There’s something singularly fulfilling in a film, like this one, that truly demands that most precious commodity: our attention.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Zachary Barnes
    The Settlers
    Torn between Tarantino-esque genre pastiche and stilted art-film seriousness, The Settlers is at once unsettling and tonally unsettled. The result is a muddled study of brutal history.
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