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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    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Brody
    Annette
    For most of Annette, Carax films the actors singing mainly in long travelling shots that hardly reveal much personality on the part of either actor or director.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Imperial Dreams
    Malik Vitthal’s first feature gives rich dramatic life to a piercingly analytical view of the American way of incarceration.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    The King of Staten Island
    What’s concrete in the film are its bluff and energetic performances. Tomei is, as ever, a wonder of passion and imagination. Burr is a dynamo of roaring invention. And, above all, Davidson himself, with his blend of blank comedic aggression and bare-nerve vulnerability, provides the film with an emotional complexity that surpasses the bare storytelling.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Brody
    Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
    The best thing about “Quantumania” is, surprisingly, its script (by Jeff Loveness), which is like saying that the best thing about a building is its blueprint.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    Drop Dead City
    Yost is a veteran of historical documentaries, and his experience handling information is apparent; the film tells an enormously complex story of financial fine points and political maneuvering, along with the underlying social and personal backstories, with a deft touch and a brisk sense of wonder.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    Minnie and Moskowitz
    The sculptural physicality of the images, a 3-D explosion without glasses, embodies that violence while preserving the antagonists’ innocent grace; love smooths things out to a dreamy and reflective shine.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    Furious 7
    The director, James Wan, sends cars repeatedly airborne and seems himself to marvel at the results; the movie’s real subject is the stunt work, but its stars’ authentic chemistry lends melody to its relentless beat.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Brody
    Patti Cake$
    Jasper hits every note of sentimental manipulation in a tale that’s as fleetingly affecting as it is insubstantial and mechanical.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Brody
    The Life of Chuck
    The Life of Chuck confronts the mysteries of life and the universe and leaves no wonder at all.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Brody
    Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
    The images of Wakanda Forever allow for little creative interpretation; the performances are slotted into the plot like puzzle pieces. The script is the main product, and it’s engineered with the precision of a high-tech machine, with all the artificial artistry to match.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    White Hunter Black Heart
    Eastwood’s subject is wasted lives and wasted talent; Wilson’s charisma and Hollywood’s money prove irresistible, and their sheer power brings noteworthy results—but they emerge from a needless vortex of ruin.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Sasquatch Sunset
    Even as the film abounds in behavioral details, rendering its four protagonists’ personalities in sharp outlines, it never presumes to know too much about them; the movie shows what Sasquatches are like without assuming what it’s like to be a Sasquatch.
    • 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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Distant Voices, Still Lives
    With an unfailing eye for place, décor, costume, and gesture, the director glides his camera through tangles of memories to evoke joys and horrors with a similar sense of wonder.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Brody
    The BFG
    The film's technical achievements may be complex, but its emotions are facile.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    Judy
    Zellweger’s singing here passes through to the other side. Suddenly, Zellweger herself seems to pass over to the other side of the character, to come out from behind the curtain and reveal that the cabaret performer and singer in question isn’t Judy Garland but Renée Zellweger, and has been all along. She leaves the movie behind, where it belongs, and heads off on her own, by herself.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Brody
    Wonka
    Unfortunately, the filmmakers’ incuriosity about Willy is matched by their incuriosity about the star’s range and depth.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Richard Brody
    Pieces of a Woman
    Its effortful grandiosity transforms it into something hollow and even, at times, risible.
    • 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.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 90 Richard Brody
    Slack Bay
    The range of tones and moods, like the range of situations, characters, and actors, is so wide, so recklessly self-contradicting, that it turns a tautly crafted local story into a comprehensive vision.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Brody
    Dumb Money
    Dumb Money, touching on questions of the authority of personality and the importance of nonfinancial—even completely irrational—motives in the investment world, offers a gleeful romp through strange and treacherous territory that merits a closer, more careful look.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Brody
    Skinamarink
    As impressive as the film is, the many thrillingly imaginative moments remain suspended and detached from each other, like scattered storyboard frames. The result is a film that’s accomplished but seemingly unfinished—indeed, hardly begun.
    • 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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Brody
    Challengers
    An intricate time-jumping framework is a large part of what makes the film distinctive, but the compromises made to achieve this are responsible for a pervasive feeling of emptiness.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    A Lion Is in the Streets
    The movie offers, amid its hectic and rowdy melodrama, a constant and underlying vision of the crucial power of government to serve the public good—and the ease with which that power can, almost invisibly, be shifted to the unfair advantage of the rich and the connected.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Marshall
    Reginald Hudlin directs this historical drama, set in 1941, with an apt blend of vigor and empathy.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    The Beguiled
    The story may sometimes come off as a ribald soldiers’ tale that Siegel, born in 1912, had been awaiting a sexual revolution to tell; still, his intense, intelligent breakdown of the film’s wild outbursts reveals subtleties of love, despair, and shame beneath the schematic luridness.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 90 Richard Brody
    Harriet
    The intensity and the lyrical fervor of Kasi Lemmons’s direction lend this historical drama, about Harriet Tubman’s escape from slavery and her work with the Underground Railroad, the exalted energy of secular scripture.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    Non-Fiction
    Despite situations aching for parody, Assayas is anything but satirical: as his characters give the book business, the Internet, and infidelity a vigorous but empty dialectical workout, he comes down squarely on the side of business as usual, which the film itself embodies. Yet Macaigne, quizzical and impulsive, invests a rote role with brilliant turns.
    • 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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