Jessica Winter

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Village Voice
For 266 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 25% higher than the average critic
  • 0% same as the average critic
  • 75% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 17.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Jessica Winter's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 49
Highest review score: 90 Sweet Sixteen
Lowest review score: 0 Hide and Seek
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 65 out of 266
  2. Mixed: 129 out of 266
  3. Negative: 72 out of 266
266 movie reviews
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    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Winter
    Ned Kelly
    The film marks a welcome departure from the usual rah-rah machismo of the semi-nationalist action adventure, but Jordan never escapes the mighty shadow of "The Thin Red Line"--from the grace-note inserts of exotic birds, snakes, and foliage to Ledger's laconic, sometimes haiku-like voice-over to Klaus Badelt's embarrassingly Zimmer-derivative score.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Jessica Winter
    The Acid House
    There's so little leavening humor here, and so much physical and emotional violence visited upon the already abject, that the film seems as pointless as the wasted lives it purports to examine.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Jessica Winter
    Langrishe Go Down
    Aidan Higgins's novel undergoes a choppy, perplexing script adaptation by Harold Pinter (who enjoys a soused, belligerent cameo), further muddied by non sequitur editing inserts. Imogen and Otto's happenstance affair holds little intrigue or surprise.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Jessica Winter
    Waydowntown
    With wit and empathy to spare, waydowntown acknowledges the silent screams of workaday inertia but stops short of indulging its characters' striving solipsism.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 20 Jessica Winter
    Say It Isn't So
    Elicits not the voluptuous discomfort stirred by the boys' (Peter and Bobby Farrelly) best corporeal shenanigans but creeping embarrassment for everyone on screen.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Winter
    Burnt Money
    Burnt Money arranges a triumphant martyrdom for its bad boys -- a redemptive blaze of glory, dozens of faceless corpses notwithstanding.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Jessica Winter
    Broken Flowers
    With elegant restraint the film subtly intimates the wintry dead end-twilight years bereft of love, partner, or vocation-that may be in store for its aged lover man. (Payne's "About Schmidt" did too, when not gorging snidely on idiot Americana.)
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Winter
    Merry Christmas
    Carion is no Jean Renoir, but he does strike an appealingly low key of tender, faintly goofy affinity between the combatants.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 10 Jessica Winter
    Body Shots
    Vomitous.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Jessica Winter
    Once Upon a Time in the Midlands
    There are pages missing from this fable: Meadows reports that his financiers asked him to cut one-quarter of his original script just before production began, and his fondness for long takes sits uneasily beside the apparent gaps in the narrative.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Jessica Winter
    Jabberwocky (re-release)
    The film itself is thinly conceived, except in the area of bodily misfunction. It plays like the murky B side to the immortal Gilliam-Jones epic "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Jessica Winter
    Riding in Cars with Boys
    Mistakes self-pitying embitterment for carry-on endurance, and manages to have its causality both ways.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Winter
    Morlang
    Penning's film applies too much force behind its hairpin turns, but broad scripting and acting are counterbalanced by crisp photography, shivery sound design, and well-chosen debts.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Winter
    About Adam
    Hudson is ebullient, never cutesy, and her accent stays in tune.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Jessica Winter
    Chutney Popcorn
    The director has a fitfully deployed gift for droll humor, but Chutney Popcorn mostly provides evidence that the ins and outs of the improvised multiparent family can be as prosaic as the nuclear Eisenhower model.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Jessica Winter
    Two Men Went to War
    Two Men is slow and sweet as warm pudding, but Cranham and Derek Jacobi (as one of Churchill's intelligence officers) both add a generous, wholehearted gravitas the film might have thought to ask for in the first place.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Jessica Winter
    B. Monkey
    B. Monkey is crawling with smart actors saying things they don't quite mean.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Jessica Winter
    Unfaithful
    Casual familiarity with Lyne's oeuvre is all you need to predict the major plot contortion.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Jessica Winter
    I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
    Jones's documentary, named for the opening song on Foxtrot, is most effective as a poison-pen missive to Corporate Rock.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Jessica Winter
    Touching the Void
    Unexpectedly bridges genres -- it's a buddy movie, a horror story, a boy's-own adventure, and a near metaphysical meditation on the limits of human endurance.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Winter
    The Flower of Evil
    Not to imply that our Claude's gone native, but here his unabiding fascination with bourgie-style repetition compulsion bears some resemblance to sympathy.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Jessica Winter
    Last Party 2000
    Hoffman has no particular argument to make, and neither does the movie -- just befuddled disgust with The System in general and the right wing in particular.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Jessica Winter
    Hostage
    Bruce looks hot and underplays handsomely as always, but Hostage is a steaming pile of siege clichés and screaming unlikelihoods.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Jessica Winter
    The Affair of the Necklace
    L'affaire du collier was a convoluted palace intrigue that Shyer and screenwriter John Sweet don't bother to unpack, crafting instead an endless illustrated Harlequin paperback of mawkish backstory and corset-popping purple prose.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Jessica Winter
    Out of Season
    There are many dramatic possibilities in an interracial lesbian romance set in a provincial town, but Out of Season focuses on the women's fears of commitment, which would be fine - even refreshing - if they seemed to, well, like each other or something.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Jessica Winter
    Wicker Park
    Dippy romantic thriller.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 20 Jessica Winter
    Sex with Strangers
    Choppy, overlong documentary.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 20 Jessica Winter
    Into My Heart
    Anemic.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Jessica Winter
    Our Lady of the Assassins
    The performances can be stiff, but a kinetic mix of anxiety, dread, and numbed resignation is always palpable.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Jessica Winter
    The Motorcycle Diaries
    Lovely to look at but insipid.
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