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For 5,163 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 59% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 38% 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: 3,565 out of 5163
  2. Mixed: 1,332 out of 5163
  3. Negative: 266 out of 5163
5163 movie reviews
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  1. Manuscripts Don't Burn
    Rather than relish in the stark proceedings, Manuscripts Don't Burn preys on its viewers' imagination, leaving several deaths and other dreary outcomes off-screen. In the unbearable tension of its final moments, the movie arrives at an expected destination, but the outcome stings more than anything preceding it.
  2. Policeman
    While blatantly topical, this is not a political film of the moment, but rather a calculated meditation on self-defined purpose in the midst of societal confusion.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    The Sacrament
    The Sacrament is a missed opportunity to further expand West's pallet. Instead of twisting conventions and playing with expectations, West plays into expectations.
  4. Edge of Tomorrow
    Edge of Tomorrow is slick, but once its fancy plot dressing takes form, it has little more to offer aside from a few impressive action sequences and the infallible grin of its nimble lead.
  5. The Fault in Our Stars
    Boone’s unobtrusive style takes cues from the subdued nature of the material, but there’s little about the movie that makes the filmmaking stand out. Instead, it derives its chief strengths from a series of efforts to take the drama seriously, mainly embodied by Woodley’s onscreen investment in it.
  6. Willow Creek
    While it eventually devolves into exploring the terrifying prospects of something hairy lurking about in the shadows, Goldthwait uses that thrill factor to validate the commitment of Bigfoot believers. Willow Creek never feels like an attempt to proselytize, but it's a smart recognition of the dangers involved in doubt.
  7. Obvious Child
    The real triumph of Obvious Child involves its ability to make familiar ingredients work just fine on their own terms. In doing so, it makes up for a lot of lost time in the pantheon of female-centric comedies, and studios would be wise to take note.
  8. Maleficent
    It’s a dazzling showcase of fantasy-based filmmaking in the 21st century that also manages a feeble attempt at injecting feminist politics into an antiquated narrative. Yet its eventual climax strains from the obviousness of these efforts.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Elena
    Shot like a dream, spoken like an elegy, it takes nonfiction where it seldom wants to go – away from the comforting embrace of fact and into a realm of expressionistic possibility.
  10. We Are the Best!
    Despite the unruly music at its center, the filmmaker has crafted a uniformly gentle ode to growing up.
  11. A Million Ways to Die in the West
    In A Million Ways to Die in the West, MacFarlane loads up enough zaniness to make for a generally enjoyable mashup, particularly because the genial plot affords him a solid backdrop.
  12. Girlhood
    The tense, involving result confirms Sciamma's mastery over the coming-of-age drama, a genre too often reduced to its simplest ingredients.
  13. Party Girl
    Though never entirely the sum of its parts, Party Girl delivers a gentle, somber portrait of the aging process that's consistently believable precisely because not much happens.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    The Blue Room
    In telling his story, Amalric is greatly aided by his ace cinematographer, Christophe Beaucarne, whose images pick up on a great many tiny but telling details, as if life were a mosaic composed of an almost infinite number of parts that are all equally important for the bigger picture.
  15. Grace of Monaco
    By exploring a narrow scenario from one chapter of Kelly's life, Grace of Monaco plays like fragments of an uncompleted biopic that's been art directed within an inch of its life.
  16. Lost River
    Rather than making his own movie, Gosling has composed a messy love letter to countless others.
  17. The Search
    The Search lacks the the credible emotions of the original and never assembles a convincing reason for its existence.
  18. Jimmy's Hall
    A minor work by Loach's standards, the movie nevertheless marks his most enjoyable effort in years.
  19. The Homesman
    Jones' alternately skillful and irreverent approach results in a mixed bag of possibilities, with many terrifically entertaining on their own even as the overall picture remains muddled.
  20. Clouds of Sils Maria
    The typically great Binoche conveys a tantalizing mixture of confidence and unease as she considers her glamorous past and undetermined future.
  21. Wild Tales
    While adhering to an internal logic that makes each punchline land with a satisfying burst of glee, the movie nevertheless stems from genuine fury aimed a broken world. It's the rare storytelling endeavor that manages to be laughably absurd and profoundly tragic at the same time.
  22. Two Days, One Night
    Much of the movie relies on Cotillard's jittery expressions as she veers from tentatively hopeful to despondent and back again, sometimes within a matter of minutes, reflecting the ever-changing stability of job security among the lower class.
  23. The Captive
    A lazily plotted and largely generic thriller.
  24. Maps to the Stars
    While not the director's canniest piece of filmmaking, it's unquestionably his angriest, politically motivated achievement. Every missive hits its target hard with a comedy-horror combo aimed squarely at the kind of commercial stupidity that Cronenberg has avoided throughout his 45-year career.
  25. Mr. Turner
    Mr. Turner is a first-rate match of director and subject. Less an explication of the man's genius than an immersion into its essence.
  26. Leviathan
    Rather than building towards the finality of a single climax, Leviathan injects several of them into the tapestry of its elegant design.
  27. Goodbye to Language 3D
    For Godard junkies Goodbye to Language is rich with Godard's temperament—and thus an enjoyable provocation, even if it doesn't all add up. But what Godard movie truly does?
  28. Mommy
    As a director, he finally shows a willingness to work on the same wavelength of the material instead of adding distracting bells and whistles that overstate his characters' grievances.
  29. Winter Sleep
    While it doesn't always earn its heft, Winter Sleep is both subdued and rich in details, its plot growing slowly over a series of extensive conversations. It's a robust, challenging experience he's been building toward with his previous features, as well as an adventurous step above them.
  30. It Follows
    No matter its conceptual intentions, It Follows never ventures too far from visceral horror. Mitchell populates a number of scenes with well-timed jump scares as the being frequently bursts out of the shadows or appears in unexpected forms, while the score provides a screaming punctuation mark.
  31. The Rover
    Like its tattered setting, The Rover is scattered with intriguing ideas never successfully fleshed out.
  32. Foxcatcher
    Though anchored by a affecting and sullen turn by Channing Tatum, the movie derives its primary discomfiting power from Steve Carell in a revelatory performance as a monster of American wealth.
  33. Welcome to New York
    No matter its silliest missteps, Welcome to New York has an impressive engine of ideas in line with the director's other New York stories. [Unrated Version]
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ida
    Pawlikowski doesn't punish his viewers, he simply challenges them. Take the vow to dedicate your attention to Ida and you’ll be rewarded deeply.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Fed Up
    Fed Up is a glossy package that gets its warnings across loud and clear: we need to change what we eat.
  36. Godzilla
    Edwards manages to sustain a grim, cerebral atmosphere all the way through, as if fighting the inevitable demands of the material. The movie contains enough basic money shots to please hardcore Godzilla fans without indulging in them at every opportunity. By contemporary blockbusters standards, it's practically a minimalist enterprise.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    God's Pocket
    The numerous belly laughs are undermined by jarring flashes of darkness that never organically sync with the plot.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Ping Pong Summer
    An affectionate love letter to a bygone era of growing up, Ping Pong Summer brims with specific pop culture minutiae, making it easy to assume the movie has been intended as a farce, but it has more going on beneath the surface.
  39. Transcendence
    While never as dynamically involving as Christopher Nolan's "Inception," for which longtime Nolan director of photography Pfister justifiably won an Oscar, Transcendence still grapples with provocative existential concepts in similarly thoughtful terms.
  40. Fading Gigolo
    Intentionally or not, however, Fading Gigolo actually functions as something of a statement on Allen's persona—onscreen and off—as it has been understood in the public eye. And the resulting conclusion, like the movie, is a decidedly mixed bag.
  41. Proxy
    Increasingly silly even as it maintains a grave tone, Proxy doesn't always work, but its commitment to unpredictable twists and pushing beyond morbid extremes bears the stamp of showmanship sorely lacking from many other examples of the genre.
  42. Oculus
    In Oculus, the horror is at once deceptively simple and rooted in a deep, primal uneasiness. Its scariest aspects are universally familiar.
  43. Evergreen: The Road to Legalization
    The absence of suspense results in something closer to a one-sided pat on the back for everyone involved, though it effectively puts forth a whole new set of challenges.
  44. Dom Hemingway
    For all its vibrant, flamboyant aspects, “Dom Hemingway” is a resoundingly empty star vehicle. It gives Law a character too thinly crafted to justify his eccentricities. He acts his heart out for a role that has no heart.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Alan Partridge
    Alan Partridge stays true to this small, very specific world of regional British radio and this class of local celebrity while also injecting the high-level drama needed to carry such a story to a much larger audience. It’s this balance that should win the film over for Alan Partridge fans and the general movie-going public alike.
  46. Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger
    Although Berlinger’s latest work is a dense, unsparing look at the offenses and trial of Whitey Bulger, it's equally concerned with capturing how the many members of Bulger's expansive web -- criminals and innocent citizens alike -- use their experiences to control their version of the man.
  47. Manakamana
    On the whole, Manakamana succeeds by creating the ongoing anticipation of something, anything to happen next, a wholly unique sensation specific to its inventive design.
  48. Cheap Thrills
    Savagely assaulting the desperate state of a blue collar family man, the comedic thriller Cheap Thrills establishes a ridiculous premise early on and takes it to various extremes, again and again, until you just have to accept the crazy venture on its own terms or simply give up.
  49. Mistaken for Strangers
    Only the band's continuing popularity makes his journey stand out. Like its director-star, Mistaken For Strangers struggles admirably but can only go so far before letting the established talent win out.
  50. Breathe In
    To be fair, Breathe In may hit a lot of familiar beats, but none of them are entirely unwelcome.
  51. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
    Shot in gorgeously expressionistic black-and-white and fusing multiple genres into a thoroughly original whole, Amirpour has crafted a beguiling, cryptic and often surprisingly funny look at personal desire that creeps up on you with the nimble powers of its supernatural focus.
  52. Noah
    The director's murky, ill-conceived take on the world's oldest disaster story contains some of the most pristine visuals produced on a mass studio scale in some time. But it's also constantly tethered to a dull, melodramatic series of events out of whack with any traditional interpretation of the material.
  53. Starred Up
    Mackenzie (whose previous credits include "Perfect Sense" and "Young Adam") applies a sharp kitchen sink realism to this haunting setting and directs it toward an ultimately moving family drama that just happens to involve vicious convicts.
  54. Fort Tilden
    While frequently very funny and sustained by a pair of boldly unlikable female protagonists, Fort Tilden adopts the glorious stupidity of its stars, and echoes their gratingly obnoxious temperaments.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Teenage
    This documentary is not a dry, academic history of youth culture, but rather a vibrant political statement that shows the powerful force of teenagers and their ability to foment social, cultural, and political change.
  56. Chef
    By its later scenes, Chef only finds respite from its bland qualities through the scrumptious-looking dishes constantly on display. As self-indulgent vanity projects go, this one's pretty innocuous, if only because it's always easy on the eyes.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Veronica Mars
    Thomas and his co-writer Diane Ruggiero have penned a self-avowed love letter to the fans of the series, but grounded it in a solid thriller with compelling characters and bright comic moments.
  58. The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
    A loud, visually assaultive assemblage of genre tropes as technically accomplished as it is difficult to watch, "The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears" has plenty to impress while simultaneously offering so little.
  59. As the Palaces Burn
    With the shift from conventional rock doc into something more sophisticated, As the Palaces Burn remains enthralling all the way through.
  60. Omar
    Omar maintains an unsettling rhythm of suspense and sociopolitical critique throughout.
  61. Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
    The contrast between the movie’s traditional execution and Stritch’s domineering powers create the lingering sense that she may be the project’s true auteur.
  62. Beauty and the Beast
    Gans isn’t especially concerned with the outcome this coupling, instead reveling in overwrought and often bloated storytelling, lush details and some of the year’s most unnerving CGI.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    The Two Faces of January
    Amini's directorial debut is a quiet and graceful achievement that suffers from a number of shortcomings but still works on its own terms.


  64. '71
    '71 constantly thrills without sensationalizing its surprises. The war-is-hell ethos drives it forward, so that the movie retains its suspense in conjunction with its dour outlook.
  65. Snowpiercer
    Unapologetically long and messy, Snowpiercer offers an unhinged ride that's worth the investment for its mixture of batty personalities, consistently impressive visuals and mad swipes at heavy symbolism jam-packed together.
  66. The Grand Budapest Hotel
    While it has many familiar ingredients — from the atmosphere to the ensemble of Anderson regulars in nearly every role — in its allegiance to Anderson's vision, everything about The Grand Budapest Hotel is a welcome dose of originality.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    7 Boxes
    “The Fast and the Furious” with wheelbarrows, Paraguayan action-thriller-romance hybrid 7 Boxes is a rollicking good time at the movies that offers breathtaking action and suspense, humor and appealing characters all in one visually flashy package.
  68. Love & Air Sex
    Poyser doesn't do anything we haven't seen before, but the familiar ingredients are done just right.
  69. The Monuments Men
    Smothered by its lighthearted approach, The Monuments Men attempts to make a grand statement about the valiance of dying for the sake of art, but fails to create it.
  70. Wish I Was Here
    Braff hasn't made another generational statement, but rather a regurgitation of tropes that got old a long time ago.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Trip to Italy
    While The Trip to Italy offers all the pleasures of a posh holiday accompanied by two of the most inventive comedians today, the improvisation here lacks the total unexpectedness that the first enjoyed.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    They Came Together
    In terms of its pure laughter quotient, They Came Together constantly delivers.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Song One
    Barker-Froyland's intention was clearly to make Song One all about music and how it can bring people together. But the result is all about Anne.
  74. Alive Inside
    Whether it's purely through the use of music or through the individual, attentive care given by some of the featured nursing home workers, the proof of positive changes presented in "Alive Inside" provide a sense of idealism amid bleak situations.
  75. Rich Hill
    There are moments when Tragos and Palermo run the risk of transforming their subjects into tools exploited for the sake of the movie's artistic vision, but the best part of Rich Hill is that its participants rise above the limitations of the material.
  76. The Skeleton Twins
    Judging by Johnson's previous feature, "True Adolescence," he's better at crafting characters with credible problems than finding equally credible ways of exploring them. Fortunately, in the case of Skeleton Twins, the actors do the legwork.
  77. The Overnighters
    At first galvanizing in its depiction of survival amid dire circumstances, "The Overnighters" transforms into a devastating portrait of communal unrest.
  78. Love Is Strange
    Love Is Strange is a sophisticated take on contemporary urbanity infused with romantic ideals and the tragedy of their dissolution.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Listen Up Philip
    Like its central character, Listen Up Philip exudes a kind of highbrow affectation that charms more than it alienates.
  80. Land Ho!
    Treasuring small victories and mood above all else, Land Ho! makes it possible to engage with its subjects' pathos and experience their sense of renewal along with them.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Laggies
    Even if the film doesn't leave much to ponder past the closing credits, it's enjoyable while it's unfolding, doing justice to the strengths of Shelton's ever-expanding filmography.
  82. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter
    Striking a complex tone of tragedy and uplift at the same time, Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter both celebrates the escapist power of personal fantasies and bears witness to their dangerous extremes. It's the rare case of a story that's inspirational and devastating at once.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Infinitely Polar Bear
    Drawing from the wellspring of her own life, Forbes' agile tone allows the film to indulge in heartbreak and humor with equal measure.
  84. 12 O'Clock Boys
    Nathan never condescends to Pug or his cohorts, instead smartly allowing their brazen maneuvers to run the show.
  85. I Origins
    While still invested in grandiose swipes at big ideas and the epistemological babbling of a late night college dorm room conversation, Cahill generates an authentic sense of mystery by keeping a tighter lid on the secrets of the universe.
  86. Happy Christmas
    Sweetly funny and relatable, Happy Christmas builds on the director's previous work by channeling its strong aspects — naturalism and self-effacing, true-to-life humor — into a relatively straightforward but utterly enjoyable character study.
  87. Camp X-Ray
    In between the meandering exchanges lies an unquestionably thoughtful interrogation of a broken system.
  88. Boyhood
    Epic in scope yet unassuming throughout, Linklater's incredibly involving chronicle marks an unprecedented achievement in fictional storytelling.
  89. The Babadook
    The Babadook isn't a transcendent horror film. But its ability to handle and manipulate the conventional tropes apparent in so many of its peers makes it a satisfying ride.
  90. Frank
    Though more in love with its silliness than the insights buried inside them, Frank works to amusingly irreverent effect when combining the two.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Calvary
    Even as it delivers an emotional wallop, not every moment of "Calvary" goes down smoothly, as comedic scenes transition somewhat abruptly to tragic moments and the final reveal never reaches the heights of its Hitchockian inspirations.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 67 Critic Score
    God Help the Girl
    God Help the Girl doesn’t quite succeed in convincing the viewer to toss conventional character development out the window, it still has its moments.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Raid 2
    If The Raid: Redemption was a thrashing drum solo, its sequel is the opulent symphony where every instrument is played with fevered inspiration.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Whiplash
    Revealing both the dangers and payoffs of artistic ambition, Whiplash is sure to establish Chazelle as a directorial force to be reckoned with.
  95. Towheads
    In Towheads, every comic bit is weighted with an awkward blend of sadness and irreverent humor.
  96. Dinosaur 13
    Douglas Miller's Dinosaur 13 is both awe-inspiring and tragic. Conventionally made but featuring an undeniably compelling story at its core, Miller’s debut benefits greatly from the combination of passion and sadness embedded in its subjects’ tale.
  97. Cold Comes the Night
    Chun treats the material with a sophistication that brings its pulpy scenario down to earth. Not even Bryan Cranston with a cheap Slavic accent can stop him.
  98. Interior. Leather Bar.
    As a fleeting essay on sexual biases, it encourages a thoughtful debate, but leaves too many questions dangling to solidify into much beyond a dashed experiment.
  99. Lone Survivor
    Lone Survivor is a grotesque action movie at times impressively directed by Peter Berg that combines the brute masculinity with the ugliness of the battlefield and viscerally unsettling shock value. But it's less a depiction of courage than a brutish magnification of anger and pain, both of which it conveys a lot better than the high ground that it reaches for.
  100. All the Light in the Sky
    A minor effort in a filmography largely composed of them, All the Light in the Sky is nonetheless satisfying on the terms it establishes early on.
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