Alissa Wilkinson
Alissa Wilkinson's reviews (from any publication) always count toward the Tomatometer
because this critic is a Tomatometer-approved critic.
| Biography: |
Alissa Wilkinson is Vox.com's film critic. Formerly, she was chief film critic at Christianity Today. Her writing has appeared at Rolling Stone, Vulture, RogerEbert.com, Pacific Standard, Books & Culture, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Paste, and others. She lives and works in New York City, and you can find her @alissamarie.
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| Publications: | Christianity Today, RogerEbert.com, Paste Magazine, Movie Mezzanine, Vox, Flavorwire |
Movie Reviews Only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4.5/5 | 97% | The Big Sick (2017) |
"Authentic" is an overused word in movie reviews, but there's no better way to describe The Big Sick: Every inch of it feels true, and not just because it's drawn from real life.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Jun 22, 2017
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| 3/5 | 62% | The Journey (2017) |
The Journey is the rare hopeful political film rooted in both reality and very recent history.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Jun 15, 2017
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| 2/5 | 78% | The Hero (2017) |
While Elliott is great in The Hero, the rest of the film is curiously inert and predictable.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Jun 8, 2017
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| 3.5/5 | 73% | The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) |
The result isn't uplifting in the least. But it's deliciously frightening, a cautionary tale for the careless and a horror film that posits a world devoid of any real goodness.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Jun 1, 2017
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| 5/5 | 100% | The Florida Project (2017) |
The Florida Project won't let us look away. Nor, given its brilliance, would we want to. Instead, we laugh, we watch silently, and we're challenged to stop simplifying people's lives so we can offer easy theoretical answers.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Jun 1, 2017
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| 2.5/5 | 55% | War Machine (2017) |
It feels like Pitt is in a different movie than everyone else -- probably because he's giving a character actor's performance in the lead role, where everyone else (save Kingsley, who is cartoonish) seems to be playing their parts with a straight face.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted May 25, 2017
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| 3.5/5 | 89% | Promised Land (2017) |
That's the most accurate picture of America that this American can imagine: a land of competing narratives, where the only thing everyone can agree on is that lots of stuff has gone wrong, even if we can't agree on exactly what that stuff is.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted May 24, 2017
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| 4.5/5 | 100% | Visages, villages (2017) |
A playful, surprisingly powerful document of an attempt to understand France by looking closely at its people.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted May 24, 2017
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| 4/5 | 69% | Happy End (2017) |
Most good films rely on their audiences to connect the dots a little, but Happy End is all dots, with none of the lines drawn in at all. The meaning is there, but you have to dig for it in the everyday events of a family's life.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted May 24, 2017
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| 4.5/5 | 74% | The Beguiled (2017) |
It's the mashed up stylistic markers of The Beguiled that make it so effective, especially as they skitter across the revenge plot humming along beneath the surface.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted May 24, 2017
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| 4/5 | 88% | The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) (2017) |
The Meyerowitz Stories is a tale of a family, like all of our families, that still hasn't quite figured out how to somehow live with each other's deficiencies. But at least they're trying.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted May 23, 2017
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| 4/5 | 84% | Okja (2017) |
Okja isn't perfect; it falls down when the absurd and the serious ricochet back and forth between scenes, making it hard to track with the film's tone. But it's easily forgivable; this is a big, ambitious movie, and when it works, it is ridiculously fun.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted May 19, 2017
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| 71% | Alien: Covenant (2017) |
Unfortunately, Alien: Covenant is not really up to bearing the weight of the yarn it wants to spin.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted May 18, 2017
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| 4/5 | 71% | Wonderstruck (2017) |
Gorgeous, moving, and innovatively told, it may even be too smart for some adults. Kids will get it just fine, though.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted May 18, 2017
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| 3.5/5 | 28% | King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword (2017) |
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is a goofy, splendid medieval romp that also makes a distinctly English case for a moderate populism.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted May 11, 2017
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| 2/5 | 50% | Paris Can Wait (Bonjour Anne) (2017) |
Unfortunately, it's not a great film. But it's an enjoyable one, if you like fine wine, beautiful countrysides, and a little frisson of flirtation.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted May 11, 2017
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| 2/5 | 36% | Snatched (2017) |
Snatched, starring Amy Schumer and a woefully underused Goldie Hawn, takes a kind of lame premise and squeezes something kind of funny out of it.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted May 11, 2017
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| 3.5/5 | 85% | The Lovers (2017) |
The Lovers casts a longing glance over its shoulder at an older cinematic era while also remaining solidly rooted in the present. And like its protagonists, it revels in its double life.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted May 5, 2017
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| 1.5/5 | 15% | The Circle (2017) |
The Circle is a bafflingly bad movie.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Apr 28, 2017
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| 72% | Sleight (2017) |
The seams still show at times - this is obviously a low-budget movie - but for the most part, it's surprising, intriguing, and fun.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Apr 28, 2017
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| 4.5/5 | 88% | The Lost City of Z (2017) |
This is a different sort of movie: a stately, elegant epic paced like an elegy.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Apr 13, 2017
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| 4/5 | 93% | A Quiet Passion (2017) |
Cynthia Nixon plays Emily Dickinson, whose poetry and life is a perfect match for the signature style of director Terence Davies: rich in detail, deeply enigmatic, and weighed down with a kind of sparkling, joy-tinged sorrow.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Apr 13, 2017
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| 3.5/5 | 87% | Their Finest (2017) |
Their Finest is a lovely and stirring film, the kind of movie that reminds the audience that bravery comes in many forms... You can call that propaganda, but it also makes for a good story.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Apr 7, 2017
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| 4/5 | 80% | Colossal (2017) |
The result is delightful: While Colossal draws from a few familiar genres, it weaves them together and makes something totally new, and unexpectedly thoughtful. It's part metaphor, part reality, and just strange enough to keep us on our toes.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Apr 6, 2017
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| 2/5 | 45% | Ghost in the Shell (2017) |
You can detect a flicker - one might even say a ghost - of an interesting idea beneath its polished shell. But at every turn, Ghost in the Shell sacrifices the opportunity to actually say something interesting.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Mar 30, 2017
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| 3.5/5 | 60% | The Zookeeper's Wife (2017) |
Both a lush historical tale and a real-life fable, The Zookeeper's Wife is an account of Warsaw during the Nazi occupation that makes a strong case for a simple truth: inhuman brutality can only be counteracted by steady compassion and kindness.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Mar 29, 2017
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| 3/5 | 67% | Life (2017) |
Life starts out as one of those hopeful-seeming films, but in thwarting our expectations, it becomes much more dismal - and we realize that it was never really making a point about life so much as the folly of optimism.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Mar 24, 2017
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| 3.5/5 | 44% | Song to Song (2017) |
Though Song to Song can get repetitive and directionless, it's also dynamic and satisfying by its conclusion.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Mar 17, 2017
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| 93% | The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2006) |
What [the film] does best is take all that frustration and put it into one man's story. As he suffers, we feel his pain and irritation by proxy. That kind of humanity is often missing from debates about policy - but there's nothing more important.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Mar 16, 2017
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| 3/5 | 78% | T2 Trainspotting (2017) |
Trainspotting evoked in its audience its characters' experience, and T2 does as well. Choose life, as Mark would say, and choose a sequel that lives pretty comfortably in its predecessor's shadow.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Mar 16, 2017
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| 3/5 | 73% | The Sense Of An Ending (2017) |
It posits that the best thing we can do is love each other and try to do our best, and apologize when we don't. Packaged into a story told sensitively, that's a lesson worth remembering.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Mar 10, 2017
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| 4.5/5 | 99% | Get Out (2017) |
In the tradition of the best social thrillers, Get Out takes a topic that is often approached cerebrally -- casual racism -- and turns it into something you feel in your tummy. And it does it with a wicked sense of humor.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Feb 26, 2017
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| 2.5/5 | 35% | The Great Wall (2017) |
It is big. It is eye-popping. It is about China. And it is definitely about a legend. It also doesn't have a single thought in its noggin, but it does have armies of toothy monsters.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Feb 17, 2017
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| 3.5/5 | 42% | A Cure For Wellness (2017) |
It is a thoroughly distracting film, entertaining a lot of the time, and ambitious in the way studio movies rarely get to be. So in its own way, A Cure for Wellness is an accomplishment. But it's also a bewildering viewing experience.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Feb 16, 2017
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| 4/5 | 90% | The Lego Batman Movie (2017) |
If a bunch of 10-year-olds who'd obsessively watched every Batman movie were equipped with a ridiculously excellent, eclectic Lego set, the result might be The Lego Batman Movie.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Feb 8, 2017
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| 99% | Cameraperson (2016) |
Watching Cameraperson, we take Johnson's rich images into ourselves. Having watched them, experienced them, they become entangled with us, too.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Feb 7, 2017
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| 33% | Trumped: Inside the Greatest Political Upset of All Time (2017) |
Trumped is a missed opportunity.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Feb 3, 2017
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| 3/5 | 25% | The Comedian (2017) |
Thanks to its talented cast, it sidesteps most of the maudlin traps implied by its premise.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Feb 2, 2017
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| 5/5 | 94% | A Ghost Story (2017) |
Remarkable meditation not just on the hereafter, but the here and now.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Jan 30, 2017
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| 3/5 | 43% | The Discovery (2017) |
The Discovery invites us to reflect on our own lives through a slightly bent lens.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Jan 30, 2017
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| 4/5 | 75% | Ingrid Goes West (2017) |
It's the impeccable comic timing of Plaza and Olsen that really makes Ingrid Goes West fly, along with the outstanding O'Shea Jackson Jr.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Jan 25, 2017
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| 3.5/5 | 100% | Novitiate (2017) |
Novitiate captures something many religious people can understand: the idea that beating oneself (both figuratively and, sometimes, literally) as an act of devotion will make God love us more than he loves other people.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Jan 25, 2017
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| 4.5/5 | 92% | Lady Macbeth (2017) |
The remarkable thing about Lady Macbeth... is that it refuses to allow the audience to have the emotional reactions we want to have. ‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Jan 25, 2017
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| 3.5/5 | 84% | The Founder (2017) |
Keaton's performance as Ray is what keeps The Founder moving, his affected accent and aw-shucks demeanor slowly morphing into something more calculating and even, perhaps, sinister. ‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Jan 19, 2017
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| 3/5 | 75% | Split (2017) |
A solid encapsulation of what Shyamalan is all about.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Jan 19, 2017
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| 100% | Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds (2017) |
Thanks to its stars, and the work of directors Alexis Bloom and Fisher Stevens, it's peppy, wistful, and a little transgressive all at once.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Jan 6, 2017
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| 3/5 | 87% | A Monster Calls (2017) |
The movie starts off looking like a conventional children's fantasy story, but it morphs slowly into something surprising, and all its own.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Jan 5, 2017
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| 5/5 | 92% | Toni Erdmann (2016) |
Rather than taking the joke-a-minute slapstick approach, Toni Erdmann slow-burns its humor, winding up to the punch with care and pathos that renders the punchline all the more poignant.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Dec 29, 2016
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| 4/5 | 89% | 20th Century Women (2017) |
[20th Century Women is] a multigenerational story that's light on its feet, funny, and wide-ranging, full of bright performances, evocative music, and the occasional experimental flourish.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Dec 28, 2016
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| 2/5 | 18% | Assassin's Creed (2016) |
While Assassin's Creed is by no means the worst movie based on a video game -- it's not even the worst released this year -- it's not a very good movie, either.‐ Vox
Read More | Posted Dec 28, 2016
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