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Jay Horton
Jay Horton's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer® when published at Tomatometer-approved publication(s).
Movies reviews only
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The Beach Boys (2024) |
A crisp, even-handed, always-watchable Behind the Music-style tribute illustrating how the untutored sock-hop darlings atop America’s silliest genre would both rewrite the rules of popular song with transcendent masterwork Pet Sounds... - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jun 26, 2024
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The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024) |
The uncomplicated heroics of charismatic sadists trading endlessly watchable flourishes of deadpan repartee couldn’t be more perfectly tailored to the talents of our breezily brutal heist auteur... - Willamette Week
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| Posted May 01, 2024
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Arthur the King (2024) |
A more humane interpretation of events would've at least questioned the wisdom of a career spent so ferociously chasing one's own tail—though self-prescribed incredible journeys are rarely about the destination. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Mar 27, 2024
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Kung Fu Panda 4 (2024) |
As with that other express Panda franchise hawking oversugared flavors plucked out of context, a creative vision ungrounded by larger perspective and unconnected to cultural context leaves a nauseating aftertaste. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Mar 20, 2024
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Your Fat Friend (2023) |
[Gordon] makes for an instantly rootable protagonist, and her tale—lifelong wallflower finds her own voice speaking out against an insidious mass bigotry—hits all the crowd-pleasing notes with a textured authenticity. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Feb 29, 2024
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Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023) |
This Netflix-financed romp blessedly preserves the original’s thumbprint-smeared, dad-joke-peppered charms and ignores recent trends toward bloodless kids’ fare in favor of another jerry-rigged thrill ride. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Dec 20, 2023
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The Boys in the Boat (2023) |
The appeal of lads propelled forward through laborious craft is obvious, but The Boys in the Boat fails to do more than skim the surface both literally and metaphorically. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Dec 20, 2023
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Strange Way of Life (2023) |
[A] soulful, frothy amuse bouche. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Oct 11, 2023
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Strays (2023) |
While cinematic canines have wagged across the silver screen since Rin Tin Tin’s heyday, Strays stands out by recognizing that any “man’s best friend” sentiment does neither side any favors. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Aug 31, 2023
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Landscape with Invisible Hand (2023) |
Landscape With Invisible Hand wastes the reputation of the YA novel it adapts and the charm of stars Asante Blackk and Kylie Rogers, devolving into a cinematic lecture on economic stratification and celebrity worship. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Aug 31, 2023
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Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023) |
[Director] Steven Caple Jr. [lets stars] Ramos and Fishback develop their characters and minimize the damage wrought by a uniformly awful screenplay. But doesn’t that make the inevitable downshift to robot-on-robot violence all the more joyless? - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jun 21, 2023
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Elemental (2023) |
As newly humanized dramatic personae, the classical cornerstones of our universe are easily enough rendered recognizable tropes yet nimbly evade the worst ethnic stereotypes. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jun 14, 2023
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About My Father (2023) |
About My Father seems a poor bet to nudge the uninitiated toward Sebastian Maniscalco’s touring act -- and it probably won’t do much for his surely doomed bid for rom-com lead legitimacy. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jun 07, 2023
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John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023) |
[Is the film] a profoundly inane exercise in empty violence or a transcendent ballet replacing exposition with movement? ... To quote Wick, "Yeah." - Willamette Week
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| Posted Mar 30, 2023
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Champions (2023) |
[It's] too foulmouthed for family viewing, too saccharine for the Farrellys’ usual fan base, and too shallow to let the measured relationship between Harrelson and team chauffeur Kaitlin Olson take center stage. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Mar 23, 2023
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Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania (2023) |
With very small powers come no real responsibilities. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Mar 02, 2023
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Plane (2023) |
A lack of pretension shouldn’t excuse the utter absence of creative ambition. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jan 26, 2023
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The Whale (2022) |
[Brendan Fraser's performance] can’t quite lift this turgid chamber drama up from the depths of director Darren Aronofsky’s bloated pretensions. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Dec 21, 2022
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Pearl (2022) |
Co-screenwriter and star Mia Goth’s Baby Jane/Norma Desmond rictus grins and disarming naturalism make it hard to root against Pearl, and the playful but never jokey film draws strength from the persistent dread roused by our darkest fears. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Sep 21, 2022
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Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris (2022) |
Ada’s journey is relentlessly pleasant enough to thrill that twinkly great aunt that lives within us all. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jul 27, 2022
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Jurassic World Dominion (2022) |
In order to keep visual track of all the famous faces, the sweeping vistas that defined the first Jurassic Park film have been chopped up into ‘80s TV-styled midrange shots, leaving a gazillion-dollar production looking cheap. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jun 23, 2022
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The Bob's Burgers Movie (2022) |
The best possible version of a comfort staple rendered fresh, flavorful and well done. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jun 01, 2022
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Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022) |
[Mikkelsen's] Hannibal/Bond villain brand of drolly effete cruelty brings a necessary gravitas to a story that moves through a Disney-fied Weimar Berlin with bounce and verve. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Apr 14, 2022
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Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) |
Everything Everywhere All at Once will be absolutely adored by some moviegoers from its very first moments. It’s a film made to be loved—and, given the sheer eye-popping technical wizardry at play throughout, nearly impossible to hate. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Apr 07, 2022
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X (2022) |
A skillful, clever, not entirely satisfying homage to the heyday of both skin flicks and slasher cinema. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Mar 24, 2022
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Death on the Nile (2022) |
Movies based on Agatha Christie’s novels always disappoint. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Mar 03, 2022
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The Matrix Resurrections (2021) |
Take the little blue pill. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Dec 22, 2021
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Nightmare Alley (2021) |
For all del Toro's gifts, the leading monster sympathist of his generation evidently cannot understand the beasts men make of themselves. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Dec 16, 2021
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Encanto (2021) |
Disney's 60th animated feature, Encanto, is a wonder to behold, but the story of a South American clan blessed with extraordinary powers becomes a struggle to endure. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Nov 24, 2021
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Eternals (2021) |
Eternals arrives as Marvel's greatest failure and feels like the worst Power Rangers adaptation yet conceived. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Nov 04, 2021
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Last Night in Soho (2021) |
Edgar Wright pivots gracefully from rom-com to sumptuous period musical to snark-free Hammer horror, committing fully to each disparate genre. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Oct 29, 2021
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Bingo Hell (2021) |
That measured world-building renders the intercut scenes of close-up carnage especially cartoonish, and however textured the victims' backstories, their gory fates feel weirdly incidental. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Oct 14, 2021
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Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over (2019) |
"Lydia's greatest work of art was herself," one adoring fellow traveler marvels early on, but doesn't that make the curator's job that much more important? - Willamette Week
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| Posted Sep 02, 2021
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Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) |
Somehow, still, director Destin Daniel Cretton (Just Mercy, Short Term 12) finds space to let blossom a genuinely touching emotive backstory for our immortal archvillain and a (however fleeting) fresh perspective on a martial arts master. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Sep 02, 2021
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The New Bauhaus (2019) |
A brisk, engaging portrait of a restless polymath and beloved educator, The New Bauhaus provides a textured overview of a fascinating life that takes pains to illuminate the subject's interdisciplinary flights of fancy. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jul 23, 2021
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The Sparks Brothers (2021) |
At its best, the doc plays out like a star-studded listening party thrown by a manic superfan asserting the Sparks' rarefied charms, and the sheer breadth of luminaries gathered diverts attention for a while. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jun 24, 2021
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Wrath of Man (2021) |
Separated into four chapters, Wrath of Man shoehorns a heist flick into the traditional revenge yarn, but a shotgun marriage of the genre's hackneyed plotlines further dims investment in the succession of charmless dolts. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jun 03, 2021
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Profile (2018) |
Profile uses the trappings of a ripped-from-the-headlines story and elevates it into an effective little thriller steeped in modern social media and a catfishing pas de deux. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jun 03, 2021
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Jasper Mall (2020) |
Jasper Mall's showcases all that is valiantly ridiculous about the fight to keep the shopping center open in a tone that is both warm and dignified. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jan 23, 2021
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Zappa (2020) |
So much of his life story feels sufficiently compelling if only the nonstop miasma of footage would get out of its own way. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Dec 03, 2020
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Sound of Metal (2019) |
At the end of the day, this is an expertly crafted labor of love championing the abandonment of dreams. What's the sound of one hand clapping? - Willamette Week
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| Posted Nov 25, 2020
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The Doorman (2020) |
The Doorman is hardly the first ill-conceived variant of Die Hard. However, this latest iteration might well be the laziest. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Oct 19, 2020
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Eternal Beauty (2019) |
Preserve the mystery or examine the motives, but showing the same mistakes made over and over again and expecting emotional resonance feels like the definition of inanity. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Oct 08, 2020
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My name is Margiela (2019) |
For all but the most hardcore fashionista superfans, less really isn't more this time. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Aug 28, 2020
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Boys State (2020) |
Politics makes strange bedfellows... - Willamette Week
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| Posted Aug 14, 2020
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The Vast of Night (2019) |
For a feature effectively premiering via the Amazon age of ubiquity, The Vast of Night thrusts suspicions squarely upon our supposed mastery of instantaneous communication and wrings fear from a moment of static. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Jun 05, 2020
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The Way Back (2020) |
Sold as a sports movie, The Way Back wishes instead to render a harrowing portrait of addiction but only manages to evoke the bleariest stages of a midweek hangover. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Mar 12, 2020
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The Call of the Wild (2020) |
With Ford's gnarled presence grounding the narrative, animation vet Chris Sanders takes full advantage of his photo-realistic CGI lead...[it] sustains the whiff of nature while actually learning a few new tricks. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Feb 28, 2020
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Cats (2019) |
For all of the star power on display, this is an indoor Cats: spayed, defanged and thoroughly domesticated. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Dec 26, 2019
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Wrinkles the Clown (2019) |
Everything we needed to know about this 2015 viral sensation could've been gleaned from Wrinkles' still-affecting debut video, but some filmmakers just want to watch the hours burn. - Willamette Week
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| Posted Oct 10, 2019
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