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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    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Richard Brody
    A Man of Integrity
    A Man of Integrity is both a work of political defiance and of artistic audacity. The movie’s extreme contrast between the bland surfaces of daily life and the maddening pressures of ambient power looming beneath them turns its starkly realistic images into calmly furious denunciations, journalistic revelations, and even wildly disorienting hallucinations.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    Hustle
    Though with little in the way of directorial originality, character development, or social perspective to recommend it, “Hustle” manages to turn a clattery plot and a treacly sentimentality into a refracted self-portrait, a work of personal cinema.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Brody
    Crimes of the Future
    Crimes of the Future is, for better and worse, a conceptual film; it’s less an experience than it is an idea, less a drama of characters’ experiences than an allegory for Cronenberg’s despairingly diagnostic view of present-day crimes, ones that society commits against society.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    RRR
    For all its political determination, RRR is also a musical, and an electrifying one.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Richard Brody
    Benediction
    The film brings the past to life with a vividness and an immediacy that seem wrenched from Davies’s very soul.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Richard Brody
    The Tsugua Diaries
    The directors, Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes, rely on some tricky devices to tell the story of this film shoot—but those tricks, far from undercutting the emotional drama, intensify it. The result is the most accomplished and absorbing film about time spent in lockdown that I’ve seen.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    Top Gun: Maverick
    What’s most impressive about Top Gun: Maverick is its speed—not the speed of the planes in flight but the speed with which the movie dashes in a straight line from its opening act to its conclusion. The flights at the center of the film are vertiginously twisty, but the drama is a bullet train on a rigid track.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Armageddon Time
    For all the film’s roiling action, its inner life is in little grace notes that open enormous vistas of time.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Brody
    Il Buco
    In excluding conversation, commentary, analysis, context, and personality, Frammartino is a cinematic Icarus: he strains high for sublimity and finds a deck of picture postcards.
    • 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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Richard Brody
    In Front of Your Face
    Here, more than ever, Hong’s cinema is also revealed to be a philosophy—his method not a means but an end in itself, an embrace of the history of the art and a preservation of its future in the eternal present tense of creation.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    Dragnet Girl
    Though the violence never uncorks and the story takes a sentimental turn, the deep shadows, the jarring angles and cuts, and the idiosyncratic whims of gesture evoke a sorry underworld that’s out of joint, out of luck, and out of time.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    Vortex
    For all its observational realism, Vortex is a message movie, a work of philosophical art that packs a grim view not merely of old age but of modern life over all.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 100 Richard Brody
    Saturday Fiction
    It’s as daring and original a work of political cinema and personal conscience as the current cinema can offer.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Brody
    The Northman
    Instead of the roots of Shakespeare’s play, The Northman merely serves up its raw material both half-baked and overcooked.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Richard Brody
    Hit the Road
    A work of practical realism that stands as a manifesto for the imaginative power of observation and for the political power of the imagination.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Brody
    Paris, 13th District
    Audiard may know and understand something about romantic entanglements, family commitments, and professional lives. But by centering his characters’ desire and pleasure, and then filming these aspects of their lives with smarmy smugness, he sacrifices the realm of knowledge in yielding to fantasy.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Brody
    Ambulance
    If the movie has any merit at all, it’s in the seemingly unintentional mockery of the conventions and styles of far more purposeful and intention-laden films. In its chaotic whirl of tinsel images, it thumbs its nose at the kind of plain realism that too often passes as synonymous with sincerity.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Brody
    Cow
    Arnold, a major artist of cinematic fiction, has made characters’ self-presentation, their sense of performance in daily life, a crucial part of her most original drama, “American Honey.” In “Cow,” Arnold hasn’t considered her subjects or her place in their world as stringently or as originally.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Brody
    The Bubble
    The Bubble (which Apatow co-wrote with Pam Brady) is a sort of good bad movie, in which the aesthetic falls flat but the personal motive, the emotional core, is authentic, pugnacious, derisive.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood
    Apollo 10 1/2 unites the inner and outer life in a form of cultural autobiography, and it does so with a unique sense of cinematic style and form.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Brody
    Everything Everywhere All at Once
    With its bland and faux-universal life lessons that cheaply ethicalize expensive sensationalism, the film comes off as a sickly cynical feature-length directorial pitch reel for a Marvel movie.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    Ahed's Knee
    For all the specific accusations and denunciations that Y—and Lapid—level at Israeli politics and culture, “Ahed’s Knee” is, above all, a work of cinematopoeia: it looks and sounds and feels like what it means.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Master
    Master is a tensely effective, terrifyingly affecting drama that’s also a virtual vision of the power and the purpose of the modern right-wing war on truth.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Brody
    The Batman
    The movie’s solid dramatic architecture is essentially uninhabited—“The Batman” is a cinematic house populated only by phantoms with no trace of a complex mental life.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    After Yang
    After Yang shows how easily the taste for beauty can be tainted, subverted, distorted, and abused by the powers that be.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Both Sides of the Blade
    The silences that overwhelm the movie’s confrontational rages and the suppression of backstory details, underplaying motives and emphasizing action, thrust “Fire” out of the realm of psychological drama and into shocking emotional immediacy.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Petite Solange
    The exemplary figure of Ropert’s film is Solange’s retreat into a sharply expressive silence, captured in poised and precisely composed images, that resounds as clearly as a cry of agony.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    Deception
    In Desplechin’s implicit view of his artistic heroes and milieu, he turns Roth’s personal story into his own.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Lucy and Desi
    Its core of information is largely a footnote to Aaron Sorkin’s drama “Being the Ricardos,” but, with access to previously unreleased audio tapes recorded by Ball and Arnaz, Poehler vividly and poignantly evokes their offscreen personalities.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Dear Mr. Brody
    Through Glassman’s diligent and empathetic investigations, it becomes a film of documents, in which the aura of the letters—the worlds that they contain in their text and evoke in their sheer physical presence—generates overwhelming emotional power.
    • 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Brody
    CODA
    The sense of calculation makes the journey feel like a lockstep march; the movie’s sense of a story that’s dictated rather than observed makes its good feelings feel bad.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    The Automat
    The principal story that The Automat tells is that of a commercial vision meshing with an aesthetic one, the transformation of cheap dining into a sort of theatrical experience, complete with a stage setting of authentic craft and luxury, in which the banal purchase of food becomes a tour de force of industrial ingenuity.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    Strawberry Mansion
    The no-holds-barred, extravagantly playful methods by which Audley and Birney conjure the audacious yet coherent tale of supernatural menaces and splendors are the movie’s prime achievement.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    Marry Me
    If “Marry Me” plays with the obvious and brings it to obvious conclusions, its actors nonetheless invest its gestures and its dialogue, its broad lines of action and its closeup incarnations, with the spark of surprise.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    The Sky Is Everywhere
    The Sky Is Everywhere is a movie of inner vision, of fantasy and symbol, that coexists with the drama even when it doesn’t quite coalesce with it.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Kimi
    Amid its tightly plotted action, it seethes with a rage that seems pressurized by the sealed-off grimness of the pandemic years.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    Moonfall
    The best parts of “Moonfall” feel like a sharp and cogent reproach to the corporate stolidity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and other superhero-franchise movies. The ridiculous proves occasionally sublime.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Brody
    The Worst Person in the World
    The movie offers no details about any conflict between domestic and artistic life—because Trier and his co-screenwriter, Eskil Vogt, display no interest in Julie’s artistic development or activity. The Worst Person in the World is driven by a relentless focus on Julie’s personal life, but it’s a focus that remains obliviously impersonal.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Brody
    Compartment No. 6
    The movie sinks, fast and deep, under the weight of dramatic shortcuts, overemphatic details, undercooked possibilities, unconsidered implications.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Introduction
    Its clarity and simplicity—and the outrageous, nearly humorous audacity with which its brisk mysteries conjure wide-ranging, complex, and turbulent stories—makes it among Hong’s most compulsively rewatchable films.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Brody
    Don't Look Up
    The failure of topicality in “Don’t Look Up” is, not least, that the movie’s cynically apolitical view of politics contributes to the frivolous and self-regarding media environment that it decries—starting with the very celebrity power that the movie marshalls to score its points.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Parallel Mothers
    Almodóvar pursues the politics of memory with uninhibited vigor, with a relentlessly physical immediacy that endows his tale of startling coincidences with the power of documentary.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Brody
    The Matrix Resurrections
    The action and the effects, so gleamingly creative in the original trilogy, are now C.G.I. commonplaces and “John Wick” retreads—and are approached as such. The duels and battles are whipped up with a sense of obligation and filmed with little verve.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    The Lost Daughter
    It’s a movie that, in adapting a novel by Ferrante, indicates the grievous lack in the current cinema of dramas that do what is done all the time in literary fiction: consider women’s lives in intimate detail and in the light of wide-ranging, deep-rooted experience.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Brody
    The Tragedy of Macbeth
    The over-all effect is of a striving toward a high style that isn’t achieved—and that undercuts the mighty import of the play.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Brody
    Nightmare Alley
    The film’s overbearing effort to say something serious about society at large seems to force del Toro’s directorial hand. It pushes him to up the razzle-dazzle in order to keep the didactic element entertaining. The result is a movie that is bloated in length, literal in its messaging, and overdecorated, like a cinematic Christmas tree, with dutiful dramatics that leach it of tension, energy, and spontaneity.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Brody
    Red Rocket
    Red Rocket is over-plotted, over-aestheticized, under-characterized, and under-observed.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Brody
    West Side Story
    The best things in [Spielberg's] version of “West Side Story”—the songs, their acerbity, the view of racial discrimination and class privilege—are already in the old one, while the best things in the old “West Side Story” are missing.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Being the Ricardos
    In peeling away the myths of pop culture and its lovable celebrities, Sorkin reveals the source of its mighty and lasting power.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Richard Brody
    I Was a Simple Man
    Yogi unfolds the characters’ intimate stories and the region’s history in sharply textured details and rapturous images; he blends social practicalities and metaphysical mysteries with a serene, straightforward astonishment.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    Listening to Kenny G
    Listening to Kenny G subtly and surely teases out the mighty and overarching idea of the inseparability of the artist and the art, the notion of art as the embodiment of the artist’s personality—for better or for worse.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Richard Brody
    Licorice Pizza
    Haim brings a constant and instant focus even to riskily inchoate emotions, and Hoffman lends his driven energumen a lambent glow of innocence. Both inhabit the screen with a sympathetic responsiveness and a rare immediacy. Their incarnation of the ardors and audacities of youth is among the marvels of recent movies, and with them Anderson rediscovers something greater than his own youth—the youth of the cinema itself.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Joji
    Long before the plot is resolved, Joji offers a sardonic vision of patriarchal tyranny and the pathologies it spawns—and the obvious artifice of the ending declares, with bitter irony, that there’s no end in sight.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Drive My Car
    It’s one of the great movies about the continuity of art and life, about the back-and-forth flow between personal relationships and artistic achievements—and about the artifices and agonized secrets on which both depend.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Brody
    House of Gucci
    House of Gucci is Gaga’s movie, and she tears into it with an exuberant yet precise ferocity. She is the main reason why the movie at times transcends the limits of its scripted action.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Procession
    Like Shoah, Procession does more than bear witness to atrocities; it uses the artistic power of the cinema to inscribe them in history.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Richard Brody
    C'mon C'mon
    C’mon C’mon is a tender and turbulent melodrama that amplifies its power with a documentary current. The result is a film of an extraordinary amplitude; it’s both poised and frenetic, contemplative and active, heartily sentimental and astringently contentious, intensively intimate and expansively world-embracing, exactingly composed and wildly spontaneous.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Brody
    tick, tick...Boom!
    Unfortunately, Garfield isn’t a musical force of nature or anything close. His mere sufficiency in that department is the wavering note to which the entire movie is tuned and which, for all its many virtues, makes the film slip away from its emotional center.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    Uppercase Print
    Jude, with his multiple dimensions of inquiry and imagination, poses philosophical questions about conscience and consciousness, media consumption and social order, that reach far beyond the case and era at hand to challenge the deceptions and delusions of ostensible present-day democracies.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Passing
    Passing is a drama of vision and of inner vision, of appearances and images and self-images, and Hall’s spare and reserved cinematic style serves to emphasize the inward aspect of the action, its crises of consciousness.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Brody
    Eternals
    Regardless of Zhao’s (and Marvel’s) intentions, Eternals is a parade of faces without experience, a movie that reaches back and forth through history and comes back empty-handed.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    A Cop Movie
    Along with its trenchant, revelatory depictions and discussion of police work and related political ills, A Cop Movie pulls these hidden vectors of image-making, opinion-shaping power to the fore.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Brody
    Last Night in Soho
    Unlike the films of such great modern stylists as Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, and the three Ter(r)ences—Davies, Malick, and Nance—Wright’s movie offers an illustrated screenplay, in which images deliver and adorn the text rather than embody its ideas.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    The Souvenir: Part II
    The entire construction of The Souvenir: Part II, the connection between its drama and Julie’s student film, reflects an earnest and principled, if simplistic, didacticism about the pain and the privilege that allow aesthetic pleasure to be created.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Richard Brody
    The French Dispatch
    The French Dispatch is perhaps Anderson’s best film to date. It is certainly his most accomplished. And, for all its whimsical humor, it is an action film, a great one, although Anderson’s way of displaying action is unlike that of any other filmmaker.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Brody
    Dune: Part One
    Because the pieces of the movie are calculated to fit together in unambiguous arrangements, the performances are reduced to ciphers.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Brody
    The Last Duel
    The most disturbing and dissonant aspect of The Last Duel involves the filming of the sexual crime at its center.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 90 Richard Brody
    Simply Black
    For all the earnest diagnosis of race relations in a country that doesn’t recognize race, Zadi crafts an extraordinary comedic work of lilt and sparkle.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Brody
    No Time to Die
    The formulaic drama is of a piece with the movie’s action sequences, which exhaust their ingenuity from the get-go, with the Matera chase and shoot-out.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Brody
    Lamb
    Lamb preens and strains to be admired even as it reduces its characters to pieces on a game board and its actors to puppets.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Brody
    Titane
    Despite its physical horrors, the movie is also a celebration of the body, of the bond between pleasure and pain, agony and ecstasy—and that fusion proves to hold for family bonds as well. But the psychology and the practicalities of the story are ultimately thinly sketched, the abrupt transitions calculated to elide reflection in repose. The movie is too specific and detailed to be starkly and abstractly symbolic, yet too vague and general to convey the complexity and density of a relationship.
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