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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    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    Avengers: Age of Ultron
    Though a mess by all conventional narrative standards, Avengers: Age of Ultron is a fascinating case study in the rules of “universe” storytelling. Chief among them is that a film may not be self-contained — it must constantly allude to worlds outside its own. Marvel fans want extra characters, extra subplots, in-jokes that pander to their supposed breadth of knowledge. They don’t want closure.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 20 David Edelstein
    True Story
    There’s only one good scene in True Story, though it’s the most flagrantly absurd.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    Unfriended
    Unfriended really does use everything teens cherish about their technology lifestyle against them. It’s a mean, potent little movie.
    • 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 David Edelstein
    Clouds of Sils Maria
    Assayas’s pace is easy, his structure linear: no tricky flashbacks, no jagged cuts. There’s so little in the way of histrionics that it’s hard to put one’s finger on why the film is so terrifically intense — except that each actress is, in her own peculiar way, preternaturally high-strung, able to convey momentous emotional stakes without raising her voice above the pitch of conversation.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    Ex Machina
    Clever novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland makes a half-dandy directorial debut with Ex Machina, a sci-fi film that — like much of his work — fakes excitingly in the direction of breaking new ground before turning formulaic so fast.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    Furious 7
    Furious 7 kicks the biggest and hardest, but it’s far from the best. Lin has handed the keys to James Wan, the cunning horror director of "Saw" and "The Conjuring," and though the thrill isn’t gone, the finesse is.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    White God
    Árpád Halász is the credited “animal trainer for 280 dogs,” Teresa Ann Miller the handler of Bodie and Luke — better actors than half this year’s Academy Award nominees. This is the new gold standard for nature-bites-back movies.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    While We're Young
    The biggest disappointment is the role that Baumbach wrote for Charles Grodin — his juiciest in many years but with only one or two laugh lines. If nothing else, I wanted Grodin to kick Stiller’s butt across the screen for desecrating the name of "The Heartbreak Kid."
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter
    Directed by David Zellner from a script he wrote with his brother, Nathan, the film has its tender mercies, as well-meaning Minnesotans attempt to reach out to this preoccupied Japanese woman with almost no English.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 David Edelstein
    The Divergent Series: Insurgent
    Insurgent is not a very good movie, but it’s better than it needs to be.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    An Honest Liar
    Whatever his foibles, An Honest Liar depicts a great American original — a man who has taught a generation of scientists, magicians, and even certain film critics that our senses must be trained to detect the smell of bullshit.
    • 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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Maps to the Stars
    Please don’t bore me by complaining that the characters are “unlikable.” The defense admits that the movie is indefensible. Just breathe in the aroma of decay and howl like a banshee.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    The Hunting Ground
    The surprise is that, given the number of female college presidents, professors, and students, victims are still so reliably blamed, punishments so reliably weak, and serial offenders (responsible for 91 percent of all sexual assaults) so reliably undisturbed.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    Wild Tales
    Whatever the style, the point is blunt, reductive: Civilized humans can transform, in an instant, into blindingly destructive forces of nature. Not exactly an original thesis, but as a source of movie fodder, it’s scarily entertaining.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    What We Do in the Shadows
    Clement and Waititi are intimate with the conventions of vampire movies and reality TV and must have had a crazy-great time blending the unblendable in the best SCTV tradition. But it’s the absence of camp that I keep coming back to. They scale it down and play it real. They’re undeadpan.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    The Last Five Years
    The camera moves with heightened sensitivity, as if on currents of emotion, and Kendrick is infinitely winning. She’s that rare thing, a movie star with a trained soprano.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
    The brilliance of Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem is that, without a shift in tone, the film begins to seem like a tragedy populated by clowns, its males clinging to ancient laws to compensate for feebleness of character.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Fifty Shades of Grey
    Fifty Shades of Grey is nowhere near as laughable as you might have feared (or perversely hoped for): It’s elegantly made, and Dakota Johnson is so good at navigating the heroine’s emotional zigs and zags that you want to buy into the whole cobwebbed premise.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    Project Almanac
    On the whole, this is a good B-movie that hits it modest marks.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 David Edelstein
    Timbuktu
    If Timbuktu has a “takeaway,” it’s a deeply humanist one and so, in this context, political: that there’s no such thing as a monolithic Muslim culture; that the threat is nowhere near as great to Westerners as to the people of Mali, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, etc.; that ideology is deaf and blind and anti-life; and that cinema (and all art) can blow it to what I’d once have called Timbuktu.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Black Sea
    Since washing out as a pretty-boy leading man, Law is what he always should have been: a high-strung character actor. In Black Sea, he’s convincingly hard, like Jason Statham with more vocal colors and without the shtick.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 David Edelstein
    Cake
    Actually, the whole movie is grim — drearily so.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 20 David Edelstein
    Mortdecai
    In the end, we must lay the badness of Mortdecai at the feet of its star. I envy Depp’s capacity for self-amusement, but it’s a pity he’s so rich and enbubbled that no one dares say to say to him, “Er, Johnny ... this is, er, really very bad.”
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    Match
    Captain Jean-Luc Picard would be enough for one lifetime, but given that Sir Patrick is now living out an exuberant second adolescence as a Brooklyn hipster and throwing himself into parts like these, it’s time to proclaim him another reason to love New York.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 David Edelstein
    The Humbling
    Pacino in low doses can be fulsome, and this is 10,000 cc’s of super-concentrated Al and his patented air of electrified stuporousness — which means it’s always on the border between thrilling and insufferable.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 David Edelstein
    Blackhat
    Good enough to make you wish it were better.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 David Edelstein
    Predestination
    If time-travel is your thing, you learn to shrug off inconsistencies. You debate chicken-egg questions over drinks or dope and mull over all the permutations. You graph it. You wish like hell you had a time machine. You savor every discombobulating, ludicrous, thrilling second of Predestination.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 David Edelstein
    A Most Violent Year
    I like — as always — what Chandor attempts: not just to denounce capitalism but to explain in detail how people go wrong. But the overcomposed, sedate A Most Violent Year lacks the one thing it most needs: violence.
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