Original-Cin's Scores

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For 1,691 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 75% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 20% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 10.8 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 76
Highest review score: 100 Memories of Murder
Lowest review score: 16 Nemesis
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,310 out of 1691
  2. Mixed: 351 out of 1691
  3. Negative: 30 out of 1691
1691 movie reviews
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  1. Midway
    On the sliding scale of war movies, Emmerich’s Midway is obviously no prestige film like The Hurt Locker or Saving Private Ryan. It belongs more to the school of the original Midway, with Tora! Tora! Tora! as its exemplar. Tell the story of a battle, offer up some sketched-out characters, played with aplomb, add a dash of soap opera and fire when ready. On that scale, for what it’s worth, Midway is a much more solid piece of entertainment than the Pearl Harbor directed by Emmerich’s fellow master-of-disaster Michael Bay.
  2. The Rest of Us
    There’s a risk of overselling a modest movie like The Rest of Us, which feels a little pat and self-congratulatory in its resolution. But it’s generous spirited and, at 80 minutes, doesn’t overstay its welcome.
  3. Door Mouse
    Door Mouse isn’t exactly noir for the ages, and it has story problems. But it moves, and as played by Law, Mouse is a dead-pan heroine I’d like to see again, backed by a bigger-budget.
  4. Bone Lake
    Director Mercedes Bryce Morgan (Fixation, Spoonful of Sugar), working from a script by Joshua Friedlander, keeps the pace moving well and creates some undeniable fun in a shell game of the three movie genres that depend on physical reaction —comedy, horror, and erotic thriller.
  5. Pacifiction
    Pacifiction is a movie to experience. In the end, it’s all an analogy between politics and nightclubs and the assumption (fiction?) of power and persuasion. But that’s my guess. Your guess is as good as mine. And to that effect, ours is as good a guess as even Serra is willing to offer.
  6. Before You Know It
    Typical of a certain kind of Sundance feelie comedy, Before You Know It is both promising and exasperating enough you’ll probably leave the cinema thinking of ways it could be improved.
  7. A Fire in the Cold Season
    If the film takes the “landscape as character” conceit to excess, there are also some strong performances, especially from its two leads.
  8. A Good Person
    Two hours witnessing the agony of a guilt-ridden pill addict doesn’t exactly have “good times” written all over it. To make it an experience worth enduring requires something more.
  9. Alita: Battle Angel
    Alita: Battle Angel is about a sweet but lethally trained hybrid girl. Fittingly, it feels like a hybrid story, pulled together from bits and pieces of Young Adult and genre action films, and is less than the sum of its parts.
  10. Another Body
    The film’s view is simply too narrow to be comprehensive on such a startling and potentially life-altering/life-ending subject. That said, it’s a chilling surface look into yet another unanticipated side effect of our ostensibly great wired society.
  11. Emma.
    There’s enough of Austen’s generous social vision and her character-revealing dialogue to make this watchable but Emma. takes a long time to connect emotionally.
  12. Gaia
    Traditional horror fans are likely to find the effort tiresome despite a few intense scenes. But those who like their horror films laced in a philosophical debate will find plenty to enjoy.
  13. Blaze
    At more than two hours, Blaze is a meandering tale of genius and futility, tender, but overlong and wallowing, given that we know how it ends.
  14. The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir
    With random elements of Bollywood, Western musicals and unlikely episodic plot contrivances, it is made to please everybody. The result is inoffensive.
  15. We Are Living Things
    There is a lot of subtlety in this film, but too much of the plot is left to ambiguity or weak implication. The UFO theme is almost completely sublimated in favour of the relationship between the two fringe dwellers.
  16. The Beach Bum
    Though Korine (Spring Breakers) doesn’t figure out how to make his protagonist breathe (at least smokelessly), he does do a commendable job of making the Florida Keys come alive with sunshine, pastel colours and partying.
  17. Here Today
    Here Today is the movie Crystal directs, a genial, monotone of good-heartedness that isn’t as funny as it wants to be or needs to be, but hits some truths about the subject of age and dementia, while maintaining its mild smile.
  18. White Noise
    The ideas are there. You can see why Baumbach would take this on. In the end, what we’re left feels like more of a sincere and heartfelt attempt than a successful movie.
  19. Umma
    Despite Oh’s solid fear-filled performance, Amanda’s inevitable possession seems to take forever in an 87-minute movie, and the inevitable maternal-love-powered dispossession seems rushed.
  20. The Deer King
    These images tantalize, but without satisfying, like a trailer for a narrative that would work better as a long-form series.
  21. All Jacked Up and Full of Worms
    So, points for shoe-string filmmaking on several fronts. But however open-minded one might try to be, it’s hard to imagine how high, or how low, you’d have to be to recognize human beings in this grungy geek fantasy.
  22. The Marksman
    The Marksman is a minor entry in the Liam Neeson Action Oeuvre, but it's unlikely to boost his genre status. Neeson puts in a valiant effort to give Hanson the edge of a man grown weary, not just by time but by the assumptions of his age and the disappointing belief that his country has let him down.
  23. Aladdin
    The loss of two-dimensional artistry of the original has some compensation of human warmth.
  24. Expend4bles
    Expend4bles is an endless pyro/bang-bang show, with actors not mainly known for their acting (also including 50 Cent and UFC champion Randy Couture), sticking to the story as well as they can.
  25. The Wrath of Becky
    Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that I enjoy violent films, but The Wrath of Becky is an example of a film that disappoints its audience with a failed promise. Given the extreme violence of the last film, we aren’t just shocked enough by the battle between her and the group of antagonists who have a veritable arsenal in their barn to start a small war.
  26. Five Nights at Freddy's 2
    I get a sense that Five Nights at Freddy’s and this week’s inevitable salad of a sequel Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, marks a turning point in how Hollywood approaches the visual medium that has been eating its lunch for decades. The lesson: Stop trying to make video game film adaptations that appeal to a general audience. A giant in-joke of a movie can pay off bigtime if the target audience is big enough. Screw the rest.
  27. Crazy Rich Asians
    The characters of Rachel and Nick are charming but their relationship feels backgrounded by numbing amounts of money porn, stilted melodrama, and often-strained comedy.
  28. The United States vs. Billie Holiday
    The problems with The United States vs Billie Holiday aren’t about Day’s creditable performance, but pretty much everything that happens around it. That includes Pulitzer-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’ time-hopping, confusing script and Daniels’ direction, which is both feverishly pulpy and stilted and laden.
  29. Kandahar
    Kandahar is standard entertainment that pushes for more than what they can deliver. Slight entertainment is the best it can be.
  30. Stanleyville
    McCabe-Loko substitutes erratic behaviour and raised voices for tension. But Stanleyville does seem to have something to say. Just because I cannot decipher any significant meaning doesn't mean you won't. Then again, in the words of someone wiser than me, some films are merely meant to be experienced. That could be the case with Stanleyville. I only wish the experience was a bit more enjoyable.
  31. Master Gardener
    The writer-director behind The Card Counter and First Reformed makes a misstep here, courtesy unlikely characters and sometimes mystifying plot changes. Luckily, stars Joel Edgerton and Sigourney Weaver are in top form, which is enough to keep a viewer happily occupied for the first hour.
  32. A Working Man
    Typically, action films benefit from a standout villain in an unexpected role. But with A Working Man, Ayer, along with Stallone and Chuck Dixon as co-screenwriters, dilutes the role of the villain so much and so often, that it becomes challenging to determine whom to harbour a grudge against and to what extent.
  33. It: Chapter Two
    In between the long patches there are some scary turns, though with diminishing returns, and director Andy Muschietti and screenwriter Gary Dauberman frequently turn to fears first cousin, humour, by wise-cracking through their peril. This too gets tired. But almost anything would after nearly three hours.
  34. Love Wedding Repeat
    The film — set over the course of one wedding day — rates as no more than a passable distraction, though those can be useful.
  35. Come to Daddy
    What starts out as a promising comic thriller deflates quickly as it becomes clear we’re just here for the gore.
  36. What Love Looks Like
    This is pure and simple filmmaking in the most precise use of the term: Pure in its unapologetic depiction of idealized romance, and simple in its uncomplicated belief of love’s easy resolutions. Let that be fair warning to anyone even mildly cynical of love’s all-conquering power; the jaded aren’t likely to find much to relate to.
  37. Brightburn
    The movie rattles through ninety minutes of episodic jolts, the visual style is jumbled. Distinctive only in having a better effects budget than your average demons-in-the-attic quickie. While the super-parody elements offer a few snorts of amusement, the movie avoids taking on more complex ideas about Superman as an American ideal, though the filmmakers are obviously aware of the Bizarro context.
  38. Kraven the Hunter
    A cinematic version of this story definitely wasn’t needed. But then again, neither was the hero.
  39. Six Minutes to Midnight
    Six Minutes to Midnight shifts focus between classroom drama and war thriller without allowing time for either genre to take shape.
  40. Living with Chucky
    Without anything more than the heralding of a cult figure, Living with Chucky becomes a Chucky lovefest relying solely on reminiscing the good times; the kind of interviews that used to be added as a DVD extra.
  41. M3GAN
    Johnstone knows his way around dark comedy, and camouflages much of the film's humour in whimsical, sometimes uneasy, encounters between M3GAN and Cady. But in directing the film's most comedic characters — an overtly judgmental childcare worker, a nosy neighbour (Lori Dungey) with an unruly dog, and a schoolyard bully—he sets a tone that feels incompatible with the rest of the characters.
  42. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
    In the end, all Beetlejuice Beetlejuice did for me was make me want to see the singular version again.
  43. Midsommar
    From very early in the film, we have a sense where it’s all going. With no real narrative surprises then, the movie becomes all about the characters and the journey. Aster’s playing out of the journey is problematic.
  44. Dicks: The Musical
    The film is broad, campy, audacious and arrives with high expectations. But Dicks ultimately disappoints — and the inherent joke that goes with that line should not pass underappreciated. The title is the joke. But it’s a joke that doesn’t get as much play as it should.
  45. Snakehead
    The decision to avoid having the characters speaking Chinese saves the trouble of subtitles but it also makes the drama feel generic, another pulpy sub-Scorsesian urban nightmare with episodes of spastic violence, the constantly throbbing soundtrack, the use of slow motion, and wide-screen, colour-saturated camera work.
  46. The Hummingbird Project
    The Hummingbird Project is a fun enough ride though one with significant logic bumps that may prove as intractable as the terrain its characters hope to traverse.
  47. Searching Eva
    While she’s not running up Billie Eilish-like social media influence, we understand that Collè is a kind of lightning rod for sexually-anxious, McJob-holding, roommate-sharing, millennial types. We also get the not-so-deep message, writ large and underscored, that sometimes transparency may be the best disguise of all.
  48. Fatima
    The cardboard scenery look of the 1952 original is replaced with a big cast, drama and lingering closeups.
  49. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City
    Raccoon City is most fun when showcasing Avan Jogia as a rookie cop who’d been transferred to Raccoon City after accidentally shooting his partner in the butt—a bad joke that Jogia turns into a workable gag.
  50. Elemental
    As an artistic design challenge, Elemental has triumphant moments (which may be good enough eye candy to keep kids occupied). But as a story, it doesn’t appear to aspire to much beyond a standard star-crossed romance.
  51. Teen Spirit
    Minghella’s directorial debut is awash with mean girls, pretty boys, seizure-inducing club scenes, headache-inducing auto-tune, and a thin plot that unfolds (and ends) dizzyingly quickly.
  52. Lilo & Stitch
    Disney’s Lilo & Stitch is about a dangerous alien lifeform that escapes from its creators, arrives on a backward planet and charms the inhabitants. Which is not a bad metaphor for Disney itself. It continues to remake hand-drawn animated classics as bloated live-action spectacles, hoping a nostalgic moviegoing public will continue to greet them with open arms and wallets.
  53. Hunt
    Without having spent enough time to establish the background of the characters and their conflicted motives, Hunt leaves us bystanders to the mayhem.
  54. Absolution
    The film’s various elements do not quite meld, and despite a few strong performances, none of the characters feel fully three-dimensional.
  55. Alice
    An undercooked ‘70s-style blaxploitation revenge fantasy with a reverse-Shyamalan plot (the “twist” is up front), Alice is an objectively bad movie wrapped around one great, all-in performance.
  56. Ella McCay
    The ironic thing about Ella McCay, James L. Brooks’ surprisingly slight politically themed comedy, is that it’s an aggressively feel-good movie that may leave you feeling bad.
  57. The Good Liar
    A preposterous mess of romance-with-secrets, generations-old closet skeletons and revenge, The Good Liar is the kind of fragrant dramatic cheese that Sidney Sheldon would have squeezed an ‘80s network mini-series out of. But the never-before-paired screen couple of Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren consume this cheese like so much scenery. There’s nothing like actors with gravitas slumming, all bemused smiles and droll delivery, even as the material descends clunkily into unintentional comedy.
  58. About My Father
    Director Laura Terruso overlooks several comedic opportunities in About My Father. It’s as though she’s working from a script that’s been edited by someone who got the situations but not the jokes.
  59. Vanguard
    Let’s be clear: Vanguard is not a great film. Arguably, it’s one of the lesser successes in the Stanley Tong/Jackie Chan oeuvre. But even if Vanguard tilts the scales slightly lower than the duos earlier efforts (Vanguard is their ninth collaboration), it still doesn’t dip low enough to be a failure.
  60. Scrooge: A Christmas Carol
    There are too many cute influences, too many perfect musical numbers and even the physical rendering of the characters themselves belie the gritty human struggle that has remained at the core of this story for this to render the true story of Ebenezer Scrooge.
  61. Late Night
    Late Night is a light-hearted comedy with something to say and an excellent cast, that is unfortunately hobbled by a storyline that doesn’t quite add up.
  62. Karate Kid: Legends
    It's clear the formula for the last film is the expectation for this one, but what’s missing is the believability behind it.
  63. Annette
    If you want to see what it means to a film when an excellent actor fully commits to a role, look to Adam Driver’s performance in Leos Carax’s award winning musical Annette. He breathes life into what is an otherwise dry and emotionally disconnected film.
  64. The Tomorrow Man
    A parade of pulled punches, there’s not enough of anything in The Tomorrow Man to make it stick as drama or even a believable romance.
  65. Foe
    In Iain Reid’s source-material novel, there are literary tricks that spell it out more clearly. But the script and execution here fails to launch, with too much ”Why?” holding it down.
  66. Where's My Roy Cohn?
    Tyrnauer’s film doesn’t seem to trust its material enough to allow the power of the stories to unfold without a constant hammering of a B-level-journalism music soundtrack — the kind best-suited for tabloid news programs. And the film’s unwavering criticism of Cohn (however warranted it might be) reduces an otherwise gripping biographical story into a sensationalized television-ready expose.
  67. Freakier Friday
    Freakier Friday is a corny, tepidly enjoyable, thematically recyclable, narratively entangled cinematic situation — sort of like watching four people trying on the same style of sweater in different sizes. And it’s nuanced.
  68. Morbius
    You do get the sense that Swedish director Daniel Espinosa really wanted to make a horror film instead of the usual super-hero origin-story-punctuated-by-carnage.
  69. French Exit
    I struggle to find the point in this exercise, although I know one exists. I think it might have something to do with the breakdown of privilege and the importance of opening up to other equally unfortunate rich people.
  70. Penguins
    Penguins is the latest of DisneyNature’s wildlife documentary features, and in many ways among the best. There’s much to admire in it, but its devotion to a family-friendly tone is often at odds with the astounding footage onscreen.
  71. The Fabulous Four
    Even with its slender premise, sporadic laughs, and abundant clichés, The Fabulous Four is entertaining and unapologetically — almost aggressively — sweet-natured, promoting friendship and female camaraderie while spotlighting a demographic underrepresented on screen and widely considered to have the kinds of dilemmas presented here all figured out by now.
  72. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
    If cute was the selling point of this spin-off series, it’s practically out of stock in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, a movie that has traded in its charm (and, for the most part, its fantastic beasts) for an extended Nazi metaphor.
  73. Sacrilege
    Despite a memorable opening scene and terrifically spooky music from composer Colin McGinness, director/writer David Creed's Sacrilege fails to adhere to all good horror films' sacred oath to build suspense.
  74. Midwinter Break
    Much as I had hoped to love it given its cast and source material, Midwinter Break just never took flight. Not all great books make great movies.
  75. Doctor Sleep
    In some reality where it came without baggage – and where it didn’t have to be a bloated two-and-a-half hours to accommodate its relationship to a classic – Doctor Sleep could stand on its own as a decently stylish popcorn thriller.
  76. Roger Waters: Us + Them
    For the fans, Us + Them offers a meticulously constructed concert experience for a fraction of the price of a live ticket and a chance to join a chorus in yelling back at the TV. For the casually curious, be forewarned: While Waters still burns with righteous zeal, at an often repetitious 135 minutes, the film will leave your backside feeling uncomfortably numb.
  77. Anna and the Apocalypse
    The charm and the limitations of this modestly budgeted, good-hearted trifle, set in a middle-class Scottish village, are its youthful energy and anxiousness to please. Along with the mechanically efficient tunes from the team of Roddy Hart and Tommy Reilly, the entire film feels as if it could have been written and produced by a group of bright theatre students.
  78. Ferrante Fever
    There are a few problems with Giacomo Durzi’s documentary, Ferrante Fever. The worst is that it’s mundane in the making, a talking heads and clips assemblage with a constantly breathless tone. The second is that betrays the entire idea of putting the work ahead of the literary cult: The film gives us neither the author in person, nor her writing, except in brief clips, read in voice-over by an actor.
  79. DogMan
    DogMan is kind of an idiotic movie built on a ludicrous premise. This does not prevent it from being eminently watchable.
  80. Cuckoo
    I was ultimately less enthralled with the final film than I was with some of the performances in Cuckoo. Stevens and Schafer are amazing, and Bluthardt makes an excellent oddity, a convenient ally with his own mysterious agenda. But Cuckoo can’t quite bring all its disparate elements together into something cohesive and coherent.
  81. Halston
    Clumsily told yet intriguing because of its singular subject, Halston — director Frédéric Tcheng’s knock-kneed documentary on the pioneering American fashion designer ubiquitous in the 1970s, who made haute couture both aspirational and accessible — offers a trove of pop culture trivia.
  82. You, Me & Tuscany
    It’s your typical mistaken-identity love story, in which one pretty person must decide between two pretty people, with the choice heavily influenced by who looks best when wet.
  83. Aline
    Esthetically perched somewhere between a low-budget TV biopic and a soap opera - with occasional flourishes of bonkers-cheesiness worthy of cult status - Aline is the Celine Dion hagiography no one could have dreamed up except its director.
  84. Book Club: The Next Chapter
    To be clear, Book Club: The Next Chapter is not a good movie by any standards except for its appeal to audiences old enough to fondly remember every cast member in their prime (I’m raising my hand here). Anyone born after Murphy Brown will see a predictable, forgettable series of non-adventures.
  85. The Oath
    As a first-time filmmaker, Barinholtz is on training wheels, shooting almost entirely in closed-space interior, the better to concentrate on his words. To that extent, The Oath is (at first anyway) a scarily realistic depiction of the argument feedback loop that seems to be ripping society apart. But the denouement allows him to slip away without a realistic premise for how one would leave that loop.
  86. Fatherhood
    When the movie abandons the memoir’s story of grief and joy it becomes less interesting.
  87. Mean Girls
    If I was a teenage girl, I might love it. But as an adult reviewer, I can’t help but feel weary about this earnest but mostly needless retread of a smart and engaging teen comedy, a genuine stand-alone classic.
  88. Spaceman
    That it falters under the weight of its earnest ambitions doesn’t mean that we don’t get its heartfelt healing message. But that earnestness, and a distracting plot device never quite takes off.
  89. 21 Bridges
    There’s a lot of dubious explaining in the last act, a sure sign that a movie hasn’t done a very good job explaining itself.
  90. Smile 2
    Smile 2 is a freakshow that will likely delight those willing to go all in, seeking a chaotic experience while others will be left to wonder not only where this is all going to but where did it come from?
  91. Levels
    There’s not enough under the hood, and the screenplay sometimes strains to tell us (rather than show us) the complexities of the reality it’s creating.
  92. The Boogeyman
    Aside from a few cleverly executed jump-scares—which are to horror what tickling is to comedy—The Boogeyman drags with G-rated scares and an appropriately dreary atmosphere, but dreary nonetheless.
  93. I Propose We Never See Each Other Again After Tonight
    Although the comic scenes are well-crafted, I Propose stumbles in the over-plotting.
  94. Bill & Ted Face the Music
    Even I found the film’s 90-minute running time draining, its story needlessly, maddeningly convoluted. I also lamented missed opportunities for in-jokes, sly sub-references, even guerilla fourth-wall demolition hijinks.
  95. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
    Despite some interesting action scenes, the movie is far too long at two hours and 40 minutes. Worse yet, you’re always aware that you’re watching a movie.
  96. Dog Days
    Dog Days moves along, mostly pleasantly and at its worst is a somewhat-forced good time.
  97. The Violent Heart
    The Violent Heart lies somewhere between a chasm that divides soft-peddled melodrama and Young Adult fiction. It's unlikely director/writer Kerem Sanga intended the story to be categorized as either melodramatic or Young Adult.
  98. UglyDolls
    Ultimately, it’s a standard formula for a kid’s movie (and standard formulas are standard for movies that are also toy ads). UglyDolls isn’t particularly inventive or outstanding.
  99. Dangerous Waters
    Dubious, predictable, and short on character development, this B-movie cheesefest is nonetheless watchable thanks to a spirited performance from Odeya Rush (Lady Bird).
  100. Jumanji: The Next Level
    Jumanji: The Next Level is a diverting disappointment that does something I don’t think I’ve seen a film do before: It’s an unnecessary two-hour film that struggles for the first 90 minutes, only to find itself in the last 30. But I suppose that’s what we should expect from a film where unexpected inversion is its strongest ploy.
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