The Week

Tomatometer-approved publication
Rating Title/Year Author
Avengers: Endgame (2019) Jesse Hassenger Infinity War may have proved that Marvel can pull off a massive superhero crossover event, but Endgame shows how much better these movies are when they pay attention to people, too. EDIT
Posted Apr 25, 2019
Captain Marvel (2019) Jesse Hassenger What really stands out about Captain Marvel, then, is its approach to its hero's origin. Unlike Marvel's typically heavy-handed exposition, this movie only hints at a backstory it never truly reveals. The restraint is refreshing. EDIT
Posted Mar 7, 2019
Glass (2019) Jesse Hassenger With its many characters alternately showcased and neglected, Glass is a strange movie. In its haunted, haunting way, it's also a satisfying one. EDIT
Posted Jan 18, 2019
Aquaman (2018) Jesse Hassenger [Aquaman's] delightful silliness does point to what these movies should have been doing all along: standing alone, rather than trying to reconcile the weird worlds of its various heroes for premature team-ups. EDIT
Posted Dec 20, 2018
If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) Jeva Lange If Beale Street Could Talk is what happens when everything in a movie comes together: the source material, the actors and actresses, the set designers, the music. Whether the Academy recognizes that or not, Beale Street is a treasure. EDIT
Posted Dec 14, 2018
Cam (2018) Jeva Lange The whole premise would be silly if it didn't feel quite so real. EDIT
Posted Nov 16, 2018
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018) Jesse Hassenger The Crimes of Grindelwald appears to be, first and foremost, made "for the fans." But the series' age agnosticism seems less about providing all-ages entertainment than a refusal to think of these fans as actual people. EDIT
Posted Nov 16, 2018
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) Jeva Lange No horse better demonstrates being above the nonsense of mankind than Franco's. It watches with the aloofness and bored disinterest of a spectator. How exactly a horse can truly appear impassive, I don't know exactly, but this one does. EDIT
Posted Nov 9, 2018
Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) Jeva Lange The problem is, inevitably the songs end. And when they do, you might wish you'd just put on a record instead. EDIT
Posted Nov 2, 2018
Lords of Chaos (2018) Eve Tushnet Director Jonas Åkerlund handles this cruel and sad material with sensitivity. He lets you laugh at Euronymous' pretensions and his Mean Girls-style cruelties, and makes you recoil from the destruction and desecration the band promoted. EDIT
Posted Nov 1, 2018
The Hate U Give (2018) Jesse Hassenger But at its best, George Tillman Jr.'s film has a gravity and forthrightness missing from so many movies aimed at younger audiences. EDIT
Posted Oct 19, 2018
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) Jeva Lange McCarthy's Lee is the most sensitively and complexly balanced character of her career. EDIT
Posted Oct 19, 2018
Apostle (2018) Andy Crump A brutal piece of work, which, if you're familiar with director Gareth Evans' aesthetic, is like describing the sun as hot; he treats his supporting characters as pieces of meat to be relieved, screaming, of their breath, whether by gun or spear or worse. EDIT
Posted Oct 18, 2018
The Kindergarten Teacher (2018) Candice Frederick All too often white feminism, as portrayed on the silver screen, highlights female complexity at the detriment of non-white characters. The Kindergarten Teacher is, unfortunately, no exception. EDIT
Posted Oct 12, 2018
Venom (2018) Jesse Hassenger The best supervillains tell us something about ourselves and our heroes. Venom crawls into its hero's head and realizes it has nothing to say. EDIT
Posted Oct 11, 2018
First Man (2018) Noel Murray First Man helps audiences appreciate the wild ride of lunar exploration, but also the awe and wonder of it all. EDIT
Posted Oct 11, 2018
A Star Is Born (2018) Noel Murray The actors' performances are often raw and improvisatory, like something out of a 1970s movie. EDIT
Posted Oct 5, 2018
Maximum Impact (2018) Jeva Lange Some movies are so bad they're good. Maximum Impact, however, is just bad. Irredeemably bad, in fact. EDIT
Posted Sep 28, 2018
The Oath (2018) Jesse Hassenger The Oath is a little scattershot and ends with a narrative cop-out, but Haddish comes out of it looking more (to borrow a favorite word of hers) ready for stardom than ever. EDIT
Posted Sep 28, 2018
Night School (2018) Jesse Hassenger It has all the hallmarks of Hart's films: a convoluted story that goes out of its way to paint Hart as an insecure but hard-working go-getter, bad CG-augmented slapstick, pointless but plot-required deception, and unearned swells of sentimentality. EDIT
Posted Sep 28, 2018
The Old Man & the Gun (2018) Andy Crump The Old Man & the Gun is ostensibly Redford's final on-screen role; in August, he announced his retirement from acting. If he makes good on that pledge, he's capping off his sterling filmography with a dazzling crowd pleaser... EDIT
Posted Sep 28, 2018
Fahrenheit 11/9 (2018) Andy Crump For the informed viewer, Fahrenheit 11/9 doesn't say anything that hasn't been said already. Instead, the film takes everything we already know and reinterprets it in service of condemning a stagnant and self-absorbed liberal political machine... EDIT
Posted Sep 21, 2018
American Dharma (2018) Jeva Lange American Dharma is a frustrating excavation of a man at the height of his narcissism. EDIT
Posted Sep 19, 2018
Science Fair (2018) Jeva Lange Science Fair is a testament to what happens when girls' inclinations are nourished and supported, when values are aligned. EDIT
Posted Sep 19, 2018
Laissez bronzer les cadavres (2017) Andy Crump Let the Corpses Tan is uniquely dizzying and occasionally hallucinatory - a one of a kind piece of madness driven by the art of the edit. EDIT
Posted Aug 31, 2018
Support the Girls (2018) Jesse Hassenger Lots of movies like to tell stories about grit, determination, and perseverance. Support the Girls understands, and even finds rueful humor in, the ways those things can still lead to a dead end. EDIT
Posted Aug 23, 2018
BlacKkKlansman (2018) Andy Crump Lee shapes his adaptation with a certain frenetic energy, eschewing traditional historical tics and instead leapfrogging across genres... The effect of his genre-swapping is as dizzying as it is immensely satisfying. EDIT
Posted Aug 10, 2018
The Meg (2018) Jesse Hassenger Director Jon Turteltaub, a longtime hand at live-action Disney movies, doesn't have the ruthlessness required to goose either the suspense or the mayhem of a giant-shark movie. EDIT
Posted Aug 9, 2018
Mission: Impossible -- Fallout (2018) Jesse Hassenger The Mission: Impossible movies are not emotional experiences, but a visceral expression of Cruise's dogged desire to remain an action star. Even with top-notch filmmakers at the helm, he's become the true auteur of this series. EDIT
Posted Jul 26, 2018
Teen Titans GO! to the Movies (2018) Jesse Hassenger The success of these cartoons comes down to a willingness to reinterpret characters with both visual and thematic adventurousness. EDIT
Posted Jul 26, 2018
Blindspotting (2018) Candice Frederick As the plot unfolds to lead us to this breaking point, it challenges its audience to overcome long-ingrained stereotypes that a black man is automatically a menacing figure. EDIT
Posted Jul 20, 2018
Eighth Grade (2018) Noel Murray Eighth Grade expertly captures those middle school growing pains every American kid for generations has endured. EDIT
Posted Jul 13, 2018
Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018) Jesse Hassenger But if making a sequel to Sicario turns distinctive material into another stylish potboiler with an elevated sense of purpose, Sicario 2 at least elevates the craft, especially with the rich blues of Dariusz Wolski's cinematography. EDIT
Posted Jun 28, 2018
Damsel (2018) Andy Crump Damsel is a "men on a mission" film devoid of true men or a true mission, and it deploys wit and slapstick to put masculinity on trial. EDIT
Posted Jun 22, 2018
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) Jesse Hassenger Like his other work, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is not a great movie. But it's a more inventive bit of ridiculousness than its nostalgia-minded predecessor. EDIT
Posted Jun 21, 2018
Ocean's 8 (2018) Andy Crump More so than cool, convoluted heist sequences, it's the chummy hangout vibe of Soderbergh's Ocean's films that makes them such a pleasure to watch. EDIT
Posted Jun 8, 2018
Hereditary (2018) Noel Murray Aster's genius here is in the way he welds old-fashioned spook-show juju to disturbingly realistic domestic turmoil. EDIT
Posted Jun 7, 2018
Avengers: Infinity War (2018) Lili Loofbourow This is why I find the movie's belief that it's doing something experimental and unprecedented more than uncomfortable: Infinity War gambles dangerously with the way people process real deaths, never mind fictional ones. EDIT
Posted May 2, 2018
Blumhouse's Truth or Dare (2018) Jesse Hassenger Instead, director and co-writer Jeff Wadlow often filters the female-friendship material through romantic or sexual rivalries, and the movie is too busy with gossipy, salacious, and weirdly obvious twists to dig into its own psychology. EDIT
Posted Apr 13, 2018
Rampage (2018) Jesse Hassenger Even the A-movie budget can't disguise how hollow and insubstantial all of the death and destruction feels, even in action-movie terms. EDIT
Posted Apr 13, 2018
Paterno (2018) Lili Loofbourow Such a brutal referendum on how deflections, euphemisms, and clichés keep us from having to know what victims went through. EDIT
Posted Apr 6, 2018
Chappaquiddick (2017) Lili Loofbourow We need more movies like this: Films that revisit "legends" of the past and interrogate the ugly blind spots that allowed America to not see what was happening and hail as Great Men people who deserved to be remembered quite differently. EDIT
Posted Apr 5, 2018
Ready Player One (2018) Lili Loofbourow I'm here to report that you can still have a good time at Ready Player One even if you don't get most of the references. EDIT
Posted Mar 30, 2018
Pacific Rim Uprising (2018) Jesse Hassenger If you liked Pacific Rim, you'll probably like Uprising, too. It might even leave a generation of kids wanting more. EDIT
Posted Mar 23, 2018
A Wrinkle in Time (2018) Lili Loofbourow A Wrinkle in Time is a big deal for many reasons worth celebrating. It also isn't perfect. And that's okay. EDIT
Posted Mar 9, 2018
Half Magic (2018) Lili Loofbourow The movie's honesty about how inured its characters have become to anything like straightforward desire is its greatest strength. EDIT
Posted Feb 23, 2018
Black Panther (2018) Lili Loofbourow Black Panther's failures, like its triumphs, are more Shakespearean than superheroic. EDIT
Posted Feb 15, 2018
Condorito: La película (2017) Lili Loofbourow The movie painlessly smooths so much that's rough in the original that it bears hardly any relation to its origin. For all that Condorito smashed Walt Disney's tendency to prettify, Condorito: La Pelicula does just that. EDIT
Posted Jan 18, 2018
The Post (2017) Noel Murray But while The Post celebrates the free flow of information, it's primarily about the businessmen who expected Kay Graham to follow their advice to kill the series, and how shocking and revolutionary it was when she ignored them. EDIT
Posted Dec 28, 2017
Molly's Game (2017) Noel Murray Whatever artificial limitations Sorkin puts on his female characters though, he's empathetic enough to understand that Molly Bloom's story is about a woman being controlled and underestimated by a succession of presumptuous jerks. EDIT
Posted Dec 28, 2017