Jesse Hassenger

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For 801 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 53% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 44% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 6.5 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Jesse Hassenger's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 59
Highest review score: 91 American Honey
Lowest review score: 12 Asking for It
Score distribution:
  1. Negative: 69 out of 801
801 movie reviews
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Jesse Hassenger
    It’s a piercing portrayal of culturally specific nerd rage in Tomine’s comics; on film, it’s a little talky, and could’ve used more Ghost World-style moments of caricature, like that savaging of Crazy Rich Asians at the opening. But while Shortcomings doesn’t turn Ben into a misanthropic hero or excuse his often-terrible behavior, it does stick to the ethos he espouses early in the picture: This is a movie full of people who are flawed, and real.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 57 Jesse Hassenger
    Rather than containing relatable multitudes in a compact story ready-made for online sharing, a bigger-screen Cat Person turns paper-thin.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 68 Jesse Hassenger
    The film’s other performances aren’t as engaging as Seydoux and young Martins, which means One Fine Morning itself sometimes feels like it’s muddling through with Sandra’s same weariness, too faithfully reproducing the repetitions of real life.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 61 Jesse Hassenger
    It is remarkable that his three-hour Wandering Earth prequel is simultaneously stranger and more emotionally grounded than the earlier film. Yet even at this length, even with eye-popping moments and believable characters, some crucial humanity feels missing.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Jesse Hassenger
    JUNG_E has plenty of spare parts, and occasionally janky green-screen effects. But both the robots and humans it assembles move with unexpected grace.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 58 Jesse Hassenger
    It’s a movie about a toxic relationship that digs into the harrowing psychological details of mental and verbal abuse without exploiting it. It’s also a single-minded PSA picture — indie portraiture with hardly any identifying details filled in.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Jesse Hassenger
    By the end, the movie feels less like a canny reflection of true-crime fascination than a weak imitation of it — screen life, reduced to mere pixels.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Jesse Hassenger
    By laying off the action-movie gas pedal, Plane makes Butler, performing in his native Scottish accent, more warmly likable than he’s been in years.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Jesse Hassenger
    At times, the movie feels like it’s having fun in spite of itself. So it’s perfect, in a way, that Edgar Allan Poe keeps turning up to jolt his own story back to life.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 61 Jesse Hassenger
    The movie isn’t quite evocative enough to work as effective minimalism. It averages out a stripped-down Smith and the more florid filmmaking touches to land squarely in the middle of the road.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Jesse Hassenger
    This film isn’t a particularly astute portrayal of war, but it does ably depict sacrifice — something ultimately missing from the movie-star restoration of Top Gun: Maverick. Comparing the two movies isn’t especially fair, but it’s still worth noting that this smaller production is doing more with less.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 68 Jesse Hassenger
    Roar Uthaug is not a director who seems destined for greater, grander epics, and that’s one of his best qualities. He makes polished B-movies without the delusions of A-list grandeur.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 67 Jesse Hassenger
    Violent Night isn’t a great action movie, or even a very good one, but George Costanza’s old assessment of Home Alone rings true: “The old man got to me!”
    • 42 Metascore
    • 49 Jesse Hassenger
    It’s not especially fair to criticize the movie that could have been made, rather than the one that was actually made. But even on its chosen terms of a family dramedy, People feels lopsided.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 45 Jesse Hassenger
    Given how unnecessary Rise Of the Damned is, Leyden’s choice to pare down the original RIPD’s summer-movie bombast into an agreeable, swiftly paced supernatural Western qualifies as a rousing success. On the other hand, anyone working in the RIPD universe should also understand the value of just staying dead.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 29 Jesse Hassenger
    Without any actual classicism to accompany Craig’s outdated notions of outrageousness, the movie quickly turns fustier than its edgy posturing lets on. Craig simply watches a bunch of selfish people behave badly in predictable ways, and occasionally has them lunge at each other in anger. How perfectly droll!
    • 73 Metascore
    • 67 Jesse Hassenger
    For better and worse, The Inspection seems like the movie Bratton had to make, a story so personal that some of its biggest emotional confrontations start to resemble a therapeutic exercise.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 59 Jesse Hassenger
    Schrader pushes the somber score and just-the-facts cinematography as close to pure explication as possible. There is visual storytelling, but little in the way of mood or evocation.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 58 Jesse Hassenger
    Gray’s many fans will probably love Armageddon Time, and it may even win over some more neutral viewers who respond to his decidedly non-nostalgic look at a pivotal (and not especially promising) moment in U.S. history. But anyone who has found his movies less articulate than the ideas behind them will only get occasional respite here.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 69 Jesse Hassenger
    As-is, Scarlet is a beautiful loll, content with its self-made magic.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 55 Jesse Hassenger
    One point in favor of Bruckner’s new Hellraiser is that it takes some time before it feels truly lost.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 82 Jesse Hassenger
    In its gentle, modest way, Aftersun might well break your heart.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 67 Jesse Hassenger
    Edgerton isn’t as electric as Hawke or Isaac, and the passion-play dramaturgy strains. But as he allows himself to drift from self-torture, Schrader finds some new, compellingly strange ways to tend this well-worn soil.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Jesse Hassenger
    When it keys into Mamie’s horrifying experience, and the way she refuses to retreat from it, Chukwu and Deadwyler pack a wallop.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 71 Jesse Hassenger
    God’s Creatures doesn’t have quite the same enchanting, unnerving mystery of The Fits, where a girls’ dance troupe begins to suffer unexplained seizures. The hardscrabble working-class details here inevitably feel a bit more familiar, whether from American kitchen-sink indies or Irish plays.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Hassenger
    Meet Cute has more on its mind than so many mid-2000s rom-coms, and sure looks a hell of a lot better, so it’s all the more crushing when so much of it turns out to be just as gratingly plastic.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 78 Jesse Hassenger
    The movie is both a daring and empathetic deconstruction of Monroe iconography anchored by a beautiful performance from de Armas, as well as a miserabilist wallow in exploitation. Like its fictionalized subject, the lines between the two are sad, blurry and spellbinding.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 72 Jesse Hassenger
    Mottola and Hamm don’t seem like they’re trying to rewrite Hamm in Fletch’s image, or vice versa. They look more like they’re making exactly the half silly, half sly movie they personally want to see.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Jesse Hassenger
    Anyone suffering from severe summer-movie withdrawal might want to seek this one out, so long as they prepare themselves for a familiar summer sensation. The film pops, then fizzes and fades: It’s a firecracker of a movie, for better and worse.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Jesse Hassenger
    The movie is so poorly staged that it manages to conceal the supposedly important hero/kid bonding elements, while telegraphing early on where the rest of the story is going.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 76 Jesse Hassenger
    Kline’s movie works best when it blurs the lines between the people of a nerdy subculture and the style of their obsessions.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Jesse Hassenger
    In its loopy, beguiling, occasionally befuddling way, Three Thousand Years of Longing feels like it’s trying—and sometimes failing—to sum something up about Miller’s own history of loving strange movie magic.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 68 Jesse Hassenger
    It’s very much in the tradition of another Spielberg summer creature movie: Like Jaws, Beast heightens basic human fears about a sharp-toothed predator into something impossible, even ridiculous, yet weirdly plausible for most people.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 38 Jesse Hassenger
    Look Both Ways has nothing meaningful to say about any of the subjects it’s supposedly addressing. Even when the filmmakers get little details right (Natalie’s animation references are spot-on and very convincing), the movie is playing the supportive friend to its audience, patting viewers on the back and talking about how everything happens for a reason, and it’ll all turn out great.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 48 Jesse Hassenger
    What’s supposed to resemble a smart, unnerving sci-fi movie looks more like a lecture about male dominance and deception that keeps foregrounding its least interesting characters.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Jesse Hassenger
    Orphan: First Kill isn’t an especially scary movie, nor is its class-war commentary especially subtle or insightful. Through sheer force of personality, though, these elements are rendered immaterial. Like Esther, the movie has a keen sense of how to weaponize its own audacity.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 48 Jesse Hassenger
    Apart from some stray moments of youthful exuberance, the film version of 13 has been scrubbed as clean as any high school musical, so that it resembles any number of sitcomy streaming programming—erasing the very novelty that made it sing on stage.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Jesse Hassenger
    At times, Rogue Agent feels reluctant to fully engage in the kind of deception that might make it a trickier, more “fun” piece of work; it’s almost too tasteful for its own good.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 62 Jesse Hassenger
    Reijn and DeLappe don’t seem interested in preying on real fears so much as laughingly confirming any suspicions that yes, your friends secretly talk smack about you. Bodies Bodies Bodies is a fun ride through those well-founded anxieties, but as the end credits roll, some viewers may still be waiting for more of a punch — or a better punchline.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 56 Jesse Hassenger
    Honor Society never gets a handle on its comedic bona fides, but its faux-irreverent tone does allow for a satisfying con-style turn as Honor struggles to keep her new maybe-fake friends under her control.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 59 Jesse Hassenger
    The movie isn’t easy to dismiss. Its awkward comedy is often funny, and its shadowy mystery is compelling, because Abilene’s death does become more of an enigma to Ben as he learns more about her. Performers as eclectic as Holbrook, J. Smith-Cameron, Isabella Amara, and Ashton Kutcher all do their best to bring these potentially elusive characters to life.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Jesse Hassenger
    Like The Prince of Egypt or Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas before it, The Sea Beast ditches talking animals and funny sidekicks, but it can’t fully shake off its Disney influences. It’s a whole lot of well-animated beasts and water, with nowhere to flow.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 62 Jesse Hassenger
    It’s telling that The Forgiven has the shape of a long, dark night of the soul, while actually taking place over several days.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Hassenger
    What makes The Princess so surprisingly fun is its commitment to a hooky premise.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Hassenger
    Even some of its rawest emotional moments feel studiously cribbed from other movies, which is probably why not a single thing any character does throughout Don’t Make Me Go is genuinely surprising or even slightly unexpected. It’s a movie about the unpredictability and inherent dangers of a life well-lived, and you can set a watch to its screenwriting beats.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 83 Jesse Hassenger
    Paramount+ should have thrown this movie a theatrical run; it may more or less amount to an 86-minute pilot episode for the new series that’s coming soon, but it’s also one of the funniest movies of the year.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 37 Jesse Hassenger
    Though its actual storytelling is pretty arbitrary, The Black Phone has the emotional simplicity of a children’s film, wearing its grit like makeup.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 67 Jesse Hassenger
    If we have to wade through some silly, pandering nostalgia to get to this pleasingly vast dinosaur playground, so be it.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 74 Jesse Hassenger
    Its creepy unease lingers, and just as in It Follows and The Guest, Monroe is the face of that unease. That’s the power of a great scream queen.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 31 Jesse Hassenger
    By the end of this movie, its inventive genre cross-breeding feels as worn-out as any other.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Jesse Hassenger
    If it’s no longer surprising that Sandler is a good, steady actor, it’s still fun to find out he can find new ways to play to the cheap seats.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 61 Jesse Hassenger
    The movie never turns into a full-tilt caper, even as the obligatory end-credits appendix hints at enough material to inspire one. It’s stuck, charmingly and a little wanly, in another era.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Jesse Hassenger
    The movie gets livelier every time Stewart appears, as if on a contact high from her intoxication. Crimes of the Future needs those extra jolts of weirded-out star power. In spite of its arresting imagery, it’s sometimes more engaging to think about than to actually watch.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 71 Jesse Hassenger
    Men
    Men is a horror film operating largely under nightmare logic and allegorical rumbling, and in a broad sense can’t offer many true surprises.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 57 Jesse Hassenger
    If Senior Year had been willing to further develop its affectionate social satire, it might have been a surprise 2020s classic of the teen-movie genre. Instead, it’s dead set on proving it has heart, too, and in the process becomes as thirsty for likes as any teenager’s Insta.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 42 Jesse Hassenger
    Is it better for a Stephen King franchise to burn out or fade away? Firestarter manages to do both at once.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 68 Jesse Hassenger
    Even when The Bad Guys resembles other movies, it’s stealing from them gracefully, with its own sensibility and energy.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 67 Jesse Hassenger
    Ambulance tightens the story’s frequent ridiculousness into genuine tension; it’s just retro enough to feel like an old-fashioned thriller done up with some newfangled tech that doesn’t choke the images with overly obvious CG.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Hassenger
    Sonic the Hedgehog 2 has just enough laughs to make its shopworn lessons about the value of friendship and (brace yourself) teamwork feel like part of a harmlessly amusing kids’ movie, rather than an insidious way of training kids to expect and even demand franchise bloat.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 59 Jesse Hassenger
    Yet there’s some kind of invisible force here, hurrying things along in the hopes of a future team-up, making sure this feature film arrives more undead than alive.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Jesse Hassenger
    With its crisply likable leads mixing it up with pleasingly chewy gangster stereotypes, it has the consistency of a good candy bar.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 34 Jesse Hassenger
    Throughout its slim but slow 83 minutes, Umma piles up missed-opportunity scenes that cry out for a ghoulish sense of humor or an audience-rattling jump.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 35 Jesse Hassenger
    As with Free Guy, Reynolds and Levy have made a movie aimed at the dead center of mainstream geek culture, designed to be described as having so much heart—even though it’s as smooth and featureless as a Funko Pop.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 12 Jesse Hassenger
    Asking for It is made with sloppy overconfidence, a stunning bluff of both style and substance.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 91 Jesse Hassenger
    Despite the sci-fi trimmings—or, really, in perfect sync with them—the anxiety After Yang generates has the gentle, humming pervasiveness of real life. It’s trying its best to tell us about the world.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Hassenger
    Dog
    As a whole, Dog is credible as a small-scale drama with some moments of light, puppyish comedy, from the man and the mutt. Like Clooney before him, Tatum hasn’t quite made his own Soderbergh movie. He has, however, made a surprisingly good one.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Hassenger
    Uncharted spends a lot of time scraping up meager points for what it isn’t, rather than what it is. It isn’t a superhero movie, despite the budget. It isn’t CG’d within an inch of its life; there appears to be some location shooting in the mix.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Hassenger
    There’s a sweetness to the movie’s multiple storylines about teenagers earnestly, supportively pining for each other—and a neutered prudishness, too, about how none of these 17-year-olds seem to think about sex for even a second.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 71 Jesse Hassenger
    More casual viewers’ mileage may vary on which stunts are laugh-out-loud funny and which are abjectly horrifying, and the rickety carnival rollercoaster ride works better when the other passengers—whether fellow audience members or the on-camera talent—are screaming and laughing along in equal measure.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 33 Jesse Hassenger
    It’s the extreme age-specificity and seeming low effort of Buck Wild that makes it more content than feature film.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 48 Jesse Hassenger
    It offers the bittersweet spectacle of a pretty loony movie trying its best to become a more conventional one. Maybe an outright boondoggle would have been more memorable.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Jesse Hassenger
    Campbell, Cox, and Arquette all have chances to shine, and Campbell’s rueful confidence even approaches something vaguely touching. But this is a crowded movie where the body count sometimes inspires relief rather than dread: Finally, some of these extra characters are being cleared out!
    • 59 Metascore
    • 83 Jesse Hassenger
    The wistful feelings it generates about a world allowed to keep moving coexist alongside an uneasy evocation of brain fog, an easy stand-in for either a zombified endemic state or a specific long-COVID symptom—take your pick. Whatever the original motivation, Leon appears to sense, after a couple of sweet slice-of-life capers, that you can’t keep walking and talking forever.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 67 Jesse Hassenger
    It’s heartening to see a big-ticket cartoon franchise end with the animation as its true star.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 49 Jesse Hassenger
    If playwright Theresa Rebeck, who receives co-writing and story credit, brought a fresher perspective to this material at some point, it has been slathered in screenwriterly varnish and a sense of take-charge female empowerment best described as EuropaCorpesque.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 59 Jesse Hassenger
    The story is never fully passed along to the younger character; this really is Fiennes’ movie all the way, and probably more interesting for it.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 83 Jesse Hassenger
    Coen’s version of Macbeth is a canny, fascinating hybrid of a theatrical sensibility and a cinematic translation, shot in ghostly monochrome.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 42 Jesse Hassenger
    The one performer in the ensemble capable of making this stuff sound like the good kind of bullshitting is Affleck
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Hassenger
    There’s liveliness in the conception of Rumble, knocked around and out by the demands of formulas no one has bothered to figure out.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 58 Jesse Hassenger
    Don’t Look Up is both types of blunt: It makes no bones about exactly what the filmmakers think of climate-change deniers and social-media distractions, and it repeatedly blunts the impact of its satire by calling its shots early, often, and loudly.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Hassenger
    The Lucy-Desi material that should be at the heart of the story never really pays off, as if it’s wandered off and found another, secret movie to inhabit.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Hassenger
    It seems questionable whether this was really intended as a movie in the first place.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 63 Jesse Hassenger
    For all of its limitations and points of departure from the previous series, though, Raccoon City maintains that lineage of B-movies made with skill.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 58 Jesse Hassenger
    The movie keeps enough of Richard’s messy past off screen to feel like a hagiography with a few concessions, rather than a true warts-and-all portrait.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Hassenger
    It’s harmless bad, not torture bad.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Hassenger
    Afterlife wants desperately to summon the spirit of watching the first movie back in 1984. It winds up ghoulish in the wrong way.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 58 Jesse Hassenger
    The movie is too vividly realized to be boring, but it spends a lot of time scrambling out of the gap between pulpy fun and serious allegory. It’s also hobbled by the fact that it’s very much, as the opening credits say, Part 1; no real resolution is offered by the end of its 155 minutes. It’s just half a movie.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Hassenger
    This intimate, four-character film has its own quiet rhythms, compatible with yet distinct from any perceived A24 house style. It’s a hybrid of unnerving, dread-based horror and genuine domestic drama. Are they naturally so different, anyway?
    • 82 Metascore
    • 83 Jesse Hassenger
    Even if C’mon C’mon occasionally feels like navel-gazing, it’s too open-hearted and generous of spirit to miss.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 83 Jesse Hassenger
    Campion’s take on the Western is an elegant, sometimes unnerving accomplishment.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 61 Jesse Hassenger
    Gyllenhaal is the whole show, and his irritable, driven, struggling character doesn’t exactly glorify his line of work. His unpleasantness gives the movie its edge, and perhaps also an unearned sense of gravitas.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Hassenger
    Todd Haynes obviously loves rock and roll, which makes it all the more impressive that he’s spent his career making movies about key figures in its history while avoiding the usual lionizing cliches.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 91 Jesse Hassenger
    Simon Rex gives a virtuoso performance.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Jesse Hassenger
    Though he’s been accused of re-carving the same dollhouse-scale miniatures over and over again, The French Dispatch finds Anderson continuing to fill out his increasingly elaborate skill set.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 58 Jesse Hassenger
    It’s a faster, wilder ride—and a choppier one, even as it moves primarily in circles.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Hassenger
    Whenever the movie seems prepared to dig a little deeper, it throws another self-actualization party in its own honor.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 58 Jesse Hassenger
    Only in fits and starts does Together capture the electricity of live performance.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 67 Jesse Hassenger
    Beyond considerable physical presence, Q brings touches of subtlety to a stock character; by the time she makes her eventual, inevitable reference to wanting to get out of the game, there’s a genuine weariness that feels earned enough to bypass the cliché.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 67 Jesse Hassenger
    The increasingly ornate violence (much of it taking place in a newer if no less creaky location) fuels an effective thrill machine, and if that machine can’t match the unexpected sweetness of the T-800’s relationship with John Connor, well, maybe that’s for the best.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 42 Jesse Hassenger
    As a babysitter, the movie’s not much different than a brief marathon of episodes. As a family bonding experience, it may qualify for adults as a mild form of psychological torture, presenting storylines that feel ready to wrap up at the 15-minute mark and then must continue on for another hour.

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