The Playlist's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
For 4,828 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 56% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 41% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.8 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 Days of Being Wild (re-release)
Lowest review score: 0 Oh, Ramona!
Score distribution:
4828 movie reviews
  1. Winner of the Caméra d’Or for the best first feature film last month at the Cannes Film Festival, writer-director Pham Thien An’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is a deeply felt three-hour spiritual odyssey about grief in its many forms.
  2. Whether a viewer might be a fan of Wham! or not is ultimately irrelevant, as Chris Smith has produced something as incendiary as any of Wham!’s hits.
  3. The Deepest Breath isn’t hiding the fact that there are daring hazards involved with athletes risking their lives for world records, but it isn't exactly forthcoming either, and the failure to effectively thread that needle is its biggest problem.
  4. Oppenheimer lands with nothing short of the mighty impact suggested by its legendary stature. But Nolan is less interested in reifying myths so much as he’s invested in rectifying them.
  5. Gerwig amplifies this feeling of liberation through understanding one’s confinement to Messianic lengths by the end of “Barbie.” Yet her and Baumbach’s screenplay foregrounds countless other intimate choices, too. It’s here where characters can opt to see the complexities of their identity as both complementary and independent. This is existentialism for consideration and consumption alike.
  6. While the film elegantly considers the relationship between Feña and their father in the third act, it still feels like something is missing from that aspect of the picture. Especially after Feña’s anxious build-up to his arrival.
  7. Crafted with stillness, empathy, and clever drollness, “Fremont” is so striking it will simply and calmly demand your attention. So seemingly introverted, humble, and unassuming, it’ll force you to lean in, listen and heed all the humorous words of wisdom in its many little moments of providence.
  8. Mamacruz is finely crafted, if not particularly challenging. This film clearly wants to wrestle with taboos, but that revolutionary spirit doesn’t go much further than the basic premise. With such important themes, this film deserves to be a bit more memorable than it ultimately is.
  9. While it may be time, and somewhat bittersweet, to say goodbye to the Lamberts and their parapsychological baggage, this is a well-conceived and impressively executed finale to the saga. It also proves that Wilson has what it takes both behind and in front of the camera. It’s a little scary how multitalented he is.
  10. Largely exhilarating across the board, ‘Dead Reckoning’ is easily the best installment thus far (at least for this writer who has desperately wanted that aforementioned pulse), and perhaps precisely because the movie is actually about something this time.
  11. It’s a striking and intimate piece of cinema, a heartrending tale of living with and battling neurological disorders, the love necessary to endure it, and the anguished dolor of remembrance.
  12. Foster tackles this material in the high-velocity fashion common to many stranger-than-fiction documentaries about people gleefully living outside the law. There is a lot for him to work with, one vivid and outlandish anecdote spilling into another.
  13. It’s not a bad movie by any means, but in its attempts to plant a seed audiences may remember in years to come, it’s a misfire.
  14. The flaccid script, co-written by Stupnitsky and John Phillips (“Dirty Grandpa”), addresses timely subjects like income inequality, helicopter parents, Gen-Z’s addiction to screens, and the compulsion to record everything, but never actually seems to have a point of view on any of these subjects. Instead, this shallow film uses these topical issues to propel its characters from one preposterous comedy set piece to the next.
  15. Hamm can be a stealth comedic force in any project, adding a slight escalation or modulation of the energy level to alter the stakes. He has a unique talent for somehow fusing the comic man and straight man personas into one. Yet Maggie Moore(s) gives him no chance to play either because Slattery cannot decide if his “Mad Men” co-star is the lead of a romantic drama or a heist flick.
  16. He led a fascinating, complicated, often contradictory life, and Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed does it justice.
  17. Shannon’s first feature might begin to sag under the weight of this stilted dialogue and stunted duration, but there is still a lot to admire in Eric Larue. Those qualities are not necessarily all concentrated in Judy Greer, either. Even if the film moves in circles, at least it’s circling something honest and true about spirituality and society alike.
  18. Users is too quiet to say anything provocative, too short to waste your time and too inconsequential to recommend to anyone searching for a fresh perspective on age-old material.
  19. It has taken so long for a feature-length The Flash to finally hit theaters, and he’s too late. Barry is barely the lead character of his own movie.
  20. Rise of the Beasts proves that Bayhem is still strong within the series. Worse, the parts that linger are not the visual signature of sweaty, sun-streaked bedlam. It’s the noisy, nonsensical insistence that submission to sensory overload should outrank any other storytelling consideration.
  21. The filmmakers should take pride in what they’ve achieved, how they’ve earned it, the story they’ve told, and the impeccable, thrilling animation craft that’s collaged, fragmented, and leaps off the screen into your eyeballs. For that alone, they should take a bow.
  22. Breillat’s film is devastating because it exposes at the heart of a seemingly normal family a black hole where empathy should be.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    As with her other works, La Chimera is a gift of a film, a philosophically stimulating piece of cinema that has the rare capacity to genuinely transform the way we look at the world.
  23. The people in Sang-soo’s latest are given the time to exist within the frame without having to respond to the sometimes constricting expectations of fiction, the director’s observational style a perfect match to the film’s titular purpose: to observe a not-so-regular day in the lives of regular people.
  24. “Lost in the Night” functions as a study of absence — the absence of others, of talent, of answers, of peace, of love. By amalgamating all those lacks, Escalante reaches an unsurprising yet chillingly effective conclusion.
  25. Unfortunately, Cailley’s conventional cinematic aesthetic is also often akin to a contemporary streaming movie (the first thirty minutes or seem like a television pilot) and while the visual effects are solid, there are few images that will stick with you hours after you’ve left the theater. What saves “The Animal Kingdom” is the genuine horror over this happening to anyone (Cailley gets that right, at least) and Kircher’s fantastic performance.
  26. It is refreshing and endearing to watch as Gondry lets his protagonist, a version of himself, go to the end of his thoughts, even if they apparently lead nowhere.
  27. Frustration is quickly diluted in service of reinforcing the central character’s enlightenment, a repeating arc that muddles the refined treatment of the film’s accompanying themes.
  28. While this doc lacks a few crucial interviews, it nonetheless charts the course of one of ’60s television’s most recognizable stars. For fans of Mary Tyler Moore, James Adolphus’ doc is a must-watch.
  29. Over the course of three and a half hours, Bang both refutes and affirms the criticisms over working conditions for these workers, many of whom are migrants, traveling hundreds of miles (or more) to make money for their families back home.

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