The Dissolve's Scores

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For 1,570 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 37% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 58% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 8.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 57
Highest review score: 100 Grey Gardens
Lowest review score: 0 Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 580 out of 1570
  2. Mixed: 771 out of 1570
  3. Negative: 219 out of 1570
1570 movie reviews
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  1. Mr. Majestyk
    Bronson playing another strong man who would prefer not to have to kick as many asses as circumstances demand. Bronson is Vince Majestyk, a Colorado melon farmer who stands up against a criminal syndicate and the local law when he hires migrant day laborers to bring in his crop, rather than using the local mob’s drunken goons.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Meet Me in Montenegro
    Holdridge and Saasen should get credit for making sure the obstacles to their happiness aren’t romance-movie contrivances, but rather the sorts of things that—to paraphrase another famous writer—happen to people while they’re busy making other plans.
  3. Jimmy's Hall
    If this is, as he claims, indeed his last film (or at least last big narrative feature), he’s retiring with the courage of his convictions intact. If only he was expressing them more vigorously.
  4. Jackie & Ryan
    There’s not much to Jackie & Ryan, which is what almost makes it something special.
  5. Terminator Genisys
    The setpieces, in addition to mostly rehashing better scenes from earlier films, feel thrown together to serve the effects, and the effects look far less astonishing than anything in Cameron’s first two films.
  6. Max
    There’s a touching story here about a boy getting over his grief and narcissism by nursing a dog through its own set of traumas, but Max is far too gung-ho about playing up the pup’s heroism and self-sacrifice to give it much time to develop.
  7. The Little Death
    Generally speaking, the more obscure the fetish, the worse the subplot gets, though they all wear out their one-joke welcome before Lawson inevitably turns up the sentiment and makes the film about love and kids and happy unions.
  8. The Princess of France
    The Princess Of France ambles from one low-key encounter to another, rarely engaging directly with the Bard, and never elevating its heart rate beyond the resting level.
  9. Felt
    The payoff may be predictable, but Banker and Everson are refreshingly unclear about how they—and viewers—feel about it. They just stay true to their protagonist’s feelings, see their premise through to the end, and leave it others to sort out. For a thesis-statement of a movie, that’s the riskiest possible conclusion.
  10. A Murder in the Park
    As a loaded summary of an important, disquieting chapter in Illinois legal history, A Murder In The Park gets the blood boiling, and suggests a justice system open to manipulation by bad actors.
  11. The Midnight Swim
    Burdge, Lafleur, and Palladino are effortlessly believable as sisters, but that only makes it seem like a shame that the script doesn’t take fuller advantage of their innate chemistry.
  12. Fresh Dressed
    It’s fun to watch the decades go by and the fashions change, but though Fresh Dressed takes its subject seriously, it ends up feeling superficial.
  13. Advantageous
    The ideas are admirably heady, and Phang, making just her second feature (after 2008’s little-seen Half-Life), demonstrates a sure hand with both her imaginative milieu and her cast.
  14. A Little Chaos
    There are weeds here, thorny stuff to slash through, but when A Little Chaos stays on course, there’s plenty of beautiful work to admire.
  15. 7 Minutes
    It’s handsomely shot and reasonably well-acted, and it’ll likely get Martin better gigs as a director, if not a screenwriter.
  16. Big Game
    Big Game tries a little of everything, but ultimately settles into being a scrappy, lower-budget spin on the Big Dopey Action Movie genre. And as with nearly every stab at the BDAM, the audience’s satisfaction will depend largely on just how dopey they expect it to be.
  17. Escobar: Paradise Lost
    Escobar: Paradise Lost takes such a limited view of this multi-faceted figure that it fails as portraiture, and the real center of the film is too much of a bland good guy to compensate.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Wanted 18
    It’s a story of utopia ruined by evil Israeli oppressors, and though that’s certainly accurate on some level, the film simply doesn’t go into enough detail, or question the interviewees’ rose-tinted nostalgia.
  19. Dope
    Happily, what Dope does well, it does extremely well—namely letting Malcolm, Diggy, and Jib hang out together and navigate the world on their own terms. All three leads are charming, and together, they convey a real sense of camaraderie, the kind that only develop between misfits who find each other.
  20. Infinitely Polar Bear
    As good as Ruffalo and Saldana are, the best parts of the film are the lovely, unpretentious performances by Imogene Wolodarsky (Forbes’ daughter) and Ashley Aufderheide as Cam and Maggie’s daughters.
  21. Manglehorn
    Pacino never goes too big, as he’s had the tendency to do for a while, but he also never goes deep. Manglehorn wanders and rambles, and the movie follows along dutifully, even though there isn’t much to see along the way.
  22. Rubble Kings
    The film’s brevity really does work against it, giving Nicholson cover to fly by the history of gang warfare without having to dwell on anything for too long.
  23. Balls Out
    The film’s greatest virtue is Disney’s ability to poke fun at sports-flick tropes while simultaneously embracing them. No cliché goes untackled; Disney and his first-stringers leave it all on the field.
  24. Soaked in Bleach
    There’s just not enough innovation or insight here to stretch a footnote to feature-length.
  25. The Stranger
    Once Amoedo lays all the cards out on the table, The Stranger feels like a piece of genre revisionism only in its deliberate, grinding pace, not in any refreshing turns of the plot.
  26. Live From New York!
    Given the wealth of possibilities, this doc’s superficial, exceedingly polite approach is a big disappointment.
  27. The 11th Hour
    It’s bracing to see Basinger take on something this dark, even if the darkness is empty.
  28. Chagall-Malevich
    Kitted out with colorful and creative scenes that aim to depict Chagall’s dreamy, expressionist work within the film’s framework, Chagall-Malevich shoots high, though it often comes crashing down to Earth.
  29. Jurassic World
    It’s fun, but it’s ultimately more of the same in brand-new packaging.
  30. Set Fire to the Stars
    Visually striking, meticulously rendered, a tiny bit pretentious, and emotionally inscrutable.
  31. The Yes Men Are Revolting
    Revolting plays with interesting ideas about how different generations of activists inspire and feed off of one another, but that theme plays out as blindly congratulatory.
  32. Dawn Patrol
    There’s a certain undeniable gravity to John’s tragic arc. But Dawn Patrol feels distended and awkwardly paced despite a lean, 87-minute runtime.
  33. Insidious: Chapter 3
    Its pleasures are familiar and its frightening bits less frightening than before, but Insidious: Chapter 3 still does right by a series that’s served as proof that, in horror, less can be more.
  34. Police Story: Lockdown
    Lockdown is mostly a humorless bore until the obligatory bloopers and outtakes in the end credits—and even those are drawing from a flat vein, since there’s so little play in the movie.
  35. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
    For the most part, Pigeon is very much in the same mold as its two predecessors, which is part of the problem.
  36. Hungry Hearts
    It’s a slow-motion horror movie founded on utter nonsense.
  37. Aloha
    Whatever Crowe’s ambitions, Aloha feels like a tropical transplant of past work, and an unfortunate demonstration of the law of diminishing returns.
  38. Gemma Bovery
    What almost rescues the film is Arterton’s performance.
  39. Barely Lethal
    While Barely Lethal is conscious of the clichés of the genre, it’s also the type of film that won’t let that get in the way of regurgitating them.
  40. San Andreas
    San Andreas doesn’t have much interest in the lives lost during its sequence of catastrophes, but it does dole out plenty of the large-scale spectacle that matters in disaster films of this type.
  41. The True Cost
    The True Cost’s aim is to make it impossible to ignore fashion’s impact on the world, and it takes an admirably thorough approach to its unwieldy subject. It’s not a particularly cinematic approach, however.
  42. Uncertain Terms
    Silver threatens to tease out some compelling emotional dimensions from Robbie and Nina, but stops just short of profundity. Uncertain Terms has no problem amounting to the sum total of its markedly basic component parts.
  43. Seeds of Time
    Fowler is not a terribly charismatic subject, but the matter-of-fact manner in which he delivers important information and the stunning depth of his knowledge compensates, as does the steady way in which McLeod reveals pertinent personal details about his life and work.
  44. (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies
    Ariely’s inquiries into how and why we stretch, reframe, or ignore entirely the truth are certainly eye-opening, but he and Melamede are better at demonstrating the ubiquity of subterfuge than prescribing remedies for it.
  45. Tomorrowland
    Tomorrowland comes across as a grinning rictus of a movie, a desperate door-to-door evangelist trying to force its foot into the door and push its salvation by any means possible.
  46. L for Leisure
    The majority of the cast are non-actors, and act it, judging by their stilted, wooden performances and robotic attempts at simple human interactions. This seems to be the point, since they’re playing non-characters, but such indifference in a film is only tolerable for so long.
  47. Dark Star: HR Giger's World
    Content to let his work speak for itself, Giger has little to add to the conversation, and while it’s intriguing to see him working in—or sometimes just ambling through—a house filled with his work and sources of inspiration, Sallin too often lets these scenes crowd out the story she’s trying to tell.
  48. Pitch Perfect 2
    While there are individual delights within Pitch Perfect 2’s 115 minutes, they don’t add up to a functional, coherent film. There’s no harmony, only loud grandstanding.
  49. Every Secret Thing
    Unfortunately, this procedural/character study unfolds in a manner that feels more generic than genuinely deep.
  50. Echoes of War
    Most of Echoes Of War amounts to Hints Of Aggression, with the film struggling to find enough incident to reach feature length.
  51. The Surface
    The film is a true two-hander—and Astin and Mulkey are mostly up for the task—but inept storytelling sinks the picture faster than anyone can bail it out.
  52. Good Kill
    Good Kill’s hero is both unsympathetic and uninteresting. That’s partly intentional. Niccol means to show how the drone program can reduce a formerly good man to mush. But making that point comes at the expense of making a nuanced, vibrant motion picture.
  53. The Film Critic
    The whole movie is encased in air quotes, and its sole purpose, apart from that winking, is to argue that even artsy-fartsy grumps secretly identify with Hollywood wish-fulfillment. Would Guerschuny the film critic have liked The Film Critic? If so, he’s a soft touch.
  54. Animals
    Searching for originality in an addiction narrative like Animals is a problem, because these stories of decline and degradation tend to sound the same. So the limited time frame is the film’s strongest asset, because it’s only paying attention to the final hours.
  55. I'll See You in My Dreams
    Haley and co-writer Marc Basch have their hearts in the right place.... But while they’re steering clear of so many pitfalls, they don’t give the impression that they’re steering in any specific direction. The film is a parade of barely connected events, presided over by a barely connected protagonist.
  56. 5 Flights Up
    Director Richard Loncraine (Wimbledon) and screenwriter Charlie Peters are able to carry this material to some unexpected places. It helps to have two of the most effortlessly charming actors in Hollywood as leads.
  57. Intrepido: A Lonely Hero
    Amelio’s latest, Intrepido: A Lonely Hero, reveals the same strengths and weaknesses as his work two decades ago—an appealing sincerity and social awareness, dogged by a mile-wide sentimental streak. In this case, when Intrepido tilts from whimsical comedy to metaphysical drama, it falls right off the cliff.
  58. Hot Pursuit
    One’s uptight. The other’s flamboyant. Put them together and… Well, not much happens, except the desperation Hot Pursuit brings to its attempts to wring laughs out of the contrast.
  59. Skin Trade
    Everyone’s there to get the job done, Dolph Lundgren style, meaning Skin Trade is a throwback to the one-man-army actioners of the ’80s, sprinkled with updated stats on human trafficking. If the film happens to raise awareness, then that’s more bonus than objective.
  60. Maggie
    Past the novelty of its conceit and casting, and the animating intelligence of its first-time director, Henry Hobson, Maggie is a bit of a drag.
  61. The D Train
    The D Train hangs some inspired ideas and winning comic moments on material that’s not strong enough to support them.
  62. 1001 Grams
    What saves 1001 Grams from being excruciatingly cute is that it does have a clean look and a pleasant tone, and it’s about a subject that’s both unusual and entertaining.
  63. The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
    100-Year-Old sometimes feels like a rote biopic of a famous figure who never was, congratulating viewers on whatever recognition has rolled over from grade-school history class, then moving on to what comes next.
  64. Saint Laurent
    Superficiality reigns here. Arguably, that should dominate a movie about a fashion designer. But fashion shows run 10-20 minutes, not two and a half hours.
  65. Ride
    The simplicity of the film’s East Coast/West Coast assumptions bear out in the rest of the script, which rides such tidy little symmetries all the way to shore, as mom learns to relax and her son grows up a bit. Meeting somewhere in the middle is what mediocrities do.
  66. Reality
    The accumulation of weird incidents and fake-outs doesn’t lead anywhere productive. That’s the problem with Dupieux’s vacant brand of surrealism: If you just keep pulling out the rug, there will never be anything to stand on.
  67. Hyena
    There’s nothing out of order here—the locales are appropriately dingy and atmospheric, the lead character is compellingly rotten, the plot tightens to a vise squeeze in the third act—but every beat that isn’t provided by The The strikes exactly where it’s expected.
  68. Marie's Story
    Anyone who’s seen The Miracle Worker in any form will find Marie’s Story very familiar, and even perhaps a bit rote.
  69. The Great Museum
    The film creates a kind of romantic view of the minutiae of running a museum, yet it’s barely concerned with the actual artwork housed within. Maybe this won’t matter to the audience, if they find the mere idea of a museum fascinating on its own.
  70. Adult Beginners
    It does not seem like too much of a stretch to call Kroll a comic genius, but this kind of low-key sincerity does not suit his particular gifts.
  71. 24 Days
    Despite strenuous efforts, 24 Days fails to make the case that Halimi would be alive now had the anti-Semitism of his abductors been properly recognized. And since that’s the film’s sole reason for existence, there’s not much else to say.
  72. Because I Was a Painter
    More attention paid to the narrative of some of these pieces, rather than simply their craft, could have been more enlightening.
  73. Misery Loves Comedy
    More than anything, Misery Loves Comedy does not need to exist. The niche it aims to fill has already been occupied by people willing to go much deeper than Pollak.
  74. Beyond the Reach
    The film leans heavily on well-trod “most dangerous game” territory, but the insistence on inscrutable characters and cheap twists never lets it feel actually dangerous. It just feels vacuous.
  75. Child 44
    Daniel Espinosa’s unwieldy, sometimes unintentionally funny film adaptation nails the gloomy period production design of a perpetually gray empire, but otherwise, it’s a wash, starting with a Europudding assemblage of performers of all nationalities besides Russian.
  76. Unfriended
    For everything here that’s new and exciting, there’s much that’s way too familiar. The kids are so one-dimensional and unpleasant, it’s hard to care once they start dying off.... Unfriended is often more innovative than scary, too, with some memorable but not particularly chilling and hilariously foreshadowed death scenes.
  77. Alex of Venice
    The film is ultimately shackled to an ultra-conventional structure and form—workaholic learns about the important things in life through the power of wanly scored montages—and a good central performance from Mary Elizabeth Winstead isn’t enough to save it.
  78. Closer to the Moon
    Caranfil, who’s made several previous features in Romanian, struggles throughout to find the right tone, mostly in vain. There’s no way to know whether he was hampered by the need to go international, but the film’s general lack of authenticity certainly doesn’t do it any favors.
  79. True Story
    Goold, a highly regarded British theater director making his debut feature, lacks the panache to realize this twisted relationship onscreen. Instead he’s made a stolid, well-acted, intelligent drama that respects the complications of Finkel and Longo’s storytelling agendas without bringing them to life.
  80. The Dead Lands
    It’s a mash-up of familiar genre elements—too familiar, frankly—given a welcome sense of scope and shading by the location.
  81. Tangerines
    Too blunt and didactic to convey the futility of war with the complexity the subject demands, Tangerines works primarily as a showcase for its trio of lead actors, who work hard to make their characters’ gradual yet quick thaw seem not just credible, but inevitable.
  82. The Sisterhood of Night
    As silly as it is, Sisterhood is smart as well, about the modern draw of victimization and attention, and how people (not just girls, and not just teenagers) who live life on a perpetually scrolling online stage can become starved for validation in any form.
  83. The Longest Ride
    Sparks has to rely on exterior plot machinations because his characters lack any inner life.
  84. Lost River
    Despite some genuinely arresting imagery—urban decay abstracted as poetic horror—the true narrative of Lost River is its bizarre, haphazard search for its own identity.
  85. Kill Me Three Times
    Kill Me Three Times is reasonably absorbing while it’s in progress, if only because it succeeds in inspiring curiosity about where it’s headed, but the finale is such a blood-soaked shrugfest that it retroactively makes everything that preceded it feel like a waste of time.
  86. Black Souls
    The ensemble cast is strong, and the filmmaking supple, but the narrative never quite catches fire.
  87. The Reconstruction of William Zero
    The less oblique and more direct the movie gets, the worse it is.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Girl Is in Trouble
    Though the film gets more banal as it reaches its climax—most viewers will have seen it all before—Onah creates refreshing space around these familiar stories and themes. He has a wonderful sense of style and movement, and he isn’t afraid of a story’s personal elements. He goes after them.
  89. Effie Gray
    Thompson makes Ruskin such a cardboard villain, playing on stereotypes of the cold, stuffy intellectual, that she turns Gray’s story into a tastefully dreary domestic-prison saga.
  90. That Guy Dick Miller
    Drenner’s overall approach here is too limiting for a character sketch—which may be why That Guy Dick Miller frequently veers off-topic.
  91. Cut Bank
    This Bizarro-universe Coen brothers mash-up has the decency to be sporadically fun, even when it isn’t especially original or steady.
  92. Woman in Gold
    Director Simon Curtis and first-time screenwriter Alexi Kaye Campbell constantly push too hard and too forcefully, laying on schmaltz where none is needed.
  93. Ned Rifle
    Ned Rifle feels closer to vintage Hartley than anything since 2001’s crazily underrated flop No Such Thing knocked him into semi-obscurity, but its dogged insularity stifles the modest pleasure of hearing the director’s distinct voice and watching his old favorites slip back into familiar roles.
  94. 5 to 7
    Accepted as fantasy, 5 To 7 has a bright, literate charm that’s hard to resist, thanks to the scattered witticisms in Levin’s script, a deftly managed tone, and fine performances across the cast.
  95. A Wolf at the Door
    The film is mostly one long stalling tactic, indulging in unreliable flashbacks and narrative wheel-spinning to expand the details of its tragic scenario to feature-length. When it finally gets to what happened, though, prepare to cringe.
  96. Home
    Home feels oddly small-scale for a globe-spanning science-fiction adventure story featuring aliens and flying cars.
  97. Marfa Girl
    Clark is either doing way too little or way too much here; he rarely hits the right tone.
  98. Apartment Troubles
    Apartment Troubles consistently finds opportunities to subvert expectations and tropes in an appealing fashion.
  99. The Riot Club
    The Riot Club was clearly made by people who understand that a film that revels in conspicuous consumption doesn’t magically become anti-greed by hastily grafting on a moral. But instead, they’ve made a polemic that suddenly, unconvincingly insists it’s a character study.
  100. Man from Reno
    The characters inhabiting this convoluted, tough-to-follow story feel too much like chess pieces, despite the refreshing multi-ethnic cast.
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