The Playlist's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
For 4,876 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 1.7 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:
4876 movie reviews
  1. It’s a ravishing ode, too, to gestures, touches, smiles, and pithy, pointless conversations; in Soul the tiny human interactions that we so often brush over come under the magnifying glass.
  2. The movie does not stint on Belushi’s destructive, self-sabotaging, and cruel habits.
  3. Bright spots are found in the supporting cast, though the less said about Faizon Love‘s portrayal of a black belt grocery clerk, the better. Walken is legitimately great as an old guy trying to be hip, a sort of exaggerated version of what Thurman is doing as the cool but protective mom. They just aren’t enough to pull The War With Grandpa and De Niro out of the gutter.
  4. Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World is a slick documentary that presents a compelling argument about the problems presented with institutionalized journalism, yet it somewhat fails to present the full picture. Nevertheless, it’s a documentary worth seeking out, suggesting the possibility of amateur investigators with the possibility to change the course of global events.
  5. Foregoing the knotty male-female relationships (and soju bottles) of recent work, Hong examines instead the textures of female relationships and what independence might look and feel like for women entering a new, more mature stage of life—and how a short trip out of one’s comfort zone might generate bounties of food for thought.
  6. The Truffle Hunters is a charming, life-affirming film, a look at an enduring folkway that brings fun and flavor to Italians every year.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    Along the way, audiences are treated to the standard Sandler shenanigans, but more inspired and less lazy than usual.
  7. Focusing primarily on the pandemic’s opening act in the first half of 2020, Totally Under Control feels fresh off the editing table. It is so timely, in fact, that an on-screen note at the end informs viewers that one day after it was completed, Trump tested positive for COVID-19. It reads like a punchline to the least funny joke ever told.
  8. Tense, scary, and full of heart, when Cummings has all the pieces moving together in the same direction the movie hums with an effortless rhythm that largely makes up for deficiencies baked into the third act.
  9. Boyega is superhuman here. Because no matter the decade, Logan isn’t an easy character to understand with regards to decision making. Yet Boyega’s sincerity holds us in this story, even when we can’t fully understand the why behind Logan.
  10. On The Rocks is almost like a Trojan Horse of intoxicating libations and magical evenings—Murray’s sporty ‘60s candy red Alfa Romeo convertible being the vehicle of these enjoyments— a capricious trick that belies the true nature of its thoughtful and feminine perspective on the difficulties of love, life, marriage, and complex fathers.
  11. The beat is infectious, these girls’ stories a resounding celebration.
  12. Ewing makes a creative decision in the final act of the picture which simply sucks all the air out of the room.
  13. One is caught between appreciating Jenkins’s soulful, empathetic performance, and just thinking “fuck that guy,” and wishing the unexpected swerve The Last Shift made was to turn to McGhie’s Jevon, to make Stan an incident in his life, rather than the other way around.
  14. This is Almodóvar, and so the magnificence is worn lightly, with irony and mischief and a cheeky little moral about how to be a modern woman trapped in the very unmodern role of spurned lover: be hysterical if you want, be philosophical if you can, but never underestimate the liberating power of a little light revenge.
  15. As an experiment in format, “America Murder” is intriguing. Instead of bringing people in to give fresh commentary, we have only the artifacts left behind by a seemingly ordinary family in a seemingly ordinary suburb. But as a documentary, it makes for an incomplete picture, like trying to piece together the story of an ancient disaster based only on archaeological fragments.
  16. Mangrove is rebellion. Mangrove is liberation. McQueen’s Mangrove, in its every personal minute, is love and devotion, not just to the now, or even the past, but for the progress of Black generations yet to come.
  17. To run the fool’s errand of divorcing the film from a political context and examine it merely qualitatively, Joe Mantello’s starry-eyed stab at the material is thrilling, an exciting cobbling together of consummate performers delivering acid dipped quips and making the Greenwich Village apartment the film is set in a both dramatically and cinematically elastic playground.
  18. While many will draw parallels between scenes involving civil unrest to the events of 2020, the philosophical differences between Hayden and Abbie — cultural versus electoral revolution, respectively — ring closely to the debates raging within progressive politics today, and actually prove more interesting.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 42 Critic Score
    Mainstream feels far more like a callow freshman effort, frantically tricked out with visual gimmicks and affected whimsy, none of which freshen up its palpably millennial stance on that ever-renewing question of whether or not the kids are all right.
  19. This is an excruciatingly stupid movie, and the nicest thing I can say about it is that, at 83 minutes, at least it’s over quickly.
  20. A brisk film that could do with twenty more minutes, Green’s “Good Joe Bell” has its heart in the right place, but the limited gaze the writers and director offer withholds this redemptive tale from being the uplifting critique of homophobia and bullying that it needs to be.
  21. A stirring testament to the necessity of empathy for surviving with any kind of dignity in a particularly undignified time.
  22. Not only is Wolfwalkers easily the best animated film of the year, but a stirring masterwork, as stunningly gorgeous as it’s philosophically profound.
  23. If not for the performance of Daddario, Lost Girls & Love Hotels could have been a disaster.
  24. Lover’s Rock is a personal love note, not only to an era and a culture, but to the days of youth and all-night parties.
  25. While there is always value in highlighting the importance of empathy and good temperament in a leader, there’s nothing inherently vital or fresh about what’s seen in The Way I See It.
  26. There are not “funny” moments or “dramatic” moments for their characters; there are simply “human” moments. Whether people react to them with laughter, pity or some combination of them both may say more about themselves than the film.
  27. At literally no point in this weirdly lumbering, sluggish movie’s narrative does its grotesque tastelessness ever appear to have occurred to anyone involved.
  28. Watts certainly makes that internal struggle compelling without resorting to overwrought physical transformation.

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