David Edelstein

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New York Magazine (Vulture), Slate
For 2,169 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 47% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 51% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

David Edelstein's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 65
Highest review score: 100 First Cow
Lowest review score: 0 Funny Games (2008)
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,257 out of 2169
  2. Mixed: 709 out of 2169
  3. Negative: 203 out of 2169
2169 movie reviews
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    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Robert the Bruce
    If I’ve made Robert the Bruce sound laughable, I’ve misrepresented it. It’s not bad at all. Though he is unusually uncharismatic, Macfadyen (who co-wrote the script) is an excellent actor, and Richard Gray directs ably. But that word — “ably.” I never used it before. It’s the bottom of the neutral zone, before you dip into negative territory.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    The Other Lamb
    The idea is that vulnerable women will give up their autonomy — their very identities — to such an entitled being, which I found a stretch but which certainly has historical precedents. It’s best to view The Other Lamb as a rite-of-passage fantasia with a gossamer heroine.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Hope Gap
    A brief, sad little piece that doesn’t quite hurdle the blood-brain barrier and rattle you to the core, but it does achieve a half-sublimity, thanks to coastal settings with white cliffs that inspire both awe and thoughts of flinging oneself off, and also thanks to poetry.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Wendy
    The style is immersive, meant to envelop us and bring us into the story, but it ends up making the movie feel abstract and distant. And there’s a void at the center.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 David Edelstein
    Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker
    Under J.J. Abrams, The Rise of Skywalker hits its marks and bashes ahead, so speedy that no emotion sinks in too deeply.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Knives Out
    A production designed to within an inch of its life, Knives Out always seems on the brink of being cleverer than it is, never quite shaking off its cobwebs and entering the present tense.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    The Current War
    Apart from those nutty camera angles and lenses, which throw you out of the action, The Current War is absorbing.... It never quite snaps into focus, though.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Terminator: Dark Fate
    These are Doritos movies, indeed: a lot of crunching, a lot of empty calories.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Jojo Rabbit
    Let me add something in the movie’s favor. Although I don’t love Jojo Rabbit, I love that it exists.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    The King
    The King has enough in its coffers to keep you moderately engaged.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Lucy in the Sky
    I have to tip my cap to such a bold attempt to induce in the audience his heroine’s inner flux and fragmentation. The double-entendre title tells you to expect a trip, and you get one.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 40 David Edelstein
    Rambo: Last Blood
    Quick as it is, though, you have time to wonder how these Mexican assassins can watch their comrades getting skewered, dismembered, and eviscerated by Rambo’s traps and not think, Maybe we should pull out and rethink this assault.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    The Goldfinch
    The Goldfinch is too artful to deserve that kind of rejection, but too arty to keep you from saying, “What did I just see?”
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 David Edelstein
    Where'd You Go, Bernadette
    He’s a deceptively crafty director (he fakes naturalism beautifully in movies like "Dazed and Confused," "Before Sunrise," and "Boyhood"), but he can’t find a suitable form for Maria Semple’s patchwork best seller about a misanthropic, malcontented ex-architect named Bernadette.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 David Edelstein
    After the Wedding
    None of the characters has a true home. Comedies end with weddings, with order replacing chaos, but After the Wedding is not a comedy and weddings don’t fool anyone.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Luce
    In the end, you’re left with a movie that doesn’t quite jell but expands in the mind. It’s an excellent Book Club movie — it demands to be discussed, debated, embraced, or (perhaps) rejected.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 40 David Edelstein
    The Nightingale
    It’s constructed like a meathead melodrama — though with odd, last-act dissonances that might reflect Kent’s ambivalence.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Luz
    If Luz had been a play, I’d probably have walked out halfway through, but as a film I found it eerie enough to stay rooted.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 David Edelstein
    The Art of Self-Defense
    The only surprise is the level of violence — not just beyond "The Karate Kid" but beyond "Fight Club." The problem with that strategy is that unless you’re knocked out, you’re just grossed out and eager to go. You practice the art of self-defense against the movie.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Yesterday
    Curtis isn’t the director of Yesterday; Danny Boyle has been brought in to lend his shallow virtuosity. But fluid transitions don’t make the movie less clunky. Patel has an appealing presence and a lovely, McCartney-­like tenor, but the musical numbers leave an odd taste.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Midsommar
    The most ambitious horror blurs the line between the psychological and the mythic, between ordinary human emotions and symbol-laden Blakean nightmares, and Aster is very ambitious and very blurry.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 David Edelstein
    The Dead Don't Die
    It’s painful to report that Jarmusch’s deadpan is in the rigor mortis stage in The Dead Don’t Die. His own creative ferment isn’t happening this time — the acid cynicism has killed the yeast — and the actors seem unsure whether to commit to the material when their director plainly hasn’t.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Dark Phoenix
    Like most good superhero movies, Dark Phoenix operates on two levels, comic-book fantastical and psychological. Like most not-so-good ones, it doesn’t do justice to either aspect. The results here are middling, but the director, Simon Kinberg, throws a lot of ideas at you. It’s not boring.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 David Edelstein
    Rocketman
    In common with most recovery stories, Rocketman boils down to a fat lump of self-pity, but the music does leaven things.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Brightburn
    Most of Brightburn belabors the obvious.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 David Edelstein
    Aladdin
    This Aladdin’s sole innovation is a feminist Jasmine who refuses to be controlled, but the song is so saccharine and the vistas are so synthetic that it doesn’t feel as if she’s being liberated. It feels as if yet another man is trying to engineer her responses. Aladdin might as well have put a VR headset on her.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
    The movie should by rights be a “Wow!” But it feels bloated, self-conscious, and pretentious, with long waits between its few dazzling fights. Evidently, it’s hard to build on a premise that’s basically so vacuous and dumb.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 David Edelstein
    Charlie Says
    A social worker’s take on a lost soul can be valuable, but in a drama it’s too orienting. You want to see how a person could surrender herself — her self — to something so diabolical, which demands a higher level of insanity than the filmmakers can muster.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Long Shot
    I generally like Rogen a lot but this performance is bad — worse than it even seems because of the drain it is on the movie.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    J.T. Leroy
    JT LeRoy isn’t a bad movie, and with these actresses it’s certainly worth seeing. It’s a passion project for Knoop, who co-wrote the script (songs by her brother, long divorced from Albert, all over the soundtrack) and has been promoting the film.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Shazam!
    So Shazam! feels blessedly old-fashioned, which isn’t to say it’s perfect — or even very good. It’s certainly fun when the juvenile actors are front and center, before the CGI moves in for the last half-hour and change.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    The Beach Bum
    I can’t tell if Korine is a true dramatist or a simpleminded provocateur who lives to mess with our heads. Both, probably. To him, the joke is that it’s all movie fodder. Moondog is an existential hero for a weightless universe.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    The Hummingbird Project
    Some of the supporting actors register, especially Michael Mando as the unpretentious but quick-witted chief engineer. But the only surprise is Skarsgård. He has played wife-beaters, vampires, rapists, and mute would-be detectives, but who’d have thought he’d make a credible nerd?
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Captain Marvel
    The best reason to see the movie is Larson, who showed how terrific she could be in "Short Term 12" and "Room" as women whose ways of fighting back were frustratingly earthbound.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Mapplethorpe
    Mapplethorpe doesn’t linger long enough to have a present tense. It hits its marks and breezes on. It’s not inept — there are few bad scenes. It doesn’t risk enough to be bad.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Paddleton
    The cancer-buddy movie Paddleton (which premieres today on Netflix) is embarrassingly bad until 20 minutes from the end, when it’s suddenly very good — quiet, tightly focused, stunning. It’s a pity that the first hour needs to be endured, but it does set the stage as well as soften you up for the indelible scene to come.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Greta
    The film is intense and features a performance by Chloë Grace Moretz that’s more committed than this swill deserves.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 David Edelstein
    The Prodigy
    Nicholas McCarthy, the director of the new bad-seed movie, The Prodigy, works in a low key that still somehow scrapes your nerves, so when the nasty stuff arrives, you realize (too late!) that you’ve been softened up for the kill. The film is cruelly well-made.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    To Dust
    The mournful comedy To Dust has a sicko premise, but scrupulously sicko.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    High Flying Bird
    High Flying Bird is an unshapely piece of storytelling — there are gaps in the plot, and it never locks into a rhythm — but that mournfulness and resentment seep into you.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Never Look Away
    The actors are good, but their lovemaking has no raw edges, no messiness. Deschanel lights them like sculptures — art objects — while Richter saws away to serenade their transcendent oneness. It’s Middlebrow Realism, comrades.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Miss Bala
    The souped-up plot is certainly indigestible (cheesecake, beefcake, bullets — choke on that), and there’s a steady stream of bad laughs, but something genuinely frightening comes through: a woman’s sense of disempowerment by men on all sides of the law. Hardwicke sticks to her guns — meaning there’s no play in the gunplay, only horror.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Serenity
    Serenity isn’t just meant to surprise you — which it will — but to give you an emotional wallop — which it may or may not. It didn’t work for me: I was too hung up on the fanciness (and, in truth, ridiculousness) of the final half-hour to feel everything Knight wanted me to feel.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    An Acceptable Loss
    So-so quasi-thriller.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 David Edelstein
    Glass
    If Shyamalan is an original, his originality is in draining the life out of pop archetypes, twerpily annotating them, and presenting it all as a gift from on high.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Buffalo Boys
    Moderately entertaining, immoderately splattery spaghetti Western.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Perfect Strangers (Perfectos Desconocidos)
    The farcical revelations — with their attendant puking and pounding on bathroom doors — work better than the grimly sincere ones. But only one bit goes clunk — the rest is deftly staged and acted.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    State Like Sleep
    Maybe my assessment is colored by the dud ending, since the journey to its criminally unsatisfying final scenes is tantalizingly dreamlike and unnerving.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Holmes & Watson
    As a director, Coen commits comedy’s most cardinal sin: He gets between us and the performers.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    On the Basis of Sex
    The defense concedes that the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic On the Basis of Sex hits its marks with the subtlety of a legal brief. But that’s not fatal.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Mary Poppins Returns
    Mary Poppins Returns is a work of painstaking re-creation, and it’s full of nice touches. But it’s a bit of a dud.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    The Front Runner
    The best thing about the film The Front Runner is that it gives Gary Hart, the Colorado senator and 1984 and ’88 presidential candidate, a measure of dignity, and today’s audiences a historical context in which to view his missteps.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 David Edelstein
    Suspiria
    An interesting take. The problem is that Guadagnino can’t cast a decent spell.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Bad Times at the El Royale
    Bad Times at the El Royale isn’t an event. But I was never too bored.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    The Predator
    The Predator throws enough at you to keep you distracted from seeing all the marks it’s not quite hitting. Rhodes’s pop-top vet is amusing and scary in equal measure, and little Jake Tremblay is as good as you’d hope, especially when his Rory mouths off to the Machiavellian Traeger on the subject of reverse psychology.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Operation Finale
    The fleeting good moments in Operation Finale come from a few of the actors.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    The Captain
    It’s too bleak to laugh at and too absurd to cry over. That it’s true adds another insanity-inducing element.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Gauguin: Voyage to Tahiti
    Although the script is based on Gauguin’s own writing, the film presents him as such a gloomy Gus that he might have swapped souls with his onetime pal Van Gogh.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    The First Purge
    The First Purge is pretty good if you’re not averse to caricatures, predictable twists, and lots of familiar B-movie tropes.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Woman Walks Ahead
    The movie’s most exciting moment comes when Weldon realizes that she has been played — that in helping turn the tribes against the Dawes Act, she has won the battle and lost the war, since the U.S. would now have cause to attack. That’s the moment when Woman Walks Ahead should get really good but turns, instead, into a weeper.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    The Catcher Was a Spy
    The movie is well-crafted, but it doesn’t have the fullness you’d expect in a movie with so much believe-it-or-not weirdness. It feels more like a nifty anecdote.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Boundaries
    Boundaries is earnest in way that partly makes up for the overbroad characters and stale setup.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
    The movie plays like a strenuous imitation of Steven Spielberg instead of the real deal.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Action Point
    The agreeable looseness edges into a less agreeable limpness.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    American Animals
    The bigger problem is that stupidity just isn’t a very interesting subject.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 David Edelstein
    Deadpool 2
    We’ve reached superhero saturation point, and Deadpool 2 is less a satire of that condition than a symptom of it. It has zero suspense — it’s too hip, too meta, for suspense.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    The Rachel Divide
    Early in The Rachel Divide, a commentator describes Dolezal as a Rorschach blot, and the movie is one, too. Some people think it’s a hatchet job, others that it gives its subject’s commitment to social justice too much credence. I found it pretty much down the middle.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Blockers
    Blockers, for all its high-velocity raunch and drug abuse, is fundamentally positive.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    The Last Movie Star
    The (elderly) Burt Reynolds vehicle The Last Movie Star strikes a note of banality in its first sequence from which it rarely deviates.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    7 Days in Entebbe
    It muddles what might have been a fascinating alternate — i.e., downbeat — take on one of Israel’s most-acclaimed military operations.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Death Wish
    Death Wish is a classier version of what you can find on cable in the wee hours — it’s not worth seeing in the theater — but it’s worth pausing over its politics of guns.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 David Edelstein
    A Wrinkle in Time
    A Wrinkle in Time, was strong enough to carry me through the film’s first, wobbly 15 minutes — but not a lot further.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Mute
    Mute is pretty meh but gets points for randomness.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Red Sparrow
    Figuring out whether someone is a double, triple, or quadruple agent isn’t a brain-teaser, it’s a brain-irritant, especially when the script is so convoluted. The novel by Jason Matthews is cleaner, without so much jumping around between the two main characters.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    The Cloverfield Paradox
    Things speed up too quickly, meaning just when the movie’s rhythms should become loopier and the action more eccentric, The Cloverfield Paradox becomes one more formulaic ticking-clock series of chases and shootings with a moral dilemma for pathos and then uplift.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Please Stand By
    Please Stand By is thoughtful in how it dramatizes the consequences of autism. The movie is a little stiff, though.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    12 Strong
    The movie, based on the terrific book Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton, is only so-so, but it moves at a fair clip and fills in a lot of details about the early successes of the Afghanistan war.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    The Insult
    Part of the film is a crackerjack courtroom drama. What’s dull is the trajectory. The Insult is so schematic that it shrinks to the level of a painfully scrupulous newspaper editorial. Which is fine — for a newspaper editorial.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool
    Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool isn’t visually drab, only conceptually. As a critic who often complains about biopics diverging too radically from the facts, I’m chagrined to find myself wishing the filmmakers had taken more liberties with Turner’s brief memoir.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 David Edelstein
    Justice League
    Like most “universe” movies, this one has about five beginnings and then segues into a round-up-the-team section that ought to have been sure-fire. But the banter has a droopy, depressed air, as if the actors know they’re coming from behind.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Murder on the Orient Express
    To return to why Murder on the Orient Express was remade: Beats me. Maybe it’s someone’s idea of counterprogramming when every other film in the multiplex is for kids or yahoos. Maybe it’s a tax shelter.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Wonder Wheel
    Watching the rest of the movie, I wondered if Allen had discovered the script in an old file cabinet (maybe meant as a play?) and appended that meta intro to account for how obvious and old-hat the rest of it is. Probably a good strategy.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Our Souls at Night
    The last act of Our Souls at Night is rushed and the ending truncated. But the good vibes linger. Netflix is putting the film in a few theaters but it’s online now to watch. You should. It’s a nice little movie.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Blade Runner 2049
    There’s nothing close to the shock of seeing Blade Runner’s Tokyo-influenced futuristic dystopia — a dismal mix of high-tech and corrosion — for the first time. I thought it was okay.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Victoria and Abdul
    The chief — though hardly the only — problem with Victoria & Abdul is that too much political correctness proves to be as bad for drama as too little.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    The Shape of Water
    It’s an utterly lovely, complacent movie, too comfortable with itself to generate real dramatic tension.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Suburbicon
    The most charitable way to view it is as a Dadaist experiment, in which two tonally disparate movies were hacked down and their remaining strands woven together to bizarre effect.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    mother!
    For all its feverish activity, Mother! feels static.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    I Do... Until I Don't
    The movie’s satirical backbone softens and dissolves, and watching it go wrong might make you realize it wasn’t that good to begin with — that Bell had been getting by on energy and the audience’s goodwill.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 David Edelstein
    The Dark Tower
    As a mascot, McConaughey embodies the movie’s lack of conviction, but as an indication that a star could conceivably be computer-generated with no loss of affect or facial mobility, he might inspire the next generation of bloodless fantasy epics.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Atomic Blonde
    You don’t go to operas for dancing or ballets for singing, and you don’t see Atomic Blonde for anything but a badass female protagonist crunching bones and pulping faces in gratifyingly long takes or remarkable simulations thereof. The auteur here is literally the stunt man.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    War for the Planet of the Apes
    War for the Planet of the Apes manages to be both alienating and sappy, and the biblical finale seems to come from a different universe altogether. It’s an awesome, dull movie.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Wonder Woman
    The only grace note in the generally clunky Wonder Woman is its star, the five-foot-ten-inch Israeli actress and model Gal Gadot, who is somehow the perfect blend of superbabe-in-the-woods innocence and mouthiness.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Baywatch
    It’s the smart-ass nerd’s Baywatch. The movie is okay, though, if you don’t mind manic pacing and icky dick jokes.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 David Edelstein
    Snatched
    I’m not sure about Hawn. A youthful twitterer, she has developed an expressively croaky voice, but nothing about her reads “nervous, agoraphobic cat lady.” She’s no longer a jumpy clown — she doesn’t need the humiliation.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    The Circle
    The Circle is a tonal mess: part satire, part moralistic melodrama. Some of it is broadly acted, some of it subtle, much of it overheated. It has great moments, though.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
    It’s not the weighty emotions that drag Vol. 2 down. It’s the plot that chases its own tail and the cluttered visual palette.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    The Promise
    The film is no masterpiece — again, George can’t illuminate why a million people were murdered by their own countrymen. But as we focus on Rusesabagina’s almost farcically desperate attempts to forestall tragedy, we have a vision of genocide as a virus with its own terrible momentum.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 David Edelstein
    Free Fire
    The result is reasonably entertaining and totally disposable. Which it shouldn’t be, given that its focus is on guns and the way that they facilitate mayhem. Gory farce can be bracing. It’s the glibness that’s unconscionable.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Wilson
    I wish the movie had more of a tragic undercurrent — the tone is wobbly.
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