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For 5,233 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 La Gradiva
Lowest review score: 0 Pixels
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3,617 out of 5233
  2. Mixed: 1,348 out of 5233
  3. Negative: 268 out of 5233
5233 movie reviews
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  1. London River
    Can actors save a mediocre movie? In London River, they come close. Blethyn's frantic, sad naivete creates a fascinating contrast to Kouyaté's understated performance.
  2. W.E.
    W.E. is less outright bad than underwhelming; if the director were unknown, it would hardly deserve notice. Like her first film, the 2008 "Filth and Wisdom," it suffers from countless storytelling flaws.
  3. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
    I had to see the new version twice to realize that there's so much to appreciate about this multilayered production.
  4. Young Adult
    With self destruction as destiny, Reitman has made the equivalent of a Roland Emmerich disaster movie writ small, an apocalyptic scenario internalized by a single person.
  5. Outrage
    On the one hand, Outrage suffers from a cold removal from the events portrayed onscreen, mainly a series of arguments and gory acts of retribution. It's often a terrible bore. But the stylish execution renders many moments into imminently watchable pastiche.
  6. Khodorkovsky
    With its subject still behind bars and the Russian government on the brink of reelecting Kremlin's United Russia party, the biggest triumph of Khodorkovsky is the case it makes for a sequel.
  7. The Artist
    The Artist plays around with the distinction between silent and sound cinema, resulting in the superficial entertainment value of a high concept film school joke. But it's a charming and supremely gorgeous joke -- sometimes too clever for its own good, other times not clever enough, and always at least an attractive diversion.
  8. A Dangerous Method
    In the movie's final shot, Jung's confidence crumbles and he looks supremely troubled, still uncertain of a world he once believed could be explained with textual prowess. Better than any analysis, his expression sums up the dangerous method at the heart of every Cronenberg movie.
  9. Rampart
    Rampart is co-written by crime writer James Ellroy as a messy, disorienting noir, and shot by cinematographer Bobby Bukowski with an unsettling degree of realism.
  10. The Descendants
    The Descendants constantly hovers on the brink of a dark comedy. But it never takes the big plug. By treading carefully, Payne has created his warmest, most earnest work, if not his best.
  11. London Boulevard
    As exercises in pulp go, this one yields a solid workout.
  12. The Love We Make
    The Love We Make provides sufficient behind-the-scenes nuggets for diehard fans of McCartney and Maysles alike.
  13. Elite Squad: The Enemy Within
    Padilha channeled national frustrations into zeitgeist entertainment. The follow-up, Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, has less success than the first installment in achieving that aim, but still keeps the snazzy combination of spectacle and polemics in check.
  14. The Son of No One
    Neither goofy enough for camp status nor lackluster enough for extreme derision, Son of No One is just mediocre enough to be an easy target.
  15. The Other F Word
    While the contradiction of punk rock parenthood may not have a solution, The Other F Word successfully has fun with the mystery.
  16. Dragonslayer
    The measured vérité style of Frederick Wiseman meets the visual polish of Terrence Malick in Dragonslayer, a fascinating slice of crude Americana from first-time director Tristan Patterson. However, it stands alone with an infectious hard rock attitude.
  17. The Last Rites of Joe May
    Dennis Farina's washed-up hustler in The Last Rites of Joe May is designed in the in the mold of a classic movie star tough guy, but the veteran character actor's performance also serves to disassemble it.
  18. Janie Jones
    Although not exemplary, Janie Jones at least manages to give its tired scenario a sense of legitimacy.
  19. The Double
    Having laid out the scenario, Brandt drags it through the motions of a tired procedural.
  20. Melancholia
    Melancholia hovers in ambiguity with riveting aesthetic prowess.
  21. Anonymous
    Emmerich takes the story at face value and delivers a film unlike any of his others. That is to say, a boring one.
  22. Oranges and Sunshine
    Of course, it might take time for Jim Loach to catch up with his father's track record; Oranges & Sunshine is a good place to start.
  23. Like Crazy
    In Sundance terms, Like Crazy qualifies as this year's "Blue Valentine," but it's more observational about the details of a doomed relationship than relentlessly bleak like the aforementioned Derek Cianfrance movie.
  24. The Rum Diary
    The result is a subpar comic adventure that's nonetheless admirable for its restrained vision of Thompson in his early gestation period.
  25. The Catechism Cataclysm
    Catechism sometimes feels intentionally obscure, much like Rohal's last movie. It's essentially a hilariously brazen lark, which is reason enough to embrace it.
  26. Elevate
    Elevate nails the mission, but not the message.
  27. Martha Marcy May Marlene
    Like "Afterschool," Durkin's first feature explores the dangerous extremes of youth vulnerability.
  28. Le Havre
    With its bouncy soundtrack, deadpan humor and good-natured disposition, Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki's Le Havre is an endearing affair.
  29. Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey
    Despite its predictably cheery vibe, Being Elmo implies a certain darkness lingering beneath the surface of Clash's life.
  30. The Skin I Live In
    The Spanish auteur has a good time with outrageous plot twists and offbeat sexual intrigue. However, Almodóvar appears unmotivated to even try holding it all together. Instead, he lets the mess pile up and enjoys it.
  31. Texas Killing Fields
    The younger Mann goes through the motions of a gritty murder mystery with plenty of technical proficiency but only a modicum of soul. The Mann touch is not only in the DNA of the director but in her movie, which inadvertently makes the case that atmosphere is more hereditary than innovation.
  32. The Woman
    There are plenty of guts, but The Woman doesn't have enough to make its feminist rhetoric stick.
  33. The Way
    Estevez treats the drama with a straight-faced, utterly earnest approach with dual respect for the material and the audience's awareness of how it can go wrong. By playing it straight, The Way never goes off the deep end.
  34. Margaret
    Artistically, however, the movie delivers on a surprisingly effective scale, no matter how Lonergan sees it. Alternately perceptive, subversive, tragic and profound.
  35. Carnage
    Polanski struggles to make the material more cinematic, toying with clever mise-en-scene to showcase the mounting tensions. However, Carnage repeatedly suffers from an internal tension between the possibilities of two media at odds with each other.
  36. The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)
    Like the original, the most shocking aspect comes from the revelation that Six can actually tell a story.
  37. Paranormal Activity 3
    Paranormal Activity 3 hardly adds anything new to the situation; instead, it pretends to fill a gap while basically just heaping on one calculated "boo!" after the other.
  38. My Joy
    Deeply sorrowful and drenched in ambiguity, My Joy adopts a patient rhythm that departs from reality while studying it in depth.
  39. Take Shelter
    As with "Shotgun Stories," Nichols assembles a tense portrait of blue-collar life, while deepening his thematic interests and working on a bigger scale. Burrowing into the subconscious of a damaged man, he delivers a modern American epic with extraordinary restraint.
  40. Tucker & Dale vs Evil
    For anyone frustrated with countless formulaic exercises that drain modern horror of fresh ideas, Tucker & Dale is a downright cathartic indictment that encourages comparison to the "Scary Movie" franchise. It's mostly a smart spoof that looks awfully dumb for a reason.
  41. Machine Gun Preacher
    The action scenes in Machine Gun Preacher work fine on their own, but they cheapen a work that attempts to command great importance.
  42. Weekend
    Weekend builds into a powerful encapsulation of an identity crisis over the course of three passionate days.
  43. Shit Year
    Ellen Barkin puts on a bold, candid performance in Cam Archer's Shit Year, but the enigmatic movie is composed of too many fragments to sustain her efforts.
  44. Art History
    Art History is essentially Swanberg's version of "Zach and Miri Make a Porno," and, within the larger context of his career, just as inconsequential.
  45. The Ides of March
    The title suggests a dramatic Shakespearean twist, but Clooney's aims are much simpler. As he builds to a western showdown divorced from political specificity, the Manchurian-like manipulation turns Ides of March into an allegorical monster movie in which everyone's competing for the role of the monster and most people can't see it.
  46. Moneyball
    Director Bennett Miller has produced a warm and generally agreeable character study about the pratfalls of athletic institutions and the willingness to think outside the box.
  47. I'm Glad My Mother Is Alive
    The first half of I'm Glad My Mother's Alive effectively inhabits a child's mind in a manner that recalls Maurice Pialat's marvelous 1968 debut "The Naked Childhood."
  48. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
    While there's a casual dissonance to each twist in its winding plot that results in a disconnected and emotionally vapid experience, Detective Dee unquestionably achieves the escapism it intends.
  49. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
    Largely a cut-and-paste affair, although useful for that very reason; it provides a glaring reminder that scary movies have evolved, both in terms of style and expectations, but the evolution isn't worth the effort.
  50. Higher Ground
    An earnest, sometimes bland and unsophisticated look at Corinne's undulating relationship to spirituality in general and Christian dogma in particular. But it's also a surprisingly well-made character study outside of its specific theme.
  51. Our Idiot Brother
    Hiding behind a shaggy beard and a stoner grin, Paul Rudd plays an amusingly oblivious shlub in Our Idiot Brother, but the movie can't keep up with his comic inspiration.
  52. The Tiniest Place
    The Tiniest Place calls to mind Patricio Guzmán's brilliant "Nostalgia for the Light," which focuses on the remnants of Chilean atrocities strewn about the Atacama Desert. Huezo, however, relies more on irony, juxtaposing the wartime setting with storybook images, acknowledging her distance from the events in question.
  53. One Day
    Anne Hathaway's faux British accent might be the first obvious conceit in One Day, but not its most cumbersome. That distinction belongs to the eponymous structure, a claustrophobic device that follows a pair of best friends over the course of a 22-year period, but only on many versions of July 15th.
  54. Amigo
    Well cast and undeniably attuned to the nuances of human behavior, Amigo nevertheless suffers from simple dramatic shorthand.
  55. Mozart's Sister
    For everything that Mozart's Sister imagines, it leaves much more up to imagination.
  56. Mysteries of Lisbon
    A four-and-a-half hour period piece littered with interconnected events spread across many years, it moves forward with fits of intrigue, interspersed with casual developments that deaden its momentum and call into question its monumental running time.
  57. Bellflower
    Despite its meandering plot, Bellflower presents its doom-laden vision as an astonishingly distinctive state of mind, arguing that the end of one self-made world always marks the start of a new one.
  58. Gun Hill Road
    Santana was cast prior to making her gender transition and had never acted before. Her personal experience brings such legitimacy that she would probably succeed in the role even if she sucked at line reading. Fortunately, she doesn't.
  59. The Devil's Double
    It's hard to believe that The Devil's Double doesn't intend to be a put-on. Despite a real-life basis of its plot, Lee Tamahori's fierce depiction of hedonistic Saddaam Hussein spawn Uday Hussein relegates the character to a farcical cartoon.
  60. Life in a Day
    It's a pretty experiment with no apparent results, but plenty of marketability.
  61. Crazy, Stupid, Love
    Unquestionably stands above the market standard for middlebrow comedies, but it repeatedly approaches greatness and stands down, beholden to forces quite possibly beyond the directors' control.
  62. The Interrupters
    Steve James's The Interrupters runs long, but earns its heft.
  63. The Future
    As the portrait of a relationship meltdown involving two eccentric creative types prone to self-doubt, July's sophomore feature bears a strong resemblance to husband Mike Mills's upcoming "Beginners," although July's version of the story has a more experimental edge.
  64. The Guard
    Only Boyle's unstoppable tendency to mouth off sustains the routine plot, but McDonagh pushes the limits of what he can make Gleeson say without making the crude nature of his asides overwhelm their comic potential.
  65. Point Blank
    An impressive feat that relies on distraction rather than fancy effects, it's easy to get swept up and forget that it's a very sweaty retread that's been done many times before.
  66. Sarah's Key
    Sarah's need to save her brother provides the initial raison d'être, but with the mystery is resolved early on Sarah's Key turns into a flimsy meditation on grief.
  67. The Myth of the American Sleepover
    By favoring mood over plot, "Myth" explores what it feels like to transition into youth adulthood and face harsher truths.
  68. Life, Above All
    The reason to care about Life, Above All doesn't stem from its bleeding-heart plot...The reason to care is newcomer Khomotso Manyaka, who nimbly shoulders a role that places her front and center in nearly every scene.
  69. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
    While indisputably beautiful and affecting in parts, "Snow Flower" is dominated by tame dramatic ingredients that never fully gel.
  70. Daylight
    Barker's screenplay demonstrates a conviction that its genre can command great importance, allowing it to transcend the easy shocks associated with the exploitation movie experience and create an entirely fresh rhythm.
  71. The Undefeated
    Even as it makes the facile Palin-for-president case, fence-sitters will find themselves non-plussed and existing Palin haters won't budge.
  72. Tabloid
    The result is not a major work, but still a wildly funny portrait that succeeds at inducing the incredulity Morris always seeks out.
  73. Rapt
    Progressing with a coldly observational pace, Rapt often strains its drawn-out structure, creating a lethargic experience despite essentially taking the form of a Bressonian suspense-thriller.
  74. Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest
    Showing the uneasiness of a first-time documentarian, Rapaport has a difficult time exploring the drama. That has extended beyond the movie itself and into a long-running media dispute with Q-Tip, who has refused to plug the movie.
  75. The Ward
    The Ward succeeds mainly as a checklist that keeps it consistent with Carpenter's nearly forty years of work. It has none of the smart genre appeal that put him on the map, instead resembling a desperate knock-off by someone with far less talent. Carpenter either lost his groove or the will to use it.
  76. Project Nim
    The movie works best when probing the nature of human interactions with Nim: He appears to form a close friendship with the stoner psych major Bob Ingersoll, not only foraging for food with him but also sharing joints.
  77. Another Earth
    The result is an uneven drama with genuine intellectual heft that often outshines its flaws.
  78. The Perfect Host
    The innumerable change-ups in The Perfect Host only pretend to take the plot in new directions. In reality, each new twist is perfectly derivative, which leads to a host of problems.
  79. Aurora
    A slow burn thriller taken to the extreme, Cristi Puiu's Aurora continues the Romanian writer-director's obsession with time as his main narrative device.
  80. Terri
    Jacobs, working from a script by Patrick de Witt, takes a conventional coming-of-age story and does it proud, enlivening the plot with an almost experimental portrait of alienation and despair.
  81. Passione
    Subtitled "a musical adventure," the actor-director's love letter to some 800 years of Neapolitan expression probes its subject with a wide romantic outlook.
  82. A Better Life
    Weisz flirts with greatness but unfortunately misses the opportunity to make the material soar. And yet he comes close.
  83. Buck
    Buck Brannaman, the subject of Cindy Meehl's engaging documentary profile Buck, has a warm presence and knows how to tame horses better than anyone else.
  84. Super 8
    Creepy implications keep Super 8 engaging, but the cast makes it click.
  85. Trollhunter
    The Troll Hunter offers high-caliber entertainment despite a low-budget production.
  86. One Lucky Elephant
    Unlike recent activist documentaries about animal cruelty like "The Cove," Leeman's narrative doesn't feature any real villains. Balding's bond with Flora leaves him in a perpetual state of uncertainty about which possible new home for his elephant would provide the safest habitat.
  87. The Trip
    The central appeal of The Trip is that it's only a comedy in bits and pieces. Overall, however, Winterbottom constructs a thoughtful and generally sad portrait of Coogan's persona as a man unsure of his next move.
  88. Beginners
    Mills fashions the set-up for an overwrought, thoroughly depressing character study into an oddly charming comedy. It's a midlife crisis gently portrayed with sympathy rather than grief.
  89. Film Socialisme
    Film Socialism is a weighty, intentionally cryptic product that's easy on the eyes and heavy on the mind.
  90. Submarine
    Where "Bridesmaids" has plenty of solid gags, it's not much to look at; Submarine always has something impressive to watch even when its plot is on autopilot.
  91. Beautiful Boy
    Despite routinely overstating the scenario with rampant scenes of tantrums and sobs, the majority of Beautiful Boy is made bearable by its two solid performances.
  92. The Tree of Life
    More meditation than movie, Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life is bound to mystify, awe and exasperate in equal measures.
  93. Everything Must Go
    The material, however, takes a Raymond Carver short story and plays it almost too straight. Ferrell looks uncomfortable, but not amusingly so.
  94. Beautiful Darling
    Beautiful Darling not only explains the appeal of its subject; it actively contributes to her ongoing mystique.
  95. Caterpillar
    Before its spell unravels with overdone theatricality and on-the-nose flashbacks, Caterpillar succeeds as a kind of representational horror movie.
  96. Hobo with a Shotgun
    Loaded to the gills with thrill-inducing mayhem, Hobo with a Shotgun feels almost tribal in its commitment to violence.
  97. The Beaver
    With tightly controlled performances and uniquely eccentric events, The Beaver is mainly undone by the lack of a satisfying outcome.
  98. Passion Play
    The reality is that Passion Play has a few good ideas that simply don't hold together. More of a miscalculation than an outright dud, it takes the form of a wildly surreal western fantasy, something that Chilean madman Alejandro Jodorowsky ("El Topo") could have executed with more rigorous invention.
  99. Cave of Forgotten Dreams
    Herzog naturally plays up the enigma at hand with epic grandeur, occasionally overdoing it but usually hitting the mark.
  100. The Arbor
    The cumulative impact of The Arbor is one of claustrophobia; at times, the endlessly downbeat adventures of Dunbar and her offspring grow almost unbearably morose.
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