David Rooney

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The Hollywood Reporter, Variety
For 1,355 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 54% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 44% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 1.8 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

David Rooney's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 The Hand of God
Lowest review score: 10 The School for Good and Evil
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 836 out of 1355
  2. Mixed: 435 out of 1355
  3. Negative: 84 out of 1355
1355 movie reviews
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    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 David Rooney
    EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert
    Calling the movie an archival doc or concert film might be accurate but somehow seems almost reductive. Much more than that, it’s a transcendent theatrical experience, an exhilarating party, a giddying visual and sonic blitz that will be an elixir to the Elvis faithful and an unparalleled primer for those who have never quite grasped what all the hysteria was about.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 David Rooney
    To Die For
    Delivers continuous pinpricks of irreverent humor and subversive cultural commentary.
    • Variety
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 David Rooney
    Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie
    While it feels a fraction overlong, Gibney’s film is a vibrant testament to the intellectual life of its subject.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 70 David Rooney
    May December
    The director is poking around in territory that’s familiar to him — self-knowledge and public perception, identity and duality, transparency and performance, social norms and the sexual outlaw. But the emotional volatility of the story ends up being somewhat muted by the approach.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 David Rooney
    Happening
    Happening is often a tough watch, compassionate but brutally honest, and almost breathless in its chronicle of a struggle that has obviously stayed with the author for decades.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 David Rooney
    The Lost Daughter
    The reclusive Italian author’s familiar themes of female relationships, sexuality, motherhood and women’s struggle to carve a professional space outside it are beautifully served in this uncompromising character study, illuminated by performances of jagged brilliance from Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley as her younger self.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 David Rooney
    Infinity Pool
    Cronenberg’s new film is less formally inventive and icy than Possessor, more narratively straightforward if no less disturbingly weird and grisly. But the go-for-broke extremity lacks the substance to make it more than an aggressive but shallow provocation.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 David Rooney
    Sentimental Value
    Sentimental Value is uncommonly rich in emotional rewards and contemplative in its reflections on the places where we live becoming a permanent repository for our memories, remaining there even after we move on. The movie’s poignancy accumulates gradually, every supple turn expertly modulated as the presence of generations past becomes more tangible.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 David Rooney
    Sweet Sixteen
    Rendered deeply moving by the director's peerless capacity to combine humor and compassion with honesty and despair.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 David Rooney
    Strong Island
    Solemn, searching and at times even poetic in its indignation, this is a sensitively crafted contemplation of corrosive grief, even if the unanswerable questions surrounding the case keep the film somewhat emotionally muted.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 David Rooney
    No Other Choice
    The movie remains the work of a master craftsman with his own idiosyncratic storytelling signature, though the pathos and suspense of a hardworking family man driven by desperation to murder get short-changed in favor of wacky humor.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 David Rooney
    A Real Pain
    With A Real Pain, [Eisenberg] demonstrates impeccable judgment and great skill at balancing sardonic wit with piercing solemnity in a movie full of feeling, in which no emotion is unearned.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 David Rooney
    The Green Knight
    It embraces the strange remoteness of myth and Middle Ages lore on its own terms and creates something quietly dazzling and new.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 David Rooney
    Afternoons of Solitude
    Any thoughts about the violence we’re seeing are strictly our own, never fed to us by the filmmaker. That makes Afternoons of Solitude, in its uncompromising way, a doc as muscular and ferocious as the poor creatures being ritualistically slaughtered in those bullrings.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 David Rooney
    Dahomey
    Diop folds the poetic into the political, without ever becoming didactic.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 David Rooney
    West Side Story
    While many wondered about Spielberg’s chutzpah in tackling a movie musical widely regarded as an ageless classic, his richly satisfying remake gives this version a resplendent life of its own.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 David Rooney
    Ash Is Purest White
    The performances of the two leads are riveting.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 David Rooney
    Girlhood
    Where many filmmakers would have underlined the bleaker, harsher aspects, Girlhood presents the characters' grim reality without surrendering its lightness of touch, its compassion or its hope.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 David Rooney
    Alcarràs
    Lovely, unforced Chekhovian notes grace the gently observed snapshot of a summer of unstoppable change and momentous upheaval. Even if there are moments of frustration in which Simón and co-writer Arnau Vilaró pull away just as conflicts are heating up, the film’s immersive, lived-in nature has a transfixing grip.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 David Rooney
    Mudbound
    Mudbound requires a taste for leisurely storytelling generally more focused on building careful nuances and layered characters than on big dramatic cymbal clashes. But patient investment pays off in an epic that creeps up on you, its stealth approach laced with intelligence, elegance and an affecting balance of humanity and moral indignation.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 David Rooney
    Passing
    Whether this is a one-time passion project or the beginnings of an ongoing move from acting into directing in her career focus, Hall has crafted a work that's thoughtful, provocative and emotionally resonant.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 David Rooney
    In the Same Breath
    Even when accessing the situation remotely via camera operators and citizen journalists on the ground, Wang deftly balances factoids with first-hand experiences to show the emotional cost, both for people unable to say goodbye to their loved ones and front-line health care workers and funeral home staff, absorbing the trauma of unrelenting losses.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 David Rooney
    God's Own Country
    Graced by its refreshingly frank treatment of gay sexuality, its casually expressive use of nudity, and its eloquent depiction of animal husbandry as a contrasting metaphor for the absence of human tenderness, this is a rigorously naturalistic drama that yields stirring performances from the collision between taciturn demeanors and roiling emotional undercurrents.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 David Rooney
    Pillion
    Pillion is less about the shock factor of some very graphic gay kink than the nuances of love, desire and mutual needs within a sub/dom relationship.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 David Rooney
    Black Bag
    It’s witty, stylishly crafted and boasts a stellar ensemble, led by especially toothsome work from Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender. It keeps you glued, even if the movie ultimately feels evanescent, a slick diversion you forget soon after the end credits have rolled.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 David Rooney
    One Child Nation
    Densely informative yet always grounded in deep personal investment and clear-eyed compassion, this is a powerful indictment of a traumatic social experiment, made all the more startling by the success of the propaganda machine in making people continue to believe it was necessary.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 David Rooney
    Decision to Leave
    Crafted with unforced humor, ravishing visuals and commanding maturity, Decision to Leave intoxicates with its potent brew of love, emotional manipulation — or is it? —and obsession.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 David Rooney
    I'm Still Here
    I’m Still Here is a gripping, profoundly touching film with a deep well of pathos. It’s one of Salles’ best.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 David Rooney
    The Eternal Memory
    Alberdi makes her directorial hand virtually invisible, observing her subjects from a discreet distance that allows them to be narrators of their own story while never speaking directly to the camera.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 David Rooney
    The Truffle Hunters
    Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw (The Last Race) directed, produced and shot this captivating vérité documentary, which finds humor, charm and poignancy in the crusty eccentrics and their adored canine companions who sniff out the aromatic tubers, usually under the secretive cloak of night.
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