Dallas Observer's Scores

  • Movies
For 1,518 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 48% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 49% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 5.6 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 59
Highest review score: 100 Final Destination 3
Lowest review score: 0 How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
Score distribution:
1518 movie reviews
  1. It's a thoroughly delightful throwaway--the kind of movie for which cable television was made, from the maker of "Music & Lyrics" (Marc Lawrence), who knows his way 'round a snappy tune.
  2. If Steven Soderbergh taught Clooney how to act in "Out of Sight," then Reitman has taught him how to stop acting. This is the most vulnerable, the most playful, the most human performance of his career.
  3. Statham's totally believable. He might yet become Bruce Willis.
  4. My Kid Could Paint That's about art—and it IS art, among the best documentaries ever made about that elusive process of manufacturing something out of nothing. But it's also a must-see for every single parent who believes their children are special, when all they want to be is your children.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    This Film Is Not Yet Rated has a refreshingly snotty sense of humor.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    There's something almost refreshingly venal about a movie with no purpose other than to meet intentions this cheesy.
  5. Without being too glib about it, World Trade Center is a most improbable thing: an upbeat film about September 11, one of the few stories to emerge from that day to come with a happy ending.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    What a breath of fresh air this stifling, claustrophobic, boldly uningratiating vision of an American subculture's last gasp imparts to its contrarian core audience. (Call me a hopeless addict: I've seen it three times.)
  6. The fanboy in me loves it, being wrapped in the warm projected glow of nostalgia for a movie I've memorized since age 9.
  7. Not everything jells, but Click is funnier and more elaborately clever than anything Sandler's done in years.
  8. Mostly it's just a sweet and lightly funny piece of highbrow piffle, as enjoyable as it is forgettable. There's no harm done, but there's not much else either.
  9. Is The Break-Up worth your time? Let's put it this way: Whenever Vaughn is onscreen, it is. When he's not, it ain't. The movie's a comedy, but it's also about a breakup, so it gets a bit maudlin toward the end.
  10. If this really is the last stand, it's a stylish farewell indeed.
  11. All in all, a respectable and predictable adaptation.
  12. A psychotic we can't help falling for, Edward Norton's beautifully drawn and richly nuanced dreamer could, in time, prove to be one of the most memorable movie characters of recent years.
  13. May be the most wrenching, profound and perfectly made movie nobody wants to see.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A sweet-natured, immensely likable family film.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Deeply engrossing and deep in numerous other ways that one scarcely encounters at the movies anymore.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Neither a mock-heroic cockeyed success story like "Ed Wood" nor a "Walk the Line"-style hagiography, Mary Harron's facile but hugely entertaining black-and-white biopic seems most interested in its subject--a studious southern girl who became the world's most celebrated fetish pinup--as an object.
  14. Smart, patient and ruefully funny... Yet because the film never digs too far into any single person's world, it doesn't build toward much.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Slither is what it is, unapologetically, and unlike Gunn's work on "Dawn of the Dead," it's probably too weird to be a crossover hit. Either you've got worms in your heart or you don't.
  15. In many ways, The Devil and Daniel Johnston is a beautiful work, a painstakingly crafted portrait of a talented self-saboteur--a man consistently done in by a vicious mental illness. But it's not as compelling as one would hope.
  16. Bleak, minimal, bone-dry and hilarious, it creates a rich and layered world from deft strokes of dialogue and action.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tough as it is, L'Enfant nudges both its protagonist and its audience toward unlikely affection. Tough as it is, L'Enfant commands our care by practicing what it preaches. No wonder the brothers call it a love story.
  17. The characters may be based on real people, with much of the dialogue culled directly from court transcripts, but Find Me Guilty plays the whole thing as comedy, and as everyone knows, putting a self-serious egomaniacal movie star in a bad hairpiece is comedy gold.
  18. From a fan's perspective, though, one might wish for a smaller budget and a truly uncompromising vision.
  19. Keaton's so good you almost forget how wonderful Downey is as Steven Schwimmer.
  20. The film, from its deadpan start to its languorous finish, provides the most joyous moviegoing experience in years.
  21. But except for a few missteps, the movie is so beautifully and sensitively rendered in its particulars, in its characterizations of soldiers and officers, and in its dramatization of a nearly miraculous event, that the result is an affecting piece of cinema.
  22. Packs an unexpected emotional wallop. Gavin Hood's film tells a story of violence and redemption that's even more remarkable when you consider that neither of the lead performers had ever acted in a movie previously.

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