David Denby

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The New Yorker
For 633 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 47% higher than the average critic
  • 1% same as the average critic
  • 52% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.8 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

David Denby's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 66
Highest review score: 100 Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
Lowest review score: 10 Wild Wild West
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 375 out of 633
  2. Mixed: 212 out of 633
  3. Negative: 46 out of 633
633 movie reviews
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    • 49 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    Men in Black II
    Apart from this going-postal moment, and a nice song from Frank the Pug (a resident alien from the original, played by the same dog), MIIB is pretty much a disaster -- repetitive beyond belief, and so busily inconsequential that it neuralizes your brain and leaves you with nothing to respond to. [8 July 2002, p.84]
    • The New Yorker
    • 29 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    Red Riding Hood
    The movie is all whoosh and whack and abrupt closeups -- jerky digital punctuation. It's alienating experience, without emotional resonance or charm. [28 March 2011, p. 116]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Mar 23, 2011
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    Savages
    If the rest of the movie had been on Travolta's level of sly knowingness, it might have been a hip classic, rather than what it is -- a summertime debauch. [23 July 2012, p. 81]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Jul 19, 2012
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    Spanglish
    Spanglish chokes on an excess of sincerity and guilt, and, in retrospect, its failure may turn out to be momentous for a sincere and guilty community--Hollywood liberals in a state of post-election dismay.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    In the Cut
    In the Cut is completely controlled and all of a piece, and yet, apart from one performance (Mark Ruffalo), it's terrible--a thriller devoid of incidental pleasures or humor, or even commonplace reality. [27 October 2003, p. 112]
    • The New Yorker
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    xXx
    In itself, XXX is not worth getting bothered about -- a half-dozen big pictures as bad as this one come out every year. At the very worst, it will kick off a pointless new movie franchise. [19 & 26 August 2002, p.174]
    • The New Yorker
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    Anything Else
    Feels like a pointlessly nagging play.
    • The New Yorker
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    Apt Pupil
    Overwrought and unpleasant nonsense.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    Hall Pass
    The movie collapses into banality. The marriages hang together, but fear and guilt provide the glue. Perhaps the biggest insult to women here is the idea that they can't get better men than these two vacuous guys. [14 March 2011, p. 78]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Mar 12, 2011
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    John Q
    Falls below even minimal standards of dramatic decency. John Q is a trashy, opportunistic piece of pop demagoguery. [4 Mar 2002, p. 90]
    • The New Yorker
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
    The movie rages on for a hundred and fifty minutes and then just stops, pausing for the next sequel.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    21 Grams
    The kind of bad movie that makes a reviewer feel terrible. It has been put together with great sincerity, and yet, impassioned and affecting as some of it is, 21 Grams is also an arrogant failure. [24 November 2003, p. 113]
    • The New Yorker
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    Righteous Kill
    The movie is hectic, exhausting, and baffling. It's an embarrassment.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    The Bounty Hunter
    The only thing that Butler and Aniston have in common, however, is identical Aruba-bronze skin tones: they seem to have been sprayed with the same can.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    The Red Violin
    The style of the movie veers unsuccessfully between humorless piety and opéra-bouffe clownishness.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    Angels & Demons
    Brown and now Ron Howard have added an incendiary element to trash--open hostility toward the Catholic Church.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    V for Vendetta
    The quarter-century-old disgruntled fantasies of two English comic-book artists, amplified by a powerful movie company, and ambushed by history, wind up yielding a disastrous muddle.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    Australia
    It's a shame that Fox entrusted Luhrmann with this project, because audiences were probably ready for a big-boned realistic movie spectacle.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    Boarding Gate
    It’s time for this talented man (Assayas) to pull himself together. He may have something serious to say about the brutal impersonality of global capitalism, yet he’s caught somewhere between insight and exploitation.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    Kill Bill: Vol. 1
    Kill Bill is what’s formally known as decadence and commonly known as crap...Coming out of this dazzling, whirling movie, I felt nothing--not anger, not dismay, not amusement. Nothing. [13 October 2003, p. 113]
    • The New Yorker
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    I Am Sam
    Pfeiffer, enormously likable in the role, almost saves the movie. [28 Jan 2002, p. 90]
    • The New Yorker
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    40 Days and 40 Nights
    The sensibility of the movie is naggingly adolescent -- less erotic than squeamish and giggly. [11 Mar 2002, p. 92]
    • The New Yorker
    • 50 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    Constantine
    Maybe some of the audience should wonder if they aren't performing the Devil's work by sitting so quietly through movies that turn wonders into garbage.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    Salinger
    The movie is like a monstrous balloon that keeps re-inflating. If Salinger were around, he would reach for a pin.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    Crossroads
    What it's really about, of course, is the very delicate marketing problem of turning a super-bland pop star into an acceptable human being onscreen. [4 Mar 2002, p. 90]
    • The New Yorker
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    Oz the Great and Powerful
    At the center of the movie, in place of the ardent, emotionally pulverizing Judy Garland, there is James Franco...as he smirks and winks, his reflexive self-deprecation comes off as a gutless kind of cool, and it sinks this odd, fretful, uncertain movie like a boulder. [18 March 2013, p.86]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Mar 18, 2013
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    300
    Pop has always drawn energy from the lower floors of respectability; this movie, in which fan-boy cultism reaches new levels of goofy chaos and sexual confusion, draws energy from the subbasement.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    The General's Daughter
    A classic case of Hollywood hypocrisy and ineptitude.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    The Hunger Games
    The result is an evasive, baffling, unexciting production - anything but a classic.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 30 David Denby
    Red Hook Summer
    A clear failure, yet Lee is getting at things that mystify him, and I was touched by parts of the movie. [13 & 20 Aug. 2012, p.97]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Aug 6, 2012
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