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?
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