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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    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Late Night with the Devil
    The result is a nasty and delicious, unapologetic pastiche with a flair for menace. I had a blast.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus
    For the fan, it’s an intensely moving experience. But even for the viewer without much knowledge of Sakamoto’s work, “Opus” holds its own as the rare cinematic space for contemplation.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Tuba Thieves
    Its connective tissue is an idea, an exploration, and it’s designed to be more absorbed than understood. But for the patient audience, it’s richly illuminating.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Damsel
    Damsel is evidence that studios still don’t realize that a “strong female lead” is not enough to make a movie good. More is required: a strong set of supporting characters, a strong plot, a strong sense of what makes a movie interesting to an audience.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Alissa Wilkinson
    Spaceman
    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.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    About Dry Grasses
    In About Dry Grasses, Ceylan is asking a vital question of himself as well as the audience: What does it mean to be engaged in the world? And if you choose to back away and watch, rather than become involved, is it self-protection, superiority or just cowardice?
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Arc of Oblivion
    The Arc of Oblivion is a documentary, which means it captures something about life right now, archiving it for the future. But Cheney is also exploring the meaning of archiving itself.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Players
    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.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Lisa Frankenstein
    Cody gets a little subversive with it all — Lisa’s stepsister, Taffy, for instance, is not at all what this kind of movie usually serves up, and that feels refreshing. But the rest is pretty predictable from the start, and so it starts to wear a little thin after a while, a title in search of a story.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Taste of Things
    In a phenomenological way, The Taste of Things captures the joy of variety injected into mere existence: savory and sweet, hot and sour, juice and cream and astringency are not required for pure subsistence, but the rich range of taste we have created in our daily meals says something about human longings not easily put into words.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Perfect Days
    Pay attention to the shadows in Perfect Days. Pay attention also to the trees, to the ways Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) looks at them. They’re as much a character in the story as he is.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Skin Deep
    What does love really mean? Skin Deep gives an answer: that real love is an act of radical imagination, of working to understand what it feels like to be another person. In reality, we can’t just swap bodies to find out — but love beckons us to try anyhow.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 Alissa Wilkinson
    Argylle
    It is ostensibly a tribute to spy movies of an earlier age, not clever enough to be a spoof and certainly not satire. But a homage shows affection for, understanding of and respect toward the thing it is honoring. Argylle feels pasted together by a robot manipulating some kind of spy Magnetic Poetry.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Sometimes I Think About Dying
    A movie like this one, reserved and a little mysterious, can be unnerving. Occasionally it feels as if Sometimes I Think About Dying is a bit too withholding, dragging down the story it has to tell. But there’s a lot here to like.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    The End We Start From
    It’s as much a movie about the hazy struggles of early motherhood as it is about survival in a destroyed world — and it’s best when it leans into the former, with characters’ discussing why anyone has a baby at all.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
    Pham manages to float existential and spiritual questions into Thien’s consciousness and ours without trying to offer solutions, at least in language.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Apolonia, Apolonia
    Apolonia, Apolonia is beguiling as a portrait of women with ambition, but also bittersweet.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Book of Clarence
    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.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Night Swim
    The problem with Night Swim is that it’s trying to say a little too much, which isn’t a complete pleasure-killer, but can get distracting.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Alissa Wilkinson
    Good Grief
    Good Grief does that rare, beautiful thing: It trusts the audience to pay attention.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Teachers' Lounge
    Taking on the uneasy complexity of a progressive modern society, and the friction produced when pluralism and an insistence on order and obedience collide, is a bold move, and The Teachers’ Lounge pulls it off with a sense of tension that makes the whole thing play like a thriller.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    All of Us Strangers
    Emotional and lyrical, All of Us Strangers is a meditation on what it means to really be a human.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Color Purple
    For the first two hours, it’s absorbing: big song-and-dance numbers and emotional set pieces, dynamic performances from everyone, and a feeling of reverence for the story and what it’s meant for 40 years give it gravitas and heart. . . Yet by the end it’s clear that the story remains slippery to would-be adapters.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Alissa Wilkinson
    Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget
    When the source material was so fun, the cover is bound to be enjoyable, and this one is, even if it sags a little around the two-thirds mark. There’s punning, and contraptions, and ducks that shoot lasers out of their eyes. It’s a good time.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Anselm
    A film like Anselm is another level of preservation as well as a contemplative experience, in which the past and the future meet, in a way we can feel as much as see.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Alissa Wilkinson
    Leave the World Behind
    After a while, the movie plays like a bulleted list of everything wrong with America — fair enough — but hurled so relentlessly at the audience that you can only assume the goal is for anyone watching the movie to find something they agree with. In the onslaught, the narrative tension dulls into passivity, both for us and for the characters.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    The Zone of Interest
    Glazer – whose previous film was the brilliantly unsettling Under the Skin – replicates the characters' internal distance through the movie's images and sounds. The result is unsettling in the extreme.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Alissa Wilkinson
    Eileen
    Eileen is a mean movie, but I intend that as a compliment: There’s no lesson here, no revelation, no good vibes to wander away with. Spiky and cold, it’s a bitter holiday treat.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    Priscilla
    Coppola’s talent is in taking this story — much harder-edged when translated to Versailles — and giving it the rosy sheen of a girl’s memory, of feeling the intensity of a star’s rays on her so keenly that there’s nothing to do but bask in it, at least for a while.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Alissa Wilkinson
    Killers of the Flower Moon
    The result of all this careful questioning is stunning. To say Scorsese has made a great movie is to announce that water is wet, but there’s a kind of unfolding grief to Killers’ tone, a steady feeling of dread and sorrow, that only works in the hands of a master. You aren’t told how to feel so much as you’re made to feel it and then, in the end, be walloped with indignance over what happened to the story of the murders and many stories like them.
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