Richard Brody

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The New Yorker
For 632 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 6.1 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Richard Brody's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 72
Highest review score: 100 The Magnificent Ambersons
Lowest review score: 10 Zack Snyder's Justice League
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 422 out of 632
  2. Mixed: 192 out of 632
  3. Negative: 18 out of 632
632 movie reviews
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    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Richard Brody
    A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
    The result is a movie thinned out almost to the point of total insubstantiality—as close to a non-experience as I’ve had at the movies in a while.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Richard Brody
    Rust
    Despite, or perhaps because of, the story’s stark melodramatic clarity—the rooting interest of saving a child from injustice, the outlaw with a heart of gold risking his life to undertake that responsibility—“Rust” is a painful slog and a nearly inert experience.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 30 Richard Brody
    Blonde
    You’ve got to hand it to Dominik: he doesn’t only outdo the ostensibly crass showmen of classic Hollywood in overt artistic ambition but also in cheap sentiment, brazen tastelessness, and sexual exploitation.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Richard Brody
    Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
    The involvement of a stylish horror-film director, Sam Raimi, in this tawdry slog of corporate constraint is as fascinating as it is disheartening.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Richard Brody
    Cyrano
    Cyrano is a thuddingly dull film that sinks under the ponderous undigested mass of its own bombast, squandering the talents of a fine cast and a fine concept.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Richard Brody
    Godzilla vs. Kong
    The film is garishly overloaded with splices and grafts from other movies, other genres, and other premises, including a mythical setting and an evil corporation. The result is a distracting jumble that reduces the stakes of the movie’s mighty showdown nearly to a vanishing point, and turns the title titans and their other colossal cohorts into the incredible shrinking monsters.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 10 Richard Brody
    Zack Snyder's Justice League
    It is a grind, it is a slog, it is a bore—it’s a mental toothache of a movie, whose ending grants not so much resolution as relief.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Richard Brody
    Pieces of a Woman
    Its effortful grandiosity transforms it into something hollow and even, at times, risible.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Richard Brody
    Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker
    The hermetic logic of the plot is as impeccable as it is ridiculous. It’s a drama crafted with robotic insularity for the consumption of viewers being rendered robotic at each moment of the soullessly uniform spectacle.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Richard Brody
    Cats
    These basic failures of taste and sensibility are a subset of Hooper’s over-all failure of literal vision: he doesn’t really see what he’s doing, and the virtual invisibility of his own movie to himself is reflected in an odd set of metaphors that result from his casting.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 30 Richard Brody
    1917
    The so-called long take serves as a mask—a gross bit of earnest showmanship that both conceals and reflects the trickery and the cheap machinations of the script, the shallowness of the direction of the actors, and the brazenly superficial and emotion-dictating music score.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 30 Richard Brody
    Jojo Rabbit
    Even though the target of satire in Jojo Rabbit is clearly the Nazis, the movie sharply but unintentionally satirizes itself, as well as its makers and the movie industry at large that saw fit to produce, release, and acclaim it.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 20 Richard Brody
    Joker
    The result is a movie of a cynicism so vast and pervasive as to render the viewing experience even emptier than its slapdash aesthetic does.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 30 Richard Brody
    Midsommar
    It’s built on such a void of insight and experience, such a void of character and relationships, that even the first level of the house of narrative cards can’t stand.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 30 Richard Brody
    Apollo 11
    With extraordinary material, a merely ordinary approach is worse than a bore; it’s a betrayal.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 30 Richard Brody
    Green Book
    It’s a calculatedly heartwarming and good-humored look at atrocious actions, ideas, and attitudes with a pallid glow of halcyon optimism, a view of a change of heart that’s achieved through colossal exertions and confrontations with danger.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 30 Richard Brody
    I, Tonya
    Gillespie stages his empathy for Tonya at arm’s length; he fails to respond to her experience in a direct, personal way. The result is a film that’s as derisive and dismissive toward Tonya Harding as it shows the world at large to have been.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Richard Brody
    Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
    The director of Rogue One, Gareth Edwards, has stepped into a mythopoetic stew so half-baked and overcooked, a morass of pre-instantly overanalyzed implications of such shuddering impact to the series’ fundamentalists, that he lumbers through, seemingly stunned or constrained or cautious to the vanishing point of passivity, and lets neither the characters nor the formidable cast of actors nor even the special effects, of which he has previously proved himself to be a master, come anywhere close to life.

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