Joe Morgenstern Movie Reviews & Previews

Critics » Joe Morgenstern

Joe Morgenstern

Agrees with the Tomatometer 79% of the time.

Publications:: Wall Street Journal
Critics' Group:: Los Angeles Film Critics Association

Total Reviews:: 982

Listing Of All Reviews & Articles

Showing 1 - 50 of 982

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T-Meter	Title \| Year	Add Date
74%	Love Is All You Need (2013)	" What's remarkable ... is how Ms. Bier's film, in Danish and English, finds beauty in its quiet moments, which are many and close between." — Wall Street Journal Posted May 2, 2013
47%	Scatter My Ashes At Bergdorf's (2013)	" The energy in "Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's"-what a great title!-is genuine, infectious and superabundant." — Wall Street Journal Posted May 2, 2013
77%	Iron Man 3 (2013)	" The third iteration of a franchise that began so well becomes a hollow hymn to martial gadgetry. The suits and story clank in unison." — Wall Street Journal Posted May 2, 2013
98%	Mud (2013)	" It's a movie that holds out hope for the movies' future." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 25, 2013
60%	At Any Price (2013)	" It's powerful stuff." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 25, 2013
53%	The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2013)	" The movie's failures are all the more unfortunate because they detract from its central and conspicuous success, the performance of Riz Ahmed in the title role." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 25, 2013
46%	Pain & Gain (2013)	" Not only hollow and assaultive, but frenzied, madly violent and skullnumbingly loud." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 25, 2013
72%	Elephant (2003)	" What I'll remember most vividly about Gus Van Sant's extraordinary "Elephant" is not the violent climax but the state of grace that precedes it." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 24, 2013
80%	Fight Club (1999)	" Fight Club is an arresting, eventually appalling excursion into social satire by way of punishing violence." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 22, 2013
87%	In the House (2013)	" A celebration of storytelling's power." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 18, 2013
56%	Oblivion (2013)	" The mystery posed by "Oblivion" as a whole is why its mysteries are posed so clumsily, and worked out so murkily." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 18, 2013
87%	A History of Violence (2005)	" This peculiarly predictable picture has been calculated, or miscalculated, to set up certain expectations, fulfill them, and then do the same thing again, thereby giving us a chance to see what's coming and, at least in theory, be shocked." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 15, 2013
81%	Oldboy (2005)	" Shakespearean in its violence, Oldboy also calls up nightmare images of spiritual and physical isolation that are worthy of Samuel Beckett or Dostoyevsky." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 15, 2013
87%	X2: X-Men United (2003)	" There's little zest, less grace and, particularly in the writing, no creative spark to ignite the imagination." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 15, 2013
78%	Sin City (2005)	" While Sin City on screen evokes the same feeling of bottomless decadence and dread that the novels do, there is one crucial difference -- you can put the novels down." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 14, 2013
82%	Road to Perdition (2002)	" What makes the movie pay off is moving pictures of real action and of intimate scenes between man and boy that are all the more moving for being understated." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 14, 2013
85%	Batman Begins (2005)	" Batman Begins summons up moments of great eloquence and power. If only its cast of characters was as fully inhabited as its turbulent city." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 14, 2013
73%	V for Vendetta (2006)	" Speaking of love, things go blooey instead of gooey whenever heroine and hero come close enough to touch; far from being sensual, let alone erotic, the movie proves to be not much fun at all." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 14, 2013
92%	Ghost World (2001)	" The greatest distinction of "Ghost World" is its singular spirit. Here's a dark, deadpan comedy about alienated kids that manages to be smart, surpassingly odd, extremely funny and mysteriously endearing at the same time." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 12, 2013
94%	American Splendor (2003)	" I can't imagine how the filmmakers went about it, let alone pulled the whole thing off, but their film comes together in unpredictable and remarkably pleasurable ways." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 12, 2013
88%	The Angels' Share (2013)	" [Mr. Loach] has gone and directed a comedy from a script by his longtime collaborator Paul Laverty, and it's so delightful that his fans will be clamoring for more." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 11, 2013
42%	To The Wonder (2013)	" The film breaks faith with its audience by asking us to care about two profoundly antipathetic characters spouting pseudo-poetic banalities." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 11, 2013
77%	42 (2013)	" Mr. Helgeland's ponderously reverential biopic is a string of unearned runs." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 11, 2013
68%	Disconnect (2013)	" A bleak vision of life in the Internet age as an asocial network where faceless predators abound, heedless kids live secret lives, everything is phishy until proven otherwise and quests for love or intimacy lead to loneliness or grief." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 11, 2013
27%	The Brass Teapot (2013)	" Ms. Mosley, who directed from a screenplay by Tim Macy, struggles to fill her debut feature with a slender notion, but the premise defeats her, even if the story operates at the outset on the pleasure principle." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 4, 2013
94%	Room 237 (2013)	" [It] may be the surpassingly eccentric-and enormously entertaining-film that Kubrick deserves." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 4, 2013
54%	The Company You Keep (2013)	" The film was shot by an excellent cinematographer, Adriano Goldman, though you'd never know it from the lighting, which is as flat as the writing." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 4, 2013
68%	Trance (2013)	" I floated in and out of states that included suspense, surprise, delight and shock, all of them adding up to steady-state enjoyment." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 4, 2013
81%	Better Luck Tomorrow (2002)	" Better Luck Tomorrow breathes new life into a familiar story: coming of age in high school." — Wall Street Journal Posted Apr 2, 2013
28%	G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013)	" I won't pretend that I had a great time watching "G.I. Joe: Retaliation."" — Wall Street Journal Posted Mar 28, 2013
81%	Renoir (2013)	" "Renoir" is so beautiful, and so intelligently conceived, that you keep waiting, in vain, for a bit of fire to break out in the narrative." — Wall Street Journal Posted Mar 28, 2013
91%	Gimme The Loot (2013)	" Tashiana Washington and Ty Hickson are terrific in the main roles. So is Zoë Lescaze as Ginnie, a spoiled white kid who teaches the taggers a thing or two about drift and being dissolute." — Wall Street Journal Posted Mar 28, 2013
81%	The Place Beyond The Pines (2013)	" For the most part ... this is self-serious stuff, seething with ambition but almost devoid of spontaneity, and ultimately drained of genuine energy." — Wall Street Journal Posted Mar 28, 2013
95%	The Return (Vozvrashcheniye) (2003)	" The story, set in contemporary Russia, seems unexceptional at the start. Yet it plays out against a vast wilderness of shorelines and lakes, and turns tantalizing ambiguity into urgent mystery." — Wall Street Journal Posted Mar 27, 2013
81%	From Up On Poppy Hill (2013)	" A film about many things-so many that the magic of Studio Ghibli's past has been displaced by exposition and earnest discussion." — Wall Street Journal Posted Mar 21, 2013
65%	Starbuck (2013)	" "Starbuck" is more than the sum of its calculations, though not a whole lot more." — Wall Street Journal Posted Mar 21, 2013
43%	Admission (2013)	" Only Mr. Rudd emerges unscathed. He protects himself by being consistently affable in the face of heavy odds." — Wall Street Journal Posted Mar 21, 2013
48%	Olympus Has Fallen (2013)	" A nitwit extravaganza that makes you long for the intellectual depth of Independence Day." — Wall Street Journal Posted Mar 21, 2013
97%	The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg (2000)	" Aviva Kempner hits a grand slam in her thrilling documentary about baseball, about a great baseball player, about Jews in America and about the country itself in the 1930s and 1940s." — Wall Street Journal Posted Mar 20, 2013
64%	Fever Pitch (The Perfect Catch) (2005)	" The film turns out to be a substantial pleasure as the spirit of the Sox shines through." — Wall Street Journal Posted Mar 20, 2013
38%	The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (2013)	" Did the producers appeal to a denominator even lower than common by making their film as dumb as possible, or did it just turn out that way?" — Wall Street Journal Posted Mar 14, 2013
79%	Ginger & Rosa (2013)	" Ms. Potter puts her heroines in a succession of interesting-and handsomely photographed-situations in which they define themselves by talking about what they're up to, rather than by taking urgent action." — Wall Street Journal Posted Mar 14, 2013
90%	Beyond The Hills (2013)	" Fascinating [and] anguishing ..." — Wall Street Journal Posted Mar 14, 2013
29%	Upside Down (2013)	" At a time when so many movies look alike, and studio productions sometimes look aggressively ugly, here's a quirky vision at the intersection of sci-fi and romance." — Wall Street Journal Posted Mar 14, 2013
84%	The Rookie (2002)	" Until The Rookie came along, I'd forgotten how good and smart a family film can be." — Wall Street Journal Posted Mar 12, 2013
60%	Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)	" What does it say about "Oz the Great and Powerful" that China Doll, a creature born of digital code, is the movie's most affecting character?" — Wall Street Journal Posted Mar 7, 2013
89%	Koch (2013)	" The film advances no theories to explain his contradictions, only a thrilling, sometimes affecting account of what he did." — Wall Street Journal Posted Feb 28, 2013
89%	A Place at the Table (2013)	" In addition to the dismaying facts and figures is a fuller sense of what hunger can look like, and feel like, among the millions of Americans classified as "food-insecure" ..." — Wall Street Journal Posted Feb 28, 2013
52%	Jack the Giant Slayer (2013)	" Jack's problem is that he's a commoner, but the movie's problem is that its script is commoner still, an enchantment-free pretext for animated action, straight-ahead storytelling and ersatz romance." — Wall Street Journal Posted Feb 28, 2013

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