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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    • 55 Metascore
    • 30 Kyle Smith
    Spirited
    Fans of Mr. Ferrell and Mr. Reynolds have likely never seen them in anything this earnest and tacky before, and are liable to feel somewhere between betrayed and stunned.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Kyle Smith
    Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
    Black Panther: Wakanda Forever may not have the same flaws as Marvel’s other recent disappointments, but it continues what amounts to a creative losing streak.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Kyle Smith
    Good Night Oppy
    Once the two rovers landed, three weeks apart, problems that had never been confronted before in the history of humanity started to become routine occurrences. So did solving them, and the documentary is a warm and well-earned tribute to the brilliant scientists and engineers who did so.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Kyle Smith
    Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
    As the film floats on, drifting from one extravagantly engineered reverie to another, the filmmaker only occasionally succeeds in making the audience feel his sorrow, regret and alienation. More often, his flights of fancy are merely exasperating.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Kyle Smith
    Call Jane
    There is less artistry to the film than there is sloganeering. Call Jane would be more effective if it stuck to human drama rather than having its characters make sweeping assertions that sound like stump speeches given at political rallies.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Kyle Smith
    Armageddon Time
    If Armageddon isn’t quite what happened economically to the U.S. in the 1980s, Armageddon Time is nevertheless a sincere effort to wring meaning out of memory.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Ticket to Paradise
    As it is, Ticket to Paradise is tolerable, but to make it a true pleasure would probably require some priming with a few glasses of arak.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 20 Kyle Smith
    Black Adam
    Much forced joshing about the conventions of the genre undercuts the impact of the film’s action, which is also severely limited by the smash-em-up frenzy of the special-effects department. Not for the first time in a comic-book epic, the CGI cart comes before the storytelling horse and leads it off a cliff.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Kyle Smith
    The Banshees of Inisherin
    Wounded but funny, quiet but resonant and resistant to anything like a Hollywood formula, The Banshees of Inisherin is a strangely profound little comedy. It’s one of the few true originals among movies this year.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Kyle Smith
    Halloween Ends
    Being more ambitious than most films in the horror genre, Halloween Ends also perhaps falls on the wrong side of the divide between being scary in a fun way and being distressingly plausible.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Kyle Smith
    Till
    As Mamie Till, the previously little-known actress Danielle Deadwyler gives an astonishing performance, shimmering first with tenderness and later with the kind of agony no mother should ever have to contemplate, much less bear.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 20 Kyle Smith
    Amsterdam
    To describe “Amsterdam” as an unfunny comedy would be unfair, because it’s so much more than that. It’s also a non-thrilling thriller and a not particularly mysterious mystery. As an allegory for our times it is vapid and irrelevant.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 100 Kyle Smith
    Triangle of Sadness
    The movie is as loaded with fun as it is with social implications. Its broad comedy about the modeling world plays like a deadpan version of “Zoolander,” and its third act has more primal drama than a season’s worth of “Survivor.”
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Kyle Smith
    Vesper
    The dystopian sci-fi drama Vesper is a gallery of astounding images set in a weirdly enticing future. The new world it depicts is both primitive and advanced, full of richly detailed flora and fauna representing strange new species that came about after mankind experimented heavily with genetic engineering as society crumbled to dust.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Kyle Smith
    Catherine Called Birdy
    Birdy is refreshingly complicated: She’s obnoxious but lovable, entitled but sweet
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Kyle Smith
    Don't Worry Darling
    It suffers from a major structural problem, which is that in its endlessly padded middle section it coyly refuses to get to the point until it exhausts the audience’s patience, then sprints through a late explanation that deserves more careful consideration.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Kyle Smith
    See How They Run
    As directed by Tom George from a script by Mark Chappell, See How They Run hits like a watered-down cocktail rather than a bracing belt of intrigue.
    • 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?
    • 63 Metascore
    • 30 Kyle Smith
    Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.
    The film is painfully slow from the beginning, then really starts to drag as it reveals that it essentially has no plot. A late turn to drama makes a bad film even worse. May Mr. Brown and Ms. Hall quickly move on to more rewarding roles. The way this movie squanders their talents is a sin.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Kyle Smith
    The Good Boss
    The film, instead of repeating clichés about the supposed heartlessness of the ruling class, could be viewed as either a barbed accusation of managerial hypocrisy from a working-class point of view or as an exasperated testimonial from a manager of how workers make it impossible to run a company like a family.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 90 Kyle Smith
    Breaking
    Films about race too often take the easy way out, which tends to yield schematic characters, grandstanding dialogue and thematic stridency; filmmakers seem more interested in emphasizing that they’re on the side of the angels than in confronting the messiness of reality. Breaking doesn’t patronize the audience with such oversimplifications.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Kyle Smith
    Spin Me Round
    Though very funny at times, and refreshing in the way it keeps us guessing, Spin Me Round is only partially successful.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 30 Kyle Smith
    Beast
    Mr. Kormákur somehow elicits a shoddy performance from the sturdy English actor Idris Elba, whom I’d never seen flail like this.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Kyle Smith
    Thirteen Lives
    If you stick with it through the somewhat plodding first half of this overly long retelling, you’ll be rewarded with a rousing final hour.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Kyle Smith
    DC League of Super-Pets
    The fur flies, the claws come out and the bad jokes hit the fan.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Kyle Smith
    Vengeance
    Mr. Novak comes up with so much funny dialogue and so many intriguing ideas that I mostly forgive the creakiness of his plotting. The basic mechanics of the whodunit seem to elude him, and he leaves important matters dangling at the end. But questioning the failings and prejudices of his tribe (Mr. Novak grew up in greater Boston, went to Harvard, worked in Hollywood, and has also written for the New Yorker) has provided him with a wealth of material.
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