The Reveal's Scores

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For 101 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 29% higher than the average critic
  • 1% same as the average critic
  • 70% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.4 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 One Battle After Another
Lowest review score: 30 Michael
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 49 out of 101
  2. Mixed: 50 out of 101
  3. Negative: 2 out of 101
101 movie reviews
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  1. Project Hail Mary
    Pulling this off requires an actor who can balance comedic grace and gravitas with the skill of, well, Ryan Gosling, who’s ideally cast as a man who can ponder big, existential questions at the end of the universe and goof around with an excitable pal from another planet. (Get you a movie star who can do both.) At once zippy and emotionally wrenching, the film performs a similar balancing act as its leading man.
  2. Father Mother Sister Brother
    Death makes what’s left unsaid unknowable. But life can make the gap between parents and children feel unbridgeable, too. Father Mother Sister Brother plays like a long, plaintive sigh of acceptance that this is the way of the world, and perhaps a quiet wish that it might be otherwise.
  3. Nouvelle Vague
    That Nouvelle Vague looks like it could have been made alongside Breathless is its most immediately striking feature. From the aspect ratio to the film stock, it’s virtually indistinguishable from a contemporary production. The tone, however, is wry, knowing, and resolutely comic, even occasionally sentimental.
  4. Send Help
    McAdams is the real show here, playing Lisa as a mouse who becomes a lion as she adapts to an environment that allows her to be herself at last.
  5. A House of Dynamite
    The film’s structure comes with some built-in restrictions, limiting how well we can get to know House of Dynamite’s many characters, who range from low-ranking soldiers to the highest rungs of power. But it also challenges a first-rate cast to tease out their characters’ hidden depths.
  6. Billie Eilish - Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D)
    Though Hit Me Hard and Soft doesn’t “reinvent” the concert film, as the promotional language promises, Cameron’s mastery with 3D photography does make for an immersive experience, and there are some playful touches, too, like a handheld 3D camera that Eilish often holds in her right hand while the microphone rests in her left.
  7. Hoppers
    Chong seems to intend for an escalating series of comic events that get more giddily absurd as it approaches the climax, but the film loses its soul in the process. Hoppers longs for the quiet beatitude of nature, but it’s just another noisemaker.
  8. Zootopia 2
    It doesn’t feel as fresh as the winning original, but it also never plays like a desperate cash-in, which immediately makes it better than a lot of Disney’s recent output. But is it worth seeing? Sure. Why not?
  9. Zodiac Killer Project
    There’s another level to it as well: Even while laying bare the mechanics he would use to tell a story likely to trip viewers’ bullshit meters and calling out one genre cliche after another, Zodiac Killer Project almost works as a compelling true crime doc anyway, up to the way it repackages a crushing anticlimax as a thrilling conclusion.
  10. Bugonia
    At once uncomfortable and compelling, Bugonia builds toward a wild and misanthropic final act that plays like nothing less than a sincere rejection of humanity itself. By that point, Lanthimos has kind of made it feel like we have it coming.
  11. Die My Love
    Die My Love is ultimately a more insightful film about motherhood than marriage, but the sheer force of Ramsay and Lawrence’s collaboration turn Grace into an essential woman under the influence.
  12. Is This Thing On?
    For long stretches, Is This Thing On? works better on a scene-by-scene basis than as a cohesive film. Arnett and Dern believably summon the off-kilter chemistry of a couple going through a rough patch in their scenes together and the lost-at-sea fogginess of the newly separated in their scenes apart.
  13. The Sheep Detectives
    It’s a lively but also lovely kids film about what happens when you can’t just be a kid anymore.
  14. The Long Walk
    The Long Walk has an impressively sober understanding of what rebellion looks like in a nation that’s fully smothered by an oppressive regime.
  15. Exit 8
    After an opening stretch that retains the film’s first-person perspective, Kawamura skillfully uses long, fluid takes and compositions that create a sense of unease about what might be just out of frame. But Exit 8 only fully commits to horror in a few select scenes.
  16. Predator: Badlands
    Predator: Badlands may be formulaic and a little cutesy, but its relentless crowd-pleasing instincts wear down your defenses. You feel like the Dek to its Thia.
  17. Crime 101
    Layton is a confident storyteller and the various subplots in Winslow’s pulpy scenario converge elegantly, even if they’re a bit secondhand.
  18. Dead Man's Wire
    Dead Man’s Wire is a curious shrug of a movie, especially from a director like Gus Van Sant, who has picked up some ho-hum work-for-hire assignments in the past, such as Finding Forrester or Promised Land, but usually puts some more spin on the ball.
  19. A Private Life
    Played by Foster with flinty persistence, Lillian is part of the long, great tradition of memorably screwed-up sleuths and A Private Life makes it easy to wish we’d see her again in a sequel in which she pursues a case that’s worth her time and ours.
  20. Jay Kelly
    Though Baumbach lays the groundwork for a satire of Hollywood excess, he instead delivers a familiar but elegant depiction of successful men reflecting on choices they can’t undo, the damage created by those decisions, and the limited time they have left to make right what they still can.
  21. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die
    Good Luck feels raggedly put together at times, however precise Verbinski’s filmmaking might be within each scene, but as the story unfolds and the full scope of the threat emerges, a winning sincerity overtakes the film.
  22. Roofman
    Turning Manchester’s story into more of a drama than a comedy feels counterintuitive, and Roofman can feel a little slow and gloppy for missing the laughs. Yet Tatum and Dunst are deeply invested in their roles, and Cianfrance loads up on ace character actors.
  23. All of You
    Goldstein and Poots play off each other well, creating the sense of a years-deep connection that’s suddenly threatened by what’s changed between them, but also by what’s remained the same. They’re convincing as two people who don’t know what to do. Unfortunately, they’re stuck in a movie that also doesn’t really know what to do.
  24. The Housemaid
    The performances, particularly Seyfried’s, keep the film popping, along with some energetic rug-pulling from Feig, who treats the material like a deadly telenovela. But at an exhausting 131 minutes, it’s an indulgent feast on empty calories.
  25. The Smashing Machine
    Adhering to Kerr’s real-life story allows Safdie to skirt clichés, but it’s really only Johnson’s memorable characterization that suggests Kerr’s story had to be told.
  26. undertone
    It might be a well-worn tale of demons and satanic beasties at its core, but Undertone’s ingenious form gives it an unnerving intimacy that begins as a dreadful whisper then slowly turns up the volume until it threatens to drown out the rest of the world.
  27. The Lost Bus
    The film indulges in the Speed-like fantasy that a skilled and intrepid bus driver can blow through the inferno, but that’s Hollywood. The Lost Bus is convincing enough to expose its own nonsense.
  28. Kiss of the Spider Woman
    While Luna and Tonatiuh play characters transported by movies, the film in which they appear never quite summons the same power.
  29. H Is for Hawk
    Only a scene where Helen defends her hunting trips with Mabel as “an honest encounter with death” suggests the tougher, more provocative movie that might have been. This one is mostly a genteel therapy arc.
  30. Normal
    Without spoiling Normal’s central twist, suffice it to say that it leads to a lot of gunplay that allows Wheatley to off one character after another in violent, sometimes explosive fashion. It’s more wearying than shocking, but not fatally so thanks to a brisk pace, a willingness to shift gears with little warning, and, again, Odenkirk’s humane performance.
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