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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    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Jesse Hassenger
    The Adults
    True to its small, sometimes nearly microscopic, scale, The Adults draws a perfect miniature portrait of a highly specific demographic: People obsessed with doing bits, making up songs, and perpetuating their own inside jokes who nonetheless never turned to a life in the performing arts.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 67 Jesse Hassenger
    The Last Stop in Yuma County
    Galluppi’s premise has ingenious simplicity.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 73 Jesse Hassenger
    Juror #2
    Eastwood, still so earnestly attuned to the mechanics of personal guilt and faltering systems, finds timelessness in that growing unease.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 69 Jesse Hassenger
    The Scout
    González-Nasser offers glimpses of what might make the work rewarding enough to stick with, and, with it, how elusive those feelings must be.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 58 Jesse Hassenger
    Love, Simon
    Love, Simon is touching as a gesture. As entertainment, it’s nothing Degrassi hasn’t done better.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 33 Jesse Hassenger
    No Good Deed
    By its end, No Good Deed becomes troublingly easy to read as a parable about the untrustworthiness of black men. The filmmakers may not have intended it that way, but the movie is so bereft of anything else that its forays into moralistic paranoia stick out.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 65 Jesse Hassenger
    The Long Walk
    The Long Walk reaches for something profound and disturbing, while at the same time wary of risking a bad stretch.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Hassenger
    Wreck-It Ralph
    Twice now Reilly and Silverman have helped to give a cartoon’s happy ending real emotional depth. And twice now, they’ve made their characters so endearing that some fans may feel oddly conflicted about the prospect of undoing those endings just to see them again.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Hassenger
    Extra Ordinary
    Some jokes may dissipate quickly, but its unusual warmth lingers in the air like a friendly ghost.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 58 Jesse Hassenger
    Only the Brave
    So squarely old-fashioned that it’s a little jarring to notice that many of the characters have smartphones.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Hassenger
    Elio
    Fun as it is, Elio just goes for the montage, eager to speak a universal language.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Jesse Hassenger
    Noble
    The real Noble accomplished a lot, but the movie insists on giving her achievements a mystical and mythical dimension...without the imagination to carry it off.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 48 Jesse Hassenger
    Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
    Fans of the series will likely bask in the warm feelings, particularly a handful of scenes following a one-year time jump toward the end, like Tolkien devotees reveling in final stretch of Return of the King; agnostics may regard this same section as if it’s, well, the final stretch of Return of the King, playing to the similarly unconverted.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 58 Jesse Hassenger
    Insidious: Chapter 2
    The techniques of the movie, then, are sound. Wan still moves his camera and composes his shots with a patience that belies his dank Saw origins. But the cinematography isn’t as virtuosic this time around.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 69 Jesse Hassenger
    Die My Love
    Die My Love is a powerful primal scream, only undercut by the question of whether it’s in love with the sound it’s making.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 67 Jesse Hassenger
    Is This Thing On?
    Is This Thing On? might come to its healing from an appropriately modest place, but there’s still a bit of actorly grandiosity under its skin.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 74 Jesse Hassenger
    Watcher
    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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 67 Jesse Hassenger
    When Marnie Was There
    As a children’s movie, it’s uncommonly sensitive and complicated, rooted in relationships rather than dazzling action. But adults may notice its simple poetry turning, after a while, to suds.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Hassenger
    Love at First Fight
    Even when it’s slowing down, Fight shows beguiling confidence in both its filmmaking and its characters—enough to make its smallest romantic moments feel significant.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 83 Jesse Hassenger
    The Invisible Man
    Moss also strengthens the notion that this is a monster movie unusually interested in looking past the toxic-male machinations of its famous character and toward the lasting horrors left in his wake. In other words, the stuff that previous movies, and real life, have sometimes tried to turn invisible.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Hassenger
    Searching
    As a thriller, Searching is both ruthlessly absorbing in the moment and relatively disposable as soon as it ends, sliding itself gracefully into the desktop recycling bin.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Jesse Hassenger
    Heretic
    There’s something rattling around, somewhere in Heretic, dealing with the power and limitations of belief, a movie that aspires to the deviousness of something like Barbarian, to which its setting bears the mildest of superficial resemblance. At some point, it escapes into the night without much trace.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Hassenger
    Ralph Breaks the Internet
    Like a lot of memes, Ralph Breaks The Internet appears proud both of its clear place within a system and its ability to stand outside and poke fun at that system.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 83 Jesse Hassenger
    Gemini
    As visually appealing as much of Gemini is, it wouldn’t work nearly so well without Lola Kirke playing Jill.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Jesse Hassenger
    Predator: Badlands
    The movie works in its moment. It seems to know that an obvious, crowd-pleasing helping of franchise nonsense at least needs to have some kind of meat, however synthetic it may secretly be.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 68 Jesse Hassenger
    You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!
    If You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah does have the feel of an expensive, well-appointed, but not exactly lushly-made family project – maybe even a coming-of-age gift to the younger Sandler daughter – at least it mounts a charm offensive, rather than treating its audience like a pack of easily manipulated rubes.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 58 Jesse Hassenger
    Girls Trip
    Before the opening credits have finished rolling, voice-over narration is lamenting the distance that can grow between even the tightest of friendships and hyping up the audience for a reunion of characters who have barely been introduced. It may be shameless, but it’s honest.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Jesse Hassenger
    Blitz
    Blitz often feels like a pitched battle between the conventions of big-canvas war recreation and McQueen’s attempt to evoke the stranger, less obviously narrative-driven chaos that happens when the battlefield descends on a major urban center from the sky.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 66 Jesse Hassenger
    The Room Next Door
    With his careful attention to the controlled emoting from both Swinton and Moore, so free of showy tearjerking or breakdowns, Almodóvar humanely and pointedly avoids turning The Room Next Door into an issue movie dedicated to assisted suicide. Then the movie backs into feeling like one anyway.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 58 Jesse Hassenger
    Companion
    The ongoing sight of a blood-soaked Thatcher finding herself through violent confrontations, essentially figuring out on the fly whether she’s a Terminator or a Final Doll, is diverting enough. Her melancholic presence hints at the trippier, more genuinely unsettling horror movie this could have pivoted into. It’s also a reminder of how facile the rest of the movie really is.
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