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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    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    The Class
    Cantet's real-time classroom scenes are revelations: They make you understand that teaching is moment to moment, an endless series of negotiations that hang on intangibles—on imagination and empathy and the struggle to stay centered. This is a remarkable movie.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Call Me by Your Name
    Chalamet gives the performance of the year. By any name, this is a masterpiece.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Wildlife
    [Dano] gives his actors space so that the rhythms are their own, and they hold us through the tough final scenes and bittersweet ending. This is a superb film.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Mr. Turner
    Perhaps the most awesome thing in Mr. Turner is how Leigh and cinematographer Dick Pope hint at Turner’s paintings in their landscapes — not to make the film look painterly but to suggest what Turner saw before transmuting reality into art.
    • 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.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Waltz with Bashir
    It has taken an animated film to go where live-action dramas and even documentaries haven't--to tickle our synapses and slip into our bloodstream.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
    No, I couldn't be more pleased with what the screenwriter, Steven Kloves, and the director, Mike Newell, have wrought this time.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Gosford Park
    The exhilaration is slow to build. It doesn't come from any one thing but from countless crosscurrents, tiny bits of color that fill out the portrait.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    The Cove
    The end of The Cove is as rousing as anything from Hollywood. Manipulative? Sure--but isn't that fitting? Capitalism has driven an entire village to massacre dolphins and keep its work hidden.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    I'm the One That I Want
    This is an amazing movie.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    The Big Short
    The best film of the year? Possibly …
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Dolemite Is My Name
    Dolemite Is My Name has the glee of a John Waters movie in which it’s freaks-versus-squares, with freakishness the only healthy design for living.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Chicago
    Isn't just the most explosively entertaining movie musical in a couple of decades. It's going to be the most influential: the one that inspires the rebirth of the Hollywood musical.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
    It might be the cinema's most astonishing holy war film. The Lord of the Rings took seven years and an army of gifted artists to execute, and the striving of its makers is in every splendid frame. It's more than a movie--it's a gift.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Indignation
    Schamus is the former head of Focus Features, and seeing how he directs (this is his debut, though he has been Ang Lee’s collaborator for decades), I suspect he chose the company’s name. His vision is 20/20 plus.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    First Cow
    This haunting movie transports you to another world — and redefines home.
    • 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.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Munich
    Munich is the most potent, the most vital, the best movie of the year.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
    The film is a masterpiece in which “locked-in” syndrome becomes the human condition.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Fruitvale Station
    Fruitvale Station will rock your world — and, if the life of Oscar Grant means anything, compel you to work to change it.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Life of Pi
    Pi has designed his own terrarium to keep from staring directly into the abyss. It's not denial. It's faith in something else: the transformative power of storytelling. The film is transcendent.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Straight Outta Compton
    Straight Outta Compton is among the most potent rags-to-riches showbiz movies ever made.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
    The Coens’ newest Western, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, might be their bleakest work of all, and one of their richest.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    First Man
    First Man might be the most grounded space movie ever made — grounded in the tension between technology that’s almost laughably fragile (the astronauts really do seem as if they’re going up in tin cans) and the sheer evolutionary imperative of family.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Birds of Passage
    The movie is a knockout.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
    An absolutely magical fusion of deadpan Ealing comedy and Gothic horror.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
    This is the best movie I've seen in a decade. For once it's no hyperbole to say, "Unforgettable!"
    • 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.
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