Richard Lawson

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IndieWire, The Guardian, The Hollywood Reporter, Vanity Fair
For 515 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 Sorry, Baby
Lowest review score: 10 The Woman in the Window
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 314 out of 515
  2. Mixed: 161 out of 515
  3. Negative: 40 out of 515
515 movie reviews
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    • 40 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Lawson
    Meg 2: The Trench
    Meg 2 is confident in its schlock, piling on one ridiculous conceit after another at such a pace that the audience can’t help but be swept up in it. That is a harder needle to thread than many filmmakers seem to think—it’s not enough to just be stupid.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Richard Lawson
    Oppenheimer
    No matter its broader effect, Oppenheimer is a mainstream offering of uncommon resonance, sending the viewer out of the theater head-spun and itchy-eyed, ears ringing from all its sophisticated, voluble explosion.
    • 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.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Lawson
    Joy Ride
    There’s great stuff in Joy Ride, the jumbled atoms of a classic comedy all waiting to be gathered into a cohesive whole. If they didn’t quite get it together on this outing, they certainly prove their potential.
    • 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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Lawson
    No Hard Feelings
    No Hard Feelings is a nice comedy, courting taboo here and there but largely rounded out with sweetness. It’s an amiable time at the movies—but I was hoping for more of a shock.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Richard Lawson
    Showing Up
    [A] quiet and lovely film.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Lawson
    Emancipation
    Fuqua’s chosen technique only undermines his solemn intentions, rather than using starkness to make a salient point. Emancipation is overthought to its increasing detriment.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Lawson
    Creed III
    With Creed III (opening in theaters March 3), Jordan takes full control of the reins, making his directorial debut in calm and confident fashion.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Richard Lawson
    Asteroid City
    It’s an oddly moving film, this bright and quite literally stagey curio involving an extraterrestrial. At its best, Asteroid City evokes the memory of what it was to first see a Wes Anderson film, surprised and delighted by its singular vision of life on Earth.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Lawson
    How to Have Sex
    How to Have Sex is a vivid and heartbreaking depiction of what is caused by the willful, dehumanizing disregard of women. May its lesson be taken to heart by those who need to hear it most.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Richard Lawson
    May December
    May December feels like a return to Haynes’s outre origins, a stylish character study that, when inspected closer, may actually have an entire culture—its art, its sexual mores—on its nimble mind.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Richard Lawson
    Killers of the Flower Moon
    For all of the episodic ramble of Killers of the Flower Moon, not enough space is provided to restoring palpable personhood to people so relentlessly robbed of it. Scorsese’s film is nonetheless effectively rattling, a grueling delineation of events that gracefully eschews the melodrama and sensationalism of so much true crime.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Richard Lawson
    The Zone of Interest
    Zone of Interest is a prodigiously mounted wonder, gripping and awful and terribly necessary to its time.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Richard Lawson
    Monster
    There’s a deep, and never pandering, empathy at work here, an allowance of confusion and moral error that keeps Monster from the smarmy and didactic lows of so many social-issues films.
    • 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.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Lawson
    Jeanne du Barry
    The movie is as engaging as it is sinisterly ridiculous. Its costumery is luxe and eye-popping, its courtly intrigue pleasingly low-stakes. The looming Revolution is only mentioned, in somber tones, in voiceover at the very end. Otherwise, Jeanne du Barry wants you to feel the fantasy.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Lawson
    Book Club: The Next Chapter
    Book Club’s four stars—and others like them—deserve material that’s specific, clever, surprising in some way. These plug-and-play movies have lost much of their charm at this point, feeling more like a slightly degrading duty than any kind of demographic triumph. Which may be overthinking it. But shouldn’t a movie about a book club feel at least a little bit literate?
    • 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.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Lawson
    Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
    The film . . . is at once light and serious, a warm and sensitive tribute to the book’s themes that avoids any unnecessary updating. Fremon Craig, whose last film was the excellent teen dramedy The Edge of Seventeen, gives the material just the right spin, letting Margaret and her friends exist wholly in their age.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Lawson
    Beau Is Afraid
    Whatever LuPone is doing, it’s undeniable. Here, long into a meandering and fitfully rewarding film, is something worthy of fear—or maybe it’s awe.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Lawson
    Air
    Jordan’s absence from this film leaves a big, leaping void at the center. We’re forced to root for marketing executives instead of the phenomenon being marketed. Without its raison d’etre, there is not enough juice to sustain the film. It all feels a bit silly by the heartstring-tugging end.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Lawson
    Boston Strangler
    What a welcome rarity Boston Strangler is, even in its limits: a sturdy, thoughtfully constructed movie featuring a compelling story and host of great actors.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Lawson
    Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
    It’s homage and gentle parody at once, seeking to capture the energy of playing the game with friends rather than trying to seriously literalize an expansive world.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Lawson
    Your Place or Mine
    Your Place or Mine occasionally gives off a glimmer of something interesting, but all too quickly snaps back to the featureless drudgery that has, sadly, come to define its genre.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Lawson
    Sharper
    Sharper is sinewy and clever, a keenly acted and written B-picture of the sort that were once myriad but now only come around once every few years.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Lawson
    80 for Brady
    80 for Brady is a loosely structured hang movie, albeit one that culminates in a curiously affecting emotional climax.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Lawson
    Knock at the Cabin
    The riskiness of that—the way Knock at the Cabin, accidentally or not, courts and even invites sympathy to one of the right’s most dangerous shibboleths—gives the film a surprising, alarming, but not unwelcome edge.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Lawson
    Flora and Son
    Flora and Son played more charming than cloying to me. It’s a nice movie about people who are mostly nice—deep down, anyway.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Lawson
    Eileen
    The movie is deliberately alienating, but Oldroyd has not done enough to earn our devotion before he pulls the rug out and flashes us a smirk. The movie is a provocative tease that doesn’t have the stuff to back up the joke, try as its game performers might to make it all mean something. I found myself wishing that Eileen was longer. Its fertile territory is woefully underdeveloped—so much of the film’s innate potential goes unutilized. At least there is Hathaway’s glowing star turn, both reminding us of what we knew she could do and introducing us to something new.
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