Wesley Morris

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Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, The New York Times
For 1,889 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 51% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 46% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 5.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Wesley Morris' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 How to Survive a Plague
Lowest review score: 0 Lost Souls
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,126 out of 1889
  2. Mixed: 439 out of 1889
  3. Negative: 324 out of 1889
1889 movie reviews
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    • 60 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Body of War
    To say the least, the film is awkward, like a piece of badly assembled Ikea furniture. Still, editor Bernadine Colish weaves together all that C-SPAN footage into a disturbing procedural indictment. Legislators use the same language - often the president's - to justify the rush to war. The repetition is comical until it's scary: They're parroting.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    A Dangerous Method
    This is the best thing Mortensen's ever done. His slow, paunchy, hairy Freud has a cavalier authority and a capacity for drollery. He's also seductively wise in a way that makes both Fassbender and Knightley, as very good as they are, also seem uncharacteristically callow.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
    [Cuaron]'s a visionary and crafty storyteller who rewards your patience, not with twists in the plot, though the movie has its share, but with pure feeling. Deploying wit, grace, and artistry, he's whisked a kid flick into adolescence.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Boys Don't Cry
    Boys Don't Cry's intensity sneaks up on you like a snake.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
    As Apichatpong erases, once again, the barriers between the celestial and terrestrial, he also does away with the cordons between film genres - this is sci-firomancefamilyreligiousthrillercomedyporn. No video service has a section for that. The only suitable shelf is the one in your soul.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
    The film's central drama is not between the former secretary and the filmmaker. It's between McNamara and history.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Mayor of the Sunset Strip
    Ultimately, Bingenheimer seems underwhelmed with himself. The people who know him say, in the movie, that he's a relic. Mayor of the Sunset Strip makes heartbreakingly clear what a glorious relic Bingenheimer is.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Taking Sides
    Proves acutely subtle. But its question of what we forgive art in the face of atrocity and immorality is one for the ages.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Oasis
    Oasis is that rare miraculous whirlwind romance that moves from attempted rape to reverence without kicking up a lot of dust.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    21 Jump Street
    We have lots of terminology for what happens when two male stars appear to have the platonic hots for each other. The genre is called bromance. The feelings are bromantic. The orientation is bromosexuality. What Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum have in 21 Jump Street scrambles, transcends, and explodes all of that.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    All About Lily Chou-Chou
    Awash in strangeness, a poem that details what it's like to be 13 at the end of a millennium.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.
    Segues from the merely quirky into the bizarrely unthinkable.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Almost Famous
    More often than not the film casts an infectious, evocative spell.
    • San Francisco Examiner
    • 67 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Fight Club
    It's the rawest, most hot-blooded, provocatively audacious, dangerous movie to come of out Hollywood this year.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    American Movie
    Hysterical-depressing, vividly sobering.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Chicken Run
    Imbued with infectious pluck. It's also a lucid, competent, titanically entertaining movie loaded with workable gags.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    The 11th Hour
    The word bears repeating, so everyone from Andrew Weil to Stephen Hawking to Mikhail Gorbachev is here to speak the still-inconvenient truth. The filmmaking, however, is far more relentless than in that Oscar-winning Al Gore slide show.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Dick
    Madhouse satire manages to disarm the second you realize it's laughing with you - and sometimes harder.
    • San Francisco Examiner
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Deep Blue
    A riveting and sobering way to spend a Saturday afternoon.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Hell and Back Again
    Dennis's film attempts something few documentaries have: to inhabit the psyche of its subject.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Taxi to the Dark Side
    The film quickly becomes one of the most powerful, carefully researched investigations of the moral-legal side effects of current American military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's terrifying in a way that sneaks up on you.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    The Crime of Padre Amaro
    Bernal, with his sweet man-boy looks, makes Padre Amaro's portrait of corruption all the more flabbergasting in its irony.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Humanité
    Staggering, gorgeously ambiguous.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Let the Right One In
    The beauty of Let the Right One In resides in the way the horror remains grounded in a tragic kind of love.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
    If there's a granddaddy of breezy situationalism, it's probably Buñuel.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Lucie Aubrac
    No-fat filmmaking aided by Berri's muscular formalism that, here, occasionally assumes the gritty focus of a taut, action thriller.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Notorious C.H.O.
    Her face is as much a part of her comedic form as her observations are. It's an amazing slapstick instrument, creating a scrapbook of living mug shots.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Old Joy
    Kurt and Mark's trip to those hot springs is a figurative return to Eden. Anyone who's had a disillusioning reunion with a moony old friend knows what Mark discovers: They're too old to stay that innocent. None of this hit me until after the movie ended. But it hit me hard: You can't go home again.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    L'Enfant (The Child)
    The arrival of closing credits feels like a trap door. The film is over, and, suddenly, we have to leave these people. The directors make no guarantee for their futures, but the strength of their filmmaking inspires you to hope for the best.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    The Central Park Five
    If the second hour or so isn't as strong as the first, it's because the filmmaking fails to rise to the injustice that's befallen its subjects since their exoneration. It can't, really.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Wendy and Lucy
    Wendy Carroll is a character we rarely see in movies anymore, a woman left alone with her thoughts. That a moviegoer would care what she's thinking testifies to the power in Williams's brand of solitude.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    The Trials of Henry Kissinger
    In ''Trials,'' Hitchens is almost endearing, stalking Kissinger from one event to the next like a bleary-eyed Michael Moore.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Silver Linings Playbook
    Cooper gives the performance just the right lunacy and doubt.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    A Prophet
    It’s imperfect, but it’s daring, bold, and from a director who isn’t scared of anything.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    The Spirit of the Beehive
    This is a modest marvel of grace and framing that unfolds with the patience of a cloud and is driven more by wonder than pure emotion. It doesn't have the exuberance of Francois Truffaut 's "Small Change." Instead, it's that movie's antonym, yet just as wondrous.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Keane
    If Keane is a downer, it's a stupendously well-conceived one.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    A History of Violence
    The film has the perverse intelligence of Cronenberg's other movies. It's not his best, but it is certainly his most accessible, least stagy work, obeying the laws of chronology and serving up characters whom we recognize as people.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Django Unchained
    The movie Quentin Tarantino has written and directed is corkscrewed, inside-out, upside-down, simultaneously clear-eyed and completely out of its mind.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Daughter from Danang
    That commendable sense of balance, which Dolgin and Franco use to approach this family reunion, ultimately makes the finished product devastating.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    The History Boys
    A shrewdly acted, bittersweet comedy.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    High Fidelity
    Like laughing into a mirror for 113 minutes.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Downeast
    An elegy for a vanishing emblem of what once characterized this country's vitality.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    25th Hour
    It's deeply stylized, but there's an accompanying patience and gravity that are hard to shake. They're the architecture of a lingering, unsentimental sadness.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Ratatouille
    All the voice work here is excellent, especially Oswalt's. He sounds like Paul Giamatti but with a greater capacity for confidence.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    I'm Not Scared
    Watching it is like being lost in somebody's richly moody campfire story -- it's so good, in fact, that only once it's over do you realize you've been holding your marshmallows too close to the flame.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Mafioso [re-release]
    Mafioso is the missing link in the mob movie arc.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Cinemania
    What Christlieb and Kijak do so well is keeping these folks from not seeming like loons.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    The Saddest Music in the World
    Maddin's movies are easy, too. Point your eyes at the screen; the magic follows.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams
    Like a whacked pinata, it spills over with treasures - and one of the best things to fall out is Steve Buscemi, doing a riotously meek variation on the mad-scientist-with-cracked-lenses-and-lab-coat bit.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Bloody Sunday
    The film is conducted in a delirious cinema-verite style; most of what you see has a brutal, you-are-there immediacy. You're not merely watching history, you're engulfed by it.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Service (Serbis)
    Merry, filthy, unstoppably hormonal, Serbis feels very much like the sort of movie that happens when no one is minding the store.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Jersey Girl
    Eloquent and unapologetically cute.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Synecdoche, New York
    I can't pretend to know fully what Charlie Kaufman is up to in Synecdoche, New York, with all the doubled characters, dreamy reenactments, comical minutiae, and personal unhappiness. But I got a great deal of pleasure out of watching him mount his fantasia about an artist suffering not simply for his art, but because of it.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    My Wife Is an Actress
    The film's most endearing trait is that these people sincerely love movies, and they truly love their own idiosyncrasies. And is that not the greatest love of all?
    • Boston Globe
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Wesley Morris
    Nosferatu
    Setting aside some gratuitous jump scares, Eggers has now made a Dracula movie that’s more than an exercise, more than an assertion of talent. There’s a vision at work.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Wesley Morris
    Wham!
    Nothing here’s overthought or pumped up. To invoke the words of a different beacon of catchiness, “Wham!” is a teenage dream. You could drink it from a coconut.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Wesley Morris
    Miss Americana
    Wilson has captured Swift at a convincing turning point, ready, perhaps, to say a lot more.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Elevator to the Gallows
    The film's look makes a divine accessory for its music, which Miles Davis composed. There's not even 20 minutes of it in the film, yet it still defines the atmosphere, transforming a crime yarn into a bebop noir.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
    So all the handsome shots that turn the city into a toyland and all the superb editing and vibrant art direction - all the formal tricks Daldry uses to whip you up and work you over - risk being too much. After 45 minutes, it can feel like junk on a sundae. But the movie has a human coup.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    My Afternoons with Margueritte
    The film isn't about the actor's intelligence. It's about his emotional radiance.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Crazy/Beautiful
    Even when the movie is bad -- it's addictively so.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Carancho
    Carancho is a particularly jaw-dropping example of what this great, cunning city - on film, anyway - is capable of: an exhilarating bummer.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    The Science of Sleep
    This pop-up book of a film is an ideal arrangement between director and star.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Time and Tide
    At its most compulsive, this is the only action flick you'll need this summer.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Bring It On
    An army of rolled abs and their owners give the state of American race relations a beginner's workout.
    • San Francisco Examiner
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    House of Sand
    It's a grand outdoor spectacle (the only real interiors are within tents, and those are hard to come by) and a perfectly juicy melodrama.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Eat Pray Love
    Is it a romantic comedy? Is it a chick flick? This is silly, since, in truth, it's neither. It's simply a Julia Roberts movie, often a lovely one.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    The End of the Affair
    The End of the Affair's masterfully heartbroken final scene is scarier in its nightmarishly wry suggestion of ill fate than anything that ever happened on Elm Street.
    • San Francisco Examiner
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Eternity and a Day
    Death doesn't knock in Theo Angelopoulos' Eternity and a Day; it raps softly, sitting patiently in the waiting room of its terminally ill poet's life until he's ready to let it in.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Shall We Dance
    Gere is a pleasure, smiling and spinning and high-fiving his two classmates -- played by Bobby Cannavale and Omar Miller -- and the movie is happy and extremely likable.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Cassandra's Dream
    The movie is actually a softer treatment of the similar sibling anguish in Sidney Lumet's "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead." Allen isn't enough of a great dark artist to pull off a full-scale tragedy the way Lumet does.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Bowfinger
    Priceless enough to flush "Metro," "Dr. Dolittle" and "Holy Man" from memory.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Sylvia
    At heart, Sylvia is constructed as a psychological suspense film framed around the ambiguities of Hughes's infidelity and Plath's resulting paranoia. So at its strangest, the movie is a potboiler.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Flicka
    The best parts of Flicka are its pinch-me optimism and its old-fashioned-movie flourishes.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
    In addition to being his filthiest, this is his most free-associative movie. In spite of and because of its homemade look, it's also his funniest.
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