Whiplash Reviews
December 19, 2014
Once it hits its stride, Whiplash gets so many things so right it starts to feel like the perfect-ten Ellington rendition its elite big bands play in the big competition.
November 14, 2014
Movies set in a Juilliard-like music school aren't supposed to make your heart race in nervous anticipation. Yet that's exactly why this taut drama rates as one of the year's best.
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| Original Score: 4/4
November 6, 2014
Primarily two actors and a jazz score, but the result is a crackling good drama that feels almost like a thriller. Smart, stylish and intense.
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| Original Score: 3/4
October 30, 2014
The film works, often wonderfully, as a remarkable visualization of jazz music - you feel it and breathe it, just like the musicians - and as a showcase for the two actors at its center.
Original Score: 3/4
October 30, 2014
The leads' prolonged, puffed-feathers sparring is entertaining while it lasts, but the sensation of something sizable is only fleeting.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
October 30, 2014
Ultimately, "Whiplash" isn't just about jazz - and it's not necessary to be a fan of the music to enjoy the film - but about life.
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| Original Score: 4/4
October 30, 2014
The film's true subject is innate talent - for music, writing, painting, sculpture, plumbing, whatever - and the superhuman lengths we sometimes have to go to in order to wring it out of ourselves.
Original Score: 3.5/4
October 26, 2014
At times, it evidences the qualities of a can't-turn-away car wreck: brutal and horrific yet compelling. At other times, it has the rhythms of a sports drama with all the ups and downs inherent in that genre.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
October 24, 2014
An intense, unmelodious, highly amped and probably unrealistic drama set in the fictionalized Schaefer Conservatory in New York.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
October 24, 2014
Quite simply, Whiplash is one of the year's best films.
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| Original Score: 4/4
October 24, 2014
It's as much a horror movie as it is a keenly realized indie about jazz, about art, about what it takes to claim greatness.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
October 23, 2014
J.K. Simmonds is amazing.
Original Score: 4/5
October 23, 2014
[Simmons gives] a crisp and nasty performance. The bullied submit, eyes cast down, relieved when they're not the target of his hectoring. His insults are torn from the misogynistic, homophobic playbook.
October 23, 2014
Whiplash darts along at an urgent bebop pace and asks questions applicable to most fields: How much are you willing to endure for the chance to be great? And what if cruelty isn't a better motivator than kindness?
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| Original Score: A-
October 23, 2014
Oh, yes. It's that good.
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| Original Score: 4/4
October 23, 2014
Whiplash is, at best, heightened realism. There's no way that Fletcher could have gotten away with his teaching methods without serious legal - or physical - pushback long before Andrew comes along. But, as drama, it's a crackling good time.
Original Score: 4/5
October 22, 2014
Simmons is always good. Here, he is great. His brilliant performance is, if not the single best of the year, certainly among them.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
October 16, 2014
At its best, "Whiplash" conveys with pungent detail the striving of young people eager to make their bones in a Manhattan that's as foul and forbidding as it is seductive.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
October 16, 2014
This is just a sports drama with a brass section.
October 16, 2014
As for the strangely exhilarating ending, it makes clear that what we have been watching is less a statement about art than a love story: a twisted one, but romantic in every sense.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5