Alison Willmore

Alison Willmore is a film critic at New York magazine and Vulture whose work focuses on whether contemporary movies live up to their own ideas, tones, and politics. She writes close, judgment-forward reviews of genre films, franchise installments, and festival discoveries, weighing their conceptual ambitions against how they actually play on screen. Her coverage spans studio tentpoles, horror and art-house projects, and awards hopefuls, with particular attention to performance, ideology, and the current state of moviemaking.

Interrogating Franchises, IP, and Big-Swing Concepts

Willmore regularly covers major studio releases and franchise entries, treating them as tests of how much imagination and integrity big IP still has left. In reviews of films like Supergirl, she separates the appeal of a character or star from the shortcomings of the movie around them, noting when a project has “no idea what to do” with its lead or core premise.

Her writing on Toy Story 5 frames the installment as a missed opportunity, arguing that the film “chickens out” on its own critique of technology and modern life. She applies similar scrutiny to live-action remakes such as Moana, describing them as “depressing exercises” in squeezing value from existing hits rather than creating something new.

Across pieces on titles like Masters of the Universe and The Furious, she digs into how movies talk about masculinity, nostalgia, and action traditions, tracking where they borrow from genre history and where they fall back on cliché. When she covers superhero and comic-book adjacent projects, she often uses them to ask who these stories are really serving and what, if anything, they add to a saturated landscape.

Genre and Horror as Laboratories for New Voices

Much of Willmore’s distinctive voice comes through in her attention to horror and genre filmmakers who push boundaries.

Her cover story “The Dawn of Jane Schoenbrun” follows a horror director whose first two films impressed heavyweight admirers and whose third won over Cannes, positioning their work as a key case study in where boundary-pushing cinema is headed. In “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” she writes about a slasher-inflected film as an “ecstatic meditation” that reclaims nostalgia as a force for good, using the genre frame to discuss sexuality and subculture rather than simply scares. She highlights projects like The History of Concrete, describing John Wilson’s first documentary feature as a “reliable delight” that enlarges his sensibility to feature length.

In pieces on films such as Misty Green and Being Heumann, she tracks how movies handle industry critique and radical disability activism, pointing out when incisive subject matter gets softened by overly cutesy or familiar storytelling. Her interest in horror and offbeat work extends to festival titles and streaming releases, where she often treats genre as a place where new kinds of stories and marginalized perspectives can emerge.

Festival Circuits, Awards Season, and Industry Context

Willmore is deeply involved in covering the fall festival and awards-season pipeline, using individual reviews to sketch a broader map of what the industry is backing at any given moment.

She files from events like TIFF and NYFF on films including Godzilla Minus Zero, Prima Facie, I Play Rocky, and Casey Affleck’s Company, assessing both their artistic strengths and their place in crowded lineups. Her TIFF and Venice dispatches frequently emphasize performance and awards viability, such as noting Cynthia Erivo’s renewed “run at awards glory” in Prima Facie or calling Company the “most frustrating” film at Venice because its message about embracing sadness and meanness lacks corresponding joy and wonder.

She also contributes preview pieces like “11 Movies We’re Lining Up to See at TIFF This Year,” which signal what she and the desk consider essential festival viewing. Outside of written criticism, she co-hosts Vulture’s podcast Critical Darlings, serving as an awards-season guide alongside another critic, which reinforces her role in shaping how films are talked about during the campaigning months.

This combination of on-the-ground festival writing and season-long commentary gives her coverage a strategic sense of how critical reception, prestige, and studio priorities intersect.

Stars, Performances, and Career Narratives

Willmore often uses individual movies to examine how stars are being deployed and where their careers are heading. Her review “Anne Hathaway Deserves a Better End to Her Big Year Than Verity” weighs the film’s “ridiculous” adaptation choices against Hathaway’s efforts, arguing that no one involved can agree on how ridiculous the project should be.

In another piece, she revels in the chaos of The End of Oak Street, noting moments like Hathaway shooting a gun at a dinosaur as emblematic of the movie’s joyfully unhinged energy. She writes about Mahershala Ali being at his “Blade-trained best” in a new action drama that has him scurrying across Houston in search of vengeance and breast milk, focusing on how a star performance elevates otherwise conventional material. Her coverage of Andrew Scott in Elsinore highlights the role as his best work yet, balancing the humor and heartbreak of playing Ian Charleson as he finally gets to tackle Hamlet. In “When Will the Movies Let Tom Holland Grow Up?”, she uses a superhero installment to discuss the actor’s struggle to show what comes next beyond his established persona.

Across these pieces, Willmore treats casting, star power, and character arcs as central parts of her criticism, mapping how performers are used, challenged, or shortchanged by the projects they headline.