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For 5,167 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 59% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 37% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.5 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 69
Highest review score: 100 The Only Living Pickpocket in New York
Lowest review score: 0 Pixels
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3,568 out of 5167
  2. Mixed: 1,333 out of 5167
  3. Negative: 266 out of 5167
5167 movie reviews
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  1. Freakier Friday
    Leave it to Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan to crack the code as to what makes a good legacyquel, which they’ve done quite handily with their long-gestating Freaky Friday sequel, Nisha Ganatra’s charming and quite fun Freakier Friday. The secret? Fittingly enough, it harkens back to exactly what Curtis and Lohan brought to Mark Waters’ 2003 Freaky Friday: actual verve, obvious joy, and performances that are about three times better than they need to be.
  2. Souleymane's Story
    Sometimes Souleymane feels like he’s sprinting through a race with no finish line, and sometimes he’s running into an unmovable brick wall. The film exists in the space between those opposing outcomes, and its contradictions become its greatest strength as it depicts the endless exhaustion of navigating a system that doesn’t care about you nearly as much as it claims to.
  3. She Rides Shotgun
    As is clear from the very first scene, and made all the more so by the very last, She Rides Shotgun is Polly’s movie at its core, and Heger’s face — a detailed portrait of love and loss, its colors all the more radiant by how they run together when she cries — is expressive enough to make it a movie worth watching even when it feels like one we’ve already seen a number of times before.
  4. The Naked Gun
    While it’s a mild shame “The Naked Gun” peters out a little bit toward the end (at least before rebounding during the credits), it’s even more of a shame that it has to end at all.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    East of Wall
    What Beecroft achieves exists in its own unique realm. It reminds us that no matter who you are, how isolated your world may seem, or how unworthy of being seen you may feel, your life is still deserving of the cinematic treatment.
  6. Monk in Pieces
    Empowered by the indivisible viscerality of Monk’s work (a massive Zoom discussion on her career immediately devolves into a mess of voices unintelligible enough to sound like one of Monk’s performances), Shebar’s film relies on creative urgency to compensate for what it lacks in specific insight.
  7. Happy Gilmore 2
    And, yes, it is also often quite funny. Most of that humor comes care of Sandler, who slips back into Happy with something like grizzled ease, and seems to have not lost a trick on what makes the character both so funny (his rage, his imagination, his fashion sense) and so easy to care about (his rage, his imagination, his fashion sense).
  8. Oh, Hi!
    The devil is in the details, and the details? Well, they’re in the kind of patchwork-guessing and random sign-seeing that so many are forced to endure as they embark on the horrors of modern dating. Brooks just takes them in some delightfully daffy (and occasionally deeply scary) new directions.
  9. Vice Is Broke
    Huang will never forgive Smith for killing the golden goose, and Smith will probably never take responsibility for it (to judge by the Instagram message with him that Huang shares in the film), but that’s not really what this raw and well-relished documentary is all about.
  10. The Fantastic Four: First Steps
    As “First Steps” limps to its total nothing of a conclusion, it feels less like a victory than it does a total surrender. You have to walk before you can run, but at this point the MCU is back to crawling on its knees, and at this point it seems like it might be too afraid to ever stand back up again.
  11. Drowning Dry
    With a Michael Haneke-esque impassive glaze and a Ruben Östlund-level satire of manners and emotional stuntedness in adults, the film acquires a quiet power as it plays out all possible permutations of a swimming accident that may or may not have ruined the lives of at least two families.
  12. Shari & Lamb Chop
    D’Apolito covers a staggering amount of ground here, much of that possible because of Lewis’ special brand of candor.
  13. Unicorns
    For two hours at least, Unicorns will help you escape the gray monotony of life with flair and color.
  14. Life After
    This movie is not about suicide, which would mean it would be about death. Rather, it’s about life, life that is far more complex than the soundbite clips from the past can give.
  15. I Know What You Did Last Summer
    Harpoons have never been more terrifying than they are here, and Robinson and Lansky expand Williamson’s once quaint universe so dramatically that it can be shockingly hard to see the Fisherman coming.
  16. Smurfs
    Somehow, in a movie about finding your niche, the Smurfs are more generic and indistinguishable than ever.
  17. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
    The grand takeaway is Venter’s astonishing turn. That kid’s got a future, and it began with a filmmaker who knew how to direct her: with patient energy while also encouraging the freedom to play and seek and explore as Bobo does within her little big world.
  18. KPop Demon Hunters
    Thankfully, Kpop Demon Hunters isn’t just a cynical attempt from Sony to cash in on a cultural trend: in the hands of directors Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans, it’s a endearing, beautifully animated crowdpleaser, with a dorkily sincere love for the pop culture phenomena it embeds itself in.
  19. We Are Guardians
    It’s a topic so vast that even a sprawling miniseries would struggle to contain it, and yet directors Edivan Guajajara, Chelsea Greene, and Rob Grobman manage to wrap their arms around the disaster in a little more than 80 minutes; not by simplifying the situation, but rather by contrasting the apocalyptic plainness of the problem with the infinite complexity of solving it.
  20. Before We Forget
    Before We Forget may not be in quite the same league as Guadagnino’s work, but fans of the latter will find plenty to long for here, even if the sluggish modern-day components detract from the compelling, sensitive love story they look back upon.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Heightened Scrutiny
    What Heightened Scrutiny reminded me is that the hope is inside of us, and that only through coalition building and helping others who need it the most will it truly be fulfilled.
  22. Daniela Forever
    Though its darkness may be alienating, there’s something to be said about a love story that isn’t afraid to admit that one of the lovers isn’t the charming dreamboat he appears to be. And to Golding’s credit, there’s no vanity in his portrayal of Nicolas.
  23. Superman
    For a movie that’s meant to represent the birth of a brand-new cinematic universe (the DCU), James Gunn’s slight and slaphappy take on Superman doesn’t feel much like the start of anything.
  24. The Old Guard 2
    The Old Guard 2 is frustratingly — if also pointedly — rushed for a movie about people who’ve been alive for eons, and it never gives any of its characters the chance to meaningfully hash out how the bonds of friendship might pull tighter as they get twisted over the course of a few hundred decades.
  25. 40 Acres
    By turning the tables and making a Black woman the landowner, the filmmaker manages to both subvert the past and illustrate the same economic forces that led to all the inequality we still face in the real world. It all makes for a fitting Fourth of July weekend viewing, with plenty of cannibal combat thrown in for good measure.
  26. Jurassic World Rebirth
    The “Jurassic” sequels were bad enough when they made an effort to evolve — they’re even less worth seeing now that they already come pre-fossilized.
  27. Ponyboi
    Through some of the screenplay’s slight formulaic stumbles, it’s Gallo’s charmingly fierce performance that anchors all the loose pieces.
  28. Afternoons of Solitude
    The film’s unflinchingly repetitive shape allows viewers to lose sight of their perspective at the same time as it invites them to draw their own conclusions, a vertigo which proves to be more involving than the didacticism that a traditional documentary might bring to the same topic.
  29. Heads of State
    Torn between action and comedy, irony and sentiment, and rah-rah jingoism and genuine self-reflection, Heads of State is a surprisingly entertaining romp.
  30. Ice Road: Vengeance
    On its own terms, “Ice Road: Vengeance” is not a terrible movie. Neeson’s mediations on finding ways to grieve without putting your entire life on hold offer more emotional depth than you’re likely to find in any direct-to-VOD action movie with “Vengeance” in its title.
  31. Nobu
    A mouth-watering but utterly flavorless documentary about one of the most acclaimed sushi chefs in the world (and arguably the most famous), Matt Tyrnauer’s “Nobu” is such a fawning portrait of Nobu Matsuhisa that it feels like it should only be available to watch on a DVD sold at the gift shops in the restaurateur’s hotels.
  32. Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything
    Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything is then both an unvarnished portrait and a slightly incomplete one. Very subtly it does show how, as a woman operating in very much a man’s world, she opened the doors for others while not necessarily doing a whole lot to change the system and its paradigms and its power structures, full-stop.
  33. Titan: The OceanGate Disaster
    While there’s nothing egregiously cynical about the film’s nature or design, its forensic tone belies the familiarity of its evidence, and its subject has already been too well-excavated for the sincerity of Monroe’s efforts to shake off that signature true-crime stink (the pungent stench of a once-proud medium that’s been left to rot on streaming).
  34. M3GAN 2.0
    Useless narrative threads and too many wasted elements give away M3GAN 2.0 as an amateur effort made by a talented horror filmmaker who has not yet mastered action’s specific visual language or skill set.
  35. Bride Hard
    The problems start with Shaina Steinberg’s misguided and shallow script.
  36. 28 Years Later
    28 Years Later effectively uses the tropes of its genre to insist that the line between a tragedy and a statistic is thinner than we think, and more permeable than we realize.
  37. Sally
    Yes, Ride’s life was rife with tensions, both personal and professional. So how do we build a film around that? Carefully. Perhaps too carefully.
  38. F1: The Movie
    The action is hardly dull, but the sheer disconnect between the wowee zowee immediacy of the race footage and the mezzo mezzo excitement it inspires suggests that tuning out the noise isn’t as easy as Sonny Hayes might seem to think.
  39. Elio
    Elio isn’t a bad time at the theaters — it’s pretty to look at, charming enough, and frequently funny. But by shying away from investing in where its main character is coming from, the movie makes his galactic adventures feel a bit weightless.
  40. Sex
    It’s a knowing smile of a drama that leaves you eager to follow Haugerud through his other two new films about the life of the mind, the last and best of which (“Dreams”) recently won top prize at the Berlinale.
  41. Inside
    Inside is a small and constrained prison drama, even by the inflexible standards of its genre, and yet Williams’ debut is so replete with such moments of raw compassion that it almost invisibly accumulates a deep well of emotion — one that allows the film to feel much bigger than it looks by the time it arrives at its absolute knockout of a final scene.
  42. Sovereign
    While every scene pulls Jerry apart at the seams, “Sovereign” is too vague and scattered to chart a legible path toward his breaking point.
  43. It's Dorothy!
    Packed with major talking heads, zippy animation, and a bouncing (and bouncy) sense of time (and timeline), “It’s Dorothy!” succeeds mightily when it comes to its most elemental thesis.
  44. How to Train Your Dragon
    No one needs a live-action remake, but ones this faithful and sweet are not the problem.
  45. Materialists
    Cynical, sad, increasingly fucked up, and often gloriously mean, Song has turned the genre inside out to show us how shallow these stories can be.
  46. Echo Valley
    There’s some fun to be had in watching Echo Valley shift into a battle of wits between Moore and Gleeson, as both actors mine devious nuance from the thin gruel of a paperback thriller.
  47. Predator: Killer of Killers
    An awesomely violent and artfully staged piece of animated pulp, Predator: Killer of Killers feels like a movie that was dreamed up by a couple of stoned teenage boys in a suburban basement one night during the summer of 1987, but this is the rare case where that feels like a good thing. A very good thing, even.
  48. Ballerina
    A bigger, more confident sequel might be just what this franchise needs to enjoy a peaceful transition of power — and to make good on the full potential of a Hollywood action movie that meaningfully tries to iterate on John Wick instead of just copying his moves.
  49. Will
    Maple’s love for her neighborhood and her neighbors is obvious, as she paints an unflinching portrait of the struggle and resiliency of the community.
  50. The Ritual
    For a film that treats historical realism as a primary selling point, The Ritual has no real grounds on which to assert that it’s less fantastical than any of the better exorcism movies out there.
  51. Diciannove
    That Tortorici pulls this twist off is both perverse and pleasurable, and that he keeps it all feeling funny is even better.
  52. Hot Milk
    Hot Milk dribbles when it should feel crisper, less torpid, but that’s perhaps to match the inner decay of everyone onscreen, and the metastasis of the most interminable vacation ever known.
  53. Tornado
    Despite considerable thrills throughout, Maclean’s writing makes it seem as though his characters never actually existed in their world before the film started.
  54. Karate Kid: Legends
    In tying its story to the saga of Daniel LaRusso, Karate Kid: Legends resorts to repeating his journey entirely, leading to a martial arts film that has limited new moves compared to what audiences have seen 40 years ago.
  55. A Useful Ghost
    Boonbunchachoke has made a darkly hilarious film that deserves to be remembered for much more than its shock value.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    A Private Life
    A Private Life does manage to create an interesting dynamic as it posits the need to balance psychology’s theoretics with actual results and action.
  57. Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5
    The result isn’t as riveting as “I Am Not Your Negro” — it feels less personal and more generic, like a term paper someone could have written in undergrad. Still, Peck makes his points well, and accomplishes what he sets out to do by getting your blood pressure rising.
  58. The President's Cake
    The President’s Cake is a case of relatively modest filmmaking that becomes rich because archetype and characterization coordinate the story world.
  59. My Father's Shadow
    My Father’s Shadow resolves as a movie less about a father than it is about the absence of one — a vibrant, deeply felt love letter to Lagos, written in blood.
  60. Yes
    As sincere in its satire as it is satirical in its sincerity, the deliriously provocative Yes is a veritable orgy of self-loathing surrender that reaffirms Lapid as the world’s most visceral director on a shot-by-shot basis.
  61. Romería
    Romería isn’t without its own unique shape, or visual vitality, or a narrative sense of joie de vivre, but it doesn’t always stand out from the pack even as Simón deserves credit for rendering her autobiography in aesthetically sublime terms.
  62. Young Mothers
    There is a satisfying, compact completeness to their handling of the storylines of four different young mothers and sufficient grace notes are enabled in each case to stave off the cliches that occasionally threaten to engulf events.
  63. Honey Don't!
    It’s a slight work that is too enamored with its own quirkiness to amount to much of anything at all.
  64. The Mastermind
    The Mastermind is a study in one man’s selfishness, his compulsion toward crime as a thrill sport, toward daring himself to execute a challenge to shake up his own humdrum day-to-day schtick.
  65. Woman and Child
    A few structural issues threaten to tip the balance from cinematic melodrama into TV soap as the bad news keeps on coming, but Izadyar’s sustained emotional conviction carries the vision onwards.
  66. Mountainhead
    While “Succession” was all about delusion, with the Roy children cluelessly thinking the family business needed them while everyone maneuvered around their childish stunts, Mountainhead is all about the cruel intentionality of men who actively choose to burn down our world and just might have the competence to do it.
  67. Resurrection
    Is this impressive, boundary-pushing, experimental cinema or an endurance test with no internal logic where the chief pleasure is leaving the theater afterwards? Could it be both?
  68. Fear Street: Prom Queen
    "Prom Queen” blitzes through familiar pop-comic vignettes, only pausing to make its loathsome characters’ adolescent nightmares just a little bit freakier.
  69. The History of Sound
    While The History of Sound suffers from some pacing issues and detours that turn up as dead ends, following Lionel’s path as a budding ethnomusicologist collecting songs and sounds to record on cylinders, this is a lovely movie capable of wounding and haunting you.
  70. Sentimental Value
    To no one’s surprise, Reinsve is immaculately attuned to Trier’s energy, and Sentimental Value is carried by the manic frustration she brings to her part, which is as fun as it is freighted with crisis.
  71. Fountain of Youth
    Occasionally muddled, mostly convoluted, and yet still broadly entertaining, it’s a shame this glossy and big budget affair (you really can’t fake Egyptian pyramids like these), will only exist as a streaming pick on Apple TV+.
  72. Splitsville
    It’s shaggy in places and favors one side of its story above the other, but ultimately makes for a delightful time.
  73. Left-Handed Girl
    Regardless of some of the screenplay hiccups and deus ex machina plopped from the sky, “Left-Handed Girl” still announces Tsou as a confident directorial talent with a rare exuberance.
  74. Eleanor the Great
    It adds up to a fascinating, if often baffling first effort from Johannson and Kamen, one not afraid of big emotional wallops, but not always able to carry them into truly revelatory spaces. It’s a little predictable, a little bizarre, a little funny, and very sad, but it’s also an ambitious swing at what movies can still be.
  75. Eagles of the Republic
    What makes Eagles of the Republic fascinating is how, even as it leaves the film world behind for more conventional political thriller trappings in its final act, it still ties the action to the struggles Fahmy undergoes as an actor and as a political mouthpiece.
  76. Leave One Day
    Taking a sturdy, mainstream premise — a big-city careerist reflecting on her life path during a trip back to the holler, in a setup that faintly echoes “Sweet Home Alabama,” among a hundred other rom-coms — and shading it with moral grays, natural light, and a more unvarnished turn from a well-known star, Leave One Day plays uncannily like a Gallic cover of a Sundance movie, gussied up and vaunted onto the international stage.
  77. It Was Just an Accident
    Despite its eventual willingness to resolve certain ambiguities, “It Was Just an Accident” derives so much of its throat-clenching power from the uncertainties at the heart of its premise.
  78. Reflection in a Dead Diamond
    Ultimately, it’s a case in point for how an impeccably styled arthouse-grindhouse crossover can feel both dense with signifiers to unpack (although lacking more commonly understood kinds of “depth”), but also fleet, frothy and fun.
  79. Paul
    Hovering around the prosody of “simp” is the word “sub” — Paul is certainly a proud sub, as we gradually understand his content isn’t solely cheery scroll fodder, but that he’s also happily exhibiting his sexual preference as an “out” kink enthusiast, shining visibility on himself and perhaps others like him to come as the 2020’s continue on.
  80. Fuori
    Fuori stands apart as one of the filmmaker’s most vibrant and accessible works so far, able to emphasize the story of a powerful and beautiful older woman — with flecks of a classic melodrama or the “woman’s picture” — beyond the heritage concerns of Sapienza’s role in Italian letters.
  81. Enzo
    The very last scene makes up for a lot of these misgivings: it’s a beautifully bittersweet last beat for the film’s theme of finding camaraderie in the uncertainty of life. For Campillo, it’s one of his greatest scenes as a director. For Cantent, it’s a fitting final statement.
  82. Pillion
    It also never hurts to be anchored by two actors who are totally game and committed to that vision, and willing to go there, chains, gags, assless chaps and all.
  83. The Little Sister
    Together, Melliti and Herzi find a rare alchemy between actor and director telling someone else’s story, but one that may turn out to be a bit of each other’s own.
  84. Two Prosecutors
    Ultimately, Two Prosecutors is like a perfect 50-50 cocktail of dread and dialogue, the vodka being whichever you’d choose, making the inevitable feel capable of deferment, before it strikes more devastatingly than you’d even think.
  85. Lilo & Stitch
    The heart of this story remains firmly intact, but there’s something about seeing it rendered in live-action that takes away its inherent magic.
  86. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life
    Austen fans might balk a bit at how much this one goes off-script into its own territory, but the spirit of Austen runs deep.
  87. Renoir
    Renoir — with its faint traces of sentiment, and complete absence of sentimentality — delicately articulates the girl’s inner child in a way that allows us to feel it expand across the season.
  88. Miroirs No. 3
    Christian Petzold‘s gossamer latest film, Mirrors No. 3, is as compact as a novella, as ephemeral in its emotion, as delicate in register as one of the Chopin or Ravel pieces that float through it.
  89. Dossier 137
    The moments when Moll lets the images reveal as much as the dialogue are the ones that linger.
  90. Alpha
    The maddening frustration of her first unambiguous misfire — which is worse than bad because it could have been good — is that it feels so much, but conveys so little.
  91. Sirât
    It’s always visually transportive and grimly sublime, focusing on simple plots and conflicts that provide ample space for philosophical and existential contemplation. And “Sirât” is undoubtedly his most fully realized work in his regard, notable too for folding in the visceral pleasures of contemporary genre and even blockbuster cinema.
  92. Highest 2 Lowest
    Titled like a sequel, plotted like a remake, and shot with enough of its own singular verve to ensure that most people never think of it as either of those things, Spike Lee’s deliriously entertaining — if jarringly upbeat — Highest 2 Lowest modernizes the post-war anxieties of Akira Kurosawa’s “High and Low” for the age of parasocial relationships.
  93. Urchin
    Dickinson clearly hopes this story will make it that much harder for people to dehumanize the homeless population, but the power of his film — and the promise of his intelligence as a filmmaker — is that it recognizes how a portrait of mottled ambivalence might better accomplish that goal than a million cheap sops of empathy.
  94. The Secret Agent
    With The Secret Agent, Filho exhumes the past as the basis for a purely fictional story, and in doing so articulates how fiction can be even more valuable as a vehicle for truth than it is as a tool for covering it up.
  95. Dangerous Animals
    Just like there’s something cruel about the way Dangerous Animals treats women, there’s also something thoughtless about the way it deploys its undersea threats. Sure, they’re not ultimately the bad guys, but haven’t they suffered enough bad press over the years?
  96. The Phoenician Scheme
    The Phoenician Scheme is the busiest of Anderson’s films, and also — at least on first viewing — the least rewarding.
  97. Die My Love
    What Lawrence achieves here is extremely impressive, a marquee movie star throwing herself with abandon into a filmmaker’s warped and demandingly miserable vision.
  98. Deaf President Now!
    The documentary builds to an almost euphoric ending.
  99. The Chronology of Water
    The Chronology of Water can — and repeatedly does — churn itself to a forbidding standstill, and yet Poots makes every moment of it ecstatic in its immediacy.
  100. Eddington
    Aster, who’s exclusively interested in making the kind of films that should be reviewed straight onto a prescription pad, is too beholden to his neuroses for his latest movie to play like a cheap provocation. This time, however, there’s a good chance those are your neuroses, too.
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