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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    • 29 Metascore
    • 20 David Edelstein
    Rock the Kasbah
    The air of mourning might have worked as a counterpoint to the silliness if Mitch Glazer’s script had smart gags, but as one-liner after one-liner misses its mark, you begin to feel sorry for Murray, who’s really too old to be playing a guy who has a little daughter (not granddaughter) and likes to get kinky with Kate Hudson as a raucous, Dolly Parton–style hooker-businesswoman.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Beasts of No Nation
    Fukunaga’s hurtling camera and taut cutting keep Beasts of No Nation only just this side of hallucinatory, and Elba is the kind of titanic actor to kick it to a near-mythic level.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Truth
    The most engrossing part of Truth is the gradual, grueling retreat from the story, first by its participants and then by the network that broadcast it.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    Steve Jobs
    The first act is a thing of beauty and the second, good enough. Shame about that third act, though, and the ending that retroactively diminishes everything that preceded it.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Experimenter
    Experimenter is busily, thrillingly reflective. Its artificiality makes it seem even more alive, more in the present tense.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    Bridge of Spies
    It’s Rylance who keeps Bridge of Spies standing. He gives a teeny, witty, fabulously non-emotive performance, every line musical and slightly ironic — the irony being his forthright refusal to deceive in a world founded on lies.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    The Martian
    The Martian is shot, designed, computer-generated, and scripted on a level that makes most films of its ilk look slipshod. Scott and writer Drew Goddard aren’t trying to make an “important” sci-fi movie like Interstellar. They aim lower but blow past their marks.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    The Walk
    The problem — not fatal — with The Walk is that the narrative wire droops between the movie’s opening and final sequences.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    The Keeping Room
    The Keeping Room is slow and rather arty, with a chamber-music (plus harmonica and fiddle) score and cinematography that shrouds the faces in shadow. But it’s a fine piece of storytelling and earns its look and feel.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    The Green Inferno
    Unlike the '70s Italian cannibal movies, The Green Inferno doesn’t have a mondo vibe. It’s artfully made and acted with skill.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    99 Homes
    Bahrani’s casting of Dern is genius. She’s such a profoundly unaffected actress that you instantly buy her aversion to her son’s lucre. She has a moral and aesthetic problem with that tacky mansion on the waterway. She wouldn’t fit in there.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Pawn Sacrifice
    This is another moderately interesting but shallow biopic with an actor going for broke — to win, not to draw.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Sicario
    What keeps Sicario from cynicism is the nature and depth of Villeneuve’s gaze, not childishly wide-eyed but capable still of feeling pain. He’s a terrific director. You know that if his heroine, Alice, gets out of Cartel-land alive, she might spend a few months in an asylum, but she’ll be back, hell-bent on seizing the foreground.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Black Mass
    Johnny Depp makes a valiant stab at the part, but even with his hair thinned and lightened and his face hardened, Depp remains Depp: I never forgot I was watching a big star doing an impersonation. It’s as if the spirit of a psychopath like Bulger resists the camera. Or maybe the movie isn’t imaginative enough to penetrate his shell.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    The Visit
    M. Night Shyamalan has come up with an unoriginal faux-doc horror picture that actually works like a demonic charm.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    Sleeping with Other People
    Sleeping With Other People is a rare American non-homogenized rom-com, and it’s delightful even when you’re not sure what you’re watching.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Time Out of Mind
    Moverman is attempting something hugely ambitious with Time Out of Mind: a socially conscious, existential-displacement art movie. I think it would have worked better with a little less rigor and a little more intimacy.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    American Ultra
    American Ultra is undemanding late-summer studio fare — ultraforgettable. But I’ll remember the faces of Eisenberg and Stewart, who are easy to ridicule but, whatever the pundits say, very much movie stars.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine
    Little here is new, but the archival footage is well chosen, the interviewees are illuminating, and Gibney, as usual, potently synthesizes what’s out there.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Grandma
    Grandma marks a new era in gay cinema — one’s that confident and mature enough to acknowledge regret.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Meru
    Meru is a packed 90 minutes. And I guess it is inspiring, in the sense that if human beings can endure this kind of risk and punishment, they could colonize Mars or breed a super-race to carry our species to the ends of the galaxy. All the familiar critical adjectives (harrowing, etc.) sound especially lame in this context. The movie is sick.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Straight Outta Compton
    Straight Outta Compton is among the most potent rags-to-riches showbiz movies ever made.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
    It turns out to be absolutely delightful.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    Fort Tilden
    The movie is broad and mean and for a while very funny, but even when it goes sour — when the world slaps them in the face for their sins — it doesn’t lose its momentum.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Mistress America
    Mistress America is hit-and-miss. It’s not as burdened by blame as other Baumbach films — Gerwig leavens him. But it’s labored.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
    The best reason to see Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation is Rebecca Ferguson, a Swedish-born actress passing easily as a British spy named Ilsa.
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