NPR's Scores
- Movies
- Games
For 1,073 reviews, this publication has graded:
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60% higher than the average critic
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3% same as the average critic
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37% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.2 points higher than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 67
| Highest review score: | Amour | |
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| Lowest review score: | This Means War |
Score distribution:
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Positive: 694 out of 1073
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Mixed: 317 out of 1073
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Negative: 62 out of 1073
1073
movie
reviews
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Reviewed by
Ella Taylor
When it comes to family togetherness, love and quality time are thicker than blood, water or just about any other social glue you can think of. That's the admirable if hardly news-breaking message of Rodrigo Garcia's domestic drama Mother and Child, whose official thread is the impact of adoption on three different women.- NPR
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Jeannette Catsoulis
Disconnect is naturally gripping. Using unforgiving closeups, Rubin pokes into unexpected corners— not least the different ways in which men and women respond to calamity — and never forces his story's social-media scares to improbable heights.- NPR
- Posted Apr 18, 2013
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Jeannette Catsoulis
West's throwback style and disdain for excess allows his characters to shine.- NPR
- Posted Feb 6, 2012
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Ella Taylor
Personally, I'd show up for Maggie Smith's top-drawer basilisk stare if she were guesting on "Sesame Street."- NPR
- Posted Dec 7, 2012
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Mark Jenkins
Canner's eye-opening, entertaining account of the search for the little pill that supplies the Big O is looney-tunes enough without the cartoon asides.- NPR
- Posted Feb 15, 2011
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Scott Tobias
Scott has made an art - or at least a career - out of playing the affable dimwit. And with Goon, a salty Canadian comedy about the rise of a minor league hockey enforcer, Scott finally has his Hamlet, a role that calls for every blank, uncomprehending look in his toolbox while accessing the cuddly puppy within.- NPR
- Posted Mar 30, 2012
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Mark Jenkins
Renoir doesn't present a particularly dynamic tale, and its attempts at stage-like drama — notably the sometimes epigrammatic dialogue — can seem overdone. But the performances are assured, the ambiance impeccable and the themes resonant.- NPR
- Posted Mar 28, 2013
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Ian Buckwalter
There's black comedy, and then, in the darkest corner of an airtight box buried deep underground, there's the humor of Big Bad Wolves.- NPR
- Posted Jan 16, 2014
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Ella Taylor
That she continues to invite not just Beyoncé and Katy Perry but millions of adoring men and women along for the ride is icing on the cake.- NPR
- Posted Nov 22, 2013
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Ella Taylor
Cloud 9 is most moving when it steps quietly into the gap between physical decline and the persistence, at full blast, of unfulfilled longing and desire.- NPR
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- Posted Jan 28, 2011
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- Critic Score
Killing Them Softly has more unruly energy, and less art-house pretension, than "The Assassination of Jesse James." Its disreputability does come with a faintly arty sheen sprayed on - the picture could be a little grubbier, but let's not split hairs, especially such nice, greasy ones.- NPR
- Posted Nov 29, 2012
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Reviewed by
Bob Mondello
This is a world of dinner jackets and evening gowns, casual jaunts to Venice and Morocco; it's about elegance, style, money and perhaps too heady a mix of drink, religion and intrigue.- NPR
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Ella Taylor
On its own terms, Tamara Drewe is a hugely exuberant black comedy, unfolding over four scenic seasons at a writer's retreat set in a rose-strewn village overrun by city bobos in search of authenticity.- NPR
- Posted Oct 20, 2010
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Bob Mondello
Though these two really grow on you, what's almost more remarkable than Nick, Norah or their playlist (which may not be infinite, but really does include some great music) is the quirky, melting-pot world director Peter Sollett creates around them.- NPR
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Ian Buckwalter
Lemmy gives the filmmakers enough time and candid access to create a profile of the man that goes deeper than just the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll - even though in Lemmy's case, there's enough of a surplus of all three to power multiple documentaries.- NPR
- Posted Mar 1, 2011
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Mark Jenkins
Perhaps the ending worked better in the book, Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog, which sold more than a million copies in France. Certainly this adaptation, Mona Achache's directorial debut, is a very bookish movie.- NPR
- Posted Aug 18, 2011
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Mark Jenkins
We Have a Pope is not the filmmaker's next assault on a Roman patriarch. It's a half-sweet, half-rueful existential drama in which the satire comes secondary.- NPR
- Posted Apr 6, 2012
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Bob Mondello
Probably the most artful of the Apatow Factory comedies so far, but that's not to suggest it doesn't take being sweetly dumb just as seriously as the rest.- NPR
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Bob Mondello
Any slack, though is picked up by Shep Gordon, who seems every inch the "supermensch" of the title — splendid company, a sterling storyteller, and yeah, a real mensch.- NPR
- Posted Jun 6, 2014
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Bob Mondello
Oddly though, the most shocking thing about the film is that it often prompts laughs.- NPR
- Posted Mar 21, 2014
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Mark Jenkins
The movie presents grim assessments from such experts as the Pacific Institute's Peter Gleick and professor and author Robert Glennon, yet it ends with a flurry of hopeful notes.- NPR
- Posted May 8, 2012
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Ian Buckwalter
The movie might not be a vengeance-driven wolf-man cage fight, but in subverting those escapist expectations, it sinks its teeth far deeper and more memorably.- NPR
- Posted Jan 27, 2012
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Mark Jenkins
It's hard to make a movie about a pederast without being exploitative, and Michael eventually comes to feel like an art house stunt.- NPR
- Posted Feb 21, 2012
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Mark Jenkins
Film Socialisme, his (Godard) latest intellectual assault, includes grating noise, scruffy camera-phone video and subtitles in fractured "Navajo English."- NPR
- Posted Jun 3, 2011
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Bob Mondello
Edwards is a wizard with his laptop's effects program. The squiddy things he conjures up look like the real deal - thoroughly creepy and a gazillion feet tall. Too bad his screenwriting software didn't have an equivalently impressive plot-twisting algorithm to get him to the final fade.- NPR
- Posted Oct 28, 2010
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Of course, there's no need to overthink it: If you just want to watch a baby respond to the arrival of a rooster in his bed with perfect comic timing, Babies is the movie to see.- NPR
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Mark Jenkins
Not even the presence of a goth-chick hotel clerk could turn Nobody Else But You into "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." The movie may teeter on the edge of Switzerland, but its playful sensibility is entirely French.- NPR
- Posted May 11, 2012
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Scott Tobias
The lack of authenticity underlines the thinness of their conceit: Without a plausible backdrop, all that's left of Love Crime are the power games between two duplicitous women and the serpentine plotting that results. And even that, under the slightest scrutiny, frays like a thin layer of tissue paper.- NPR
- Posted Sep 2, 2011
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Mark Jenkins
Strange and uncompromisingly personal. It's also vivid and unforgettable.- NPR
- Posted Jan 18, 2013
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