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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    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Jay Weissberg
    That Summer
    Almost exclusively composed of 16mm footage shot in 1972 and lost until now, Göran Hugo Olsson’s fascinating documentary recounts the summer when Lee Radziwill and photographer Peter Beard decided to record Radziwill’s reclusive aunt and first cousin, hiring the Maysles and shooting in and around Grey Gardens while workers fixed the place up.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Jay Weissberg
    Beauty and the Dogs
    Ben Hania’s decision to divide the film into 9 chapters, each seemingly orchestrated in a single take, works on a cerebral level, but the form doesn’t serve the story, and while the overall choreography of actors and camerawork is impressive, it never fully satisfies.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Jay Weissberg
    The Last Family
    The film is a remarkable, frequently unsettling exercise in staged voyeurism, recreating the interdependent lives of the three members of the troubled Beksiński family.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Weissberg
    The Banishment
    The undeniably talented helmer’s sophomore feature has little of the emotional power of “The Return,” though d.p. Mikhail Krichman does stellar work and thesping is faultless.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Jay Weissberg
    I Killed My Mother
    There’s much to praise, especially the oh-so-real dialogue, but true psychological penetration is lacking and Dolan’s hunger to prove his talent results in a superfluity of styles. Still, multigenerational auds worldwide will likely find kinship with the many funny/painful situations, and pic is a genuine crowdpleaser.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Jay Weissberg
    Cinderella the Cat
    The film plays on a number of clever riffs on the Cinderella tale, all in the darkest of veins, from the sadism of Mia’s step-siblings to Salvatore’s drug empire built on shoes made from soluble cocaine.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Jay Weissberg
    The Dancer
    More problematic, even if we accept the film as pure fiction, is its pedestrian construction and ill-conceived script, unlikely to spark interest in one of the most innovative and influential performers of the last century and a quarter.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 90 Jay Weissberg
    The Long Night of Francisco Sanctis
    Rather than any outward show of police or physical repression, the directors suffuse their drama with a sense of paranoia and constant surveillance, chillingly capturing the fear of one man forced into a moral dilemma.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Jay Weissberg
    Mansfield 66/67
    There’s value in examining the myth of Mansfield and its impact, but here poor Jayne herself is lost.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Jay Weissberg
    Deliver Us
    The documentary wisely avoids questioning beliefs, but it does force audiences to question how those responsible for shepherding the faithful use their influence, for good or bad.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Jay Weissberg
    Hissein Habre, A Chadian Tragedy
    [A] concise, clearly told and deeply effective documentary.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Jay Weissberg
    The Leisure Seeker
    With a script that signals every progression as obviously as the large-lettered signs used in homes for people with dementia, viewers can guess after 10 minutes exactly how this predictable story is going to end.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Jay Weissberg
    The Future Perfect
    Wohlatz’s sensitivity to language, the way it’s used and how the ability to express oneself literally changes the manner in which we deal with the world around us, is subtly yet rigorously demonstrated, not just with the words and tenses themselves but how they’re spoken.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Jay Weissberg
    EX LIBRIS: The New York Public Library
    This is an enriching way to spend three-plus hours.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Jay Weissberg
    Human Flow
    Lost among the bulletins and traveling shots is any sense of the individuals whose distinctiveness is eliminated under the crushing word “refugee.”
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Jay Weissberg
    The Queen of Spain
    Sure it’s meant to be taken in good fun, but the energy keeps getting undercut by over-broad comedy and uninspired scenes, such as a limp musical number in the Isabella movie.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 30 Jay Weissberg
    The Black Prince
    Clunkily scripted and generically pretty in a Stately Home porn kind of way, the film is vaguely accurate in its sequence of events but falls completely flat on personal relationships, psychology and political undercurrents — in other words, the stuff that makes history come alive.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Jay Weissberg
    Letters from Baghdad
    The bottom line is that Oelbaum and Krayenbühl have fleshed out a complex, fascinating figure.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Jay Weissberg
    Fortunata
    The camera barely leaves Trinca’s side. She delivers an over-sized, nervy performance but the material is so flawed that it’s hard to truly say whether it’s exceptional acting.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Jay Weissberg
    Barbara
    The movie lightly plumbs that dangerously unsettled space between performing and literally being the protagonist in a biopic.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Jay Weissberg
    Gabriel and the Mountain
    On one level, the film can be classified as a journey of discovery, but what deepens interest is the way Barbosa constantly asks the viewer to question what it means to travel.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 40 Jay Weissberg
    Rodin
    Rodin is a meticulously reverential, handsomely lit and very dull biopic.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Jay Weissberg
    In the Fade
    Diane Kruger’s powerhouse performance in her first German-language production goes a long way toward compensating for the narrative’s dip into overly crystalline waters.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Jay Weissberg
    A Gentle Creature
    The film beguiles with its bravura but it’s a deliberately punishing journey, made by a male Cassandra impelled to point out his nation’s destruction yet sadly aware that it’s too late to change the tide of history.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Jay Weissberg
    The Wedding Plan
    The film nicely plays with the standards of romantic comedy.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Jay Weissberg
    A Woman's Life
    A Woman’s Life has the kind of majesty found not in the grand gesture but the modest detail, the kind that accumulates resonance with each seemingly minor event until the picture of a character becomes as complete as a painting by Ingres. Or a story by Maupassant.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Jay Weissberg
    Like Crazy
    Boasting a deliriously loquacious script together with a rare understanding of how to balance certain Italian caricatures with a grounding sense of realism – a combination that’s truly Virzì’s forte – the film takes two psychologically damaged women...and makes them into a mutually supportive duo who surprisingly touch our emotions.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Jay Weissberg
    Finding Oscar
    A standard-issue piece of heart-tugging reportage better suited to small screens than art houses.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Jay Weissberg
    Glory
    The film quietly builds to a feeling of inexorable disaster, guided by terrific performances as well as spot-on editing.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 90 Jay Weissberg
    The Ticket
    Boasting complex, sharply drawn characters and top-notch performances, this mature drama plays with ideas of seeing, both the outside world as well as within oneself, as Fluk (“Never Too Late”) masterfully depicts intimacies gone awry.
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