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 0.5 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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    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Lawson
    Challengers
    It is a true star vehicle that asserts Faist and O’Connor as new leading men and gives further dimension to Zendaya’s already well-established profile. The humble ambition here is to charm and entertain, to arouse and amuse. This is, in that way, a refreshingly sincere and uncynical movie. Challengers may tire toward the end, but it’s scored enough points by then that a few double faults probably don’t matter.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Richard Lawson
    The Holdovers
    Funny and rueful, The Holdovers seems beamed in from another time in cinema history, when wordy and thoughtful little movies like this were in healthier supply.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Lawson
    The Northman
    Eggers’s action sequences are swift and brutal, filled with the crunch of life extinguished and tossed into the bone pile of time. Skarsgård, hulking and seething, is a fine vessel for the film’s opulent menace. He’s a fearsome, yet elegant, creature of destruction as he hacks and slashes away.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Lawson
    Blade Runner 2049
    While it certainly stimulated and overwhelmed my senses, Blade Runner 2049 rarely got my mind whirring the way one always hopes this kind of artful, serious-minded sci-fi will.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Richard Lawson
    Mass
    It sounds strange to say of a film about such impossible sorrow, but Mass is thoroughly entertaining. Or maybe engrossing is a better word. Its incisive dialogue and nuanced performances demand our attention, inviting us into a roiling weather system of guilt and sadness. The experience proves oddly nourishing, clarifying.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Lawson
    American Fiction
    American Fiction, a sharp and clever film, could be all the more so if it felt better connected to the present tense. As is, the reflection is a bit warped; contemporary subtleties are missing.
    • 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Lawson
    The King
    Without the Shakespearean language, this is just an ahistorical story about a king and a battle. ... But it’s nothing fancy, really, nothing newfangled or inventive. This is a pretty straight-down-the-middle period war-king film, a true Boy Movie of respectable pedigree but no real distinction.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Lawson
    Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
    Once the politics of food and gas and guns have finally been sorted, Furiosa revs its engines and goes chasing after the grandeur of its predecessor. It doesn’t quite catch up. But it comes close enough that we can at least glimpse Fury Road’s tail lights in the distance.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Lawson
    Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
    His intricate craftsmanship is a pleasure to watch in motion, though a bad symptom of sequel-itis stalks the film: Johnson, facing all that daunting follow-up pressure, has decided to go bigger.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Lawson
    Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
    That McQuarrie and Cruise are eventually able to get this hurtling, heavy plane level and pull off a rewarding climax is a testament to the fierceness of their commitment to these projects.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Richard Lawson
    The Nest
    The Nest is a complex movie, despite its economical size.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Richard Lawson
    Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
    Marcel the Shell with Shoes On both gets on little ones’ level and lifts them up to give them a better view out the window, presenting a world of thought and feeling to go along with the giggles and “aw”s of the film’s endearing landscape. Maybe quirky earnestness is back—so long as it’s done with as much care and insight as this rather marvelous curio.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Richard Lawson
    Passages
    It’s a piercing and often very funny character piece, a study of narcissism masked, at least in part, by bourgeois, Millennial understandings of progressive coupling. But Sachs, who is in his 50s, has not made some condemnatory thinkpiece about what’s wrong with a generation. The people of Passages could, in some senses, be from any time; mercurial partners have existed forever.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Lawson
    Incredibles 2
    From a certain angle, Incredibles 2 looks a little too slavish to creaky conventions.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Lawson
    Ad Astra
    While visually and aurally stunning, James Gray’s latest film doesn’t explore anything new.
    • 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Richard Lawson
    You Hurt My Feelings
    Holofcener weaves these people and their problems together in delicate fashion, guiding us toward her thematic conclusions in a way that never feels starchy, didactic, too lesson-oriented. She’s got a light touch, a humane one too.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Richard Lawson
    Bergman Island
    The gap between fact and fiction is where Bergman Island finds its murmuring potency. Its maybe unanswerable questions of self and creation give Hansen-Løve’s finespun film a sneaking weight. Perhaps one point of art is the guessing.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Lawson
    Barbie
    There is plenty in Barbie to be delighted by, even moved by. I have no doubt that the film will be a massive hit, cheered for turning a cynical I.P. project into a loopy treatise on being. But the movie could maybe have been stickier, more probing and indelible, if it had reined in some of its erratic energy and really figured out what it wanted to say.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Richard Lawson
    The Forty-Year-Old Version
    With weary humor, Blank details how hard it is to sustain an actual, decades-long career in the arts, when the twin forces of public appetite (and money) and personal obstacle conspire to derail or deaden what was once so exuberant, so teeming with possibility.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 85 Richard Lawson
    The Old Man & the Gun
    Mostly, the cat-and-mouse of Lowery’s film is just reason enough to contemplate the shuffling everydayness of life, of how we are ever aware of its finality while also tending to, seeking out, and appreciating the little joys, mercies, and adventures of it.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Lawson
    Wildlife
    Dano shows technical promise as a director, but I hope his taste in material has a bit more range. Now that he’s gotten a rather passionless passion project out of his system, hopefully he’ll lift his gaze up in search of other, more vibrant lives—out there in the vastness, hungry for perfect lighting.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Lawson
    The Wife
    I wouldn’t call The Wife middling, exactly—but for all its soapy seriousness, it can’t match the genuine heft of Close’s craftwork.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Richard Lawson
    Let Them All Talk
    The pleasure of Let Them All Talk is in how it expands on the premise of an older lady hang movie, burrowing into darker corners and pausing to consider the ambient hum of life tumbling along. It’s a fun movie. It may also be profound.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 95 Richard Lawson
    Mank
    Mank taps into a vein of feeling that reaches farther than mere family tribute. The film also serves as a political cri de coeur, one that inspires as much as it dismays. In making a film that’s sort of about the making of another film, Fincher has many metatextual layers to work with, which he does with trademark precision and unexpected gentility.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Lawson
    Annihilation
    Garland is a breathtakingly talented filmmaker, one whose few second-film stumblings—the unwieldy scope of his ambitions, his scrambling for an ending—are forgivable. Annihilation murmurs and roars with ideas, a dense and sad and scary inquest into life and self. It’s a true cinematic experience.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Lawson
    Babygirl
    What is decidedly clear, consistent, and declarative in the film is the force of seeing Kidman venture down yet another new avenue, tossing self-consciousness out the window (or, maybe, just laying it aside for a while) to help realize Reijn’s curious vision.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 85 Richard Lawson
    Bad Education
    Bad Education (which honestly isn’t a great title for this movie) is an arresting, nuanced depiction of insatiable want, of the bitter fact that reaching for things is often more instinctual, more human, than holding on to what we’ve already got.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Lawson
    Dumb Money
    Dumb Money is a sturdy entry into the developing canon of docufiction that seeks to be lively and lucid and informative about the rotten state of the American dream. It’s often as crassly effective as Roaring Kitty and his cohort were in those wild months two years ago, when greed was good for the many instead of the few.
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