Paste Magazine's Scores

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 3.3 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:
2243 movie reviews
  1. What’s most distinguishable about Bad Trip is the way that it depicts the public which it interacts with. The film never aims to humiliate or dehumanize its subjects—instead of being disparaged or mocked in the name of comedy, bystanders are portrayed as more of a righteous tribunal than mere crabs in a barrel.
  2. It’s true, the specifics of The Thursday Murder Club’s story aren’t anything special, but the film is fairly remarkable in the way it centers and uplifts older characters, giving them stories that don’t revolve around distant family, precocious grandkids, or the bleak prospect of their impending deaths. Yes, the club’s members are all pushing eighty, but they’re each vibrant, fully realized characters who still have things they want out of life.
  3. A small cadre of performers and a play-like production—split into three contained acts that leap decades and single-location settings—keep the indie charmingly subdued, but the movie is so literal when drawing attention to its own underdeveloped themes that it boldly challenges you to be ignorant of the genre’s most basic philosophical bullet points.
  4. Kingsman: The Secret Service may lack the sophistication of its peers, but damned if it doesn’t know how to have a good time.
  5. Like many of the bright suggestions The Pod Generation offers, it would have been better left trimmed from the story, not because the outcomes and repercussions of the tech shouldn’t be explored but because there isn’t room to explore them all in under two hours.
  6. The movie is exhausting, but when we’re talking about the DCEU, we have been the victims of far worse. The movie bores you but, perhaps newest for this universe, it does not drain your will to live. One takes progress where one can find it.
  7. As a piece of revisionist mythmaking, the film employs a staunchly feminist, Aboriginal liberationist lens, one perfectly molded for Purcell’s specific gaze.
  8. It’s the palpable, playful chemistry between Emmanuel and Sy that finally gives this version of The Killer a reason to exist. Their rapport is a little bit sexy, witty and plenty world-weary. Every time they reunite, the film crackles back to life.
  9. Gorgeous and gross in equal measure, propelled by the sense that anything could happen, Like Me is a visual feast.
  10. While its minimalist approach keys into creepy unknown anxieties about our extraterrestrial neighbors, Duffield’s signature dose of emotional heft floats away into the clouds this time around.
  11. The Lost City might follow conventional genre beats, but an expert cast with a stellar sense of humor and fresh writing leads to lots of laughs and a romantic adventure that turns out to be a diamond in the rough.
  12. All the components for bite are here, from unflattering character portraits to hideous amorality, but The Commune never clamps down quite as hard as you’d like it to. Your time won’t be wasted with the movie, but it won’t send you out of the theater scarred, either.
  13. Posley balances Bitch Ass’ moral dilemma with clever, exuberant filmmaking.
  14. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is everything you could reasonably expect from a Sam Raimi-Kevin Feige collaboration, but not much more.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Curtis and Lohan haven’t missed a beat in their comic chemistry, and they’re now joined by the winning Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons. Rather than an attempt at some lofty reinvention (it’s Freaky Friday, for God’s sake), Ganatra’s take is more of a reunion tour where we bop our heads along to the familiar tunes.
  15. Despite effectively crafting character conflicts and jokes around the messy business of moving life to the stage and then moving it from the stage to the screen, See How They Run feels like it’s missing some punch. It’s certainly clever, but almost too much so.
  16. One of the more frustrating experiences in appraising art is arriving at the confusing intersection of admiring an artist’s work, while simultaneously not particularly enjoying it.... Bill Watterson’s fiercely creative yet endlessly frustrating Dave Made a Maze leaves the viewer in precisely this uncomfortable position.
  17. It’s a star vehicle intent on dulling its leads’ shine, a slick blockbuster relying on narrative and visual restrictions, a cynical movie about the power of friendship. And yet, even as Wolfs undermines itself, it’s a charmingly prickly (or charming, despite its prickliness) mess.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Given its limited cast, location and budget, Glorious is an impressive feat. It never drags or feels more claustrophobic than intended. Thanks to strong performances and mostly tight writing, it’s a tense little chamber film, with deities and grand ideas, but without pants.
  18. At its best, The Perfection is an homage to 1970s horror movies and 1980s thrillers, a glorious, multi-hewed mind screw.
  19. While Chase, Taylor and Konner figure out a way to give us a half-assed rundown of the gangster rise-and-fall we saw again and again in the series, they couldn’t figure out how to make that into any kind of satisfying film—let alone one worth its references to the gangster canon and let alone one that has anything at all to say about the race relations in Newark during its setting.
  20. The film never quite achieves the level of fevered hurry for which it aims—sometimes due to its often trite, on-the-nose dialogue and sometimes to the stilted delivery of said dialogue.
  21. This is a film that aims squarely at respecting its source’s established fan base, and cares little for casualties who can’t hang on through its grindhouse paces.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 78 Critic Score
    As a feature film debut this is a miraculous venture, one that feels glamorous and big while still relishing in the sparks that emit from talented actors finding new and interesting ways to fill an empty space.
  22. This is the best installment since the original, mainly because the film takes risks and bends conventions already set forth by the films that came before it. Scream was built on rules, but rules are always best when broken.
  23. Eremita (Anthologies) offers bursts of such inspired and inhibited strangeness in an uneven assessment of life, documenting this specific period around the world through a diverse spread that’s very imperfection is relatable to anyone that’s tried to get anything done under quarantine.
  24. Lightyear is a beautiful starship with precious genre cargo, functional and direct in its simple mission to carry on.
  25. Good Boys manages to find that happy medium between outrageous and heartstring-pulling.
  26. As movies about a Liam Neeson character marinating in regrets before punching and shooting his way out of immediate danger go, this is a pretty good one, by which I mean at one point Neeson smokes a pipe while driving a car. It’s also Lorenz’s best as a director by a fair margin, a movie that feels inspired by Eastwood and old Westerns, but not beholden to them.
  27. There’s some surprisingly compelling footage, played over the end credits, of real life Juggalos providing testimonials about what their community means to them, and in that a message about understanding the misunderstood.

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