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. Smile 2
    Smile 2 ultimately seems struck dumb by its own possibilities, and gets stuck franchising hopelessness.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Balconettes
    On the whole, for a filmmaker at the start of her career, The Balconettes is a rather impressive display of Merlant’s talents. It balances its more serious subject matter with dark humor to navigate a modern world where it feels as though women are more at risk than ever before, and it does so with stylistic flair.
  3. Oh, Canada
    It’s no wonder why Schrader, an older artist whose life and career have been defined by a seemingly limitless series of controversies, took to bringing to the screen the story of Leonard Fife.
  4. Blitz
    Blitz might be a story of a war-torn metropolis and its inhabitants, but even so it feels bogged down by its ever-mounting tragedies.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Queer
    Where Burroughs achieved the profound in the brevity of the novella, Guadagnino punishes you with longwindedness, ending after (non-final) ending souring the film into a clock-watching endurance test.
  6. We Live in Time
    For a touch-and-go exercise in hoping the audience will fill in not just the narrative blanks but the emotional ones, there’s We Live in Time.
  7. The Apprentice
    In the end, The Apprentice is a story whose central character wouldn’t really justify the telling of said story in normal circumstances, except for the fact that he eventually became a ruinous president of the United States.
  8. The Shrouds
    The Shrouds might not be Cronenberg’s most accessible or cohesive film, but it’s just as muddled as the process of coping with mortality in a world where we are pulled steadily further from what makes us human.
  9. Nickel Boys
    Though Nickel Boys is at least in part about Black oppression and the suffering that comes along with it, Ross uses the movie’s point of view to avoid making a movie that turns that suffering into a marquee attraction or an endurance test.
  10. The Room Next Door
    With his careful attention to the controlled emoting from both Swinton and Moore, so free of showy tearjerking or breakdowns, Almodóvar humanely and pointedly avoids turning The Room Next Door into an issue movie dedicated to assisted suicide. Then the movie backs into feeling like one anyway.
  11. House of Spoils
    Rarely does it ever genuinely feel like a horror movie at all, in fact. Instead, it’s more like a halfhearted feminist kitchen drama, with the occasional “scary” beat inserted under protest, a horror film via technicality of labeling and marketing rather than any particular intent. It wants to be just about anything but.
  12. Emilia Pérez
    The promise of more music keeps the movie on life support when its drama threatens to flatline. When these sequences gradually recede from the movie, it feels as if someone should call an ambulance, but it’s also too late. What’s left are shadows of what might have been Saldaña and Gomez’s best on-screen performances, or Gascón’s breakthrough.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 73 Critic Score
    Joker: Folie à Deux
    This is a sequel that literally puts on trial not simply its protagonist, but the very storyline that preceded it, making mockery of the simplistic readings that it engendered, while at the same time engaging in the kind of hoarish courtroom antics that make the musical sequences feel almost vérité in stylistic contrast.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Maria
    The history baked into Maria is fascinating, one of the film’s greatest strengths.
  15. It's What's Inside
    Who we really are versus who we hope we are is a source of phenomenal dramatic tension in any genre. Throw in some horror concepts and some scary atmosphere and you’ve got what’s (hopefully) a compelling concoction about the fear of facing your true self, and the fear of learning those closest to you aren’t who you thought they were.
  16. Eephus
    The “Eephus” pitch is an apt characterization for the film that now shares its name, an odd, surprising story about a baseball game with seemingly little to no stakes, that continues on for long after it should’ve already ended.
  17. V/H/S/Beyond
    The strong results of segments like “Stork,” “Live and Let Dive” and “Stowaway” buy the series a brief reprieve for now, but the yearly releases feel increasingly like a beast that will never be satiated.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Brutalist
    For every beat of affecting brutalism, there is an equally affecting beat of brutality.
  19. Anora
    Baker obviously loves most of his characters, and while Anora doesn’t necessarily give off warmth, spending so much of time in the visceral chill of a Coney Island winter, it regards the entire situation with nonjudgmental good humor and a touch of melancholy.
  20. 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.
  21. Frankie Freako
    Built from the same little monster framework as stuff like the Gremlins and Critters series, Frankie Freako is an unapologetically weird, esoteric ride through a very particular kind of ’80s movie, complete with what feels like an absolute suspension of the rules of reality. That makes it, at minimum, refreshing, and at its best, wildly entertaining.
  22. The Wild Robot
    At times, The Wild Robot feels almost elegiac – or is that just what happens when DreamWorks drops their worst habits and dedicates themselves to serving as a genuine creative competitor to their old rivals at Disney.
  23. Youth (Hard Times)
    Hard Times is just as unflinching as Spring in its repetitive nature, but the second installment adds a dynamic approach to the material that was lacking in Spring.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 85 Critic Score
    Lee
    Kuras avoids fashioning Lee as a generic war biopic by using Miller’s life story as a means through which to explore the myriad experiences of women during war.
  25. Wolfs
    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.
  26. Eureka
    Not only does the film successfully advocate for, and humanize, a populace that has been routinely silenced in popular culture, but it demonstrates that the destruction of these cultures has been emblematic of humanity’s extended downfall.
  27. Transformers One
    Look, as far as toy ads go, Transformers One is tolerable. It’s a little more fully imagined and rounded out than the jankier weirdness of its 1986 spiritual predecessor. The difference is that in 2024, a Transformers cartoon isn’t just selling toys to kids; it’s selling its own sketchy credibility to fans of all ages.
  28. 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.
  29. Never Let Go
    The movie’s lack of a clearly defined villain might alienate some genre fans; so might the lack of an easily trackable metaphor. Others will find it a relief. Never Let Go is a horror movie more interested in what it can evoke than what it can state or even imply.
  30. The 4:30 Movie
    While still leagues beneath the slacker-inspired brilliance of his early career works, The 4:30 Movie does at least concertedly cement itself in Smith’s prose and perspective.
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