Alison Willmore

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New York Magazine (Vulture), The Playlist
For 402 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 39% higher than the average critic
  • 1% same as the average critic
  • 60% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 2.5 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Alison Willmore's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
Lowest review score: 0 Melania
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 210 out of 402
  2. Mixed: 147 out of 402
  3. Negative: 45 out of 402
402 movie reviews
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    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Alison Willmore
    Sirât
    For all the personal hardship each of the main characters has encountered, they’ve also lived lives of unquestioned security, such that they’re able to pass through a country in an apparent state of emergency without believing such a thing would affect them. Sirāt brilliantly depicts that bubble breaking, its characters confronted with what it really means to be a citizen of the world, rather than gliding above it, with the music turned up loud enough to not have to listen.
    • 5 Metascore
    • 0 Alison Willmore
    Melania
    The gap between Melania’s insistently anodyne tone and what’s happened in the year since it was filmed can become downright vertiginous, especially when Melania intones observations about her immigrant journey and how “everyone should do what they can to protect our individual rights.”
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Alison Willmore
    Send Help
    Raimi indulges Send Help’s gore and gross-out moments with the zest of someone returning to his cult-favorite roots. But when it tries to cast Linda as a figure who, in her own way, is just as uneasy as Bradley, the movie loses its nerve.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Alison Willmore
    The History of Concrete
    The result is scruffily endearing, though it teeters on the verge of collapse at times, as the pretense that what’s unfolding onscreen is all a serendipitous journey gets stretched to the breaking point.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Alison Willmore
    Anaconda
    The movie is all concept and, well, not quite no execution, but such confusing, conflicted execution that it makes the entire exercise feel like it was messed with after the fact.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Alison Willmore
    Ella McCay
    Ella McCay is gas-leak cinema at its finest, which is to say that there is a naïve purity to its unhinged qualities that is almost charming.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Alison Willmore
    Zootopia 2
    There was something undeniably valiant about the way the first one tried, however imperfectly, to bend that long Mouse House tradition of human-acting animals into a means for an examination of racial bias. But in repeating that approach for a story about the banishing of reptiles from the city and the strategic destruction of neighborhoods, Zootopia 2 sets up parallels that strain even more at the seams.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Alison Willmore
    The Secret Agent
    In The Secret Agent, there’s no line between a refugee and being part of a resistance movement — there’s only the state and the people who’ve been designated its enemies.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Alison Willmore
    The Running Man
    Wright’s movie, aside from its mess of an ending, is a propulsive and generally fun affair that sends Powell careering around the Eastern Seaboard like the Tom Cruise successor he’s so determined to become, even if he’s not entirely plausible as a guy who’s volcanic with anger.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Alison Willmore
    Christy
    Christy, which was directed by Animal Kingdom’s David Michôd from a script he wrote with his partner, Mirrah Foulkes, isn’t rote Oscar bait, and Sweeney isn’t doing the sort of studied showboating that so often comes with the territory.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Alison Willmore
    Ballad of a Small Player
    This new movie suggests that Berger isn’t capable of rising above his source material or, in this case, even meeting it.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Alison Willmore
    Blue Moon
    Lorenz is the kind of role that Hawke thrives in — a big talker and a self-mythologizer who everyone can’t help but like, despite being aware that he’s mostly full of shit. He wisely approaches the character like he’s giving a performance of a performance, his Lorenz committing himself as thoroughly as he can to acting like someone who’s happy and having a good time despite everything in his life crumbling away.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Alison Willmore
    If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
    Some films make a point of not pulling away from their main character’s uglier moments. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, brilliantly and suffocatingly, turns its unrelenting photography into a manifestation of Linda’s self-loathing, her anxiety so intense there’s barely room for anyone else in the frame.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Alison Willmore
    Roofman
    The sympathy Roofman extends toward the break room of its big-box stores and the low-ceilinged place of worship where Leigh sings in the choir every Sunday is more moving than its treatment of its protagonist, offering an appreciation that these places could be anywhere and at the same time are highly specific.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Alison Willmore
    Is This Thing On?
    We’ve seen Arnett play variations on his character before, sardonic and self-deprecating. It’s Dern who’s the revelation as a woman who truly doesn’t know what she wants, and who is figuring it out in real time in a way that’s a delight to watch.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Alison Willmore
    TRON: Ares
    Mostly, when you watch Tron: Ares, you become aware of the degree to which this franchise has exhausted its own metaphor.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Alison Willmore
    One Battle After Another
    It sprawls across genres and tones and defiantly refuses to anchor itself to a single character.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Alison Willmore
    The History of Sound
    Those bookending sequences, the start and the finish, are the only ones The History of Sound fully inhabits, while in all the others it plays coy, holding back for no particular reason than that it offers the illusion of sophistication.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Alison Willmore
    Spinal Tap II: The End Continues
    This Is Spinal Tap is a comedy about how the desire to be seen as a rock god collides with the humiliations of actually being human, and the visual of a group of guys in their 70s and 80s unable to move on from the styles of their youthful heyday is as effective a continuing riff on this theme as any. It’s also the only one fully realized by the new film.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Alison Willmore
    A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
    To give A Big Bold Beautiful Journey credit, it is a democratically even-handed waste of talent.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Alison Willmore
    Preparation for the Next Life
    The adaptation frames the relationship it depicts less as a romance than as the intersection of two individuals in their own moments of transition. It’s a much better movie for it, though I’d guess that one of the reasons it’s getting such a quiet release is that it’s not a desperate melodrama about people trying to save each other.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Alison Willmore
    The Conjuring: Last Rites
    Last Rites comes from Michael Chaves, the same director as that last film, but returns the series to what it does best, which is dealing with a supernaturally infested home.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Alison Willmore
    The Long Walk
    Jonsson, despite some worrying initial forays into a twangy accent, is the stand-out as Peter, with his crumpled smile and his insistence on solidarity, however much it goes against the spirit of the competition.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Alison Willmore
    The Toxic Avenger
    The splatter comes more easily to this new movie than a grasp of overall tone does.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Alison Willmore
    Caught Stealing
    Caught Stealing is an intermittently fun experience that would be a better time if Aronofsky either loosened up a little more or, conversely, maintained a tighter grip on the wheel.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Alison Willmore
    Lurker
    Matthew is a ruthless worm who demonstrates in disturbing ways how far he’s willing to go to preserve his place at Oliver’s side, and Pellerin — who was previously seared into my mind as the persistent creep on the bus in Never Rarely Sometimes Always — delivers a masterful performance always riding the edge of cringe.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Alison Willmore
    Splitsville
    Splitsville is a comedy that’s grounded in its characters, but also has a downright old-fashioned devotion to the visual, to the ways in which the farcical sight of four guys crammed onto a sofa can be just as capable of generating laughs as a good line.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Alison Willmore
    Americana
    The movie is called Americana, not America, and while it treats characters as mixtures of what they were born into and what they chose for themselves, it suggests that there’s something kitschy about the very idea of national identity, whether it’s defined by what’s in your display case or the color of your eyes.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Alison Willmore
    Architecton
    Architecton comes across as a more plaintive depiction of our desire to imagine ourselves able to leave a lasting mark on this planet.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Alison Willmore
    Together
    Brie and Franco, in providing nuance and texture to Millie and Tim, may actually have worked against a film that would be better off allowing its characters to be in an unhealthy relationship from the beginning — a choice that would make the ending feel more unsetting rather than just a flubbed allegory.
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