Alissa Wilkinson

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The New York Times, Vox, Vox.com
For 537 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 53% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 43% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 6.6 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Alissa Wilkinson's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 72
Highest review score: 100 Procession
Lowest review score: 10 The Happytime Murders
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 375 out of 537
  2. Mixed: 138 out of 537
  3. Negative: 24 out of 537
537 movie reviews
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    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Nope
    Nope is a big, very loud, very effects-driven spectacle. It’s a movie with a thousand references to the past. It’s also a riotously entertaining thrill ride that owes portions of its plot to some of Hollywood’s most successful summer blockbusters, Jaws and Independence Day. It’s part of the culture; it can’t stand outside of it. But it functions at least a little bit as a warning, or maybe a prophecy, or a call for a reboot, or a reminder to care about what, or who, gets our attention.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    They'll Love Me When I'm Dead
    With interviews, clips, commentary, and more, the documentary serves as a quick primer on Welles as well as the film.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    Malcolm & Marie
    The movie is pretty to look at, and its stars are great. But here is the thing: It’s just really dull.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Royal Hotel
    What makes The Royal Hotel brilliant, besides its heart-pounding performances, is how it illuminates the many ways in which men acting in socially acceptable, ordinary ways — playful catcalling, persistent passes, flexing power to be impressive — forms its own kind of horror house of mirrors in which it’s impossible to tell what’s truly sinister and what’s just someone acting like a guy they saw once in a Western.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Apolonia, Apolonia
    Apolonia, Apolonia is beguiling as a portrait of women with ambition, but also bittersweet.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    I, Tonya
    Craig Gillespie’s take on Tonya’s story, the hilarious and gut-punching I, Tonya, is a nearly pitch-perfect black comedy that distills the sensational story into two potent insights very relevant to 2017. It’s a movie about class, and it’s a movie about the nature of truth. And somehow it’s also a supremely entertaining sports movie.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Small Axe: Alex Wheatle
    Alex Wheatle plays like a conventional coming-of-age story, of sorts, but the film is a fitting addition to Small Axe, rounding out a picture of young manhood and serving up powerful images of isolation and courage.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Tuba Thieves
    Its connective tissue is an idea, an exploration, and it’s designed to be more absorbed than understood. But for the patient audience, it’s richly illuminating.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara
    “Fanatical” is both a truly appalling story and a peek into something darker and more sinister about the way social groups form and evolve — and devolve, too — when the internet mediates it all.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Beguiled
    As a film, The Beguiled is thrilling, delicious, wicked fun.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Detroit
    The reason films like Detroit are important isn’t just because they remind us that the more things change, the more they stay the same; it’s because watching them forces us to tread moral ground alongside the characters.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    mother!
    Mother! is a mad fantasia of fire and water and insanity, a spinning, flaming plume that is not here to make you like it, though it wouldn’t mind if you decided to just bow down in worship.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Disaster Artist
    The movie is a pure delight — a funny, fast-paced, heartfelt story of a friendship and a weird dream. Impressively, it will satisfy fans of The Room while remaining completely accessible to those who’ve never seen it.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Lady Macbeth
    If you can adjust to the idea that you’re not meant to sympathize with anyone, Lady Macbeth is quite a film.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Dolemite Is My Name
    It’s an interesting (if not in-depth) exploration of how culturally dependent a thing comedy really is. It’s a vivid depiction of the challenges that black entertainers have faced, particularly in Hollywood. And it is, to everyone’s delight, a great Eddie Murphy performance.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Pavements
    The low-key and never very mainstream Pavement seems like the last band that would get this treatment, and that’s the joke. But it also makes the band the perfect subject for what Pavements is slyly doing, and quite brilliantly, too.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Bernstein's Wall
    While his celebrity has largely faded, Bernstein’s Wall makes the case that his charge to artists to lead the way in culture is timeless, and more vital than ever.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    Asteroid City
    In Asteroid City, Anderson builds several worlds mediated by layers of performance, artifice, and technology, in which nonetheless real humans grieve, long for one another, fall in love, get hurt, and feel wonder. The layers they’ve put between themselves and their emotions crack and crumble.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Amateur
    It felt a bit like the life was draining away from the movie the longer it went on — as if this was more of an imitation of a good movie than an actually good movie. (The technical name for this among critics is a “nothingburger.”)
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Love That Remains
    The landscape in which this family makes its domestic life is wild and lovely, and Palmason signals the changing of the seasons by showing us all of its beauty: the snow and ice, the sunshine and greenery, beautiful skies, placid water. The weather can be both delightful and harsh, warm and chilly, and that’s mirrored in the characters.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Fire Inside
    The Fire Inside has a little more going on under the hood than your average sports movie.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Queen of Chess
    Kennedy sticks largely to conventional documentary techniques for Queen of Chess, which is not a bad thing: It’s a good story, well told, and Polgar makes for an interesting subject.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Love Me
    The Zucheros bring a great deal of imagination to the task, and the sheer audacity of the movie is enough to make it worth watching, even if, at times, the gadgets’ sentimental education starts to feel repetitive.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Oh, Hi!
    To the degree it works — and it does, a lot of the time — it’s a testament to its performers, especially Gordon and, once she arrives on the scene, Viswanathan, both of whom bring an energy to the screen that always has a touch of mischief, like they could veer off into lunacy or ecstasy at any time.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    My Dead Friend Zoe
    Most of the filmmaking in My Dead Friend Zoe feels workmanlike, proficient and straightforward in its storytelling — a promising feature debut for Hausmann-Stokes. The film’s best feature is its performances from a uniformly excellent cast.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes
    It’s not just a fascinating glimpse into a woman who spent her whole life in the spotlight. It’s a chronicle of a moment when everything changed, and a sobering reminder that we often think we know who public figures are, but we rarely really understand.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Get Me Roger Stone
    The single most useful insight of Get Me Roger Stone is that men like Stone are driven not so much by ideology as by an overweening thirst for power and celebrity, propelled by absolute antipathy for their enemies.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Fyre
    You actually come away from Netflix’s Fyre feeling like you’ve got a sense of who McFarland is and why he was able to con so many people into giving him their time, respect, and millions in cash.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    In Flames
    Kahn manages to assemble the story in a way that escapes feeling like a series of object lessons.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Tully
    It’s funny. It’s uncomfortable. And it feels real and lived-in, right to the bone.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Darkest Hour
    Oldman is excellent in the movie, playing a jolly, idiosyncratic, sometimes conflicted version of the British prime minister. But the movie Oldman is in isn’t as good as his performance. Darkest Hour is certainly engaging during its run time, but it’s weirdly forgettable after the fact.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Santosh
    Santosh is equally about the methods by which the poor and oppressed are kept in their place, and about what it means to be woman among men who aren’t at all interested in sharing their power.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Belfast
    It’s become a lazy critical cliché to declare that a film is a love letter to a city or to the past or to cinema, but in this case it’s inescapable, and Belfast succeeds in passing that love along to us.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Blindspotting
    The film is a confident debut from two writers and a director with no shortage of things to say and a strong voice to say them in.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Okja
    Okja isn’t perfect; it falls down when the absurd and the serious ricochet back and forth between scenes, making it hard to track with the film’s tone. But it’s easily forgivable; this is a big, ambitious movie, and when it works, it is ridiculously fun.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    True History of the Kelly Gang
    Kurzel favors stylized images and the occasional anachronistic metal track to provoke a mood more than faithfully recreate history. And his approach works well in this film, bolstered by a strong cast, which features MacKay, Russell Crowe, Nicholas Hoult, Charlie Hunnam, Thomasin McKenzie, and Essie Davis.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Jawline
    Jawline is both disturbing and empathetic, and an important peek into the glory and angst of being a teenager on the internet today.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    My Old Ass
    It’s as much about reframing middle-aged regrets as it is a story about youth, love and possibility — and thus the emotional heft it wields is two-pronged.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Jackass Forever
    I stumbled into the night after Jackass Forever with aching cheeks from laughing, a sore derriere from sitting, and a little bit of gratitude to inhabit a planet with people who don’t mind being fools on purpose
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Dune: Part One
    The film moves slowly at times, and that’s entirely on purpose. Cinema is primarily a visual medium, and Dune provides a terrific opportunity to lean in and experience what that really means.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Every Little Thing
    Masear is a terrific documentary subject, but the hummingbirds are as well, and Aitken brings them close to us.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Woman of the Hour
    As a drama, Woman of the Hour is effective and infuriating.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Eno
    There’s a pure joy to this documentary, a sense that creativity is miraculous and we ought to be grateful that we get to participate in it. I left both screenings full of ideas for my own work.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Eternal You
    In a wide-ranging and somewhat rambling manner, it is about humans’ desperation to find meaning in life wherever they can, and how companies are rushing to fill that gap and inspire almost religious devotion, even in the professionals making the tools.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Crazy Rich Asians
    Crazy Rich Asians is fun, funny, gorgeous, and swoon-worthy. It’s got a terrific cast, glamorous locations, witty jokes, and a story with a lot of heart. And on top of all that, it may actually succeed in proving to Hollywood that both Asian-centered stories and romantic comedies deserve much more attention.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Omaha
    I was left befuddled about the movie’s message and, indeed, what I was supposed to make of the whole thing. That’s frustrating, and it’s not the sort of feeling you want to have when leaving a movie like this; it overwhelms whatever impression the rest of the movie might have left.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Bird
    There’s a wealth of lovely performances in Bird, including Adams, who holds the film together by slowly taking on tenderness as it progresses. But the two poles of the movie are Rogowski and Keoghan, who radiate precisely opposite energies.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Queen & Slim
    It’s a subversive and powerful way to retell the Bonnie and Clyde myth for a new era — but also to reexamine what that myth has meant (something that Thelma and Louise’s feminist retelling did as well).
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Novitiate
    While Novitiate is unsteady in some places, it’s genuinely moving, bolstered by Qualley’s and Nicholson’s performances in particular, as well as a host of talented supporting actresses.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Fight
    It’s both interesting and sometimes a little dull, which seems to be by design.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Jane Austen Wrecked My Life
    Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is both pleasantly diverting and sneakily wise.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    This Closeness
    The film’s stripped-down aesthetic is mirrored in the actors’ performances; they deliver straightforward lines with a hint of self-consciousness and discomfort, even between friends and lovers. It’s as if the closeness is projected through a scrim, which creates a kind of purposeful clumsiness the audience can feel, too. When actual physical contact occurs, it’s almost jarring.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Killing of a Sacred Deer
    The result isn’t uplifting in the least. But it’s deliciously frightening, a cautionary tale for the careless and a horror film that posits a world devoid of any real goodness.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Wind River
    While there’s no reason to crack a lot of jokes to lighten the mood, it can start to feel like the movie relies too heavily on despair, to the point of capitalizing on its characters’ suffering — and, given the realism of Sheridan’s films, the suffering of people like them.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Air
    Watching Air, I found myself thinking that maybe what Hollywood needs is a movie like this: fresh, fun, full of movie stars doing their movie star thing without the aid of capes or pre-chewed IP, opening only in theaters. A story about risk-taking that could prove the reward was worth it. A weird, wild sneaker of a movie, if you will.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
    Among its contemporaries, John Wick, in a word, rules.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Lost in the Jungle
    Lost in the Jungle can’t really explain how the children survived, or how, ultimately, they were rescued. Miracles and mysteries happen in the jungle. What the film does elucidate, in rich and tense storytelling, is that no headline story like this is ever as simple as it seems on the surface.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Platform
    Somehow it works — probably because The Platform commits to its conceptual framework so thoroughly, and with such precision, that it coaxes the audience to do the same. Its vivid images are designed to imprint on your brain.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Hoppers
    It’s a fable, really, with a science-nerd edge and some charming animal friends. You could do a whole lot worse at the movies.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Jay Kelly
    Inevitably, the results do not quite cohere narratively or tonally. But the film still has a strange, old-fashioned charm. You can’t really imagine anyone other than Clooney playing Jay, but Sandler is equally good; he brings a pathos to Ron, a man who has perhaps loved not wisely but too well.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Honey Boy
    It’s an intensely personal project for writer and star Shia LaBeouf, one that walks a thin tightrope, but pays off beautifully.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Slay the Dragon
    Slay the Dragon isn’t a glorified PowerPoint presentation about the history of voting. It’s an unabashed activist documentary aimed at convincing viewers they can fight gerrymandering in their home states.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Square
    Burying self-referential allusions in the background and merrily poking viewers till they bruise, The Square at times feels more like longform performance art than a narrative film. It’s social satire by way of art-world comedy, and no woke participant is exempt from its barbs.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Good Grief
    Good Grief does that rare, beautiful thing: It trusts the audience to pay attention.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Battle of the Sexes
    Battle of the Sexes, for all its failings, is still enjoyable to watch. Stone in particular is terrific, and Faris and Dayton make the smart choice to shoot the film with the kind of texture and camerawork that evokes movies from 1973. But as a sports movie, it’s unsatisfying — though that’s not exactly its fault.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Zodiac Killer Project
    The truth is that Shackleton isn’t settling for one mode; he’s working in a bunch of them at once, mixing affection and critique. Just like any true fan would.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    All the Money in the World
    I left All the Money in the World wondering why this was a movie at all. It’s a series of events that happened, to be sure. And Getty is an important and interesting figure from the middle of the 20th century. But those facts don’t make for a good movie.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Friendship
    These men are so lonely. Thankfully, in a movie, they’re also really funny.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Happy End
    Most good films rely on their audiences to connect the dots a little, but Happy End is all dots, with none of the lines drawn in at all. The meaning is there, but you have to dig for it in the everyday events of a family’s life.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Am I OK?
    The movie feels very lived-in, the banter fresh and funny, even if sometimes it feels like it’s standing in place a bit too long
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Outrun
    The movie gets dangerously close to being overwrought. But Ronan’s restraint keeps it truthful, even when she’s screaming, or crying, or blacking out. In the end, it mostly aches, and aches, and aches.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Power
    The point isn’t the data, but the spider-web nature of the argument; seemingly disparate things (labor strikes, slave patrols, the removal of Indigenous Americans from their land) are drawn together in “Power,” which becomes an act of pattern recognition. It is not easy viewing, but it’s a strong introduction to a topic that seems freshly relevant every day.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Babes
    There’s substance here, and talent in spades, but it needed a little more time to gestate.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Bugonia
    Really, though, the reason to watch Bugonia is its leads.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
    The fun comes from seeing your favorite characters again, not finally resolving missing pieces that have tortured your sleep for six years. And on that front, El Camino delivers.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Nutcrackers
    The film gets better whenever Stiller recedes into the background, but the movie’s insistence on Michael’s redemption story as the main narrative thread hurts it. It’s impossible to care too much about this pompous, uptight, strangely boring guy. Especially because we know how his story will end.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Midsommar
    There’s no cutting away from the disturbing in Midsommar (in fact, the camera prefers to push into the worst of it); you will look at this, and you will see the violence that is life and death, the movie says.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Die My Love
    Submerged in Grace’s overheated, claustrophobic, tedious, maddening reality, we are drowning, just like her. It is full-body immersion cinema.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 10 Alissa Wilkinson
    Geostorm
    Even though no movie that lends itself to individually tailored special effects should be a royal snoozefest, it’s 2017 and everything is awful, and so, too, is Geostorm, a disaster movie without a disaster and an apocalypse flick lacking the apocalypse.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Late Night with the Devil
    The result is a nasty and delicious, unapologetic pastiche with a flair for menace. I had a blast.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
    Its workmanlike cinematic language can’t quite capture the urgency and expansiveness of Didion’s vision as a writer, and how keenly and bitingly she managed to forecast the insanities that plague our time.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Everyone Is Lying to You for Money
    Even if you’re confused or mystified by the whole concept of cryptocurrency, the movie is a pretty solid introduction to how it works. More important, it explains why people got into it in the first place.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Sometimes I Think About Dying
    A movie like this one, reserved and a little mysterious, can be unnerving. Occasionally it feels as if Sometimes I Think About Dying is a bit too withholding, dragging down the story it has to tell. But there’s a lot here to like.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Eileen
    Eileen is a mean movie, but I intend that as a compliment: There’s no lesson here, no revelation, no good vibes to wander away with. Spiky and cold, it’s a bitter holiday treat.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Arctic
    Arctic doesn’t employ too many fancy tricks or frills: It’s just a simple, straight-ahead survival drama that lets Mikkelsen showcase his considerable acting chops, leaving viewers as impressed with his stamina as we are with his character’s.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Suspiria
    By its enigmatic end, Suspiria is troubling and grim and yet strangely mirthful, having opened wounds without much interest in closing them. This is not a film you untangle; it’s a movie you feel. That will drive some mad. For others, it will feel something like ecstasy.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    MoviePass, MovieCrash
    Surprisingly, the film goes much further than expected. Streaming services are loaded with documentaries about scammy internet-era companies, but “MoviePass, MovieCrash” finds the barely told story in all the juicy facts.
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