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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    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 David Denby
    Hollywood Ending
    Has its satirical charms, but it repeats itself remorselessly, and it has no emotional center. We are so distant from Val that when he gets his sight back we don't feel a thing. [20 May 2002, p.114]
    • The New Yorker
    • 88 Metascore
    • 60 David Denby
    A Serious Man
    A Serious Man, like “Burn After Reading,” is in their bleak, black, belittling mode, and it’s hell to sit through.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 60 David Denby
    The Grand Budapest Hotel
    The Grand Budapest Hotel is no more than mildly funny. It produces murmuring titters rather than laughter -- the sound of viewers affirming their own acumen in so reliably getting the joke. [10 March 2014, p.78]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Mar 6, 2014
    • 87 Metascore
    • 50 David Denby
    Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
    I'm more than ready to welcome a new style and a new metaphysic, but I still respond with skepticism and exasperation to Weerasethakul's work, which is sensuous and ruminative but also flat, almost affectless. [28 March 2011, p. 116]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Mar 23, 2011
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 David Denby
    The Longest Day
    Seen now, the picture is ludicrous, pointless, and stirring all at once.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 David Denby
    Holy Motors
    Holy Motors is full of larks and jolts, but the movie is so self-referential that it's mainly aroused by itself. The audience, though eager to be pleased, is left unsatisfied. [22 Oct. 2012, p.88]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Oct 19, 2012
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 David Denby
    The Dark Knight
    The Dark Knight is hardly routine--it has a kicky sadism in scene after scene, which keeps you on edge and sends you out onto the street with post-movie stress disorder.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 David Denby
    The Place Beyond the Pines
    Cool, violent, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, Gosling reprises his inexorable-loner routine from “Drive.” Cianfrance and the screenwriters Ben Coccio and Darius Marder wrote thirty-seven drafts of the script, but gave him almost nothing to say. He rides, he smokes, he knocks over banks, he loves his baby, and that’s it.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 40 David Denby
    Kill Bill: Vol. 2
    A shapeless mess, but at least it’s not as monotonous as “Kill Bill Vol. 1.” [19 & 26 April 2004, p. 202]
    • The New Yorker
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 David Denby
    Monsieur Lazhar
    The movie is so discreet and respectful that, outside the classroom, within whose walls the glory of French literature and language triumph, it never quite comes to life. [16 April 2012, p. 86]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Apr 9, 2012
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 David Denby
    The Sum of All Fears
    As an evocation of danger, the movie seems threatening yet is nowhere near serious or intelligent enough to satisfy our current sense of alarm. [3 June 2002, p. 100]
    • The New Yorker
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 David Denby
    44 Inch Chest
    A very strange, often terrible affair that is nevertheless mesmerizing, in a limited way.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 David Denby
    Skyfall
    It would be lovely to announce that the new Bond movie is scintillating, or at least rambunctiously exciting, but Skyfall, in the recent mode of Christopher Nolan's "Batman" films, is a gloomy, dark action thriller, and almost completely without the cynical playfulness that drew us to the series in the first place. [12 Nov. 2012, p.94]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Nov 7, 2012
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 David Denby
    King Kong
    This Kong is high-powered entertainment, but Jackson pushes too hard and loses momentum over the more than three hours of the movie. The story was always a goofy fable--that was its charm--and a well-told fable knows when to stop.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 David Denby
    Silver Linings Playbook
    Pretty much a miscalculation from beginning to end. [26 Nov. 2012, p.87]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Nov 26, 2012
    • 80 Metascore
    • 40 David Denby
    Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
    Unfortunately, it's also maddeningly repetitive, and dependent on the kind of strained English whimsy that leaves your throat sore from laughter that dies in the glottal region.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 David Denby
    Stage Beauty
    Second-rate bawdiness--that is, bawdiness without the wit of Boccaccio or Shakespeare or even Tom Stoppard--is more infantile than funny, and I’m not sure that the American playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, who concocted this piece for the stage and then adapted it into a movie, is even second-rate.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 David Denby
    Iron Man
    [Downey] can make offhandedness mesmerizing, even soulful; he passes through the key moments in this cloddish story as if he were ad-libbing his inner life.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 40 David Denby
    Keep the Lights On
    The two characters are ciphers, and the script, which Sachs co-wrote with Mauricio Zacharias, is by turns underwritten or banal.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 40 David Denby
    Black Swan
    Off the dance floor, however, Black Swan is trashy and incoherent. Aronofsky, for all his gifts, is a gaudy maestro, opportunistic and insecure as an artist.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 David Denby
    A Bug's Life
    O.K. for children.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 David Denby
    Tracks
    The memoir is strongly written, and I wish that the movie, directed by John Curran (Marion Nelson did the adaptation), had more excitement to it.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 David Denby
    The Princess of Montpensier
    The battle scenes are extraordinarily mucky and violent, but here, as in Tavernier's "Let Joy Reign Supreme," the intricate protocols of aristocratic sexual passion are the most startling elements. The movie, however, is opaque at its center. [25 April, 2011 p. 89]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Apr 22, 2011
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 David Denby
    Grindhouse
    The movie won't do much for anyone who doesn't have an academic or fanboy absorption in junk.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 David Denby
    You Don't Mess with the Zohan
    An obscene, ridiculous, and occasionally very funny movie, and if it ever gets to the Middle East it will roil the falafel tables on both sides of the Arab-Israeli divide.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 40 David Denby
    The Immigrant
    In this movie, Phoenix turns himself inside out, but Cotillard’s reserved performance doesn’t move us. Bruno advances in his confused way, Ewa resists, and, despite Jeremy Renner’s flickering presence, the movie becomes dour and repetitive. Looking at them, you finally think, Enough! Life must be elsewhere.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 David Denby
    The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
    Yet, despite the good acting, the middle section of the film, set at the Capitol, is attenuated and rhythmless — the filmmakers seem to be touching all the bases so that the trilogy’s readers won’t miss anything.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 David Denby
    Wild
    The scenery, of course, could stop the heart of a mountain goat, and Wild has an admirable heroine, but the movie itself often feels literal-minded rather than poetic, busy rather than sublime, eager to communicate rather than easily splendid.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 David Denby
    The Manchurian Candidate
    The movie is overwrought and unfocussed.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 David Denby
    The Wolf of Wall Street
    The Wolf of Wall Street is a fake. It’s meant to be an exposé of disgusting, immoral, corrupt, obscene behavior, but it’s made in such an exultant style that it becomes an example of disgusting, obscene filmmaking. It’s actually a little monotonous; spectacular, and energetic beyond belief, but monotonous in the way that all burlesques become monotonous after a while.
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