Jesse Hassenger

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Consequence, Decider, IGN, Paste Magazine, Polygon, The A.V. Club, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, The Verge, The Wrap, TheWrap
For 802 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. Positive: 363 out of 802
  2. Mixed: 370 out of 802
  3. Negative: 69 out of 802
802 movie reviews
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    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Jesse Hassenger
    Leo
    Leo looks like the kind of standard big-studio animation Netflix has been regularly knocking off, but it’s far funnier, and more unexpectedly sweet, than the average kid-targeted cartoon. In fact, Robert Smigel, Adam Sandler, and their collaborators have made one of the funniest movies of the year that doubles as a love letter to the complexities of teaching kids, in or out of the classroom.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Jesse Hassenger
    Blue Collar
    Pryor has a lot of funny moments in Blue Collar, especially in the first half or so, when the movie tends toward angry comedy.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 83 Jesse Hassenger
    The Edge of Seventeen
    Despite its upstart distributor and relatively low-key cast, it’s an unabashedly mainstream movie; compared with edgier, more indie versions of onscreen American youth, it might even look a little pat.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Jesse Hassenger
    28 Years Later
    As with the first film, the look of 28 Years Later is key to its effectiveness.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 91 Jesse Hassenger
    Red Rocket
    Simon Rex gives a virtuoso performance.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 67 Jesse Hassenger
    Their Finest
    But if Their Finest is a little stodgy and tasteful, it also possesses Scherfig’s trademark wistfulness.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 58 Jesse Hassenger
    The White Tiger
    There’s little of the intimacy of Bahrani’s best work, and while the book has been described as dark-humored, the movie feels more like a typical prestige adaptation, hitting the key themes and scenes without finding an independent tone. Despite its obvious currency, it’s more yesterday than tomorrow.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 59 Jesse Hassenger
    The Mother
    Lopez indulges a different form of movie-star vanity than simply making herself over as an unstoppable woman of action. The movie pretends to conceal her mothering sensitivity, but it’s actually flaunting the same maudlin old-man sentimentality that drives so many Liam Neeson vehicles, minus the genuine anguish Neeson can usually summon on cue.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 91 Jesse Hassenger
    Rebel Ridge
    Rebel Ridge isn’t a lecture on civil asset forfeiture; it’s as elementally satisfying as a great Western. That’s really the genre Saulnier lands on here, complete with a moral clarity about its violence.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 83 Jesse Hassenger
    No Sudden Move
    Though the movie ultimately minds its business about a lot of the personal affairs it brings up, it imbues its characters with a bounty of implied off-screen life. No Sudden Move is somehow both a stylized genre exercise and part of a larger, less rigidly controlled tapestry that reveals itself as it goes.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Hassenger
    Pavements
    It all threatens to resemble a hat on a hat, possibly worn by a snake eating its own tail. Yet Perry isn’t really going for a trippy hall-of-mirrors approach, even when he cuts together multiple performances of songs so that Pavements past, present, and fake-ass trade verses on their catalog of ’90s non-hits.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Hassenger
    Locked Down
    If you’re looking for two hours of not-quite-escape, the solipsism of Locked Down has real charm and entertainment value, not least in its willingness to be a movie about adults — and for adults. If the specter of a global pandemic haunts the material more than it enriches, well, it’s not alone, is it?
    • 76 Metascore
    • 58 Jesse Hassenger
    King Richard
    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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 58 Jesse Hassenger
    The Amateur
    It’s not that The Amateur explores moral gray areas; it just swirls generic and weirdly apolitical spy-movie elements around until all that’s left is a watery blur, accidentally paying faithful tribute to studio mediocrities past.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 68 Jesse Hassenger
    Oh, Hi!
    The opening of the movie has some perfectly timed visually-delivered laughs, like an early car scene involving an accidental failure to reverse, and the bottle-episode staginess of later scenes limits the visual invention. Still, by this point you’ve boarded the ride, and Oh, Hi! keeps you captive in a way that Iris only dreams of: by sheer force of Gordon’s personality.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Jesse Hassenger
    The French Dispatch
    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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Hassenger
    Profile
    No matter where he goes, even when he’s working in a subgenre he helped build, Bekmambetov loses himself in the pixels.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 91 Jesse Hassenger
    Tully
    Though Davis makes Tully convincing both as a human being and as a mysterious godsend, it’s Theron whose work is absolutely vital to Tully’s success.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 55 Jesse Hassenger
    Final Cut
    The dead air in the movie’s opening section is intentional, yet there are moments where Final Cut, the movie you’re actually watching, feels off – not through outright incompetence, but the eerie, imitative quality of a too-soon-too-little remake. Call it undead air.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Hassenger
    Spy
    Spy, similarly, doesn’t exactly send up James Bond or Jason Bourne espionage thrillers, but it places McCarthy in the middle of the action while subverting the traditionally male domination of that arena.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Hassenger
    Send Help
    As much as some of the imagery feels like Raimi playing the hits, Send Help also suggests a later-career shift for the filmmaker, one where his comic-book throwbacks run into (or over?) contemporary obstacles without losing their go-for-broke loopiness. It can get messy. Good for him.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 83 Jesse Hassenger
    Blindspotting
    Diggs, Casal, and Estrada are all walking on a high wire here, requiring a balance so delicate that it may not be visible to some of the audience until they have to decide for themselves whether Blindspotting’s leap-of-faith climax works.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 69 Jesse Hassenger
    Together
    Together doesn’t succumb to the dreaded “metaphorror” effect, where every plot point and character serves a clearly coded metaphorical purpose. It’s often grimly funny, with the actors (and their talented physical doubles) throwing themselves into their roles.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 58 Jesse Hassenger
    Late Fame
    Even Dafoe, seemingly incapable of a false note or forced delivery, ultimately must fall in line with the movie’s broad-arc predictability.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Hassenger
    The LEGO Batman Movie
    If The Lego Movie was a delightful tribute to the multifaceted experiences of playing with Legos, this movie is like one of the licensed sets that inspired it: Less essential, more market-driven, and still irresistible for certain kids, fans, and nerds.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 83 Jesse Hassenger
    Trainwreck
    Unlike many comic vehicles and just as many big-city romances, it’s a real, and ultimately rewarding, piece of work. A big-studio romantic comedy infused with actual human feeling is just as rare an accomplishment as the perfect comedy sketch.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Jesse Hassenger
    Sister Midnight
    Kandhari’s film emerges as an off-kilter treatise on identity, and what cultural, social, and physiological elements can shape it, even well into adulthood.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 58 Jesse Hassenger
    A House of Dynamite
    Despite some white-knuckle moments, Dynamite slackens with each runthrough of its perma-climactic 15 minutes. In the world of global catastrophes, Bigelow increasingly resembles an unwitting tourist, just like the rest of us.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 58 Jesse Hassenger
    The Good Liar
    Instead of deepening his material, Condon has made an unsuccessful fling of a movie: fun for a while, but trying to get as far as it can by leaving crucial material off of its profile.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Jesse Hassenger
    They Cloned Tyrone
    On a scene-by-scene basis, though, They Cloned Tyrone is well-crafted entertainment, buoyed by its three major performances.
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