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 8.6 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. The World Made Straight
    For all the good intentions and native hands behind the camera, The World Made Straight never seems particularly credible or convincing as a fresh look at regional history.
  2. Special ID
    The story is a hopeless mess that from the outset seems to be missing key exposition that might help fill in some of its many gaps.
  3. RED 2
    The focus is much more on Sarah, Frank, and their repetitive, ugly dynamic than on the giddy elements that made the first film trashy fun.
  4. Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb
    Even for the third entry in a family franchise, the construction is lazy to the point of indifference.
  5. The Network
    A heartening but tempered portrait of the media’s ability to effect social change.
  6. 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.
  7. Convoy
    Convoy has one huge advantage over the song that inspired it: It’s one thing to hear about a mighty convoy, but it’s quite another to see it. There’s a certain tacky, truck-stop grandeur to witnessing so many huge vehicles traveling together like a pack of steel, gasoline-fueled animals.
  8. Frankie & Alice
    Frankie & Alice gives her the rare opportunity to play a film’s hero and its villain inside the same body, and she does a memorably dreadful job in both capacities. That trainwreck fascination is about the only redeeming facet of a prestige picture gone terribly, though not entertainingly, awry.
  9. Young Ones
    Young Ones looks promising in the early going, when it’s relying on Shannon’s customary intensity and building its harsh, arid world. (Principal photography took place in South Africa.) Shannon quickly disappears, though, and that’s when the dreary plot kicks in.
  10. Kabbalah Me
    Kabbalah Me is most satisfying as a personal artifact that traces Bram’s quest, bumps and all, and it stumbles when it attempts to lay on educational aspects.
  11. Poltergeist
    Though the memory of Hooper’s picture haunts every frame of nü-Poltergeist, Kenan’s will fade unseen into the great beyond first.
  12. Hercules
    Brett Ratner remains a director of no great distinction, but here, he proves himself an adept orchestrator of battle scenes, clearly presenting the forces on both sides, and using clear, coherent editing and dynamic compositions.
  13. Inch'Allah
    Inch’Allah tries hard, and serves up a few moments of compelling specificity, but for the most part, it has little to offer beyond good intentions. For a subject this daunting and knotty, that isn’t nearly enough.
  14. 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.
  15. Project Almanac
    If Project Almanac didn’t bungle it all with a shrug of an ending, it would be easier to recommend. Maybe someone with a time machine should go back and give the movie a do-over.
  16. Open Windows
    Vigalondo is shooting for something densely layered, an expression of the complexity and moral murkiness of the hacker sphere, but he doesn’t have the plot sorted out.
  17. Heaven Is for Real
    As much an inspirational email forward as a film, it’s helped by the work of a strong cast and some photography that makes Nebraska look like heaven on earth. That doesn’t make it persuasive, however.
  18. The Giver
    Mostly the problem is that every aspect of The Giver feels both painfully familiar and like an awkward, unsupportable stretch. For a film about the deep, hidden dangers of enforced sameness, that’s almost hilariously ironic.
  19. Fanny
    Visually, nothing’s changed, with Auteuil still framing his actors (and himself) in purely functional medium shots, occasionally punctuated by postcard-pretty views of Marseilles’ piers. Dramatically, however, Fanny is a bit meatier.
  20. A Teacher
    A Teacher feels a bit like watching some fool cross a busy freeway on foot over and over again for an hour and change. There’s little to do but await the inevitable splat.
  21. The Returned
    There’s a sluggishness to The Returned throughout, attributable to generally weak acting and a plot that requires a lot of exposition.
  22. Interior. Leather Bar.
    Interior. Leather Bar.’s intriguing curiosity provides ample food for thought, in part because it’s the rare film that devotes much of its running time to its own principals discussing what, if anything, the film ultimately means.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Drones
    Topical as it may be, Drones consistently manages to undermine the points it presumes to be making.
  24. Before I Disappear
    The fundamental predictability of Before I Disappear’s main plot is just one of the missteps that betray Christensen’s inexperience.
  25. At the Devil's Door
    At The Devil’s Door is a frustrating display of craft desperately searching for purpose.
  26. Treading Water
    Smith and Kravitz, both tremendously likable, simply don’t have enough to do together.
  27. In Secret
    Though it sounds like a contradiction, the film could be described as both dull and over the top.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Alien Abduction
    A rote, unimaginative entry in the found-footage subgenre of science-fiction/horror. It looks better than a YouTube video, but it’s rarely more engaging.
  29. 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.
  30. The Calling
    It could generously be referred to as a character study about a detective haunted by her past, and a case that forces her to confront that past in Biblical terms. It could less generously be referred to as a pseudo-spiritual thriller that tries to literalize scriptural mythos in the same bloody terms David Fincher’s Seven used to literalize the Seven Deadly Sins, only far less artfully.
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