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The SS Ben Hecht

The SS Ben Hecht is not a Tomatometer-approved publication. Reviews from this publication only count toward the Tomatometer® when written by the following Tomatometer-approved critic(s): Stephen Silver.

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
Mercy (2026) Stephen Silver Starts as a certain kind of bad movie- boring, convoluted, and inert, while not making much use of its unconventional style. At the end, though, it becomes something much worse.
Posted Jan 23, 2026  Edit critic review
Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart (2026) Stephen Silver Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart is valuable in that it gives the now 38-year-old Elizabeth her say, on camera, and shares the story that her voice has too often been left out of.
Posted Jan 23, 2026  Edit critic review
Father Mother Sister Brother (2025) Stephen Silver It quickly transcends its gimmick, mostly because it’s about something much more crucial than coffee or cigarettes: Namely, family, and how parents and children fracture over time.
Posted Jan 15, 2026  Edit critic review
One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5 (2025) Stephen Silver Like the show’s endgame in microcosm: There’s some interesting stuff here, but it’s way longer than it needed to be.
Posted Jan 15, 2026  Edit critic review
Peaches Goes Bananas (2024) Stephen Silver What it’s like for a transgressive artist to reach late middle age is a frequent topic of documentaries, about music and other things. This one handles it much better than most.
Posted Jan 09, 2026  Edit critic review
BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions (2025) Stephen Silver A dynamite cinematic essay, comprised of a history lesson, an exploration of Encyclopedia Africana, and a trip aboard an Afro-futurist ship across the Atlantic.
Posted Jan 09, 2026  Edit critic review
Paul Anka: His Way (2024) Stephen Silver Doesn’t break much new ground, but it does show Anka as a compelling character and big personality, with great stories to tell.
Posted Jan 09, 2026  Edit critic review
The Merchants of Joy (2025) Stephen Silver A fun documentary about the surprisingly competitive, but not as cutthroat as you might think, Christmas tree industry in New York City.
Posted Jan 09, 2026  Edit critic review
The New Yorker at 100 (2025) Stephen Silver Director Curry does a good job balancing the history with stories about New Yorker writers today
Posted Jan 09, 2026  Edit critic review
Breakdown: 1975 (2025) Stephen Silver It’s very fun, making strong choices about talking heads, narration, and clips. But it doesn’t really go anywhere new
Posted Jan 09, 2026  Edit critic review
Age of Audio (2025) Stephen Silver The history is pretty straightforward, which doesn’t depart far from the conventional wisdom
Posted Jan 09, 2026  Edit critic review
The Age of Disclosure (2025) Stephen Silver Almost entirely consists of former government and military officials saying that they have seen such evidence, but not providing any of it.
Posted Jan 09, 2026  Edit critic review
Corey Feldman vs the World (undefined) Stephen Silver One of those documentaries that’s so ridiculous that it feels like a mockumentary.
Posted Jan 09, 2026  Edit critic review
The Chronology of Water (2025) Stephen Silver It’s tough stuff, but it ultimately works.
Posted Jan 09, 2026  Edit critic review
She Rides Shotgun (2025) Stephen Silver The kind of film that I think is going to be looked upon very positively, years from now, possibly after the director has made more movies.
Posted Dec 25, 2025  Edit critic review
Henry Fonda for President (2024) Stephen Silver The clips are well-chosen, but I don’t know, this exercise is a bit too overlong and chin-stroking for my taste.
Posted Dec 25, 2025  Edit critic review
Dance Freak (2025) Stephen Silver Seems like a potential cult hit, aimed at people who like Tim Robinson’s stuff but don’t think it’s weird or antisocial enough.
Posted Dec 25, 2025  Edit critic review
Where to Land (2025) Stephen Silver The farce part is fun, but I really liked it as a hangout movie, with likable New York actors having nice scenes with one another.
Posted Dec 25, 2025  Edit critic review
Ebony & Ivory (2024) Stephen Silver You’re either going to be on this movie’s wavelength or not, but I found it almost entirely unwatchable.
Posted Dec 25, 2025  Edit critic review
Kill the Jockey (2024) Stephen Silver This movie rules- super-stylish and a lot of fun.
Posted Dec 25, 2025  Edit critic review
Re-Election (2025) Stephen Silver Like the answer to a writing prompt: What if Billy Madison was 40 years old, and his return to high school never resulted in anything funny
Posted Dec 25, 2025  Edit critic review
Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025) Stephen Silver It’s a visually beautiful, technically impressive film, even though it's way too long and it doesn't quite get going until the last hour.
Posted Dec 19, 2025  Edit critic review
Kiss of the Spider Woman (2025) Stephen Silver It looks amazing, the musical numbers pop, and all three lead performances are quite good.
Posted Dec 13, 2025  Edit critic review
Left-Handed Girl (2025) Stephen Silver It’s a sweet drama that goes to some seriously dark places, especially near the end, but I liked it a lot.
Posted Dec 13, 2025  Edit critic review
A Little Prayer (2023) Stephen Silver The plot makes this sound like a salacious drama, but that’s the furthest thing in the world from what it really is, an understated character study, about the sort of people not often visited by the movies. A true gem.
Posted Dec 13, 2025  Edit critic review
Alpha (2025) Stephen Silver Another body-horror story, this time about a teenage girl suffering a blood-borne disease, and I can’t quite figure out if the story is an allegory for HIV/AIDS or for COVID.
Posted Dec 13, 2025  Edit critic review
TRON: Ares (2025) Stephen Silver Sports awesome music, cool visuals, and not much else; the visual and plot conceit seemed to owe way more to the Matrix films than to the Tron ones.
Posted Dec 13, 2025  Edit critic review
M3GAN 2.0 (2025) Stephen Silver Has an extremely convoluted script and storyline, which keeps changing the mission every five minutes
Posted Dec 13, 2025  Edit critic review
Reflection in a Dead Diamond (2025) Stephen Silver It’s a tribute to the early Bond films, and also to the movies in the ’60s and ‘70s that ripped off the Bond films. The title even sounds like a 007 title.
Posted Dec 13, 2025  Edit critic review
Waltzing with Brando (2024) Stephen Silver Zane is excellent, but it’s just a shame that the movie tells one of the least interesting possible stories about his life.
Posted Dec 13, 2025  Edit critic review
Song of My City (2025) Stephen Silver I loved it, and would have watched a longer version.
Posted Dec 13, 2025  Edit critic review
Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus (2024) Stephen Silver Tells the fascinating story of Diane Luckey, the performer known as "Q Lazzarus."
Posted Dec 05, 2025  Edit critic review
Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter (2025) Stephen Silver A fascinating examination of a microcelebrity of the distant past, its legacy, and what happens to such people once their 15 minutes are over.
Posted Dec 05, 2025  Edit critic review
Suburban Fury (2024) Stephen Silver The film features on-camera interviews with Sara Jane Moore, the assassin, whose backstory was fascinating, if confusing.
Posted Dec 05, 2025  Edit critic review
The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Photo (2025) Stephen Silver While it makes a strong case, the documentary itself is a bit too long-winded and repetitive, including multiple levels of narration that are unnecessary.
Posted Dec 05, 2025  Edit critic review
When We Went MAD! (2024) Stephen Silver A documentary history of MAD magazine that’s fun to watch, but never really gets far beyond testimony from comedy luminaries about how foundational MAD was to them
Posted Dec 05, 2025  Edit critic review
Come See Me in the Good Light (2025) Stephen Silver A triumphant, tear-jerking documentary, providing an extremely intimate look at a couple dealing with terminal illness.
Posted Dec 05, 2025  Edit critic review
Marty Supreme (2025) Stephen Silver An American epic that touches on table tennis, New York, the 1950s, and masculinity in its specifically mid-century and Jewish forms
Posted Dec 05, 2025  Edit critic review
The Floaters (2025) Stephen Silver Set in a world that I know very well, that of Jewish summer camps, but it’s also one I hardly recognize.
Posted Nov 26, 2025  Edit critic review
Rebuilding (2025) Stephen Silver Rebuilding, despite a slow start, is one of the better of this type of movie
Posted Nov 26, 2025  Edit critic review
Eternity (2025) Stephen Silver There is very hilarious stuff going on at the margins of nearly every scene. The problem is, what’s happening at the center isn’t nearly as interesting.
Posted Nov 26, 2025  Edit critic review
Zootopia 2 (2025) Stephen Silver It’s way better than it has any right to be. at a time when so many animated sequels, especially over on the Pixar side, are lazy and tossed-off
Posted Nov 26, 2025  Edit critic review
Dracula (2025) Stephen Silver This one is sort of all over the place, combining a massive amount of ideas in a seriously messy way, over the course of nearly three hours.
Posted Nov 26, 2025  Edit critic review
Zodiac Killer Project (2025) Stephen Silver A truly fascinating documentary, which rose from the ashes of a failed project and almost certainly ends up better than the planned film would have been.
Posted Nov 26, 2025  Edit critic review
Seeds (2025) Stephen Silver Absolutely gorgeous, utilizing black and white photography to tell the stories of Black farmers in the American South.
Posted Nov 21, 2025  Edit critic review
Thoughts & Prayers (2025) Stephen Silver What the film is missing is a Michael Moore figure to occasionally pop up and get smug about all of this
Posted Nov 21, 2025  Edit critic review
WTO/99 (2025) Stephen Silver Hollywood made a strange version of this in 2007 called Battle in Seattle; this is much better.
Posted Nov 21, 2025  Edit critic review
Santacon (2025) Stephen Silver Porges’ film has a certain story it wants to tell about how this earnest, comical subversive exercise turned into anything but, except it's not quite that simple.
Posted Nov 21, 2025  Edit critic review
Steal This Story, Please! (2025) Stephen Silver Overall, this is a fair and fascinating portrayal.
Posted Nov 21, 2025  Edit critic review
The Six Billion Dollar Man (2025) Stephen Silver Jarecki has delivered a comprehensive overview of the last 15 years of history, one that whitewashes Assange at every turn
Posted Nov 21, 2025  Edit critic review
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