Leah Greenblatt

Leah Greenblatt
Tomatometer-approved critic
Publications: Entertainment Weekly

Movie Reviews Only

T-Meter Title | Year
B+ 100% 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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 25, 2021
C 37% 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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 25, 2021
B+ 89% The Nest (2020) You could easily spend the next decade trying to decode its themes. - Entertainment Weekly EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 21, 2021
C+ 55% Silk Road (2021) The Social Network redrawn in weed and wispy start-up beards. - Entertainment Weekly EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 20, 2021
B 59% 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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 20, 2021
B 81% 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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 17, 2021
B+ 89% Kajillionaire (2020) Bleak and funny and still, somehow, flickering with hope. - Entertainment Weekly EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 15, 2021
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 14, 2021
B 74% The World to Come (2020) A love story of deep and delicate feeling if not strict originality. - Entertainment Weekly EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 13, 2021
B 78% 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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 12, 2021
B 72% 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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 11, 2021
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 5, 2021
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 5, 2021
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 5, 2021
B+ 90% Together Together (2021) A wry low-key dramedy that lands with surprising sweetness. - Entertainment Weekly EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 4, 2021
B 84% 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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 3, 2021
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 2, 2021
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 1, 2021
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 1, 2021
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 31, 2021
B 84% 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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 30, 2021
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 29, 2021
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 29, 2021
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 28, 2021
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 26, 2021
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 22, 2021
B 45% 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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 14, 2021
B+ 92% The White Tiger (2020) Through his eyes, Balram's singular story - in all its wild, exuberant improbability - roars to life. - Entertainment Weekly EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 8, 2021
B- 76% Pieces of a Woman (2020) Kirby... makes Woman's scattered pieces come utterly alive, if never entirely whole. - Entertainment Weekly EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 8, 2021
A- 95% Soul (2020) Soul feels easily like one of the best Pixar movies in years... - Entertainment Weekly EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 23, 2020
B 92% 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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 22, 2020
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 11, 2020
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 9, 2020
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 9, 2020
B 92% Another Round (Druk) (2020) An intoxicated tale of midlife angst and catharsis and better living through Aquavit. - Entertainment Weekly EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 5, 2020
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 3, 2020
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 21, 2020
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 21, 2020
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 21, 2020
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 21, 2020
C+ 83% Freaky (2020) A freak flag half-flown. - Entertainment Weekly EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 21, 2020
B- 89% Run (2020) A brittle, nasty bit of fun. - Entertainment Weekly EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 20, 2020
B+ 82% Happiest Season (2020) A smart, heartfelt comedy whose small flaws are easily blotted out by bigger charms. - Entertainment Weekly EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 20, 2020
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 20, 2020
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 6, 2020
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 6, 2020
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 30, 2020
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 EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 21, 2020
C 81% I'm Your Woman (2020) Without a narrative through-line to pull those threads together... Woman feels lost, a mislaid exercise in style. - Entertainment Weekly EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 21, 2020
A- 98% Time (2020) It tells a story as urgent and beautifully human as almost anything on screen this year. - Entertainment Weekly EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 21, 2020