Jay Weissberg

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The Film Verdict, Variety
For 254 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 42% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 55% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Jay Weissberg's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 65
Highest review score: 100 Sunday's Illness
Lowest review score: 10 Another Me
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 133 out of 254
  2. Mixed: 106 out of 254
  3. Negative: 15 out of 254
254 movie reviews
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    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Jay Weissberg
    The Venerable W.
    “Evil” is one of those tricky words usually best avoided, since its quasi-mythological sense of moral absolutism tends to downplay the human agency involved. Yet as Barbet Schroeder well knows, there are times when no other term properly conveys the insidious nature of intolerance and carnage robed in the trappings of power.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Jay Weissberg
    Sicilian Ghost Story
    The filmmaking doesn’t simply tell a story but makes us feel its impact.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Weissberg
    The Girl in the Spider's Web
    It was probably inevitable that Hollywood would neuter the best elements of Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” franchise, but did the producers really need to shift it into a commonplace cross between a superhero flick and James Bond?
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Jay Weissberg
    On Her Shoulders
    It’s one thing to tell a traumatic story, and another to capture how that trauma impacts a life. What makes Alexandria Bombach’s On Her Shoulders so powerful — besides the profound dignity of its subject, Yazidi massacre survivor Nadia Murad — is the way she reveals Murad’s distress at having to take on the role of activist.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Jay Weissberg
    The Waldheim Waltz
    Thanks to her smart narration — clear, impassioned but never polemical — and the astute way she allows exceptional footage to play out to its full extent, The Waldheim Waltz has a sense of urgency made more pressing given political developments not just in Austria but Poland and Hungary as well.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Jay Weissberg
    What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire?
    While always attractive, the look conveys a level of non-spontaneous construction that often takes away from the potency of hard, brutal reality.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Jay Weissberg
    The Quietude
    Boasting a trio of actresses at the top of their game and cinematography that constantly impresses with its confident yet unshowy fluidity, the movie deftly enters into the bosom of a family harboring multiple secrets, encompassing the personal and political.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Jay Weissberg
    Our Time
    Die-hard acolytes will argue that the camerawork transcends or even complements the storyline; most everyone else will wonder what happened to an auteur whose work was awaited with such eager anticipation.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Jay Weissberg
    The Great Buster: A Celebration
    Structured as a straightforward life story followed by an extended coda looking in detail at the features Cohen is restoring, The Great Buster can’t hold a candle to the 1987 three-part series “Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow” but will make do as a decent DVD extra.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Jay Weissberg
    Walking on Water
    The artist’s forceful character does battle with technology, bureaucracy, corruption and the elements, resulting in an installation of stunning beauty and a documentary that delights in capturing the act of creation.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Weissberg
    Sibel
    Weaving together folklore, gender roles and a fitful kind of emancipation in the story of a mute young woman desperate to counter the ostracism of her fellow villagers, the writer-director couple have created an attractive package that doesn’t hold up to close inspection.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Jay Weissberg
    Too Late to Die Young
    While the film is perhaps longer than necessary, and the adult characters could use some fleshing out, this is a satisfying sensorial work.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Weissberg
    A Land Imagined
    "Land” will feel overly familiar to those looking for more than well-intentioned musings on the horrendous treatment of guest workers.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Jay Weissberg
    Sunset
    The chaos is there but without the coherence necessary to balance sensorial turmoil with genuine meaning.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Jay Weissberg
    Non-Fiction
    This story of two couples dealing with change in their personal and professional lives, so packed with intellectual sparring, gets progressively lighter as it moves along, acknowledging the primacy of human interaction (foibles and all) over doctrine.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Jay Weissberg
    No Date, No Signature
    All four main actors are in top form, but it’s Mohammadzadeh who steals the show in his scene at the poultry plant, when his desperate monologue takes on an epic, Shakespearean quality as he throws all his physical force into a verbal storm of pained outrage.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Jay Weissberg
    Good Manners
    Class, desire, motherhood, responsibility to society — all these themes are worked in, to varying degrees. Yet balancing the film’s two halves is less successful, and certain shifts between humor and dead-seriousness don’t quite work.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Weissberg
    Sunday's Illness
    With breathtaking elegance and stunning assurance, Ramón Salazar takes a melodramatic chestnut and makes it flower with unexpected emotion in Sunday’s Illness.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Jay Weissberg
    Guilty Men
    Ensuring that most characters are neither all-good nor all-bad means “Guilty Men” is a much more human film than other dramas basing themselves on often clear-cut Westerns.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Jay Weissberg
    Capernaum
    While this is unquestionably an issue film, it tackles its subject with intelligence and heart.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Jay Weissberg
    Yomeddine
    Anchored by lead Rady Gamal’s warm-hearted charisma, the film is a sweet, solid first feature marbled with genuinely touching moments that make up for times when the siren call of sentimentality becomes a little too loud.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Weissberg
    Woman at War
    Erlingsson’s genius lies in how he puts it all together with such witty intelligence, arranging beautifully shot picaresque episodes around a central figure who lives the ideals of the heroes she has hanging on her wall, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Jay Weissberg
    The Wild Pear Tree
    Even more than in his previous film, Ceylan and his fellow scriptwriters (wife Ebru Ceylan along with Akın Aksu, also acting) develop astonishingly complex spoken recitatives that weave philosophy, religious tradition, and ethics together into a mesmerizing verbal fugue.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Jay Weissberg
    Girls of the Sun
    Clearly the director’s positive impressions from her research made her want to create something that would generate popular sympathy for the cause, but writing a glorified TV movie wasn’t the way to go.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Jay Weissberg
    Donbass
    Corruption and humiliation are the guiding forces of Donbass, resulting in a scathing portrait of a society where human interaction has descended to a level of barbarity more in keeping with late antiquity than the so-called contemporary civilized world.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Jay Weissberg
    Everything Else (Todo Lo Demás)
    Though the concept of the gendered gaze can be over-pushed in film theory circles, in this case there’s no mistaking Almada’s privileging of a woman’s perspective, with its sympathetic non-judgmental stance and sense of female solidarity.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Jay Weissberg
    In the Last Days of the City
    The real achievement is how the film captures and holds a mood that develops and expands, with a yearning for what was and what might have been.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Weissberg
    Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Audacity to be Free
    While trying to save her from being considered as merely an inspiration to the great men around her, the script inadvertently reinforces this impression.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Jay Weissberg
    This Is Our Land
    The film is so calculated in its plotting that it loses some of its chill.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Jay Weissberg
    The Judge
    Greater attention to how and when information is revealed would make “The Judge” a far more valuable film.
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