Joe Morgenstern

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Wall Street Journal
For 2,688 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 44% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 54% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 3.7 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Joe Morgenstern's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 62
Highest review score: 100 Drive My Car
Lowest review score: 0 Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,446 out of 2688
  2. Mixed: 742 out of 2688
  3. Negative: 500 out of 2688
2688 movie reviews
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    • 47 Metascore
    • 20 Joe Morgenstern
    Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
    Productions can go wrong. Certain elements can fail to ignite or cohere. Bad stuff happens all the time, especially in industrial enterprises of this magnitude, but usually there’s some good stuff to dilute the debacle. Not here, though.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Joe Morgenstern
    The Contractor
    This film is what it is, a particularly generic genre piece that the bean counters at a once-great studio must have had reason to believe would turn a profit, mostly in the foreign market. Very possibly it will.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 Joe Morgenstern
    Uncharted
    If less is more, Uncharted must be a masterpiece. It’s bloodless, heartless, joyless, sexless and, with one exception, charmless. The exception is Tom Holland, but what’s he doing in a slapdash action adventure adapted from a videogame? Making money, of course—gamers will flock.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 0 Joe Morgenstern
    Blacklight
    Blacklight isn’t much of a title. At the very least, though, it provides a useful hint that the movie isn’t much either. One could even argue that it’s not a movie at all, only a rusted-out recycling bin of ill-fitting themes, notions, poses, conventions, affectations, tropes, tropelets and inert snippets of dialogue from other movies.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 10 Joe Morgenstern
    The King's Daughter
    Instead of “The Shape of Water” this is a stream of drivel.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 Joe Morgenstern
    Don't Look Up
    A plausible premise, right? Yes, absolutely, but it’s squandered in a slapdash, scattershot sendup that turns almost everyone into nincompoops, trivializes everything it touches, oozes with self-delight, and becomes part of the babble and yammer it portrays.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 30 Joe Morgenstern
    The Matrix Resurrections
    The Matrix Resurrections is a recycling dump of murky effects, indifferent action and a crazily cluttered, relentlessly repetitive narrative.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 30 Joe Morgenstern
    Dear Evan Hansen
    The film suffers from a different condition, an emotional elephantiasis that is inexorable and ultimately terminal. What was by all accounts a modestly scaled production in all of its live-theater iterations has become a ponderous movie that turns earnest into maudlin, lyrical into lugubrious.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Joe Morgenstern
    Old
    For many reasons, none of them good, Old is in a class by itself. M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller-slasher-sci-fi-creep-out is peerlessly clumsy, silly and alarmed.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Joe Morgenstern
    Cruella
    Every joke is leaned on, as if it were some Shavian gem; every pregnant pause eventually aborts.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 20 Joe Morgenstern
    Here Today
    A comedy afflicted with terminal unfunniness, Here Today, which is playing in theaters, may well be gone tomorrow.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Joe Morgenstern
    Voyagers
    The film’s ponderous pace, its deficit of emotional energy, its ugly colors, its repetitive chases down more corridors than anyone has seen since “Last Year at Marienbad,” and its actors’ shared penchant for mumbling and scowling make those 108 minutes seem interminable.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Joe Morgenstern
    Godzilla vs. Kong
    It’s hard to believe that human minds conceived the story line of Godzilla vs. Kong—not because it’s so intricate, elegant or spiritually elevated, but because it’s so incoherent and idiotic.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Joe Morgenstern
    Cherry
    Cherry is a film for the age of information overload. It shows us more than we need to know, and leaves us feeling little or nothing about it.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Joe Morgenstern
    I Care a Lot
    I defer to no one in my admiration for Ms. Pike and her fellow cast members, but it’s no fun watching them soldier on through this heavy-handed and mean-spirited charade. I Care a Lot is a good title for the film that might have been. In the film that is, you can’t find anyone to care about.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 10 Joe Morgenstern
    Let Him Go
    The pace is deadly slow, the style old-fashioned and the acting devoid of spontaneity. These are skilled actors, but the writing is so threadbare — an important character from the novel has been eliminated — and the direction (by Thomas Bezucha, working from his own adaptation) is so lacking in nuance that genuine dramatic energy gets lost by the wayside during the road trip to North Dakota.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 20 Joe Morgenstern
    The Witches
    What was weirdly but deliciously scary has grown ponderously out of scale, even for witches at their malign worst.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 30 Joe Morgenstern
    The Personal History of David Copperfield
    Truth be told, though, the film, which Mr. Iannucci directed from a screenplay he wrote with Simon Blackwell, is blissed out on its own cleverness and ultimately exhausting.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 10 Joe Morgenstern
    Capone
    Mr. Hardy does have a few sensationally lurid moments, but the stuff of high drama isn’t there. Most of the time his character is a minimally animate object, scowling furtively and growling in a voice that evokes Marlon Brando, Lionel Stander and Stephen Hawking’s synthesizer.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 0 Joe Morgenstern
    Greed
    The film isn’t funny at all. It’s so didactic and dislikable that it took me a while to realize humor wasn’t its main goal.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 30 Joe Morgenstern
    Emma.
    What’s missing is nuance (the idea of Mr. Nighy’s performance, like others in the film, is wittier than what’s actually on screen); connective tissue (the story is semicoherent at best, a jumble of characters rushing to and fro); and depth of feeling.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 0 Joe Morgenstern
    The Call of the Wild
    Buck is so precocious, such a relentlessly clever construction, that he leaves nothing to our imagination. He’s the soul-free star of a movie that’s dead in the icy water.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 10 Joe Morgenstern
    The Rhythm Section
    Still, human doesn’t leap to mind, even though Ms. Lively works hard to inject blood in the veins of her feminist avenger. The Rhythm Section isn’t a human movie. It’s as cold as the waters of that loch, and nowhere near as lucid.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 10 Joe Morgenstern
    Dolittle
    Too much tumult and chaos, not enough dramatic focus; too many animals with clever names spouting glib one-liners, not enough simple human — or for that matter nonhuman — feeling. What a waste!
    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Joe Morgenstern
    The Good Liar
    The calculation couldn’t be clearer. Put two superb performers together — they don’t get superber than Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen — and you’re on your way to making an exceptional movie. Not so fast, though. The Good Liar is calculation from arch start to hollow finish.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 20 Joe Morgenstern
    Terminator: Dark Fate
    The plot makes no sense — time travel as multiverse Dada. Worse still, it renders meaningless the struggles that gave the first two films of the franchise an epic dimension.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Joe Morgenstern
    Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
    The big-horned heroine is played once again by Angelina Jolie in this dull sequel to the not-so-sparkling 2014 original.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 10 Joe Morgenstern
    Jojo Rabbit
    The film doesn’t lack for audacity, or ultimate purpose — it’s against hate and in favor of love. But the adaptation isn’t funny enough to sustain the style, which owes an overt debt to Mel Brooks and amounts to Springtime for Hitler Youth.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 20 Joe Morgenstern
    Gemini Man
    A star once beloved for his buoyant spirit has taken another bad turn in his career, and that’s painful to behold.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Joe Morgenstern
    Joker
    Think of Joker as both dental drill and Novocain. This origin story of the famously depraved smiler deals in pain from start to finish — pain that the hero, Arthur Fleck, first suffers, then inflicts — and Joaquin Phoenix plays the title role with piercing intensity. Yet the film, directed by Todd Phillips, leaves you numb. And glum. Days after the screening I was still under its stultifying spell.
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