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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    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    The Amusement Park
    The film’s view of a mind thrown back on itself, and the profound vulnerability, mental derangement, and physical degradation that result, is, true to form, a political horror.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    The Salt of Tears
    Two classic themes, the eternal triangle and a provincial’s big-city struggles, get distinctive twists in Philippe Garrel’s brisk yet pain-filled new drama of youth’s illusions.
    • 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Presence
    Soderbergh’s premise is no mere gimmick. Working with a script by David Koepp, he infuses his dramatic mechanism with substantial themes.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Last Summer
    Breillat directs her cast with precise clarity, and her exacting staging produces both intensely evocative moments and a rare, quietly terrifying pugnacity that permeates the drama.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Félicité
    The movie is a virtual documentary of city sights and moods, and also a bitter exposé of a country without a social safety net.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Megalopolis
    With its intellectual earnestness, first-person grandiosity, and aesthetic extravagance, the film is more floridly and brazenly youthful than anything else Coppola has made.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Mandabi
    Sembène looks ruefully yet tenderly at the ruses and wiles of the poor, whose desperate struggles—with the authorities and with one another—distract them from political revolt.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Cairo Station
    [Chahine]'s richly textured, good-humored, visually forceful storytelling portrays the surging, ribald vitality of Egyptian society that squirms beneath the unjust authority of dictators and dogmatists.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Xala
    Sembène depicts a corrupt system that replaced white dictators and profiteers with black ones; the symbolic ending, a glimmer of revolutionary hope, is as gratifying as it is implausible.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Out of the Past
    The intricate story moves through New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Mexico, and picturesque points in between, but Tourneur cooks up shot-by-shot surprises that outdo those of the screenplay.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Born in Flames
    Borden’s exhilarating, freely assembled story stages news reports, documentary sequences, and surveillance footage alongside tough action scenes and musical numbers; her violent vision is ideologically complex and chilling.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Persona
    Bergman blends a theatrical subjectivity—scenes of the inner life that defy physical reality and depend on special effects, whether in the film lab or on set—with a tactile visual intimacy, with his characters, the objects close at hand, and the superb coastal landscape.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc
    Dumont films Joan’s spiritual conflicts and confrontations with playful exuberance but avoids frivolity; the ardent actors infuse Joan’s spirit of revolt with the eternal passions of youth.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Magnificent Obsession
    Every step depends on stifled emotions and closely guarded secrets, resulting in a buildup of operatic passion that endows everyday gestures and inflections with grandeur and nobility.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    The Waldheim Waltz
    The movie is constructed entirely of a remarkable array of archival footage, including Beckermann’s recordings, that spotlights unresolved national traumas and unabated anti-Semitism.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    An Unmarried Woman
    Mazursky applies a light and graceful touch to matters of intimate agony.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    El
    With eerie point-of-view shots, Buñuel gets inside the mind of a madman whose sadism is inseparable from his high social position; his commanding manner mirrors the folly and the cruelty of society at large.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Black God, White Devil
    Despite its heroic energy and impulsive youth, it’s a bleak philosophical work of its time, a bitterly terrifying vision of no exit.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    The Tarnished Angels
    With its tangled shadows, fun-house mirrors, wrenching angles, and glaring lights, the wide-screen black-and-white photography evokes the psychological distortions of reckless and rootless outsiders, the disproportion of their seedy circumstances to their doomed heroism.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Hedda
    In DaCosta’s hands, Ibsen’s emotionally extreme but tonally restrained play becomes a spectacular, flamboyant melodrama, with physical action as intense as the characters’ inner worlds.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    The Killers
    Siegel’s terse, seething, and stylish direction glows with the blank radiance of sheet metal in sunlight; the movie’s bright primary colors and glossy luxuries are imbued with menace, and its luminous delights convey a terrifyingly cold world view.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Residue
    Gerima films Jay’s intimate confrontations with an impressionistic flair that focusses attention on characters’ listening, thinking, and remembering; flashbacks and dream sequences infuse Jay’s tightening conflicts with the pressure of history—both social and intimate.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Early Spring
    Ozu’s despairing view of postwar Japan looks as harshly at blind modernization as it does at decadent tradition.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Tito
    Despite the merely functional reticence of Glowicki’s direction, along with the narrow scope of the drama, Tito is an instant classic of acting.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Two-Lane Blacktop
    In Hellman’s film, Taylor and Wilson exert a negative charisma: their presence is both powerful and blank, deeply expressive in its neutrality. They offer one of the few original post-sixties reconfigurations of the movie star. Their manner is a perfect match for the story, and for the mythic, symbolic landscape in which it’s set.
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