RogerEbert.com's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
For 7,549 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 55% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 42% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 65
Highest review score: 100 Ghost Elephants
Lowest review score: 0 Buddy Games: Spring Awakening
Score distribution:
7549 movie reviews
  1. In this context, Farnworth’s appropriately broad performance is exceptional. She doesn’t have much dialogue that’s worthy of her playful, all-in line readings, but Farnworth deserves all due praise.
  2. The muddled story-telling, a reflection of Jane's perception of the world, may frustrate some viewers. But those who can appreciate it as pointillist rather than linear will be able to appreciate fully Roberts' control of mood and the exceptional depth of the performances.
  3. Gleefully high-concept and defiantly low-budget two-hander.
  4. The optimistic, twisting core of what 2067 is about will keep genre fans engaged even as the increasingly bad performances and frustrating writing pushes them away at the same time.
  5. An engrossing and often thrilling spy drama, and a tribute to this courageous and diverse group of women.
  6. Possessor is humorless, start to finish. Its energy is ponderous and glum, and the provocative ideas are not given a chance to really take on a life of their own. Still, there's much here that is imaginative and fresh.
  7. Maybe Dick Johnson is Dead is the filmmaking equivalent of the band on the deck of the Titanic playing their hearts out while the water rises. If so, the movie is aware that it might be that thing, and seems content to be that thing. That's every movie, every story. When the end is preordained, you might as well make music.
  8. The Glorias is consistently a visual treat, as you’d expect from Taymor.
  9. I prefer, and recommend, the original, but I’m on the fence about this one. Your mileage may vary.
  10. The result is a film that feels deeply personal, and not always in a good way. It’s a film that can’t help but feel a little like an invasion of privacy.
  11. Ava
    If the action and espionage elements were executed at the same level as the dramatic and comedic exchanges and the observations about the types of people drawn to this life, Ava might've been a cult classic.
  12. Mangrove becomes a full-on courtroom drama. The standard, expected beats and tropes are hit, but what happens within those elements makes the film so powerful and so rewarding. The lead actors also step up their game here, with each getting juicy dramatic moments that linger long after the credits roll.
  13. If you can look beyond the 90-minute runtime depriving this movie of a more satisfying conclusion, there is not simply “a lot to like,” there’s an embarrassment of riches crying out for perusal. On the Rocks is the kind of doodle only a truly skilled director could produce.
  14. Based solely on its own merits, Shortcut is both an amateurish production and a mindless genre exercise.
  15. In its attempt to cram too many narratives and subjects into too short of a running time, it ends up coming across as both overstuffed and oddly undernourished.
  16. Nothing about this inert, dull project feels like a movie. It’s a half-idea, half-heartedly filmed. Yes, it’s a kids’ movie, but kids are smarter in 2020 about their action entertainment and putting this alongside all the Marvel movies on Disney Plus feels almost mean.
  17. Had the filmmakers put forth the effort to view the story through Jamal’s eyes, they may have had a worthy cinematic counterpart to their noble off-camera achievements.
  18. An attempt to tell this complicated intersectional story, and it does so with a comedic light-hearted style, sometimes appropriate, but sometimes inadequate to the possibilities inherent in the real-life event.
  19. The dénouement of The Artist’s Wife, wasting compassion on a character who has earned only the minimum, winds up fully validating an ideology and morality that is complicit in women’s oppression.
  20. It looks and sounds great, but should it?
  21. July’s best and most mature work to date, the often hilarious and gradually heartbreaking Kajillionaire.
  22. This may be the start of a most welcome girl-powered franchise.
  23. The Swerve is the opposite of comforting.
  24. Thankfully, there’s enough affection and charm in the movie’s first half to keep Teenage Badass running on fumes most of the way home.
  25. The entire story takes place in and around a spectacular house with curiously sterile interiors that are more like the setting of a magazine ad for expensive liquor than a home real people live in. The bigger problem is that the world of the characters is not fully inhabited either.
  26. Lost Girls and Love Hotels is too vapid to work as a psychological drama, too silly to work as a passionate romance, and too tepid to work as a sexy guilty pleasure.
  27. Alone gives us little reason to care if our hero makes it out alive, but I have to give credit where it’s due: Jessica isn’t written as some damsel in distress. Though she does make a questionable choice or two, she’s more crafty and engaged than a standard victim.
  28. Agenda-driven films make for dreary viewing and Infidel is never dreary. Aided by excellent performances across the board by its international cast, "Infidel" works best when it's an old-fashioned thriller.
  29. Writer-director Sean Durkin ("Martha Marcy May Marlene") has delivered a nearly perfect film here — the cinematic equivalent of of those substantial, long-but-not-too-long short stories that says everything about its subject without actually saying everything.
  30. The viewer is not only a fly on the wall at this party, they are also on the dance floor being carried along as the music moves them.
  31. But the true strength of Residue is in its images. Gerima finds a poetic grace in his framing while forcing you to focus on unexpected things.
  32. While Antebellum is dazzling to the eyes, it also leaves an icky taste in your mouth in its leering, exploitative depiction of violent, slavery movie tropes.
  33. While I rather doubt that co-writer/director Yuval Adler pitched his new picture as “'Death and the Maiden' meets ‘Leave it to Beaver,’” that sure is what he ended up with, conceptually at least.
  34. The various praiseworthy elements of The Devil All the Time ultimately override the feeling that they aren’t quite cohering into a great movie overall.
  35. Textured in ways that family entertainment is rarely allowed to be and even more visually ambitious that the other Cartoon Saloon films, this is a special movie.
  36. From the beginning of Ammonite, writer/director Francis Lee trusts his lead performer to convey an incredible amount without dialogue. And that trust pays off in one of the best performances of Kate Winslet’s career.
  37. A movie that finds poetry in the story of a seemingly average woman. It is a gorgeous film that’s alternately dreamlike in the way it captures the beauty of this country and grounded in its story about the kind of person we don’t usually see in movies. I love everything about it.
  38. At some point, the movie forgets comedy and dwells on cruel calamity. It almost makes one wish García Bernal could reboot it, with a more polished text.
  39. Our Time Machine leaves you wanting a whole lot more, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
  40. Rich in impulsive sensuality and knowing humor, the film captivates even as it stumbles through too many subplots. It’s a tad convoluted but never dull.
  41. I Am Woman is a start in the right direction. However, based on this film you might think that the most interesting thing about Reddy is that she married her manager who then got addicted to cocaine. It's a frustratingly shallow approach to a singer who deserves better.
  42. All In: The Fight For Democracy is a valuable public service wrapped in an educational, informative and engaging documentary.
  43. For all the nostalgia that comes with seeing David pop in a VHS tape, the movie’s time period allows Stevenson to focus our attention on the horror emitting from just one screen.
  44. Geraldine Viswanathan has been steadily working her way through the coming-of-age subgenre, on her way to becoming a star. In the open-hearted romantic comedy The Broken Hearts Gallery, the charismatic whirlwind of an actress is vivacious and lovable.
  45. No one expects The Babysitter: Killer Queen to be anything other than your basic escapist entertainment, but it fails even at this modest goal. It's a defiantly stupid movie, with references so bizarrely dated that it verges on fascinating.
  46. The movie is so much more nuanced and bold than the first wave of outrage charged. With Cuties, Doucouré announces herself as a director with a keen visual style who’s unafraid to explore these cultural and social tensions.
  47. The film's solid grounding in friendship and comic teamwork carries the day. Unpregnant becomes more affecting as it goes along thanks to the sincere, committed, and mostly unaffected lead performances by Richardson and Ferreira.
  48. Expect to be moved to tears during this reflective film as clear-eyed as Souza’s photo books, reliving the memories of dignity that once piloted the country and often pondering, “How could we have gone from this to Trump?”
  49. David Byrne’s American Utopia is a joyous expression of art, empathy, and compassion.
  50. It’s a fun soulful documentary that’s rarely ever invasive, depicting the type of statesman we’re sorely missing today.
  51. The most important lesson from The Social Dilemma is that we should question everything we read online, especially if it is presented to us in a way that reflects a detailed understanding of our inclinations and preferences.
  52. Pepe was been turned into something he was never intended to be. His creator and steward didn't realize what was occurring until it was too late to halt or reverse it.
  53. Based on the Shakespeare play of the same name, Paul Ireland’s Measure for Measure is filled with drama, although perhaps not the kind you’d expect from the Bard. No, this is a modern-day adaptation—one grappling with xenophobia, drug addiction, and gun violence. There are no period costumes here, but there’s a stone-faced Hugo Weaving to make up for it.
  54. There are some very funny bits here, but unfortunately the concept takes too long getting off the ground, leaving the first three-quarters of the movie floating in limbo, waiting for it to all make sense.
  55. Loosely based on the graphic novel Une Nuit de Pleine lune, The Owners doesn’t feel new or groundbreaking by any measure. Still, this increasingly bizarre film is grisly and absurd in all the right, self-aware ways; qualities that the comparable (and far superior) “Don’t Breathe” also possessed as another recent horror film that turned the tables against its lowlife aggressors.
  56. I am always game for a movie that makes me reckon with my personal feelings and biases, and I’m glad this one exists because representation will always speak volumes. If nothing else, Critical Thinking reminds you what a chess player can look like.
  57. The trip to a remote farmhouse is just the narrative skeleton on which Kaufman hangs arguably his most challenging film to date, a piece that verges on Lynchian in its surreal register, moving back and forth between reality and a dreamlike commentary on connection, although there may be even less of the former than it first appears.
  58. It’s steeped in traditional cultural locales and details, yet feels bracingly modern with the help of dazzling special effects and innovative action sequences.
  59. Love, Guaranteed is the kind of movie you leave on the TV because you’re lying on the couch with a cold, and the remote control has fallen off the blanket onto the rug, and you don’t feel like going to the trouble to reach down, grab it and change the channel.
  60. Children of the Sea is consequently yet another animated fantasy based on hackneyed tropes, like sprite-like martyrs, the guiding hands of fate, and vague nostalgia for a pre-technological past.
  61. For however quaint and sporadically quirky it is, The Mole Agent is an earnest look at old age, and a community full of people just like Sergio.
  62. Although Robin's Wish is ultimately unwilling or unable to really grapple with the emotions of the people left behind after suicide, it is a compassionate film that will bring information about Williams' condition to a wide audience.
  63. The Garden Left Behind works best as a message movie, not for the community it’s set in but for everyone else.
  64. Rather than massage the ego of its progressive target audience, this film stares back at us with a piercingly critical gaze.
  65. A tedious and only occasionally amusing comedic riff on “The Purge” franchise.
  66. Worst of all, the pacing here is just off, leading to a film that drags even at 90 minutes. If the cold doesn’t kill you, the boredom will.
  67. Even for a movie about a theatrical sport, focused around an actor who wants to learn what it's like to wrestle for real, You Cannot Kill David Arquette rings far too much like a vanity project.
  68. A general lack of urgency are the main things holding Get Duked! back from being as good as it is promising.
  69. “Copperfield” is a grand, long novel, and in reducing it to 120 minute scale, Iannucci has hewn it to something almost anecdotal.
  70. Fatima is told simply but emotionally, prioritizing the sensorial reality of the children's world and the people inhabiting it. This devotion to the "real" makes the holy vision palpable and plausible.
  71. Much of Matthias & Maxime is pedestrian to the extreme, and there is a general lack of character development across the board, but the way Dolan chooses to frame things, the visual choices he makes, the way he revels unashamed in the big-ness of the emotions, makes it an entertaining ride.
  72. “A complete and utter love affair with your blackness.” That’s how one of the interviewees in this incredibly enjoyable documentary describes the tenor of Soul! a U.S. public television arts and chat show that ran from 1968 to 1973. Mr. Soul!, as the title indicates, is not just about the show, but about the visionary that created it and, a little reluctantly, hosted it, Ellis Haizlip.
  73. The bodies of the competitors are photographed to emphasize their strength, their power, and their unquestionable beauty; classical Greek-style statues modeled after the athletes frame the chapters of the film.
  74. It is a remarkably likable comedy about two good guys still trying to find their place in the world that’s anchored by genuinely sweet beliefs about the importance of friendship, honesty, and, most of all, music. Be excellent to each other, dudes. It still matters.
  75. A sharp, funny, and bizarrely responsible documentary about an amusement park in Vernon, New Jersey.
  76. If Tenet can be a hard movie to engage with emotionally or even comprehend narratively, that doesn't take away from its craftsmanship on a technical level. It’s an impressive film simply to experience, bombarding the viewer with bombastic sound design and gorgeous widescreen cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema.
  77. Lingua Franca isn’t a screed. Far from it. Sandoval pulls us in gently with long, single takes which are often static, immersing us in the quiet rhythms of the lived-in environment she’s created within the Russian-Jewish neighborhood of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.
  78. Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin, is one of the most deeply personal films of his long and brilliant career, I am not just indulging in a bit of critical hyperbole.
  79. It inadvertently puts Hawke in the position of having to carry a film that's more of a series of half-formed notions, some intriguing, others ill-advised, and a few verging perilously close to cute.
  80. A sweet but ineffective comedy that cashes in on drag culture’s new mainstream fame. While the movie brings up a handful of important topics, the way it handles issues like drug addiction and physical abuse ultimately feel superficial and hollow. Fortunately, a few sparkling performances salvage the show from becoming too maudlin.
  81. Koontz’s command over the material is so absent that it is at times hard to distinguish his film from a spoofy Western-themed fair where a group of friends play dress-up for amusement.
  82. The frantic adults and kids in Trish Sie’s The Sleepover are often screaming, but that doesn't mean they’re getting anywhere. You’d think that a story about a mom's cool secret and kids breaking curfew would be a lot more fun, especially with a charismatic cast like this, and yet The Sleepover is mostly about killing time, specifically that of your own.
  83. Though Willmott has the best intentions with The 24th, and the story of this infantry is ripe for the Black Lives Matter era, the narrative drama is a missed opportunity to honor these fallen heroes.
  84. Beyond the political implications, this is a terrifically dramatic and very emotional film; understandably, some of the interviewees struggle to maintain composure when recalling their past trials.
  85. I have to admit: the wrap up got me good, enough to make me admire Facinelli’s ambition and handling of mechanics.
  86. A deeply felt teenage melodrama.
  87. While it’s undeniably a sophomore slump in this franchise, Yeon’s skill with action keeps it from dipping too far that we should give up hope he can find the track again in another installment.
  88. Nick Naveda's strong, smart script is based on the award-winning novel by Julia Walton. Adam is a perceptive and sympathetic character and director Thor Freudenthal brings us inside his perception of the world with striking visuals.
  89. Like a novice juggler struggling to master some complicated tricks, The One and Only Ivan tries to encompass several different stories, themes, and ideas while appealing to adults and very young kids at the same time. It’s a tough feat to pull off — an uneasy mix of lofty notions about freedom and dog fart jokes — which the film only sporadically succeeds in achieving.
  90. The result is a sprawling urban drama with eruptions of violence.
  91. A depressing, cynical slice of nihilism, a movie that thinks it’s saying something about gratuitous violence and exploitation of real tragedy but is even more hypocritically hollow than the films it purports to criticize.
  92. Pistorius does solid work throughout in expressing various states of panic, but she’s mainly reacting to Crowe’s improbable omnipresence.
  93. Emperor is lousy in the same way that many other mediocre slave narratives are: it re-presents a dark period in American history without being inspired or insightful enough to be worth your curiosity or emotional investment.
  94. Coup 53 is worth seeing, but its general effect on this viewer was to seek out more books, rather than movies, on the subject. Which I suppose is something.
  95. Considering that the entire movie is about pushing boundaries — for art, profit or both — it’s disappointing that director Danny Wolf tells the story in such a tediously prosaic way — though this, too, might be a crafty strategic move, as the many copyright owners being shrugged at here might have gotten a lot angrier had “Skin” been an exciting, innovative work, as opposed to a merely informative one.
  96. In terms of both actual storytelling and subtext, there’s so much that the creators of Project Power could have done, but they chose the path of least resistance, turning a story of reclaimed control and buried human strength into a dull action movie that only gets by on the charisma of its stars and speediness of its filmmaking. It’s almost like they were afraid to unleash the power within their own project.
  97. Like the director’s 2017 profile of Dries Van Noten, Martin Margiela: In His Own Words explores how its titular subject is driven by ideas rather than ego or a desire for stardom.
  98. I suppose director Paula van der Oest was trying to go for some kind of European Gothic feel, but something this unsavory needs to move a lot faster than this. This contraption is slower than molasses in winter.
  99. An awkward and mostly unpleasant hybrid of social critique and horror-comedy, detailing how this psycho kid decides to take the gloves off and become internet famous.
  100. Nowadays it seems when European filmmakers want to make pictures in North America, it’s always some gritty backwoods blood-drenched drama or thriller. Same with young actors like the Fiennes fella wanting to play black-eyed scruffy snotty miscreants. Is this some wayward pursuit of a kind of authenticity? Because what it is, ultimately, no matter how much competence is brought to bear to such exercises, tiresome.

Top Trailers