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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    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    War Horse
    Spielberg has been ridiculed for shooting his actors from below against impossibly Spielbergian skies and a denouement that lays the love on copiously. But there's nothing simpleminded about how he uses movie magic, as a spell to dispel nihilism, to save us from the worst of ourselves by summoning up the best.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    The Adventures of Tintin
    Everything he did in live-action movies with rolling boulders and runaway convoys he does bigger and better - by a factor of ten - in every frame. At the end of two hours, my jaw ached from grinning.
    • 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.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Election
    American satire rarely comes more winning than Election, an exuberantly caustic comedy that shows the symbiotic relationship between political go-get-'em-ism and moral backsliding.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Incredibles 2
    Brad Bird’s The Incredibles 2 is, much like its predecessor, delightful as an animated feature but really, really delightful as a superhero picture. It’s proof that someone (not anyone, mainly Bird) can make a Marvel-type movie that’s fleet and shapely, with action sequences rich in style rather than tumult.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Blackfish
    It’s true that the number of whales in captivity isn’t huge. But they’ve now become the mightiest symbols of our cultural hubris — of our inability to manage creatures we have the power to capture and imprison. It’s a metaphor for the ages.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    The Queen
    The Queen is the most reverent irreverent comedy imaginable. Or maybe it's the most irreverent reverent comedy. Either way, it's a small masterpiece.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Her
    In Her, Jonze transforms his music-video aesthetic into something magically personal. The montages — silent, flickering inserts of Theodore and his ex-wife recollected in tranquility — are sublime.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Spotlight
    This tight, relatively low-key, step-by-step procedural has a stronger impact than any horror movie.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Tower
    I love when non-fiction filmmakers stretch the form and attempt, with as much honesty as they can muster, to put us in the middle of the events they describe. They give us stunning hybrids like "Waltz With Bashir," "Persepolis," and, now, Tower.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Superbad
    Might be the most provocative teen sex comedy ever made; it is certainly one of the most convulsively funny.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Rachel Getting Married
    I've never seen a movie with this mixture of fullness and desolation. Rachel Getting Married is a masterpiece.
    • 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.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Amour
    Something sacred passes between Trintignant and Riva. The actress's eyes signal deep awareness as the sounds coming out of her mouth become animalistic.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Ford v Ferrari
    The movie is an old-fashioned rouser with a lot of new-fashioned virtuosity.
    • 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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Heart of a Dog
    Anderson says that as a child she dreamed of making something that had never been made before, and, with the help of some gifted artists and editors and camera-people, she has done it again — with bells on. The only thing that would make it more pleasurable would be Anderson narrating it in person.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Moonlight
    Hype would bruise Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, which is so delicate in its touch that the usual superlatives sound unusually shrill. It’s the gentlest, most suggestive of great films.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    La La Land
    The actors carry the music in their gait, their gestures, the rhythms of their speech, so that their singing and dancing is a small but exquisite step up from the way that they normally talk and walk. To rhapsodize about La La Land is to complete the experience. You want to sing its praises, literally.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Black Swan
    This is, no doubt about it, a tour de force, a work that fully lives up to its director's ambitions.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    American Hustle
    The movie is a slot machine that never stops spitting quarters.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Little Women
    At her best, Gerwig can make galumphing seem an even higher form of grace — one that’s doesn’t just forgive imperfection but rejoices in it.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Sin City
    I loved it. Or, to put it another way, I loved it, I loved it, I loved it. I loved every gorgeous sick disgusting ravishing overbaked blood-spurting artificial frame of it.
    • 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
    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.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Ratatouille
    Bird clearly knows the great silent clowns: The slapstick he devises is balletic.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Cold Water (1994)
    Cold Water has the kind of emotional purity that puts it in a class by itself. Its blue fog envelops you.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Minding the Gap
    The skateboarding and camaraderie are contrapuntal notes, liberating flurries of motion in a powerful saga of kids who were — and in some cases still are — miserably stuck in place.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    There Will Be Blood
    Anderson’s fearless, bighearted filmmaking is an antidote to the toxic cloud of Manifest Destiny. He has made a mad American classic.
    • 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.
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