The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic of The Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern reviews films weekly in the paper and on KCRW; he airs his current musings on the film industry in a biweekly column for the paper as well. He has worked for The New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and his freelance writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Playboy, GQ and the Columbia Journalism Review. He has also written for television; his scripts include "The Boy In the Plastic Bubble" and several episodes of "Law & Order." Joe is a founding member of the National Society of Film Critics and a member of the New York Film Critics Circle.
Photo credit: Marc Goldstein
Charity Buzz Auction: Attend a Press Screening in Los Angeles with Wall Street Journal Film Critic and Pulitzer Prize Winner Joe Morgenstern and Enjoy a Post-Screening Discussion
If you listened to War for the Planet of the Apes with your eyes closed, the music alone would let you know you were in the presence of a grand adventure.
Spider-Man: Homecoming is delightfully smart, genially aware of itself and terrifically likeable. Only now is this series coming of age.
Baby Driver is a time-capsule testament to the primacy of music and movement in contemporary life; the beat is both the medium and the message.
Maybe the title of The Big Sick could be improved, but everything else conspires to make this romantic comedy a cockeyed classic. It's hilariously hyperverbal, yet wonderfully heartfelt.
Cars 3 is about Lightning McQueen. This time the hotshot is a faded champion who yearns to win one more race. He's an intriguing hero for young audiences, a living legend and incipient geezer struggling to compete against a new breed of race cars.
"The Mummy" goes beyond defying comprehension. It's truly incomprehensible, and I have some questions about it.
Wonder Woman puts the super back in movie heroism, and the Woman herself, as played by Gal Gadot, is the dazzling embodiment of female empowerment.
The action sequences of Alien: Covenant give satisfaction, and the supersmart, superambitious android element provides ample food for thought and plenty of cause for worry, given what machine-learning already is and soon it soon will be.
Director Lydia Tenaglia traces Jeremiah Tower's progression from Chez Panisse to the 1984 opening of his own restaurant, Stars, the spectacularly successful San Francisco brasserie where he reigned as a new model of celebrity chef until 1999, when the place closed. .
