Original-Cin's Scores

  • Movies
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:
1691 movie reviews
  1. Rifkin’s Festival is a romantic farce, with ideas that long-time fans will recognize from a range of other Allen films, but with one difference. The movie ends on a surprisingly sweet note.
  2. It means well, but Greed fails to locate the heart of the fast-fashion calamity, instead spotlighting the grotesqueness of the one percent at the expense of everyone else.
  3. Like every cringeworthy wedding you’ve ever attended, it leaves one with a lukewarm smile, and the hope that the time invested in witnessing this spectacle of forced happiness will be appreciated.
  4. Double Walker’s story is feverishly imaginative, though its internal logic often doesn’t hold up. But the star and co-writer Sylvie Mix is committed to her story, playing a mostly silent, seductive (often nakedly so) phantom who “can only be seen by believers and sinners.”
  5. Smith’s musical performances in the film, which are big on power chords, anthemic hooks, and gravel-voiced melancholy, help fill some the film’s emotional weak spots. What primarily distinguishes this lowkey, unsurprising drama is a well-stocked soundtrack, courtesy of music supervisor Natasha Duprey, amounting to a survey of Canadian alt-country songs over the past three-and-a-half decades.
  6. The inexorable pace of this marital disintegration is masterfully dictated by its leads, Nighy (whose granite expression remains fairly unchanged whether unhappy with Grace or newly-alive with his new love) and Bening (without whose energy there would be no movie).
  7. While there are a few twists in the film, much like the certainty of a flight delay, none arrive unexpectedly.
  8. Nattiv is aiming to redeem her legacy with this film. To that end he unfolds the story like a thriller, where we get a sense of the day-to-day tensions of a war that posed an existential threat to her country and the immense pressure she was under. He has cast it well. And yet, despite the tension, Golda is disappointingly flat.
  9. It’s a quiet, thoughtful movie that aims to be sensitive to the family, while plumbing some of the darker feelings that this late success wrought.
  10. Lou
    The performances are mostly entertaining, the scenery is rich, but it has flaws in the story that make it difficult to accept in some places. It’s also these flaws that allow the audience to figure out the plot a little prematurely.
  11. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom is Warner Brothers/ DC Comics latest sacrificial offering to the altar of comic properties. And while the film isn’t bad in itself, it’s pretty clear that there’s a bit of a schism in deciding how to present this film and its hero.
  12. In one way or another, every Planet of the Apes movie except the first has been a part of a longer narrative towards how this planet went ape. And for much of the screen-time, it does look like Kingdom is moving us there.
  13. Unfortunately, Da 5 Bloods’ impassioned civics lesson is grafted on to a slapdash B-movie action plot.
  14. It’s a movie that is well intentioned and aims big, but ends up being somewhat shallow.
  15. Death to Metal is something of a fresh breath of stale air. In a genre long familiar with demonizing nuns, having an evil priest is a nice change of habit.
  16. While it’s fun to see the characters back in action, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is overstuffed and meanders. The film also suffers from self-consciousness. Too many celebrities show up in ways that feel pointless, turning TDWP2 into self-congratulatory mush.
  17. If you want to dramatize a real-life celebrity fraud tale, you can’t settle for the superficial. Either go for psychological truth or camp it up to the level of the superduperficial. There’s not much of either quality in JT Leroy, a film that offers colourful performances by Laura Dern and Kristen Stewart but fails to find any urgency in retelling the tale of an early 2000s literary fraud.
  18. Yes, Anderson is good, but it’s the film that ultimately lets her down.
  19. If it’s not original ground, Don’t Worry Darling is a visually arresting mash-up of The Stepford Wives and Pleasantville, with its plot about an idyllic artificial ‘50s with pampered suburban housewives religiously dedicated to their husbands and their cocktails, and hints of the decade’s dark side.
  20. Working from a script by Neil Forsythe, Marsh has created a superficially experimental if tame take on an artist of grim truths and dark comedy.
  21. Much of Doors comes across as experimental. But its weirdness, its stone-faced humour, and its none-too-complicated effects can be hypnotizing. Doors is compelling and indiscernibly droll; A 2020 Space Odyssey as mesmerizing as it is strange.
  22. There are white-knuckle moments, notably Gloria’s crossing of the border with a heap of stuff that would raise troubling questions were she stopped and searched. Rodriguez puts us right there in the car beside her and it’s thrilling. But the outcome arrives a bit too pat, our heroine conveniently switching from cowed hostage to arms-wielding ass-kicker with dubious ease.
  23. At an hour and a half, Gretel and Hansel shouldn’t be a slog. But at a certain point in the last act, it definitely labours for its chills - and all that feasting eventually leaves the audience more hungry than scared.
  24. Assassination Nation may be empty calories as social satire, but it’s a dark, wry, of-the-moment story of run-amok panic that will entertain horror fans.
  25. Approached with a casual regard for logic, period thriller The Secrets We Keep is entertaining enough to recommend though it never feels quite as original or shocking as the filmmakers — working with a plainly Hitchcockian roadmap — likely hoped for.
  26. Fair warning: Tango Shalom is a broad comedy, with a thick coating of the sentimental lubricant known in Yiddish circles as “schmaltz.”
  27. Overall, The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a middling entry in the Dracula canon.
  28. All in all, it’s something of a merry mess, barely held together by Eigenmann’s wary, steadfast performance as Joy, an illegal immigrant mother whose life is a nightmare even before the movie turns into one.
  29. The fight scenes are initially impressive and artfully filmed, but eventually repetitive. As a selling device for UFC, The Smashing Machine falls a little short. Still, even if it seems like we’ve seen this movie before, Johnson does sell his character, no gimmicks, raised eyebrows or phony theatrics. He is believable, even if we never really discover who he is.
  30. There’s more than an echo here of The Client, the 1993 John Grisham adaptation which saw Susan Sarandon playing a maternal role to Brad Refro’s 11-year-old Mafia witness. But the surrogate mother-child bond barely develops here, as Hannah and Connor leap from one near-death experience to the next in this relatively brisk 100-minute film.

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