Richard Brody

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The New Yorker
For 633 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 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 633
  2. Mixed: 193 out of 633
  3. Negative: 18 out of 633
633 movie reviews
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    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    The Competition
    Seeing, in Simon’s documentary, the directing candidates forced to analyze a scene, submit a dossier, step on a set and direct a dictated scene, is like watching the training of hired hands rather than original artists—people better suited to writing grant applications than scripts, better suited to following orders than creating new worlds, to playing the urbane part of a director in meetings and interviews than actually being one.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    Luxor
    The dialogue is thin and the action is patchy, but Durra films Hana’s travels—and the places that she visits—with an ardent attention that fuses emotional life with aesthetic and intellectual exploration.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Experiment in Terror
    With Experiment in Terror, Edwards, working in the familiar genre of criminal depravity, does something that may well be, for Hollywood, unprecedented: he makes a virtual piece of film criticism in movie form.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    Asako I & II
    Brilliant melodramatic flourishes adorn the blank center of this passionate fable.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Richard Brody
    Opening Night
    Cassavetes’s most cleverly constructed film is also a definitive lesson in the death-defying, all-consuming art of acting, proof of a madness beyond the Method.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    The Man I Love
    Lupino’s flinty performance and Bennett’s haunted one infuse the movie’s pugnacity and violence with tender vulnerability, and Walsh, a cinematic poet of brassy urbanity, stokes the story’s volatile elements—artistic passions, high-society temptations, streetwise bravery, postwar trauma, family loyalty, and the secrets and lies that pass for romance—to a crescendo of abraded grandeur.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Brody
    Cha Cha Real Smooth
    The entire film is tinged with a cloying glaze that seeps into the interstices of the drama and limits his characters’ range of motion.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Richard Brody
    Uncertain Terms
    Silver’s incisive direction blends patient discernment and expressive angularity; he develops his characters in deft and rapid strokes and builds tension with an almost imperceptible heightening of tone and darkening of mood.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    Gloria
    Cassavetes films Rowlands, his wife, with self-deprecating adoration; the demanding man likens himself to the defenseless boy, and both are saved by this gloriously burdened woman who would kill for them.
    • 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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    The 11th Green
    The extraordinarily imaginative new feature by Christopher Munch, The 11th Green, stakes out a genre unto itself: poli-sci-fi, a fusion of science fiction and the history-rooted political thriller.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Brody
    Harvest
    Tsangari’s view of her world is blocked by her ideas; she is so concerned with what she has to say that she doesn’t see what she’s not showing.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Brody
    Professor Marston & the Wonder Women
    The movie is sympathetic but simplistic, depicting an exceptional story with little energy or sense of physical presence.
    • 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
    Two Pianos
    Desplechin and his co-writers have created an enticing set of characters who arouse a viewer’s curiosity not only about their connections to one another but about their relation to the world in which they live. But in “Two Pianos” there is no such world.
    • 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
    • 70 Richard Brody
    Dear Diary
    This light-toned but thematically substantial autofiction is organized like a sequence of diary entries brought to life with Moretti’s wryly confessional voice-overs.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Just Mercy
    While displaying the erratic workings of the law and the crucial importance of journalism, the movie’s legal focus narrows its imaginative scope; the drama, though infuriating and moving, sticks to its characters’ surfaces.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Brody
    Superman
    Gunn is admirably overflowing with imagination, but he squanders his best material.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 100 Richard Brody
    Voyage of Time: Life's Journey
    Voyage of Time inhabits a rarefied plane of thought, detached from the practicalities of daily life, that leave it open to a facile and utterly unjustified dismissal, given the breathtaking intensity of its stylistic unity and the immediate, firsthand force of its philosophical reflections.
    • 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.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    All of Us Strangers
    For all its droll shading of the screenwriter’s art, “All of Us Strangers” is a screenwriter’s movie, in which the power of intention over observation, of the blueprint over the finished product, is asserted with a vengeance.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Brody
    I Was at Home, But
    The emotional repression and intellectual stiffness that suffuse Angela Schanelec’s melancholy new drama are as much a matter of style as of substance.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Brody
    Dead Man's Wire
    Unfortunately, the film only hints at its larger ambitions and leaves them undeveloped. The story is told mainly methodically, sometimes deftly, but with little verve, relying on a generalized sensitivity that never approaches imaginative curiosity. It holds attention as a yarn but doesn’t build the incidents of its plot into a world view.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Brody
    Avatar: The Way of Water
    For all its sententious grandiosity and metaphorical politics, “The Way of Water” is a regimented and formalized excursion to an exclusive natural paradise that its select guests fight tooth and nail to keep for themselves. The movie’s bland aesthetics and banal emotions turn it into the Club Med of effects-driven extravaganzas.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Brody
    Brigsby Bear
    Spunky yet maudlin, grim yet heartwarming, the movie—written by Mooney and Kevin Costello—is mainly a batch of hollow gestures.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Cuties
    Doucouré pays keen attention to Amy’s quest for a self-made identity—and to a sexualized, commercialized mainstream culture that deludes children, especially those raised in cultural isolation. The film’s ultimate subject is the ghetto itself; a remarkable symbolic ending redefines French identity.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Brody
    A Private Life
    Foster gives a taut performance despite the unstrung absurdities of the plot. The story is anchored in Paris’s Jewish community, but the context remains anecdotal and unexplored.
    • 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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    Invention
    Invention is a film about pollution—media pollution, the despoiling of the American mind along with the landscape.
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