Richard Lawson

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IndieWire, The Guardian, The Hollywood Reporter, Vanity Fair
For 510 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: 311 out of 510
  2. Mixed: 159 out of 510
  3. Negative: 40 out of 510
510 movie reviews
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    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Lawson
    M3GAN
    It’s funny in ways anticipated and not, and there is enough suspense—or something like suspense—to balance out the coy winks to the audience. The irony isn’t overweening, the doll is equal parts creepy and yassified, and the human lead, Allison Williams, anchors things with an admirable commitment to the bit.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Richard Lawson
    Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody
    I Wanna Dance with Somebody is a mighty testament to Houston’s catalog, the cathedral highs and sultry lows of her singular voice. Those songs, at least, are eternal. If a movie that simply presses play on the mix tape is what it takes to remind us of Houston’s special power, then that’s reason enough for the film to exist. But the story behind the songs probably deserves more, and better.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Lawson
    Babylon
    Babylon is unfocussed and overeager, continuously distracted by the burst of a new idea. That could be read as an apt rendering of the manic thought of a cocaine binge, but there is something awfully studied in how Chazelle conjures up that nose-scratching, high-speed verve.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Lawson
    Avatar: The Way of Water
    Watching The Way of Water, one rolls their eyes only to realize they’re welling with tears. One stretches and shifts in their seat before accepting, with a resigned and happy plop, that they could watch yet another hour of Cameron’s preservationist epic. Lucky for us—lucky even for the culture, maybe—that at least a few more of those are on their way.
    • 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.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Lawson
    Falling for Christmas
    It’s a story of reinvention for an actor trying to do the same. It mostly works a treat. Lohan’s performance is perky and agreeable, a shimmer of that old Mean Girls (or, hell, Parent Trap) charm dancing around her for the first time in a while. I’d happily watch her in more after this—though preferably in something a bit meatier than a Hallmark knock-off.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Lawson
    The Wonder
    Lelio’s haughty piece of flair doesn’t diminish the impression made by Pugh, who fluidly projects compassion tinged with the faintest hint of menace.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Lawson
    Causeway
    There is a fine line between creating a laconic, closed-off character and simply not creating a character at all—a line that Causeway transgresses. Lynsey is a frustrating cipher, seemingly guided more by the beats of the script than by any internal impulse or logic.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Lawson
    Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
    Wright, Angela Bassett, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, and others are commanding presences, standing proud and formidable in Ruth Carter’s glorious costumery. The film’s lush visuals—its rendering of bustling old-town Wakanda, of a mysterious city under the sea, of gleaming tech and natural landscapes—are sumptuous and considered. There is much to be admired here, a care for craft and detail on a higher plane than other Marvel fare.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Richard Lawson
    Aftersun
    The film isn’t merely some metatextual exercise, though. It’s deeply felt, a warm embodiment of a liminal time in life when our conceptions of ourselves and our loved ones come pinging into focus while also, somehow, drifting into new confusion.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Richard Lawson
    She Said
    If that storytelling decision was made so there was more room for the intimate human factor, then it was an understandable one. She Said has a calmly insistent moral clarity, earned through its patient empathy, its quiet awe not at the insidiousness of what Weinstein did, but at the mettle and courage of the women who endured it—and then spoke out about it.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 20 Richard Lawson
    Halloween Ends
    Halloween Ends is a bizarre hash of tones and theses, stitched together into a movie that’s neither fun nor frightful.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Lawson
    Till
    Rising to challenge viewers’ qualms about the movie’s existence is Deadwyler, whose stirring performance may be reason enough to see the film.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 100 Richard Lawson
    Empire of Light
    Whatever Mendes’s connection to the material, he’s made something humane and nourishing, a picture of rare thoughtfulness and decency.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Lawson
    The Greatest Beer Run Ever
    Farrelly shows us the formative experience, but only a little of its consequence. Perhaps too much consideration of that would make the whole thing seem something less than great.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Lawson
    Master Gardener
    Much of Master Gardener is disarmingly placid. It’s a warmer, more optimistic film than one might expect, even if it does at times creak with the antiquated perspective of a stalwart septuagenarian filmmaker unwilling to shake off some of the past’s bad habits.
    • 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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Lawson
    The Fabelmans
    Not all memoir is generous. It can be intriguingly solipsistic, or maddeningly vain. But because there’s always been a curious blankness to Spielberg’s public persona—cheerful and engaged but never quite known—The Fabelmans does feel like something of a gift.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 30 Richard Lawson
    My Policeman
    My Policeman is studied and plodding in its period-piece solemnity, a dirge of a movie about reckless people that is never warmed by their implied inner fire.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Lawson
    The Woman King
    An action-drama sourced from history (while riffing considerably on that history), The Woman King is a sturdy testament to how renewed a staid form can feel when it’s stretched to include different narratives.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Lawson
    Bros
    Bros leans into the giddy little revolution of its own existence, inviting the audience into a good, gay time that hasn’t exactly happened, in this way, before.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Lawson
    The Inspection
    Bratton, though, is not solely interested in a litany of struggle. He fills The Inspection with style, with spiky humor and alluring edge. It’s a promising feature debut.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Lawson
    Women Talking
    Polley admirably allows her fine performers ample space to bring Women Talking to life. But there are also the bigger needs of the film to be considered—sometimes Polley’s actorly generosity comes at a cost, when the film turns stage-y for a minute and we’re snapped out of its enveloping spell.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Richard Lawson
    Blonde
    Blonde is a film partly about exploitation that might be exploitative itself. If the film is aware of that meta function, then there’s something interesting happening in it. If not, and Dominik thinks he is genuinely ennobling Monroe and expressing some kind of radical pity for her, then Blonde is a little perverse.
    • 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.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Richard Lawson
    The Banshees of Inisherin
    Those wary of McDonagh after the bulldozer that was Billboards should seek out this film; at its best, The Banshees of Inisherin whispers and laments and amuses the way McDonagh’s best stage writing does. And it offers the invaluable opportunity to see Farrell in his hangdog element, as Pádraic scrambles about trying to find purchase in the world, ever creaking and groaning in motion.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Richard Lawson
    The Whale
    What might have been a somber and carefully considered study of a lonely man grappling with his past becomes a posturing labor.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Richard Lawson
    Bones and All
    Bones and All has its merits, but the film is only a decent side dish at the feast of Guadagnino. You’ll likely leave the theater still feeling hungry.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Richard Lawson
    Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
    Iñárritu has a lot on his mind here, weighing the sins and graces of personal and public history, and attempting to atone for some of it. But as Bardo stretches on and on and on, the film narrows into something solipsistic and meta.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Richard Lawson
    TÁR
    TÁR is breathtaking entertainment, beautifully tailored in luxe, eerie Euro sleekness by production designer Marco Bittner Rosser and cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, and ominously scored by Hildur Guðnadóttir (who gets a little meta shout-out in the film). That fine craftsmanship is all anchored by Blanchett’s alternately measured and ferocious performance, a tremendous (but never outsized) piece of acting that is her most piercing work in years.
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