The Dissolve's Scores

  • Movies
Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Le Week-End
    Screenwriter Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy And Rosie Get Laid) sometimes overdoes the emotional-seesaw routine... But director Roger Michell (who’s previously worked with Kureishi on The Mother, Venus, and the miniseries The Buddha Of Suburbia) maintains a slightly jagged rhythm that proves disarming, and he has two magnificent collaborators in Broadbent and Duncan.
  2. Big Men
    Thankfully, Big Men doesn’t have heroes or villains. It’s a deep dive into an endless pool of moral and political ambiguity in which very little is clear-cut, except that the desire for wealth and power.
  3. Perfect Sisters
    Perfect Sisters may stand accused of being rife with tone-deaf stylistic choices, but the more positive spin is to call it a marginal film elevated, however inadvertently, by the strange specificity of its scenes.
  4. Honey
    ts small achievement is in trying to understand the life-and-death choices of two people who aren’t as certain about what they’re doing as they initially appear.
  5. Nymphomaniac: Volume I
    So far, Nymphomaniac looks like a major work from a major director: a compendium of all von Trier’s career-long preoccupations with gender roles, authoritarianism, religion, obsessive behavior, and lust.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Farewell to Fools
    Though the story’s directness and simplicity are admirable, the ending’s moral ambiguity is frustrating.
  7. Bethlehem
    In a spy story, Bethlehem insists, there are no good guys or bad guys, and no victor—just day-in, day-out deceit and betrayal, the weary work of hate.
  8. Mr. Peabody & Sherman
    The film respects its cartoon roots, but never its audience.
  9. 300: Rise of an Empire
    The film feels epic in scope, visually at least, but the depth of its deep-focus composition is bitterly at odds with the flimsiness of its characterization and plotting.
  10. War of the Worlds: Goliath
    Director Joe Pearson (who also has a mysterious “created by” credit) and screenwriter David Abramowitz have ginned up a fan-fiction-y premise that suggests much more apocalyptic fun than it ultimately delivers.
  11. 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.
  12. Journey to the West
    Chow’s go-for-broke sensibility has been sorely missed, and a tale of demons is the ideal context for the gravity-defying, logic-impaired stunts he favors.
  13. The Grand Budapest Hotel
    There’s nothing lost in his continued refinement of style; if anything, it makes the pleasures of his work that much more acute.
  14. In Fear
    All the pieces are in place for a gripping indie horror flick, but this pointless, motivation-free film just goes around in circles.
  15. Particle Fever
    As much as any documentary since Errol Morris’ A Brief History Of Time, Particle Fever excels at expressing advanced scientific theory through graphics that are simple, attractive, and utterly approachable.
  16. The Face of Love
    Whether it’s worth seeing a film solely for one amazing performance is a personal judgment call; for those who take that particular leap once in a while, though, here’s a worthy candidate.
  17. Boys of Abu Ghraib
    Writer-director-star Luke Moran has his heart in the right place, and a clear compassion for soldiers thrust into impossible situations with no training, but he lacks the desire to steer his film in the honest direction this topic requires.
  18. U Want Me 2 Kill Him?
    The pretense of concern, combined with the cynical manipulation of the plot for cheap thrills, is both transparently hypocritical and broadly repulsive.
  19. Alan Partridge
    Film doesn’t suit Alan Partridge as well as other media, but Coogan and company have nevertheless delivered a consistently lively satirical comedy that would stand on its own merits, even if it wasn’t weighed down by expectations more than 20 years in the making.
  20. Repentance
    Repentance lurches unsteadily to a foregone conclusion that isn’t the riveting twist the filmmakers imagined: It’s the final, predictable disappointment in a film full of them.
  21. Stalingrad
    Bondarchuk mingles the you-are-there grittiness of close-quarters combat and constant assaults from above and below with war-movie clichés that haven’t been updated since before the real Battle Of Stalingrad. It’s history written with airbrush.
  22. The Bag Man
    The Bag Man is always teetering on the edge of amateurish absurdity, before being tugged back from the edge by its actors.
  23. Son of God
    Excerpted from The History Channel’s 10-part 2013 miniseries The Bible, then given extra footage, Son Of God boils the life of Jesus down to feature-length, but it plays less like a movie than a hastily edited attempt to explore a new revenue stream.
  24. Non-Stop
    Neeson’s innate dignity can often serve as a gravitational force for movies this ludicrous, but in a cabin filled with so much flying debris, he is but an ineffectual paperweight.
  25. The Lunchbox
    Going strictly by plot description, Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox sounds a little like an Indian knock-off of a Nicholas Sparks movie, but it plays out more like Brief Encounter.
  26. Odd Thomas
    Sommers’ typically hyperactive touch robs the material of most of its charm, placing way too much emphasis on Koontz’s goofy plot, and making Odd a bland paranormal cousin to Guy Ritchie’s ass-kicking Sherlock Holmes.
  27. Two Lives
    Despite some mawkish moments, this portrait of where espionage and domesticity collide is a unique take on typical John le Carré turf.
  28. Chlorine
    it’s hard to not see the puppet strings above everyone’s heads as Alaimo tugs them into big statements about suburban emptiness, economic flim-flammery, family dysfunction, and other hallmarks of America’s foundational rot.
  29. HairBrained
    Kent’s photography is so energetic, and the soundtrack is so sprightly—it features jagged tunes from beloved cult act The Feelies, as well as other, less familiar indie bands—that the thinness of the characterization slips by almost unnoticed.
  30. Almost Human
    In the end, there just isn’t much of a movie here; Almost Human clocks in at a mere 76 minutes, and that includes what may well be the slowest end-credits crawl in cinema history.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »