Leah Greenblatt
Tomatometer-approved critic
Publications:
Entertainment Weekly
Movie Reviews Only
T-Meter | Title | Year | Review | |
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B+ | 96% | Raya and the Last Dragon (2021) |
Feels fresh not just for the mere fact of its female-forward and predominately Asian cast, but for the breeziness with which it bears the weight of Disney history... - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Mar 2, 2021
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B+ | 98% | Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry (2021) |
A fascinating if occasionally frustrating portrait of a remarkable young artist attempting to live out her own idea of radical honesty in an era of endless information and relentless image-shaping... - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Feb 26, 2021
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B+ | 99% | The Father (2021) |
Zeller, working from his own acclaimed 2012 French-language play Le Pére, is able to turn devastating illness into a kind of disjointed poetry - and one still threaded with real emotional resonance... - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Feb 25, 2021
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C | 39% | Cherry (2021) |
For all the frenzied action of the final scenes though, there's an airless, overwrought sense of diminishing returns - and that's a comedown we've seen too many times before. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Feb 25, 2021
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B+ | 89% | The Nest (2020) |
You could easily spend the next decade trying to decode its themes. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Feb 21, 2021
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C+ | 55% | Silk Road (2021) |
The Social Network redrawn in weed and wispy start-up beards. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Feb 20, 2021
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B | 53% | The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021) |
Hers was a life that often played like a melodrama - addiction, heartbreak, shadowy government conspiracies - and so Daniels largely chooses to portray it as one, often to messy and outsized effect. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Feb 20, 2021
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B | 80% | I Care a Lot (2021) |
Pike, who lately has taken the lead in noble biopics like last year's Radioactive and 2018's A Private War, feels unleashed by the wickedness of the role, gleefully sinking those gleaming white teeth into her finest villainy since Gone Girl. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Feb 17, 2021
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B+ | 90% | Kajillionaire (2020) |
Bleak and funny and still, somehow, flickering with hope. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Feb 15, 2021
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B+ | 86% | Emma. (2020) |
If anyone were to push Emma Woodhouse into a less straitened age, why not the woman who captured Childish Gambino in a palm-tree polyblend? - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Feb 14, 2021
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B | 72% | The World to Come (2020) |
A love story of deep and delicate feeling if not strict originality. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Feb 13, 2021
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B | 79% | Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar (2021) |
Barb and Star commits to its deep silliness so sweetly and completely that you can't help falling a little bit in love with them too. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Feb 12, 2021
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B | 73% | The Mauritanian (2021) |
The Mauritanian... reaches for something not many Hollywood productions do: Telling a story centered not just the moral quandaries its Western characters face, but on the soul of the man at the center of it all. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Feb 11, 2021
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B+ | 97% | Two of Us (Deux) (2021) |
Meneghetti, a first-time but remarkably assured filmmaker, gives Two a dreamlike realism, letting the score go ragged in its tensest moments and swooping in artfully on aching closeups and empty spaces. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Feb 5, 2021
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A- | 95% | First Cow (2020) |
Some itchy viewers probably (and understandably) won't make it past the first 20 minutes. But if they stay, the deliberate paces of Reichardt's storytelling do cast a sort of spell: a bittersweet comic absurdity, told in the rhythms of real life. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Feb 5, 2021
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C | 66% | Falling (2020) |
Barring any greater lessons on motivation or forgiveness, the movie becomes little more than an endurance test; one far easier - at least for the viewer - to fall away from than to stay. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Feb 5, 2021
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B+ | 90% | Together Together (2021) |
A wry low-key dramedy that lands with surprising sweetness. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Feb 4, 2021
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B | 83% | The Way Back (2020) |
Affleck keeps the movie anchored with his rumpled, unshowy performance: a man killing himself to live, until he can start to believe that maybe there's a better way. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Feb 3, 2021
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B+ | 95% | CODA (2021) |
A handful of sitcom-ish moments seem like small glitches in a script that works so winningly to bring the often unseen (or just terminally underexplored) world of deafness to such joyful, ordinary life. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Feb 2, 2021
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A- | 96% | Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) |
Black Messiah's center of gravity has to be a Hampton you can't look away from, and Kaluuya - alternately raw, tender, and incendiary - duly electrifies every scene he's in. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Feb 1, 2021
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B | 93% | Mass (2021) |
An urgent and necessary movie, if not at all an easy one - and an exceptional opportunity too to watch four great character actors, finally called up from the sidelines to center stage, do what they do. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Feb 1, 2021
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A- | 84% | On the Count of Three (2021) |
Shot in intimate 35mm, the whole thing is almost shockingly short (just over 80 minutes), and the style sort of poetically raw, like an old Jim Jarmusch movie. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Jan 31, 2021
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B | 85% | Passing (2021) |
[I]t feels like an actor's film: a delicate, melancholy study in black and white, nearly every scene filled with careful silences and subtext. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Jan 30, 2021
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B+ | 87% | Supernova (2021) |
Generous, lived-in performances bring finer layers to what is at heart an old-fashioned and otherwise surprisingly conventional melodrama about love and loss. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Jan 29, 2021
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B | 88% | The Dig (2021) |
Fiennes and Mulligan make lovely, delicate work of characters whose emotions operate for so much of the film like icebergs, only exposed at the tip. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Jan 29, 2021
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B+ | 100% | Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (2021) |
The result, maybe unsurprisingly, is a kind of pure fan's love letter, but still a rich and joyful one to experience secondhand. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Jan 28, 2021
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B | 47% | The Little Things (2021) |
A serial-killer thriller reframed as a slow-burn mood piece more consumed with character and smolder, perhaps, than in the payoff of its central mystery. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Jan 26, 2021
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A- | 98% | Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu) (2020) |
There's almost no single moment in Portrait of a Lady on Fire that couldn't be captured, mounted, and hung on a wall as high art. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Jan 22, 2021
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B | 46% | Locked Down (2021) |
A sort of scrappy, quarantined Mr. and Mrs. Smith, helmed by the same man who actually brought you that movie the first time. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Jan 14, 2021
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B+ | 92% | The White Tiger (2020) |
Through his eyes, Balram's singular story - in all its wild, exuberant improbability - roars to life. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Jan 8, 2021
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B- | 76% | Pieces of a Woman (2020) |
Kirby... makes Woman's scattered pieces come utterly alive, if never entirely whole. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Jan 8, 2021
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A- | 95% | Soul (2020) |
Soul feels easily like one of the best Pixar movies in years... - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Dec 23, 2020
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B | 93% | Sylvie's Love (2020) |
Love's most radical act may be the simple fact of its Blackness - that the faces at the center of the screen are ones that for so many decades we'd mostly see only in the margins of a movie like this, or not at all. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Dec 22, 2020
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B+ | 88% | News of the World (2020) |
The movie offers few surprises and even less alacrity; and yet there's a cumulative weight to World that feels, if hardly new, still worth sitting through. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Dec 11, 2020
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B- | 29% | Wild Mountain Thyme (2020) |
By the time there are soaring pan flutes and kisses in the rain, you've either happily surrendered or slumped over, Walken-wasted. Either way somebody, or at least the whiskey, wins. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Dec 9, 2020
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B | 51% | The Midnight Sky (2020) |
A dystopian drama whose fluctuating tone - grim, with flickers of hopeful sentiment - feels almost comfortingly familiar, if a little on the nose for 2020. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Dec 9, 2020
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B | 92% | Another Round (Druk) (2020) |
An intoxicated tale of midlife angst and catharsis and better living through Aquavit. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Dec 5, 2020
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A- | 89% | Let Them All Talk (2020) |
Talk is just a chance to spend two hours watching Streep & Co. make the most of Deborah Eisenberg's deliciously salty script, while Soderbergh - who also serves as cinematographer - shoots it all in ruthless, radiant light. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Dec 3, 2020
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A- | 96% | Sound of Metal (2020) |
As Ruben's fear and rage begins to open itself to the unknown, the movie reaches toward something profound - finding real, furious power in the spaces between the sound. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Nov 21, 2020
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B+ | 90% | The Climb (2020) |
For all the absurdist laughs (and not a few cringes) both men wring from it, their interplay feels both inherently ridiculous and entirely true to life; a bittersweet bromance writ in whiskey and spandex. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Nov 21, 2020
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B | 92% | The Life Ahead (2020) |
Sophia Loren is by far the best reason to see Edoardo Ponti's new Italian-language drama, out now on Netflix. But what a reason it is... - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Nov 21, 2020
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B+ | 89% | Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey (2020) |
A sprawling musical extravaganza whose candy-colored, dandily overstuffed revelry spills over with joy and jubilance and every other happy J-word. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Nov 21, 2020
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C+ | 83% | Freaky (2020) |
A freak flag half-flown. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Nov 21, 2020
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B- | 89% | Run (2020) |
A brittle, nasty bit of fun. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Nov 20, 2020
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B+ | 82% | Happiest Season (2020) |
A smart, heartfelt comedy whose small flaws are easily blotted out by bigger charms. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Nov 20, 2020
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B | 98% | Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020) |
It's Boseman, though, in his final appearance on screen, who makes both the bitter and the sweet of the story sing: a pointed arrow of hurt and hope and untapped fury, heartbreakingly alive in every scene. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Nov 20, 2020
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B+ | 83% | Mank (2020) |
The story then becomes less a forensic accounting of a masterpiece than a bittersweet ode to a certain slice of old Hollywood: part love letter, part cautionary tale, and still somehow a mystery. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Nov 6, 2020
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B | 83% | Let Him Go (2020) |
There's blunt power in the execution, most of it concentrated in Bezucha's moody big-sky atmosphere, and in the seasoned professionals he's found to tell the tale. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Nov 6, 2020
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A- | 85% | Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm (2020) |
Into possibly the least hilarious year on record, he has come: not the Borat we deserve, maybe, but the one we need right now. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Oct 30, 2020
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C | 49% | The Witches (2020) |
This Witches, alas, has the misfortune of doubling down on all the late writer's eccentricities, while somehow finding only a fraction of his magic. - Entertainment Weekly
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| Posted Oct 21, 2020
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