Paste Magazine's Scores

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For 2,243 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 60% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 37% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3.4 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 68
Highest review score: 100 Young Frankenstein
Lowest review score: 7 Reagan
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,591 out of 2243
  2. Mixed: 515 out of 2243
  3. Negative: 137 out of 2243
2243 movie reviews
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  1. Playdate
    No one escapes from this mess looking good, although to his credit, Ritchson is at least giving it a titanic effort.
  2. Him
    Tipping approaches this dilemma but is too intellectually distracted to focus on the raw complexities that would otherwise give it shape or resonance. He opts for spectacle, which wears thin fast.
  3. Smurfs
    Who could have guessed that a simple Smurfs reboot would constitute such an unholy mess?
  4. Brick
    Sadly, even a perfectly workable premise needs engaging writing, directing and performances to bring it to life, and in this capacity, Netflix’s new feature Brick is as utterly inert as its title–likewise reused from Rian Johnson’s far more interesting high school neo-noir from 2005.
  5. G20
    Before we get to its many faults, it’s worth noting G20 gets one part of its concept correct: casting Viola Davis as the President. Getting the vibes right when casting your President is the most important first step when making a film in this subgenre.
  6. Captain America: Brave New World
    Directed by Julius Onah, Brave New World is as visually lifeless as the most lifeless MCU thrillers, marred by needless overcutting, flimsy digital backdrops and stilted composition; thematically, it says nothing confidently and even less coherently.
  7. Flight Risk
    Flight Risk feels like a free-floating outlet for a little bit of rage and a little bit of shtick, both Mad Mel standbys that he seems unwilling to really examine, within these confines or elsewhere.
  8. Red One
    If only Red One had a bit more respect for its audience. We can all use a reaffirming message this holiday season, but this stuffs stockings with little more than hot air. I’d have preferred some coal. There’s at least a use for that.
  9. Apartment 7A
    A discarded made-for-TV sequel to Rosemary’s Baby in the ‘70s is now just what most mainstream American filmmaking is, summed by prequel Apartment 7A: something stupid, easy and familiar to watch in the comfort of one’s home, confined to the medium that had once threatened to overtake cinema and is now doing so again all these years later.
  10. The Substance
    An overuse of stale horror conventions in an already predictable plot—combined with decades-old, thoroughly unchallenging ideas about women’s relationships to their bodies—leads to a film that claims to support its protagonist, while treating her like the butt of the joke at every turn.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 7 Critic Score
    Reagan
    It fancies itself to be a likeness of reality but is simultaneously unapologetic about mythologizing its central figure, obfuscating Reagan’s sins along the way and refusing any narrative that doesn’t paint him as the Christian, capitalist savior of the family unit.
  12. The Union
    The movie seems to pre-suppose that in our desperation to spend time with Wahlberg and Berry, any empty stupid simulacra will suffice as an excuse.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 24 Critic Score
    It Ends with Us
    It Ends with Us is in deep solidarity with its source material when it comes to constructing a work that is uniquely bland and unmemorable.
  14. Borderlands
    At Borderlands’ best, we see some nice concept art, divorced from the movement or humanity of cinema. At its worst, we see some poor saps clearly wandering through unreality, stuck in a CG hackjob not quite as convincing as a Spy Kids sequel.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Deadpool & Wolverine
    Deadpool & Wolverine is another mind-numbingly corporatized CGI fest, divorced from any true emotional stakes. It’s a picture that would rather tell you how to feel than make you feel.
  16. Despicable Me 4
    Despicable Me 4 loses focus like a golden retriever in a Petco plushie aisle, splitting characters into bottled subplots that can only be addressed in single-file order.
  17. Trigger Warning
    The veteran-comes-home revenger Trigger Warning is thoroughly idiotic and deathly slow, filled with so much ugly camp that it could stand in as the first Lifetime Original action movie.
  18. Psycho Therapy: The Shallow Tale of a Writer Who Decided to Write About a Serial Killer
    It’s a shame, because the idea of a serial killer approaching his work with a kind of dutiful, world-weary professionalism is funny enough – maybe only comedy-sketch funny, but then again, The Shallow Tale produces a profound longing for the number of laughs that could sustain a five-minute sketch.
  19. Atlas
    AI may not be advanced enough to make a movie even as crappy as Atlas, but in the meantime, it seems like autocomplete is having a go at it.
  20. Unfrosted
    If there’s one apt element Seinfeld and company bring to Unfrosted, it’s that they knowingly treat it like a bunch of silly bullshit.
  21. Boy Kills World
    Overlong and overstimulating, the entire film is like a giant, immersive eyesore.
  22. DogMan
    Compounded with dull plotting and a truly uninspired protagonist arc, Dogman is a curiosity of a comeback film that only makes you consider the virtues of director jail.
  23. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
    Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire doubles down, fully committing to its existence as a cynical nostalgia raid masquerading as a movie.
  24. Sleeping Dogs
    Sleeping Dogs winds up playing like a low-rent Saw sequel without the elaborate traps or gore. It’s all bad cops and worse twists, turning the fragility of human memory into a cheap trick.
  25. Imaginary
    A horror movie so derivative that it becomes uniquely terrible.
  26. Upgraded
    Ana may be attempting to climb the class ladder, but the movie moves between classes with a freedom that feels weakly imagined.
  27. Marmalade
    Marmalade is the kind of just okay, middle-of-the-road, nearly inventive but still mostly derivative indie that at least has the decency to be only 90 minutes.
  28. Suncoast
    While there is a literal amount of truth running through the semi-autobiographical Suncoast, its glossy, uncertain cutesiness is as fake as Ron DeSantis’ height.
  29. He Went That Way
    Surely a short film interview would have been more interesting, and engaging, than He Went That Way. It’s the kind of story that’s undeniably fascinating, but so bare-bones as a screenplay that it needs a little something more if it’s going to work, padded out either in the director’s style or in the writer’s script.
  30. Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire
    By the time the credits rolled, I realized I don’t think I’d ever watched a movie this long that still felt so brief and bewilderingly abridged; where so much happened and yet nothing happened at all.
  31. The Family Plan
    There is nothing in The Family Plan that you haven’t seen before, to the point that there’s somehow even less.
  32. Good Burger 2
    Even when it’s not selling its past self, Good Burger 2 is selling something. It’s what makes it a hard movie to root for, even when it lucks into saying the right things: It tosses one money-grubbing trend in the trash while ordering all the others directly off the menu.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 34 Critic Score
    It's a Wonderful Knife
    Festive horror is a notorious subgenre, with last year’s runaway success Violent Night scratching this itch for many—to say nothing of classics like 1974’s Black Christmas. It’s A Wonderful Knife sports an equally clever parody title, but has little else going for it, coasting on the premise of Frank Capra’s classic and failing to stand out among its predecessors.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Pain Hustlers
    There’s not anything in Pain Hustlers that’s worth your valuable time. Better-told versions of its story abound. More thoughtful takes on the opioid industry and the harm it causes everyday people are plentiful.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Bikeriders
    Unfortunately, Nichols’ interpretation feels like a blind wandering through uncharted land, populated by a host of chiseled yet undeveloped characters. The Bikeriders is a shallow parade of cool images.
  36. Fantastic Machine
    The documentary—with the pretentious full title of And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine, after the British monarch whose coronation Georges Méliès staged and filmed—is a bad undergrad media studies paper, given shape and movement by directors Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck.
  37. AGGRO DR1FT
    Aggro Dr1ft is less interesting than the video game cutscene it resembles, padded by a narrative peppered with the tropes of a hit man action film but lacking substance.
  38. Pet Sematary: Bloodlines
    The generic moniker proves accurately foreboding for the run-of-the-mill film, one that desperately latches onto the goodwill of a familiar title but has nothing meaningful to add to its legacy.
  39. Wildcat
    Regrettably, a gross number of missteps overshadow the Hawkes’ good intentions with this film. Even without Maya Hawke’s frumpy hag drag as O’Connor, complete with too-large dentures and an unfortunate wig, the lack of creative risk taken by the filmmakers, as well as the lack of research done by the team, sinks Wildcat before it gets started.
  40. Shaky Shivers
    This inept, unpleasant, cobbled-together debut only reveals its first-time helmer as a Dr. Frankenstein about to lose his license.
  41. Retribution
    It’s as if Neeson is attempting to maintain the same schtick from Taken, with the children remaining the same age despite his own age ever trudging onward (there’s a twisted Dazed & Confused joke someone could make here). It is a workaround refutation of his mortality without the use of de-aging CGI.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 32 Critic Score
    Gran Turismo
    Through its aspatial editing, refusing to ever let a racetrack be understood in continuity, Gran Turismo becomes a cacophonous collage of experience based on real car racing as much as real videogames, but fundamentally opposed to the reality of either.
  43. Heart of Stone
    Heart of Stone is murky, drab and always going the wrong speed. It’s either motionless, allowing exposition scene after exposition scene to lay out the boring details of what might happen if the wrong folks get control of The Heart, or erratic, dicing its badly remixed action sequences like it was trying to avoid a copyright strike from the movies it steals from.
  44. Haunted Mansion
    A movie like Haunted Mansion is always going to be, at its heart, a cinematic advertisement for the theme park, but couldn’t we at least run with that idea and make it fun?
  45. Run Rabbit Run
    Run Rabbit Run never gets past the sensation of being a Mad Libs horror movie, where those blank spaces are filled in with the most obvious tropes.
  46. Dalíland
    The worst choice Mary Harron makes in Dalíland is relying on convention to make an end-stage portrait of an unconventional figure.
  47. Padre Pio
    Padre Pio’s two halves stubbornly, constantly butt heads with each other, stories in catastrophic disharmony.
  48. About My Father
    Beyond the tepid cultural commentary, the film has few other redeeming qualities.
  49. White Men Can't Jump
    The confused comedy waddles onto the court as confidently as a kid in an oversized hand-me-down jersey. But why would this derivative filmmaking aspire to anything else? It’s all just set dressing for Jack Harlow’s brick of a big-screen debut.
  50. Knights of the Zodiac
    This live-action co-production between Sony and a Japanese animation studio begins with the colorful bounce of Paul W.S. Anderson directing a cosmic X-Men knockoff, and quickly runs out of gas in a way that resembles the worst of Sony’s Screen Gems genre arm.
  51. Book Club: The Next Chapter
    In its broadest outlines, Book Club: The Next Chapter is a harmless, mildly farcical travelogue for fans of the central actresses, as well as those casually interested in briefly recognizing Andy Garcia, Don Johnson and Craig T. Nelson.
  52. Love Again
    It misses the painful performance of everyday life, or less Hallmark-friendly emotions, like anger or numbness.
  53. Peter Pan & Wendy
    I can’t imagine any child actually enjoying this film, let alone a child who is familiar with and fond of the original animated adaptation.
  54. Mafia Mamma
    Even in Kristin’s quietest, most contemplative moments, Collette can’t stop bugging her eyes or yanking down her mouth – which, to be fair, is a natural reaction to being repeatedly poisoned over the course of 101 endless minutes.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 18 Critic Score
    On a Wing and a Prayer
    This is the film: Constantly rendered emotionless by decision-making both numbingly predictable and entirely inexplicable.
  56. Paint
    Paint is interested in the meme of the man. As the old proverb goes: A funny meme does not a feature film make.
  57. 65
    Beck and Woods seem to have an entirely misguided conception of what people love about B-movies in the first place and, like A Quiet Place, 65 flounders in this middle ground because it won’t commit to being a genre film.
  58. The Lair
    The Lair is an abomination of bad accents (“Texan American” yee-haw, “Unintelligible Englishman,” Australian muddying both), excruciating action hero one-liners, and discouragingly archaic plot choices.
  59. Kids vs. Aliens
    Kids vs. Aliens is a harmless trifle. A filmmaker with this many years under their belt should have more to show for themselves than that.
  60. The Son
    Zeller is clearly more experienced as a writer than a director, but even his ability to extract the powerful (if stagey) performances we saw in The Father is missing here, as everyone just insists their lines upon each other with tones borrowed from shouty amateur theater.
  61. Poker Face
    The sparse action scenes are useless jumbles, tossing bodies in misblocked blurs of messy motion—like a human game of 52-card pickup—or encased in total darkness. If we can’t see anything, this gamble suggests, maybe we won’t think that what we see is bad.
  62. The Estate
    Without any actual classicism to accompany Craig’s outdated notions of outrageousness, the movie quickly turns fustier than its edgy posturing lets on. Craig simply watches a bunch of selfish people behave badly in predictable ways, and occasionally has them lunge at each other in anger. How perfectly droll!
  63. The School for Good and Evil
    The School for Good and Evil is juvenile, over-the-top and campy in all the worst ways. It’s too busy trying to combine TikTok fashion with Top 40 music and popular children’s fantasy films to create any visual, musical or narrative distinction for itself.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Black Adam
    It all adds up to another frantic grab by a studio desperate to wring success from a superhero universe they’ve never fully understood.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 35 Critic Score
    Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power
    The most galling, offensive thing about Brainwashed is how poorly it demonstrates a point that should have been so very easy to prove.
  66. Mr. Harrigan's Phone
    Those unfortunate enough to populate Mr. Harrigan’s Phone must be as dumb as the movie thinks we are. This low opinion of its audience is apparent in every step of its narrative and in some of its stranger creative choices.
  67. Summering
    Everyone has off days, or in his case off years. But Summering extends those off years into Ponsoldt’s most puzzling effort so far, a genre jumble roping together a kid-detective novel, a ghost story, a hokey “do you know where your children are” PSA and a coming-of-age dramedy.
  68. The Black Phone
    Though its actual storytelling is pretty arbitrary, The Black Phone has the emotional simplicity of a children’s film, wearing its grit like makeup.
  69. Jurassic World Dominion
    The Jurassic World franchise may have willingly chosen extinction with this final entry, but Dominion would’ve killed it off anyways.
  70. The Score
    By the end of this movie, its inventive genre cross-breeding feels as worn-out as any other.
  71. Dashcam
    Rob Savage’s Dashcam is the equivalent of strapping a GoPro to a Republican edgelord’s dirty diaper and throwing it into a blender.
  72. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
    As Rowling continues submerging her magical world into the same hellish and disreputable bog as her personal legacy, I wish she’d kept The Secrets of Dumbledore to herself.
  73. The Adam Project
    As with Free Guy, Reynolds and Levy have made a movie aimed at the dead center of mainstream geek culture, designed to be described as having so much heart—even though it’s as smooth and featureless as a Funko Pop.
  74. Asking for It
    Asking for It is made with sloppy overconfidence, a stunning bluff of both style and substance.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 35 Critic Score
    Fistful of Vengeance
    It is glorious to see a predominantly Asian cast, including Asian-Americans, and extended scenes set against a gorgeous Thai backdrop. However, there’s little else to enjoy in this middling martial arts flick.
  76. Blacklight
    Poor writing and direction suffocate Neeson so thoroughly that he can’t be charming, nor weathered, nor any other distinguishable feature; instead, the stalwart of old man action is just an expensive vessel for Williams’ half-baked ideology.
  77. Clean
    Clean is irrefutably, deliciously bad. But there is something unironically beautiful about movies that are just plain awful, movies that dare to provoke your senses at all instead of simply sating them with something pleasant and “competent enough.”
  78. The King's Daughter
    Because of its long road to the screen, I wanted so deeply to like it. However, its haphazard story, mediocre visual effects, downright awful costuming and other cardinal sins made it hard to find anything redeeming about the movie, no matter how many years have passed.
  79. Shattered
    David Loughery’s writing isn’t necessarily bad, it just isn’t interesting, and when you’re doing this type of done-to-death B-movie, you need to bring something fresh to the table or else your film just fades away.
  80. The Tender Bar
    As mired as it is in identity confusion, cheeseball sentimentality and jaundiced camera filters, The Tender Bar could’ve been something if it had a purpose.
  81. The King's Man
    The King’s Man is an off-putting installment in a series that should have already ended.
  82. The Unforgivable
    It’s possible for cinema to weave this many themes and concerns together into one cohesive film. The Unforgivable simply doesn’t.
  83. Being the Ricardos
    There’s a good movie baked into Being the Ricardos’ 131 minutes. It’s about 90 minutes long, maybe a little less. The remaining 41 minutes comprise an Aaron Sorkin movie, and like too much cream in a beautifully fried donut, they weigh down the total package with needless fat: Talking heads, flashbacks and archival footage.
  84. Red Notice
    What wants to be a James-Bond-derivative blockbuster ends up being more like The Hitman’s Bodyguard, an unintentional pastiche with somehow even lower stakes. Yes, it’s possible.
  85. Home Sweet Home Alone
    Home Sweet Home Alone doesn’t bear any aesthetic beyond “existing.” It is obligatory when it needn’t be. It will undoubtedly get a sequel.
  86. Dear Evan Hansen
    I could dig into any number of the movie’s unfortunate choices, bad decisions or downright detestable elements—sprinkling in faint praise like, hey, the Tony-winning Platt might be acting through five layers of bullsh*t, but he can still sing—and I’d still never capture all the reasons Dear Evan Hansen fails.
  87. He's All That
    He’s All That is, yes, a nightmarish, joyless commentary on influencer-beholden adolescence told through the crutch of nostalgia and starring a charisma-less TikTok star, but it’s hard to know if one is merely an example of “Old Man Yells at Cloud” or if the teenagers of today are truly living in a Hell on Earth
  88. John and the Hole
    A completely detached exercise in bewilderment that’s enigmatic nature comes off less Lynchian and more “unfinished scriptian,” director Pascual Sisto’s feature debut aims for intrigue but settles comfortably in mediocrity.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 21 Critic Score
    Stillwater
    As the film trickles toward its howler of a conclusion, any hopes McCarthy might somehow salvage this story evaporate. Stillwater sinks like a stone.
  90. How It Ends
    The problem dogging the film from the start is the absence of insight. Nothing that Wein and Lister-Jones have to say about facing the past, making peace with yourself and with the people who psychologically and emotionally scarred you over the course of your life, or even their most central concern, death, turns out to be worth hearing.
  91. Space Jam: A New Legacy
    The story isn’t necessarily awful, but it’s mostly boring, stretching itself out to an unwieldy 115 minutes.
  92. The Tomorrow War
    Unfortunately, The Tomorrow War isn’t allowed to be the dumb, “just go with it” summer spectacle it should have been, a la Independence Day. Instead, McKay and Dean force it to be a self-aware and “smart” time travel drama, with feelings big enough to crack generational war trauma issues, among lots of things that go “boom!” and “pew, pew, pew.”
  93. America: The Motion Picture
    It is obnoxious, overlong, annoying and, above all, deeply unfunny.
  94. Good on Paper
    Good on Paper wasn’t that good as a stand-up segment; as a movie, it should be permanently erased from the memories of anyone unlucky enough to have seen it.
  95. The Misfits
    The Misfits, starring Pierce Brosnan and Nick Cannon, is airless, pointless and only passably made; an amalgamation of the most tired clichés of heist movies, executed in the emptiest way possible.
  96. Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse
    Making it just a little bit smarter—taking out perhaps just one of its multiple, intelligence-insulting ending clichés—could make its plot simply boring rather than asinine, which would make the film dangerously forgettable, able to inflict 100-minute gaps into moviegoers’ memories at distances of up to 500 yards.
  97. Vanquish
    Imagine spending an hour and a half or so watching a film that, the minute the credits roll, dissolves from the mind like cotton candy in hot water. That’s Vanquish. Nothing that happens throughout its narrative happens for any good reason, other than the plot dictates it must for the sake of limping to the next scene.
  98. Thunder Force
    But there’s so much done wrong as the film tries to be funny that when it is funny, the funniness goes down like a bitter pill: Why can’t it be good all the time?
  99. Voyagers
    And as far as criticism goes, the tedious and trite, regressive and ridiculous Voyagers doesn’t need any more than it’s already going to get.
  100. Stay Out of the Attic
    Despite (or perhaps due to) having four writers contributing to the script, Stay Out of the Attic is disjointed and incongruous, with thematic ties to twin experimentation, eugenic science and the medicinal properties of the optic nerve that never connect to reveal anything substantial.
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