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. Psycho II
    Psycho II doesn’t live up to the original, but doesn’t dishonor it either, even though its allegiances are clearly with Hitchcock’s film rather than Robert Bloch’s words. Psycho II isn’t perfect or brilliant. But it was good enough to successfully bring a beloved cinematic fixture back into action after an extended hibernation, and savvy and soulful enough to realize that what makes Norman Bates such an icon isn’t his monstrousness, but his trembling, eminently relatable humanity.
  2. Tootsie
    What ultimately makes Tootsie linger past the giggles is its immense affection toward everyone on the screen.
  3. Sophie's Choice
    Alan J. Pakula’s 1982 adaptation of William Styron’s 1979 novel Sophie’s Choice is one of those films whose great qualities put its lesser elements in sharp relief.
  4. The Slumber Party Massacre
    Though the sequels to The Slumber Party Massacre venture into outright sex comedy, Jones tries the more effective tack of playing the slasher stuff straight and inserting clever visual jokes when she has the opportunity.
  5. Class of 1984
    Class Of 1984 anticipated Lean On Me, The Substitute, and a spate of other high-school thrillers and docudramas that advocated a fight-fire-with-fire approach to teen violence, but it’s vastly more entertaining.
  6. Cat People
    While Cat People feels like an early Bruckheimer production, it’s also permeated with the themes that personify Schrader’s work as a screenwriter and filmmaker: obsession, sex, the strange permutations of destiny, and man’s bottomless capacity for cruelty and violence.
  7. Swamp Thing
    Swamp Thing has many dubious qualities, but it clearly isn’t a piece of product tested and polished to a blinding gleam, and the world is duller for not letting oddball efforts like this slip into theaters once in a while.
  8. Time Bandits
    It’s sloppy and slippery, but for a $5 million movie, it’s remarkable.
  9. Southern Comfort
    Beyond its genre roots and its deeper meanings, Southern Comfort is a well-honed study of characters and setting.
  10. Bloody Birthday
    Between the placid suburban setting, the dogged ordinariness of the murderers, and the lengths these homicidal tots go to, Bloody Birthday is too goofy to be scary. But it’s thick with campy dialogue and memorable scenes.
  11. Ms. 45
    Ferrara blows up the everyday threat of harassment and violence against women into a magnified force.
  12. Knightriders
    The brilliance of Knightriders—and it is a brilliant film, even though no one paid it much attention when it was released in 1981—is that Romero clearly identifies with King William, yet doesn’t lionize him.
  13. Thief
    Debut features are rarely this confident and accomplished, much less such a perfect blueprint of what to expect from a filmmaker down the line.
  14. The Postman Always Rings Twice
    The disconnect between Rafelson’s low-key style and Cain’s hard-boiled storytelling is jarring at times.
  15. Seems Like Old Times
    Seems Like Old Times is some of the best work that all of these people ever did on film.
  16. Tess
    The film, like its source, is filled with pessimistic fatalism, but it spares no pity for the instruments of fate, painting Alec as an irredeemable villain. What, if anything, this meant to Polanski remains unknowable.
  17. Popeye
    Even the flaws mesh with the overall fabric of the film in a way that impeccably choreographed musical numbers and fight scenes might not have. Altman reverses the emphasis of most mainstream family entertainments, which are about pace and snap, and instead favors a gentle, more inviting evocation of Sweethaven and its oddball inhabitants. Robert Evans wanted an answer to the Broadway hit Annie. Instead, he got a Robert Altman film.
  18. The Visitor
    The Visitor is like a puzzle jammed together by a 3-year-old, with the polyglot pieces forced into place whether they fit or not. In other words, it’s an essential curiosity.
  19. The Idolmaker
    The movie’s two main aims—to blow the lid off the music business and to exalt some of the unsung heroes of American pop culture—are somewhat contradictory, and haven’t been worked into a polished narrative.
  20. Motel Hell
    Director Kevin Connor, coming off a string of British horror films and Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations, never turns Motel Hell into an all-out comedy, but humor is always part of the mix.
  21. The Stunt Man
    It’s a carnivalesque lark whose brevity and gravity are both attributable to the remarkable, pitch-perfect performance of O’Toole.
  22. All That Jazz
    All That Jazz is one of the most self-indulgent movies ever made—but blessedly so.
  23. 10
    10 has the rare and wonderful quality of being simultaneously a perfect sociological document of the era that created it, and strangely timeless in its obsessions.
  24. More American Graffiti
    It’s ambitious, drug-infused, psychedelic, and fractured in strange and interesting ways.
  25. The Muppet Movie
    There’s a fair amount of Hollywood magic in the way director James Frawley and Henson’s Muppeteers stick Kermit and friends into scenarios in which he’s riding a bike, rowing a boat, and walking in cowboy boots. But the less showy effects always defined the Muppets.
  26. La Cage aux Folles
    Without challenging viewers’ notions of how gay men behave, the film shamed its homophobic characters while showing a loving family headed by longtime same-sex partners who are embraced by their community—boas, makeup, and all. Albin and Renato were onto something. It was the rest of the world’s job to catch up.
  27. Long Weekend
    There’s a boldness in Eggleston and De Roche’s choice to let almost the entire last half-hour of Long Weekend play out without dialogue, and in the clever ways they illustrate Peter and Marcia’s dangerous callousness.
  28. Picnic at Hanging Rock
    Weir builds atmosphere one detail and lingering shot at a time. The cluttered, shadowy interiors of the school contrast with the open spaces and welcoming light of Hanging Rock, but the film makes neither feel like a safe place. Every moment feels designed to be unsettling, but the film also creates a sense of inevitability, that whatever is happening can’t be avoided, and should perhaps be embraced.
  29. Watership Down
    It’s the work of a director deeply enamored of his source material, and determined to do right by it, even if it means frightening kids, baffling parents, and embracing whatever style works in the moment.
  30. Interiors
    Much of what’s great about Interiors comes from Allen writing a piercing drama, straight from the heart; much of what’s bad about Interiors come from his arid feints at duplicating a master.
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