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. It is, despite its surprisingly gruesome violence, little more than another superhero movie that will make more money than the GDP of a small island nation. It’s pretty good.
  2. Ocean’s 8 feels a bit like a high-end knockoff in that way that lots of spinoff films can, although the compensation is the familiar delights of watching smart characters do their job very, very well.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 64 Critic Score
    The film’s a lot of fun, but it’s more empty than it needs to be, and even the piercing intensity of Leto (who also serves as one of the film’s producers) doesn’t allow one to take this nearly as seriously as it takes itself.
  3. What Keeps You Alive’s forthright quality feels refreshing, and Minihan’s craft is a major plus, too.
  4. Day-Lewis, as expected, is utterly convincing inhabiting this space, with two very different showstopping monologues, one grossly comic and one filling in a defining event in his past. It’s easy to forget, given his legendary status and reluctance to play the game, how much fun it can be to watch Day-Lewis at work.
  5. There are problems with Mrs. Hyde that have nothing whatsoever to do with Bozon’s puzzling creative choices, though for perspective’s sake, the problems are dwarfed by the choices.
  6. Love, Antosha lays Yelchin’s immense spirit bare, but the film remains wanting for depth. Make no mistake: This is the definitive Encyclopedia of Anton Yelchin, a tome to chronicle the best of him. But there’s so much about him to learn, and so much breezed over to fit into a 90-minute running time, that Price’s study feels somewhat diffuse.
  7. Where Hill’s characters fill every frame with warmth and empathy, the world they inhabit is as contrived as a memory one trusts too much.
  8. Where Chicken Run once played off of the specific aesthetics of WWII POW films with dark humor, Dawn of the Nugget loses its identity in favor of a harmless playfulness interchangeable with a Madagascar or Ice Age sequel.
  9. Wright’s flair for freakazoids remains undeniable, but his focus on rebellion obscures the cruel machinery that incites it. That reluctance to linger too long in the muck of this world—to give perceptible shape to the apathy that creates this level of soulless greed—leaves Ben fighting an abstraction. It’s a devil we’re familiar with, just not one this film is willing to face head-on.
  10. Thanks to some excellent FX work and steady performances from its two leads, the film is free to deliver on the monster gore front in a way that is particularly easy for fans of practical FX to admire. Clearly the product of a filmmaker who knew how to work within his limitations and highlight the project’s strongest selling points, it manages to get every bit of meat off those bare bones.
  11. While [West] gets credit for trying to pull off some unwieldy, contrived storylines with conviction, it’s in its final moments that Linoleum nearly buckles under its own weight. West is not content to let his film speak in pure abstractions, and is convinced that it’s better to give clear, explicit explanations for a story that would be better off trading solely in metaphor.
  12. The movie is a worthy examination of the culture surrounding Abercrombie and why it became so toxic—and how we followed suit—but it could’ve been a slightly more rounded-out story had it focused on all elements of the company’s biases.
  13. If your tastes run to the rude, crude and pleasantly bizarre—the laughs are there, doing the heavy lifting for a story that barely is.
  14. The result is a movie significantly more flawed than its franchise predecessor yet more fun than anything we’ve seen in Phase 4 thus far.
  15. The Italy-set farce can boast 96 minutes of smooth comedic chemistry, but struggles to organically integrate its believable characters with the madcap situation it’s building around them, ultimately feeling like it’s missing some final push into more subversive territory.
  16. There’s solace to take in the realization that in another director’s hands, The Silent Twins would have been completely standardized, absent the redeeming artistic value invested in the film by Smoczynska’s presence. But the film doesn’t capitalize on her vision.
  17. The atmosphere that Franz and Fiala maintain isn’t a replacement for thoughtful writing, and their visual inventions are undone by the secrets that inspire them.
  18. While the movie is often adorable and overwhelmingly wholesome, it lacks the true essence of Tom and Jerry cartoons: Goofy, slapstick barbarity perpetually enacted between the two characters.
  19. Schroeder’s eye is right on the money for Ultrasound, spotlighting the best bits of a lackluster script with heightened visual play. If only the other, crucial parts of the film lived up to the vision in his head.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    In Dìdi, development is occurring on multiple axes: technological, social and generational, and the film is best when it’s unmooring these at once. Dìdi is bogged down, though, by its reliance on coming-of-age clichés: sex and drugs as markers of maturity, family conflict that’s easily smoothed over, the struggle of forming an identity when one has an insecure sense of self.
  20. The fight scenes will make you laugh more than the dialogue, and it doesn’t survive a bumpy landing, but led by Captain Hartnett, Fight or Flight takes advantage of its budget airline resources for a knowingly ludicrous romp.
  21. As a thriller, Cloud is half of a fascinating, disquieting, grimly amusing satire of online chicanery. As an action movie, it’s chaotic and vague, grasping to voice a critique of our digitally warped capitalistic age.
  22. Granted, the film might not have turned out much better had Smit stuck with one perspective or the other, but at least it would have had constancy. Instead, it reads strictly as a video game, sans the requisite interactive gratification.
  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. The Mauritanian plays by the numbers, hitting courtroom conspiracy drama beats dutifully but without any urgency. From the start, everyone on every side of the court is running out of time, and hitting their heads on brick walls of government silence, which, though drawn from real life, remains a well-worn genre cliché played too heavily by Macdonald’s direction.
  25. What Jan Komasa’s film gets right is how so much right-wing radicalization, especially in upper classes, stems from status-based grievances.
  26. For all of its craft, 40 Acres feels fenced in.
  27. Dickinson, in his film debut, almost makes this familiar narrative feel fresh.
  28. Zlokovic’s film misses the point of celebratory tongue-in-cheek referentialism, not to the point where the horror cinema gods will force reassessment of The Babadook’s status as a contemporary classic, but enough to cheapen everything of merit about Appendage.

Top Trailers