movie review for a good person

‘A Good Person’ Review: Florence Pugh Connects in an Addiction Drama That Marks a Return to Form (If You Like His Form) for Zach Braff

She plays a tragic accident victim, numbing herself with OxyContin, in a tale of the karma of trauma.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

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“ A Good Person ,” the fourth feature written and directed by Zach Braff (and the best one that he has made since his first, “Garden State,” in 2004), is exactly that kind of movie. It’s an addiction drama that has scenes you can bicker with, a few contrivances, and other peccadilloes. Yet beneath the middlebrow situational conventionality, there’s a core of raw feeling and truth to it. The movie creates a highly specific situation — about its heroine, and about an entire family — that it carries right through. It’s not a melodrama about scraping bottom. It’s a story of lives that have been frozen by tragedy, and of how the unfreezing happens.

Talk about happiness crashing and burning. We’ve just been to the engagement party of Ally ( Florence Pugh ) and Nathan (Chinaza Uche), who live in New Jersey and are radiantly in love. Ally sells wholesale pharmaceutical drugs for a living, and feels a bit guilty about it, but she’s a soulful (if non-professional) piano player and singer, and her party rendition of the Velvet Underground’s “After Hours” is an ideal mood-setter.

A scene or two later, she and her future sister-in-law, Molly (Nichelle Hines), and Molly’s husband, Jesse (Toby Onwumere), are driving into New York City for a shopping expedition and possible theater outing. Ally is at the wheel, and as their plans are forming she takes out her phone to glance, for a moment, at a map. It’s the wrong moment. A bulldozer on a road-construction site to her left lifts its shovel into the highway, and the next thing you know…well, we don’t see the accident, but we cut to its aftermath. Ally is laying in a hospital bed with a serious head injury. Molly and Jesse? They’re gone.

The loss of life is staggering, but what hovers over the movie (even though, smartly, it doesn’t bring up the subject until much later on) is that Ally looked away from the road. Did that make the accident her fault? Maybe so, but you could put that question another way: Who of us hasn’t stolen a look at a cell-phone map for two seconds while driving along the highway?

Cut to a year later. Ally has every right to her trauma, and to her guilt. And the way she sees it, she has every right to her pills — the sky-blue OxyContin painkillers she started taking for her injuries and has been popping ever since. We don’t need to be told that she’s self-medicating; neither does Ally or her mother, Diane (Molly Shannon), in whose home she’s now living. In America, self-medication has practically become a point of pride. But what happened to Ally’s engagement? We assume it fell apart out of the revelation that she, on some level, bore responsibility for the death of her fiancée’s sister and brother-in-law. We would be wrong. (That’s another smart touch.) What we can see is that Ally is now in one desolate cocoon.

Florence Pugh doesn’t distance herself, and doesn’t do overwrought acting out either. She brings Ally’s emotions right to us through the hypnotic blur of her confusion. Ally’s life has become a limbo, and Pugh nails the considerable acting feat of getting us to connect to that. Early on, Ally follows a self-hair-trimming tutorial to chop her own hair into a shorter, not-insane-looking, but still rather telling cut — a martyr’s bob. She’s coasting, but her Oxy refills have run out, and that means she’s about to go off a cliff.

A central one belongs to Daniel ( Morgan Freeman ), who was going to be Ally’s father-in-law, and who kicks off the movie in a very Morgan Freeman way, speaking to us in voice-over about the comforting utopia of building model trains. Freeman, in recent years, has been cast as outwardly spiky but angelic characters. Not so here. Daniel has a benign surface with demons inside. A retired cop and Vietnam veteran, as well as a violent drunk with 10 years of sobriety behind him, he has done more than his share of damage. Freeman makes him a saintly sinner of an old granddad who, in the right circumstances, will threaten to blow your brains out and mean it. It’s a terrific role, and Freeman runs with it, making Daniel an addict of puckishly philosophical pain and depth.  

When Ally, realizing that she’s become a pharmaceutical junkie, and that she’s got to find a way out, wanders into a church for a 12-step meeting, who does she find there but — yes — Daniel, who has always blamed her for the accident. We think: Okay, these two at the same meeting feels a little tidy. But you can get hung up on the contrivance, or you can roll with it to get to the scene a few minutes later where Ally and Daniel are talking at a diner, and we see the interface of two stricken souls with a thornier connection than either one can acknowledge.

Braff unfolds his story on parallel tracks: Ally’s rocky road to recovery, and Daniel trying — and failing — to be an effective guardian to his orphaned granddaughter, Ryan (Celeste O’Connor), who at 16 is doing her own acting out. What’s compelling about the movie isn’t so much that a single tragedy connects both stories but that we see, in the telling, how trauma has its own karma, spreading across a family.

Maybe healing has its own karma, too. In “A Good Person,” wounds are torn open, truths are spoken, and hugs happen. It’s that kind of movie. Yet if the uplifting side of the addiction drama can be one of its pieties, in this case it feels earned. It was clear from “Garden State,” with its quirky surface and woozy heart, that Zach Braff is a certain kind of commercial sentimentalist. But though more than a few critics rolled their eyes at that movie, it had a romantic conviction that won some of us over. His next film, “Wish I Was Here” (2014), was a misfire, and his remake of “Going in Style” (2017) was a trifle, but “A Good Person” finds Braff, at 47, drawing on his experience to create a movie that feels rooted in life. Where some may see a facile filmmaker, I see facility. And a voice that’s his own.

Reviewed at Park Ave. Screening Room, March 17, 2023. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 129 MIN.

• Production: An MGM release of a Killer Films, Elevation Pictures production. Producers: Zach Braff, Pamela Koffler, Florence Pugh, Christine Vachon, Christina Piovesan, Noah Segal. Executive producer: Beverly Rogers.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Zach Braff. Camera: Mauro Fiore. Editor: Dan Schalk. Music: Bryce Dessner.
• With: Florence Pugh, Morgan Freeman, Chinaza Uche, Celeste O’Connor, Molly Shannon, Zoe Lister-Jones, Alex Wolff.

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‘a good person’ review: florence pugh and morgan freeman lift zach braff’s labored trauma drama.

Pugh plays a young woman whose life hits rock bottom after being involved in a fatal car accident in Braff's latest directorial effort.

By Frank Scheck

Frank Scheck

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Meryl streep, morgan freeman, naomi watts and reese witherspoon set for nicole kidman's afi tribute, florence pugh shares tour of 'thunderbolts' set and previews yelena's combat suit, a good person.

Alas, it’s not meant to be, as Allison, driving on the New Jersey Turnpike, glances at the navigation app on her phone for just a few seconds and winds up in a crash that leaves Nathan’s sister and her husband dead.  

Cut to several years later, with a guilt-ridden Allison and Nathan no longer together and her returning to her New Jersey hometown to live with her mother ( Molly Shannon , in another excellent dramatic supporting turn). Her promising musical career in tatters, Allison is now impoverished and hopelessly addicted to painkillers. Her desperation to score is shown in one of the film’s most authentic-feeling scenes, when she has a painfully awkward reunion at a bar with two former high-school classmates who don’t hesitate to mock her even while providing her with drugs.

Her life begins to change for the better when she meets Daniel (Freeman), her former fiancé’s father, who has taken in his teenage granddaughter Ryan (Celeste O’Connor, excellent), who was left orphaned by the accident. Their initial encounter, in which Allison attempts to apologize, doesn’t go well. But Daniel, an ex-cop and recovering alcoholic, recognizes a damaged soul when he sees one.

Braff does a good job of establishing the characters and their complex relationships, but he gets carried away at times — particularly in a late plot development involving Allison and Ryan secretly traveling together to New York City, where the latter takes off with an older man and is eventually tracked down and retrieved by a gun-toting Daniel, who nearly loses his sobriety in the process. Indeed, there’s so much going on in the story — including Allison’s mother’s own addiction issues; Allison’s tortured reunion with Nathan, who has since become involved with another woman; and Nathan’s slow rapprochement with his father, from whom he had been estranged after a violent incident in his youth — that you begin to feel the story would have been better served by a mini-series.

The film also becomes labored in its attempts at poeticism, with an elaborate train set lovingly tended to by Daniel and featuring miniature figures too easily representing the need for control that he lacks in the real world.

Beautifully photographed in suitably autumnal fashion by DP Mauro Fiore in unglamorous New Jersey locations and effectively scored by Bryce Dessner of the rock band The National, the film, in any case, marks Braff’s most assured work since his award-winning Garden State nearly 20(!) years ago.

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‘A Good Person’ Review: Florence Pugh Muscles Through Zach Braff’s Stilted Addiction Melodrama

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At this point, the dulcet rumble of Morgan Freeman’s omniscient voiceover could almost qualify as its own genre. The legendary actor lends his considerable gravitas to the opening screed of “ A Good Person ,” another New Jersey-set drama from “Garden State” writer/director Zach Braff .

The film opens with an obvious metaphor about model trains that is very quickly hammered into the ground, along with a few too many other themes and plot lines. With model trains, you see, one can construct “a world where the hobbyist plays omnipotent creator,” says Freeman, before sealing it with the winking clincher: “In life, of course, nothing is nearly as neat and tidy.” If only filmmaking were more like model-train-making, Braff could have kept “A Good Person” from going so wildly off the rails.

The film centers on 26-year-old Allison, or Ali, played with unrestrained bravery by Florence Pugh , who finds herself stuck in the throes of opioid addiction after surviving a fatal car crash in which she was the driver. Ali had a bright future ahead of her before the accident, as shown in a blissful engagement party capped off with her earnest performance of The Velvet Underground’s “After Hours.” (For what it’s worth, Pugh has a lovely voice, and appears to play the piano herself.) As she sings, her fiancée Nathan (Chinaza Uche) looks at her with uncomplicated joy, though it’ll be the last time.

While driving into the city to try on wedding dresses with her soon-to-be sister-in-law and her husband, Ali looks down briefly at her maps app before noticing a construction vehicle about to swing into traffic. When she wakes up in pain begging for more morphine, she receives the tragic news that she is the sole survivor of the accident.

The movie then jumps ahead one year to find Ali living in her childhood home in West Orange with her mother Diane (Molly Shannon) and battling a nasty dependency on Oxycontin. “We said we were going to ween off them,” Diane says, before flushing Ali’s last few pills. As she panics, cries, and rifles through the medicine cabinet, suddenly the film swings wildly into addiction melodrama territory. Donning a sloppy cardigan and choppy bob she cut herself, she takes off for the pharmacy on her teeny, tiny child-sized bike.

Shut down by the pharmacist and a childhood friend who works in the pharmaceutical industry, she finds herself downing tequila in a local dive bar, where she is recognized by two former high school classmates. Sensing an in, she asks if they have any pills. The anachronistic scene takes a dark turn when scuzzy Mark (Alex Wolff) cruelly forces her to say “I’m a fuckin’ junkie” before helping her out. The whole thing feels forced and cliche, as does the image of Ali smoking crack in an alleyway, which she does after being told “it’s all the same thing.”

After all of this exhausting setup, the film sort of finds its stride, or at least gets to the meat of the story. The harrowing bar experience having helped Ali see she has a problem, she wanders timidly into a local 12-step meeting. She is surprised to find Nathan’s father Daniel (Morgan Freeman), who is now saddled with raising his orphaned 16-year-old granddaughter Ryan (Celeste O’Connor). Masking his bitterness toward Ali, Daniel kindly urges her to stay for the meeting, speaking from his experience as a sober alcoholic. (Though there are too many other strange choices in Braff’s script that pointing it out seems irrelevant, he sweeps past the fact that N.A. and A.A. are two different programs.)

The heart of the film becomes Daniel and Ali’s healing friendship, in which they bond over stories about Nathan, insights into raising rebellious teenage girls, and of course, model trains. Though the film is meant to be Ali’s journey, Braff gives Daniel a whole back story about his father’s alcoholism, his own failures as a father, and — what else? — his love of model trains.

“So much of my life has been out of control,” he says from the basement where he has constructed a miniature replica of the entire town of West Orange. “Down here, I get to decide.”

Though their relationship is by far the most interesting in the film, “A Good Person” loses whatever sense of purpose it had when the focus splits so dramatically toward Daniel and Ryan. Though Pugh valiantly muscles through the melancholy beats of Braff’s melodrama, there are too many other characters and plot threads to allow her to do much besides heave the story forward.

After a chaotic trip into the city to save Ryan from a scary party in Williamsburg tests the limits of their friendship, it’s Daniel and not Ali who delivers the titular line, “I’m a good person.” Whatever journey this befuddled character was carrying has been co-opted, albeit by a very kindly older gentleman. When all is said and done, the film feels as slight and synthetic as a model train set.

MGM releases a “A Good Person” in theaters on Friday, March 24. 

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A Good Person

Follows Allison, whose life falls apart following her involvement in a fatal accident. Follows Allison, whose life falls apart following her involvement in a fatal accident. Follows Allison, whose life falls apart following her involvement in a fatal accident.

• Florence Pugh
• Morgan Freeman
• Celeste O'Connor
• 141 User reviews
• 76 Critic reviews
• 50 Metascore
• 2 nominations

• Statetrooper
• (as Adam 'Chip' Hamilton)

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia Florence Pugh wrote and performed two songs in A Good Person, "The Best Part" and the piano track titled "I Hate Myself".
• Goofs South Orange station in the movie is actually Mountain station. South Orange is an elevated rail stop, while the station used in the movie is an at level boarding.

Daniel : You know what they say...

Diane : What?

Daniel : Comparison is the thief of joy.

Diane : Oh! I didn't know they said that.

Daniel : Well, somebody did.

• Crazy credits Firms are mentioned in the disclosure. "The events, characters and firms depicted in this motion picture are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual firms is purely coincidental."
• Connections Referenced in OWV Updates: The Seventh OWV Awards - Last Update of 2022 (2022)
• Soundtracks After Hours Written by Lou Reed Performed by Florence Pugh

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 8 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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‘A Good Person’ Review: Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman Deal With Addiction in Zach Braff’s Uneven Attempt at Maturity

Braff's third film as a writer/director shows steps towards maturation, and features two solid lead performances.

In the opening of A Good Person , the third film written and directed by Zach Braff , we hear Morgan Freeman ’s Daniel reading a quote as he looks out over his model train set and the town he’s built. The quote says “blissfully have I been lost in a world of my own creation,” and while we’ll come to learn that this is true of Daniel’s experience with this miniature world he’s made, this also could be true of the previous films Braff has written and directed. His 2004 film Garden State has been criticized frequently over the last two decades for its quirkiness and twee nature, while 2014’s Wish I Was Here certainly overdid it with its precocious, saccharine story. Braff created his own little worlds, where a song could change a person’s life and the unorthodox nature of these characters didn’t feel out of place.

In the nearly ten years since Braff wrote and directed Wish I Was Here , he has mostly moved away from this idiosyncratic style, directing (but not writing) 2017’s Going in Style , starring Michael Caine , Freeman, and Alan Arkin , and working in television, directing episodes of Ted Lasso and Shrink —frankly, perfect shows for Braff to try and hone his style and tone. With A Good Person , Braff returns to writing with a film that feels sort of like a combination of these two periods in his work, as he tells two stories in his latest film that work fine separately, but flourish when brought together.

Florence Pugh stars as Allison, a pharmaceutical rep who is getting married to Nathan ( Dickinson ’s Chinaza Uche ). Allison takes Nathan’s sister and her partner into New York City to look at wedding dresses, and after looking at her phone's map for a second, she gets in a crash that kills the couple. Soon after, we meet Daniel (Freeman), a former police officer who is taking his granddaughter Ryan ( Celeste O’Connor ) to school, when he receives a call that his daughter and her daughter’s partner have died in this car crash.

RELATED: Best Florence Pugh Performances, From Her Breakout in 'Lady Macbeth' to 'Black Widow'

Cut to a year later, and Allison is still struggling to deal with the repercussions of the crash. She broke things off with Nathan and has been doing a whole lot of nothing, living with her mother Diane ( Molly Shannon ), and taking OxyContin to ease her physical and emotional pain. When Diane takes her pills away, Allison has to reckon with the fact that she’s a junkie who needs something to ease her suffering. Similarly, Daniel has been raising Ryan since her mother’s death, and with Ryan acting out in school and having sex with a boy far too old for her, it’s been a lot to deal with. Nathan is an alcoholic who has been sober for a decade, yet the stress of his situation has made him really want a drink.

After realizing she has a problem, Allison goes to a support group, where she runs into Daniel. He pleads for her to stay, realizing she has problems of her own, and states that it’s a sign that they’re together at the same meeting. As the two seek help, they start to form something close to a friendship, as they both continue to deal with the loss and pain in their lives.

While A Good Person is by no means “quirky” in its approach to substance abuse, Allison’s side of the story feels more in line with Braff’s first two films, as Allison only rides a bike around the suburbs of New Jersey, often draped in her robe. But Nathan’s story reminds more of Braff’s work in the last decade: restrained, mostly without the notes that one has come to expect from him. It’s an interesting balance to watch Braff play with, as if he’s attempting to show his maturity, while also trying to be more reserved with the side of things that inherently feels more of his style.

Yet it’s when Braff unites these two sides that A Good Person really soars, as we see Allison attempt to make penance for her actions, while Nathan does his best to move past the incident that changed his life. Both Pugh and Freeman are doing wonderful work, but when they’re together, we can see the push-and-pull that both are dealing with when they’re with each other, a desperate attempt to move forward by confronting their past, no matter how difficult that can be.

But it’s the odd choices sprinkled throughout A Good Person that makes this story occasionally feel off or unrealistic, despite its heavy subject matter. For example, we early on meet Allison and Nathan at their engagement party, and watching these two together and with their friends has an awkward tone to it that seems like Braff not knowing how to present these characters until after the tragedy strikes. A Good Person defines these characters by their pain, and while that’s not necessarily a damning issue, in these opening moments, we see that on the page, that pain is really all there is to these characters.

Another unusual scene late in the film finds Allison, Daniel, and Ryan at a party, and Braff is so focused on getting us to the party that he’s forgotten to explain why so many other characters from this cast just happen to find this location as well, popping up without any rationale. Again, these aren’t moments that ruin what Braff is going for, and we can tell that the intention is good, it’s just the execution is shaggy at times in a way that can take the viewer out of what is supposed to be a heartbreaking, emotional experience.

Led by two solid performances by Pugh and Freeman, A Good Person shows growth from Braff as both a writer and director, as he attempts to push himself into a more mature story that we’re used to from him. It’s not a bad look for Braff, and it makes one wish that he’d write and direct his own films more than just once a decade. Braff’s tiny worlds of his own creation are starting to feel real, and it’s a welcome change.

A Good Person opens in limited release on March 24, and opens wide on March 31.

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A Good Person Review – a stunning performance by Pugh

We review the 2023  film A Good Person, which does not contain spoilers.

Zach Braff spent the second half of his career acting in T-Mobile commercials and directing films obsessed with quirk and man-babies who don’t want to grow up. (Yes, that includes the older adult dramedy, Going in Style ).

For instance, Wish I Was Here was an extension of his award-winning film, Garden State , with the same character in a different stage in their life. With this movie, A Good Person , he combines his trademark quirk that is toned down for a script that tackles the painful subject of addiction.

A Good Person (2023) Review and Plot Summary

Braff finds himself behind the camera again, and his script follows a woman named Allison ( Florence Pugh ) , who is in the prime of her life. Her career is exceptional. Allison has a great support system and is about to marry her fiance, Nathan (Chinaza Uche) : a kind, warm soul who compliments Allison in many ways and is deaf in one ear.

After spending the night with Nathan, she drives her future sister and brother-in-law, Molly and Jesse, into the city. While driving, Allison uses her phone to reroute them to the festivities.

A bulldozer backs into her lane. She wakes up in the hospital a few hours later. Her in-laws are dead, leaving their 14-year-old daughter Ryan ( Selah and the Spades ‘ Celeste O’Connor ) to be looked after by her grandfather, Daniel (Morgan Freeman) .

At that point, Braff’s script deals with Allison’s self-medicating as a way to escape the mental and physical pain of the accident. By chance, she walks into a group meeting to help support her attempt at sobriety, being attended by Daniel.

He struggles to stay sober while trying to raise Ryan independently. To say the least, it’s a complicated relationship that Braff makes much more welcoming than you usually would think.

Where the film struggles is in showing some chronic tension between characters. In particular, when Daniel confronts Allison. The film misses an opportunity even when Ryan confronts the woman behind her parent’s death.

They are both very forgiving, and their character acts like it’s their job to heal her somehow. With the script taking place four months or more after the incident, honestly, it’s hard to believe. Even the revelation of the tension between Nathan and Daniel comes across as faux since Freeman plays it as if it wasn’t a big deal and has already offered an apology.

Where the film excels is the performance by Pugh. There are times her performance is a revelation. The Oscar-nominated star has no trouble finding that deeply felt manic depression that comes with self-medicating with opioid addiction.

Her turn is always in the moment, even if Allison is constantly ruminating over the death, not just of her family, but the life that almost was. She is simply stunning here and elevates a film that needed something — or in this case, someone — great to get A Good Person where it needed to be.

Is the 2023 movie A Good Person good?

A Good Person is a slightly above-average character study on grief, with Pugh’s outstanding performance at its center. While the film uses its quirk as a tool to move the story along more than my liking, I see there is a method to Braff’s tendencies.

The script is not about directing blame. Braff wants to explore how trauma can strengthen bonds and how empathy encourages closure. And no matter what you do, there are just some broken connections that can never be fixed.

All you can do is move forward and help manage the pain the best you can.

What did you think of the 2023 film A Good Person? Comment below.

Article by Marc Miller

Marc Miller (also known as M.N. Miller) joined Ready Steady Cut in April 2018 as a Film and TV Critic, publishing over 1,600 articles on the website. Since a young age, Marc dreamed of becoming a legitimate critic and having that famous “Rotten Tomato” approved status – in 2023, he achieved that status.

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A Good Person Reviews

Has everything that you would expect from a Zach Braff film - a good screenplay and a great soundtrack. This one will keep you guessing with all of its twists and turns. Morgan Freeman, Florence Pugh and Celeste O'Connor are amazing throughout.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 16, 2023

Braff has not grown as a filmmaker or writer and still believes putting a bunch of indie songs over a scene is enough to make it dramatically coherent. Still, for those who love Florence Pugh, her performance will not disappoint even if the film does.

Full Review | Sep 6, 2023

Though Pugh does her customary excellent work here, she’s ultimately undermined by all the overlong, transparently manufactured, and downright whiplash-inducing melodrama around her.

Full Review | Sep 2, 2023

Zach Braff’s latest won’t change the screenwriting or filmmaking game one bit, but a pair of solid lead performances made it worth watching. Morgan Freeman helps every movie he's in.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Aug 26, 2023

The entire cast elevates the heavy-handed, predictable and contrived melodrama, though there are magic human moments that land because of the performers’ skills.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 16, 2023

Zach Braff's direction is solid but his writing is the best aspect of it all as well as Florence Pugh great performance.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 22, 2023

Director Zach Braff delivers many insightful, poignant scenes about grief, guilt, and how hard it can be to forgive ourselves, even when other people have already forgiven us.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | May 30, 2023

There are some undeniably foreboding moments, but thankfully, it wades into darker territory without quickly brightening everything with a cute scenario.

Full Review | May 29, 2023

Touching story about three people who are able to face addiction and grief through their kindnesses to each other.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 28, 2023

A Good Person is a story of shades of grey that loses itself in its third act, but just as well deserves our attention to attend a display of honesty told by a regretfully insecure hand. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 22, 2023

It’s a deeper issue than the stakes of the film not manifesting, there’s something about the clear-eyed presentation of its bleary-eyed characters that seems to signal a quality of inauthenticity.

Full Review | Original Score: 45/100 | May 20, 2023

A forgettable sentimental melodrama about a family tragedy. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | May 18, 2023

Writer/director Zach Braff’s well intentioned but predictable drama A Good Person is saved by another stunning screen performance from Florence Pugh.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 28, 2023

A Good Person mostly works, thanks to the strength of its performers and its compassionate spirit.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 24, 2023

“A Good Person” veers between moments of genuine feeling and moments of phony schmaltz — and ends up delivering more of the fake stuff than the real thing.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 23, 2023

After an annoying beginning, A Good Person hits its stride and turns into a movie you definitely should not miss; a meditation on the ravages of opioid addiction, featuring dramatic heavy-hitters Pugh and Freeman. Very heartwarming.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 21, 2023

The pleasure lies in watching Pugh and Freeman face up and finally come around to one another. It’s not straightforward, a dance of advance and retreat with both revealing their strengths and weaknesses, but it’s always worth watching.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 20, 2023

Every one of these characters is up to their necks in a mother lode of woe that makes perversely compelling viewing.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 20, 2023

… manages to eke out a good experience off the strength of its visceral lead performances and its eventual, if still rocky, ability to wring proper catharsis out of occasionally screwface-inducing developments.

Full Review | Original Score: 13.99 | Apr 18, 2023

The answer to a question no one asked (what would happen if you smushed misery porn into eldersploitation and had Zach Braff do it?)...

Full Review | Original Score: 0/4 | Apr 16, 2023

Screen Rant

A good person review: pugh & freeman are excellent in braff's poignant drama.

Although it sometimes feels like a first film with certain choices and edits, A Good Person is an altogether poignant, emotional & thoughtful drama.

Redemption, guilt, and grief are themes often explored in films. But they aren’t always handled effectively. A Good Person , written and directed by Zach Braff, leans into its themes and sits in them long enough so that its characters’ journeys aren’t short-changed for an easy, neat ending. Braff assembles a fabulous cast, led by Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman, which lends the film proper gravitas. Although it sometimes feels like a first or second film with certain choices and edits, A Good Person is an altogether poignant, emotional and thoughtful drama.

Allison (Pugh) is happily engaged to Nathan (Chinaza Uche), and they’re looking forward to the wedding. Things take a tragic turn, however, when Allie, and Nathan’s sister and brother-in-law are in a car accident that kills the latter. Allie was the driver at the time of the accident, and she can’t move past it despite Nathan wanting to be there for her. A year later, Allie is struggling and is now addicted to oxycontin. When she begins to attend AA meetings, Allie runs into Daniel (Freeman), Nathan’s estranged father who is also having a rough time caring for granddaughter Ryan (Celeste O’Connor) and is grieving the loss of his daughter, contemplating a return to drinking despite his long road to sobriety. Allie and Daniel have a rocky relationship, but they are more alike than they think.

Related: Florence Pugh & Morgan Freeman Cope With Grief In A Good Person Trailer

A Good Person takes its time fleshing out the characters, their dynamics, the way they were each traumatized by the accident, and how they are coping in the aftermath. Though the final scenes are a bit rushed to get to the heartbreaking, yet hopeful conclusion, Braff understands that it’s the journey that is crucial. It would have been easy to turn the story into an emotionally manipulative one, but A Good Person delves into Allie and Daniel’s feelings, unafraid to explore the parts of them they neglect to see or contend with. For Allie, that’s the avoidance of shouldering the blame for the accident; for Daniel, it’s trying to do right by his granddaughter in a bid to prove he’s changed.

They are two sides of the same coin, especially in that they firmly believe they are good people regardless of their actions. To that end, A Good Person gets to the heart of each of their conflicts without forcing it. The film is quite emotional, and it’s hard to watch Allie and Daniel struggle. What’s pertinent here is that they aren’t particularly asking for redemption, but it is apparent in everything they do. They want someone to tell them it’s alright without any self-reflection, and this is especially true of Allie. It’s only through her friendship with Daniel that she can acknowledge the truth and move forward. Braff ultimately crafts a gentle, thoughtful meditation on guilt, redemption, and forgiveness. The film’s conclusion doesn’t tie everything up neatly, but it does offer some hope through the darkness.

A Good Person is a tear-jerker , and the emotion wells up naturally. Watching these characters struggle and attempt to make it out the other side is emotional enough, and it’s all the more effective thanks to Pugh and Freeman’s performances. Pugh is always good, and she really gives her all to Allie, who is a mess and would rather be numb than feel anything at all. Pugh conveys Allie’s struggle with tenderness, and an understanding that this person is hurting and feels she deserves to feel that way. A wavering voice, hunched shoulders, and an uncertainty that lingers in Pugh’s eyes perfectly encapsulates this character and her journey.

A Good Person is one of Freeman’s best roles in a long time. The actor straddles the line between kindness and anger, testing the limits of his patience. Freeman conveys Daniel’s exhaustion and handles his feelings delicately through body language and cadence. Celeste O’Connor is an actress to keep an eye out for, and she shifts easily between grief, anger, annoyance, and joy. Chinaza Uche and Molly Shannon, who plays Allie’s mother, get less to do within the narrative, but their talent shines through nonetheless, and Uche especially does a lot with a little, showing all of Nathan’s emotions through his expressive eyes.

The film isn’t without some contrivances, and there is one key scene that lacks the tension needed to fully land, but it does what it needs to do in the end. There are also certain choices, such as the use of a blurry background that brings focus to an actor while another in the same scene doesn’t get the same treatment, that are questionable and don’t necessarily enhance the moment. A Good Person is littered with instances that make clear Braff is still trying to find his voice as a filmmaker, and certain characters could have been focused on more regarding their grief. However, the result is a story that exudes heartbreak, empathy, and an engaging exploration of two messy people who have made mistakes and hurt people. It’s a tender drama and one that focuses on its characters in interesting, thoughtful ways.

More: The Young Wife Review: Tayarisha Poe Crafts Intimate Story With Visual Flair [SXSW]

A Good Person is in select theaters Friday, March 24 and everywhere March 31. The film is 129 minutes long and rated R for drug abuse, language throughout and some sexual references.

Review: Florence Pugh is heartbreaking in Zach Braff’s less-than-subtle ‘A Good Person’

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Writer-director Zach Braff’s affecting, if blandly titled, family drama, “A Good Person,” takes a largely convincing and compelling look at such big topics as grief, drug addiction, parental bonds, redemption and fate. Whether it will feel distinct enough from so many other screen stories of its kind may depend on just how many versions of this stacked deck of a film that viewers have seen and, as is so often the case, one’s own relatable life experiences.

Braff returns to his Garden State roots (he shot in and around his New Jersey hometown of South Orange) for this intricate tale of a pharmaceutical rep, Allison (Florence Pugh), who’s involved in a car accident that kills her passengers, Molly (Nichelle Hines) and Jesse (Toby Onwumere) — the sister and brother-in-law of her kindly fiancé, Nathan (Chinaza Uche). Allison, who’s also a budding singer-songwriter, survives but, a year later, is left with a stultifying addiction to the OxyContin that has helped her manage her pain. At this point, she’s in sheer survival mode, unable to work, split from Nathan and unhappily living with her long-divorced mother, Diane (Molly Shannon), a well-meaning enabler with her own set of compulsions.

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Then there’s Nathan and Molly’s widowed father, Daniel (Morgan Freeman), a retired cop and recovering alcoholic, who’s in over his head as the guardian of his granddaughter, Ryan (Celeste O’Connor), a rebellious, hormonal teen still grieving the loss of her parents. Daniel, who keeps a whiskey bottle stashed away for the occasional look-but-don’t-touch, takes solace in his longtime model train set, a lovingly crafted re-creation of his town that allows him to reshape several key life events as he wishes they’d been. (If that sounds a bit too precious, it’s not. As handled, it’s beautiful.)

Allison and Daniel’s worlds are, of course, destined to collide. And they do when Allison, at the end of her opioid-dependent rope, gives in to visiting a local Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, unaware that it’s the same one Daniel attends. An anxious and ashamed Allison wants to bolt, but Daniel, looking to surmount his own anger and finger-pointing, urges her to stay and confront her demons.

And thus begins a cautious alliance between the broken pair who, in an ironic and poignant twist, may not be able to heal without the other.

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Unsurprisingly, the road for Allison and Daniel — both individually and together — is a bumpy one. It’s made no easier by Ryan’s unforgiving presence and escalating defiance, which inspires Allison to step in to help the flailing Daniel better deal with his granddaughter. Despite the dicey dynamic, a friendship eventually blooms between Allison and Ryan that will come with its own challenges (and, honestly, a few contrivances).

Meanwhile, Nathan, who has moved on with his post-Allison life, finds there may be a slow way back to some kind of détente with his estranged, once-abusive and hard-drinking dad. It’s another one of the film’s many powerful, difficult journeys that offer emotional rewards.

Still, Braff sometimes takes the more obvious, melodramatic route when a subtler approach to certain themes and actions would have sufficed. (For one, the film’s overwrought, second-act low point needed a rethink.) Overall, though, he manages enough honest, superbly charged moments between his various character pairings that more than make up for his earnest missteps.

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Enough can’t be said about the two lead performances. Pugh (“Little Women,” “Don’t Worry Darling”) has quickly become one of the best young actors out there, and her portrayal of the defeated Allison is galvanizing, lived-in and heartbreaking. As for Freeman, though we expect excellence from the veteran star, his performance here is next-level. It’s one of his best turns in years as he, like Pugh, is asked to work through a kaleidoscope of emotions, memories and crucibles.

The rest of the cast, including Zoe Lister-Jones as Allison’s supportive but no-nonsense sponsor, is also fine, though Shannon could have used a bit more modulation. In his one tough scene as a slacker who turns the tables on Allison, Alex Wolff is terrific.

“A Good Person” isn’t an easy ride but, like such disparate, if similarly themed, movies as “Rabbit Hole,” “Waves” and “Four Good Days,” it’s a haunting slice of real life that will make you think, feel and maybe even want to reach out to your loved ones. As the film vividly shows, they can be gone in a flash.

'A Good Person'

Rating : R, for drug abuse, language throughout and some sexual references Running time : 2 hours, 5 minutes Playing : In general release

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A Good Person review – Zach Braff’s tale of self-healing is excruciatingly ersatz

Writer/director Braff takes Florence Pugh’s ‘good person who has done a bad thing’ on an contrived journey towards self-forgiveness

I n his dual capacity as writer and director, Zach Braff here puts us through an ordeal of excruciating contrived nonsense: a masturbatory Calvary of ersatz empathy and emotional wellness. The film goes on a long, long indie-acoustic healing journey towards indie-acoustic self-forgiveness after Florence Pugh’s Allison accidentally kills her fiance’s sister and husband while driving them in her car, having taken her eyes off the road to look at her phone.

Allison breaks up with her fiance, spirals into OxyContin addiction and alcoholism and then finds herself at 12-step meetings with her fiance’s grieving old dad and AA veteran Daniel, played by Morgan Freeman , who with heartsinking inevitability delivers a sonorous voiceover of cute wisdom over the opening scene. Daniel spends a lot of time tinkering with his model railway and its hand-painted tiny human figures, a controllable mini-universe where there is no pain, you see.

The low point has to be when Allison finds herself befriending Ryan (Celeste O’Connor), the unhappy teenage daughter of the couple she killed and they wind up going out together clubbing in the city – Allison in her Nick Cave T-shirt – and it leads to an outrageously implausible crisis of painful truth-telling.

The title asks us to consider what happens when a good person does a bad thing; this film seems to imply that if you’re a good person, you can pull a gun on someone at a party in front of many witnesses and you won’t get into trouble as your exhaustively established sensitivity and suffering means there is apparently no question of the cops showing up the next morning. Braff puts us through a gruelling “relapse” montage as Allison hits the pills again after an illusory breakthrough and then a “recovery” montage as she gets it together. And the film’s single valuable lesson – the one about not looking at your phone while driving – is all but forgotten.

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A good person, common sense media reviewers.

Poignant Pugh redemption drama has drug abuse, teen sex.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Themes of family, forgiveness, redemption, and res

Allison isn't an obvious role model, but she's str

Other than main character Allison (White British a

Deadly car accident, with lots of grief as a resul

Engaged couple kiss and playfully interact; a woma

Very strong language throughout, including "ass,"

Story centers on alcohol and drug dependency. Exte

Parents need to know that A Good Person is a mature, moving drama about substance use disorder from writer-director Zach Braff. It stars Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman and depicts the ripple effect of a tragedy on two families who were set to be joined by marriage before a tragic accident. The consequences…

Positive Messages

Themes of family, forgiveness, redemption, and resilience.

Positive Role Models

Allison isn't an obvious role model, but she's struggling and trying and eventually makes positive choices. Both she and Daniel are responsible for unforgivable actions. Other characters try to make up for past mistakes to the best of their abilities. Two characters act with compassion, even though it takes some effort to get themselves to that place. Nathan is loving, supportive, compassionate, and forgiving, even in the worst circumstances.

Diverse Representations

Other than main character Allison (White British actor Florence Pugh), the majority of the cast is Black, including her fiancé, Nathan (Chinaza Uche). Nathan is partially deaf (Uche is not) and is portrayed as sensitive and loving. Daniel (Morgan Freeman) is a recovering alcoholic who's repentant for the mistakes he made as a parent and is ferociously protective of his granddaughter. Ryan (Celeste O'Connor) is smart and athletically gifted but also engages in risky behavior.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Deadly car accident, with lots of grief as a result. Suicide attempt. Threat at gunpoint. Detailed story of child abuse. Slow-motion footage of inside of car during accident. Bullying behavior. Statutory rape: A teen and a 20-year-old are in bed together, sex implied.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Engaged couple kiss and playfully interact; a woman wears a lacy thong, and her fiancé kisses her partially exposed bottom. Conversations about teen sex, with a recommendation of taking the pill over abstinence as a solution. Description of oral sex.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Very strong language throughout, including "ass," "a--hole," "bitch," "crap," "d--k," "d-ke," "hell," and "s--t," and pervasive use of "f--k." "Oh my God" used to express exasperation.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Story centers on alcohol and drug dependency. Extensive prescription drug use and pill popping, portrayed as pathetic. Being high is represented by photographic effects. Characters smoke cigarettes, pot, and a much harsher drug that's not identified. Aspirational character is shown to be incredibly cute while high on a pot gummy. Underage drinking. Character with an alcohol dependency orders liquor before breakfast. Insights into Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and sponsors.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that A Good Person is a mature, moving drama about substance use disorder from writer-director Zach Braff . It stars Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman and depicts the ripple effect of a tragedy on two families who were set to be joined by marriage before a tragic accident. The consequences of the tragedy -- including drug dependency and unresolved grief -- are hard to watch but painfully realistic. Pugh's character becomes addicted to OxyContin, the painkillers prescribed to her during her recovery. Expect honest depiction of drug abuse: popping pills, snorting powder, smoking of all sorts, and substituting liquor when drugs aren't available. Another affected character, teenage Ryan ( Celeste O'Connor ), becomes belligerent and prone to fighting. She engages in risky behavior, including drinking and hooking up with an adult man. While she's never seen having sex, she's shown in bed with the man, both in their underwear, and there are several conversations about teen sex. Pugh wears a lacy thong, and her fiancé kisses her partially exposed rear end. Other characters share stories of alcoholism and addiction, and there are references to child abuse, a threat at gunpoint, and an attempted suicide. Strong language includes "f--k," "bitch," "d-ke," and more. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Based on 1 parent review

A Good, But Heavy, Drama

What's the story.

Allison ( Florence Pugh ) is A GOOD PERSON, and her life seems on track for all of her dreams to come true. But then she's involved in a tragic accident that leaves two people dead. A year later, she's addicted to painkillers, and her life -- as well as that of teenager Ryan ( Celeste O'Connor ), who was also connected to the accident -- is in shambles. When the last person Allison would ever expect it from ( Morgan Freeman ) offers her help, she starts to learn that the only way out is through.

Is It Any Good?

Through his two phenomenal leads, writer-director Zach Braff skillfully displays the complexity of the human condition and the messiness of substance dependence. It's impossible to imagine anyone besides Pugh and Freeman playing the two battered and bruised souls whose fates are intertwined in A Good Person . Both are responsible for unforgivable actions, and, in real life, some might be inclined to judge them harshly. Yet through the actors' ability to deliver both humor and pathos, we're able to see the importance of forgiveness -- and that people are so much more than even their most grievous mistakes.

There's not a false note in Braff's screenplay. He has created characters who should avoid running into each other at the grocery store, much less be in each other's homes -- and yet each can't escape the emotional prison they've constructed around themselves without the other. The film argues that those who struggle with drug or alcohol dependency shouldn't be dismissed as junkies or drunks, but rather given a hand when they're ready to move forward. And that anyone who puts in the work and takes responsibility for their actions should get a second chance.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how A Good Person portrays drug use and addiction and alcohol use. Does the movie warn viewers against doing drugs and drinking, or is it made to look appealing in any way? What are the consequences ? Are they realistic?

What's the relationship like between Allison and her mother, Diane? Is Diane helping or hurting her daughter -- and what do you think she should do to help, given their circumstances?

Why is compassion an important life skill? How does it play out here when the characters are forcing themselves to act with compassion against their natural inclination? Can you think of other examples when it's beneficial -- or not beneficial -- to treat someone with compassion when you don't think they deserve it?

Why is forgiveness important for the person doing the forgiving? How do you think Allie's life would be different if she could forgive herself?

What are coping skills? What should you do if you're overwhelmed with difficult feelings?

Movie Details

• In theaters : March 24, 2023
• Cast : Florence Pugh , Morgan Freeman , Celeste O'Connor
• Director : Zach Braff
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Black actors, Non-Binary actors
• Studio : MGM
• Genre : Drama
• Character Strengths : Compassion
• Run time : 129 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : drug abuse, language throughout and some sexual references
• Last updated : January 3, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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• DVD & Streaming

A Good Person

Content caution.

In Theaters

• March 24, 2023
• Florence Pugh as Allison; Morgan Freeman as Daniel; Celeste O'Connor as Ryan; Molly Shannon as Diane; Chinaza Uche as Nathan; Zoe Lister-Jones as Simone

Home Release Date

• May 19, 2023

Distributor

• Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Movie Review

She only glanced away for a moment.

Allison’s eyes slipped quickly to the phone in her left hand as her thumb moved the map on screen up a bit. But in that, oh, second or two, the backhoe in the roadway construction area backed into her lane. And by the time she saw it, gasped, and hit the brakes, it was too late.

Does that make her a bad person? Surely not. Good people have tiny lapses of judgement all the time, right?

Allison woke up bruised and with a hole in her skull. Her soon-to-be sister-in-law and brother-in-law, passengers in the car, were both dead. And Allison felt she had no recourse but to quickly drown her guilt and grief in a marching parade of little blue OxyContin pills.

Now, a year later, Allison hasn’t one shred of doubt that she is indeed a bad person. She’s a bad person with no fiancé, no job, no life, and an addiction the size of … a heavy construction backhoe.

Of course, in a rationalizing addict’s brain, the real problem is that OxyContin prescriptions only last so long. And after you burn through them—and every doctor in town who will write you a script—what does a bad person then do?

Oh, you might be surprised.

Eventually, if you actually want to keep living (which is a question Allison has debated), you probably need to get some help. Maybe go to an AA meeting at the local church.

Problem is, when Allison finally musters up the courage to walk into a meeting, she is immediately spotted by an older man named Daniel. Yeah, he just happens to be a recovering alcoholic and the father of Allison’s former fiancé, Nathan.

Oh and let’s not forget, Daniel is also the father of the woman Allison killed while glancing at her phone for a moment.

Allison supposes that this out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire situation is exactly what she deserves.

After all, she’s not a good person.

Positive Elements

Allison has a great many things to suffer through thanks to her corrupting and destructive addiction. (Which is obviously not a good thing.) But on the positive side, the further down she slips and the more she struggles, the more she realizes that she needs help. Some, including Daniel, offer that help. Eventually, after many failures, she’s able to find some desperately needed life correction.

Daniel struggles with his own grief and addiction. And, in addition, he has to care for and protect his teen granddaughter, Ryan, who’s going through her own anger and grief issues. Eventually, all of these broken, suffering people are able to offer what little they have to each other.

A Good Person declares that sacrificing for others, accepting help, and reaching daily for a healthy life are all keys to finding freedom from addiction.

To help combat his alcoholism, Daniel began working with model trains at one point. He talks to Allison about creating 1:87 scale model figures and buildings that help him “record” events from his own life. But he also decides to put a positive spin on those memories, such as having a loving father figure in his life.

While trying to hold Ryan accountable for her actions, Daniel makes an earnest effort to communicate clearly with her and express his love for her.

Spiritual Elements

The AA meeting that Daniel and Allison attend takes place at a nondescript local church. Participants in the program say the Serenity Prayer at the beginning of one meeting. While speaking about his own alcoholism, Daniel admits that he believes there are “some things that are impossible to forgive.” “I think even God knows that,” he laments. He later proclaims that he thinks God is testing him with the torments of his life. But he says he will be “unbreakable!” He also states that Allison is a waste of a soul.

Sexual Content

Daniel catches 16-year-old Ryan in bed with a 20-year-old man. (Both are in their underwear.) Daniel runs the guy out, keeping the man’s clothes. And he crudely threatens to rip off an important body part if he sees the guy again. Later, Allison assures Daniel that a 16-year-old is going to have sex no matter what he does. Ryan tells him the same thing. So, Daniel concedes the issue and makes her promise to get and use birth control.

A desperate Allison tries to blackmail a former friend by threatening to reveal her darkest sexual secrets.

Allison wears some low-cut tops. And she wears a t-shirt and a pair of very revealing underwear to bed with Nathan. They playfully kiss and caress each other and he moves to kiss her mostly bare backside. Ryan wears a formfitting dress to a concert.

At Allison and Nathan’s engagement party, he jokingly states that if someone is about to have sex with a certain friend, he needs to “wear, like, 11 condoms.”

Violent Content

It can be argued that this whole story of Allison’s grueling battle with addiction and self-abuse is its own form of violence; her emotional and physical crawl toward recovery is incredibly painful to observe.

In a more purely physical sense, Allison struggles with her mother for a bottle of pills and smashes her arm into a mirror, leaving it cut and bloody. She also dreams of her deadly car accident in slow motion as the car spins, windows shatter and the vehicle’s occupants lurch back and forth in their seatbelts.

When Daniel catches a 20-year-old with his young granddaughter, he grabs the guy by the throat, slams him against a wall and then shoves him out of the room. Later, that same guy is in bed with granddaughter Ryan again and Daniel points a pistol at him. It’s nearly certain that the now drunk Daniel will shoot him until Nathan steps in front of the gun and talks Daniel down. Then Nathan punches the guy in the nose.

In a different scene, Daniel talks to Allison about the dangerous and abusive “darkness” that alcohol would cast him into. “I thought I would never lay a hand on my children. And I didn’t. When I was sober,” he reports. Later when Daniel and Nathan talk about the wildness of young Ryan, Daniel proclaims that Nathan and his sister were never so rebellious. “We were good because we were terrified of you,” Nathan sadly replies. In fact, we find out that Nathan’s hearing loss in one ear is because Daniel beat him so mercilessly while drunk.

Crude or Profane Language

Along with a great deal of emotional and physical misery, viewers will also suffer the pain of lots of foul language. There are more than 90 f-words and some 20 s-words in the dialogue here, along with repeated uses of “h—,” “d–n,” “b–ch” and “crap.”

God’s name is misused 10 times (twice in combination with “d–n.”) Name-calling includes the slurs “dyke” and “whore.”

Drug and Alcohol Content

People drink wine, beer and alcohol at several parties, a concert and at a bar. We see people smoking marijuana at a couple parties. And after one of those, Allison reports being very stoned from a consumed edible.

Daniel is a recovering alcoholic. But on several occasions, the stress of life almost drives him to opening a bottle of whiskey he keeps hidden away. And when he does finally give in, he gets staggeringly drunk.

Driven by her addictive needs, Allison downs glasses of tequila, even though she has no money to pay for them. A former classmate agrees to pay for her as long as she debases herself verbally and openly admits her addiction. Which she does.

Allison has a morphine drip in the hospital. And we see her downing OxyContin pills on several occasions, as well as swilling cough syrup, struggling to steal someone’s Xanax, snorting cocaine and smoking heroin. In fact, a guy argues that OxyContin is actually “heroin in a pretty dress.” Allison crushes OxyContin pills to snort. She fills her mouth with the pills at one point in anticipation of committing suicide, but spits the drugs out at the last second. We watch her struggle with drug withdrawal.

Eventually Allison sells her only item of value and checks herself into a recovery clinic.

A recovering addict from the AA meeting agrees to sponsor Allison if she agrees to stay clean, to work hard and to go to 90 meetings in 90 days. The sponsor says she won’t waste time on anyone who doesn’t want to recover, noting that she’s worked with many others with only two outcomes: “Some beat it. And some are dead!”

Allison’s mother drinks wine and smokes cigarettes, and we see her ashtray packed full of butts. Daniel remembers a “guy who smoke Camels” who also stole his girlfriend.

Other Negative Elements

In the grip of addiction, Allison vomits on a bar floor.

Allison talks about the terrible impact her father’s abandonment of their family had on her. For instance, she once loved to swim and have her dad cheer her on. But when he left, that was one of the joys of her life that she abandoned. “Maybe some people just aren’t good,” she reasoned.

When we look honestly at the broken world around us, it’s easy to see why people are in pain, why some unfortunate souls sometimes tumble in hopeless directions. Moviemakers have often tried to capture that broken human condition on film. A Good Person is writer/director Zach Braff’s latest stab at that theme.

His movie is hard to watch at times. Its dialogue is rough and raw. And its story of terrible events and life-crushing addiction is almost too painful to take in. Certainly, too painful to enjoy . That fact alone will head many moviegoers off at the pass.

That said, there’s a message of hope hammered into this film’s tungsten-hard edges. Its performances are moving and immersive—particularly the gritty character choices of Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman. They declare that with help, determination and profound effort, a struggling person might find a way through the bloody battlefield of life.

That’s not to say that you’ll find any uplifting spiritual revival in this cautionary pic. But you will find an emotional nudge toward the possibility of a new beginning.

And sometimes that’s a good first step.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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Movie Review – A Good Person (2023)

May 30, 2023 by Robert Kojder

A Good Person , 2023.

Written and Directed by Zach Braff. Starring Florence Pugh, Morgan Freeman, Molly Shannon, Celeste O’Connor, Zoe Lister-Jones, Chinaza Uche, Toby Onwumere, Nichelle Hines, Ignacio Diaz-Silverio, Oli Green, Brian Rojas, Ryann Redmond, Sydney Morton, Jackie Hoffman, Victor Cruz, Anthony Cedeño, and Emilia Suárez.

Allison’s life falls apart following her involvement in a fatal accident. The unlikely relationship she forms with her would-be father-in-law helps her live a life worth living.

Trauma is laid on thick by writer and director Zach Braff in A Good Person , sometimes ringing true and occasionally forced. There is no single character that doesn’t have an expressive personality cranked up to 11. However, there are also scathingly raw moments of different types of addiction and forms of self-loathing, built into some truly thorny character relationship dynamics so authentically performed that there’s a good enough reason to let the shortcomings slide.

Florence Pugh is Allison, engaged to Nathan (Chinaza Uche), living a relatively happy life pondering other dreams to pursue. At 26, she is still young enough to achieve any goal set. The next day while driving with Nathan’s sister-in-law and her husband on the New Jersey Turnpike, tragedy strikes with a fatal car accident that kills everyone inside aside from Allison. This is also where Zach Braff makes a wise choice to reveal from the beginning that this accident is partially the fault of Allison, who was far too into conversation while driving, eventually opening up a map app on her phone, which turns out to be the deadliest mistake of them all literally.

One of the most intriguing aspects of A Good Person is that it’s not just a film about survivor’s guilt but a survivor directly responsible for these deaths in a way that could have been avoided. One year later, Allison has left her fiancé, slipped into an Oxy addiction following her facial injuries, and hasn’t truly confronted the irresponsibility of her actions.

Now living back in her hometown, there is an early bar scene (she goes anywhere and tries anything to get a fix after her mom, played by Molly Shannon, flushed the rest down the toilet) where Allison encounters a pair of directionless burnouts that can get her drugs but were also boys during high school that she always thought she was superior to. It’s a devastating crashing-down-to-earth moment that Allison might not see that way. It’s tough to say who is better or even a good person here, but there is something vile about these once-bullied patrons that is more about twisted vindication than trying to make a reasonable point about whoever Allison was during high school.

Scenes like the ones mentioned above are phenomenally acted by Florence Pugh, who is extraordinary in this challenging role that also demands her to sing (for reasons I won’t spoil, but the lyrics are shatteringly depressing) on top of believably playing an addict who consistently relapses and finds herself in low moments, absolutely despising what she sees in the mirror (another scene bound to wreck anyone that watches this).

A Good Person also has to make time for the other characters, such as Nathan’s parentless niece Ryan (Celeste O’Connor), now living with Daniel (Morgan Freeman, who hasn’t committed to a performance with this much passion and dedication in at least ten years), the former alcoholic police officer that would occasionally get so drunkenly violent he physically beat Nathan deaf in one ear. Father and son didn’t even speak to one another when Nathan was together with Allison, but there are forgiveness and redemption arcs here. There is also an honest depiction that even someone clean for a decade good relapse over unexpected traumatic events, as Daniel and Allison wind up in the same AA meeting, with the former deciding to support the latter as if it’s God’s will.

Meanwhile, Ryan has become a problem child disinterested in soccer and obtaining a scholarship, dangerously interested and sexually intimate with a 20-year-old man, which naturally causes one of Daniel’s violent outbursts. Morgan Freeman being forced into talking to a teenager about safe sex and inappropriate partners is already a realistic (and sometimes organically hilarious) enough plot point, but there are many instances where Zach Braff begins to pile drama on (including a bit where Daniel drunkenly grabs a gun for bad intentions) for the sake of it when nuance would have been more welcome.

Some of these characters and scenarios fare better when they are in the presence of Allison, but even then, everything feels like it’s slipping away from Zach Braff’s grip when the story leans a bit too hard into a certain kind of destiny born from Ryan’s misguided but well-intentioned actions toward Allison and Nathan. 

Much like the model train world that Daniel has been constructing over decades of his life while delivering some early narration comparing the happy perfection of his escapist hobby to real life, A Good Person falls somewhere in between; there are good and bad things that sometimes happen out of nowhere to push the plot forward as if the film is Zach Braff’s version of a model world. However, it is a powerful story anchored by truly remarkable performances.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★  / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check  here  for new reviews, follow my  Twitter  or  Letterboxd , or email me at [email protected]

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A GOOD PERSON

"wise, deeply affecting story about recovery".

What You Need To Know:

Miscellaneous Immorality: In the movie’s first half, the lead character constantly lies and manipulates people to get drugs, but, as she recovers, she becomes a much more honest person.

More Detail:

The story of a woman named Allison (Florence Pugh) who causes a car crash that kills her fiancé’s sister and his sister’s husband and her subsequent descent into self-loathing and drug addiction before seeking redemption, A GOOD PERSON is an alternately gritty and beautiful look at addiction, loss, forgiveness and reconciliation.

Allison is a joyful, vibrant woman in her 20s excitedly looking forward to her impending wedding to Nathan (Chinaza Uche), when she causes a car accident that kills his sister and his sister’s husband. The story jumps to one year later, where Allison is a full-blown opioid addict living in chaos and in a terrible relationship with her mother (Molly Shannon) until she hits bottom and joins an AA meeting in a church that’s unexpectedly attended by Nathan’s father, Daniel, played by Morgan Freeman.

As Daniel tries to forgive Allison and build a relationship with her, his embittered 16-year-old granddaughter, Ryan (Celeste O’Connor), is upset because she lost her parents in the crash. He also struggles with the temptation to drink. This temptation is not only because of the loss of his daughter, but also because he’s also trying to forgive himself and rebuild his relationship with his son, Nathan, which was ruined by Daniel’s abusive parenting when his children were young.

Can Allison, Daniel and Ryan forge a friendship despite the tragic odds they’re overcoming? Can Daniel and Nathan overcome their many years of separation? Will Allison be able to make a successful recovery from addiction and restart her life in a healthy way?

Powerfully written and directed by Zach Braff (GARDEN STATE and SCRUBS), the movie’s first act is relentlessly ugly while capturing the chaos and immorality of a drug addict’s life. However, when Allison seeks recovery in an AA meeting, the movie settles into a much calmer and far more moral tale of Allison’s struggle to live her life right and make peace with those she’s hurt.

Viewers should be warned that the movie’s first half hour is packed with foul language, and severe drug use. The rest of the movie, however, makes it clear that Writer/Director Zach Braff is creating a wrong-vs.-right view of Allison’s life, as the story becomes peaceful and beautifully thoughtful once she attends the AA meetings in a church.

One big downside of the movie, however, is its casual depiction of teenage sex. The grandfather catches his 16-year-old granddaughter having an affair with a 20-year-old man, which Daniel strongly disapproves. The movie has an approving tone when Daniel chastises and manhandles the young man. However, Allison and Ryan convince Daniel that expecting abstinence is futile since “all teenagers are having sex” [which is not true], and, regrettably, he helps Ryan obtain birth control.

A GOOD PERSON is an absolutely terrific, redemptive movie. It takes an unflinching look at tragic family issues, but it thankfully has a happy ending. Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman as the recovery addict and the grandfather deliver excellent, Oscar-worthy performances. Ultimately, Writer/Director Zach Braff has fashioned a wise, deeply affecting movie that is regrettably excessive in its foul language, drug use, wrong comment that every teenager is doing sex, and condoning birth control for a teenagers.

Now more than ever we’re bombarded by darkness in media, movies, and TV. Movieguide® has fought back for almost 40 years, working within Hollywood to propel uplifting and positive content. We’re proud to say we’ve collaborated with some of the top industry players to influence and redeem entertainment for Jesus. Still, the most influential person in Hollywood is you. The viewer.

What you listen to, watch, and read has power. Movieguide® wants to give you the resources to empower the good and the beautiful. But we can’t do it alone. We need your support.

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A Good Person Parent Guide

Powerful performances, lots of negative content, and disturbing material. one out of three isn't enough..

Theaters: After a horrible tragedy, a young woman struggles with opioid addiction, forgiveness, and moving on.

Release date March 31, 2023

Run Time: 129 minutes

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The guide to our grades, parent movie review by kirsten hawkes.

Joyfully anticipating her upcoming wedding to Nathan (Chinaza Uche), Allison (Florence Pugh) drives off to try on wedding dresses. In the car with her are Nathan’s sister, Molly (Nichelle Hines) and her husband, Jesse (Toby Onwumere). In a split second, everything changes – an accident in a construction zone leaves Molly and Jesse dead and Allison drowning in a sea of grief and guilt.

A year later, Allison’s life is bleak. Engagement broken, she’s living with her mother (Molly Shannon) and struggling with addiction to Oxycontin. In a desperate search for help, she goes to an AA meeting, where she runs into Nathan’s father, Daniel (Morgan Freeman), who is battling his own demons and trying to raise his orphaned granddaughter, Ryan (Celeste O’Connor). Daniel reaches out to help Allison, but their shared tragedy continues to sow division and suffering.

Boy oh boy, is the negative content here a doozy. Profanity is ubiquitous, with 95 sexual expletives and another four dozen swear words. Main characters are shown smoking, drinking to the point of intoxication, and using drugs – either swallowing illicit painkillers, snorting drugs, or smoking heroin. An underage character is also shown under the influence of an unspecified substance. Adults are seen in bed together (without nudity) and a teenage girl is twice discovered in bed with an adult man (again without explicit content). There’s even some violence in scenes where a man is punched in the face, grabbed by the neck, and threatened with a handgun. There are no free spots in this movie’s content bingo card.

Plaudits for this film go to the cast, who are almost universally good. (Molly Shannon struggles as Allison’s mother, but I think her role is poorly written.) Morgan Freeman is one of America’s greatest actors, and in this film you can watch him visibly age in a matter of seconds. He brings sincerity and gravitas to his complex, messy character and emotionally grounds the entire film. Florence Pugh once again demonstrates that she is one of her generation’s best as she delivers a fierce, vulnerable, gutsy performance as a broken woman who tries to heal.

There’s definitely a need for movies that explore the hard realities of being human, the tragedies that ravage people’s lives, and our desperate need for forgiveness, hope, and courage. Adult audiences at the multiplex need more to choose from than one spandex-suited superhero after another. But couldn’t we get grown-up stories with less profanity and on-screen drug use? Honestly, the stories would be just as powerful and I would be happy to recommend them. Thanks to the negative content, I can’t recommend A Good Person. But I wish I could.

About author

Kirsten hawkes, a good person rating & content info.

Why is A Good Person rated R? A Good Person is rated R by the MPAA for drug abuse, language throughout and some sexual references.

Violence: Two women grapple with each other, cracking a pane of glass. The movie screen blacks out immediately before a car accident takes place. There is mention of fatalities in the accident. A woman is seen in a hospital bed with a bandage on her head and bloody scrapes and bruises on her face. A man grabs another man by the throat and pushes him against a wall. A man punches a man in the face. A main character points a handgun at someone. After being insulted, a teenage girl punches an opponent in a sports event. One teenager spits on another. There is an incomplete suicide attempt in the movie: there are no injuries or lasting effects. A person talks about his personal and family history of child abuse, specifically beating and injuring children while intoxicated. Sexual Content: A woman is seen in high cut underwear: her fiancé kisses her lower buttock before the two embrace and kiss in bed (with no further explicit activity). A 16-year-old girl is twice seen in bed with a 20 year old man. There is no explicit activity or nudity but her bra is visible in one scene. There is a brief discussion about contraception. Profanity:   The script contains over 95 sexual expletives, 19 scatological curses, a dozen terms of deity, a smattering of minor profanities, and a couple of crude anatomical expressions. A demeaning term for women is also used. Alcohol / Drug Use: Main characters are shown drinking alcohol in social functions and becoming intoxicated. Adults also drink alcohol to numb emotional pain. A character shares his personal and family history of alcoholism, including mention of blackouts and violent behavior. A main character is addicted to oxycontin and engages in drug-seeking behaviors. A woman swallows illicit pills and also crushes and snorts them. She is seen snorting an unidentified drug. There is an attempted suicide attempt which the person aborts before suffering harm. A main character smokes heroin. Adults are briefly seen smoking cigarettes. There’s mention of someone’s dependence on anti-anxiety medication. A character chugs what looks like cough syrup.

Page last updated January 11, 2024

A Good Person Parents' Guide

Why is the movie titled “A Good Person”? To whom do you think the title refers? Do you think Daniel and/or Allison are good people? What do you think their journeys show about redemption?

Do you think that Daniel is correct when he says that some things can’t be forgiven? Does he forgive Allison or does he simply move on? Is Allison able to forgive herself? What are your beliefs about forgiving others?

Related home video titles:

If you simply can’t get enough of heartwrenching movies about addiction, you can watch Beautiful Boy , 28 Days , Four Good Days , or Hillbilly Elegy

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, unsung hero.

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Being a fan of the Christian pop duo for KING & COUNTRY or having even the slightest interest in the musical genre probably goes a long way toward making the drama “Unsung Hero” more meaningful. For everyone else, it plays like a blandly well-intentioned tale of triumph over adversity and an earnest celebration of the importance of family. 

And what a family it is. The massive Aussie brood at the film’s center provides both the inspiration for the story and the behind-the-scenes machinery to tell it. Joel Smallbone , half of the singing group with brother Luke, co-wrote and co-directed the film with Richard L. Ramsey. He also stars as his own father, David Smallbone, a music promoter who moved his pregnant wife and their six kids from Sydney to Nashville in the early 1990s with dreams of making it big in the United States. (A younger actor, Diesel La Torraca , plays Joel as a child with a natural yearning to perform.) Stick around for the credits, and you’ll discover how various members of the clan appear in minor supporting roles throughout. 

But this isn’t a music biopic or even an origin story, even though much of the plot centers on whether older sister Rebecca can secure a record contract with her pure, clear voice, which could rescue the family financially. (Spoiler: she does and goes on to become Grammy winner Rebecca St. James; for KING & COUNTRY has won multiple Grammys, as well.) This is, as the title suggests, a tribute to the person who held the family together when everything was falling apart: matriarch Helen Smallbone, played with optimism and authenticity by Daisy Betts . “Unsung Hero” follows the highs and lows of the Smallbones' efforts to stay afloat in a foreign land, but Helen’s resiliency—as well as her faith—provides a consistent through-line. The casting of Kirrilee Berger as Rebecca is particularly effective since she so closely resembles Betts, adding believability to their mother-daughter bond. 

We know these attractive and talented people will be fine even before they set foot in their local church and meet the big-hearted neighbors who will rally around them in times of need. It’s all very affirming to the Christian audience it’s geared toward and somewhat predictable from a narrative standpoint.  

What is surprising, though, is that there are actual moments of raw emotion within the workmanlike direction and episodic script. Things get ugly. Pride takes over. Having dragged his family halfway around the world to an empty rental home, and with job prospects falling through left and right, David feels depressed and resentful. He lashes out at the friendly fellow churchgoer ( Lucas Black ), whom he feels has been too generous alongside his perky wife, played by Hallmark Channel and Great American Family mainstay Candace Cameron Bure . Helen, in a rare show of anger, even explodes at David at one point. 

“Unsung Hero” could have used more of such emotional honesty. But it ultimately must deliver a broad uplift that’s palatable for the whole family, so it tends to skim the surface. And aside from the parents and Rebecca, the characterization is woefully lacking; the other kids are all kind of a perky blur. Joel Smallbone has a solid screen presence in what must have been a challenging role, but his choices behind the camera with Ramsey feel mostly pedestrian.  

The ‘90s costume design is on point, though—so many bad sweaters on display—and the soundtrack of secular pop songs, including Jesus Jones and Seal, is period-specific if a little on-the-nose lyrically. For the most part, “Unsung Hero” does what David Smallbone himself didn’t do: It shies away from taking risks. 

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Critics are calling Luca Guadagnino's sexy tennis drama 'Challengers' the 'horniest movie of the year'

• The reviews for Luca Guadagnino's new movie "Challengers" are in. 
• The drama about a former tennis prodigy caught in a love triangle has a 92% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes.
• Critics say the film is stylish, the performances are gripping, and the score is exhilarating.

Luca Guadagnino's latest film " Challengers " has finally arrived — and critics can't get enough of the sexy tennis drama.

The movie stars Zendaya as Tashi Duncan, a tennis prodigy who becomes a coach after a severe on-court injury forces her to abandon her dream of going pro. Tashi's past and present collide years later at a lower-tier challenger tournament leading up to the US Open , where her husband, Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), and her ex-boyfriend, Patrick Zweig (Josh O'Connor) — who are also former best friends and doubles partners— compete against each other.

At the time of this article's publication, "Challengers" has a critics score of 92% on Rotten Tomatoes , with people praising Guadagnino's direction, Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor's pulsating score , and the mesmerizing performances of the main trio of actors. Here's a rundown of the reviews.

Director Luca Guadagnino films the tennis sequences in stylish and inventive ways, aided by cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom.

"The tennis is shot with formidable emotional urgency." — Clarisse Loughrey, The Independent

"Guadagnino, for his part, treats what could be a visually straightforward relationship/sports drama as a laboratory, where he tinkers with unlikely ways to communicate action and emotion on screen. — Tasha Robinson, Polygon

"Cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom's nimble shooting style brings excitement to the matches, inventively switching up the angles to bolster the energy. And the intoxication of his camera with the leads' physicality is entirely contagious." — David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

"Guadagnino frames his three actors in many close-ups and medium shots where their eyes and the way they ogle each other tell the story. In return, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom's camera ogles the actors' bodies, capturing every flicker of light in their eyes, every trembling lip and sweaty brow. All of this makes for a movie high on sexual heat, something not seen much in contemporary American cinema." — Murtada Elfadl, AV Club

Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O'Connor deliver undeniable chemistry and star-making performances.

"Like seeing a well-balanced team dominate in triples, the film is a true three-hander, with everyone performing at the top of their game." — Rocco T. Thompson, Slant magazine

"That script is a terrific three-course meal for Faist and O'Connor. They get to trade off face and heel roles from scene to scene and era to era, as Art and Patrick help and hurt each other in equal measure. But it's an absolute smorgasbord for Zendaya, who even in starring roles has never been given this much room to stretch." — Tasha Robinson, Polygon

"All three lead actors carry themselves like movie stars." — Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert.com

"Zendaya, O'Connor, and Faist play off each other charmingly, particularly in the flashbacks when their characters are younger. Those scenes are lively and jocular and the three actors bring into them combustible chemistry." — Murtada Elfadl, AV Club

"Zendaya is the linchpin. Her work here, on the heels of 'Dune: Part Two,' cements her status as a born Movie Star. She moves with the decisive ferocity of a warrior on the court and the floating grace of a ballerina elsewhere." — David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

"The trio of actors all share a crackling chemistry, but the electricity between O'Connor and Faist is strongest. Both men engage in passionate scenes with Zendaya, making out in intense close-ups and tearing clothes off with palpable want. But none of those more physical scenes sear with the level of heat that O'Connor and Faist create with a mere shared glance." — Maureen Lee Lenker, Entertainment Weekly

Justin Kuritzkes' screenplay vacillates between different time periods, mirroring the back-and-forth nature of tennis.

"Justin Kuritzkes's twisty script leaves us guessing as the trio's mind games wreak havoc on each other and the audience all at once." — Maureen Lee Lenker, Entertainment Weekly

"What keeps the movie humming is the skill with which Kuritzkes' script draws out the complications in the trio's relationships." — David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

"Constructed like a tennis competition, Justin Kuritzkes' screenplay ricochets back and forth through time, asking us to pivot our brains the way audiences do at the movie's opening challenger match." — Peter Debruge, Variety

"​​Kuritzkes' script nimbly leaps back and forth between their teens and 20s and the present, never missing a beat to put them — and us — through the emotional wringer. And as these three flirt, fumble, fuck, and break each others' hearts, 'Challenger's' tantalizes with its ambush of raw emotions and gnarled repressions." — Kristy Puchko, Mashable

Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor's rousing techno and electronica score drives the action forward, on and off the court.

"One of the best surprises turns out to be the soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, a propulsive techno score that does a lot of the work to keep the tennis scenes moving." — Caryn James, BBC

"'Challengers's' simple conceit, thrillingly executed, is that every conversation is a tennis match, and every tennis match is a sex scene. The film's galvanizing score, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, unifies both." — Clarisse Loughrey, The Independent

"Propelling the on-court action is Reznor and Ross's score, bringing a level of bombast to the sports action that at times threatens to overwhelm the action, without ever actually proving distracting." — Liz Shannon Miller, Consequence

"The electronic, staccato rhythm mimics the rapid back-and-forth of tennis while also catapulting us into a sound that is inherently sexy in the ways it evokes the hypnotic trance of a dance club." — Maureen Lee Lenker, Entertainment Weekly

There aren't any explicit sex scenes, but "Challengers" is still incredibly sexy.

"There are no explicit sex scenes or orgasms on screen, and yet this is the horniest movie of the year." — Mireia Mullor, Digital Spy

"The promotional materials for 'Challengers' make it out to be slightly more erotically charged than what we actually get on screen; there's certainly sexual content, but it's not as explicit as you'd expect, and it's all very rooted in these characters and their relationships..." — Liz Shannon Miller, Consequence

"Those hoping for a threesome throwdown might initially be disappointed here, as there is no literal group sex — neither on screen nor implied offscreen. However, using tennis as a metaphor, every grunt, groan, and drip of sweat (all of which are generously dispersed) has a sexual implication." — Kristy Puchko, Mashable

"There isn't an inch of nudity apart from some extras in the locker room showers, and yet Guadagnino shoots the climactic match with a stylistic vulgarity that suggests what sports might look like if Brazzers suddenly took over for ESPN." — David Ehrlich, IndieWire

"Challengers" is tantalizing and entertaining, regardless of how familiar you are with the rules of tennis.

"Moment by moment, line by line and scene by scene, 'Challengers' delivers sexiness and laughs, intrigue and resentment, and Guadagnino's signature is there in the intensity, the closeups and the music stabs." — Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

"Smart, seductive and bristling with sexual tension, 'Challengers' is arguably Luca Guadagnino's most purely pleasurable film to date; it's certainly his lightest and most playful." — David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

"Behind every high-speed volley and smashed racket courses raw emotion, resulting in the steamiest (and funniest) sports-centric love triangle since 'Bull Durham.' With some romantic movies, you'd do well to pack tissues. In the case of 'Challengers,' bring a towel. It's that rare film where you'll work up a sweat just from spectating." — Peter Debruge, Variety

"Anchored by three arresting performances and playfully experimental direction, 'Challengers' is fresh, exhilarating, and energetic." — Maureen Lee Lenker, Entertainment Weekly

• Main content

The best movies of 2024 so far, according to critics

‘perfect days,’ ‘sasquatch sunset,’ ‘love lies bleeding’ and ‘civil war’ all make our evolving list of 2024’s best films.

When it comes to movies, why wait for the end-of-year best-of lists? A number of movies have already garnered three stars or more from The Washington Post’s critics and contributors (Ann Hornaday, Ty Burr, Amy Nicholson, Jen Yamato, Jessica Kiang, Michael O’Sullivan, Mark Jenkins and Michael Brodeur — identified by their initials below).

Throughout the year, we’ll update this list — bookmark it! — with the films that we loved and where to watch them. (Note that all movies reviewed by The Post in 2024 are eligible for inclusion.)

Writer-director Alex Garland doesn’t investigate how this war started or how long it’s been going on or whether it’s worth fighting. His lean, cruel film is about the ethics of photographing violence, and those blinders make it charge forward with gusto. The film feels poetically, deeply true, even when it’s suggesting that humans are more apt to tear one another apart for petty grievances than over a sincere defense of some kind of principles. Starring Kristen Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny. (R, 109 minutes) — Amy Nicholson

Where to watch: In theaters

Challengers

A slick, sexy, hugely entertaining, tennis-themed romantic triangle that offers three young performers at the top of their games under the guidance of Luca Guadagnino, a director who gives them room to swing in all senses of the word. The movie’s a paean to hard work and hedonism, and if its pleasures are mostly surface — grass, clay, emotional — it’s still been too long since we’ve had an intelligent frolic like this. Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor play rising tennis stars; Zendaya is their coach, holding down the center with her furiously knitted brow. (R, 131 minutes) — Ty Burr

Wicked Little Letters

An art-house audience pleaser , based on an actual historical incident, that slaps a veneer of tea-cozy classiness over cartoonish characters and changing social values. In a dingy English seaside town in 1920, someone has been sending anonymous poison-pen letters to church lady Edith (Olivia Colman) — written in language so obscene that it’s practically an art form — and suspicion quickly falls on the foul-mouthed Rose (Jessie Buckley), a single mother freshly arrived from Ireland. The movie is good fun and surprisingly obvious — a slapstick comedy of manners that only hints at darker human urges. (R, 100 minutes) — T.B.

Sasquatch Sunset

Either the silliest movie you’ll see in 2024 or one of the most unexpectedly affecting, but, like the meme says, why not both ? A year in the life of a family of Bigfoots — Bigfeet? — it functions simultaneously as slow-motion slapstick, a very hairy nature documentary and a melancholy portrait of creatures not unlike us as they confront their own disappearance from the Earth. With no narration and no dialogue beside grunts, hoots and warbles, the movie effectively puts an audience on the same (big) footing as the characters. Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough and Nathan Zellner. (R, 89 minutes) — T.B.

Two-time Oscar winner Ennio Morricone , who died in 202o at the age of 91, was a composer and arranger of music that helped define what it sounds like to go to the movies. Now, director Giuseppe Tornatore — who worked with Morricone for nearly all his films, including 1988’s “Cinema Paradiso” — turns an overdue spotlight on the composer behind the legendary scores of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” “The Thing” and more than 500 others. At nearly three hours, “Ennio” is a long haul, exhaustive without ever becoming exhausting. Though it could definitely survive edits, its length feels like the product of genuine ardor and care. (Unrated, 156 minutes) — Michael Brodeur

Where to watch: In theaters and on demand

The People’s Joker

Hollywood’s superhero blockbuster business has grown creatively stale, but Vera Drew’s irreverent renegade opus is just the antidote the genre desperately needs. Both a tough-love letter to the commodified IP it satirizes and a scathing takedown of mainstream comedy institutions, this defiantly personal low-budget marvel is also a genuinely affecting queer coming-of-age tale in which Drew stars as Joker, a closeted trans woman and aspiring comedian who leaves her Smallville hometown for a dystopian Gotham City. Her film is the cinematic coup of the year, finally delivering the boundary-obliterating antiheroine Hollywood deserves. (Unrated, 92 minutes) — Jen Yamato

The Iranian French actress Zar Amir Ebrahimi has the eyes of a silent film heroine and the face of a Modigliani. In repose, she can convey a sense of sorrow that feels both elegant and timeless, but in “ Shayda ,” that stillness is fraught with specific threat: the anguish of a woman fleeing an abusive husband. Made with a striking sensitivity to mood and moment, the film marks a strong debut for Iranian Australian writer-director Noora Niasari, who mines her own experience and that of her mother for a gripping yet tender suspense drama. (PG-13, 117 minutes) — T.B.

Antiquity and the modern day sit side by side in the films of Italy’s Alice Rohrwacher, permeating each other with the timelessness of a folk tale passed around a campfire. The writer-director’s latest concerns a raffish band of working-class tombaroli — grave robbers — who dig up ancient Etruscan artifacts and sell them on the black market, but the movie’s also a meditation on the tension between romanticizing the past and profiting from it. Wise, funny and mysterious, it’s a one-of-a-kind charmer. (Unrated, 132 minutes) — T.B.

Where to watch: Not yet streaming

Love Lies Bleeding

Rose Glass’s gorgeously pulpy film is a grisly delirium of female rage and romance in which queerness is neither a liability nor a simple fact of life that deserves respect: It’s a goddamn superpower. Kristen Stewart, in a skeevy mullet and a sleeveless tee, plays a gym manager who falls in crazy, scuzzy love with a bodybuilding drifter (Katy O’Brian). There are pyrotechnics and sucked toes and a jaw beaten clean off a skull. In terms of graphic gore, the head-stomping scene in “American History X” and the corpse-splitting moment in “Bone Tomahawk” need to scooch over on the podium. (R, 104 minutes) — Jessica Kiang

Where to watch: In theaters, available for streaming later this year on Max

They Shot the Piano Player

Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba (“Belle Époque”) and artist/co-director Javier Mariscal celebrate the spirit of Brazilian bossa nova and the ghosts of artists who live on only in recordings and archival interviews. But this animated documentary ’s central ghost remains touchingly and frustratingly unknowable: Francisco Tenório Júnior, a gifted pianist, considered by his peers as one of the best of their generation, who disappeared in 1976 while on tour in Argentina. “They Shot the Piano Player” doesn’t unravel a mystery so much as confirm a tragedy. (PG-13, 103 minutes) — T.B.

Four Daughters

Film as family therapy and family therapy as film. This gripping and format-stretching documentary by writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania brings actors into the household of a Tunisian mother named Olfa and her two youngest daughters, both teenagers. The three women play themselves alongside two professional actors filling in for the girls’ two missing siblings — what happened to them will unfurl, one twist at a time. (Unrated, 110 minutes) — A.N.

Where to watch: Netflix

Perfect Days

The premise is perfectly simple: Hirayama (Kôji Yakusho) lives in Tokyo, where he cleans bathrooms, approaching his job with the same care and detail he gives to the tree seedlings he’s nurturing in his modest, sparsely furnished apartment. The fact that writer-director Wim Wenders has called a movie about cleaning toilets “Perfect Days” might strike some viewers as the height of absurdity, even perverse humor (the film bears more than a whiff of Jim Jarmusch at his most wryly absurdist). But once they get a glimpse of Hirayama in action, the dreams behind the drudgery reveal themselves. (PG, 123 minutes) — Ann Hornaday

Where to watch: On demand

Directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville (“Twenty Feet from Stardom”), this documentary take on comic Steve Martin is broken into two feature-length installments, titled “Then” (94 minutes) and “Now” (97 minutes). The first and lesser half is pretty standard stuff, covering in enjoyable but repetitive detail the period of Martin’s gradual stand-up ascendancy to selling out stadiums. The much more engaging “Now” dips in and out of Martin’s movie career, includes interviews (Jerry Seinfeld, Tina Fey, Lorne Michaels) and delivers candid moments with Martin’s bestie, Martin Short. (TV-MA, 191 minutes in two parts) — J.K.

Where to watch: Apple TV Plus

The Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer’s quietly shattering, Oscar-winning portrait of a family living next door to Auschwitz is really two movies in one: the film that audiences see on-screen — a bucolic domestic drama, filled with children, gardens and daily rituals — and the movie we conjure in our minds, with images of emaciated bodies, shaved heads and screams barely audible above the clinking teacups and cooing babies. Adapted from Martin Amis’s novel, the film is about denial and Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. But the mental contortions Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) go through to justify their own monstrosity go beyond obliviousness into something far more insidious and timeless. (PG-13, 106 minutes) — A.H.

Where to watch: Max

Ava DuVernay’s audacious, ambitious adaptation of the equally audacious and ambitious book “Caste,” operates on so many levels at once that the effect is often dizzyingly disorienting. But hang in there: Viewers who allow themselves to be taken on this wide-ranging, occasionally digressive journey will emerge not just edified but emotionally wrung out and, somehow, cleansed. (PG-13, 135 minutes) — A.H.

The Taste of Things

A radiant Juliette Binoche plays Eugénie, a gifted cook who for the past 20 years has been running the kitchen of a 19th-century epicurean named Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel). No one breaks a sweat in “ The Taste of Things ” — they glow. No one swears or yells “Corner!” or “Yes, chef!” — they whisper, or simply deliver an approving glance of gustatory satisfaction. This is the anti-“Bear,” a sensuous fantasia of gastronomical pleasure less redolent of the Beef than “Babette’s Feast.” (PG-13, 134 minutes) — A.H.

Born two months before the Nazis surrendered, celebrated German artist Anselm Kiefer grew up amid his homeland’s rubble. Destruction still compels and even delights him, as Wim Wenders demonstrates in his epic 3D documentary. The colossal spaces Kiefer inhabits and transforms are ideal for Wenders’s approach, which conveys the physicality of the artist’s work and places the viewer virtually within the maelstrom of creation. It’s a fascinating, if somewhat unnerving, place to be. (Unrated, 93 minutes) — Mark Jenkins

How to Have Sex

The title of this promising writing-directing debut from Molly Manning Walker is something of a misdirect. Her startlingly intimate portrait of teenage girls in search of the endless party while on summer holiday in Greece is more accurately described as a tutorial in how not to have sex, i.e., when you’re young, inebriated, feeling pressured or vulnerable to manipulation. In its frankness and often frightening candor, it’s of a piece with coming-of-age dramas like “Thirteen” and “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” with a dash of “Spring Breakers.” (Unrated, 90 minutes) — A.H.

Io Capitano

Matteo Garrone’s Oscar-nominated, migrant-themed drama fashions a hero’s journey that feels utterly of the moment: inspired by the true stories of African immigrants , but told in a way that features episodes of both harrowing verisimilitude and hallucinatory magic realism. It’s a film that is gorgeous at times yet also tough to watch. (Unrated, 121 minutes) — Michael O’Sullivan

The Teachers’ Lounge

Despite the title of Germany’s Oscar submission , the primary setting is a sixth-grade classroom, where things have gone missing lately. As school officials attempt to get to the bottom of the thefts, that classroom becomes a mirror of the outside world, with all its diversity, divisions and discontents. The film is far more than a conventional whodunit, though it does build a nice head of suspense as it grapples with themes of justice, doubt and bias. Its larger message is also one worth hearing, if not exactly news: In an age of cancel culture, the classroom is a battlefield. (PG-13, 98 minutes) — M.O.

Sometimes I Think About Dying

As subdued in tone and emotion as the neutral beige and brown ensembles favored by its mousy, office-worker protagonist (Daisy Ridley), this film offers an unconventional love story : one less about the thrill of romance than about the terror — and ultimate release — of connection. Director Rachel Lambert delivers its story with a reserve that is made up for by a genuinely affecting tenderness for its flawed yet searching characters. It’s kind of a downer, yes, but also stimulating as hell. (PG-13, 91 minutes) — M.O.

The Monk and the Gun

This sweet, off-kilter comedy offers a sly satire of today’s polarized world. Written and directed by Pawo Choyning Dorji, and focusing on Bhutan’s preparations for the democratic elections first held in 2008, it shares the same wry spirit and gentle tension between tradition and modernity that characterized the Bhutanese-born, American-trained filmmaker’s heartwarming Oscar-nominated 2019 film, “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom,” but with some added bite. (PG-13, 112 minutes) — M.O.

This rebooted hybrid of the hit 2004 movie “ Mean Girls ” and the Broadway stage musical it spawned wisely doesn’t try to simply adapt for the screen something that worked onstage and wouldn’t translate to film. Yes, it’s got songs (by Jeff Richmond and Nell Benjamin), but they feel abridged and ever so slightly diminished, delivered more in the context of the original narrative of viral shaming, which has been tweaked for our TikTok times. The remake is sharp, well-acted and funny, and there are a few surprises for “Mean Girls” cultists. (PG-13, 105 minutes) — M.O.

Where to watch: Paramount Plus

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Bon Jovi, Forever Young, Comes Face-to-Face With Mortality in ‘Thank You, Good Night’

By Joseph Hudak

Joseph Hudak

You can’t watch Thank You, Good Night: The Bon Jovi Story and walk away with anything but respect for Jon Bon Jovi . The four-part, nearly five-hour documentary about the singer-songwriter and his namesake New Jersey rock band (streaming now on Hulu ) unflinchingly addresses the vocal problems that plagued Bon Jovi’s 2022 tour. If you’ve seen the YouTube videos of him struggling through “You Give Love a Bad Name” or “Wanted Dead or Alive,” you know how brutal it was to hear.

Bon Jovi does too. In one scene, he walks offstage after a concert in Indianapolis and collapses on the rug in his dressing room. “By far the worst show,” he mutters.

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The film’s dissection of the Bon Jovi/Sambora dynamic will delight longtime fans of the band, and vintage footage of the twosome during the group’s early days and in their acoustic appearance on the 1989 MTV Video Music Awards reminds you how electrifying their onstage chemistry was, especially as singers. In one segment, Bon Jovi is shown listening to the isolated vocal tracks of “Livin’ on a Prayer” with longtime engineer Obie O’Brien. “I don’t think that’s been replaced,” he says later of he and Sambora’s musical interplay.

Nearly all past and present members sit for interviews, from gruff drummer Tico Torres and gregarious keys man David Bryan to Sambora’s replacement, Canadian shredder Phil X, and bassist Hugh McDonald. (Founding bass player Alec John Such, who died in 2022 , is seen in archival clips.) Bruce Springsteen, one of Bon Jovi’s chief influences when he led his first band, the Atlantic City Expressway, also appears, and we learn that the two Garden State heroes often take 100-mile drives together, without their phones, to talk about music and mortality.

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“I don’t have a messiah complex…,” Bon Jovi says in one interview, before his voice trails off and he chokes back tears. “Anyway, that’s why the legacy matters.”

In the end, Thank You, Good Night is a story about how you react when the very thing that makes you who you are begins to let you down. Such a change is a jarring, physical eye-opener, and also a crisis of conscience. But as Bon Jovi himself wrote, sometimes you’ve gotta keep the faith.

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A dying father looks for the perfect family to adopt his son in 'nowhere special'.

Bob Mondello

A young single dad is on a mission in the film Nowhere Special . With a terminal illness and no family to turn to, he's searching for the perfect adoptive family for his four-year-old son.

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

British actor James Norton stars in the BBC crime series "Happy Valley," and he's also on many a shortlist to be the next James Bond. But critic Bob Mondello says Norton's new father-son film, "Nowhere Special," finds him in a gentler, more vulnerable place.

BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: John is a window washer in Belfast, going about his trade so unobtrusively you'd never notice him if the camera weren't turned his way. But there's a reason it's turned his way.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "NOWHERE SPECIAL")

JAMES NORTON: (As John) This is the biggest decision of my life. Don't they understand? Don't you?

MONDELLO: John has just a few months to live, which is made doubly challenging because John has a 4-year-old son, Michael. His decision, in tandem with the social services folks he's talking to, is about what happens next.

NORTON: (As John) It's not about me wanting to be right. It's...

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) I do understand. That's why I'm here.

MONDELLO: Michael's mother abandoned them shortly after he was born, and with no other family members, John must now find his toddler a new family. And he's full of doubts.

NORTON: (As John) It's Michael. I always thought that I knew him. I mean, I do, I do. You know, he's my son. But do I know him, really know him, you know, enough for this?

MONDELLO: The social services team has lists of folks who are eager to adopt, among them a postman and his wife who have adopted before...

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Your child will be part of a big family.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Real people that respect you. Not people who talk down to you, know what I mean, John?

MONDELLO: ...A chilly transactional household that feels all wrong...

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) Doesn't really look like his photo, does he? - or you. Does he look like the mother?

MONDELLO: ...A wealthy couple who could offer Michael things John couldn't...

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #5: (As character) Does he like nature? We're very outdoorsy people. We like to go for long walks, as you can see.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #6: (As character) And of course we can afford the best education for our son. I mean, your son.

MONDELLO: ...All while James Norton's quietly devastated John is trying to figure out what he can possibly say to Michael as every moment grows more precious.

NORTON: (As John) Would you like to live somewhere else, in a different time, different home?

DANIEL LAMONT: (As Michael) I like home.

MONDELLO: Played by a doe-eyed Daniel Lamont, Michael seems to sense that something's amiss, and, heartbreakingly, his instinct is to reassure and comfort, using his own blanket to cover daddy when he's resting on the couch and turning pages at story time.

NORTON: (As John) He gave his dad a little wave. Page. And when he reached the other side, his father's heart was full of pride.

MONDELLO: Writer-director Uberto Pasolini lets all of this play out without grandstanding. The filmmaker doesn't embellish. We don't even hear what illness afflicts John. We just see things through his eyes, a window washer's eyes. He's used to catching glimpses through glass of worlds he'll never enter. But to have his son's future be like that? The ache is enormous, even as he finds the words Michael needs and a safe harbor just as his window for decision-making starts to close.

I'm Bob Mondello.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

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Review: Zendaya's 'Challengers' serves up saucy melodrama – and some good tennis, too

The saucy tennis melodrama “Challengers” is all about the emotional games we play with each other, though there are certainly enough volleys, balls and close-up sweat globules if you’re more into jockstraps than metaphors.

Italian director Luca Guadagnino ( “Call Me By Your Name” ) puts an art-house topspin on the sports movie, with fierce competition, even fiercer personalities and athletic chutzpah set to the thumping beats of a techno-rific Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross score. “Challengers” (★★★ out of four; rated R; in theaters Friday) centers on the love triangle between doubles partners-turned-rivals (Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor) and a teen wunderkind ( Zendaya ) and how lust, ambition and power dynamics evolve their relationships over the course of 13 years.

The movie opens with Art (Faist) and Tashi (Zendaya) as the It couple of pro tennis: He’s eyeing a U.S. Open title, the only tournament he’s never won, while she’s his intense coach, manager and wife, a former sensation along the lines of a Venus or Serena whose career was cut short by a gnarly knee injury. To build up his flagging confidence after recent losses, Tashi enters Art in a lower-level event that he can dominate – until he faces ex-bestie Patrick (O’Connor) in the final match.

Justin Kuritzkes’ soapy screenplay bounces between that present and the trios’ complicated past via flashbacks, starting when Art and Patrick – a ride-or-die duo known as “Fire and Ice” – both have eyes for Tashi. All three are 18 and the hormones are humming: The boys have been tight since they were preteens at boarding school, but a late-night, three-way makeout session, and the fact that she’ll only give her number to whoever wins the guys' singles match, creates a seismic crack that plays itself out over the coming years.

All three main actors ace their arcs and changing looks over time – that’s key in a nonlinear film like this that’s all over the place. As Tashi, Zendaya plays a woman who exudes an unshakable confidence, though her passion for these two men is seemingly her one weakness. Faist (“West Side Story”) crafts Art as a talented precision player whose love for the game might not be what it once was, while O’Connor (“The Crown”) gives Patrick a charming swagger with and without a racket, even though his life has turned into a bit of a disaster.

From the start, the men's closeness hints at something more than friendship, a quasi-sexual tension that Tashi enjoys playing with: She jokes that she doesn’t want to be a “homewrecker” yet wears a devilish smile when Art and Patrick kiss, knowing the mess she’s making.

Tennis is “a relationship,” Tashi informs them, and Guadagnino uses the sport to create moments of argumentative conversation as well as cathartic release. Propelled by thumping electronica, his tennis scenes mix brutality and grace, with stylish super-duper close-ups and even showing the ball’s point of view in one dizzying sequence. Would he do the same with, say, curling or golf? It’d be cool to see because more often than not, you want to get back to the sweaty spectacle.

Guadagnino could probably make a whole movie about masculine vulnerability in athletics rather than just tease it with “Challengers,” with revealing bits set in locker rooms and saunas. But the movie already struggles with narrative momentum, given the many tangents in Tashi, Art and Patrick’s thorny connections: While not exactly flabby, the film clocks in at 131 minutes and the script could use the same toning up as its sinewy performers.

While “Challengers” falls nebulously somewhere between a coming-of-age flick, dysfunctional relationship drama and snazzy sports extravaganza, Guadagnino nevertheless holds serve with yet another engaging, hot-blooded tale of flawed humans figuring out their feelings.

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Album review

On ‘The Tortured Poets Department,’ Taylor Swift Could Use an Editor

Over 16 songs (and a second LP), the pop superstar litigates her recent romances. But the themes, and familiar sonic backdrops, generate diminishing returns.

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By Lindsay Zoladz

If there has been a common thread — an invisible string, if you will — connecting the last few years of Taylor Swift’s output, it has been abundance.

Nearly 20 years into her career, Swift, 34, is more popular and prolific than ever, sating her ravenous fan base and expanding her cultural domination with a near-constant stream of music — five new albums plus four rerecorded ones since 2019 alone. Her last LP, “Midnights” from 2022, rolled out in multiple editions, each with its own extra songs and collectible covers. Her record-breaking Eras Tour is a three-and-a-half-hour marathon featuring 40-plus songs, including the revised 10-minute version of her lost-innocence ballad “All Too Well.” In this imperial era of her long reign, Swift has operated under the guiding principle that more is more.

What Swift reveals on her sprawling and often self-indulgent 11th LP, “The Tortured Poets Department,” is that this stretch of productivity and commercial success was also a tumultuous time for her, emotionally. “I can read your mind: ‘She’s having the time of her life,’” Swift sings on “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” a percolating track that evokes the glitter and adoration of the Eras Tour but admits, “All the pieces of me shattered as the crowd was chanting ‘more.’” And yet, that’s exactly what she continues to provide, announcing two hours after the release of “Poets” that — surprise! — there was a second “volume” of the album, “The Anthology,” featuring 15 additional, though largely superfluous, tracks.

Gone are the character studies and fictionalized narratives of Swift’s 2020 folk-pop albums “Folklore” and “Evermore.” The feverish “Tortured Poets Department” is a full-throated return to her specialty: autobiographical and sometimes spiteful tales of heartbreak, full of detailed, referential lyrics that her fans will delight in decoding.

Swift doesn’t name names, but she drops plenty of boldfaced clues about exiting a long-term cross-cultural relationship that has grown cold (the wrenching “So Long, London”), briefly taking up with a tattooed bad boy who raises the hackles of the more judgmental people in her life (the wild-eyed “But Daddy I Love Him”) and starting fresh with someone who makes her sing in — ahem — football metaphors (the weightless “The Alchemy”). The subject of the most headline-grabbing track on “The Anthology,” a fellow member of the Tortured Billionaires Club whom Swift reimagines as a high school bully, is right there in the title’s odd capitalization: “thanK you aIMee.”

At times, the album is a return to form. Its first two songs are potent reminders of how viscerally Swift can summon the flushed delirium of a doomed romance. The opener, “Fortnight,” a pulsing, synth-frosted duet with Post Malone, is chilly and controlled until lines like “I love you, it’s ruining my life” inspire the song to thaw and glow. Even better is the chatty, radiant title track , on which Swift’s voice glides across smooth keyboard arpeggios, self-deprecatingly comparing herself and her lover to more daring poets before concluding, “This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots.” Many Swift songs get lost in dense thickets of their own vocabulary, but here the goofy particularity of the lyrics — chocolate bars, first-name nods to friends, a reference to the pop songwriter Charlie Puth ?! — is strangely humanizing.

Taylor Swift’s New Album Reviewed

For all its sprawl, though, “The Tortured Poets Department” is a curiously insular album, often cradled in the familiar, amniotic throb of Jack Antonoff’s production. ( Aaron Dessner of the National, who lends a more muted and organic sensibility to Swift’s sound, produced and helped write five tracks on the first album, and the majority of “The Anthology.”) Antonoff and Swift have been working together since he contributed to her blockbuster album “1989” from 2014, and he has become her most consistent collaborator. There is a sonic uniformity to much of “The Tortured Poets Department,” however — gauzy backdrops, gently thumping synths, drum machine rhythms that lock Swift into a clipped, chirping staccato — that suggests their partnership has become too comfortable and risks growing stale.

As the album goes on, Swift’s lyricism starts to feel unrestrained, imprecise and unnecessarily verbose. Breathless lines overflow and lead their melodies down circuitous paths. As they did on “Midnights,” internal rhymes multiply like recitations of dictionary pages: “Camera flashes, welcome bashes, get the matches, toss the ashes off the ledge,” she intones in a bouncy cadence on “Fresh Out the Slammer,” one of several songs that lean too heavily on rote prison metaphors. Narcotic imagery is another inspiration for some of Swift’s most trite and head-scratching writing: “Florida,” apparently, “is one hell of a drug.” If you say so!

That song , though, is one of the album’s best — a thunderous collaboration with the pop sorceress Florence Welch, who blows in like a gust of fresh air and allows Swift to harness a more theatrical and dynamic aesthetic. “Guilty as Sin?,” another lovely entry, is the rare Antonoff production that frames Swift’s voice not in rigid electronics but in a ’90s soft-rock atmosphere. On these tracks in particular, crisp Swiftian images emerge: an imagined lover’s “messy top-lip kiss,” 30-something friends who “all smell like weed or little babies.”

It would not be a Swift album without an overheated and disproportionately scaled revenge song, and there is a doozy here called “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?,” which bristles with indignation over a grand, booming palette. Given the enormous cultural power that Swift wields, and the fact that she has played dexterously with humor and irony elsewhere in her catalog, it’s surprising she doesn’t deliver this one with a (needed) wink.

Plenty of great artists are driven by feelings of being underestimated, and have had to find new targets for their ire once they become too successful to convincingly claim underdog status. Beyoncé, who has reached a similar moment in her career, has opted to look outward. On her recently released “Cowboy Carter,” she takes aim at the racist traditionalists lingering in the music industry and the idea of genre as a means of confinement or limitation.

Swift’s new project remains fixed on her internal world. The villains of “The Tortured Poets Department” are a few less famous exes and, on the unexpectedly venomous “But Daddy I Love Him,” the “wine moms” and “Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best” who cluck their tongues at our narrator’s dating decisions. (Some might speculate that these are actually shots at her own fans.) “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” is probably the most satisfyingly vicious breakup song Swift has written since “All Too Well,” but it is predicated on a power imbalance that goes unquestioned. Is a clash between the smallest man and the biggest woman in the world a fair fight?

That’s a knotty question Swift might have been more keen to untangle on “Midnights,” an uneven LP that nonetheless found Swift asking deeper and more challenging questions about gender, power and adult womanhood than she does here. It is to the detriment of “The Tortured Poets Department” that a certain starry-eyed fascination with fairy tales has crept back into Swift’s lyricism. It is almost singularly focused on the salvation of romantic love; I tried to keep a tally of how many songs yearningly reference wedding rings and ran out of fingers. By the end, this perspective makes the album feel a bit hermetic, lacking the depth and taut structure of her best work.

Swift has been promoting this poetry-themed album with hand-typed lyrics, sponsored library installations and even an epilogue written in verse. A palpable love of language and a fascination with the ways words lock together in rhyme certainly courses through Swift’s writing. But poetry is not a marketing strategy or even an aesthetic — it’s a whole way of looking at the world and its language, turning them both upside down in search of new meanings and possibilities. It is also an art form in which, quite often and counter to the governing principle of Swift’s current empire, less is more.

Sylvia Plath once called poetry “a tyrannical discipline,” because the poet must “go so far and so fast in such a small space; you’ve got to burn away all the peripherals.” Great poets know how to condense, or at least how to edit. The sharpest moments of “The Tortured Poets Department” would be even more piercing in the absence of excess, but instead the clutter lingers, while Swift holds an unlit match.

Taylor Swift “The Tortured Poets Department” (Republic)

Inside the World of Taylor Swift

A Triumph at the Grammys: Taylor Swift made history  by winning her fourth album of the year at the 2024 edition of the awards, an event that saw women take many of the top awards .

‘The T ortured Poets Department’: Poets reacted to Swift’s new album name , weighing in on the pertinent question: What do the tortured poets think ?  

In the Public Eye: The budding romance between Swift and the football player Travis Kelce created a monocultural vortex that reached its apex  at the Super Bowl in Las Vegas. Ahead of kickoff, we revisited some key moments in their relationship .

Politics (Taylor’s Version): After months of anticipation, Swift made her first foray into the 2024 election for Super Tuesday with a bipartisan message on Instagram . The singer, who some believe has enough influence  to affect the result of the election , has yet to endorse a presidential candidate.

Conspiracy Theories: In recent months, conspiracy theories about Swift and her relationship with Kelce have proliferated , largely driven by supporters of former President Donald Trump . The pop star's fans are shaking them off .