Critics » Ronnie Scheib » Rotten
Ronnie Scheib

Ronnie Scheib

Agrees with the Tomatometer 74% of the time.

Biography:
Variety film critic.
Publications:
Chicago Reader , Variety
Total Reviews:
797

Worst Reviewed Films

Showing 1 - 50 of 280
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Rating T-Meter Title | Year Add Date
40% Letters to Juliet (2010) " Jose Rivera and Tim Sullivan's script relentlessly piles on goopy conversation-stoppers like "Do you believe in destiny?" and "I didn't know that true love had an expiration date."" — Variety
Posted Apr 26, 2010
5% Multiple Sarcasms (2010) " Timothy Hutton's fine, loose-limbed perf as a man adrift lifts Multiple Sarcasms, frosh scribe-helmer Brooks Branch's male menopause apologia, out of cliche-ridden territory -- at least temporarily." — Variety
Posted Apr 15, 2010
26% After.Life (2010) " On a plot level, few of the psychodrama elements make much sense." — Variety
Posted Apr 8, 2010
30% Shutterbug (2010) " Spins experimental imagery and mystical manifestations into a gossamer-thin, ponderously off-the-wall plot." — Variety
Posted Mar 17, 2010
50% Blood Done Sign My Name (2010) " Comes off as a painfully old-fashioned, flatly directed exercise in passionless historical reenactment." — Variety
Posted Feb 18, 2010
40% For My Father (Sof Shavua B'Tel Aviv) (2010) " Likable but insubstantial." — Variety
Posted Jan 27, 2010
35% The Slammin' Salmon (2009) " It is the presence of Duncan as a Mike Tyson-esque, malaprop-spouting ex-champion that, at least momentarily, lifts the pic out of its mediocrity." — Variety
Posted Dec 10, 2009
39% The Little Traitor (2009) " Sentimental and a bit too cute in evoking a child's-eye view." — Variety
Posted Oct 14, 2009
33% Tickling Leo (2009) " A radiant perf by Annie Parisse and a virtuoso turn by Eli Wallach are insufficient to lift this male intergenerational angst-fest out of the ghetto." — Variety
Posted Sep 2, 2009
33% Gospel Hill (2008) " The potentially thought-provoking concept of historical reconciliation is ill served by a half-baked script that reduces every cliched plot point to jaw-dropping levels of preachiness." — Variety
Posted Aug 24, 2009
38% Paraiso Travel (2007) " Unfortunately, aside from the glimpses of the couple's nightmarish crossing, Brand never commands an aesthetic that galvanizes the pic's rather conventional moral oppositions." — Variety
Posted Jul 22, 2009
0% Homecoming (2009) " Competent but unimaginative." — Variety
Posted Jul 15, 2009
69% American Casino (2009) " The pic never completely escapes a smallscreen feel, however cogent the material." — Variety
Posted May 1, 2009
28% Chatham (The Golden Boys) (2009) " It seems particularly perverse to take actors who helped develop the '60's thesping style of hang-loose, semi-improvisational immediacy and stick them in a creaky period piece glazed with arch gentility and ersatz quaintness." — Variety
Posted Apr 24, 2009
50% Whatever Works (2009) " Though stuffed with witty one-liners and wondrously convoluted tirades, this far-fetched, deliberately artificial game of musical chairs...feels forced, often losing itself in excess verbiage." — Variety
Posted Apr 24, 2009
—— Stay the Same Never Change (2009) " The provocative pic, often disturbingly absorbing from moment to moment, registers as considerably less than the sum of its parts." — Variety
Posted Mar 26, 2009
40% We Pedal Uphill (2008) " With a few notable exceptions, pic relies on O. Henry-esque twists, simplistic surprise endings and "aha!" epiphanies to gets its points across." — Variety
Posted Mar 20, 2009
90% Carmen and Geoffrey (2009) " Proves too slight to encompass the innovative artistry of its celebrated subjects...could still wow cognoscenti and philistines alike." — Variety
Posted Mar 13, 2009
18% Reunion (2009) " A drearily pretentious, ultra-stagy exercise in middle-age self-loathing." — Variety
Posted Mar 6, 2009
59% Phoebe in Wonderland (2009) " Barnz arbitrarily posits a nonsensical series of school "rules" to embody conformity, while imagination is repped by Tourette syndrome." — Variety
Posted Feb 6, 2009
—— The Sublet (2008) " Zero-budgeter proves uneven, its unseasoned cast unable to fully flesh out the perfunctory setups." — Variety
Posted Jan 16, 2009
50% We are Wizards (2008) " Among movies about fans' obsessive fixations on fictional universes, the film registers neither as bemusedly distanced as Trekkies nor as dramatically engaged as King of Kong." — Variety
Posted Nov 12, 2008
64% The First Basket (2008) " When the history of the sport is allowed to unfold through the reminiscences of geriatric Yiddish pros, pic approaches the richness of its impressive archival trove. Too often, however, director David Vyorst's chauvinistic agenda intrudes." — Variety
Posted Oct 29, 2008
20% Ball Don't Lie (2008) " Handcuffed to a story with no internal development and without the stylistic rigor to transform its jerky stop-and-start rhythm into an aesthetic, pic jumps from one disconnected scene to another." — Variety
Posted Oct 18, 2008
63% Who Does She Think She Is? (2009) " Sometimes strident and combative, and sometimes celebratory and encouraging, uneven pic often feels like a cobbled-together recap of '70s feminist issues, still patently unresolved." — Variety
Posted Oct 17, 2008
43% Choose Connor (2008) " Whether or not one buys into pic's vision of government as irreversibly corrupt, the leap from the general to the specific registers as unconvincing at best." — Variety
Posted Oct 16, 2008
10% Proud American (2008) " A corporate-sponsored, feature-length infomercial on behalf of the core entrepreneurial values of the U.S. of A., Proud American combines unabashed hokiness with relentless oversimplification." — Variety
Posted Sep 17, 2008
45% Take (2008) " The talky redemption element, however, ultimately feels artificially tacked on." — Variety
Posted Aug 13, 2008
—— Red 71 (2008) " Lays out the pieces of a highly stylized noir puzzle with maddening deliberation and total lack of humor." — Variety
Posted Jul 24, 2008
29% Harold (2008) " A terminally lame puberty comedy about a prematurely bald 13-year-old." — Variety
Posted Jul 22, 2008
72% A Man Named Pearl (2008) " Pic looks very much like a protracted man-of-the-week spot on a local newscast." — Variety
Posted Jul 15, 2008
80% Chevolution (2008) " The pic comes off as too scattershot to do anything but skim the questions it raises about the nature of the image as spiritual beacon and corporate logo." — Variety
Posted May 28, 2008
72% Eden (2008) " Pic loses its delicate edge when it builds to a prescribed dramatic flashpoint within an overly compressed timeframe -- a structural holdover from the pic's stage play roots that ultimately tips it into meller territory." — Variety
Posted May 22, 2008
11% Lake City (2008) " Moore and Hill's script plunges [Sissy] Spacek in a mawkish stew of banality and improbability composed of bits and pieces of earlier roles." — Variety
Posted May 21, 2008
—— The 27 Club (2008) " Though consistently maintaining a wryly observed interaction between the motley, convertible-bound threesome, the pic fails to get much mileage out of encounters along the way." — Variety
Posted May 20, 2008
26% Anamorph (2008) " Beyond its cool, reflective surfaces and infinite plays with perspective lies nothing -- character, relationships, motives all seemingly irrelevant." — Variety
Posted Apr 17, 2008
50% Stalags (2007) " Unfortunately, Ari Libsker's hour-plus docu on this potentially mind-boggling topic meanders disconnectedly, as various experts, collectors and storytellers kick around anecdotes and theories that tend to cancel each other out." — Variety
Posted Apr 8, 2008
8% Backseat (2005) " Culturally falling somewhere between Sideways and Dumb and Dumber, this low-rent road movie similarly rides on principles of audience identification, largely minus competent helming, thesping or scripting." — Variety
Posted Mar 31, 2008
—— Japan Japan () " DV-shot exercise in gay teen angst." — Variety
Posted Mar 27, 2008
20% Hacia la oscuridad (Towards Darkness) (2007) " A convoluted bilingual thriller about a kidnapping in Colombia, Towards Darkness may be too clever for its own good." — Variety
Posted Mar 12, 2008
15% How to Rob a Bank (2007) " Andrew Jenkins' amateurish, half-hearted romantic comedy-cum-heist film twists itself into unconvincing knots to pull off a guilt-free bank robbery." — Variety
Posted Feb 12, 2008
55% Orthodox Stance (2008) " Hutt's straightforward presentation tends to flatten out pic's anomalies instead of highlighting them." — Variety
Posted Jan 25, 2008
12% The Air I Breathe (2008) " Morosely pretentious." — Variety
Posted Jan 22, 2008
6% Strength and Honor (2007) " The script delivers a series of low blows to the intelligence from which auds will never recover." — Variety
Posted Dec 11, 2007
56% Maurice Richard (The Rocket) (2007) " Every bit as single-minded as its French-Canadian protagonist, pic drowns a potentially interesting story in careful literalism and elaborate period detail." — Variety
Posted Dec 5, 2007
90% Yiddish Theater: A Love Story (2006) " Its extremely narrow focus on the death throes of an art form, rather than the art itself, limits its appeal." — Variety
Posted Nov 21, 2007
65% Trilogia: To livadi pou dakryzei (The Weeping Meadow) (2004) " We get a distractingly vapid couple who tend to drain the emotional resonance of these extraordinary, ever-shifting tableaux." — Chicago Reader
Posted Nov 15, 2007
47% Vivere (2007) " German helmer Angelina Maccarone's latest film, Vivere, piles heavy emotional baggage on a slender story frame." — Variety
Posted Nov 3, 2007
58% A Slice of Lynch (2007) " Filmed over a two-year period during production of David Lynch's Inland Empire, Lynch, like the feature it loosely chronicles, has no immediately discernable throughline and a wide variety of video-image densities." — Variety
Posted Oct 29, 2007
60% Golda's Balcony (2007) " Jeremy Kagan's green-screen filmization, in its over-busy editing, ever-changing angles and constantly shifting backdrops, strips the play of its starkness, leaving disproportionate schmaltz and propaganda." — Variety
Posted Oct 16, 2007
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