Rolling Stone's Scores

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For 4,534 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 56% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 41% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0.6 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 65
Highest review score: 100 The Wolf of Wall Street
Lowest review score: 0 Joe Versus the Volcano
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2,923 out of 4534
  2. Mixed: 982 out of 4534
  3. Negative: 629 out of 4534
4534 movie reviews
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  1. The Personal History of David Copperfield
    This teeming film sometimes bursts at the seams, but it’s abound with an exuberant energy that honors Dickens without embalming him in the literary past. It’s irresistible.
  2. Lingua Franca
    The expression here is one of shared humanity regardless of background, gender identity, race or creed. The common language being used here is cinema.
  3. The Silencing
    Even in these pandemic times, when we all hunger for escapism, this long journey to a lame ending hardly fills the bill.
  4. Project Power
    Whatever this eye-popping head trip lacks in plausibility, it makes up for in flash and a sense of a world spinning off its axis.
  5. Unhinged
    Even marking on a B-movie curve, Unhinged is running on empty.
  6. The 24th
    The 24th has its share of unevenness. It also has the blessing, and the curse, of necessity. It’s a story that has to be retold.
  7. The One and Only Ivan
    The film is torn between a tough-minded plea for animal rights and edge-free, PG family entertainment. But its advocacy of kindness to man and animal is indisputable.
  8. Tesla
    A striking film that frustratingly never coheres but still holds you in thrall.
  9. Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula
    Though Yeon can still deliver memorable frights, like the car horn that literally does wake the dead, he can’t decide what kind of movie to make. So he does a genre mashup, tops it with a sappy ending, and hopes for the best. The result is decidedly uneven.
  10. Sputnik
    You’ve seen this before. Think of it as a potent dose of sci-fi/horror Methadone to keep the withdrawals at bay.
  11. Boys State
    Forget who wins or loses, Boys State is about that promise of change in the air. And it’s exhilarating.
  12. Creem: America's Only Rock 'n' Roll Magazine
    Mostly, it’s a testament to a storied legacy that may be gone, but deserves never to be forgotten.
  13. Made in Italy
    The mutual grief and abiding love felt by the Irish actor, 68, and his son, 25, cuts close to home and brings the film a touching honesty it otherwise sorely lacks.
  14. La Llorona
    La Llorona is the kind of tale of mystery and imagination that prefers to get under your skin rather than shock your central nervous system, which only makes its near-suffocating feeling of foreboding more potent.
  15. I Used to Go Here
    Rey deserves credit for comic observations that sting.
  16. Waiting for the Barbarians
    The desert outpost, mostly shot in Morocco by the gifted cinematographer Chris Menges (a two-time Oscar winner for his camera work on The Killing Fields and The Mission), becomes a powerful symbol of human decency trying to hold out under the brutal siege of alleged law and order. It’s thuddingly obvious who the real barbarians are.
  17. Howard
    Blunt honesty and rare introspection sets Howard apart from the usual cut-and-paste trips down memory lane.
  18. An American Pickle
    Still, a movie that even glancingly grapples with questions of ethnic and spiritual identity, past and present, is hardly hack work. It’ll do in a pickle.
  19. The Fight
    The Fight may be cursed with a generic name. But it’s a 100-percent accurate one.
  20. She Dies Tomorrow
    It feels both timeless in its ability to channel a universal fear of mortality and if it has arrived, regrettably, right on time.
  21. Summerland
    A sweet, soft-centered pastoral drama that’s never as tough-minded as you want it to be. Thankfully, in her feature debut as a filmmaker, playwright Jessica Swale shows a genuine flair with actors.
  22. The Go-Go's
    The doc’s goal: Don’t think of the Go-Go’s as a bit of Reagan-era nostalgia, the musical equivalent of a Rubik’s cube. Think of them as a first-tier, kick-ass rock group, period, full stop, the end. Mission accomplished.
  23. Amulet
    The movie’s ambitions exceed its grasp, and it’s hard not to wonder if the ideas here might not have been better served in a shorter, tighter format.
  24. Radioactive
    Never mind the curveballs that Radioactive throws audiences on its defiantly unconventional journey into a defiantly unconventional life. Maria Salomea Skłodowska Curie has been done proud.
  25. The Rental
    What elevates The Rental is the dynamite acting from the four leads.
  26. We Are Freestyle Love Supreme
    As an introduction to who these guys are, the bond they share and the legacy they contributed to, it’s a better-than-decent primer. You simply wish it didn’t feel like one long, stop-and-start mic check.
  27. The Painted Bird
    Extending its litany of horrors to nearly three hours, the film is certainly an endurance test. Yet its potent presentation, notably Vladimir Smutny’s striking monochromatic cinematography, gives the film the raw impact of a documentary.
  28. Greyhound
    The trouble does not emerge from the movie’s noble intentions, but from the stodgy manner in which they play out.
  29. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
    So call Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets a documentary, or a docufiction, or an ecstatic-truth improvisation — just don’t let it miss last call.
  30. Relic
    Relic marks an auspicious debut for Japanese-Australian director Natalie Erika James, who wants her slow-building thriller to seep into your bones rather than pound you with cheap scares.
  31. Palm Springs
    Palm Springs suggests that repetition can kill sex drives, marriages, and even the will to live. Yet it still leaves you laughing gratefully at the resilience of love.
  32. The Old Guard
    Theron has already showed her talent for bringing a deeper dimension to action as Furiosa in "Mad Max: Fury Road." Here, the actor reveals the toll that living forever is taking on Andy, who took a year off to heal emotional scars before her reluctant return to battle.
  33. John Lewis: Good Trouble
    The subject’s virtues, however, outweigh any of the film’s weak spots.
  34. The Outpost
    The Outpost gets it crucially right by bringing home the meaning of heroism as a collective action. The you-are-there ferocity of this sequence, brilliantly abetted by the prowling, handheld camerawork of Lorenzo Senatore, ranks with the best interpretations of combat on film. Your nerves will be shattered, guaranteed.
  35. The Truth
    It’s the essential conflict between mother and daughter that brings The Truth into Kore-eda territory, where life is always a delicate balance. He’s lucky to have Deneuve and Binoche tempering the verbal fireworks with a tenderness that that allows for pain, regret and the hard-won knowledge that they must both face the truth to move on.
  36. Hamilton
    It’s an indisputable classic.
  37. Welcome to Chechnya
    Welcome to Chechnya is a horror movie, but it’s also a collective profile in courage. You can’t say that “such people” are not here. They are, and they’re not just heroes, the movie suggests. They’re the last thing standing between survival and a purge.
  38. Force of Nature
    There is nothing distinctive about this toxic available-on-demand tripe except the absence of Mark Polish, though Michael didn’t spare his wife Kate Bosworth from acting duty in a thankless role. One thing’s for sure: This downpour of offensive ethnic stereotyping is a total washout.
  39. All I Can Say
    And when we arrive at Hoon keeping the camera rolling as he lays on a New Orleans bed, literally hours before he’ll be found unresponsive on the band’s tour bus, it doesn’t feel ghoulish. It just feels like we’ve walked long and hard in his shoes and reached the end way too soon.
  40. Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga
    It’s impossible for Ferrell and McAdams to top Stevens for campy pyrotechnics, so they’re left to hard-sell a Lars-Sigrit romance that’s too tepid to strike a jaja ding dong.
  41. The Ghost of Peter Sellers
    Movie junkies, rejoice. Director Peter Medak has made an instructive and nightmarishly funny documentary about how actor Peter Sellers drove him crazy and nearly trashed his career.
  42. Irresistible
    In a twist ending, Stewart leaves us wondering if gaming the system is preferable to changing it. Can a political satire that dances on the border between silly and profound really make us take off the blinders, even for a few hours?
  43. You Should Have Left
    Enter at your peril…of major eyeroll strain.
  44. Babyteeth
    In the hands of first-time feature director Shannon Murphy — who crushed it in both of the Season Three Killing Eve episodes she helmed — and screenwriter Rita Kalnejais, who adapted her own play, Babyteeth rips past the hackneyed tropes of illness drama to dig out what’s fresh in the familiar.
  45. 7500
    Your chances for enjoying this will depend on giving up a search for depth and just strapping in for a B-movie hell ride.
  46. Miss Juneteenth
    Fort Worth native Channing Godfrey Peoples, making a striking feature debut as director and screenwriter, knows this place in her bones. She’s crafted a keenly observant and emotionally resonant debut film that feels authentically lived in.
  47. Aviva
    There is a sense of healing — emotional, personal, psychic, definitely and defiantly sexual — that this filmmaker seems to be chasing. The ultimate goal, however, is really just casting away creative shackles and just letting it all hang out without professional worry. Yakin has assuredly done that.
  48. Exit Plan
    It’s slog, slog, slog, all the way.
  49. Artemis Fowl
    The best way to handle this relentlessly nice movie that deserved a touch of nasty, is to enjoy the few flashes of what have been before the sheer heaviness of the production stomps out all the fun.
  50. Da 5 Bloods
    This is a lobbed grenade. But it’s also personal filmmaking at its prodding, profound best. This is a Spike Lee joint and a Spike Lee history lesson. Prepare to be schooled.
  51. Tommaso
    If this is Ferrara hashing through his issues, may his troubled soul never be totally purged.
  52. The Last Days of American Crime
    The idea of putting these images out there at this very moment, and pimping it out as “entertainment” is, frankly, nauseating. It goes from being a crime against an art form to something a little more toxic. No. Nope. Nuh-uh. Netflix, what the hell were you thinking?
  53. The King of Staten Island
    The result is both emotional and a comic knockout.
  54. You Don't Nomi
    In the context this documentary provides for the cult classic, it makes you want to see "Showgirls" again regardless of whether you belong to that cult or not.
  55. Becky
    This ultra-violent, ultra-stupid smarm-bomb deserves to take a few lumps before shuffling off to the digital boneyard.
  56. Shirley
    All praise to Elisabeth Moss, who brilliantly plays Jackson as a volcano on the verge of eruption, and director Josephine Decker, whose experimental "Madeline’s Madeline" reveled in leaving folks in a twist.
  57. The Vast of Night
    What makes it one of the best (and most unclassifiable) movies of the year is the hypnotic way it keeps re-inventing itself from scene to scene.
  58. The High Note
    What does work is hearing Grace take the stage for a new song, “Love Myself” that shows Ross can hold the screen as if by divine right. Loving her is easy — it’s swallowing the movie’s sudsy, soap-operatics that’s hard.
  59. On the Record
    How sexism, toxic masculinity, complicity, and not-so-borderline criminal behavior is baked into the music business gets pecked at but never fully unpacked.
  60. The Painter and the Thief
    You can be successfully creative or you can end taking a much more crooked path. As The Painter and the Thief so ably demonstrates, your life is worthy or compassion and consideration regardless.
  61. Military Wives
    In these times of pandemic isolation it’s no crime to look for the film equivalent of comfort food. Military Wives, though deeply reliant on formula and wrapped in a blanket of bland, fits the bill.
  62. The Trip to Greece
    By the time these two comedians are served dessert, they’re bickering over Coogan’s level of fame regarding a fake eulogy and trading celebrity impersonations. Fourth verse, same as the first. Only the scenery has changed.
  63. Inheritance
    One adjective you don’t hear much anymore is “preposterous,” defined as “contrary to nature, reason or common sense.” Yet the word applies perfectly to Inheritance, a blithering botch job of a thriller that begs the question: “Come on, are you f**king kidding me?”
  64. The Lovebirds
    The Lovebirds knows how to send out a laugh with a sting in its tail. That’s what they call inspired lunacy.
  65. Scoob!
    The original cartoon’s credit sequence, redone with modern computerized shininess, is indeed a gas to witness. The rest is basically corporate synergy, canine shenanigans, and hot air. Zoinks, indeed.
  66. Proximity
    A tale of alien abduction, Proxmity serves as an in-and-out impressive calling card for debuting feature writer and director Eric Demeusy.
  67. Blood and Money
    From its generic title to an ending you can see coming from outer space, Blood and Money follows a path rutted with enough clichés to cover the three million acres of Maine forest land where the film is set.
  68. Driveways
    The director’s sophomore feature brims with so many tender mercies, so many quietly observed moments, that even its light touch leaves a mark.
  69. Capone
    Aside from Hardy’s full-on commitment, Capone seems too dramatically dull and laborious to support its ambition as a subversive biopic or a deeply personal take on public vilification.
  70. Spaceship Earth
    We may never see the likes of something like this again, even as climate change makes the impetus behind Biosphere 2 that much more urgent. But if Spaceship Earth proves nothing else, it left behind some one hell of a stranger-than fiction yarn.
  71. Saint Frances
    All credit to O’Sullivan, Thompson and a tone-perfect cast for creating a film that moves to the rhythms of life as its lived rather than fantasized. Saint Frances retains its rough edges to that last. And that’s some kind of miracle.
  72. Hope Gap
    Hope Gap is a deeply personal project for Nicholson, who is performing an autopsy on the marriage of his own parents, with him as the son trying to be faithful and fair to both combatants.
  73. Arkansas
    What does matter, besides the collection of deranged characters who can’t escape their limitations, is the southern-fried atmosphere so resonantly captured by DP Steven Meizler (Contagion).
  74. How to Build a Girl
    It’s funny — as is a lot of this eager-to-please, all-over-the-place movie — thanks to the dry snap of Moran’s dialogue and Feldstein’s exhilarating performance.
  75. Blue Story
    Blue Story is a 91-minute assault of sound and image that leaves no doubt about the vicious cycle of gang violence it presents. Prepare to be wowed.
  76. Bull
    The reason you need to see Bull, however, and we do not use that verb lightly, is Morgan. The calm, concentrated, understated manner in which he presents this man, who’d rather have a battered body than a bruised pride, is something to behold.
  77. Deerskin
    If this pitch-black comedy seems perilously close to falling apart under the weight of its creator’s ambitions and near-camp aesthetic (a common problem with even the best of Dupieux’s work), it also comes at a type of delusional alpha dudes in the most gleefully caustic of ways.
  78. The Half of It
    Despite its fluid sexuality, The Half of It turns out to be less of a love story than a funny, touching and vital look into the nature of friendship.
  79. Bad Education
    In the end, the audience is rewarded with a steadily riveting provocation that jabs at the culture of money that makes us all complicit.
  80. True History of the Kelly Gang
    Visually, however, True History speaks volumes. In tandem with MacKay, whose incendiary performance finds method in Ned’s growing madness, Kurzel and his crew of merry, malicious pranksters blow the dust off a calcified outlaw history to bring something elemental and transgressive to the screen.
  81. Extraction
    No judgments here if you just want to hang back and let nonstop gore, gunfire, and explosions numb you into submission. Take that, COVID-19.
  82. Selah and The Spades
    You can tell there’s a voice and vision behind Selah and the Spades, one that’s likely to come into its own after some seasoning. It might seem like faint praise to throw a “watch this space” sign on top of what is indeed a more-than-impressive first movie.
  83. Endings, Beginnings
    Though the movie stalls frequently before it finds its balance, Woodley makes us care.
  84. Sergio
    Sergio is not a film about a saint or a sinner, but an attempt that succeeds more often than not to create a portrait of a man in full. Yes, it also occasionally puts him on a pedestal — but in these dark days, advocating for hope and idealism feels exactly right.
  85. Tigertail
    It would be unfair to fully explain Tigertail‘s last act, though you may be able to figure out where this gentle, heartfelt tale is going to wind up. All you need to know, really, is that it ties everything you’ve seen together, the title takes on new meaning and the film exits on what is, for my money, one of the single greatest last shots in recent memory.
  86. Trolls World Tour
    Trolls World Tour hits the home market at exactly the right time, celebrating music as a joyful, community experience that excludes no one. Nothing wrong with a movie, even this kiddie piffle, that steps up and does that.
  87. Love Wedding Repeat
    For those who mistake Love Wedding Repeat for a comedy with actual laughs, consider yourselves warned.
  88. Sea Fever
    And suddenly, amid the claustrophobic compositions and shadowy hallways and tick-tick-tick of inevitable sickness, Sea Fever goes from being a monster movie to an eerily timed example of pandemic horror. Coming to a TV screen in a near you in the middle of a quarantine, this exercise in it-came-from-below suddenly takes on a whole other level of resonance.
  89. Coffee & Kareem
    Helms, a master jester on The Office, seems to have forgotten everything he’s ever learned about comic timing to judge by fiasco. Since Coffee and Kareem also credits Helms as a producer, he has only himself to blame.
  90. Resistance
    Jakubowicz achieves maximum impact by keeping our eyes on the man in the invisible box, one trying to teach children that the power of art can literally be a saving grace.
  91. Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution
    Using their voices for demonstrations and protests, they helped pass 1990’s revolutionary Americans With Disabilities Act. This documentary proves that they are still changing the world.
  92. Blow the Man Down
    Everything goes to hell in a decorative handbasket. What starts out as a simple plan will be destined to become, well, "A Simple Plan" redux.
  93. Big Time Adolescence
    It’s the kind of film that works well if you don’t feel like getting off your couch. Zeke would definitely approve.
  94. The Hunt
    The Hunt is neither a harbinger of Western civilization’s end nor quite the Swiftian satire its creators want it to be. It’s simply a better-than-decent B-movie, the kind that takes pride in its sick kills and throws a lot of punches that only occasionally connect.
  95. The Roads Not Taken
    There’s no doubting Potter’s laudable ambition to capture the swirling headspace of her brother, who died in 2013. But in trying to restore his dignity in fighting the dying of the light, she’s neglected to portray him in the human terms that would let us share his spirit.
  96. Never Rarely Sometimes Always
    The friendship at the heart of this film, as indelibly portrayed by two brilliant young actresses — Flanigan is a wonder to behold, while Ryder nails just the right notes of supportive and warmly sympathetic — is a thing of beauty. Hittman’s urgent film is an emotional wipeout. It’s hard to watch. It’s also impossible to forget.
  97. Bacurau
    There are some breathtakingly gorgeous images the movie throws at you — the townsfolk silently waving white handkerchiefs during a funeral — among the few giddily grotesque visuals that you can’t shake. (Pedro Sotero’s cinematography is as stunning as a painting and as psychotropic as the drugs the villagers take before the finale.)
  98. First Cow
    How it informs so much of what the movie is getting at is something you’ll find yourself mulling over for weeks after you’ve left the theater. The feeling that you’ve just witnessed a major work from a great American filmmaker, however, is instantaneous.
  99. The Burnt Orange Heresy
    What a bummer that a movie that paints itself as a scintillating, sexually-charged, art-world thriller ends in a swamp of failed intentions.
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