I don't have a dog in this fight, but out of limited experience I suspect that certain problems and personality types are just a lot more amenable to therapy than others.

The 40 for 40 doc of him is pretty good.

Still waiting for them to can him. Weakest reviewer on this or any other site by a mile.

Elf is pretty amazing until the third act when the writers decided that they needed a plot for some reason; it then rapidly turns into hot garbage.

Totally agree- people act like you can grade a Dowd review on a curve somehow and still get a clear idea about the film (e.g., just add two letter grades or something) but he's way more scattershot than that. More of a random number generator than a harsh critic.

At least it had a happy ending.

Shitty hating is kind of Dowd's wheelhouse. He wouldn't have a place in this world without it!

Hence the Dowd A.

Or an F. Or some other symbol that people don't usually use to talk about movies.

Similar experience here, but I'm less convinced that the game is very salvageable. The Ladies' side seems especially broken, as there aren't enough bad cards to really incentivize going to another person's store in most cases, and the cards are often ambiguous as to what exactly you are buying- at the end of our game…

Yeah, they just had to have Dowd review this, didn't they? Nobody else wanted to see the new Star Wars?

You forgot to include a pseudoprofound phrasing and a pointless reference, but otherwise spot on.

Fair enough, and I totally get it why the endless Cs grind people's gears. I was focusing on Nysa because it was a specific example, but I agree that there are many reasons to be disappointed with his reviews.

I usually do, but I'm sure you can understand how frustrating it is to seek out alternative reviews for the 20% of the movies that you end up reviewing.

I'm actually not at all interested in this movie, nor do I particularly care if Dowd gives out a lot of low grades in general. It's more that I am disappointed by how misleading his writing is, which contrasts sharply with the rest of the (generally good) reviewers on this site.

Respectfully disagree. If Dowd can only write a passable review for super arthouse stuff then he's obviously not a very good critic- he's just some random dude on the internet who happens to like arthouse stuff. And frankly, his reviews of arthouse stuff are weak too- they usually just say how awesome A.A. Dowd's…

So do you have a good recommendation for another site with useful film commentary? I'll admit that I think it's hard to come by, and old AVC and the Dissolve generally were solid.

Still waiting for the AV Club to fire him and get back some of the Dissolve people. This is just a crappy review- overwritten, snooty, and conveying limited information about the film itself.

Seriously. Can this guy!

Yeah, all of the Dissolve people are available now… Any reason that they haven't replaced Dowd yet? He's definitely the weakest critic on this site, by a lot.