Alissa Wilkinson

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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. Negative: 24 out of 537
537 movie reviews
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    The jokes feel tired. The actors are mostly doing their best, but the screenplay too often leaves them mimicking comedy rather than performing it.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Even when he’s in a mediocre movie (and he often is), LaBeouf is a magnetic onscreen presence. There’s a naturalism and complexity to his McEnroe that keeps him from being turned into a caricature. It’s hard not to want more of him.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    What does work about H Is for Hawk (aside from Mabel, whose presence is enough to recommend the film) is its refusal to make grief facile or tidy, or to proclaim that healing must look the same for everyone.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    A hopeful break-up film, with three leads who sparkle together.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    What we get here isn’t interesting, and it’s not told in an interesting way.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Alpha is definitely sentimental, even pandering at times. But its unexpected setting, images, set pieces, and even language balance out the sentimentality with a strangely raw and cinematically adventurous aesthetic that’s uncommon for a film of its sort.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Blood-soaked and intense, it is occasionally uneven in tone, with varying degrees of skill from the cast. But story-wise, it mostly holds together, a thinker of a thriller that, even when it heads into pure slasher territory, still has its brain turned on.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    For one, it’s immersive and incredibly beautiful, shot like poetry and scored by Mali Obomsawin. The result is both stunning and sobering.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    It’s clear that the movie has a point of view; what’s most interesting, though, is the raw materials it employs.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    The result is a bland heist movie in space that does nothing unexpected and never justifies its existence.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    This isn’t just about fringe cults on ranches anymore: It’s about social groups, theories about the world, the bubble you float around in on the internet, the candidate you believe in an election.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Morris’s film is less a takedown of its subject, and more a Rorschach test for its viewers. What you’ll see is precisely what you’re primed to see — and that, not Bannon’s ideas themselves, is the point.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Beautiful Boy is a beautifully made and complex rendering of a father and son’s relationship that ends with too little hope to fit into people’s “inspirational movie” box. But at its best, it’s a strong rendering of both that horror and the frayed rays of hope that sometimes break through. It’s not easy to watch, but it is, in its own way, still beautiful.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    By the end, a kind of narrative lethargy has set in. “Armand” feels mostly like an interesting formal exercise: an attempt to meld realism and surrealism in the most nondescript of places, but in a way that evokes an ancient terror.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Dumbo isn’t entirely unpleasant to watch — on the whole, it’s probably Burton’s best since Big Fish, whatever that’s worth — and while the scenes in which the elephant takes flight around the circus tent aren’t exactly magical, they’re pretty fun.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    The farce props up the nihilism, and gives The Monkey a strangely hopeful refrain.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    It’s not exactly for the faint of heart, and its wild zinging from plot point to plot point can get tiring. But if you’re on the hunt for a frightening and original horror movie, it’s a stellar choice.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    As “Eric LaRue” starts barreling toward an upsetting conclusion, you start to wonder about everything that’s happened earlier in the movie, about what went unsaid and now refuses to stay quiet.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    Unfortunately, the thinness of The Hero gives Elliott little to work with, and he’s already a subtle actor, with a mustache and hound dog visage that tends to obscure facial expressions anyhow.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Weeks after I saw it, I cannot quite decide if Babylon is a good film. But I’m entranced, and moved, and frustrated, and transported — which is what Hollywood has built its business on accomplishing from the very beginning.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    What it does do, though, is remind us that bad men get away with bad things in part because we’re conditioned, over and over, to see them as normal and funny, permutations of “locker room talk” and “just making a joke.”
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Alissa Wilkinson
    Vice smooshes a bunch of metaphors together, none of which are particularly illuminating.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    It’s true that every documentary about a musician made with their involvement functions, on some level, as a piece of marketing, an attempt to write the narrative of their life. That mode can get a bit wearying. But when the results are this endearing, it feels like a little celebration instead.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Nothing about Dream Team is very serious, and it would be a waste of time to force meaning onto it. But that’s not a mistake; it’s the whole idea.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Pod Generation foregrounds Rachel and Alvy’s relationship, exploring how technologies change our most intimate connections and raising questions from a world not so unlike our own.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    “2000 Meters” is bruisingly intimate nonfiction.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    By the middle of the film, the narrative also begins to stutter, set piece after set piece, caper after caper, loping toward the inevitable moment of collision and resolution, without always maintaining the narrative tension to keep things interesting. Since we know where this is going, these bits need to be really funny, not just broadly perfunctory jokes about how generations don’t understand each other.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    This is a story of wealth, and power, and what love can and can’t overcome. But it’s also about something far more heart-rending: what it means to be accustomed to being looked at one way, and then experiencing, out of the blue, what it feels like to actually be seen.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    One of Good Boys’ smartest insights into that period of life is that everyone is developing into their teenaged selves, but at very different speeds.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Part metaphorical (which it jokes about halfway through), part homage to old Hollywood, part whodunit, and part social commentary on an America reeling from mid-century chaos, it’s overstuffed but still feels controlled.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Under the Silver Lake isn’t an homage so much as a remix of classic Hollywood tropes, which positions itself and its contemporary hipster characters less as the continuation of history than the end of it.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    House of Gucci is probably the funniest comedy and dopiest tragedy of the year. Everyone chomps on the scenery.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    The result is sublimely ridiculous, or perhaps ridiculously sublime: the very definition of frothy summer entertainment, moderately (if unevenly) well-directed by Ol Parker, that works best if you just suspend your need for it all to make sense.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Outlaw King is plenty entertaining, with a hint of humanity in Robert and Elizabeth’s courtship.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    This isn’t a movie with much to say, but it’s the sort of thought experiment that will keep you up at night.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    What Godzilla vs. Kong lacks in narrative logic, it makes up in visual fun, even imagination. And that’s all too lacking in an industry dominated by movies that sacrifice imagery for story beats.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Rae and Nanjiani are terrific comedians whose wisecracks and antics are thoroughly entertaining, so even if you know what the ending of The Lovebirds will be, it’s great fun watching them get there.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    There’s nothing flashy or innovative about On the Basis of Sex. It’s the very definition of a workmanlike film. But it’s a satisfying watch nonetheless, and a smart one too — just like its subject.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Good Grief does that rare, beautiful thing: It trusts the audience to pay attention.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Joker is a well-made movie, with a killer performance from Joaquin Phoenix, who seems born to play the role. But there’s nothing “bonkers” about it. It has nothing to say about the Joker himself or what he represents, or even about the world in which his brand of evil exists. Go ahead and crack open the movie. It’s hollow to the core.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    I’m here to litigate “The Roses,” and on that front I’m quite confident that it’s a strangely boring failure, whoever’s at fault.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is a worthy sequel, repeating some of the same beats as its predecessor, but cleverly reinvented so that it’s still unpredictable and hilariously bizarre.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    It might be the most perfect Hollywood summer blockbuster ever made. Not the best, mind you.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Mule is a thinly characterized, clunkily realized showcase for its director, who may or may not be working out some personal issues on screen. Yes, there are some very funny moments, and Eastwood retains plenty of charm. But too often, the film feels slapped together, half-assed, and lacking some much-needed care. And nowhere is that more evident than in the way the characters themselves are written.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    The film is a little too sprightly to land any heavy punches — it’s more of a comedy with satirical elements than a true satirical tale. ... But hate can be both worthy of ridicule and deadly serious, and for the most part Jojo Rabbit manages to thread that needle.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    The movie is full of goofy side characters and one-liners, yet elevated occasionally to genuine complexity by Colman and Buckley, who are consistently the best thing about any movie they’re in.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Dial of Destiny is loaded with related ironies, though they’re mostly extratextual. On the screen, it’s fairly straightforward: a sentimental vehicle, one that hits familiar beats and tells familiar jokes, comfort food to make you feel like a kid again for a little while.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Elemental isn’t a full failure. It’s an original story, for one, and coming from Disney, that’s no small thing. The best thing about Elemental — and, since movies are a primarily visual medium, it’s a very good thing indeed — is that it looks incredible.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    If The Book of Clarence doesn’t totally work, its combination of the sacred and the irreverent is enchanting. It gets bogged down in its own mud, but it’s certainly shooting for the stars.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Laundromat is unwieldy at times, and its final scene is truly befuddling. But it’s worth watching not just for its bitterly entertaining explanation of a densely confusing matter but also the way it illustrates a larger problem.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Education becomes a portrait of a community disappointed by the country they came to with eagerness — and determined to make something of themselves, and their culture, in spite of it.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    Wine Country is a pleasant enough comedy about friendships in middle age and learning to embrace change. It’s surprising, though, that the film isn’t more fun. The pacing feels oddly slow, which blunts the edges of some of the jokes. For a group of actresses with improv comedy chops, it feels labored at times.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Alissa Wilkinson
    Even the twists feel obvious and not all that interesting, more the fulfillment of plot points seeded early on rather than startling turns of fortune.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    This exceptionally well-cast version of Tammy Faye’s story does manage to tap into a cultural moment with reverberations we continue to feel today.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    For most of the movie’s runtime, it seems like a story about coming to grips with your complicated feelings about the past, but by the end, some of the complexity seems to have evaporated.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    It’s a useful framework for understanding leaders around the world, and Baranov is the ideal cipher, someone who intimately understands how easily people’s minds are swayed and molded.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    It’s not a great film, but it’s interesting one.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Alissa Wilkinson
    Spaceman is neither particularly astute about human nature nor discernibly interested in the politics embedded in it, and it is not even meme-ably bad, which is a shame. So much wasted potential.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Alissa Wilkinson
    It’s underbaked and baffling to watch, with little tension or interest to pull us through.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is not a good movie nor a terribly enjoyable one, if you’re paying attention to it. But as background noise, it’s diverting and intermittently amusing.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    I’ll be pondering I Love You, Daddy more; for now, though, I’m not convinced it’s thoughtful, and suspect it’s nothing more than clever and funny provocation for provocation’s sake.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Old
    There is, indeed, an explanation — but I kind of wish there wasn’t. For most of Old, the sheer weirdness of the setup is what’s so compelling.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    The film’s revelations are two-pronged: They uncover much about the Hasidic community, while also more broadly exposing how insular groups keep people in and everyone else out. It’s hard to leave, even when staying is impossible too.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    On a number of occasions, the film veers close to succeeding. At times it’s evocative and touching. But it’s also heaped high with ideas about the magic of stories and the importance of recapturing your sense of wonder, which don’t really add up to much in the end.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    As with most comedies, your mileage may vary wildly. It’s more of a celebration of its own existence than anything terribly fresh, but the jokes are solid and I laughed a lot, which I can’t say for most studio comedies of late.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    So The Lion King now has its very own pristine cover album, rendered in intricate, realistic detail, a high-fidelity B-side for its many devoted fans. But it might, in the end, leave you wishing for the slightly scuffed-up vinyl original.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Another Simple Favor is a two-hour vacation I’m not mad to have taken.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Falling Star offers little in the way of dramatic tension or intrigue, and its comedy, mildly clever at first, starts to feel repetitive. The word “tedious” popped into my mind a few times, perhaps because the world of the film is so small that it starts to feel airless and lacking in surprise.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Maximalism has its place, but it wears out its welcome here.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    In the hands of Deadpool director Tim Miller, Dark Fate by and large pulls off recapturing the goofy fun of the original, though with a twist. It evokes the earliest Terminator films, but Dark Fate doesn’t want to just rewrite Terminator’s future — it wants to reevaluate its past, too.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    The movie is gentle, almost sluggish, and takes some weird left turns — in other words, it’s a Jarmusch film. Zombies suddenly turn up. People are dying. The world is ending. And by now, we’re more or less expecting it.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    For as much as DuVernay’s film is a lovely and good-hearted movie that delivers lots of eye-popping, imaginative awe, its status as an adaptation necessarily raises the question: Was A Wrinkle in Time the right source material through which to tell this story?
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    It’s not a particularly fresh plot, and the movie’s screenplay feels a tad limp, devoid of some of the potential for comedy. But Dumplin’ still manages to be entertaining, and if it hammers on its message a little too often and a little too clumsily, it’s still a fun romp at heart.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Rise of Skywalker falls somewhere between an overstuffed fan-service finale and a yawnfest. If The Force Awakens kicked off a new cycle in the franchise and The Last Jedi set it up to push beyond its familiar patterns, The Rise of Skywalker for the most part runs screaming in the other direction.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Journey is the rare hopeful political film rooted in both reality and very recent history.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    The movie is pretty to look at, and its stars are great. But here is the thing: It’s just really dull.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    It’s a fan’s dream, to be sure. But in getting so close to a man who has so often been turned into a caricature, “EPiC” goes beyond just the concert: We enjoy both the performance and the man who loved nothing more than to perform.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    Extremely Wicked gives off the distinct impression that it finds Bundy far more fascinating than anyone who suffered at his hands.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Coming 2 America is really just a movie about how fun and great Coming to America was. It gives us another way to dance to the prior movie’s beat.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    There’s enough in Eleanor the Great to still make it watchable, especially the genuinely moving intergenerational connection between two women who need each other to move past their particular grief. If only the world around them had been developed more carefully, too.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    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.”)
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    It’s a tonally strange movie from the get-go, masquerading as a typical holiday flick about long-lost friends getting together at the holidays but ending with mass extinction. Yay!
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    After the Hunt seems wildly desperate to be seen as provocative about things like cancel culture and the “feminist generation gap.” But my overriding sense was that some earlier, better version of the script exists, and all the political stuff was stapled on later to make it feel more “relevant.”
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    It’s as much a story of love among friends as it is of any couple, and a handful of good gags and great performances keep the whole thing steaming along.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Fallen Kingdom understands the moral weight of the setup it’s been handed by the previous five movies. Even when it stumbles as a film, it has a definite point of view on what a humanity callous enough to revive a species for its own pleasure and inquiry ought to experience in return.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    There is something off about You’re Cordially Invited, some sense that the whole thing never clicks into place.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Streamlined a little, it would have made for a rich text. But as it is, it’s too much to wade through.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    It’s entertaining enough to be worth watching for fans of the genre or of Bullock, who turns in a strong performance as a woman who has motherhood thrust onto her in a world loaded with peril.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    The big difference between this kind of video game movie and an actual video game is that you’re not playing it — you’re just passively consuming it, and you know how it will end before it gets going. So any surprise or intrigue comes from just seeing how our mighty protagonist will get himself out of this scrape. That’s just enough for a couple hours of fairly mindless entertainment.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Alissa Wilkinson
    Bernadette is a soggy misfire, with sparks of possibility peppering a weirdly plodding tale.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    It’s a true story, and a simple one, but couched in Malick’s signature style, it becomes something more lyrical and pastoral.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    It’s all jocular and surface-level, but it’s also not trying to be anything more than old-fashioned blockbuster entertainment — neither overly serious nor, on occasion, allergic to a bit of sentimentality.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 20 Alissa Wilkinson
    Whatever your opinion of the book, the movie is a different animal, and a startlingly terrible one.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    The fault seems to be in the chemistry, not just between the leads — it’s tough to believe that Charlotte and Adam have the connection on their night together that the movie insists upon — but between all of the characters.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    There’s an interesting film dancing around the edges of The Greatest Hits, but there’s both too much sentimentality and not enough thought, and that’s too bad.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    For me, the bludgeoning tends to blunt the entertainment value.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    If you’re an aficionado of ’70s cinema, there’s probably not much new here. The films covered are certainly a murderer’s row of masterpieces, but they’re familiar to cinephiles. Yet despite its lack of depth, there’s value to Breakdown: 1975 as an introduction to an era, particularly for younger people or newer movie lovers who might relish learning about the films of the time and the ways they weave into history.

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