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. The Grudge
    Three films into his career, Pesce is batting below average: Last year, he dropped his inventive sophomore stunner, Piercing, and demonstrated range and precision not as evident in his hollow, unrepentantly nasty debut The Eyes of My Mother. With The Grudge, the worst proclivities of that movie override the sensibilities of Piercing and combine with studio horror’s “just play the hits” ethos, resulting in one of the year’s most unpleasant releases to date.
  2. Come to Daddy
    Don’t mistake Come to Daddy as anything less than unbridled, of course, but for such a staunchly bonkers movie, composure rules Timpson’s aesthetic. He maintains an impressive control over a narrative that, at face value, appears to be constantly spiraling out of control, but that’s part of his design.
  3. First Cow
    If the film wants to implore us to understand the essence of man, how its portrayal of burgeoning American capitalism and entrepreneurial spirit is undoubtedly, jarringly, at odds with the nature of mankind. At its core, humanity craves companionship, stability and understanding, while capitalism breeds selfishness, inequality and isolation.
  4. Emma.
    With our current cultural moment so defined by protracted digital isolation—and its cousin, anonymity-enabled cruelty—the best thing de Wilde’s Emma. could do was lean so hard into the sublimity of Austen’s original that, for the entirety of its gloriously phone-free two-hour runtime, its audience might feel, collectively, transported. And that, it absolutely does.
  5. Onward
    Onward has sections where you worry that it’s a disaster, but it turns out to have more emotional oomph than initially apparent.
  6. Young Ahmed
    Young Ahmed isn’t the affront to taste people feared it would be. But its lack of genuine depth feels like an offense unto itself.
  7. The Invisible Man
    It’s all pretty marvelous stuff, as much a well-oiled genre machine as it is a respite from big studio bloat, a flick more decidedly horror than any version before and yet another showcase for Elisabeth Moss’s herculean prowess.
  8. Saint Frances
    Saint Frances gets specific, stays lighthearted, but hits like a ton of emotional bricks.
  9. Premature
    It’s a gorgeous, shattering film. It’s an unapologetically real film about a number of very real subjects, plot-agnostic but driven by character, consequence and compassion.
  10. VFW
    Unlike Bliss, which has a cogent intention pushing it forward, VFW plays slapdash, which admittedly fits the film’s grimy aesthetic, a delirious theme park ride. Maybe that’s all a horror movie needs to be to be worth watching, but Begos can do more than douse a set with viscera, even if VFW doesn’t need “more” to justify itself.
  11. My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising
    Sure, the action is thrilling and the visual effects are stellar, but Heroes Rising as a whole only manages to graze the surface of what makes My Hero Academia the series itself so great.
  12. Bacurau
    Bacurau is wildly creative, and its hilarious, Dadaist aura provides an uncanny comfort despite ample bloodshed. This is not to say that the film is without heart-wrenching loss and tearful contemplation of a world on fire.
  13. Gretel & Hansel
    The film thrives within a dream-logic vibe, especially in Olivares’ cinematography, with its heavy emphasis on symmetrical framing, stark contast and lush use of yellows and blues, evoking subliminal terror.
  14. Sonic the Hedgehog
    The movie’s real joy, if there is any, lies with Carrey fully embracing his ’90s rubberface days. Director Jeff Fowler makes the right decision by letting Carrey’s signature madness loose on such a vanilla scoop of family entertainment.
  15. The Lodge
    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.
  16. Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)
    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.
  17. The Rhythm Section
    The Rhythm Section certainly doesn’t rewrite the structure of the revenge movie. The usual plot twists can still be seen coming a mile away. None of which keeps it from being a smart and insightful genre exercise in an already promising director’s young career.
  18. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
    Even more powerful than Sciamma’s portrayal of a feminine portrait of solidarity and desire is the statement that art is not exclusive to those who make it.
  19. Zombi Child
    What makes the movie such a welcome surprise is Bonello’s creativity: Digging back nearly 60 years to trace an arc of trauma inherited through French colonialism takes as much chutzpah as imagination, the latter seen here mostly in the form of atmospheric horror homage.
  20. Color Out of Space
    Color Out of Space feels shaggy at the edges but so rich within them that the flaws of the DIY aesthetic matter less than the merits of Stanley’s perspective.
  21. Dolittle
    Kids deserve better entertainment than Dolittle. They deserve not to have their intellect insulted with half-assed celebrity vocal cameos and a plot that concludes not with a bang, but with a fart joke. Neither Gaghan, nor his ensemble, nor Universal have an excuse. Downey doesn’t either.
  22. Three Christs
    Avnet likely means well, just as Rokeach meant well. Three Christs needs more than a deep focus on the Christs themselves, and on the system that so utterly failed them. It needs to focus on Stone, and on the collision between ego and benevolence that led to The Three Christs of Ypsilanti’s birth. That should be the story.
  23. Weathering with You
    It never quite rises to pedigree of Your Name, but it certainly asserts its place in Shinkai’s oeuvre as his most challenging film to date.
  24. Bad Boys for Life
    Bad Boys for Life is better than it should be—the audience at my screening clapped when it ended—but not quite up to being what it must: a reminder that, you know what, a thousand years from now, Bad Boys will still fucking be here.
  25. VHYes
    Think of the film as an extended cousin of Too Many Cooks, where parody gives way to weirdness, which gives way to surrealism, which gives way to genuine horror by the end. Bonkers as the combination sounds, and it is unimpeachably bonkers, the effect of their marriage is hypnotic.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rise of the Guardians
    Rise of the Guardians is definitely fun, and definitely worthy of a holiday outing to the theater.
  27. Just Mercy
    It’s genuinely passionate about telling the tale of a man who sought the truth and applied it to attain true equality under the law. Perfectly executed or not, we need these kinds of stories these days.
  28. The Sonata
    While the director clearly has a few tricks up his sleeve for hitting his viewers with the heebie jeebies, what he doesn’t have, at least for The Sonata, is a sense of how to weave those tricks into a unified, cohesive narrative.
  29. Clemency
    The strength of ensemble’s performances can’t be overstated, especially that of Woodard and Hodge—she one of the greatest actors of her generation, he on the path to becoming one of the greats of his own.
  30. Marriage Story
    Good as Marriage Story’s pieces are, they’re too finely curated: Baumbach rarely lets the film be as messy as it needs to be, hemming himself in with the threads of his limited perspective.
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