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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    • 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
    • 90 David Denby
    Paprika
    The brilliant Paprika, directed by Satoshi Kon--a masterly example of Japanese anime, intended for adults--is partly hand drawn, and features multiple areas of visual activity layered at different distances from the picture plane.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 David Denby
    Hairspray
    The movie version of the hit Broadway musical Hairspray is perfectly pleasant--I smiled to myself all the way through it--but it’s not as exhilarating as the show.
    • 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
    • 80 David Denby
    Starred Up
    At first, you may think, Oh, it’s that damn prison movie again, but Starred Up has a much more intimate texture of affection and disdain than most genre films. You’re held by every exchange, every fight.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 David Denby
    Midnight in Paris
    Midnight has one big problem: Allen hardly gives Gil a perceptive moment. He's awestruck and fumbling - he doesn't possess, to our eyes, the conviction of a writer. But who knows? He's young.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 David Denby
    Bad Education
    Complex and devious beyond easy recounting, Bad Education is about the fallout from the ending of a "pure" love between boys, consecrated in an Almodóvaran temple--a movie theatre.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 David Denby
    Flight
    We get tired of watching Whip fail, and we're caught between dismayed pity and a longing to see him punished. Only a great actor could have pulled off this balancing act. [12 Nov. 2012, p.94]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Nov 7, 2012
    • 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
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 David Denby
    Buena Vista Social Club
    The movie comes closer to pure happiness than anything else in the theatres at the moment, and it has an intriguing and moving subtext: the Cubans' buried but irrepressible love of things American.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 David Denby
    Waiting for 'Superman'
    We need another movie, one that shows us why some charter schools work and others don't. And there's an issue that needs to be addressed by Guggenheim and such people as Bill Gates, who appears in the movie as an advocate for charter schools, which he has generously funded.It is the question of scale.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 David Denby
    Wendy and Lucy
    She's infuriating, but the movie, for all its morose impassivity, is beautiful and haunting.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 David Denby
    The Hours
    The twin themes of The Hours are the variety of human bonds, especially the bond of love, and the gift that the dying make to the living. The miracle is that such sombre notions fit together as surely and lightly as the dancers in a Balanchine ballet. [23 & 30 December 2002, p. 166]
    • The New Yorker
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 David Denby
    The Secret in Their Eyes
    It's powerfully and richly imagined: a genre-busting movie that successfully combines the utmost in romanticism with the utmost in realism.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 David Denby
    Food, Inc.
    For many of this movie's likely viewers, the sting built into Food, Inc. is the realization that, without unending effort, they are not all that much freer in their choices than that hard-pressed family.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 David Denby
    Central Station
    An intimate epic.
    • The New Yorker
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 David Denby
    True Grit
    For the Coens, the plot elements are a given; the telling is all. [20 & 27 Dec. 2010, p. 144]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Dec 13, 2010
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 David Denby
    Jung (War) in the Land of the Mujaheddin
    A film that cannot, in the normal sense of the word, be enjoyed, but it can be endured in a spirit of tempered anticipation -- The movie becomes an anguished demand that the dream be fulfilled. [26 Nov 2001, p. 122]
    • The New Yorker
    • 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 David Denby
    Good Night, and Good Luck.
    This is an elegant and stirring entertainment about the hard-drinking, hard-smoking reporters of "See It Now," the show that Murrow and the producer Fred Friendly put together every week.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 David Denby
    Coraline
    Coraline is a beautifully designed, rather scary answered-prayer story.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 David Denby
    Tarzan
    At its best, the movie is an exhilarating, surf-topping ride. With Minnie Driver providing the voice of a deliciously flirtatious Jane.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 David Denby
    Frost/Nixon
    Offers considerable insight into the Nixon mystery, without solving it; the movie is fully absorbing and even, when Nixon falls into a drunken, resentful rage, exciting, but I can't escape the feeling that it carries about it an aura of momentousness that isn't warranted by the events.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 David Denby
    The Dancer Upstairs
    A dramatic failure, but, at its best, it offers a frightening suggestion of the way terror can alter reality so thoroughly that, step by step, the fantastic becomes accepted as the mere commonplace. [5 May 2003, p. 104]
    • The New Yorker
    • 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
    • 80 David Denby
    The Piano Teacher
    A seriously scandalous work, beautifully made, and it deserves a sizable audience that might argue over it, appreciate it -- even hate it. [1 April 2002, p. 98]
    • The New Yorker
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 David Denby
    March of the Penguins
    A perfect family movie, a perfect date movie, and one of the most eye-ravishing documentaries ever made.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 David Denby
    Dinner Rush
    Combines pulse-of-the-city drama and comedy with an elaborate revenge plot, but mostly the movie is about New Yorkers talking.
    • The New Yorker
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 David Denby
    Pride
    Pride is brilliantly entertaining just as it is, so I trust that no one connected with the film will be insulted if I say that, despite the existence of shows with similarly stirring themes, like “Billy Elliot” and “Kinky Boots,” the story would make a terrific musical.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 David Denby
    Hotel Rwanda
    The film turns into a triumph for Don Cheadle, who never steps outside the character for emotional grandstanding or easy moralism.
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