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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    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 Zachary Barnes
    Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
    They both had a lot to lose, in other words, and Mr. Coppola was quite sure that they would: “The film will not be good,” he states at one point. He was wrong, but in watching “Hearts of Darkness” we can see why he might have thought so, as the making of his mammoth movie, requiring its director to wrestle art from chaos, seems to unfold in its very own fog of war.
    • 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.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 70 Zachary Barnes
    Blue Heron
    It takes a series of self-reflexive turns that are overelaborate in their conception and slightly inert in their execution, rendering the movie’s poignancy more theoretical than fully felt.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Zachary Barnes
    All We Imagine as Light
    What makes Ms. Kapadia so clearly an artist is her ability to let a scene breathe, to be patient but not ponderous, suffusing the film with atmosphere and unarticulated feeling.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Zachary Barnes
    It Was Just an Accident
    The director has considered how good people are to respond to brutal injustice, and created in the wake of his own nightmare a movie of bracing anger and empathy. Mr. Panahi’s victimization by Iran’s government may well continue, but this is a film of emotional and political truths that can be crushed by no regime.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Zachary Barnes
    Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat
    The film, with its dazzling musical energy, its complex narrative sweep and its dizzying cast of characters, finally emerges as a tragedy: a story of promises broken and trust betrayed, echoing into our own era with all the force and feeling of a ballad from Armstrong’s horn.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 70 Zachary Barnes
    All of Us Strangers
    The film, though lush, thoughtful and at times affecting, never fully escapes a certain therapeutic mode. It doesn’t depict life lived, exactly; it depicts life theorized.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 70 Zachary Barnes
    Sorry, Baby
    If Sorry, Baby isn’t exactly an assured debut, it nonetheless has a sincere purpose, thoughtfully expressed.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Zachary Barnes
    Silent Friend
    The film has a remarkable formal and narrative fluidity, not presenting its three stories as discrete chapters but cutting effortlessly from one to the other, with Ms. Enyedi sometimes dipping into a period for the length of only a shot or two before spinning off to a different storyline.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Zachary Barnes
    Hard Truths
    Ms. Jean-Baptiste portrays a character on an extreme end of human temperament, and she brings to it an intensity of focus and feeling that abolishes the easy contours of caricature.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 70 Zachary Barnes
    2000 Meters to Andriivka
    The film is more illuminating in its depiction of a distinctly contemporary war, in which men are augmented at every step by advanced machines.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Zachary Barnes
    Familiar Touch
    Familiar Touch is a film about forgetting, but it’s also a reminder—as moving, sincere and gracefully unadorned as any I’ve seen in some time—of the actor’s art.
    • 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.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Zachary Barnes
    All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
    “All Dirt Roads” is difficult to firmly grasp, sometimes frustratingly so, but its textures linger.
    • 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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Zachary Barnes
    Fallen Leaves
    Fallen Leaves, though no radical departure for its maker nor a landmark of its medium, reminds us of a singular artistic personality, still vibrant after all these years. In a world of disasters large and small, surely that counts as consolation.
    • 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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Zachary Barnes
    Dahomey
    As a witness to some small rectification and the still simmering problems that surround it, Dahomey is at once haunting and humble.
    • 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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Zachary Barnes
    The Taste of Things
    The Taste of Things is at once a delight for all five senses and an affecting drama of a relationship, as idiosyncratic as all loving ones are. Lingering on the tongue like a sip of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the film leaves one feeling a little drunk, desperately hungry and entirely alive.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Zachary Barnes
    Two Prosecutors
    The movie has an elegant, almost symmetrical narrative economy. It’s at once orderly and disorienting, as though following a plan drawn by M.C. Escher.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Zachary Barnes
    Pillion
    The two lead actors, both superb, strike a delicate imbalance.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Zachary Barnes
    I'm Still Here
    Much of it has a potent force, thanks in large part to the performance of Ms. Torres.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Zachary Barnes
    Sinners
    The great sin of “Sinners” is that, for all the audacity of its conception, it finally collapses into the familiar.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 40 Zachary Barnes
    Sirât
    Visually epic, sonically relentless and otherwise fatuous, the film has a dramatic inertia occasionally punctuated by eruptions of utter catastrophe—a series of shocks that leaves you singed, shaken and not much better for it.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Zachary Barnes
    Love
    With Love, Mr. Haugerud has fashioned a film with a rich complexity of feelings, navigated by people taking full advantage of their own freedoms. It’s the sort of talky European drama that, in its well-expressed thoughtfulness, leaves one feeling strangely refreshed. I’ll happily take two more.
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