Metacritic reviews

That Weinstein’s downfall was the product of diligent reporting, dogged persistence, and the resilience of a few brave souls is essential to remember. In Maria Schrader’s artful and incendiary She Said, we’re reminded of something else that makes for one hell of a movie: It was women who did it.

It’s immensely satisfying to follow Kantor and Twohey while they take on that toxic system as two working mothers trying to set a good example for their children, sharing resources and a sense of sisterhood down the line. It’s, in fact, so satisfying that you find yourself wishing there was more of that intimate camaraderie throughout “She Said,” which sometimes gets too repetitive in newsrooms and private interview sessions with lawyers, PR spokespeople, and silenced victims alike.

She Said delivers on the dopamine hits of a journalism movie: proficient pace (the film runs just over two hours but feels shorter), tactile work, the thrill of pavement pounded into revelation.

Things get a little overly explanatory, in general, as though the film assumes its audience is not familiar with these allegations or the bombshell nature of this story. But perhaps that is the issue that the film is addressing: that there are still huge swaths of indifference towards sexual harrassment and abuse thorughout the country.

If that storytelling decision was made so there was more room for the intimate human factor, then it was an understandable one. She Said has a calmly insistent moral clarity, earned through its patient empathy, its quiet awe not at the insidiousness of what Weinstein did, but at the mettle and courage of the women who endured it—and then spoke out about it.

The film — based on their book of the same title — is sensible, dutiful and, thanks to key performances, more engaging than the average newsroom procedural.

Following the template of “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight,” She Said is a tense, fraught, and absorbing movie, one that sticks intriguingly close to the nuts and bolts of what reporters do.

As Jodi, Kazan gives the film’s standout performance, delicate and affecting, and when we’re in her company, the stakes of the investigation feel gravest.

Schrader pushes the somber score and just-the-facts cinematography as close to pure explication as possible. There is visual storytelling, but little in the way of mood or evocation.

She Said is not as economical in its filmmaking as "Spotlight" nor as robust as "Shattered Glass." Instead, as a journalism movie, it just feels rote. As a biographical drama, it feels too early. And as a Me Too movie, it feels too quiet.