Richard Brody

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The New Yorker
For 638 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 5.9 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Richard Brody's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 72
Highest review score: 100 Fiume o morte!
Lowest review score: 10 Zack Snyder's Justice League
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 425 out of 638
  2. Mixed: 195 out of 638
  3. Negative: 18 out of 638
638 movie reviews
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    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Richard Brody
    Da 5 Bloods
    The teeming profusion of events that Lee dramatizes is inseparable from the historiography that he foregrounds throughout. Both are brought to life with an intricately varied texture of dialogue and gesture, purpose and spirit—a crucial aspect of Lee’s career-long artistry that, here, reaches new heights, thanks to an extraordinary cast of actors who blend fervor and nuance, and whom Lee directs with manifest inspiration.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    The Truth
    Perhaps a filmmaker whose powers were less orderly, less morally driven to soothe and pacify, could have pushed Fabienne—and Deneuve—to tragic and stylistic extremes that would have rendered the film’s reconciliations as mighty as its conflicts. Instead, he offers half a film of magnificent fragments.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    The Ghost of Peter Sellers
    It’s a revealing view of an industry of enormous personalities—and the indulgences that feed them.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Richard Brody
    Hill of Freedom
    Hong’s deft artistry is an attempt to get past the habits of issue-oriented, advocacy-besotted political cinema to work out just what a political cinema would be. And his answer is: first of all, it’s cinema. In this regard, he connects with Mankiewicz, Resnais, and other great filmmakers for whom politics is an important, interwoven part of life—and of art.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Joan of Arc
    Dumont turns the tale into a dialectical spectacle: he stages military musters like Busby Berkeley productions, seethes at the torturers’ rationalizations, delights in hearing his actors declaim the scholars’ sophistries, and thrills in the pugnacious simplicity of Joan’s defiant responses, which reduce her captors’ pride to ridicule.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Richard Brody
    Fourteen
    The diverging paths and seething conflicts of two lifelong friends, now young Brooklyn professionals, are explored deeply and poignantly in this deceptively calm melodrama, written and directed by Dan Sallitt.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Brody
    First Cow
    Reichardt films the workingmen’s friendship and their frustrated strivings sympathetically, and observes with dismay the official’s domineering ways and pretentious airs, but she reduces the protagonists to stick figures in a deterministic landscape.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    The Invisible Man
    For all the authentic thrills that the film eventually delivers, it leaves the feeling of a terrific idea that’s been left on the drawing board.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    The Whistlers
    The many characters’ distinct perspectives on the action are multiplied by chilling views from surveillance cameras, prompting deceptive displays—including romantic ones—in which tipped-off targets fool those who are watching.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Vitalina Varela
    Spectacular images, ideas, emotions, and performances are embedded in the lugubrious pace and tone of Pedro Costa’s modernist fusion of classic melodrama and documentary.
    • 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Richard Brody
    Cane River
    In its modest, forthright warmth, “Cane River” is a work of visionary artistry and progressive imagination.
    • 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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Brody
    Beanpole
    The characters don’t seem to exist outside the stilted drama of their individual scenes; the ambiguities of Balagov’s detached approach yield a sentimental tale of pride and reverence.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    The Assistant
    Green’s direction and dramatic sensibility are blunt, but the film’s laboratory-like microcosm of scenarios pointedly similar to recent widely publicized events in the movie business is shocking and effective.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Brody
    I Wish I Knew
    Wondrous yet rueful views of the city, with its blend of grandeur and squalor, are anchored by the wanderings of an actress, Zhao Tao, whose mysterious role is clarified by one of the most anguished of testimonies.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Brody
    Pain and Glory
    The film’s pleasures and its frustrations, its energies and its enervations, are inseparable.
    • 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.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Brody
    The Souvenir
    In the end, The Souvenir is a movie about experience that doesn’t itself offer much of an experience.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Brody
    A Hidden Life
    The immensely empathetic view of Franz is overwhelmed by vague spirituality and vaguer politics; the impressionistic methods dispel the story’s powerful and noble specificity.
    • 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.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Richard Brody
    Uncut Gems
    Uncut Gems jitters and skitters and lurches and hurtles with Howard’s desperate energy. Sandler’s frantic and fidgety performance provides the movie with its emotional backbone, and he’s not alone.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Brody
    Dark Waters
    The director Todd Haynes’s artistry is hardly detectable in this environmental thriller, yet the film, based on a true story, nonetheless offers a stirring and infuriating story of brazen corporate indifference to employees, neighbors, and the world at large—and the obstacles faced by those who challenge it.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Brody
    The Cotton Club Encore
    Coppola can’t avoid a dash of mythology when filming brutal killings, but he also looks grimly at the Mob’s role in popular artistry—and in enforcing racial barriers.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Richard Brody
    Atlantics
    Diop films the characters and the city with a tactile intimacy and a teeming energy that are heightened by the soundtrack’s polyphony of voices and music; she dramatizes the personal experience of public matters—religious tradition, women’s autonomy, migration, corruption—with documentary-based fervor, rhapsodic yearning, and bold affirmation.
    • 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Brody
    American Dharma
    American Dharma succeeds neither as journalism nor as portraiture, neither as political critique nor as cultural survey nor as psychological study.
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