Amy Biancolli

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For 214 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 50% higher than the average critic
  • 1% same as the average critic
  • 49% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 4.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Amy Biancolli's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 59
Highest review score: 100 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Lowest review score: 0 Vanishing on 7th Street
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 97 out of 214
  2. Negative: 39 out of 214
214 movie reviews
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    Moaadi is the standout here, subtly evoking filial worry and fatherly pride in one scene, popping off with rage in another: He's believably decent, believably flawed. A Separation touches on religious strictures and the role of women in Iran, but it does so with a light hand and not a twitch of condemnation.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    Nostalgia for the Light is a strange and stunning work of art: a poem disguised as a movie about astronomers in the Atacama desert of Chile.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    This is one helluva drama, with one helluva star turn by Jennifer Lawrence as Ree.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    At its simplest, "Fire" tells of Mikael's efforts to exonerate Lisbeth. At its most baroque, it explores a vast web of sex trafficking and deep-rooted conspiracy that goes back decades and touches on Lisbeth's inflammatory background.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    The King's Speech is a warm, wise film - the best period movie of the year and one of the year's best movies.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    The epic and impassioned close that the saga deserves, a sweeping Wagnerian finish that's taut with suspense and wet with emotion.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    When it's over, this documentary lingers as a testament to extraordinary human bravery. It stands as one of the most heartbreaking and suspenseful sagas of the year.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    The main source of astonishment is the precision exhibited everywhere, from the slyly vintage look of Rodrigo Prieto's cinematography to the gradual, cinching tension in Chris Terrio's careful screenplay.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    The film is its own beast, and it's a rare one.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    Screenwriters Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan have clarified a few things that needed clarifying, camouflaged a few things that needed camouflaging - and gently tugged some passive flashbacks into the active present. It's a cagey adaptation.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    The formality of Moonrise Kingdom - the orderly structure and dreamlike perfection of it all - is as poetic as any film I've seen this year.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 25 Amy Biancolli
    The film is confusing and awkwardly timed, and it drags.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    Handily beats back the evils of boredom.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    After watching Project Nim, a distressing portrait of a misguided 1970s language experiment, you'll be glad you're not a chimp in a cage. But you might want to revoke your membership in the human race, which comes across as a narcissistic, hedonistic, self-absorbed, neglectful, anthropomorphizing and arrogant bunch of hippie-dippy know-it-alls.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    It's a remarkable film: A gritty, gut-churning, crime thriller based on a true story. Its greatness lies in its unwavering fidelity to human nature and the unstoppable laws of the wild.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    This is a remarkable movie: lovely, slow-paced and almost silent, rich with pathos and deft comic gestures.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    The kid is a charmer, the message is heartfelt - love your kids while you can - and, OK, the ending might jerk a few tears, even from a crank like me. OK, it did.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    Israeli writer-director Joseph Cedar imbues his tale of academic maneuvering, misunderstanding and mystery with the zest of passion and the zing of intrigue, It's a vivacious film, having its little fun with suspense-flick conventions (including Amit Poznansky's bouncing score) that build to a climactic finish.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    It isn't a long journey. Kisses clocks at 72 minutes, which feels something less than feature length. It's long enough to include a few cliches and nagging questions, yet it's short enough to leave you wanting more.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    What's missing is any real menace - the signature Miyazaki freak factor that turns spirits into monsters and parents into pigs.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Amy Biancolli
    A little movie with a lot of hilarious swearing and an unexpectedly big heart.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    The film benefits most of all from Rees' careful screenplay, which dances that shifting line between fear and emergent hope. One of Alike's poems says it best: "Even breaking is opening. And I am broken. I am open."
    • 67 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    The Perks of Being a Wallflower hurts. It hurts because it depicts the loneliness, anxiety and all-out quivering mess of adolescence in a manner not often seen since John Hughes' heyday.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    Although this one indulges in unnecessary CGI enhancements, it's still a striking piece of character-driven horror, and it ranks among the more understated fright fests to hit the mainstream in recent memory.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    Crisp, acid-tongued and sharply acted, it's the sort of exercise in tangy Celtic cynicism that's become one of the Emerald Isle's most reliable exports.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    A first-class genre entry stacked with dandy performances and some crackerjack action to boot.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    Chandor's writing goes to some darkly interesting places, and there's fun to be found in individual performances.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    Ayoade is well known to British viewers for his role as a coddled nerd in the sitcom "The IT Crowd," so it's fair to expect laughs from his directorial debut feature. But much depends on your mind-set; U.S. audiences could have trouble with the movie's less-than-sunny worldview.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    It is, all in all, off its rocker. But it's gorgeous.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    The effect is an endearing and plainspoken clarity that stops just short of naturalism; the people in his movies don't seem real, exactly, but we end up caring about them as though they were.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    A film of great hilarity, humanity, idiosyncrasy and grade-A, eyebrow-singeing raunch.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    A triumph of simplicity, innocence and goofy jokes.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    Make no mistake, this is advocacy cinema; interviews with Defense Department and military officials notwithstanding, there's not much effort, on Dick's part or anyone else's, to consider any point of view besides the victims' and those who love or speak for them. That's what makes it difficult to watch. And that's what makes it necessary.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    It is pure, retro-cinematic joy.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    This is spellbinding, transporting, damn near indescribable and the latest indication that Christopher Nolan might be the slyest narrative tactician making movies today.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    Herzog, as ever, is obsessed most of all with human nature: Into the Abyss explores our deepest urges to love, and live, and kill.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 25 Amy Biancolli
    Features an exceedingly dapper Richard Gere in a series of nice suits and handsome close-ups that serve no purpose other than to remind us how exceedingly dapper Richard Gere looks in nice suits and handsome close-ups. The rest of the movie registers as a loss of: time, money, talent and logic.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    That the film happens to be in 3-D, with digitized settings and backgrounds, doesn't detract from the timeworn charm of watching blob-like characters lurch erratically through harebrained comic pratfalls.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    What a treat to find a movie so bright-eyed and true - without a trace of bathos - in its depiction of such a harrowing subject.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    If you widen your eyes and turn off your brain, it all adds up to cracking good fun.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    As for Butler's screenplay, it's less beguiling than preachy.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    The protagonists and their idle dreams of a fiery wasteland may well be nihilistic. But the movie - with its stunning cinematography and lingering aftertaste of old-school heartbreak - most assuredly is not.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    Gluck also directed "Fired Up!," another teen charade with lots of quick-witted verbal raunch. Easy A does a few things better.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    Shame has a lolling pace and stunning visual clarity. Structurally, it's close to perfect - its precision echoed in the Glenn Gould piano recordings of Bach keyboard works that Brandon listens to obsessively.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Amy Biancolli
    There aren't that many songs this time - just a handful, reprised ad infinitum. You get to sing most of them, so I'm sure you've noticed how bland they are.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Amy Biancolli
    Even his wife barely knew him, recalling for her son the peculiarities of raising a family amid Daddy's cloak and dagger - and if she's baffled by his behavior, what hope is there for anyone else?
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    This is brutish, visceral stuff - a type of raw-meat violence that's undeniably cinematic but seems, to this worried parent, ill-fitted for PG-13.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    It all adds up to a fine, funny exercise in disheveled self-deprecation: a self-portrait of a guy who can't control a major portion of his life. Which, when you get right down to it, could describe almost any of us.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Amy Biancolli
    An imperfect, fascinating film about an imperfect, fascinating man.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    This is a sobering piece of advocacy cinema.
    • San Francisco Chronicle
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Amy Biancolli
    The film's editing and pacing are appealingly straightforward, not to say blunt, and the humor runs from dry to bone-dry to parched.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Amy Biancolli
    The film isn't half as deep as intended, but parts of it are very funny - someone actually barfs onto a stack of art books - and the parts that aren't may as well be.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    Never Let Me Go is gorgeous. And depressing. It's exquisitely acted. And depressing. It's romantic, profound and superbly crafted, shot with the self-contained radiance of a snow globe. And it's depressing.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    Once it gets rolling, Unstoppable doesn't pause for breath.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    There are moments of genuine pathos, genuine humor, genuine surprise. As much as the film adheres to the strictures of the standard comic-book movie, it also pops with a knowing, loving, Whedon-world jokiness that keeps everything barreling along.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    If the characters weren't so well drawn, if the effects weren't so convincing, and if the upshot weren't so ghastly, the moral component wouldn't carry any weight. But Trank tells his tale with an emotional and visual crispness that gives the superhero genre its best crack at naturalism so far.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    There's nothing dark about Arthur: It's as bright and twinkling as a Christmas tree, decked with warmth and humor.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    What joy it is to watch the man (Douglas) slime himself on camera.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    Solid performances, and a sincere faith in the dignity of the average working stiff, save it from getting too preachy.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    This is better than any of the "Twilights." It features a functioning creative imagination and lots of honest-to-goodness acting by its star, Jennifer Lawrence.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    Baughman and O'Hara's documentary spews out so much information in just 111 minutes that the movie would have benefited from a longer run time and tighter focus.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    The best scenes are filmed inside the cruiser, dashboard shots that face inward instead of out, catching Gyllenhaal and Peña in moments so playful and true they make all other buddy cops look bogus by comparison.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    Such are the timeless joys of the books (and now the movie), this sparkling absurdity and knack for buckling swash under the worst of circumstances.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    Some films are harder to watch than others - not because they're bad, which makes for a different sort of painful viewing, but because they touch on areas of such profound moral discomfort that the mere act of watching makes us feel complicit. We feel like gutless witnesses to a crime. And that's what makes Compliance such a hard thing to stomach.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    Spitzer was undone by his zipper, but as Client 9 makes clear, he was also undone by his refusal - or inability - to make nice with some of the state's most powerful characters.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Amy Biancolli
    In creating his modern homage to the classic film, Im has twisted all the heated melodrama into a satiric - and in the end, surrealist - attack on the terrors of the polished upper class.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Amy Biancolli
    Given the number of real-world cults that have ended in major bloodshed, there's some irony - and no small narrative coquetry - in any drama on the subject that ducks out so pointedly at the finish.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Amy Biancolli
    If the movie packs a weaker punch than the original, it has less to do with the action sequences than the script (by Edmond Wong, son of Raymond, who wrote the first), a flimsy affair with subpar villains.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    For Kline's performance alone, The Extra Man is well worth seeing.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Amy Biancolli
    Many scenes in Outrage are crisply filmed and stylish enough, as serial assassinations go. But the film doesn't add up to much.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Amy Biancolli
    An artfully depraved piece of South Korean torture porn directed by Kim Ji-woon, is a skillful serial-killer thriller in keeping with the likes of "Saw."
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    What distinguishes Cap is his humble backstory, which involves neither hairy gods nor hot-dogging test pilots but a kid from Brooklyn who just wants to fight for freedom.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Amy Biancolli
    The combative, off-putting Dark Horse features many of writer-director Todd Solondz's usual preoccupations: misery, complexity, stunted emotions, misplaced dreams.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    Doesn't require anyone to love metal, or even like it. It only requires us to laugh at it - and other exemplars of bloated '80s pop, from Starship to Journey - and it does so with a campy and attitudinous spirit that's hard to resist.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Amy Biancolli
    The less-good stuff: the pirates, who are so blandly and predictably drawn that they sap all the personality out of Peter Dinklage (as an ugly ape skipper), which isn't easy. And the plot, which just barrels forward with very few surprises.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Amy Biancolli
    In its most touching moments, the film achieves a kind of sad and waltzing rhythm all its own. In its least, it's precious and plodding; the metaphoric link between grief and housework drags like a mop on a bathroom floor.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    What makes this whole thing work is, first of all, Wilee's ride, an elegant machine that lacks any gears or brakes.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    Any movie that features a character calling herself Fat Amy has a pretty firm grip on irony. It helps that Fat Amy is played by Rebel Wilson ("Bachelorette," "Bridesmaids"), my favorite eccentric Aussie practitioner of lip-curled comic timing.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Amy Biancolli
    Another innocuous film about another unusual girl.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    Inky-black humor does strike on occasion, and when it does, it's surprising. So is the movie's star, who sweats and shrieks with game intensity and a capacity for discomfort that would impress a Byzantine saint.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    What matters most in this sad, sobering movie is not what anyone says; it's what goes unsaid for most of the running time.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Amy Biancolli
    All in all, the 3-D animations wow without gimmickry, Banderas purrs without peer - and it's a cheerful movie.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Amy Biancolli
    A tonally confused, fitfully entertaining film about a pathologically two-faced man.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Amy Biancolli
    After sitting through Takers with my stomach rearranged by hyperactive camera spazzing, I hereby formally request all directors and cinematographers to just get a grip already and STOP. WIGGLING. THE CAMERA.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    It's still a spirited look - well written, beautifully acted, full of uplift - at lovably cheeky heroines on the march for a little respect.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Amy Biancolli
    Uneven, occasionally silly, true, but it's also an improvement over 2006's "X-Men: The Last Stand."
    • 65 Metascore
    • 100 Amy Biancolli
    A compact British drama that does more with only three people and a few modest settings than most movies do with computerized bloat and a cast of hundreds.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    As a runner, the robber is dogged; as a robber, the runner is efficient, explosive and fast.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 25 Amy Biancolli
    This one is a long, archetypal journey that screeches to a halt a few stops short of its destination.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    The film about violence and retribution is a tough piece of work, subtle in some ways, obvious in others, viscerally affecting throughout.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    A Better Life isn't an instant classic, but it tells its story with a simplicity and compassion that other urban dramas would be wise to emulate.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Amy Biancolli
    A typical vehicle for Ferrell's atypical humor.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    One can argue the movie's finer points, but in the end, there's no escaping its creeping pile-up of evidence that Mother Earth is critically dehydrated - and we need to do something, fast.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 25 Amy Biancolli
    A handsome but gabby take on the standard survivalist thriller that's more concerned with lofty metaphysics than which poor blockhead is about to bite it next.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Amy Biancolli
    An arty, ruminative and slow-paced film that's being marketed as a big ol' alien-invasion flick. Just don't expect an invasion flick.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    A smart, juicy entertainment, but it's the kind of straight-up legal drama that hinges entirely on crafty storytelling and across-the-board solid performances.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    Rio
    The humor's a little strange, and the action's a little frenetic, but all of it whooshes past in a swirl of tropical color and pseudo-South American bonhomie. Gorgeous scenery meets oddball characters and mild ethnic stereotyping.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Amy Biancolli
    Megamind, it turns out, is a villain to root for.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Amy Biancolli
    The film is a vehement drama and a fitfully amusing snark fest set to Nicola Piovani's jaunty circus music. It winds up only half-succeeding at both.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Amy Biancolli
    Ted
    For all of its transgressive plush-toy sex and screw-'em humor, the plot is pretty standard stuff.

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