Dallas Observer's Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 678 out of 1518
  2. Mixed: 604 out of 1518
  3. Negative: 236 out of 1518
1518 movie reviews
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    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shakespeare in Love
    These filmmakers have taken a historical figure and made him into a hot-blooded romantic hero. Shakespeare did that a time or two himself.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rushmore
    By the end, were it not for Murray, watching Rushmore would be like reading an article on "Why adolescents need Prozac."
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Psycho
    Funny and sort of creepy--a not bad little thriller with some peculiarly dated plot development.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A Bug's Life
    Lasseter and Stanton and the rest of the animators and gagsmiths use the computer with staggering imaginative freedom.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Very Bad Things
    It poses as an unblinkered look at the hangups and hypocrisies of the bourgeoisie. In reality it's an empty, narcissistic tantrum.
  6. Home Fries
    Overloaded with oddities but a bit short on horse sense, this is one of those stubbornly defiant, attitude-driven movies that's so busy scrambling genres, breaking rules, and dashing expectations on the road to becoming art that it slips off into the ditch.
  7. Waking Ned Devine
    Waking Ned Devine works up enough feel-good momentum that in the end it's irresistible.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Celebrity
    Here Branagh and his writer-director have managed something more haunting than town-square self-flagellation: they've created a man whose appetites will always be greater than his abilities. And for an artist like Woody Allen, who possesses plenty of both, there can be no scarier fate on the planet.
  9. Meet Joe Black
    Meet Joe Black takes an interesting idea--Death assumes human form and comes to earth to learn about human existence--and reduces it to a flat, uninspired, interminably slow movie.
  10. The Siege
    A political film in the form of a thriller, rather than a garden-variety potboiler gleefully helping itself to stock political tropes from the genre's grab bag.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gods and Monsters
    This chamber drama is a deeply felt and oddly moving reverie on death and the process of taking stock of one's life.
  12. American History X
    Fails dramatically as well as ideologically.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Vampires
    Scary or not, there's energy in the way Carpenter frames and cuts his movies, and there's energy to spare in Woods' performance.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Life Is Beautiful
    If, like Benigni, you were born after World War II, it reassures us that he hasn't forgotten the innate seriousness of his subject matter, and that despite its grimness, he still thinks life is beautiful.
  15. Pleasantville
    This uncommonly clever, surprisingly poignant fairy tale packs a social wallop that we're not quite prepared for.
  16. Apt Pupil
    This brutal film borders on the brilliant. Beautifully structured and edited, with a chilling central performance by Ian McKellen and an exceptional score by John Ottman, who also edited the picture, it churns up emotions and leaves the viewer feeling stunned and depleted.
  17. Beloved
    Beloved tries to be an anthem of the spirit, and that's just about the most difficult--and unfilmable--thing you can attempt in the movies. Demme stretches things out to epic length, but what was really needed here was an epic imagination.
  18. Practical Magic
    As witch movies go -- even lighthearted, supposedly comic witch movies -- Practical Magic is conspicuously lacking in supernatural phenomena.
  19. Ronin
    As is common in a Frankenheimer picture, the plot lines get a bit tangled in Ronin, but the atmosphere is tense, the style impeccable.
  20. Pecker
    Pecker is a satire, but an incredibly good-natured one, which is not quite the contradiction in terms it might seem.
  21. One True Thing
    In a confused world, this is a movie with answers.
  22. A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries
    A major weakness of A Soldier's Daughter is that it has no real plot.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Simon Birch
    The film is a feeble shadow of a book that won over even those of us who are no special fans of Irving -- it's probably his funniest, least self-conscious work.
  24. Cube
    Cube is essentially a glossy, beautifully designed 90-minute Twilight Zone episode.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    54
    In the end narration, Shane gripes that the new corporate owners who took over Studio 54 after Rubell and Schrager's crash made the club "safe and boring." But that's exactly what Christopher has done to 54.
  26. Next Stop Wonderland
    While too many things about the story don't ring true for the film as a whole to work, there is enough in Next Stop Wonderland to keep the viewer wide awake and entertained.
  27. Your Friends & Neighbors
    In Your Friends and Neighbors, LeBute is having a high old time giving himself the creeps. For the rest of us it's all kind of...well...nasty.
  28. Slums of Beverly Hills
    It's one of those movies that gets bonus points for being "personal" -- it bops along from episode to episode, as if the filmmaker were discovering her subject as she went along.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    How Stella Got Her Groove Back
    This is escapism, pure and simple. And few know the power of such purity better than Terry McMillan.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Return to Paradise
    Instead of a gripping, conscience-bending thriller, Paradise plods along, determined to be some sort of master chess game ruminating on personal and cultural value systems and the complex and often contradicting facets of loyalty, honesty, friendship, love, responsibility, self-preservation, and exploitation.
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