Richard Lawson

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IndieWire, The Guardian, The Hollywood Reporter, Vanity Fair
For 512 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 50% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 48% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.6 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Richard Lawson's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 66
Highest review score: 100 Roma
Lowest review score: 10 The Woman in the Window
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 313 out of 512
  2. Mixed: 159 out of 512
  3. Negative: 40 out of 512
512 movie reviews
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    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    Thunderbolts*
    On occasion the film is wryly amusing. But too often the humor is strained, playing as meek attempt to laugh through the pain—for the characters, the movie itself, the entire franchise, even.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    On the Rocks
    The film never achieves lift-off, drifting instead through a series of scenes that repeat and repeat the movie’s few, basic themes before sputtering to a too easily resolved—and patly rendered—conclusion.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    Argylle
    To be fair, toward the end of the film, Vaughn does up the ante to stage one utterly ridiculous fight scene that teeters between amusing and embarrassing. At least he is trying for something there. Otherwise, Argylle lacks the inventive physics and gaudy flair we have come to expect from him.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    Nosferatu
    Nosferatu is a sensory pleasure. But on a story level, it leaves much to be desired.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    In the Blink of an Eye
    Overall, there is so little texture to these character arcs that the actors are mostly just working in service of a blandly uplifting message. It’s as if they’ve all been commissioned by a well-funded science museum to lend their bodies and voices to the cause of slickly comestible up-with-people infotainment.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    Lizzie
    Lizzie isn’t a bad film, but it doesn’t accomplish all that it wants to—and all I wanted it to. We’re never as immersed in its psychological swirl as we should be, and every character in it is either such a creep or a flinching headcase that it’s hard to get our emotional hooks in any of them.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    Sacrifice
    The film is a mess, opaque in its argument and tiring in its effortful weirdness, and yet in its best moments has a hypnotic pull.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    The Gallerist
    The Gallerist is not without its occasional charms. There’s a chuckle to be had here and there, bits of zinging dialogue that actually find the right notes. Enough so that one roots for the movie despite its many missteps. The problem, ultimately, is that Yan chose a poor subject for her film, an environment that is an incredibly hard target to nail.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    Don't Worry Darling
    Director Olivia Wilde has made an obvious and intermittently entertaining sci-thriller, one that borrows heavily from many better things but uses those pilfered parts effectively enough. For a while, anyway.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    Reminiscence
    The film doesn’t do much to distinguish itself, or to retain audience interest. Jackman, dutiful thespian as always, gives it his all, but the specter his character is running after doesn’t have enough shape, or meaning.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    Bad Times at the El Royale
    I remain as curious as ever to see what Goddard does next. But this film, for all its canny presentation, is a mishmash of compelling narrative premises clumsily fused together. It manages to be both overwrought and under-developed, disappointing less for what it is than for what it could have been.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    Lisa Frankenstein
    Lisa Frankenstein never gets its blood up, essentially playing as a casual mood piece rather than full-bodied horror or romance or comedy.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    The Craft: Legacy
    Lister-Jones has a lot of good ideas that are given short shrift in this film. The potency of their implications is sapped by, among other things, the film’s seemingly hyper-conscious worry that it might put a foot wrong, especially within such a limited run time. Which may actually be The Craft: Legacy’s most modern dimension: it probably should have been a Netflix series.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    The Killer
    The Killer is an experiment in economy whose results are lesser than the effort put in. Calculating efficiency is all well and good, but at least some life is required to make meaning of all of this killing.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    Driver's Ed
    There are a few laughs to be found in the film, little moments of wit or weirdness, but the film is otherwise a mirthless drag rescued only by its bright leads. Maybe let them make the movie next time.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    Chasing Summer
    Chasing Summer often plays as the most peculiar Hallmark movie ever made. I want that to be a good thing, but it unfortunately is not.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    Greta
    Huppert and Jordan are certainly capable of turning up the volume, but for whatever reason they pull back in Greta, getting stuck somewhere between shlockly art and arty schlock. That’s not a good place to be, even if it is a Greta one.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
    Now 80 years old, Ford still glows with that unique charisma. It’s a shame, then, that Dial of Destiny doesn’t do right by its heroes—both Ford and Dr. Henry Jones, archeologist adventurer.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    Free Guy
    Free Guy has moments of dizzying action and offers up some intriguing sci-fi speculation, but it is decidedly not a cool movie.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    Couture
    The film is somehow both glancing and melodramatic, a strange and underwhelming cocktail of blasé Euro sleekness and TV-movie drama. Ah well. At least the clothes are nice.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    Glass
    Glass is simply Shyamalan giving a book report on the basic structure of comic-caper narratives. There’s something endearing about his eagerness to explain these simple things, to show us what he knows. But Glass still suffers for that pedantic self-seriousness.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    Us
    It pains me to say this. I spent a good deal of Us straining to like it, to get on its slightly preening wavelength, to be nourished by its heady stew of tropes. I couldn’t get there, though. As loaded up on stuff as Us is, there’s not enough to grab onto; it’s an alienating idea piece that lumbers away just as it’s about to reveal its true nature.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    Maria
    Maria is the thinnest of the three, psychologically facile and overly mannered. There is something arbitrary, unspecific about the film.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    Tenet
    Mostly, Tenet is a straightforward caper movie—maximally staged and very, very loud, but flimsy at its heart.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
    It’s an odd, lumbering patchwork of a film, occasionally fascinating but otherwise bloated and aimless.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    Disenchanted
    It is a proper movie, one that probably would have fared decently in theatrical release. I believe there was genuine artistic intent put into the making of the film, which distinguishes Disenchanted from HP2 and so many other chintzy streaming endeavors.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    This Is Me…Now: A Love Story
    The new film This Is Me…Now is a passion project, about passion, that curiously lacks that essential quality.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    No Time to Die
    Craig is certainly sent off in grand fashion, but it’s a grandiosity that isn’t quite fitting for his run of films.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    Under the Silver Lake
    Mitchell has made a stylish, occasionally intriguing film, by turns idiosyncratically funny and downright scary. But he says and shows a lot of bothersome things throughout, which I’m not quite sure how to approach.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    White Noise
    The story’s themes—fear of death, societal atomization at the dawn of the information age—are clearly stated, but there’s little passion pulsing beneath the thesis. It’s a respectful, and respectable, film to a fault; it’s hard to locate the animating why of White Noise. Despite some alterations, the film seems to exist more as a recitation of the book than its own kind of invention.
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