Elizabeth Weitzman

Tomatometer-approved critic

Publications: Film.com, Village Voice, New York Daily News, TheWrap, Culture Trip

Movie Reviews Only

Movies
TV

T-Meter	Title \| Year	Review
44%	Black Christmas (2019)	If you're intrigued to hear that Riki Lindhome of Garfunkel and Oates has refashioned "Up on the Housetop" into a jaw-dropping rape-culture callout, this is the movie for you. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 12, 2019
60%	Bombshell (2019)	They didn't want to leave anyone out, and they didn't want to make anyone mad. As a result, a genuinely explosive story never detonates with the force it should. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 9, 2019
88%	The Two Popes (2019)	Given that the film and its title are inspired by actual events, it would be no spoiler to reveal where this path is leading. But there is so much artistry in the unexpected ways the journey is plotted that viewers ought to experience them firsthand. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Nov 27, 2019
96%	Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (2019)	It's certainly curious that the first people to be interviewed in a movie about a former Communist activist are her chauffeur, secretary, and caretaker. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Nov 14, 2019
52%	Charlie's Angels (2019)	The real asset Banks brings to the movie, though, is her own perspective. She builds the whole project on a scaffolding of sisterhood that feels so natural, it highlights Hollywood's historic failures in this regard. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Nov 12, 2019
No Score Yet	Good Girls Get High (2019)	Cynicism often curdles movies of this kind, but director Laura Terruso, who co-wrote the script with Jennifer Nashorn Blankenship, underscores each scene with sweetness. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Nov 7, 2019
65%	The Good Liar (2019)	The film really wants to be either a thriller or a caper. Unfortunately, it has neither the excitement necessary for the former nor the fun required of the latter. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Nov 7, 2019
96%	The Kingmaker (2019)	Marcos innately understands the importance of image, but she seems to have underestimated her inquisitor, who uses well-chosen historic footage and powerfully-edited interviews with other Filipinos to gradually expand the canvas. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 30, 2019
86%	Synonyms (Synonymes) (2019)	Filmmaker and subject also share a disdain for restraint, shouting and jostling to ensure we've gotten their point. But while their parallel passions aren't exactly subtle, they do make their mark. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 24, 2019
80%	Greener Grass (2019)	The repetition can start to feel overdone, but the best jokes are acutely-crafted and sold with impressive deadpan by DeBoer, Carden and Bennett. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 17, 2019
11%	Jexi (2019)	Jon Lucas and Scott Moore have figured out how to modernize one of the most traditional and apparently still essential Hollywood tropes: the Crazy Bitch. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 11, 2019
69%	Wrinkles the Clown (2019)	What Nichols finds is promising, but because of the way the movie is structured, the reveal feels like a murky cheat. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 3, 2019
89%	Brittany Runs a Marathon (2019)	What starts out feeling inspirational threatens, at some points, to tip into disheartening conformity. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 22, 2019
40%	Vita & Virginia (2019)	Because Arterton portrays Vita with an almost adolescent superficiality, her fixation on Virginia never feels like more than a conquest, or a rung to be climbed on the literary ladder. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 22, 2019
61%	Driven (2019)	A joyride more interested in the journey than in any significant destination. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 15, 2019
48%	Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2019)	Not an ideal match for the source material, but those who arrive without any preconceptions - or are willing to stray from the novel's style - will appreciate the assets of a modestly engaging and gently touching dramedy. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 14, 2019
100%	Vision Portraits (2019)	Evans intersperses his own experience with those of three others, finding comforting commonalities and essential differences. The result is artistically uneven in structure but emotionally powerful throughout. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 7, 2019
64%	The Mountain (2019)	Probably best suited for the sort of on-a-loop side room you'd find in a modern art museum, where it could endlessly challenge viewers but give curious wanderers a quick way out if they've had enough. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 25, 2019
93%	Sword of Trust (2019)	As with all of Shelton's improv-inspired movies, the plot offers plenty of interest but the personalities provide the purpose. She chooses her actors very carefully, and then lets them loose to explore, expand, or ignore the script. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 11, 2019
64%	Annabelle Comes Home (2019)	Annabelle seems to be on the same shoot-it-all-in-a-day schedule as Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson. None of them appear in more than a few scenes, preferring to set things up and then let a cast of (admittedly appealing) unknowns take over. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Jun 24, 2019
63%	Child's Play (2019)	The movie's biggest strength is its balance between mordant humor and psychological fear. Everyone's focus seems to be in a very old-fashioned place, and here that's an asset. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Jun 20, 2019
87%	Mouthpiece (2019)	Ultimately, the filmmakers' intention isn't to throw us off but to invite us in, to encourage us to wonder: Is it really so strange for one woman to have two reactions to life? - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted May 30, 2019
91%	Framing John DeLorean (2019)	Most compelling of all are the interviews with the two people who come closest to answering, or at least addressing, the question that overwhelms this entire project: DeLorean's daughter Kathryn and son Zach. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted May 1, 2019
85%	Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation (2019)	Michael Wadleigh's seminal 1970 documentary was immersive and electric, a definitive, you-are-there experience rather than a here's-what-happened chronicle. This Woodstock is a here's-what happened chronicle. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted May 1, 2019
94%	You Don't Nomi (2019)	All power to the director and his sources for seeing more than most of us do. But skeptics are unlikely to be converted by quotes that tend to be either generic or overstated. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 29, 2019
30%	Red Joan (2019)	Cookson is very good, but she's too often left to perform in a vacuum. Lindsay Shapero's script - based on Jennie Rooney's novel - neglects to build in the tension Cookson clearly aims to generate. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 18, 2019
68%	Stockholm (2019)	Stockholm is no Dog Day Afternoon, but if you're willing to take the movie for what it really is - a fairly generic caper inspired by, rather than based on, actual events - you'll find just enough to appreciate. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 10, 2019
97%	Working Woman (2019)	Feels very contemporary, but will also resonate with generations of viewers who recognize the many small moments that lead up to and follow its quietly wrenching central experience. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 26, 2019
92%	Light from Light (2019)	A movie this modest requires patience and generosity and a rejection of expectations...But it is a gem likely to stay with anyone smart enough to seek it out. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 19, 2019
86%	The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (2019)	Exhibiting a dexterity that suggests far more extensive directorial experience, Ejiofor proves himself a master of impact. His visual approach is expansive and evocative, thanks also to the fine work of cinematographer Dick Pope. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 27, 2019
80%	The Amazing Johnathan Documentary (2019)	We learn that "everything in this film is strictly based on the available facts." If you appreciate the passive aggression of that deceptively mild "available," this is definitely the movie for you. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 26, 2019
71%	The Invisibles (2019)	Räfle's docudrama approach comes with the risk of disjointed storytelling. But he handles each element with a sure hand, bringing us both a fascinating documentary and a suspenseful drama. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 23, 2019
36%	State Like Sleep (2019)	Does a fine job of recreating the dream-like fog of grief. But it doesn't go much further, and "somnolence" isn't an ideal quality around which to build an entire film. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 3, 2019
85%	Dumplin' (2018)	This is a generous movie, and an unrepentant fantasy at that, so it's hard not to meet it with openheartedness. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 17, 2018
100%	They Shall Not Grow Old (2019)	By thoughtfully employing cutting-edge technology, Jackson has instead created an essential portal connecting audiences of the present to his subjects in the past. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 13, 2018
50%	Postcards From London (2018)	But self-consciousness is not the same thing as self-awareness. And in a movie overflowing with the former and lacking in the latter, Jim primarily becomes an inadvertent symbol of narcissism and superficiality. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Nov 1, 2018
36%	Hunter Killer (2018)	You know those DVDs that sit in a giant Wal-Mart bin? The kinds of movies usually dumped unceremoniously into theaters in January, and maybe if you're going stir-crazy you take a chance and find yourself happily surprised? Hunter Killer is one of those. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 25, 2018
37%	Johnny English Strikes Again (2018)	If you're determined to recycle one of his characters, wouldn't the beloved Mr. Bean or Blackadder make more sense than a James Bond parody made up for British credit card ads? At the very least, doesn't he, and don't his fans, deserve better material? - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 25, 2018
81%	Mid90s (2018)	Hill envisions these endless days with a kid's-eye abstraction that's both timeless and firmly entrenched in its own era: his skate punks banter like Kevin Smith extras, wander like Richard Linklater dreamers, and misbehave like Larry Clark lost boys. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 18, 2018
91%	The Kindergarten Teacher (2018)	Though Gyllenhaal is all-in on this complex character study, it's in an admirably subtle way. She never once overplays Lisa's precarious emotional state, choosing instead to portray a rather ordinary woman doing some rather extraordinary things. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 10, 2018
94%	Private Life (2018)	It's about love, and pain, and marriage, and friendship, and family. And it's also about enduring, about picking yourself up over and over and over, in the eternal hope that something beautiful is waiting around the corner. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 4, 2018
27%	Little Women (2018)	The girls in this contemporary retelling are not messy and complex human beings but Hallmark Channel characters, two-dimensional symbols of virtuous nostalgia. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 27, 2018
87%	Colette (2018)	As a traditional period biopic, it checks all the boxes in fine fashion, but you'd never know it was inspired by a woman whose life was expansive and contradictory and unwieldy in the extreme. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 21, 2018
86%	The Land of Steady Habits (2018)	No detail ever seems to go unnoticed in Holofcener's world, and viewers could spend the entire running time simply admiring her powers of surveillance. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 13, 2018
60%	Operation Finale (2018)	Kingsley isn't an ideal match for the mild-mannered murderer who inspired Hannah Arendt to coin the phrase "the banality of evil." But like the rest of the cast, he holds our attention even when the movie buckles under the burden of earnest intentions. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 22, 2018
88%	Madeline's Madeline (2018)	By pushing to the edges of her own iconoclastic vision, director Josephine Decker touches on universal truths rarely found inside a multiplex. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 10, 2018
86%	The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)	It's hard to think of a more highly-charged topic than the brainwashing of vulnerable adolescents in the name of God, so it's certainly to Akhavan's credit that she uses such a determinedly understated style. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 2, 2018
61%	Unfriended: Dark Web (2018)	Where the first film tapped into the Internet's unavoidable underbelly -- cyberbullies, trolls, obsessive FOMO -- the second never settles on a persuasive POV. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 18, 2018
100%	Leave No Trace (2018)	Granik is a strikingly observational director, and she takes great care to avoid leading viewers in any direction. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Jun 20, 2018
88%	Love, Gilda (2018)	Most crucially, D'Apolito allows her subject to guide the story from start to finish. Radner's gentle spirit and wise observations connect each chapter, bringing us into her life with an unusual intimacy. - TheWrap EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 30, 2018