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For 7,772 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 33% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 64% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 6.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 59
Highest review score: 100 Mulholland Dr.
Lowest review score: 0 Jojo Rabbit
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4,346 out of 7772
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7772
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7772
7772 movie reviews
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  1. Madam Phung's Last Journey
    With the invocation of national allegiance as an inherent contradiction, the documentary blooms its larger, allegorical inklings.
  2. Safe
    We know nothing of this woman’s inner-traumas, the repressed memories or hidden pains of her youth, yet Moore, in an extraordinary milestone performance, gives us a glimpse inside Carol’s frail and lonely soul.
  3. Kate Plays Christine
    It movingly posits acting as a metaphor for the search for connection, through visceral texture rather than platitude.
  4. Fire at Sea
    Fire at Sea initiates a narrative that probes the fundamental gap between wanting to help and actually being able to do so.
  5. Only Angels Have Wings
    The other reason why Hawks's film can't be approached as a pure sociological interrogation is that it's, quite visibly, a Hollywood production with certain inescapable commitments to entertainment convention. This isn't to downgrade the movie, though, as there's a reason why Hawks and other Old Hollywood filmmakers have become so revered.
  6. Elle
    This is a film that isn’t afraid to inhabit the maddening ambivalence of pleasure, recognizing that desire simply doesn’t recognize good manners.
  7. The Salesman
    Asghar Farhadi's film yields a tonal and emotional friction that's simultaneously tragic, transcendent, and comic.
  8. Paterson
    Paterson's sunny aesthetic and disposition marks a stylistic departure for writer-director Jim Jarmusch.
  9. Sid and Nancy
    Sid & Nancy, in its first half, offers an immersive plunge into the punk lifestyle, capturing with wit and verve its anti-authoritarian sneer and DIY ethos, before then slowly circling the drain during a dour second half given over to disillusion and dissolution.
  10. Dekalog (1988)
    The biblical root of the [Dekalog] may suggest didacticism on its face, but whatever morals are advanced are decidedly ambivalent.
  11. Phantasm
    What makes Phantasm special is the way it captures a boy's life in 1978. [Remastered]
  12. Nocturama
    Bertrand Bonello constructs a clear-eyed sense of how technology keeps getting closer and closer to replacing human consciousness.
  13. Carlito's Way
    Though the story in Carlito’s Way is treated in a fatalistic sense, the moment-to-moment, frame-to-frame experience is anything but rigid and stodgy from over-determination. It sings, dances, punches, slinks, embeds. It moves like the luxurious tracking shots that punctuate the film.
  14. L'Argent
    Robert Bresson's film hits with the effect not so much reflecting a cleansing of the soul, but rather a ransacking.
  15. The House That Jack Built
    The film becomes an even broader consideration of individual fascinations and follies, of ways of responding to art without the boundaries of morality and reason.
  16. Golden Exits
    Alex Ross Perry's characters are shrewd enough to recognize the irrational contours of their lives, which they diagnose and chew over in some of the most inventive, twisty, and richly ironic dialogue in modern American cinema.
  17. Phantom Thread
    Phantom Thread arrives at a place of qualified peace that cauterizes the emotional wounds of Paul Thomas Anderson's cinema.
  18. Paraguay Remembered
    Like most great essay films, Paraguay Remembered is driven by associations not just with art works with which it shares a kinship, but a stream-of-conscious relationship between word and image.
  19. Lancelot of the Lake
    Because Bresson’s cinematic personality is as deliberate and clean as it is, the viewer is tempted to chalk up the bizarre and moving experience of watching Lancelot du Lac to some latent spirituality or grace.
  20. 12 Angry Men
    What's most interesting about the intense deliberations that ensue, specifically when a piece of seemingly indisputable evidence is brought back into question, is how a fresh angle and perspective, usually born from Juror 8's critical thinking, can permanently alter the tone of the discussion.
  21. Casablanca
    The film has a peculiar magic to it, and because of its pace the richness of its sense of detail often goes unnoticed.
  22. Columbus
    The seeming miracle of Columbus is its mixture of formal precision with a philosophical grasp of human mystery.
  23. Miss Kiet's Children
    Childhood in Peter Lataster and Petra Lataster-Czisch's documentary is the terrain of contradiction and ambiguity.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Blow Out
    Blow Out is not known as one of Brian De Palma’s horror movies, but of all his films, it’s the one that feels most like a nightmare.
  25. Psycho
    Felt in the full impact of a theatrical screening (with the pleasure of seeing patrons reflexively kick or stiffen at the sight of Miles startled by her mirrored reflection), its power is not just that of a showman’s calibrated scare machine, but of a somber fugue on the trapped 20th-century creatures who inhabit its world, clawing but never budging an inch.
  26. Carrie
    Carrie, on the other hand, is frighteningly feminine, a slap in the face of those charging De Palma with misogyny as fierce as the one Betty Buckley whales across Nancy Allen’s face.
  27. Rosemary's Baby
    Rosemary’s Baby is one of horror cinema’s all-time slow burns, drawing viewers gradually into entertaining the possibility that the movie’s series of strange coincidences and accumulating sense of dread are only subjective representations of Rosemary’s unraveling mental state.
  28. Body Double
    Body Double, while not his finest, is the best candidate as De Palma’s signature film. It’s a wicked, feature-length double entendre from a Doublemint era. Take it at face value, take it for its prurience or take it for all it’s worth. Hell, try taking on all three at once.
  29. Night of the Living Dead
    A stark, eerie and unrelenting parable of dread. There’s a brute force in Night of the Living Dead that catches one in the throat.
  30. Dawn of the Dead
    Romero’s distinctly Pittsburghian sensibilities can’t be underestimated when explaining Dawn’s appeal; the Monroeville Mall perfectly evokes the feel of a hollow monument standing at the center of a community that couldn’t be bothered to define itself any more distinctively than could be represented by their choice between Florsheim or Kinney’s shoes. The mall, in essence, shoulders the burden of their identity.
  31. Day of the Dead
    Here, a pessimistic Romero dares to tackle the very essence of man’s inhumanity to man. And in the end, Day of the Dead is every bit as compelling and unsettling as its more lauded predecessors.
  32. Mommie Dearest
    Inscrutably powerful and brutally honest about diva worship as another form of male domination, Mommie Dearest is to camp what Medea was to Dr. Benjamin Spock.
  33. Dressed to Kill
    The pleasures of Dressed to Kill flat out do not translate to print, but for what it’s worth it is the most perfectly-directed film ever, provided you, like me, bust into orgasmic laughter when De Palma’s double-shuffling editing makes it seem like the only threat Nancy Allen and a wooden cop can see boarding the subway is a 250-pound bag lady.
  34. Suspiria
    Argento’s deliriously artificial horror film owes as much to Georges Méliès and German Expressionism (specifically The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) as it does to Jean Cocteau and Grimm fairy tales. =
  35. First Reformed
    After more than 20 features, Paul Schrader has been reborn with First Reformed, an unhurried, furious, deeply agonized look at faith and skepticism that’s as reverent as it is blasphemous.
  36. EX LIBRIS: The New York Public Library
    Frederick Wiseman is a portraitist of ideals, of the insidious inspirations and nightmares that enable and undermine them, and, implicitly, of the political waves that have yet to balance this duality of first-world life.
  37. Zama
    How strange and apt that the year’s most sensorially and ideologically dense film is also a comedy of microaggressions, built on the minor workplace humiliations of a pencil-pusher in the 1790s.
  38. Singin' in the Rain
    Many things reinforce the enduring greatness of Singin’ in the Rain, but its most charming element is the filmmakers’ love for and dedication to the basic tenants of cinema as pure enchantment, and an open indulgence of all the bells and whistles that have been allowed it to grow into something bigger and (arguably) better over the decades.
  39. Apocalypse Now Redux
    With its view of Vietnam as a colonial mud pit being raped by a post-rock generation, it’s as aimless as it is prescient. Coppola’s subjective use of technology (pathologically integrating operatic image and sound) evokes war as a psychedelic fugue state: timeless, horrifying, and affecting us all.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Distant Voices, Still Lives
    Davies transcends the facile trap of misery-porn by tapping into the basic notion that could make musicals so enlivening—music as direct expression, music as emotion felt. One of the most profoundly spiritual films in recent decades.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    House of Games
    His meticulous, largely self-taught directing style—dazzlingly showcased in House of Games, a master class in dramatically functional compositions and camera moves—should be mandatory viewing for any would-be filmmaker.
  42. Legend of the Mountain (1979)
    Every pan and snap zoom and dissolve is exact, every whorl of smoke and wind-thrown swath of leaves pulled from a dream and placed methodically before our eyes.
  43. Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood
    The film is Quentin Tarantino’s magnum opus—a sweeping statement on an entire generation of American popular culture and an almost expressionistic rendering of the counterculture forming at its margins, gradually growing in influence.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Rebel Without a Cause
    Where the attitudes of "East of Eden" are hopelessly dated and broad, the poetic longing for connection in Rebel Without a Cause will always feel timeless.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Bridge on the River Kwai
    Whereas Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago feel more pictorial than cinematic, The Bridge on the River Kwai carefully builds its psychological tension until it erupts in a blinding flash of sulfur and flame.
  46. If Beale Street Could Talk
    The film is at its most potent in the scenes where human frailty and the specter of injustice come more elliptically to the surface.
  47. The Grapes of Wrath
    Too many films these days trivialize poverty as an ironically, tastelessly over-produced pageant to earn kudos. The Grapes of Wrath is flawed, but it captures that shiver of panic that grips anyone for whom the money for the next meal is unknown. The film remains a vital document of the perversion and torment of the fantasy most commonly known as the American Dream.
  48. North by Northwest
    The picture is hugely pleased with itself, but it’s too funny and expertly calibrated to mind in the least. Both Hitchcock and Grant raise relaxed confidence to masterpiece level here.
  49. Personal Problems (1980)
    Bill Gunn and Ishmael Reed collapse conventional notions of reality, providing simultaneous glimpses into the minds of dozens of characters, lingering on scenes and informing them with confessional intensity.
  50. Picnic at Hanging Rock
    It’s the characters’ ceaseless need to fully understand, outsmart, and undermine nature’s sway that drives them into fervor and, often enough, leads them to shuffle off this mortal coil.
  51. Eraserhead
    Eraserhead is an extraordinarily raw film that’s not so much an announcement of its filmmaker’s obsessions, but a complete, intimate, and heartbreaking fulfillment of them.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    To Live and Die in L.A.
    To Live and Die in L.A. exhibits a remarkable degree of kineticism, evident in several memorable chase sequences, the film’s headlong momentum abetted by Wang Chung’s dynamic score.
  53. Deliverance
    Dickey taps into that stark mortal terror of abandoning control, where to become a wild man is somehow a form of connection.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Last Picture Show
    Delineates the quiet, desperate lives of the citizens of Anarene, Texas over the course of one year in the early 1950s.
  55. Bisbee '17
    The film's epic canvas invigorates Robert Greene, who fuses a procedural documentary, in the key of Frederick Wiseman’s films, with tableaux that wouldn’t be out of place in a horror western.
  56. Gavagai
    Rob Tregenza's film is rooted in the communion as well as the sensorial challenges of savoring art.
  57. Deep Red
    Deep Red is a riveting thriller whose secrets carefully unravel via a series of carefully calibrated compositions that become not unlike virtual gateways into Freudian pasts.
  58. The Philadelphia Story
    Add Hepburn’s persona, beautifully explored here in all its wonder, and Stewart’s likeability, and George Cukor’s sensible, subtle, and lovingly unrushed direction of a firecracker script…the result is a studio picture far deeper and richer than its whimsical surface style might lead you to believe.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Third Man
    Although he’s only on screen for a fraction of the film’s running time, Lime (Welles) stands out as one of the screen’s most chilling embodiments of the banality of evil, and a perfect stand-in for Third Man’s vision of moral breakdown in post-WWII Europe.
  60. Monrovia, Indiana
    As always with Frederick Wiseman, it’s the quotidian gestures that haunt one in Monrovia, Indiana.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Shadow of a Doubt
    Hitch’s habit of taking us to the edge of the abyss and then returning us with a wink, so often resulting in unconvincing happy endings, here seals one of his most pitiless visions of a monstrous cosmos admitted only to be denied.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Lifeboat
    Lifeboat is actually much more complicated than it first appears. Its emphasis on moral debates in dialogue can seem a little dry, but Hitchcock’s shifting sympathies guarantee our guilty involvement with the characters until he builds to a climax of intellectual and spiritual excitation.
  63. Shoah: Four Sisters
    By uniting these four interviews in particular, Claude Lanzmann emphasizes the impossibility of moral clarity in the unthinkable circumstances into which Germany’s invasion of Eastern Europe threw its Jewish population.
  64. Basket Case
    Horror is said to be driven by a fear of death when the genre is often more viscerally concerned with rejection and loneliness. Henenlotter feels these emotions in his bones.
  65. Near Dark
    A romance, a western, and a totem to lost youth in an era ravaged by infection and addiction, it’s a high-water mark in a decade filled with exemplary genre fare. Borrowing from, and surpassing, the exceptional chemistry of Aliens’s tightly knit cast, the melancholic Near Dark is gorgeous even in its savagery, and one of pulp cinema’s greatest achievements.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Tin Drum
    The Tin Drum, adapted from the eponymous novel by Günter Grass, doesn’t cast the story in a new light, though it does deepen a few of its subplots.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Possession
    Many directors have taken full advantage of Adjani’s exotic, ethereal French beauty; only Zulawski saw beyond the exquisite surface to something unsettling. Most disconcerting is the way Adjani can register almost demonic ill-intent while never losing some trace of the alluring.
  68. Straw Dogs
    Sitting through Peckinpah’s controversial classic is not unlike watching a lit fuse make its slow, inexorable way toward its combustible destination—the taut build-up is as shocking and vicious as its fiery conclusion is inevitable.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Circus
    It is Chaplin’s great elegy to the lost art of music-hall pantomime and, for that matter, the soon-to-be lost art of silent-film comedy.
  70. Blow-Up
    Blow-Up is moving and influential for the chasms it understands to exist between people, and for its perception of art as unable to bridge those divides.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Medium Cool
    Medium Cool stages, not so much with voguish nihilism, despite its demonstrably downbeat ending, as dispassionate vérité straightforwardness, the growing pains that strain a nation when the countercultural ideal of limitless possibility matures into something closer to political reality.
  72. Hyenas
    Djibril Diop Mambéty’s 1992 film resonates primarily for its lacerating comedic writing and pacing.
  73. Atlantics
    As Mati Diop mourns Senegal’s lost men, she honors their grief and affords them tremendous power all at once.
  74. The Apartment
    The tone of The Apartment differs from both those darkly moral movies and the filmmaker’s farces, finding a middle ground of somber tragedy that undercuts the awkward comedy of manners between the characters.
  75. All Quiet on the Western Front
    Anti-war statements of the cinema in the subsequent 80 years have occasionally surpassed Lewis Milestone’s technically and artistically groundbreaking film, but few can match it for relentless despair or elemental fury—both on and off the battlefield.
  76. The Fury
    Ultimately, The Fury is a film about pre-pubescence by a director whose work had finally reached the level of confidence reflecting a post-pubescent talent. The best of both worlds, baby, and barely legal.
  77. La Flor
    The arc of La Flor’s first three episodes, in particular, suggests someone continually working and reworking the film of their dreams, adjusting the tone, the approach, the narrative twists and the emotional intensity on the fly.
  78. Casualties of War
    It stands as maybe the only great film by the director that I feel an unconscious crisis of conscience that makes me want to view it without an auteurist context.
  79. Koyaanisqatsi
    Koyaanisqatsi is enraged with modern societal convention, but still expresses awe of the spontaneous, incidental poetry that can exist despite invisible oppression.
  80. Vitalina Varela
    At last, Pedro Costa appears to be more interested in how people get on with life than how they keep the company of ghosts.
  81. Don't Look Now
    It figures that the sex scene from Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now has become more legendary than the film itself. Forget that Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland were off-screen lovers at the time, the film’s infamous bedroom romp is every bit as devastating and organic as anything else in the film.
  82. Lord of the Flies
    Brook renders savagery with the despairing eye of a humanist, and with the irresolvable ambivalence of an artist.
  83. To the Ends of the Earth
    If Kurosawa is less interested in narrative dynamics, it’s because he’s focused on an acute understanding of societally and sociologically conditioned behavior.
  84. Memoria
    Again in a Apichatpong Weerasethakul film, we find spirits lurking behind the everyday world, but in Memoria, they might just be repressed memories emanating from a world that never actually forgets.
  85. Rebecca
    A key film in Alfred Hitchcock’s evolution as a master explorer of sexual neuroses.
  86. Come and See
    It suggests that a war’s horrors were the ultimate unassimilable experience of the shadowy depths of the human mind.
  87. The Shop Around the Corner
    The charm of the gimmick in Lubitsch’s take (directing a script by Samuel Raphaelson, who had collaborated with the German-born filmmaker on comedies and melodramas alike) is passed over quickly in favor of studying both its effects on those involved, as well as the dynamics of the workplace at large.
  88. McCabe & Mrs. Miller
    It could be the most authentic representation of wilderness life ever put on screen.
  89. Grey Gardens
    Grey Gardens remains one of the greatest and possibly only disaster movies that clearly benefits from not having seen the moments of reaping.
  90. Wild Strawberries
    Initially, Wild Strawberries appears to be an almost pointedly unsubtle coming-of-age story that’s been goosed with dime-store surrealism and male handwringing masked as intellectual engagement with humankind. But the bluntness is a misdirection that underlines the depth of Bergman’s empathy with his hero as well as his dedication to his real subject, which is the process of mentally freeing oneself from an insidiously limiting self-mythology.
  91. The 39 Steps
    Like Rear Window later on, this charming, masterfully made British spy adventure from 1935 is a sigh of doubt, perhaps even a cry of anguish, disguised as a slick pop bauble.
  92. The Bellboy
    The Bellboy clearly sets a standard of self-involvement and examination in Lewis’s work that is so successfully hermetic that it scarcely needs the approval of the audience.
  93. The Patsy
    The Patsy reflects a genuine affection for the artisans and jacks-of-all-trades that make careers like his possible.
  94. Point Blank
    Though Point Blank is rife with existential malaise, it is also one of the most ferociously sexy crime movies ever made.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Top Hat
    Every musical number works, and the mistaken-identity plot is pleasant enough, even if there’s too much emphatic dithering from the supporting players toward the end.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    F for Fake
    F for Fake is one of the more wistfully humorous of Welles’s wrestlings with reality. Roguishly comic yet profoundly bittersweet and edited in seizures with a deliberate, manic grace, the film represents the most flamboyant of its director’s magical acts, with Welles himself acting on screen as the narrator/conjuror, pulling the curtain back again and again, each time only to reveal another stage and another curtain in a series of dizzyingly self-reflexive meditations on fakery.
  97. Imitation of Life
    The film isn’t only revolutionary for its aesthetic rigorousness but its rare fascination with white America’s difficulty relating to people of color.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Marnie
    The film’s themes, along with its avalanche of formal signifiers, are all fused together in the magisterial hunting sequence.
  99. Chimes at Midnight
    Welles is at the height of his powers while reveling in the poetic force of Falstaff’s weakness.
  100. Battleship Potemkin
    A persistently political work salvaged by its unforgettable grasp of motion.
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