Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal
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For 1,673 reviews, this critic has graded:
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41% higher than the average critic
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2% same as the average critic
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57% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 1 point lower than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Joe Morgenstern's Scores
- Movies
| Average review score: | 58 |
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| Highest review score: |
Critic Score
100
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| Lowest review score: |
Critic Score
0
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Score distribution:
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Positive: 810 out of 1673
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Mixed: 507 out of 1673
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Negative: 356 out of 1673
1,673
movie reviews
- By critic score
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Joe Morgenstern 90
What makes The Flat mesmerizing is its wealth of historical detail. What makes it universal is what it says about families everywhere - that children, being children, don't want to know what their parents are up to, and that grown-ups, being human, don't want to credit troubling facts that conflict with what they need to believe.- Posted Oct 18, 2012
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Joe Morgenstern 90
The greatest fascination is watching these three people when they're planted firmly inside the frame, talking at cross-purposes while trying to perceive one another in the reflected light of their needs and risky assumptions.- Posted Feb 21, 2013
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Joe Morgenstern 90
Room 237, which goes into national distribution this weekend, may be the surpassingly eccentric — and enormously entertaining — film that Kubrick deserves.- Posted Apr 4, 2013
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Joe Morgenstern 90
Like "Argo" or "Zero Dark Thirty," the film dramatizes a fertile subject — in this instance, the language of advertising in modern politics.- Posted Feb 16, 2013
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Joe Morgenstern 90
The silents, as this film suggests, achieved aesthetic marvels before sound came along to set things back for a while.- Posted Mar 28, 2013
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Joe Morgenstern 80
A win-win situation in which a mainstream feature works equally well as stirring entertainment and a history lesson about a remarkable convergence of sports and statesmanship. -
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Joe Morgenstern 80
Between the two performances there's not a false note. Between the father and son there's an unbreakable bond. Though civilization has ended, love and parental duty shape the course of this fable, which is otherwise as heartwarming as a Beckett play shorn of humor. -
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Joe Morgenstern 80
The sparkle is what's been missing in the star's (Cage) recent performances. What's not to love in a movie that transmutes Terence's moral squalor, and the squalid state of post-Katrina New Orleans, into darkly comic gold? -
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Joe Morgenstern 80
The carnival is loud, brash, brassy, sexy and sometimes tacky or silly, but always entertaining. -
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Joe Morgenstern 80
The entire film is a seduction, one that draws us into a vanished world where Count Leo Tolstoy and his wife of 48 years, Countess Sofya, come to joyous, tempestuous life in a matched pair of magnificent performances by Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren. -
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Joe Morgenstern 80
Mr. Almodóvar's love of movies informs every frame of this beautiful film. -
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Joe Morgenstern 80
Much of Summer Hours, which was shot by the excellent Eric Gautier, feels like a Chekhov play and resonates like a Schubert quartet; it’s a work of singular loveliness. -
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Joe Morgenstern 80
The malignity can be oppressive -- this is a far cry from Fellini finding poignant uplift in the slums -- but the dramatic structure is complex, the details are instructive, and the sense of tragedy is momentous. -
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Joe Morgenstern 80
A remarkably fine and genuinely frightening movie about a teenage vampire. -
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Joe Morgenstern 80
By the end I felt sure it was the most obsessively, graphically violent film I'd ever seen, but equally sure that Apocalypto is a visionary work with its own wild integrity. And absolutely, positively convinced that seeing it once is enough for one lifetime. -
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Joe Morgenstern 80
Still, the cynosure of all eyes is honest, articulate Elizabeth, her own woman in an era when women belonged to men, and at the same time full of love. Lizzie is the best, and Keira Knightley does right by her. -
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Joe Morgenstern 80
The life that swirls around Kym before, during and after her sister's densely populated, wonderfully detailed wedding seems to have been caught on the fly in all its sweetness, sadness and joy. (In its free-form style the film constitutes an elaborate homage to Robert Altman.) -
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Joe Morgenstern 80
It's a meditation, as affecting as it is entertaining, on the limits of violence and the power of unchained empathy. -
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Joe Morgenstern 80
It's a comedy of crisp, mordant wit and quietly radiating warmth, as well as a coming-of-age story with a lovely twist -- you can't always spot the best candidates for maturity. -
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Joe Morgenstern 80
His film is not for the weak of stomach or heart, but it's a stunner all the same. -
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Joe Morgenstern 80
Director, Darren Aronofsky, and the writer, Robert D. Siegel, have turned the story of this washed-up faux gladiator into a film of authentic beauty and commanding consequence. -
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Joe Morgenstern 80
I can't begin to count the ways in which The Savages pleased me, but the very best of them is the way Tamara Jenkins's comedy stays tough while sneakily turning tender. -
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Joe Morgenstern 80
From seductive start to shattering finish, the film is as stirring, entertaining and steadfastly thrilling as it is beautiful. -
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Joe Morgenstern 80
This ostensibly simple film evokes whole lives in 96 minutes, and does so with sparse dialogue. -
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Joe Morgenstern 80
Mr. Spielmann's film is full of surprises and, in its distinctive way, full of life. -
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Joe Morgenstern 80
A feature film that's often astringent on the surface, yet deeply and memorably stirring. -
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Joe Morgenstern 80
For all its awkward structure, the film is heartfelt and deeply affecting. -
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Joe Morgenstern 80
Daniel Craig isn't merely acceptable, but formidable. His Bond is at least the equal of the best ones before him, and beats all of them in sheer intensity. -
