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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    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    For Sama
    For Sama doesn’t feel like raw footage — it has been carefully shaped, with a bit of movie-­ish suspense during the final hours, when the last of the families in East Aleppo were told they could surrender to the regime but were fired on anyway. The ending is a little fancy for my taste — a montage of the good times and an overhead shot of Waad and her baby walking through the rubble.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
    Except for a screamingly funny climax in which he attempts to kidnap Pamela Anderson (who reportedly wasn't in on the joke), I found the Borat feature (directed by Larry Charles, who does similar duties on "Curb Your Enthusiasm") depressing; and the paroxysms of the audience reinforced the feeling that I was watching a bearbaiting or pigsticking.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Seymour: An Introduction
    Buoyed by Chopin, Schubert, Schumann, and more, Seymour: An Introduction is lyrical without getting fancy, its director plainly rapt.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    No End in Sight
    A meticulous, thoroughly engrossing lesson in how not to win friends (or wars) and influence people (or potential terrorists).
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Phoenix
    A haunting, morbidly romantic melodrama with obvious links to "Vertigo," but from a reverse angle.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Goodbye Solo
    Like his protagonist, Bahrani never gives up on William; his camera never stops probing. He loves West's face, and he honors its mystery.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    The End of the Tour
    At times the movie’s small canvas feels momentous. They’ve found the inner tensions in people’s presentations of themselves in a way that’s positively Wallace-like.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Letters from Iwo Jima
    For my money, Flags (however clunky) cuts more deeply, but Letters is more difficult to shake off. Together, they leave you with the feeling that even a just and necessary war is an abomination.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Anomalisa
    Once the surprise of seeing something so miserable depicted with such wit and poetry wears off, you’re left with a nagging ugh, as well as the feeling that this emotional/psychological syndrome isn’t nearly as universal as Kaufman thinks it is.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Corpse Bride
    The movie is so Burtonesque that it verges on self-parody--but it's fun and stunningly beautiful anyway.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Crime + Punishment
    Crime + Punishment makes you angry and scared in equal measure. What it doesn’t do is illuminate the sources of this evil. What about the majority of cops who know the 12 are right but shun them anyway? Would you trust them if they stopped you on the street?
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    A Serious Man
    A Serious Man is not only hauntingly original, it’s the final piece of the puzzle that is the Coens. Combine suburban alienation, philosophical inquiry, moral seriousness, a mixture of respect for and utter indifference to Torah, and, finally, a ton of dope, and you get one of the most remarkable oeuvres in modern film.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Capote
    Hoffman goes beyond the surface mannerisms and diction. He disappears into Capote.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    The Death of Stalin
    As in the most unnerving satires, the glibness adds to the horror. Even the most absurd deaths have a sting.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
    I confess that I had a hard time reconciling McDonagh’s madcap incongruities with the horror of the original crime and the grief of a mother struggling to cope with so primal an injury. Are the people who love the movie less rigid in their tastes? Or has McDonagh succeeded in so thoroughly psyching them out that they’re afraid to call foul?
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    A Film Unfinished
    It becomes a meditation on the dual nature of film, on a "reality" at once true and false, essential and tainted.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    The Grand Budapest Hotel
    Wes Anderson’s latest cinematic styling is The Grand Budapest Hotel, an exquisitely calibrated, deadpan-comic miniature that expands in the mind and becomes richer and more tragic.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    A Star Is Born
    I have zero doubts about the first half of A Star Is Born — it couldn’t be more charming.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Citizenfour
    The hotel scenes go on a tad long, but what holds us is that we’re right in the room as history is being made — with the guy, the actual guy, soon to be notorious all over the world.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Time Out
    It's like an Ingmar Bergman film with the loss of religious faith replaced with a sort of socioeconomic nebulousness.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Away from Her
    Away From Her is a twilight-of-life love story, one that harshly demolishes our romantic notions of love and loyalty, then replaces them with something deeper and, finally, more consoling.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Mafioso [re-release]
    That's the beauty of Mafioso: that what begins as a comedy of disconnection becomes a tragicomedy of connection -- of roots that go deep and branches that span continents.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Foxtrot
    Foxtrot feels unusually full for a film that seems to move in slow motion, in which the characters’ brains grind emptiness.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Small Time Crooks
    Sour and mostly feeble, with a depressingly curdled worldview. It bears no resemblance to Allen's surreal, open-ended comedies.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Inside Job
    As he proved in his Iraq-centered "No End in Sight," policy wonk turned documentarian Charles Ferguson has no peer when it comes to tracking the course of a preventable catastrophe.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Leave No Trace
    The heart of Leave No Trace is the rapport between the father and daughter, and McKenzie and Foster are keyed to each other’s movements, perhaps even each other’s thoughts.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Chicken Run
    Poetry in motion: It's eggsquisite.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    The King's Speech
    It's a prizewinning combination, terribly English and totally Hollywood, and Firth is, once more, uncanny: He evokes, in mid-stammer, existential dread.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Hell or High Water
    This is the kind of Western in which we know there will be blood but pray there won’t be, because the violence is bound to be gratuitous, absurd, with a needless finality. Hell or High Water is a rare humanist Western: Finality is the true villain.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Up
    By all means, see Up in its 3-D incarnation: The cliff drops are vertiginous, and the scores of balloons--bunched into the shape of one giant balloon--are as pluckable as grapes.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 20 David Edelstein
    Friday the 13th
    You really have to screw it up to dishonor the memory of a movie as shitty as the original "Friday the 13th." Heads should roll.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Black Panther
    Unusually grounded for a Marvel superhero epic, and unusually gripping.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Brooklyn
    Brooklyn doesn’t quite capture Brooklyn, but its ambivalence about being Irish is gloriously epic.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Nobody Knows
    Pure and universal.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Joshua
    The line between eeriness and tedium is fatally fluid.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    A glorious, visceral mess -- The film is, by most criteria, an ungainly piece of storytelling. Yet it sweeps you up and hurtles you along like water from an exploded dike.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    Poetry
    It comes together neatly, perhaps too neatly to be … poetry. But it's not prosaic, either. It has a lucid grace.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    If Beale Street Could Talk
    Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton’s palette is rich and warm, its colors deepened by a score by Nicholas Britell that ranges from a distant, forlorn trumpet to a string quartet in which the players dig in as if they’re having their own dialogue between hope and despair. The close-ups are immense, the emotions archetypal.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
    Birdman is the very definition of a tour de force, and Iñárritu’s overheated technique meshes perfectly with the (enjoyable) overacting—the performers know this is a theatrical exercise and obviously relish the chance to Do It Big. But what comes out of the characters’ mouths is not so fresh.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Gomorrah
    Gomorrah isn't memorable. The structure feels random, and the characters remain at arm's length. Next to HBO's "The Wire," which depicted an enormous financial ladder and also brought to life the characters on every rung, the movie is small potatoes: excellent journalism, so-so art.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Mulholland Dr.
    Mulholland Drive isn't a "puzzle" like "Memento," in which the pieces (sort of) fit together. There are some pieces here that will never fit -- except maybe in Lynch's unconscious. And yet -- and yet -- this distinctly Hollywood nightmare makes a deeper kind of sense.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    His sixth Mission: Impossible movie, Mission: Impossible — Fallout, isn’t the best of the bunch (that would be number four, Brad Bird’s Ghost Protocol), but it’s easily the second-best and certainly the Cruise-iest, meaning it’s nearly as entertaining as it is strenuous. Which is a mighty high bar!
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Grizzly Man
    Makes for quite an emotional roller-coaster ride. You don't know whether to celebrate or mock, to laugh or weep.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    En el Séptimo Día (On the Seventh Day)
    McKay does no editorializing in En el Séptimo Día. He’s a simple, graceful storyteller — so graceful that we don’t notice all the technique he brings to the task of making us see the world through José’s eyes.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    Jane
    Morgen gets a little Terrence Malick-y for my taste, too, as he revs up for the big finish.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
    An absolutely magical fusion of deadpan Ealing comedy and Gothic horror.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    About Elly (2009)
    It’s breezy, then suspenseful, and gradually, crushingly sad. On its own terms, it’s a perfect film.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Lincoln
    Lincoln is too sharply focused to deserve the pejorative "biopic" label. It's splendid enough to make me wish Spielberg would make a "prequel" to this instead of another Indiana Jones picture.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    All Is Lost
    In his late seventies, Robert Redford has never held the camera as magnificently as he does in the survival-at-sea thriller All Is Lost.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Love & Friendship
    Only the generic title disappoints. Leo Rockas, who turned Lady Susan’s epistles into an Austen-esque novel, suggests Flirtation and Forbearance or Coquetry and Caution. But by any title this is a treat.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    Hereditary
    Just as the “French Extreme” film Martyrs set a new standard for garish sadism, Hereditary raises the bar on emotional agony. If you want to see things you can never un-see and feel pain you can never un-feel, here’s the ultimate test.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Listen to Me Marlon
    Stevan Riley’s Listen to Me Marlon is the greatest, most searching documentary of an actor ever put on film, and it’s no coincidence that it’s about film’s greatest and most searching actor.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
    This Romanian movie defies categorization--it's halfway between a black comedy and a Fred Wiseman documentary. And it haunts you like the ghost of any dead person you've ever ignored.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Maria Full of Grace
    The whole movie, of course, is a setting for its jewel, Catalina Sandino Moreno as Maria: With her clear, round eyes, long dark hair, and radiant transparency, she brings to mind two of the loveliest ingénues of the last quarter-century -- Meg Tilly and Jennifer Connelly.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Happy as Lazzaro
    Part of the movie’s fun — and it is fun, once you adjust to its uninsistent rhythms — is how it forces you to share Lazarro’s go-along-to-get-along ebullience.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
    Uncle Boonmee is entrancing-and also, if you're not sufficiently steeped in its rhythms, narcotizing.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Brokeback Mountain
    Brokeback Mountain could use a little more of it--by which I mean more sweat and other bodily fluids. Ang Lee's formalism is so extreme that it's often laughable, and the sex is depicted as a holy union: Gay love has never been so sacred.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    The Kid with a Bike
    Despite the simplicity of the brothers' technique, The Kid With a Bike has deep religious underpinnings, a relentless drive toward the mythos of death and resurrection. The film is not just in the tradition of Pinocchio and A.I.: It is a worthy successor.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Tarnation
    A collage of pain that breaks over you like a wave. Every second you can feel the cost to Caouette of what he's showing: The sounds and the images are like a pipeline from his unconscious to the screen.
    • 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.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    All About My Mother
    Even though the film is full of laughs, the jokes hover on the edge of the abyss: This is a world in which lurid colors and extravagant gestures are means of filling the void.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    Moneyball
    The movie doesn't quite come together, but it's full of smart, cynical talk, and it's very entertaining.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Force Majeure
    Being a puckish Swedish, the writer-director Ruben Ostland slips into a tone that makes Force Majeure almost seem like a deadpan — frozen — comedy.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Diane
    The opening of Diane is simple but packed, like the movie: The more mundane the details, the more redolent it is of time going by too fast. Someone I know called it the most depressing film she’d ever seen. I found it one of the most exhilarating, but I admit that the exhilaration is hard-won and slightly perverse.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Baby Boy
    Rambling and conflicted as it is, it's one of the most entertaining African-American comedies of manners ever made.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Tangerine
    What’s extraordinary about Tangerine is that it’s everything an entertaining, old-fashioned, mainstream Hollywood comedy should be but no longer is. That nowadays you have to get this kind of stuff via Sundance from directors using iPhones is a drag — the wrong kind.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 40 David Edelstein
    Saint John of Las Vegas
    The film turns into one of those indie parades of eccentrics that are hit-and-miss but mostly miss.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Room
    Room is astonishing: It transmutes a lurid, true-crime situation into a fairy tale in which fairy tales are a source of survival.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Nebraska
    The movie is a triumph of an especially satisfying kind. It arrives at a kind of gnarled grace that’s true to this sorry old man and the family he let down in so many ways.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 20 David Edelstein
    Million Dollar Baby
    It's impressive, in the sense that a sucker-punch impresses itself on your skull.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Last Days in Vietnam
    In sum, Last Days is the best kind of documentary — it ties you up in knots.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Krisha
    There’s an extended shot in Trey Edward Shults’s remarkable debut feature, Krisha, that’s a showstopper of bad vibes, a psycho-symphony that bumps the film to a different — more ominous — level of reality.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    The Babadook
    This is Kent’s first feature — an astonishing debut. Not perfect, though.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Little Men
    The power of Little Men is in how the characters resist the melodramatic flow (which is, come to think of it, how Chekhov works, too).
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    The Kids Are All Right
    The self-satire of The Kids Are All Right is so knowing, so rich, so hilarious, so damn healthy that it blows all thoughts of degeneracy out of your head.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Cave of Forgotten Dreams
    Cave of Forgotten Dreams is sometimes frozen by Herzog's awe. But it's hard not to love him for always trying to look beyond the surface of things, to find a common chord in the landscape of dreams.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Loveless
    Loveless is about a state of mind, a lament, an indictment of crimes against the human spirit.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    In the Bedroom
    The best movie of the last several years: the most evocative, the most mysterious, the most inconsolably devastating.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    The Apostle
    The fact that Duvall gives such a glorious performance in The Apostle is likely to distract people from the fact that he has also written and directed a glorious movie--the most vivid and radiantly made of 1997.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
    His [Sidney Lumet] touch in Before the Devil is so sure, so perfectly weighted, that it’s hard to imagine him capable of making a bad movie. The thing is just enthralling.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    The Beaches of Agnès
    One job of memoir is to show the world through another's eyes and inspire you to live more alertly, and that is the glory of The Beaches of Agnès.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    Sex and the City
    Sex and the City: The Motion Picture is a joyful wallow. And it's more: In this summer of do-overs (The Incredible Hulk, a new Batman versus a new Joker), it's what the series finale should have been.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Drug War
    Hot-dog Hong Kong action stylist Johnnie To has never achieved the cult status of John Woo in this country, but his explosively entertaining — and startlingly splattery — Drug War should win him new fans.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Argo
    A marvel of cunning, an irresistible blend of cool realism and Hollywood hokum.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Summer Hours
    Hats off to Olivier Assayas's plain yet hauntingly beautiful Summer Hours, a true--albeit nonsecular--meditation on art and eternal life.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Traffic
    You could get high on this movie's technique, dizzy on its storytelling. Yet it's one of the most lucid bad trips ever made.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    The Master
    If I seem cool, it might be because I came in hoping for the same level of blood-and-thunder as in the Evangelical scenes of "There Will Be Blood," whereas The Master is a cerebral experience. But Anderson has gone about exploring fundamental tensions in the American character with more discipline than I once thought him capable.
    • 13 Metascore
    • 0 David Edelstein
    Freddy Got Fingered
    The most appalling comedy of the millennium after "Joe Dirt," which is so supernaturally terrible that it levitated me out of the theater after 40 minutes.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    The Son
    By the climax, we can hardly breathe -- The outcome is less important than our utter and complete empathy with this man. As we await what he does, we breathe with him, in and out. This is an astonishing movie.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Ponyo
    Liam Neeson has gravely splendid pipes as Ponyo’s father, a once-human wizard who lives underwater and despises humankind for polluting the planet.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    American Factory
    It’s a great, expansive, deeply humanist work, angry but empathetic to its core. It gestures toward the end of the working world we know — and to the rise of the machines.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    First Reformed
    First Reformed is rigorously austere (as befits the author of Transcendental Style in Film), but every frame suggests a longing for a world elsewhere. It could be argued that it gets away from Schrader, who probably had to wrest the script from his own hands to begin shooting.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Z
    The story of the "accidental" death of a peacenik politician (Yves Montand) and the investigator (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who unravels a right-wing conspiracy remains as fresh as a head wound.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Baby Driver
    As he proves yet again in his thrillingly syncopated heist movie Baby Driver, the 43-year-old U.K.-born Edgar Wright is just about the perfect 21st-century genre director. He has a fanboy’s scintillating palette — flesh-eating zombies, righteous vigilante cops, stoic bank robbers in sunglasses — without a fanboy’s lack of peripheral vision.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Beasts of the Southern Wild
    I hope I'm not raining on Beasts of the Southern Wild's deluge to say it doesn't always live up to its pretensions. There's a lot of unshaped babble and draggy landscape shots, and the music, so lovely in small doses, is numbing when it's ladled over everything.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Let the Fire Burn
    Osder has made a documentary that’s astonishingly in the present tense.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution
    An inspirational civil rights documentary that sounds as if it’s going to be Good for You rather than good, but it actually turns out to be both — as well as surprising, which is surprising in itself, given that inspirational civil rights documentaries tend to be more alike than unalike.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Flight of the Red Balloon
    In The Flight of the Red Balloon, the great Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao Hsien uses Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 masterpiece "The Red Balloon" as a springboard for his own masterpiece--a distinctively modern and allusive one, yet so tender and plaintive that you understand what Hou is up to on a preconscious level.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Waking Life
    One of the most inspired cases of the medium embodying the message ever captured on celluloid.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    The Bourne Ultimatum
    It’s not just vérité--it’s battlefield vérité; it triggers your fight-or-flight instincts.
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