Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
For 2,749 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 65% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 32% lower than the average critic
Average Movie review score: 65
Highest review score: 100 The Secret Lives of Dentists
Lowest review score: 0 Get Rich or Die Tryin'
Score distribution:
2,749 movie reviews
  2. The film is a hugely compelling tribute to the French Resistance movement in World War II, staged with a genuine epic flair but in the icy, downbeat, film-noir style of the director's celebrated policiers.
  3. Above all, the film is a classic of "poetic realism," that distinct brand of pessimistic '30s French urban drama that gave lyrical, sometimes even surrealistic, interpretations to working-class romances and underworld characters, settings and dramas.
  4. Like the folk tales from centuries past, Pan's Labyrinth is a dark odyssey with nightmarish visions and cruel threats, but coming through the sacrifice and suffering is the childlike belief in magic and imagination that for Del Toro represents the hope and optimism of a happily ever after in this cruel world.
  6. A grueling and deeply affecting human drama.
  7. Doyle's handheld camerawork is intimate and curious and his hazy colors radiate off the screen.
  8. Long for an animated feature and too demanding for very young children, but it's also filled with delights.
  9. Has the power to transport us to a different place. The spark of special anime magic here is unmistakable and hard to resist.
  10. Free of the ghetto clichés that fill the movies made by people who have never lived in one, Killer of Sheep is a strongly individual portrait of black, working-class America.
  11. A charmer of a film and a delightful piece of storytelling.
  12. The French are very much the villains of the saga and, naturally, have always hated the movie (it was banned in Paris until 1971); and it remains controversial in other quarters as well because it seems to embrace, even celebrate, terrorism as a political tool.
  13. Wise, entertaining and often very funny.
  15. A masterpiece.
  16. In what was indisputably his finest moment as a filmmaker, Forman summoned the absolute best work of his craftsmen -- costumes, makeup, camerawork, production design -- and merged them with his own storytelling sense and his special way with actors to create what has to stand as cinema's most successful musical epic.
  17. The film is an extraordinarily complex, well-rounded and multileveled portrait of how Crumb got to be the way he is, as well as a tribute to how he was miraculously able to rise above his dysfunctional roots by putting his demons into his art. [16 Jun 1995]
    • Seattle Post-Intelligencer
  18. It's a magical film -- an exquisitely made and exceedingly wise family drama that communicates a touching sense of the universality of the human condition, and leaves us with the rich emotional satisfaction we just don't seem to get often at the movies anymore.
  19. The movie never falls into gushy moments of inspiration and Schnabel never tries to manipulate any particular response from the audience. We're left to make of it what we will.
  20. The young cast, all nonactors who developed their characters with Cantet and Bégaudeau, brings the weight of full lives to each of the students.
  21. It's cumulatively entertaining, and a fascinating and nostalgic time capsule of its era. Watch for the cameo by Brigitte Bardot.
  23. A suspenseful, elegant entertainment.
  25. As empowering and triumphant a film as you'll see this or any year.
  26. Some may find it slow. I found it utterly spellbinding.
  28. When it was released in the United States more than 30 years ago, its distributor hacked away 40 minutes of its precise structure. This rerelease restores every meticulous second of Melville's cinematic fantasy.
  29. So magnificent in so many ways that, for the first time, it seems to raise the docudrama to high art.
  30. What begins as an introspective odyssey examining the effects of war on the young Israeli soldiers turns into a provocative exposé on the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

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