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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    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Boyhood
    Living with Mason and his parents over time you feel an intimacy, an empathy, a shared stake. I’m not saying Boyhood is the greatest film I’ve ever seen, but I’m thinking there’s my life before I saw it and my life now, and it’s different; I know movies can do something that just last week I didn’t. They can make time visible.
    • 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.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Pan's Labyrinth
    His palette here is deep-toned, with bottomless blacks and supersaturated oranges and blues--as if the Walt Disney of "Pinocchio" had collaborated with Goya.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
    The coup de grâce is especially graceless because everything we know is already visible in Marinca’s eyes. The actress is extraordinary.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    12 Years a Slave
    The movie nails all this, and it’s smashingly effective as melodrama. But McQueen’s directorial voice — cold, stark, deterministic — keeps it from attaining the kind of grace that marks the voice of a true film artist.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    A Hard Day's Night
    Watching the opening of A Hard Day's Night is like getting a direct injection of happiness.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Ratatouille
    Bird clearly knows the great silent clowns: The slapstick he devises is balletic.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    The Wackness
    The movie feels autobiographical--emotionally authentic (with a fair amount of bitterness toward women) and somewhat unshaped.
    • New York Magazine (Vulture)
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Gravity
    The movie is as cornball as all get-out and — once you discern the narrative arc — as predictable. But then there’s the part that’s — as we serious cinephiles like to say — infuckingcredible.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    The Social Network
    It's an entertainingly cynical small movie. Aaron Sorkin's dialogue tumbles out so fast it's as if the characters want their brains to keep pace with their processors; they talk like they keyboard, like Fincher directs, with no time for niceties.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    I Am Not Your Negro
    Raoul Peck’s driving, free-form documentary I Am Not Your Negro is not a direct response to Donald Trump’s delighted recognition of the lone nonwhite face he saw at one of his rallies: “Look at my African-American over here!” But the movie feels, if anything, even timelier, which is to say, timeless.
    • 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.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    The Hurt Locker
    The Hurt Locker might be the first Iraq-set film to break through to a mass audience because it doesn't lead with the paralysis of the guilt-ridden Yank. The horror is there, but under the rush.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Zero Dark Thirty
    As a moral statement, Zero Dark Thirty is borderline fascistic. As a piece of cinema, it's phenomenally gripping - an unholy masterwork.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    A Separation
    What makes it so good is that no one is bad. These humans, desperate to do right, are caught up in a perfect storm of inhumanity. The evil is in the ecosystem.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    WALL-E
    The new Pixar picture Wall-E is one for the ages, a masterpiece to be savored before or after the end of the world.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Carol
    Haynes has calibrated the film so precisely to Blanchett’s talents that he couldn’t have rendered her better with animation.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Before Midnight
    Before Midnight counts on our previous investment to keep us riveted. We are. And we want them back in spirit on that train to Vienna as much as they do. What’s next — After Sunrise?
    • 94 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    Dunkirk
    What Nolan plus IMAX can do is go big. Spitfire swerving, boat tippings, men dropping to the sand as planes scream by — it doesn’t get any better. That first shot of men on a street in a shower of paper on which their deaths are foretold — brilliant. Somewhere inside the mess that is Dunkirk is a terrific linear movie.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    45 Years
    The movie has momentously disturbing ideas but a fine grain, its images suitable for framing — or hiding away in the attic.
    • 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.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    The Irishman
    For Scorsese, the slowing-down in The Irishman is radical, and it pays off in the long series of final scenes in which the characters are too old to move as they once did. They can’t hide inside motion, and so Scorsese doesn’t — and the upshot is one of his most satisfying films in decades.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
    My first viewing left me dazzled but slightly confused; a second deeply impressed; a third rhapsodic. I wish I hadn't needed to rediagram it in my head to turn it into the masterpiece it so obviously wants to be.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Inside Out
    This teeming, tear-duct-draining, exhaustingly inventive, surreal animated comedy is going to be a new pop-culture touchstone. In all kinds of ways it’s a mind-opener.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Sideways
    A warm, ingratiating, and fitfully hilarious epicurean road movie with a steady ache-an ache like a red-wine hangover.
    • 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.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Call Me by Your Name
    Chalamet gives the performance of the year. By any name, this is a masterpiece.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Carlos
    Shot by shot, scene by scene, it's a fluid and enthralling piece of work. I wasn't bored for a millisecond.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Marriage Story
    Baumbach’s main characters are written and acted straight as befits their personal integrity, but the rest of Marriage Story is done in a satirist’s broad strokes — a penetrating, often inspired satirist.
    • 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.
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