Kyle Smith

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New York Post, Wall Street Journal
For 1,913 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 35% higher than the average critic
  • 1% same as the average critic
  • 64% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 13.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Kyle Smith's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 52
Highest review score: 100 The Birth of a Nation
Lowest review score: 0 Victor Frankenstein
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 789 out of 1913
  2. Mixed: 407 out of 1913
  3. Negative: 717 out of 1913
1913 movie reviews
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    • 93 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    TÁR
    Like its subject, the film is severe, dry and painfully serious, but in the closing seconds Mr. Field does, at last, deliver some relief with a visual joke that deals in a kind of cosmic comeuppance. It’s by far the best part of the movie, but it arrives too late to make much of a difference. Up to that point, “Tár” is like listening to a slow, ominous roll on the timpani for two and a half hours.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 60 Kyle Smith
    The Boy and the Heron
    The Boy and the Heron, while typically bursting with imaginative elements, is also narratively tangled and a bit confusing, and falls far short of Mr. Miyazaki’s best work.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 60 Kyle Smith
    All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
    As a character portrait, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is absorbing, but as an argument it fails.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Winter's Bone
    The main reason for Winter's Bone to exist is that it delivers a little voyeuristic thrill -- a bit of poverty porno -- for the critics who awarded it their highest honors at this year's Sundance Film Festival.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    This Is Not a Film
    So there is courage and cheekiness here. What there is not is a story, or much insight or even anger; anyone expecting an indictment of Iran will be sorely disappointed.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    American Hustle
    American Hustle is a movie that was built backward, or inside out: It puts actors’ needs before the audience’s. There’s no heart under those polyester lapels, and what all that Aqua Net is pasting together is a few sparse strands of wispy story.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 40 Kyle Smith
    Killers of the Flower Moon
    Ms. Gladstone draws a lot of sympathy as the modest, helpless Mollie, but like everything else here her performance suffers from inertia. She spends the bulk of the movie mired in illness and despondency, and her look mirrors how I felt as I watched: numb and trapped.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Kyle Smith
    The Alto Knights
    Perhaps the Oscar winner was simply attracted to reliving glory days, just as Mr. Levinson must have enjoyed revisiting the territory of one of his best movies, the 1991 Bugsy Siegel saga “Bugsy.” "Alto Knights is, however, buggy: a curious mixture of the inert and the frenetic.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    About Dry Grasses
    About Dry Grasses is characteristically extravagant and tiny at the same time, like a 10-story museum devoted to paper clips.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    The Grand Budapest Hotel
    “GBH” is a featherweight screwball comedy that, trying mightily to be cosmopolitan, feels awfully provincial, desperately touristy.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 Kyle Smith
    Caught by the Tides
    The film is a sort of pocket epic, one that travels a great length of time and distance in order to create space for people to find themselves. The changes in appearance of the two lead actors over the course of events are as startling as China’s full-throttled economic development. Yet Mr. Jia is subtle to a fault.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    The Kid with a Bike
    In The Kid With a Bike, Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne offer a sly but finally banal update of the Italian neorealist classic "The Bicycle Thief."
    • 86 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    The Tillman Story
    The Tillman Story purports to be an exposé of the cover-up of the death by friendly fire of the Army Ranger and one time NFL star Pat Tillman. But, provocative and colorful as the film is, it does the very thing it denounces -- massaging the facts to seize Tillman for a political agenda.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
    As visually hypercaffeinated as the film is—mixing animation styles, cramming the screen with imagery, and cutting rapidly around each donnybrook—it’s a bit sleepy when it comes to the plot, which doesn’t really kick in until the second half of the movie.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Summer Hours
    Even for a French drama, Summer Hours is so slow as to be practically still.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
    In Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, selfish oldsters scheme to rob young people of their vital essence, sacrificing them in the process. It’s basically “Social Security: The Movie.”
    • 85 Metascore
    • 40 Kyle Smith
    The Wild Robot
    This denial of nature is more banal than inspiring. The robot may grow a heart but the movie feels strictly mechanical.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 40 Kyle Smith
    Hamnet
    As dry and matter-of-fact as Ms. Zhao was in Nomadland, which won her Oscars for best director and best picture (as she was one of its producers), she is the opposite here, driving her actors to maximal emoting. The movie purports to dip into the deep well of Shakespearean magnificence but emerges only with a ladle full of greasy schmaltz.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Universal Language
    The oblique nature of the final act might perhaps be justified if the rest of the movie were better. As it is, I kept thinking, “I guess that’s funny, in a way” rather than actually laughing at any of Mr. Rankin’s aggressively whimsical notions.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
    A big warm cinematic jelly doughnut stuffed with youth, vitality, style, whimsy and other equally alarming properties. I tried to love it. But after 20 minutes, I sensed I was intruding on the movie's love affair with itself.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Fay Grim
    Fay Grim is like watching stoners playing Risk and Clue at the same time.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Hugo
    Young Hugo (Asa Butterfield), a boy who literally lives inside the clocks he manages in a grand Paris train station in the 1930s, embodies one problem that bedeviled even Dickens: He's boringly nice.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    The LEGO Movie
    As cute and energetic as it is, The Lego Movie is more exhausting than fun, too unsure of itself to stick with any story thread for too long. The action scenes are enthusiastic, colorful but uninvolving, like an 8-year-old emptying a bucket of plastic blocks.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Drag Me to Hell
    Drag Me to Hell is pure cheese. Goat cheese.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 40 Kyle Smith
    Evil Does Not Exist
    As pleasing as the film may be to those who treasure ambiguity and nuance, it strikes me as dry and tedious.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
    The bulk of the movie consists of scene after scene coyly setting up the same ironic juxtaposition, in the exact same way, about innocence vs. Nazism.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    The Animal Kingdom
    Mr. Cailley is interested in the allegorical implications of his story, but not interested enough to pursue them very seriously.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    The Illusionist
    Since this low-grade comedy doesn't really even attempt to be funny, the purpose of the movie is to establish (or reinforce) a feeling of luxurious old-timey melancholy.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    The Odd Life of Timothy Green
    If the movie's story is anything but daring, it does takes guts to make a movie so shamelessly emotional as this one. Not that guts are the same as taste.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
    When I go to a Mummy movie, I don't want ninjas and yetis and men turned to stone. I want embalmed corpses and hieroglyphics. I want pharaoh. I want pyramids and sphinxes and Ace bandages. Did "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" take place on the Nile?
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    The Holdovers
    There might be a sweet 90-minute movie in here somewhere. But as it stands, it’s impossible not to notice how many scenes limp along, how many have nothing to do with the previous one, and how many fizzle out.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    At Berkeley
    At Berkeley casts a nonjudgmental eye on everyone from cement layers to students discussing Thoreau to administrators complaining about budgeting. If only everything were interesting.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Jackie
    Clipped, controlled and composed, Jackie Kennedy was a woman of her times, but since composure doesn’t win you Oscar nominations, Natalie Portman opts to play the part with a sort of emotional incontinence.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Kyle Smith
    Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
    At its best, “Furiosa” is like a more fun, less ponderous and mysticism-free “Dune,” with every pedal properly to the metal. But it’s closer to numbing than enthralling, like a long ride with no shock absorbers.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Skyfall
    In the utterly routine effort Skyfall, we're actually expected to cheer each chord we've heard so many times (here's a martini shaker! Look, it's a Walther PPK! And there's an Aston Martin!) We've been turned into wretched Pavlovian dogs, salivating at the bell instead of the snack. The highlight, by far, is a classic animated credit sequence: Adele, you are the new Shirley Bassey.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Benediction
    Mr. Davies’s wit is admirable, but his structure is nonexistent. He devises no problem to be solved, no goal to be met, no riddle to be answered. Occasionally we hear bits of Sassoon’s beautiful war poetry in voiceover, but it is irrelevant to most of the action.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    District 9
    The movie falls into the same uneasy category as "Eight Legged Freaks": too tongue-in-cheek to be thrilling, not funny enough to be a comedy.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 40 Kyle Smith
    A Thousand and One
    It’s a cousin to other superficially gritty but essentially cloying movies about the traumas of urban striving, such as “Precious” or “Moonlight.”
    • 80 Metascore
    • 40 Kyle Smith
    Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
    Someone makes a jokey reference to the cartoon contrivance of “Scooby-Doo,” and the comparison is brutally apt.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Incendies
    A kind name for this attitude is false moral equivalence, or perhaps post-imperial cringe. A less kind one is Western self-hatred, or an urgent plea to tolerate the intolerant.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Barbie
    Barbie is a template for how not to write a crowd-pleasing Hollywood feature.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    I Am Love
    As things pick up in the second half, the splendid photography and tempestuous John Adams score cannot quite conceal that the film is uncomfortably close to being an extravagantly elongated, Fendi-clad episode of "Dynasty."
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
    Nor does the movie try to use the game to make some larger point. Here's one: Even at its best and luckiest hour, Harvard can aspire only to equal Yale.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Silence
    Silence comes to us billed as 30 years in the making. Unfortunately, it plays like 30 years in the watching.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Kyle Smith
    Dumb Money
    There’s a more interesting, less strident film under the surface, but it never manages to get out.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    The Fighter
    Pity the boxing movie that thinks it can be both "Raging Bull" and "Rocky."
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Jodorowsky's Dune
    The doc consists of interviews with the absurdly grandiose Jodorowsky (whose fans include Kanye West) plus acolytes like current director Nicolas Winding Refn and film nerds, all of whom walk us through storyboards and tell us how awesome this “greatest film never made” would have been.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Conclave
    None of it rings true; those who seek a serious dramatic inquiry into the inner workings of the church should look elsewhere.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Please Give
    Two possible ways of regarding Please Give: It's shallow. Or maybe it's deeply shallow.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Results
    The movie can be mildly amusing. But I couldn’t figure out which of the three principals I least wanted to know.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 40 Kyle Smith
    Fancy Dance
    Thanks to an inert story and disagreeable characters, its 90 minutes go by slowly.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Nope
    Mr. Peele has loads of ideas and builds up considerable suspense and dread, but he fails to tie everything together with a resounding final act.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Kyle Smith
    Women Talking
    Ms. Polley, a longtime actress who got started in movies as a child, does an admirable job of keeping the dramatic temperature at a high level despite the strictures of the format, and Ms. Mara, Ms. Foy and Ms. Buckley all make a vivid impression. Yet no one in the movie seems to have a grasp of the practical realities.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Kyle Smith
    Alice, Darling
    The intended overarching message is that vile men can exercise a kind of mind control over their innocent girlfriends. Perhaps. But Alice, Darling delivers an equally striking unintended message: that two people in a failing relationship have a tendency to bring out the worst in each other.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant
    Mr. Ritchie has fashioned a simple, meat-and-potatoes action thriller, in the same category as “12 Strong” (2018) and “Lone Survivor” (2013). Yet unlike those films, this one is pure fiction, which both untethers it from reality and imbues it with a certain free-floating meaninglessness.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    The Ghost Writer
    Although the movie is reasonably suspenseful for a while and has a few witty moments (of a first draft, the ghost says, "All the words are there. They're just in the wrong order"), it rings false.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Kyle Smith
    Inu-oh
    Those who’d like to take their more mature children to an animated feature with considerably more imaginative richness than, say, “DC League of Super-Pets” will find that the Japanese anime movie “Inu-Oh” fits the bill: How often do you get a chance to take in a medieval rock opera? But an imaginative hook isn’t everything.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Maestro
    Leonard Bernstein was a towering musical figure and a complicated man. Netflix’s “Maestro” has a great deal to say about the latter characterization and surprisingly little about the former.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Stephanie Daley
    The movie amounts to an extended short story that progresses slowly and fades away with key questions unanswered. Ambiguity isn't necessarily interesting.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Shayda
    Sensitive as the film is, it might be most effective to those who haven’t sat through scores of iterations of what has come to be known as the Sundance Film.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    99 Homes
    There might be a great movie to be made out of the financial crisis, but 99 Homes, which is like being shouted at by a man with bad breath while he grips your collar with both hands, isn’t it.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    What We Do in the Shadows
    Most of the best gags are in the early going and the film seems ever more stretched and thin as it goes on. It would have made a brilliant eight-minute sketch, though.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 40 Kyle Smith
    The Woman King
    Sony Pictures is positioning “The Woman King” as not only a rousing action film but also an important one: At the screening I attended, a marketing slide read, “Join the conversation.” I’ll start: Is there any limit to Hollywood shamelessness?
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Asteroid City
    Asteroid City may be infused with the powers of the Atomic Age, but no Anderson movie except “The Darjeeling Limited” runs so low on energy.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Emily the Criminal
    Caper movies rely heavily on how well they build plausibility into the doings of professional scam artists, but Emily the Criminal scores poorly on that front.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    The Order
    Unfortunately, the script by Zach Baylin doesn’t do an adequate job of making either side of these cat-and-mouse games thrilling.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    The Mighty Macs
    Everything plays out exactly as you'd expect in a cheerful, well-meaning movie in the style of something made for the Disney channel.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Spy
    Alas, “sad case” is not how we want to see McCarthy; it’s frustrating to see her spend more than half the movie being the pathetic target of jokes rather than the dominating figure she was in “Bridesmaids” and “The Heat,” both of which are far funnier than this one.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    John Wick: Chapter 2
    The first “John Wick” was taut and nasty, a potent slug of B-movie. This one is so enamored of its own extravagance that, on more than one occasion, I was reminded of “Zoolander 2.”
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    How to Train Your Dragon
    You could say the 3-D animated kidpic How To Train Your Dragon is "Avatar" for simpletons. But that title is already taken, by "Avatar."
    • 75 Metascore
    • 40 Kyle Smith
    Civil War
    Civil War is superficially silly—Mr. Garland writes himself into a trap in one tense scene and gets out of it with an absurd moment of action-hero gusto that is, as presented, not possible—but it’s also deeply silly. It’s a statement movie that contains no insights at all.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Captain America: Civil War
    After the first two “Captain America” entries, the finest comic-book movies of the last five years, this one is disappointing. The story doesn’t make sense.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Kyle Smith
    The Equalizer 3
    For those who can tolerate—or better yet, relish—extreme violence, The Equalizer 3 is diverting enough. If the script is so-so, the beautiful Italian locations, Mr. Washington’s still-world-class charm and an eerie, frightening musical score by Marcelo Zarvos lift it (slightly) above average for the action-thriller genre.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 40 Kyle Smith
    Origin
    Even those who find Ms. Wilkerson’s thesis convincing are likely to concede that it is more at home in the library than at the multiplex. Many others will find Origin confusing and dry.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
    Neither bad enough to be a complete waste of time nor good enough to remember past next Tuesday, the film co-written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie staples together one routine action piece after another with cutesy dialogue and lots of merciless pounding away at iPad screens.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Tabloid
    The documentary Tabloid shows that an oddball lead character and a smirky style do not necessarily add up to a complete movie.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    What Maisie Knew
    This is a fine idea for a PSA TV commercial, but (a) they already did it back in the ’70s and (b) it goes on well past the 30-second mark.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 40 Kyle Smith
    Every Little Thing
    Ms. Aitken seeks to draw a connection between Terry’s life story and her dedication to helping these impossibly vulnerable and sweet birds, but a documentary that avoids important questions is a failure.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan
    Mongol really isn't worth leaving your yurt for.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Ain't Them Bodies Saints
    In mashing together story elements from Terrence Malick’s “Badlands” with the look of Malick’s “Days of Heaven,” Lowery put 90 percent of his energy into the atmosphere and 10 percent into the script.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 40 Kyle Smith
    Joy Ride
    It isn’t until the last half hour that the film finally switches tones from aggressively and charmlessly filthy to thoughtful.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Kyle Smith
    Dream Scenario
    Dream Scenario is such an imaginatively offbeat movie that it’s a shame it isn’t better.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Big Hero 6
    Big Hero 6 even has a title that sounds like a product ordered off the takeout menu of the type of restaurant that recombines a few elements in many ways. That could work fine, if any of the ingredients were particularly flavorful.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Joe
    David Gordon Green’s Joe largely succeeds in immersing us in a rural world of cruelty, ugliness, decay, neglect and aggression, but if there is a point to it all, I couldn’t find it.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Rust and Bone
    The visual effects are amazing, but they don't make up for acting that is restrained to an uninsightful fault.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Kyle Smith
    The Fall Guy
    Mr. Pearce (“Iron Man 3,” “Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation”) and his director have no idea what kind of picture they want to make. Instead they have four or five different concepts which they set loose like cars ramming into each other as they jostle for position.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    1971
    It’s mainly instructive in that it shows how liberals believe the end always justifies the means.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    A Most Wanted Man
    This atmospheric, cool-looking but gimpy thriller based on a John le Carré novel makes “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” look like “22 Jump Street.”
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Arbitrage
    Every episode of "Law & Order" I've ever seen has a more complicated and plausible plot, punchier dialogue and more New York authenticity, all in less than half the time consumed by this poky would-be finance thriller.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Kyle Smith
    Air
    It plays like pure television by an Aaron Sorkin disciple, and there is no reason whatsoever to see this on the big screen.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Beyond the Lights
    The teary-eyed sincerity of the music-industry drama Beyond the Lights is at times too much, but despite its cliche elements, the film at least has the feel of a passion project.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Hoppers
    Pixar, which is notable for its emotionally rich soul and its irresistible fancy, this time comes up with almost none of the former and very little of the latter.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Kyle Smith
    The Killer
    I dearly wished someone from Wick-land would emerge to take out this self-aggrandizing dunce.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    The Lookout
    Combines the sweet strangeness of "Fargo" with the existential panic of "Memento" and some Elmore Leonard tough talk. It all creates a cinematic tummy ache.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    The Club
    The Club offers plenty of stifling, agonized atmosphere, but it’s all penitence and no redemption.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Diary of a Wimpy Kid 2: Rodrick Rules
    Seventh-graders are far cooler and more anarchic than depicted in this often-dopey movie, which is aimed at more of a fourth-grade sensibility.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Bros
    A case can be made that it’s gutsy and honest for Mr. Apatow, Mr. Stoller and Mr. Eichner to place such an obnoxious (and recognizable) figure as Bobby at the center of a rom-com, but as we saw in “The King of Staten Island,” comedies about jerks work only if they’re funny, and Bros isn’t.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Kyle Smith
    Juror #2
    Jonathan Abrams’s script is so amateurish it feels like a first draft.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    The Sheep Detectives
    This soft, sedate mystery comedy seeks nothing more than to be like its heroes: warm and fuzzy. Less attractively, it’s also a bit cloddish and tame, falling into that unsatisfying category of children’s entertainment that seems to be styled in accordance with the tastes of old people.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Dope
    As a comedy, the film isn’t especially funny, and as a screwball drug caper a la “Go,” it’s raggedly plotted, with ridiculous coincidences popping up everywhere.
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