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. Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger
    It’s a compelling story. Trouble is, it isn’t a terribly visual story, and this documentary doesn’t serve it nearly as well as a book or lengthy article would.
  2. Jackpot
    Jackpot feels more like Guy Ritchie than the Coen brothers. It revels in moronic violence, unleavened by playfulness or wit.
  3. Snowpiercer
    Evans is a revelation here, delivering a haunted performance that his previous work has only suggested he had in him. He gives the film a solid center, allowing others in the cast to explore the extreme.
  4. Third Person
    Third Person’s considerable strengths generally come from the actors.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Last Sentence
    Troell’s portrait, driven by a desire to excavate the truth, is a refreshing respite from artificial biopics.
  6. Think Like a Man Too
    Think Like A Man Too isn’t a movie, or even an arbitrary sequel to an arbitrary adaptation of a novelty book, so much as an extended victory lap from filmmakers and actors convinced that all they have to do is show up to equal or top the first film’s success. The sad thing is that they’re probably right.
  7. Jersey Boys
    Between the high-gloss, desaturated prestige-picture look of the film and the visibly fakey soundstage sets of the Jersey boys’ hometown, Jersey Boys feels plastic and artificial throughout. There’s no sense of authentic urgency or intensity to any of it.
  8. Venus in Fur
    Polanski’s direction of Venus In Fur is masterful—a pleasure in and of itself—but Seigner is the star attraction here, giving one of the best performances of her distinguished career.
  9. Norte, the End of History
    Norte is the rare film where the characters seem simpler the longer we spend time with them. They’re humans that evolve into types.
  10. Code Black
    Code Black doesn’t suggest ways to improve health care in America, but it at least documents one of the most noble and necessary professions with insight and humility.
  11. Coherence
    Shot over five nights in a single location, and almost entirely improvised, Coherence is no-budget filmmaking at its most delectably inventive.
  12. Miss Lovely
    Ahluwalia’s commitment to accurately capturing the era’s aesthetic almost compensates for his failure to mine a good story from a great setting.
  13. Le Chef
    Le Chef involves a showdown between traditional French cuisine and molecular gastronomy, but the film very much serves as the cinematic equivalent of fast food, offering generic, processed menu items that are practically pre-digested.
  14. The Amazing Catfish
    What keeps The Amazing Catfish from greatness despite the evident skill at every level of its production—the editing is sharp, and the actors are all excellent, especially the children—is the sense that Sainte-Luce is luxuriating in quirkiness for its own sake.
  15. Violette
    It’s a brutal argument to make: that the most relevant information to convey about the life of an influential writer is the fact that she struggled early and often. This approach may seem philosophically appropriate for a movie about existentialists, but dramatically, it makes the film a bit of a slog.
  16. Ivory Tower
    Ivory Tower asks a lot of provocative, important questions, but it’s decidedly short on answers, and even shorter on satisfying or convincing answers.
  17. The Signal
    The Signal would desperately like to be a film of ideas, but the few it presents are vapid and secondhand. Eubank’s overachieving work on the film suggests he’s destined for bigger and better things, though given the airy nothingness of the film’s mind games, that’s setting the bar awfully low.
  18. The Rover
    While Michôd never satisfactorily develops the central relationship, The Rover is still a showcase for two strong performances.
    • The Dissolve
      • Posted Jun 12, 2014
  19. How to Train Your Dragon 2
    The rote hero/villain face-offs are exciting, but the film is in no hurry to fast-forward to them. DeBlois seems to have a real passion for this world, and like Hiccup, he seems much more interested in soaring through the clouds than in fighting on the ground.
  20. Witching and Bitching
    Transitioning from Reservoir Dogs to From Dusk Till Dawn with a lunatic’s grace, Witching & Bitching resolves itself as a gloriously gory civil war between men and the grotesquely literal manifestations of how the worst of them see the fairer sex.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Manuscripts Don't Burn
    Rasoulof’s dissident return to filmmaking is ultimately little more than a sporadically searing, though more often unfocused and listless treatise on the pervasive censorship enforced by the autocratic Iranian government.
  22. I Am I
    The performances, particularly from Towne and Tighe, go a long way toward making the story’s improbabilities seem trivial.
  23. The Hornet's Nest
    The filmmakers don’t bother to dig into the psychology of their subjects, or even get to know them as anything more than symbols.
  24. Policeman
    Give the Israeli drama Policeman some credit: It keeps finding new ways to be unsatisfying.
  25. 22 Jump Street
    22 Jump Street squeezes every last drop of comic inspiration it can get from Tatum and Hill, as well as the very notion of a sequel to such a superfluous enterprise.
  26. Burning Bush
    Burning Bush is a rare accomplishment. It’s a political film with clear heroes and villains, and true to its HBO roots, it works as a fleet-of-foot juicy plot-delivery system.
  27. A Long Way Down
    The film wavers between the drippy and the glib from start to finish, sometimes within the course of a single scene.
  28. A Coffee In Berlin
    Sporadically amusing and sprinkled with a fine silt of truth that helps elevate Niko above the movie around him, A Coffee In Berlin is at its best when it rolls up the blueprints and lets its hero figure things out for himself.
  29. Heli
    The problem with Heli is that “hard to watch” is its sole characteristic.
  30. The Human Race
    On your mark, get set, go find something else to watch! Because The Human Race, a dreary, smeary, low-low-budget but even lower-inspiration horror flick from British writer-director Paul Hough, is likely to leave viewers rueing the craven, disappointing species into which they were, through no fault of their own, born.
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