Alissa Wilkinson

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The New York Times, Vox, Vox.com
For 535 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: 373 out of 535
  2. Mixed: 138 out of 535
  3. Negative: 24 out of 535
535 movie reviews
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per page
    • 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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Men
    Men is the most visceral and organic dive into the curse of human nature that [Garland's] made yet. But it’s like each of his movies, filling in the question of what it means to be human — and to keep living on this planet — stroke by stroke.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Northman
    Eggers recreated, with obsessive accuracy, the world of the medievals in order to lower us into a myth that feels primordial and strange, as if it’s tapping into something in the back of our minds that we’ve always known but half forgotten.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Donbass
    Portraying a lie as the truth so forcefully, so unrelentingly, that people just believe it is a key to understanding Loznitsa’s portrait of the region.
    • 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
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Lost Daughter
    The movie captures the spirit of the novel well. It’s suspenseful, but it’s not a thriller; there are elements of obsession and eroticism, but they never quite go where you expect. The end is deeply ambiguous, neither punishing nor condoning its characters’ behavior. It simply asks us to sit with them — to pay them the respect of attention, and learn something about ourselves in the process.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Silent Night
    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!
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Don't Look Up
    For me, the bludgeoning tends to blunt the entertainment value.
    • 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.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Souvenir: Part II
    One of 2021’s best movies.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    Flee
    By the end, it seems telling his story — saying it out loud in a safe space, at last — may have helped Amin heal a bit more. Perhaps sharing it with audiences opens the same space for others, too.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Power of the Dog
    Its rough-hewn, side-glancing characters are full of secrets and unspoken intentions, thinking thoughts it didn’t even occur to you to imagine are in their heads. It’s a gothic thriller wrapped in a Western. It’s outstanding.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    Licorice Pizza
    The film, which is structured as a series of set pieces that Alana and Gary stumble into and out of, is far too strange and specific and sometimes cringey to simply be made up, even by someone with as fertile an imagination as Anderson.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    House of Gucci
    House of Gucci is probably the funniest comedy and dopiest tragedy of the year. Everyone chomps on the scenery.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Passing
    The result is cool, elegant, and devastating, a film as tightly woven and plaintive as the source novel itself. It’s an artifact of its time, both 1929 and in 2021, when the questions around identity have morphed and shifted but are still relevant as ever.
    • 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.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    Procession
    In letting them retell those stories their way, and asking us to watch, Procession dares its audience to not look away. It calls us, in other words, to join the healing community, not just with vague aspirations but with our actual eyes. To play our roles as audience members and then take what we learn and bring it to others.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    No Time to Die
    No Time to Die exists to wrap up lots of plot lines — it feels, like 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, like the end of a cycle, a grand epic about sacrifice and the future of mankind. But it also gives us a Bond with more emotion and maybe even humanity than many of his predecessors seemed to possess.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Eyes of Tammy Faye
    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.
    • 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.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Alissa Wilkinson
    Space Jam: A New Legacy
    To be fair, it’s not all unpleasant. The joyride through the Warner Bros. IP universe is not quite as soul-busting as the trailer led me to believe it would be, though I suspect it benefited only in comparison to my expectations.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain
    In resisting the urge to paint its subject as a saint, Roadrunner gives us something better: a human.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
    It’s not just a blast to watch — and it truly is a blast. It’s another tiny step in reclaiming the full history of America, expanding the context of our present not just for people who remember the past, but people who never knew about it in the first place. We’re fools if we don’t think burying the era-changing import of events like these is as much a part of American history as the events themselves — and movies like Summer of Soul fight back bringing the past vibrantly to life.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    F9: The Fast Saga
    It might be the most perfect Hollywood summer blockbuster ever made. Not the best, mind you.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    A Quiet Place Part II
    The performances in A Quiet Place Part II make it very watchable, when combined with some heart-pounding action scenes that deploy the presence or absence of sound to ramp up the anxiety.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    In the Heights
    The nervy electricity and joy of the film, arriving at this moment in time, is an unbeatable combo. It’s hard to imagine a movie-hungry audience returning to the theater and not being swept away.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Concrete Cowboy
    Despite its flaws, the film works because it’s not, in the end, contrived.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Godzilla vs. Kong
    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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Coming 2 America
    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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Judas and the Black Messiah
    Judas and the Black Messiah is galvanizing, with an intoxicating energy that makes the story beats land with a jolt.
    • 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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    One Night in Miami
    The film has the feel of theater, focusing on conversation and subtle power dynamics rather than a lot of movement and action. But some nimble staging and stunning performances from all four of its lead actors make One Night in Miami pulse with energy.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
    The best plays are often more situation than plot. They capture, unravel, and singe the edges of the power struggles between people who are standing on shifting sand, letting the upper hand change from moment to moment. In retaining the feel of a play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom hangs onto that inherently theatrical quality.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Another Round
    By the end, Another Round is a truly wonderful movie about trying to come to grips with life, anchored by terrific performances, infectious music, and a real understanding of the humming discontentment that all adults must learn to navigate in their own ways. It’s the sort of comedy fused with tragedy that may just best represent what life really is: a melancholy, glorious, slightly off-kilter dance.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Soul
    Soul wasn’t made for a world that’s just gone through the nightmares of 2020, but coming out at the end of this harrowing year, it couldn’t feel more poignant. It’s funny, and it’s imaginative, but it’s also just very, very real.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Wolfwalkers
    The only thing that can conquer fear is love, and Wolfwalkers loves its characters, their world, and the stunning beauty of human life. But most of all, it loves the truth that is buried within the myth.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Mank
    It’s a very good movie, tight and layered and complex. And though it could feel chilly — and I understand that reaction — I found it quite moving.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Small Axe: Education
    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.
    • 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.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    I Am Greta
    What might be best about I Am Greta is a related theme woven throughout the film. She speaks to the camera frequently, frankly, and without embarrassment about her experience of having Asperger syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disorder she refreshingly sees as a positive rather than a negative.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Nest
    The Nest isn’t a haunted house movie, per se, but it draws on some of the visual tropes of the genre. It frequently feels as if something sinister is lurking around every corner.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Small Axe: Red, White and Blue
    There are many obvious reasons why Red, White and Blue feels timely, but perhaps the greatest one is that it depicts the tricky dynamics Leroy experiences among his superiors.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    Small Axe: Lovers Rock
    Watching Lovers Rock is like being at the party at which the film takes place.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Small Axe: Mangrove
    The film boasts a stellar cast led by Letitia Wright (Black Panther), who plays Altheia Jones-LeCointe, the leader of the British Black Panther movement.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 20 Alissa Wilkinson
    Hillbilly Elegy
    Whatever your opinion of the book, the movie is a different animal, and a startlingly terrible one.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    Dick Johnson Is Dead
    Dick Johnson Is Dead suggests that learning to confront reminders of death, to even conjure them for yourself and examine them closely, takes some of the sting out of death and replaces it with love. To love someone is to accept that one day, death will part the two of you. The pain of knowing that is built into the act of loving. But we go on loving anyway.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Tenet
    There’s a chilliness to Tenet that I haven’t felt in his previous work. The stakes, presumably, couldn’t be higher — both onscreen and offscreen — but after watching the movie, I don’t understand why I was meant to care. As an intellectual exercise, Tenet is very interesting, if not entirely successful. As a movie, I’m not so sure.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Vast of Night
    In using all those technical aspects of filmmaking to tell this story, director Andrew Patterson manages to marry form and content beautifully. The tale is engrossing, reminding us that even the simplest technologies we take for granted now have an element of magic to them.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Trip to Greece
    Taken together, the movies are a meditation on middle age and mortality, on how our irrevocable life choices, even when they’re the right ones, will haunt us for the rest of our lives.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Lovebirds
    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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Painter and the Thief
    By the time the breathtaking final moment arrives, we have learned, a little better, how to really look at the world, as a lover of both beauty and the strange bits of ourselves that make us really human.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    Driveways
    Driveways is surprising at every turn. It’s a modest and gentle story about a boy who feels out of place, and the weak ties he forms that gradually become strong ones.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Becoming
    It’s not a puff piece, but it also doesn’t contain any big revelations.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    South Mountain
    South Mountain suggests that the moments that break us can also give us the space and excuse to grow and re-mold ourselves in new ways. There’s joy in those broken spaces.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Assistant
    It’s one of the best, most gripping, and smartest films of 2020.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Bad Education
    Where the film really sings — aside from its often darkly funny writing and surprisingly thrilling take on what could have been a dull bureaucratic scandal — is in tracing the effects of the pressures placed on administrators and faculty.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Other Lamb
    Chilly, precisely designed scenes make for a sharp juxtaposition with images of blood, violence, and birth. And the feeling that something very wrong is going on here is inscribed into every exacting, unnerving shot.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Vivarium
    Though it verges on the overstuffed at times, Vivarium is dirty, sinister, hair-raising, and thoroughly entertaining — and completely worth a watch if you’re feeling a little, well, trapped.
    • 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.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Way Back
    Movies like this one are just looking for an audience with whom they’ll resonate. And the seriousness of The Way Back — its unwillingness to take the easy road, and Affleck’s total commitment to letting his personal rawness inform performed pain — should ensure those audiences find what they’re looking for.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Onward
    It’s better than most of the entertainment aimed at children that studios churn out these days.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Wendy
    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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Emma.
    This new Emma doesn’t play too fast and loose with the story or its most familiar beats, but it digs out the absurdities of being wealthy (or adjacent to wealth) around the turn of the 19th century — the affectations, the frills that cover up the crudeness of real life, and above all, the vast, unmitigated boredom.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Palm Springs
    Zinging between humor and poignance with a lot of charm, it achieves in its most insightful moments what comedy does best: Let us laugh at the world a little, by way of learning something about ourselves.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Fight
    It’s both interesting and sometimes a little dull, which seems to be by design.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution
    Crip Camp is buoyant and inspiring, a tale of people working together through difficulty and opposition to change the world.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
    The film is a beautifully empathetic work of art.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Cats
    It’s literally incredible. I hope I never see it again.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Alissa Wilkinson
    Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker
    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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    Richard Jewell
    If we learn anything from the story in Richard Jewell, it’s that truth is truth, whether or not it fits your pet narrative. So either the movie fails at understanding its own message, or it flat-out lies. What a disappointing way to undermine your own valid point, in a movie that’s otherwise well-acted and competently filmed.
    • 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).
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Frozen II
    Frozen 2 is still a plenty enjoyable film, even if it lacks its predecessor’s subversive spark. But for me, watching generative and derivative nostalgia spar within it prompted a different sense of the familiar: bleakness about the future of mouse-eared entertainment.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Laundromat
    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.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Tell Me Who I Am
    Ultimately, the film is not just a wild and nearly unbelievable story; it’s a rumination on the lasting effects of sexual abuse, the complicated question of “good” lies, and the moral quandary that comes along with withholding painful information.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Terminator: Dark Fate
    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.
    • 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.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Zombieland: Double Tap
    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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Alissa Wilkinson
    Lucy in the Sky
    Lucy in the Sky, distracted by its own flashy filmmaking, can’t center its gaze on one goal long enough to convey any of its interests well.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Irishman
    The movie has the maturity of an older man’s perspective, an eye cast backward on a full life. It is lively and wry and very funny, but at times it also feels like a confession, a plea for grace, not just from its protagonist but from the filmmaker himself.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Ad Astra
    Ad Astra is beautiful, contemplative, and loaded with meaning — not an action movie, but one that leaves you with plenty to ponder.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    Parasite
    Parasite is an unpredictable, thought-provoking masterpiece about inequality.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    Marriage Story
    Marriage Story sees the end of a marriage as cause for both mourning and bittersweet comedy. The relationship is changing, but not ending. And the evolution is something to behold. To get a story like this right requires a sense of the comical and the absurd along with the devastating — and Marriage Story delivers.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
    This film invites us into Rogers’ philosophy that adults would be better people if they tried to remember what it was like to be children. It gently coaxes the audience to filter some very adult emotions through the familiar characters and songs and stories of Rogers’ world. The result is unexpected and unlike any film of its kind, and a testimony to Rogers’ enduring influence, too.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Joker
    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.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Goldfinch
    I think I’d rather re-read The Goldfinch than watch it again. Straughan’s screenplay strips out most of the novel’s heart in favor of plot fidelity, albeit with the pieces told out of order. No longer does it feel like we’re on a journey with Theo. Instead, we’re just observing what happened to him during his life, and there’s no reason to care about any of it.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Knives Out
    It’s the most finely tuned version of a murder mystery you could hope for, with joyous performances and style in spades.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Jojo Rabbit
    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.
    • 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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Just Mercy
    The film is smartly designed to deliver its message into as many hearts as possible.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Waves
    Waves earns its grace-filled ending by asking us to live alongside a trial by fire. It sounds like hyperbole, but I mean it: You walk out with a weary, cleansed soul.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    American Factory
    American Factory tackles the challenges of globalization with much more depth and nuance than most reporting on the topic, precisely because it steps back to watch a story unfold over time and resists easy generalizations. It’s both soberly instructive and fascinating.
    • 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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Ready or Not
    Ready or Not takes its name from a game, an amusement for children, but it has something to say about some very grown-up concerns. And it’s both fun and deadly serious.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Alissa Wilkinson
    Where'd You Go, Bernadette
    Bernadette is a soggy misfire, with sparks of possibility peppering a weirdly plodding tale.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Good Boys
    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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    13th
    The movie's arguments and implications for policy are a matter of life and death, and yet it’s the images that stayed with me after 13th.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Great Hack
    The Great Hack isn’t revealing much that hasn’t been reported elsewhere, but it’s powerful in the ways it does so.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Lion King
    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.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Farewell
    Grief and love coexist in The Farewell, as do truth and fiction, past and present, sorrow and joy. It’s an outstanding, quietly devastating, deeply personal story, and one that’s destined to put Wang firmly on the map.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Edge of Democracy
    While the film often feels like a slow-motion real-world horror story, it’s not without hope. For Brazil, liberty once existed. Can it exist again? And what does that mean for the rest of the world?
    • 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.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Murder Mystery
    Murder Mystery does feel like a very specific sort of direct-to-Netflix offering, designed to ape other movies you’ve already seen and enjoyed without straying too far from the formula or doing anything particularly innovative. But it does so cleverly enough to make watching it a pleasure.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Last Black Man in San Francisco
    Most of all, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a love letter — not a romantic one, but the kind you write when you can no longer hold on to a relationship that nonetheless shaped you profoundly. Richly textured and vividly rendered, it’s clearly the fruit of a lifelong love.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Late Night
    Late Night feels underwritten in some spots, but it’s surprising in others — an unfussy, entertaining comedy with some serious matters on its mind.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Booksmart
    When you’re a teenager, you project your feelings onto the world, sure that you’re in the right and everyone is out to get you. But in reality, your biggest enemy is usually yourself. Booksmart taps into that truth and makes it memorably relatable in a way that goes far beyond the cap, gown, and college acceptance letters.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood
    Tarantino, famously obsessed with the history of cinema and its preservation, has recreated a world he wishes he could have worked in with such care and skill and love that, for the most part, it feels like his most personal film. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is lots of fun, but it’s also strangely, hauntingly sad.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Dead Don't Die
    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.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Souvenir
    The Souvenir clearly stands out as one of the year’s best films: pointedly personal art that somehow manages, in its specificity, to hit on something universal.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    A Hidden Life
    It’s a true story, and a simple one, but couched in Malick’s signature style, it becomes something more lyrical and pastoral.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Lighthouse
    There’s horror and gaslighting and high-on-helium-style comedy and bits of Freud scattered about; in essence, it’s a pile of things that don’t add up to any one thing but do leave you feeling both elated and creeped out.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Rocketman
    It’s absolutely exploding with energy because Elton John is its pulse. It stumbles a few times — as has its subject — but on the whole, it’s a consistently good performance from start to finish, a movie rooted in a real story that nonetheless doesn’t keep itself too tethered to the ground.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
    Among its contemporaries, John Wick, in a word, rules.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    Wine Country
    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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
    Extremely Wicked gives off the distinct impression that it finds Bundy far more fascinating than anyone who suffered at his hands.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Knock Down the House
    Knock Down the House is the rare documentary about today’s American political landscape that might make you shed happy tears.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Someone Great
    A hopeful break-up film, with three leads who sparkle together.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Mary Magdalene
    I appreciate the aim of Mary Magdalene, and the ways it reimagines a familiar story with modern implications, even when it falls flat.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Dumbo
    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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Us
    Us is more intuitive than explicatory, more visceral than diagrammatic; it’s horrific in a way that hangs onto your gut when it’s all over.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Native Son
    Though it has some problems as a film — some of which are part and parcel of translating a book to the screen — Native Son still packs a punch, one that connects directly with the gut.
    • 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.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    Glass
    It’s a movie ostensibly interested in how comic book stories work, but it has the same problems as a lot of the comic book movies hitting the big screen these days. The big twist: Shyamalan seems to have not learned very much at all from his own movies.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    On the Basis of Sex
    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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Mule
    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.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Bird Box
    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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Alissa Wilkinson
    Vice
    Vice smooshes a bunch of metaphors together, none of which are particularly illuminating.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Marwencol
    Marwencol brings you into Hogancamp’s world as a guest, and as his story slowly unfolds, you come to understand what these stories really mean to him and to his mental health. It’s a quiet, extraordinary film.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Bumblebee
    So in not sacrificing that human element, Bumblebee is a nostalgic delight that taps into not just the 1980s but youth in general.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Mortal Engines
    Mortal Engines is visually spectacular, if a bit derivative. It’s a social allegory that goes for broke. And while it’s hardly a groundbreaking movie, it’s still pretty fun.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Mary Poppins Returns
    It’s focused on pleasing fans of the original without taking any risks. It’s a pleasant, diverting, modestly ambitious film, fun for the whole family. But it leaves much to be desired, too.
    • 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Other Side of the Wind
    The Other Side of the Wind is best viewed as a meta-drama about Welles, laced with a barbed wit.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Apostle
    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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Outlaw King
    Outlaw King is plenty entertaining, with a hint of humanity in Robert and Elizabeth’s courtship.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Happy as Lazzaro
    The result is a realist tale about labor, class, and cruelty, while also being a moral fable with a fantastical core.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Dumplin'
    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.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    If Beale Street Could Talk
    Elegiac and lovingly wrought, If Beale Street Could Talk is darkness laced with light, a story that has not stopped being true in the years since it first was told.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Widows
    There’s no denying that Widows is entertaining. Partly familiar and partly something all its own, the film still stumbles at times. But when it works, it’s enthralling.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Shirkers
    It’s a mesmerizing, fascinating story that also feels like an attempt, on Tan’s part, to reclaim the film from Cardona, putting it back in the hands of its rightful owners: herself and her friends. In that way, the new Shirkers is a kind of punk feminist project — a deeply personal, fabulously engrossing, visually assured bit of first-person creative nonfiction filmmaking.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
    The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a tall tale about death, a murder ballad about us, trapped in a universe that is mostly unreasonable and nonsensical. And at the end of the journey we’re left laughing through the lump in our throat.
    • 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Beautiful Boy
    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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Bad Times at the El Royale
    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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Old Man & the Gun
    The Old Man & the Gun — which, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, is based on real characters — is a natural fit for both star and director, and in Lowery’s hands, it feels like both an homage to the past and a gentle step toward the future.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    A Star Is Born
    The movie works best, above all, as a melodrama about the limits and possibilities of love, and how love can make us into the best and worst versions of ourselves in the very same moment.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    American Dharma
    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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    First Man
    The movie sees Armstrong’s reserve as both a blessing and a curse, a gift and a problem, but it’s unequivocal in its admiration of his humility. And in this way, it feels less like it’s forcing a myth onto the man who made it clear to his biographer that he wasn’t seeking renown — and more like a statement of gratitude.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Hate U Give
    It strikes a perfect balance between being a coming-of-age story nestled in a family narrative on the one hand, and a social drama on the other. And in never sacrificing either of those two interests, it becomes a strong example of both.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Fahrenheit 11/9
    Moore still suffers from bouts of self-aggrandizement and snide generalization. But they feel jarringly out of place, and in a good way. That’s because, for a great deal of the film, Moore cedes the floor to people whose voices are not as easily heard, or who have had to fight to have a voice at all.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Little Stranger
    It’s a slow-burn horror film, one that has all the sudden scares and moments of pristine fear present in any good movie of its ilk. But in the hands of Lenny Abrahamson (Room), The Little Stranger is elevated by measured pacing that also makes the larger house-based metaphor clear — and the result is both elegiac and frightening.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Bisbee '17
    Bisbee ’17 is a fierce, lyrical probe into the soul of a town haunted by a history it would rather forget. It’s also an unsettling cipher for America, in a year when the ghosts of our past revealed themselves in frightening ways.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 10 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Happytime Murders
    Like all ghastly failures, The Happytime Murders is not “so bad it’s good.” It’s just bad: a boring flop, an unfunny comedy where nothing’s at stake.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Alpha
    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.
    • 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.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Meg
    In the hands of Jon Turteltaub (National Treasure), it’s just a shark movie, and a kind of inert one at that.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
    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.
    • 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.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    In addition to the absurd stunts and convoluted plot machinations, what makes the Mission: Impossible movies work in general, and Fallout in particular, is that they let their characters be characters, driven by a number of complex factors, even when they’re chasing an enemy or trying to get out of a scrape.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Skyscraper
    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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    The First Purge
    It knows what year it’s coming out — on July 4, no less — and it’s slamming on every hot button it can find. That might be cathartic. It might also be turning pain into entertainment. With The First Purge, your mileage may vary.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Leave No Trace
    Leave No Trace is the story of a bond between a teenage daughter and her veteran father, but in the background is another kind of bond, something that keeps the world from spinning apart. That’s Granik’s subject, and Leave No Trace explores it simply but unforgettably.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 30 Alissa Wilkinson
    Sicario: Day of the Soldado
    It’s inexcusable for a movie that tries to say daring and surprising things about a very urgent matter of cultural and political importance to be so thuddingly predictable in so many places.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
    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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    First Reformed
    It’s a remarkable addition to the small but growing canon of American films that aren’t afraid to stare straight into an abyss with all of the implications — moral, ethical, political, and religious — that are required for this moment in our history. First Reformed is a confounding stunner of a movie and richly deserves our full, serious attention.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Incredibles 2
    While writer-director Brad Bird’s Incredibles 2 is undeniably a good time at the movies for the whole family, it’s the rare superhero movie that may have too many ideas knocking around in its noggin, none of which seem terribly coherent. And that, in the end, makes the film less than it clearly wants to be.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Won't You Be My Neighbor?
    The film succeeds on the radically subversive and obvious notions we learned when we were children: that being nice is not a weakness; that speaking with care is a thing we do simply because we believe the person we’re talking to is a human being with worth and dignity. What’s most startling about Won’t You Be My Neighbor, and what makes it feel almost elegiac, is how very jarring that message feels.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Hereditary
    The movie lingers in the mind and sits like a lump in the soul. And it’s deliciously twisted along the way. Hereditary has nightmare fodder to spare, and nobody, in the end, gets to escape.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Under the Silver Lake
    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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Solo: A Star Wars Story
    The result is a bland heist movie in space that does nothing unexpected and never justifies its existence.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Leto
    While the movie finds its setting in a particular moment in Leningrad, it also feels very universal — a movie about being young and disaffected and passionate and in love, and watching all that change as you grow older. Summer, after all, never lasts forever.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Pope Francis - A Man of His Word
    Pope Francis — A Man of His Word isn’t likely to convert any of Francis’s critics, but it might just convince the indifferent that he has something to say to our world.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Cold War
    It’s a work of unspeakable beauty, one that doesn’t leave you when the film ends, and its deceptively simple focus on a love story can’t mask its cinematic achievement.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 30 Alissa Wilkinson
    BlacKkKlansman
    BlacKkKlansman isn’t wrong about the evils of white supremacy. But it’s pretty sure you, out in the audience, aren’t going to get it unless it spells out the message in blinking neon lights. And even then, the film seems to fear you might miss the point.
    • 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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Tully
    It’s funny. It’s uncomfortable. And it feels real and lived-in, right to the bone.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    I Feel Pretty
    There’s a potentially funny movie in here somewhere. But it lumbers along, wasting some of its greatest assets and, in the end, overstaying its welcome.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Borg vs. McEnroe
    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.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Rampage
    It’s both a blindingly predictable pastiche of an action movie — absolutely nothing happens here that you haven’t seen in a movie before, with the possible exception of some crass sign-language humor from a giant gorilla — and weirdly charming.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    A Quiet Place
    A Quiet Place is the best kind of horror movie. It toys with how we hear the world around us, in ways that are startling and creative and tense.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Blockers
    For the most part, it works. Blockers isn’t groundbreaking or particularly memorable. As comedies go, it’s pretty standard fare. But its characters and performances keep it light on its feet, even when the writing gets clunky.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Ready Player One
    Ready Player One is set in a dystopian future. But it seems to have no idea how dystopian it really is.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    Pacific Rim: Uprising
    What’s most interesting about Pacific Rim: Uprising isn’t the movie itself — it’s how the cause of the impending apocalypse has evolved from the first to the second film, and how that maps onto apocalyptic stories more generally.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Isle of Dogs
    Isle of Dogs, though carefully crafted, doesn’t have much to say — and that’s what’s frustrating about the movie. Anderson has always been one of the most stylistically distinctive American directors, but at times it’s felt as if his fussiness was a way to wallpaper over a lack of new narrative ideas. Isle of Dogs doesn’t suggest an evolution.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Tomb Raider
    For all of Tomb Raider’s strengths, it would still be a stretch to call it a good movie. It’s diverting, a good way to spend a couple of hours, but it’s hamstrung by something that’s unavoidable: The whole central concept — raiding tombs — is just, well, not that interesting.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    A Wrinkle in Time
    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?
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Annihilation
    It’s a beautiful and haunting film, and another examination of what makes us human from Garland.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Early Man
    A quintessentially Aardman-esque stew of slapstick, homage, and wordplay so wry it barely (but always) misses being groan-worthy, Early Man is a gentle and modest reflection on how we have, from the very beginning, always needed to treat one another with kindness in order to survive.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Cloverfield Paradox
    The Cloverfield Paradox has a great cast and an interesting setup, but it feels extremely — almost painfully — derivative of other science fiction films. It’s not nearly as good as its predecessors.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    Proud Mary
    Wherever it falls on the quality spectrum, the bigger, more concerning story here is that Proud Mary’s journey into the movie marketplace is a good example of how Hollywood still fundamentally doesn’t understand what to do with many movies starring black actors.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Phantom Thread
    For Anderson purists and couture aficionados, Phantom Thread is still a feast. But for many others, it’s likely to feel, at times, like it’s gotten a bit too bound up in its own stitching.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 Alissa Wilkinson
    Pitch Perfect 3
    The new third entry in the series isn’t interested in character development or logical storylines or anything resembling innovation. It’s lazy and limp and profoundly weird, and not in any meaningful way a “good movie.”
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Downsizing
    The overstuffed Downsizing doesn’t totally work, but when it does, it’s fascinating.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 20 Alissa Wilkinson
    Bright
    Bright pulls off the uncommon (and not at all admirable) hat trick of being confusing, boring, and vaguely insulting about the matters it wants to appear smart on. The movie is a case of reading the room very wrongly, then slapping a lot of violence and muddled mythology on top as a means of distraction.
    • 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.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Greatest Showman
    The Greatest Showman is not, in any traditional sense of the phrase, a biographical motion picture about P.T. Barnum. It is a high-energy, breathless fantasy. Employing sleight of hand, some fast talking, and a lot of tall tales, it exaggerates the legend until the illusion takes on a life of its own, turning into the promised “fever dream” that, while admittedly stuffed with some truly excellent musical setpieces, has something sinister at its core.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi
    There are images in this movie that provoke awe and delight, and creatures that feel lifted out of half-remembered childhood dreams. And though it briefly appears to lose steam in the middle, that’s short-lived, with a third act harboring sequences that feel like a maestro conducting a concerto the size of the cosmos.
    • 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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Post
    If Hollywood is going to make “now more than ever” movies, this is the way to do it: with a marvelous cast, pitch-perfect design, and a story that feels like the work of latter-day Frank Capra. The Post is an act of goodwill and faith in American institutions, but it’s also aware of how fragile those institutions are, how dependent on their participants they are for their survival, and how much is at stake when press freedom is threatened.
    • 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.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    Call Me by Your Name
    It summons an erotic orientation toward the world with all its power, and then pours it onto the audience. It is, undoubtedly, Guadagnino’s masterpiece.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Coco
    While Coco brings a lot of sweetness and light with it (and, undoubtedly, a lot of happy tears), not one story beat includes something to startle the adults in the audience into realizing something new. No movie has to do that. But Pixar once was reliably in the business of making indelible cinematic crowd pleasers — and now it feels like it’s settling into something much more routine.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Wonder
    While the movie’s premise feels prone to the maudlin, it’s ultimately quite poignant; Wonder is a family-oriented tale in which people make mistakes in the way they treat one another, but learn and grow in a way that doesn’t feel condescending to the film’s younger audience.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Mudbound
    It is a sober, clear-eyed, and haunting work of art.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    Lady Bird
    Lady Bird is the rare movie that manages to be affectionate, entertaining, hilarious, witty, and confident; it’s one of the best films of 2017, and certainly my favorite.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    A Bad Moms Christmas
    A Bad Moms Christmas is thin and silly, like an overlong Christmas episode of a sitcom you pair with some reheated lo mein when you can’t figure out what else to do on a stray weeknight.
    • 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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Thank You for Your Service
    Thank You for Your Service is moving and unflinchingly honest — and its release comes at a time when its central theme feels depressingly relevant.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    One of Us
    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.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 10 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Snowman
    Watching The Snowman keeps you so thoroughly occupied with trying to figure out why the movie itself exists that all other questions become irrelevant.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    Marshall
    Casting the movie as Marshall’s story — and then skimping on Marshall himself, one of the most interesting figures in US history — winds up skewing the film in ways that end up inadvertently denigrating the subject.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Mountain Between Us
    As a professional film critic, I’m also obliged to tell you that The Mountain Between Us isn’t a very good film. But it’s not unwatchable, either, probably owing to the fact that its two leads are great actors in their own right, and they’re willing to take the whole thing quite seriously.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Blade Runner 2049
    It’s not mere fan service; the film tries very hard to sustain interest with new characters and developments that draw on the past without being handcuffed to it, throughout its sometimes ponderous 163-minute runtime. But far too often that attempt to be interesting fails.
    • 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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    American Made
    It’s not that American Made doesn’t have anything to say; it’s just that whatever it has to say has been said better somewhere else. It’s not bad; it’s not good, either. It’s just shallow.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
    For its faults as a movie, the story is still compelling as a bit of history, and more so in the midst of a presidential administration that at times seems to be taking all the wrong lessons from Nixon.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
    Every performance in this movie acknowledges that while tragedy is what prompted the film’s events, its contours, characters, and conversations are pure, inky black comedy. Absurdity makes for good humor, and the screwed-up world in which these characters live is nothing if not absurd.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Molly's Game
    Sorkin is still a better writer than director, but the fun of watching this film comes mostly from witnessing him at the top of his game.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Shape of Water
    Del Toro always renders his films’ social critiques in fantastical and imaginative images, and The Shape of Water is among his best, with a creature that’s both fully reptilian and strangely human.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Alissa Wilkinson
    Suburbicon
    It makes a run at cleverness, trying to be a dark screwball commentary on America’s race problem. But instead it’s just a spectacular flop.
    • 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.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    Home Again
    It does just what it sets out to do: Give us a bit of fantasy, and then let us remember the joy of reality.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Hitman's Bodyguard
    The Hitman’s Bodyguard is strangely soulless, particularly for a movie that wants to be about murder, morality, and revenge. Those elements are there only to serve up the appearance of a smart film, when The Hitman’s Bodyguard would have been better served by sticking to pure action and stupid humor.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Logan Lucky
    The best part of Logan Lucky is that from the get-go you know you’re in confident hands, and whatever’s about to happen, it’s going to be great.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Glass Castle
    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.
    • 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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Brigsby Bear
    Brigsby Bear is about how the things we love help us find where we belong.
    • 12 Metascore
    • 10 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Emoji Movie
    The Emoji Movie is a waste of time, resources, and a bunch of comedians’ voices, plus a premise that actually had the potential to do some small good in the world. It’s less of a movie and more of an insult.
    • 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.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Dunkirk
    Dunkirk wants us to sense what made this moment so pivotal without reducing it to an individual tale. And at that, it succeeds richly.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    War for the Planet of the Apes
    War for the Planet of the Apes is the rare blockbuster that’s both entertaining and full of complexity.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    A Ghost Story
    A Ghost Story isn’t all sorrow and grief. There’s a kind of deadpan humor throughout — the sheet ghost is comical, and there’s no getting around it — that complicates the film and rewards a rewatch.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press
    In Trump’s America, most people watching Netflix already have their minds made up about journalists — they may trust them, or they may think they’re the scum of the earth. Nobody Speak is a stirring argument that could sway some of the undecided viewers.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Reagan Show
    By letting the past speak for itself, The Reagan Show stays both sober and light on its feet.
    • 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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Big Sick
    The Big Sick feels authentic because it isn’t afraid of complexity.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Journey
    The Journey is the rare hopeful political film rooted in both reality and very recent history.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Hero
    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.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Florida Project
    The Florida Project won’t let us look away. Nor, given its brilliance, would we want to. Instead, we laugh, we watch silently, and we’re challenged to stop simplifying people's lives so we can offer easy theoretical answers.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    The King
    Elvis as a metaphor for America is a genius of an idea, and that central theme of Promised Land really works, even though it feels sometimes like the musician’s life is being edited and bent to fit a narrative.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Faces Places
    Visages, Villages is quite a moving film, and speaks to a particular cultural mindset that knits art into the fabric of public life.
    • 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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    War Machine
    It’s not a great film, but it’s interesting one.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Beguiled
    As a film, The Beguiled is thrilling, delicious, wicked fun.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Alien: Covenant
    Alien: Covenant would probably be a better movie if it had calmed down and narrowed its scope. And yet you have to respect Scott’s ambition, even if you don’t like his movie.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Alissa Wilkinson
    Paris Can Wait
    Unfortunately, it’s not a great film. But it’s an enjoyable one, if you like fine wine, beautiful countrysides, and a little frisson of flirtation.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
    We rarely get to see Sandler do this kind of straight-faced comedy, and he's so good in The Meyerowitz Stories that he deserves the chance to do more.
    • 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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Wonderstruck
    It trusts its audience, adult and child alike, to feel its theme, to knit themselves into its multigenerational fabric.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    Woodstock
    Terrific concert documentary...The film that resulted — a roughly though not strictly chronological document of the much-publicized event — is an outstanding documentary, a joyful musical experience and a playful artifact of an era. [2019]
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Sorry to Bother You
    Careening from office comedy to something like horror, Sorry to Bother You is weird and funny and unsettling, and not quite like anything I’ve seen before.
    • 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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Private Life
    Private Life is an accessible and complex portrait of two people whose ardent shared desire for a child leads them in some unconventional directions, and it’s a joy to watch whether or not you’ve shared their experience.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Tale
    In The Tale, Fox takes an experience that’s far, far too common — and newly visible in American culture — and mines it for its emotional heft, turning it into an interrogation of how those who’ve experienced assault and abuse go on to navigate their lives. It is a story of a woman taking her life back, nested in a film serving the same purpose.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    I Think We're Alone Now
    In the end, I Think We’re Alone Now isn’t very interested in constructing a mythology or exploring the apocalypse itself. It’s more of a relationship drama, one that works as a showcase for two great performances against a post-apocalyptic backdrop that ups the stakes
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Death of Stalin
    The Death of Stalin is Iannucci’s most complex and almost nihilistic rendering of what politics is: A team of bumbling and weak-minded people who lack any real conviction other than a desire for power and position.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Final Year
    The greatest thing about The Final Year, and the part that needs repeating over and over in our abrasive, attention-seeking political age, is that no matter what your method for bettering the world is, the real work is usually done quietly, in ways that defy pomp and fanfare.
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