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 3.8 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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    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Joe Morgenstern
    United 93
    Quite remarkably, though, its clear-eyed view of an unprecedented American tragedy leaves us with emotions that audiences of those earlier days would readily recognize -- love of country, bottomless grief, an appreciation of life's preciousness and fragility. A film that can do this and also teach is to be cherished. And seen. It's time.
    • Wall Street Journal
    • 55 Metascore
    • 10 Joe Morgenstern
    Hitchcock
    Hitchcock rings false from start to finish.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Joe Morgenstern
    The Wind Rises
    What's on screen is a gorgeous grab bag of notions: ardent love, a salute to Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain," a bit of "Camille" and a lot — I mean a lot — of nuts-and-bolts stuff about nuts and bolts.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Joe Morgenstern
    Fantastic Mr. Fox
    A captivating entertainment for the holiday season and well beyond.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Joe Morgenstern
    Soul
    I think Soul will become a classic, but we must be patient too, because this stretch of the film is mostly illustrated notions, heavier on explanation than action. It’s very pretty—Klee-like figures and lots of pastel translucency—but not, perhaps inevitably, all that lively.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Joe Morgenstern
    Amores Perros
    One of the great films of our time, or any other.
    • Wall Street Journal
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Joe Morgenstern
    Osama
    Recreates the Taliban era with chilling details and startling beauty, and follows its terrified heroine on a journey that no child should have to take.
    • Wall Street Journal
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Joe Morgenstern
    The Salt of the Earth
    Stunning and, in the aggregate, almost overwhelming. This is not a feel-good travelogue, and Mr. Salgado has never pretended to be a cockeyed optimist.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Joe Morgenstern
    Turning Red
    The climax as a whole is cheerfully chaotic, if not over the top, but who cares about perfection when a movie is as good as this one?
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Joe Morgenstern
    Lingui, The Sacred Bonds
    Mr. Haroun is a sophisticated filmmaker who alternates bold, almost impressionistic strokes with quietly meditative passages, and his cinematographer, Mathieu Giombini, works in astonishing colors that can be bold and exquisitely subtle almost simultaneously.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Joe Morgenstern
    Last Chance Harvey
    A good chance to see two superb actors having their way with wafer-thin material.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Joe Morgenstern
    Raising Victor Vargas
    I loved this movie, and I wish it could be seen by all those kids who turn out every weekend for shoddy studio comedies that show them who they'd like to be. Raising Victor Vargas shows young lovers as they are.
    • Wall Street Journal
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Joe Morgenstern
    '71
    Yann Demange’s ’71, with an astonishing performance by Jack O’Connell, is big-screen storytelling stripped to its dramatic and visual essentials, and the result is nothing less than shattering.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Joe Morgenstern
    Blackfish
    More persuasively still, Blackfish — an Indian name for orcas — argues against the very concept of quasiamusement parks like SeaWorld that turn giant creatures meant for the wild into hemmed-in, penned-up entertainers.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Joe Morgenstern
    Corpse Bride
    This stop-action animated feature is downright sweet and tender, as well as all the other things we've come to expect from him -- funny, bizarre, graphically stunning and blithely necrophilic.
    • Wall Street Journal
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Joe Morgenstern
    Mike Wallace Is Here
    Avi Belkin’s documentary offers fascinating insights into what made its subject tick.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Joe Morgenstern
    Project Nim
    For the most part, though, the real people - the movers and shakers of Nim's world - are there to speak for themselves in the present as well as the past, and the main ones are, with a conspicuous exception, a sorry, self-serving lot.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Joe Morgenstern
    The Lighthouse
    That’s all there is, the two men and the lighthouse — plus a matched pair of brilliant performances, torrents of astonishing language, a slow crescendo of fateful sounds and a succession of hypnotic images, in black and white on an almost square screen, that lend a rock-solid sense of reality to a growing struggle for dominance.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Joe Morgenstern
    Spider-Man 2
    A lot of talent to lavish on a single movie, but the result is uncommonly smart for the genre, and not just smart but tremendously enjoyable.
    • Wall Street Journal
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Joe Morgenstern
    Saint Frances
    Verve! Lilt! They are precious qualities in movies. As soon as you encounter them you know that liftoff is likely. Saint Frances, newly available on demand, has them in an abundance.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Joe Morgenstern
    Avatar
    Much of the time, though, you're transfixed by the beauty of a spectacle that seems all of a piece. Special effects have been abolished, in effect, since the whole thing is so special.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Joe Morgenstern
    20th Century Women
    What makes this droll, darting story about a loose group of family and friends so moving? The answer lies partly in its tone. Mr. Mills seems to have thrown everything he could think of into the mix, dramatic unities be damned, but suffused it all with a poetic sense of life’s goofiness, solemnity and evanescence.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Joe Morgenstern
    Pina
    The images captured by the film - dancers in theatrical sets, dancers in surreal exterior settings - are deeply scary for their loneliness and pain, and crazily thrilling for the intensity of their joy.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Joe Morgenstern
    Animal Kingdom
    A phenomenal debut feature with a terrific title, David Michôd's Animal Kingdom is both a study in Darwinian survival-in this case survival of the shrewdest-and a group portrait of ruthless predators in the underworld of Melbourne, Australia.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Joe Morgenstern
    Hugo
    Visually Hugo is a marvel, but dramatically it's a clockwork lemon.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Joe Morgenstern
    The LEGO Movie
    The Lego Film has a specialness all its own. There's never been a hodgepodge quite like it.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Joe Morgenstern
    Gloria
    With someone else in the central role, Gloria might have been cloyingly sentimental or downright maudlin. With Ms. García on hand, it's a mostly convincing celebration of unquenchable energy.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Joe Morgenstern
    Drag Me to Hell
    This film is cunningly crafted in every detail--direction, script, performances, comic timing, special effects--from thunderous start to delicious finish.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Joe Morgenstern
    Spider
    The most elegantly crafted and confidently directed of all his (Cronenberg's) films, it's a calm, chilling portrait of a blighted soul and, just as calmly but quite stunningly, an evocation of the thought processes behind the blight.
    • Wall Street Journal
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Joe Morgenstern
    Seymour: An Introduction
    More than a musical offering, it’s a study in boundless passion, plus a wellspring of wisdom about art and life from a man who sees no dividing line between the one and the other.
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