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Grantland

Tomatometer-approved publication.

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
Chelsea Peretti: One of the Greats (2014) Molly Lambert Peretti's special is by far the most experimental Netflix original special to date, and also the funniest. It's the first Netflix original stand-up special that truly is one of the greats
Posted Jul 12, 2019  Edit critic review
Mountains May Depart (2015) Wesley Morris Another breakthrough by a director who has never stopped pushing either himself or his idea of what a Chinese movie can do and be.
Posted Oct 24, 2016  Edit critic review
My King (2015) Wesley Morris As a director, Mawenn is at her best with ensembles, using actors as instruments and harmonizing tones.
Posted Aug 16, 2016  Edit critic review
Carol (2015) Wesley Morris This is a slender movie that Haynes gives plenty of antique atmosphere.
Posted Aug 16, 2016  Edit critic review
A Tale of Love and Darkness (2015) Wesley Morris Is this like a parody of European filmmaking?
Posted Aug 16, 2016  Edit critic review
The Sea of Trees (2015) Wesley Morris You know, artistically, that the news is going to be bad in the opening minutes when Van Sant feels compelled to provide a shot of the keys McConaughey's character leaves in the ignition. There are almost two hours left of that kind of filmmaking.
Posted Aug 16, 2016  Edit critic review
Our Brand Is Crisis (2015) Alex Pappademas It's the first time I've watched a David Gordon Green movie and found myself wishing I was in the capable hands of a set-'em-up-knock-'em-down director like Jay Roach.
Posted Oct 30, 2015  Edit critic review
Jem and the Holograms (2015) Molly Lambert What it lacks in humor it makes up for in sheer weirdness -- it's a master class in How Did This Get Made? It feels focus-grouped to within an inch of its life, but it's so strange that it's impossible to imagine what process led us here.
Posted Oct 23, 2015  Edit critic review
The Last Witch Hunter (2015) Alex Pappademas A feature film that feels like a longish TV pilot.
Posted Oct 23, 2015  Edit critic review
Steve Jobs (2015) Alex Pappademas Fassbender looks enough like Jobs that it's not distracting, and he finds a voice for the character.
Posted Oct 09, 2015  Edit critic review
The Walk (2015) Alex Pappademas For at least the duration of the 25-minute wire sequence, The Walk is a breathless, exhilarating moviegoing experience. It's just not much of a movie.
Posted Oct 02, 2015  Edit critic review
The Martian (2015) Alex Pappademas It's a brisk, funny piece of competence-porn sci-fi.
Posted Oct 02, 2015  Edit critic review
The Intern (2015) Wesley Morris There's not much here story-wise. But when Meyers wants to write an involving scene with characters thinking and feeling the way humans think and feel, you want to applaud.
Posted Sep 25, 2015  Edit critic review
Time Out of Mind (2014) Wesley Morris The writer and director, Oren Moverman, makes homelessness harshly immersive.
Posted Sep 23, 2015  Edit critic review
Everest (2015) Wesley Morris The toggling between the base and various points along the way to the summit becomes stressful, then heartbreaking.
Posted Sep 18, 2015  Edit critic review
Sicario (2015) Wesley Morris Villeneuve and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan aren't selling more than a tautological action movie with the dread and body count of a horror film.
Posted Sep 18, 2015  Edit critic review
Black Mass (2015) Wesley Morris The acting here is much stronger and more soulful than I would have expected, and not only from Depp.
Posted Sep 18, 2015  Edit critic review
The Perfect Guy (2015) Wesley Morris I love Sanaa Lathan, except when she has to play dumb. And, boy, does The Perfect Guy need her to be dumb.
Posted Sep 15, 2015  Edit critic review
Digging for Fire (2015) Wesley Morris The movie has been dedicated to Paul Mazursky, the great radiologist of American social interplay who died last year. But Swanberg is still murmuring where Mazursky could speechify, gesticulate, and shout, sometimes in the same sequence.
Posted Sep 11, 2015  Edit critic review
The Visit (2015) Wesley Morris It was fun watching this with a gasping and screaming audience. For horror-goers, the comparative competence must hit the spot. But there's nothing new here -- and what I sensed for 94 minutes was compromise.
Posted Sep 11, 2015  Edit critic review
No Escape (2015) Wesley Morris No Escape is bare-bones, shameless, and too obnoxious to stay suspenseful for long.
Posted Sep 04, 2015  Edit critic review
The Transporter Refueled (2015) Wesley Morris There aren't enough showpiece numbers for Skrein, at least not of the quality that Jason Statham has had.
Posted Sep 04, 2015  Edit critic review
We Are Your Friends (2015) Wesley Morris It's as if a Michael Lewis story or a 1980s Paul Schrader movie were intercepted by studio marketing execs who said, "You should turn Saturday Night Fever into a commercial for SunnyD."
Posted Aug 28, 2015  Edit critic review
Z for Zachariah (2015) Wesley Morris Z for Zachariah has the tasteful dullness of a movie too afraid to make a choice in any direction.
Posted Aug 28, 2015  Edit critic review
Grandma (2015) Wesley Morris The best thing here is Harden, who gets the most strongly written part, with the highest degree of difficulty.
Posted Aug 26, 2015  Edit critic review
Squirrels to the Nuts (2014) Wesley Morris The whole movie is tantrums and meltdowns and pitiful nostalgia... And yet every once in a while, something funny will happen.
Posted Aug 26, 2015  Edit critic review
Sinister 2 (2015) Wesley Morris There comes a point when you have to say no to these horror sequels. There's no skill or idea visible anywhere, just the sound of money being sucked from your pockets.
Posted Aug 26, 2015  Edit critic review
Mistress America (2015) Wesley Morris With Gerwig, you worry that she seems to be winging it -- until you realize that she also knows how to fly.
Posted Aug 21, 2015  Edit critic review
American Ultra (2015) Wesley Morris The movie has the sleepy vibe of some of those scuzzy '90s crime thrillers. It aspires to Natural Born Killers, but has barely enough competence to get close to something like Feeling Minnesota.
Posted Aug 21, 2015  Edit critic review
Digging for Fire (2015) Amos Barshad The look, the sounds, the cast -- everything is bigger and better. The optics are there. The narrative is ready to be fulfilled. And so why does Fire feel like it all fizzles out at the end?
Posted Aug 20, 2015  Edit critic review
The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015) Wesley Morris Exactly no one was asking for this. So it's a surprise to discover that the bar for this movie is low enough to conga under.
Posted Aug 18, 2015  Edit critic review
Straight Outta Compton (2015) Wesley Morris Straight Outta Compton is so beholden to the appeasement of so many artists and legacies and estates that none of it coheres as a movie.
Posted Aug 14, 2015  Edit critic review
The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) Wesley Morris Heller's empathy and, let's be honest, her denial of prurience appears to free Powley from embarrassment. She's seizing this part, not shrinking from it.
Posted Aug 13, 2015  Edit critic review
The Gift (2015) Wesley Morris Officially, this is a blank-from-hell movie. But Edgerton has remixed the formula.
Posted Aug 13, 2015  Edit critic review
Ricki and the Flash (2015) Wesley Morris The film, which Diablo Cody wrote and Jonathan Demme directed, is a work of bulk-size bogusness. Barely a single scene is convincing.
Posted Aug 07, 2015  Edit critic review
Fantastic Four (2015) Wesley Morris The entire experience is shameful -- for us, for the filmmakers, for whoever at the studio had the job of creating the ads, in which the cast appear to be starring in hostage posters.
Posted Aug 07, 2015  Edit critic review
Vacation (2015) Wesley Morris You can't do much worse at the movies than Vacation.
Posted Aug 05, 2015  Edit critic review
Listen to Me Marlon (2015) Wesley Morris Part of Riley's achievement is a simple matter of assembly. His editing manages to find a movie amid all of Brando's raving, pontification, and truly deep thinking. The enlaced audiovisual material becomes as intoxicatingly impressionistic as 3-D Brando.
Posted Jul 31, 2015  Edit critic review
Phoenix (2014) Wesley Morris There's no point in explaining where all of this goes. But Petzold is in command of it.
Posted Jul 24, 2015  Edit critic review
Southpaw (2015) Wesley Morris The trouble with how hard Gyllenhaal goes in Southpaw is that he's in the service of weak material, so you notice the effort.
Posted Jul 24, 2015  Edit critic review
Pixels (2015) Wesley Morris This is just a lot of chomp-chomp-chomp and point tallies wafting upward whenever something game-oriented is blown up.
Posted Jul 24, 2015  Edit critic review
Irrational Man (2015) Wesley Morris This is another of Allen's films in which characters advance positions rather than embody them. Very little is allowed to be lastingly funny or suspenseful, and the positions themselves don't feel close to the truth.
Posted Jul 22, 2015  Edit critic review
Mr. Holmes (2015) Wesley Morris As someone who neither hungers for yet another incarnation of this character nor understands why anyone would, I watched in subdued bafflement.
Posted Jul 22, 2015  Edit critic review
Unexpected (2015) Wesley Morris The movie's radiance comes from [Gail Bean].
Posted Jul 22, 2015  Edit critic review
Amy (2015) Wesley Morris There are a couple of scenes in Asif Kapadia's new Amy Winehouse documentary, Amy, that make the fame-industrial complex seem rock-bottom awful.
Posted Jul 17, 2015  Edit critic review
What Happened, Miss Simone? (2015) Wesley Morris More omissive than impressionistic.
Posted Jul 17, 2015  Edit critic review
Trainwreck (2015) Wesley Morris It's got no rhythm or reliable comfort zone. The jokes and ensemble scenes are all rushed, so you can't savor them or what anyone in them is doing.
Posted Jul 17, 2015  Edit critic review
Ant-Man (2015) Wesley Morris This is the sort of movie where you see the effort and say, Thank god.
Posted Jul 17, 2015  Edit critic review
Tangerine (2015) Wesley Morris These people are the way they are, the movie says. This obscenely vibrant patch of L.A. is officially an enclave. But Baker makes it feel bigger and louder and crazier than that. He turns subculture into family.
Posted Jul 10, 2015  Edit critic review
Self/less (2015) Wesley Morris There's no reason to spoil what follows except to say that even by the standards of both Alfred Hitchcock and science fiction, it's nonsensical.
Posted Jul 10, 2015  Edit critic review
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