The Assistant
Bleecker Street | Release Date: January 31, 2020 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
79
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 43 Critic Reviews
Positive:
41
Mixed:
2
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
VoxAlissa WilkinsonMay 3, 2020
It’s one of the best, most gripping, and smartest films of 2020. Read full review
100
Time OutTomris LafflyMar 6, 2020
The understated film builds into a gut punch that’s more painful than anything in the superficial, recent Roger Ailes exposé "Bombshell." Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comSheila O'MalleyJan 31, 2020
The Assistant, a very good film, is especially good on power dynamics. Read full review
94
PolygonKaren HanMay 19, 2020
Green’s approach to stories — finding larger truths rather than focusing on the most sensational aspects — vaults The Assistant into extraordinary territory, as it sheds light not only on the actions of abusers in power, but on the people around them, who can’t or won’t do anything to change the status quo. Read full review
91
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Jan 25, 2020
The Assistant is more of a spartan procedural, its narrative a methodical accounting of one day—typical in incident, atypical in dawning realization—for an entry-level employee at the New York production house of a Weinstein-like figure. Read full review
90
New York Magazine (Vulture)Alison WillmoreJan 25, 2020
What makes the film such a spare but searingly insightful treatment of the issues at the core of Me Too is the way it refuses to separate its unseen executive’s sexual predation from the larger structures that enable it. Read full review
88
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenJun 29, 2020
Garner gives a remarkable performance, especially considering she has very little dialogue with which to work. Read full review
88
The Seattle TimesMoira MacdonaldFeb 13, 2020
You leave The Assistant thinking about why some of us are invisible and some of us don’t notice — and about how evil lives in the places from which we look away. Read full review
88
Boston GlobeTy BurrFeb 6, 2020
The Assistant is a stealth bomb of a movie: It barely makes a noise but it leaves a crater in your heart. Read full review
88
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsFeb 5, 2020
Besides being the best American film of our new year, writer-director Kitty Green’s drama The Assistant confounds expectations and has the strange effect (on me, anyway) of simultaneously chilling and boiling the viewer’s blood. Read full review
85
The AtlanticDavid SimsFeb 1, 2020
Green has crafted a hermetic, office-bound world so ambiguous that the moments when she reveals its dynamics directly sometimes come off as disconcerting. Read full review
83
Original-CinKim HughesFeb 6, 2020
A compact drama with outsize emotional heft, The Assistant is propelled as much by what it doesn’t show as what it does. Read full review
83
Entertainment WeeklyLeah GreenblattJan 25, 2020
Instead of melodrama, the movie finds its traction in parsing out micro-aggressions and mood: a sort of devastating slow-drip portrait of the power structures that allowed a man like Weinstein to happen — and keep more like him in place, untouched by any justice a hashtag can reach. Read full review
83
IndieWireEric KohnSep 4, 2019
A quiet work with major ambitions, The Assistant is a significant cultural statement in cinematic form. Read full review
80
The Observer (UK)Mark KermodeMay 4, 2020
It’s a credit to Garner that, as a character who effectively has no voice, she manages to say so much about Jane’s predicament through posture, pose and gesture. Read full review
80
CineVueChristopher MachellApr 30, 2020
Quietly raging, The Assistant is a bleakly precise study of complicity in workplace abuse. Read full review
80
EmpireElla KempApr 30, 2020
A stirring, sober examination of an ongoing injustice, The Assistant speaks to women whose discomfort is ignored, and bravely says that they matter, their feelings have been noticed. Now is the time for us to act on them. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawFeb 26, 2020
It is a sombre, realist study of what day-by-day, moment-by-moment abuse actually looks like. Read full review
80
Film ThreatSabina Dana PlasseFeb 17, 2020
The Assistant, without a doubt, leaves a lasting impression for any woman who has experienced an oppressive work environment without recourse. I don’t think there’s a woman alive who can’t relate to The Assistant’s main character Jane played by Julia Garner. Read full review
80
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzFeb 12, 2020
Green shows us nothing lurid, nothing explicit. Instead she lets the toxicity build, bit by bit, until it’s seeped in everywhere. That’s powerful, and that’s worse, too. Read full review
80
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternJan 30, 2020
Ms. Garner transcends the inherent limits of her role to convey ineffable tenderness and wordless ferocity in a movie that’s bigger than it seems. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranJan 30, 2020
Treating an incendiary issue in an austere, minimalist manner has turned The Assistant into an arresting independent drama. Read full review
80
The New York TimesJeannette CatsoulisJan 30, 2020
Unfolding over one acutely distressing workday, The Assistant is less a #MeToo story than a painstaking examination of the way individual slights can coalesce into a suffocating miasma of harassment. Read full review
80
Rolling StonePeter TraversJan 29, 2020
Green’s slow-burn style might not spell box-office windfall in a cinema era of short attention spans, but her artistry is indisputable. Read full review
80
Vanity FairK. Austin CollinsSep 4, 2019
[Green has] made a powerful movie about the ways power enforces silence, even between assistants and other underlings—people convinced they have everything to lose. It’s a movie about the tragedy of being brought into the fold and conditioned into that silence. And it’s a movie about how a person feels when they believe they have nowhere to go. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenFeb 12, 2020
Complicity is the offense under investigation in The Assistant, the first fiction film of the #MeToo era that indicts the system along with its colluders, willing and unwilling. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineChuck BowenFeb 24, 2020
With The Assistant, writer-director Kitty Green offers a top-to-bottom portrait of incremental dehumanization, and, on its terms, the film is aesthetically, tonally immaculate. Read full review
75
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperFeb 6, 2020
No blood is shed. No bodies turn up. And yet The Assistant is one seriously chilling monster movie. Read full review
75
Washington PostMichael O'SullivanFeb 5, 2020
Set over the course of a single, very long day, The Assistant derives almost all its quiet power from Garner, on whose face we see confusion congealing into concern. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleFeb 5, 2020
The Assistant isn’t a particularly enjoyable film, but its message and quiet power linger for days. Read full review
75
CNNBrian LowryJan 31, 2020
The movie still works, if somewhat marginally, in portraying the culture that allowed such behavior to fester, the mix of fear and going along, coupled with a fleeting compliment and the burning desire to get ahead. Read full review
75
The Associated PressJocelyn NoveckJan 30, 2020
The expressive Garner does a lot with a little. She has no big speeches, no tantrums, no floods of tears. It’s the ultimate unshowy part. If there is a word to describe Jane, it is small. Garner seems to shrink as the day goes on. Read full review
75
New York PostSara StewartJan 29, 2020
Never seen, but often heard bellowing profanities from the other end of Jane’s desktop landline, the boss and his eyebrow-raising closed door meetings dubbed “personals” provide the menacing undertone of this day-in-the-life drama. Read full review
75
The Film StageDan MeccaJan 29, 2020
Garner is effective, the camera rarely losing focus of her. This is an actress whose animated features tell an engaging story without needing much help. Read full review
75
The PlaylistRodrigo PerezSep 4, 2019
Clinical in nature and matter-of-fact (but still affecting), The Assistant is essentially a procedural about being a personal assistant to a powerful Hollywood man and all that entails. Read full review
70
Screen DailyTim GriersonFeb 1, 2020
The Assistant is inspired by potentially scandalous material but subverts expectations, asking the audience to consider the broader societal implications of the crime. Read full review
70
The New YorkerRichard BrodyJan 29, 2020
Green’s direction and dramatic sensibility are blunt, but the film’s laboratory-like microcosm of scenarios pointedly similar to recent widely publicized events in the movie business is shocking and effective. Read full review
70
TheWrapCandice FrederickJan 25, 2020
While the filmmaker rightly understands that shock value isn’t the only way to tell a visceral story, its central performance by Julia Garner is what makes the film most interesting to watch. Read full review
70
TimeStephanie ZacharekJan 23, 2020
Garner is perfectly cast, a pixie of steel. You can see by the stern set of Jane’s lips and by the way, time and again, she just barely represses an eye roll, that she’s tough enough to handle all of this–and yet she knows she shouldn’t have to. Read full review
63
Movie NationRoger MooreFeb 25, 2020
Anybody expecting high drama or even a little righteous outrage and “Hollywood” melodrama may feel sorely let down by Green’s portrait. Read full review
63
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Sarah HagiFeb 6, 2020
The film succeeds in showing how men with power can openly do essentially whatever they want as long as their company is successful, but it still left me wanting something more. Read full review
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