Original-Cin's Scores

  • Movies
For 1,709 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 10.9 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:
1709 movie reviews
  1. The film has a lot of promise, but in the end, it simply just doesn’t deliver.
  2. It’s a good, fun film, the kind that likely scans differently with repeat viewings, and includes a savvy wink to the vegan word as per Silverstone’s noble and ongoing mission. But I had the killer — if not the labyrinthine impetus for the crime — pegged from the get-go.
  3. 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.
  4. If it’s not exactly a documentary, Dumb Money offers up enjoyably anarchic glee as the little guy wins for a minute.
  5. Canadian writer-director Tim Brown captures a heady mix of action, bloodshed and comedy here, hitting all the high notes of a crime thriller even as he appears to be spoofing the genre — and who better to do that with than Cage, the meta master himself?
  6. A chamber-sized display of cinematic razzle-dazzle, and convoluted political allegory filled with gallows humour and broad polemics, Pablo Larraín’s El Conde re-imagines the Chilean dictator as the 250-year-old vampire star of a 1930s horror movie.
  7. Poirot’s latest adventure may engender some brief happiness in audiences, but I’m not sure it will leave them fully satisfied.
  8. The Italian characters in The Equalizer 3 tend to speak more slowly than usual, almost as though waiting for the subtitles to catch up. If you can handle that pacing, interspersed with short bursts of intense violence, then The Equalizer may yet hold your attention. But at the tail end of a summer that delivered exciting new chapters in the Indiana Jones and Mission: Impossible franchises, that may be asking a lot.
  9. Bottoms is absurd, ridiculous, often wildly inappropriate in the way of teen comedies and occasionally as exaggerated as a Looney Tunes cartoon. But everyone in the movie is giving it their all, taking the craziness seriously and clearly having fun. There are a lot of terrific performances.
  10. 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.
  11. Ultimately, if Gran Turismo were a car, it would have shoddy brakes, little pickup and bad cornering. If you’re looking to get from narrative point A to point B by the most direct route possible, it’ll suffice. If you want something more engaging, you may want to choose a different ride, one with a little more under the hood.
  12. 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.
  13. Ukrainian director Roman Liubyi’s Iron Butterflies is an experimental film, a memorial scrapbook and a forensic documentary that revisits the 2014 downing of the Malaysian passenger plane, Flight 17.
  14. If you’ve seen the red-band trailer for Strays, you know the dog-centric, live-action new comedy is profane and outrageous, slapstick and amusing in that distinctly stoner-friendly way.
  15. A bawdy comedy about male strippers that lives up to mediocre expectations, Back On the Strip is directed and co-written by Chris Spencer who has previously worked with the Wayan Brothers comedy team.
  16. The film Dark Windows, by Norwegian director Alex Heron, manages to work in both forms of teen-o-cide in a film that feels like a Mothers Against Drunk Driving public service announcement appended to a slasher film, though that makes it sound more exciting than it is.
  17. While Reyes’ Blue Beetle isn’t as endearing as Ted Kord’s, the movie still finds its audience. The music and cheap jokes that are substituted for where meaningful dialogue could have been more successful still manage to carry the film. In short, the cheap laughs worked.
  18. A lot of genuine heart and goodwill has been poured into Jules, a slight, gentle comedy with a sci-fi edge. Heartfelt as it might be and despite a strong cast led by Sir Ben Kingsley, an unfocused storyline undermines the film, making it a frustrating watch.
  19. Sure, The Eternal Memory is tough and occasionally relentless, but it is also affirming in ways unexpected. Significant and intense indeed, but the excursion is far from weary.
  20. There is not much more you can ask of a film than that it provides you with another perspective, a new angle to look at old problems. The Beasts does that.
  21. Sometimes, in equations of the heart, you can solve for X. And sometimes it remains stubbornly, soul-stabbingly unknown.
  22. Overall, The Last Voyage of the Demeter is a middling entry in the Dracula canon.
  23. Director Ben Wheatley gives the summer blockbuster the finger, and it’s the funniest damn thing I’ve seen this year. Meg 2: The Trench is flawed to perfection; a satirical pummeling of commercial cinema and the first out of gate with a Barbie send-up.
  24. In contrast to the complex psychodrama of Nolan’s opus, A Compassionate Spy is a gentle and intimate film, largely narrated by Hall’s wife, Joan, who was 90 at the time of filming. She tells a love story.
  25. Wryly funny, and just a little more complicated than its familiar indie film tropes suggest, the dramedy Shortcomings marks the directorial debut of comic actor Randall Park (Fresh of the Boat, Blockbuster, The Interview).
  26. Credit goes to the Philippou brothers for their originality and perfectly queasily executed bits of ghoulish anarchy.
  27. A thoroughly endearing movie that’s difficult to dislike, Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem tackles the basic themes of the characters Eastman and Laird originally instilled in their stories, like acceptance, growing up, or just simply wanting to do the right thing.
  28. Kokomo City is a vibrant, original work, shot in black and white, in a kaleidoscopic blend of monologues, conversations, and re-enactments. At a moment when the American right are obsessed with criminalizing health care for transgender people and erasing Black history, it’s also timely.
  29. A wildly funny film for all fans with a refined sense of nerd-humour, this is a must-see.
  30. At a little more than two hours (about the length of the line to get into the actual ride), The Haunted Mansion sometimes strains to keep up its frenetic pace. But the fun tone is on point, and younger family members in the audience are in little actual danger of being traumatized by fear.

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