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 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. Positive: 362 out of 801
  2. Mixed: 370 out of 801
  3. Negative: 69 out of 801
801 movie reviews
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    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Jesse Hassenger
    Shortcomings
    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
    Cat Person
    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
    One Fine Morning
    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
    The Wandering Earth II
    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
    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
    Alice, Darling
    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
    Missing
    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
    Plane
    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
    The Pale Blue Eye
    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
    Emancipation
    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
    Devotion
    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
    Troll
    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
    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
    The People We Hate at the Wedding
    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
    R.I.P.D. 2: Rise of the Damned
    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
    The Estate
    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
    The Inspection
    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
    She Said
    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
    Armageddon Time
    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
    Scarlet
    As-is, Scarlet is a beautiful loll, content with its self-made magic.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 55 Jesse Hassenger
    Hellraiser
    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
    Aftersun
    In its gentle, modest way, Aftersun might well break your heart.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 67 Jesse Hassenger
    Master Gardener
    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
    Till
    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
    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
    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
    Blonde
    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
    Confess, Fletch
    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
    Brahmastra Part One: Shiva
    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
    Samaritan
    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.
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