Arizona Republic's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
For 2,968 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 62% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 34% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.1 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 66
Highest review score: 100 The Peanut Butter Falcon
Lowest review score: 10 The Legend of Hercules
Score distribution:
2968 movie reviews
  1. Vincent Grashaw's film, although well-meaning (as a postscript reminds us), tries too hard, both in content and form.
  2. For a movie filled with amateur porn, sex toys, cocaine and Cameron Diaz's butt, "Sex Tape" is awfully tame. You're in greater danger of taking a nap than needing a safe word.
  3. By far the scariest thing about director Stuart Beattie’s I, Frankenstein, a terrible would-be horror story that somehow roped in a couple of really good actors, is that the ending seems to suggest the possibility of a sequel. Now that’s horror.
  4. Another entry in a long line of good video games adapted into terrible movies, Assassin’s Creed is ragingly stupid. That its incoherent plotline is treated with the utmost reverence by skilled thespians only brings its idiocy into sharper relief.
  5. Jenkins is a fantastically adaptable talent. It helps that his character here is supposed to be innately likable (by everyone, evidently, but his girlfriend's family), since Jenkins is so likable as an actor. Good thing, because there is little else to like about Darling Companion.
  6. Olivier Megaton (he helmed "Taken 2") starts things off at a sluggish pace and never picks up speed. Even the action scenes, which often are filmed in jittery fashion, don't generate thrills.
  7. It strains both credulity and patience in its attempt to be different, and it leaves you feeling creeped out as well.
  8. Paul Schrader, the once-brilliant screenwriter of such films as “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull,” has fashioned a movie that seems to exist to be repugnant. Maybe that’s the point; it was written by Bret Easton Ellis. Nearly every character in this movie is unlikable.
  9. A relentlessly unfunny comedy, it wastes the talents of Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara as egregiously as one could possibly imagine, resorting to lame jokes, cliches and incompetent storytelling to pass the time.
  10. It’s not clear that the movie has anything to say, new or otherwise. . . . Other than that it’s just blood and guts, and lots of it.
  11. There is nothing brave about Bravetown, a film so paint-by-the-numbers bland that its efforts to piggyback the sacrifice of American servicemen and women for emotional depth is downright craven.
  12. The purpose of San Andreas is not to make us think, but to make us gape, to pummel us with effect and effect until we finally give in. Fair enough. Uncle. I need a Tylenol anyway.
  13. Mean-spirited.
  14. It's all-around generic, made notable by its weirdly schizophrenic tone. Sometimes it strives to be a character-driven thriller in the Jason Bourne mold. In other moments, it goes for over-the-top action and violence. But it's never very exciting.
  15. CHIPS is a miserable movie, an exercise in stupidity that takes whatever nostalgia one had for the late-1970s television series – this assumes anyone actually had nostalgia for it — and beats it to death on a bed of idiocy. The action scenes, though, are pretty well-directed.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    If you have young kids and want to spend two hours out of the house in a cool, air-conditioned theater, then go see “Haunted Mansion.” But if you can hold out until it’s released on Disney+ all the better. It’s really not worth spending money on the ticket.
  16. It’s a spectacularly wrong-headed, chemistry-free romance, and too dumb to know how sexist it is.
  17. Without Lohan, Falling for Christmas would be another of the near-anonymous morass of holiday movies so prevalent during the season. Even with her it’s not much more.
  18. Journalists deserve to be heralded — just not in this holier-than-thou cinematic cri de coeur. So, on behalf of journalists everywhere, I have to tell Mr. Reiner thanks, but no thanks.
  19. It’s hard to get excited about any of the on-screen happenings, because director Justin Lin can’t seem to hit the right notes.
  20. There is nothing about the movie that isn’t utterly predictable. You meet a character, and it’s immediately obvious what’s going to happen to him (or her). And then it happens. Maybe it’s meant to make you feel good about your deductive reasoning skills or something. But mostly it just makes you want to see something else.
  21. Director and co-writer Jeremy Garelick doesn't even reach high enough to pick the low-hanging fruit, opting instead to gather half-rotted, fly-infested jokes off the ground and expect Kevin Hart to make them funny by virtue of being Kevin Hart. Only grudgingly will I acknowledge that he sometimes does.
  22. ¡He Matado a Mi Marido! seems to be inspired by the kind of bold comedies that Pedro Almodóvar specializes in, with divas at center stage and madcap situations. But writer-director Francisco Lupini-Basagoiti is no Almodóvar, mistaking stupidity for zaniness.
  23. The Snowman is like if aliens studied humanity and tried to make their own movie in an attempt to communicate with us. This simulacrum contains all the requisite pieces of a movie, but humanity got lost in translation.
  24. Aside from the waste of talent, the frustrating thing about The Lazarus Effect is how it cheats. Good horror movies work on internal logic.
  25. Gomez plays ... well, that’s one of the problems. Her character is so underdeveloped in director Courtney Solomon’s movie that she doesn’t actually have a name.
  26. Josh C. Waller’s movie is just prurient nonsense, a film only a couple of notches up from the women-in-prison films that were popular years and years ago.
  27. What a mess. Its meandering plot draws attention to the alarming lack of laughs — not what you look for in a supposed comedy.
  28. Director Michael Goi is big on jump shocks that get increasingly tiresome.
  29. There are plot twists galore, but they unfold in ham-fisted fashion, as if the screenwriter (newbie Brian Tucker) didn't know how to layer the mystery. Instead, the movie simply drops these secrets out of nowhere, in clunky fashion.

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