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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    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Wesley Morris
    Tadpole
    Written in wisps and watery double-entendres by Heather McGowan and Niels Mueller, and the movie is so benign that its proceedings are beside the point.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Everyone Else
    Everyone Else is not about hurricanes and earthquakes and knives in the back. It's about private, emotional phenomena: the tiny tremors and imperceptible shifts that bring a couple closer together or drive them apart, almost without their noticing.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    La Moustache
    Comes on as both a rebuke to male vanity and a chic metaphor for midlife panic.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 100 Wesley Morris
    Cookie's Fortune
    Meanders around Holly Springs, Mississippi, with the fuzzy benevolence of a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Wesley Morris
    Jerichow
    As ridiculous German suspense dramas go, you could do worse than Jerichow.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 100 Wesley Morris
    Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One
    This is a movie from the past that's also eerily of a piece with the film culture of now and tomorrow.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Wesley Morris
    The Good Girl
    Despite Aniston's hard work, Good Girl could be better.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Intolerable Cruelty
    The film is often at odds with itself as a sincere work of romantic comedy, as Wilder's sometimes were, too. Nonetheless, it's determined to keep Clooney's considerable comedic skills front and center. He's never been looser, sexier, or more antic.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Tropic Thunder
    Despite its contradictions, the film stayed with me after I left the theater. It's frivolous. But it's also powerfully surreal.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 38 Wesley Morris
    Red Eye
    A one-trick action thriller that feels like a poor cousin of an episode of ''24." Call it ''12."
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    My Brother Is an Only Child
    Ripe, ferociously acted comic drama.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Wesley Morris
    Bestiaire
    The images are meant to accumulate shame, and they do. But they also might be too much.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Benjamin Smoke
    It's the hypnotic long-form music video Smoke never got to make.
    • San Francisco Examiner
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Deep Blue
    A riveting and sobering way to spend a Saturday afternoon.
    • 15 Metascore
    • 12 Wesley Morris
    College
    The grime, filth, slop, vomit, and crotch-nibbling pigs double all too easily as a recipe for this movie's failure. It hasn't been made so much as excreted.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Young Adult
    Diablo Cody wrote Young Adult, and it's an improvement over "Juno," her first script.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer
    Aileen is Broomfield working compassionately. Perhaps it's only because he knows he can't save Wuornos that he can offer her as she might have been: part wounded animal, part self-destructive martyr, and all tragedy.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    I don't think I've seen an actor do more with deadpan expressions than Mara does in this movie. Her face doesn't move but, whether she's tasing a man or standing in front of a mirror watching a cigarette dangle from her mouth, we respond to her.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Wesley Morris
    Shadow Boxers
    What makes Shadow Boxers special is how Bankowsky restores the woman's touch that always seems intentionally excised from coverage of the sport without comprising their participation in the sport.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Wesley Morris
    The Great Dance: A Hunter's Story
    Moreover, what the film lacks in temporal credibility, it amply makes up for in sheer rawness -- the rawness being literal.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Wesley Morris
    Warrior
    This is bench-press melodrama, and it's as manipulative as anything Bette Davis or Jane Wyman ever starred in. You can't abide the shamelessness of any of it.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Wesley Morris
    Sleepwalk with Me
    Birbiglia, who's from Shrewsbury, has done some wonderful things with awkwardness. I'm sad to report that Sleepwalk With Me isn't one of them.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Wesley Morris
    Requiem for a Dream
    It's one of the most beautifully unpleasant movies ever made - its reverse charge being that it is no fun at all.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Wesley Morris
    Separate Lies
    Fellowes is so desperate for us to like these people that, despite how guilty everyone seems, there's scarcely any pleasure in the film for us.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Earth Days
    The rare ecological documentary that doesn’t nag us to run out of the movie theater and change the world.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Wesley Morris
    Roman de gare
    The 70-something director puts us back in luxury's lap with Roman de Gare, which looks just like the high-roller ads you get in the first 40 pages of Vogue or Vanity Fair but feels vaguely more emotional. Lelouch wants to tie a Hermès scarf around our hearts.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Carandiru
    Angry and tragic, Carandiru is finally, in its own way, uplifting.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Hukkle
    There's scarcely any dialogue, and the "hukkle" sound is universal enough to make subtitles unnecessary and to please an audience of any age and attention span.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 25 Wesley Morris
    What Happens in Vegas
    When it was over I felt vaguely embarrassed. I wasn't just leaving a movie theater. I was taking a walk of shame.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Wesley Morris
    Beyond the Gates
    Sadly, this is the sort of movie in which the white Europeans do all the talking and worrying with each other. The Africans, for the most part, are either terrified, cowering, wincing masses or corpses strewn in the dirt.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Strongman
    By the end, you don't entirely understand either of these people, but you come to understand why they need each other.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Aliens of the Deep
    Stirs excitement about exploration of all kinds.
    • 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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    The Way We Get By
    Watching them issue hugs produces an involuntary response. You want to hug them, too.
    • Boston Globe
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)
    The title is Portuguese for "send a bullet" and the clever American tag line is "the rich steal from the poor; the poor steal the rich."
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    The Descent
    A cult classic is born.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Wesley Morris
    Sunshine
    Szabo doesn't bring the film to its senses until just past the halfway point.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Yossi & Jagger
    What the movie lacks in ambition, originality, and grit, it makes up for in pure feeling.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Wesley Morris
    Year of the Dog
    Shannon gives the movie its inner life. Maybe the movie will give her back her comedy career.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Wesley Morris
    The Tao of Steve
    The vibe is acoustic-cafe: cute, catchy and ironic given its wimpy point of view.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Hamlet
    Hamlet finds in Hawke's greatish performance a Great Dane for this, or any other, modern moment.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Swimming Pool
    Very much a genre picture, relying on notions of suspense, surprise, and comeuppance. Indeed, at the center of this movie is a question of whether what we're seeing is really to be believed.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Wesley Morris
    Sweet and Lowdown
    Woody Allen's questionable toe-tapping faux-documentary.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Wesley Morris
    Narc
    Frustratingly, Carnahan barely trusts his storytelling to keep our attention long enough to get through a scene without some grisly cutaway -- a gun to the head, the writhing wounded.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 100 Wesley Morris
    A Moment of Innocence
    Turns into something like a screwball farce, an intimate, self-aware one.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Wesley Morris
    Vicky Cristina Barcelona
    Fitfully good.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Lost Embrace
    Has a novelist's human touch. Were it a book, it would go somewhere on the shelf with Jonathan Safran Foer and early Philip Roth.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Wesley Morris
    Countdown to Zero
    An earnest, alarmist new docu-plea for nuclear disarmament, concludes with an orgy of such destruction. Mushroom clouds. Infernal white light. Obliterating energy blasts. It's all here, and mostly beyond the pale.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Wesley Morris
    The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
    At its most profound, Benjamin Button isn't about anything more important than Pitt's very handsomeness, which, for a surprising stretch of time, is a wonderful subject for study.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Turn Me On, Dammit!
    What's refreshing about the Danish movie is how direct the girls are.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Wesley Morris
    Better Living Through Circuitry
    Fans likely to rave about Living.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Millennium Actress
    The movie's narrative can be taxingly ornate, but there's something beautiful about its metaphorical conflation of politics and glamour, the real and the fictional.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Wesley Morris
    Prisoner of Paradise
    While Prisoners of Paradise gives us but an impression of Gerron's state of mind, the film does a powerful job of showing us how deflated, small, and desperate this boisterous man had become.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Wesley Morris
    10 Things I Hate About You
    The movie's afraid of [Stiles], turning Kat from riot grrrrl to Solid Gold dancer in the time it takes to drop one Notorious B.I.G. song at that house party - which is why it's the Spam of processed teen movies.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Wesley Morris
    Merry Christmas
    It's a heart-warmer, a well-meaning movie that sets out to wring a modern message (and preferably some tears) from a famous but largely forgotten moment in history.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Heartbeats
    The good news is that the movie advertises Dolan's delirious visual talent.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 100 Wesley Morris
    eXistenZ
    Gets diagnosably schizo.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Wesley Morris
    Gunner Palace
    Works purely as a series of complex snapshots of the conflict in Iraq.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    The Skin I Live In
    The Skin I Live in is Almodóvar reaching back to his sickest, kinkiest self, and it's nice to see him trying to luxuriate in sleaze again.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Wesley Morris
    Curse of the Golden Flower
    As easy as this movie is to watch, it's artificially flavored. "Golden Flower" runs on crocodile tears and corn-syrup blood.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    The Science of Sleep
    This pop-up book of a film is an ideal arrangement between director and star.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 100 Wesley Morris
    Elephant
    The atmosphere is hypo-stylized, vividly generic and worse than real, like a doomy Frederick Wiseman documentary.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Love Songs
    Sings in the key of life.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Wesley Morris
    Doubt
    As a consideration of faith and propriety, the movie never managed to boil my blood or break my heart.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    The Hoax
    The only thing missing from The Hoax might be a couple of songs. It's that breezy and fleet a movie.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Outsourced
    A sweetly acted and neatly executed social comedy.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Fados
    As a production, Fados is pretty with its reflected surfaces and many projected images. But at times it hurts for the bite and texture of life outside that studio. For all the dolorous singing about and shots of streets, it'd be nice to hit one.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Wesley Morris
    My One and Only
    The movie has a jolly, half-remembered quality, as though it were adapted from a particularly rose-colored memoir.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Only Human
    A dinner-from-hell comedy about a pretty Jewish Spaniard who brings a nice Palestinian guy home to her outspoken Madrid family.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Wesley Morris
    21 Grams
    Long on mood and moodiness, but at a loss as how to break any interesting human ground.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 38 Wesley Morris
    Our Idiot Brother
    It's all emotionally counterfeit, and that bogusness infects the comedy.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Contagion
    As a filmmaker Soderbergh requires nothing more of us than a willingness to enjoy ourselves. He had fun. Why shouldn't we? With Contagion, the fun begins with a cough.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    En la ciudad sin límites
    A tidy soap opera. But it's a discreet, warmly made one, too. In a show of restraint, the intrigue never rises above mildly juicy.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Wesley Morris
    It Might Get Loud
    As documentary, it’s low concept. But it’s never dull.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Wesley Morris
    Warlords
    It’s all lavish, if disposable. But in a nifty change of pace, the warriors in The Warlords are interesting.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Cedar Rapids
    The movie shouldn't work, yet it does.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Strayed
    Hardship and suffering don't drive this movie so much as a romantic's gloss on the two.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Lars and the Real Girl
    When a movie about a guy who orders a sex doll off the Internet can turn vice into virtue, something miraculous has occurred. Lars and the Real Girl achieves that kind of miracle.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    Tears of the Black Tiger
    A parody of and winking homage to the history of Thai melodrama, Wisit Sasanatieng's uproarious filmmaking debut exuberantly combines pop and kitsch with a wholesome belief in the thrills of bad art.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Wesley Morris
    Never Let Me Go
    Amazingly, Never Let Me Go could have been assembled from the Merchant-Ivory kit. It's stale with suppressed anguish.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Wesley Morris
    The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans
    Frankly, the story isn’t remotely as interesting as Cage. Nothing is. In Ferrara’s movie, Keitel emptied himself out. But there’s a hellion’s joy in Cage’s cop.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Girlhood
    Documentary filmmaker Liz Garbus spent three years shooting two teenagers living in a Maryland juvenile detention center. The completed film is called Girlhood and it feels as much a work in progress as its two troubled subjects do.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Dung che sai duk
    "Ashes of Time" was always more a work of philosophy than pure entertainment, and a decade and a half later it still is.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Up for Grabs
    A rarity for documentaries. The movie is a full-tilt farce, and were it not completely true, it'd be a piercing satire that Preston Sturges might have polished into a resonant screwball.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    The September Issue
    What the movie unfolds is how the magazine is inextricable from Wintour’s vision of it.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt
    When the film ends, we're haunted. We've been driving with a ghost.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 12 Wesley Morris
    The Strangers
    A horror film with a moral. No matter how nasty a gang of murderers is, the moviemaker calling the shots is ultimately worse.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Wesley Morris
    Giorni e nuvole
    In American movies, the iconic question usually is, can men and women be friends without the sex part getting in the way? Here it's, can a husband appreciate his wife as a woman? The movie's success in Italy is partly a matter of frustration: Women need their men to grow up.
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