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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    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 David Denby
    Casablanca
    The most familiar movie in the world is still fresh; it has so many little busy corners to nestle in... Casablanca is the most sociable, the most companionable film ever made. Life as an endless party.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 David Denby
    Killer of Sheep
    Burnett used many kinds of African-American music on the soundtrack, and the movie itself has the bedraggled eloquence of an old blues record. The amateur actors, who occasionally burst into fury, combined with the black-and-white cinematography, bring the poverty of Watts closer to us emotionally.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 David Denby
    12 Years a Slave
    12 Years a Slave is easily the greatest feature film ever made about American slavery.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 David Denby
    Ratatouille
    In Ratatouille, the level of moment-by-moment craftsmanship is a wonder.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 David Denby
    Gravity
    Gravity is not a film of ideas, like Kubrick's techno-mystical "2001," but it's an overwhelming physical experience -- a challenge to the senses that engages every kind of dread. [7 Oct. 2013, p.88]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Oct 6, 2013
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 David Denby
    The Social Network
    Brilliantly entertaining and emotionally wrenching.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 David Denby
    The Hurt Locker
    A small classic of tension, bravery, and fear, which will be studied twenty years from now when people want to understand something of what happened to American soldiers in Iraq. If there are moviegoers who are exhausted by the current fashion for relentless fantasy violence, this is the convincingly blunt and forceful movie for them.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 David Denby
    Zero Dark Thirty
    The virtue of Zero Dark Thirty, however, is that it pays close attention to the way life does work; it combines ruthlessness and humanity in a manner that is paradoxical and disconcerting yet satisfying as art.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 David Denby
    WALL-E
    Apparently, the movie has caused annoyance in some quarters because it criticizes the American way of life. This it does, and with suavity and supreme good humor. WALL-E is a classic, but it will never appeal to people who are happy with art only when it has as little bite as possible.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 David Denby
    Before Midnight
    What follows is astounding: a thirty-minute fight, which, in its bitterness, complication, and psychological revelation, recalls episodes from Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage." [27 May 2013, p.86]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Jun 3, 2013
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 David Denby
    Mr. Turner
    Mr. Turner is a harsh, strange, but stirring movie, no more a conventional artist’s bio-pic than Robert Altman’s wonderful, little-seen film about van Gogh and his brother, “Vincent and Theo.”
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 David Denby
    Sideways
    In this role Giamatti gives his bravest, most generously humane performance yet. Women may be repelled, but men will know this man, because, at one time or another, many of us have been this man.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 David Denby
    Elevator to the Gallows
    Moreau's nocturnal wanderings are made unbearably poignant by an exquisite Miles Davis jazz score that became famous in its own right.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 David Denby
    There Will Be Blood
    An enthralling and powerfully eccentric American epic.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 David Denby
    The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
    Schnabel’s movie, based on the calm and exquisite little book that Bauby wrote in the hospital, is a gloriously unlocked experience, with some of the freest and most creative uses of the camera and some of the most daring, cruel, and heartbreaking emotional explorations that have appeared in recent movies.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 David Denby
    The Class
    I would be surprised if this brilliant and touching film didn't become required viewing for teachers all over the United States. Everyone else should see it as well--it's a wonderful movie.
    • 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
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 David Denby
    Frenzy
    Frenzy, with its piles of peaches and lettuces, its constant drinking, is a masterpiece devoted to appetite in all its varieties—but it is most seriously devoted to the perversion of sexual happiness in murder and to the absence of sexual happiness in “normal” life.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 David Denby
    The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
    Consistently beautiful and often exciting -- despite some dead passages here and there, it's surely the best big-budget fantasy movie in years. [24 & 31 Dec 2001, p. 126]
    • The New Yorker
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 David Denby
    Lost in Translation
    Not much happens, but Coppola is so gentle and witty an observer that the movie casts a spell. [15 September 2003, p. 100]
    • The New Yorker
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 David Denby
    Ida
    This compact masterpiece has the curt definition and the finality of a reckoning—a reckoning in which anger and mourning blend together.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 David Denby
    Before Sunset
    The movie is an O. Henry-like conceit--the slenderness of the initial premise is part of the charm--but the anecdote becomes almost momentous as it goes on.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 David Denby
    Winter's Bone
    In its lived-in, completely non-ideological way, Winter's Bone is one of the great feminist works in film.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 David Denby
    Bloody Sunday
    For the viewer, the miracle of Bloody Sunday is that firm moral judgment can exist side by side with a wild and bitter exhilaration in the sheer physicality of violence. [7 Oct 2002, p. 108]
    • The New Yorker
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 David Denby
    Gosford Park
    Altman achieves his dream of a truly organic form, in which everyone is connected to everyone else, and life circulates around a central group of ideas and emotions in bristling orbits. [14 Jan 2002, p. 92]
    • The New Yorker
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 David Denby
    This Is Not a Film
    The movie is also about a man without fear. It is often funny and stirring, but as you are watching you know what the game will lead to; dictatorships are not known for their sense of humor. [5 March 2012, p. 86]
    • The New Yorker
      • Posted Feb 27, 2012
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 David Denby
    Paths of Glory
    The sardonic rhetoric may be laid on a little heavily at times, but the movie is blunt and scornfully brilliant.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 David Denby
    United 93
    Greengrass’s movie is tightly wrapped, minutely drawn, and, no matter how frightening, superbly precise.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 David Denby
    Capturing the Friedmans
    To begin your career with a masterpiece is so remarkable a feat that one can only hope Jarecki finds another subject as rich as this family, which was obsessed with itself but needed a filmmaker to begin to see itself at all. [2 June 2003, p. 102]
    • The New Yorker
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 David Denby
    American Hustle
    “Inside Llewyn Davis” and “Nebraska” are the current standards of what a serious Hollywood movie looks like. American Hustle offers so many easy pleasures that people may not think of it as a work of art, but it is. In the world that Russell has created, if you don’t come to play you’re not fully alive. An art devoted to appetite has as much right to screen immortality as the most austere formal invention.
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