Critics » David Denby
David Denby

David Denby

Agrees with the Tomatometer 71% of the time.

Publications:
New York Magazine , New Yorker
Critics' Group:
National Society of Film Critics, New York Film Critics Circle
Total Reviews:
441

Listing Of All Reviews & Articles

Showing 1 - 50 of 441
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Rating T-Meter Title | Year Add Date
63% The Five-Year Engagement (2012) " Like Apatow's "Funny People," the film is an intentional hybrid: half gag comedy, half open-ended exploration of everything that can go wrong -- and occasionally right -- between two people whom nature, if not society, means to be together." — New Yorker
Posted May 1, 2012
75% The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012) " Judi Dench delivers one of her most wide-ranging and moving performances." — New Yorker
Posted May 1, 2012
36% Lockout (2012) " At the screening, in between laughing fits, people around me whispered, in awed tones, "B movie, 1956."" — New Yorker
Posted Apr 23, 2012
47% The Three Stooges (2012) " The movie is so infantile that it achieves a special kind of purity and gentleness." — New Yorker
Posted Apr 23, 2012
85% Bernie (2012) " Linklater has made a smart movie, with a mordant satirical edge, but he almost falls victim to his own sense of authenticity." — New Yorker
Posted Apr 23, 2012
96% Monsieur Lazhar (2012) " Monsieur Lazhar is so discreet that it never quite comes to life." — New Yorker
Posted Apr 10, 2012
91% Footnote (2012) " Footnote requires little knowledge of Judaism and its texts. Rather, it's about the complications of love, guilt, and rage." — New Yorker
Posted Apr 10, 2012
54% Bully (2001) New Yorker
Posted Mar 27, 2012
87% Bully (2012) " [The directors] avoid charts and graphs, talking heads and sociology. Their approach is more direct and, perhaps, more effective." — New Yorker
Posted Mar 26, 2012
84% The Hunger Games (2012) " Even when two people are just talking calmly, Ross jerks the camera around. Why? As the sense of danger increases, he has nothing to build toward." — New Yorker
Posted Mar 26, 2012
52% John Carter (2012) " A mess." — New Yorker
Posted Mar 26, 2012
79% The Deep Blue Sea (2012) " Sombre and powerful." — New Yorker
Posted Mar 20, 2012
60% Wanderlust (2012) " A messy but occasionally very funny satirical comedy..." — New Yorker
Posted Feb 28, 2012
100% This Is Not a Film (2003) New Yorker
Posted Feb 28, 2012
90% In Darkness (2012) " Honesty is the movie's greatest strength." — New Yorker
Posted Feb 26, 2012
58% Edge of Darkness (2010) New Yorker
Posted Feb 7, 2012
85% Chronicle (2012) " "Chronicle" is a mildly experimental commercial film, and, for the most part, it's loose-limbed fun." — New Yorker
Posted Feb 7, 2012
51% Contraband (2012) " A winter-season product, but perfectly absorbing once it gets going." — New Yorker
Posted Jan 24, 2012
84% Crazy Horse (2012) " The spectacle lodges somewhere between erotic reverie and the perfection of a revolving sculpture." — New Yorker
Posted Jan 24, 2012
80% Haywire (2012) " Carano is strong, fast, relentless. She's not much of an actress yet, but Soderbergh hides her weaknesses well..." — New Yorker
Posted Jan 24, 2012
67% We Bought a Zoo (2011) " Nothing that happens in this movie is in the least surprising, but it's all quite pleasant and even, at times, moving." — New Yorker
Posted Jan 9, 2012
47% Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2012) " Sorry, but there must be richer ways of dramatizing so obvious a theme." — New Yorker
Posted Jan 9, 2012
93% Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol (2011) " "Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol" is sheer hurtling mechanism-and it's great silly fun." — New Yorker
Posted Dec 30, 2011
77% War Horse (2011) " We never ask why the production is devoted to an animal while ten million men are dying, but when Spielberg does the story realistically, it seems trivial, even a little daft." — New Yorker
Posted Dec 30, 2011
54% The Iron Lady (2012) " An oddly unsettling compound of glorification and malice that whirls around and winds up nowhere." — New Yorker
Posted Dec 27, 2011
75% The Adventures of Tintin (2011) " Tintin is exhausting, and, for all its wonders, it wears one out well before it's over." — New Yorker
Posted Dec 5, 2011
87% The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) " This is a bleak but mesmerizing piece of filmmaking; it offers a glancing, chilled view of a world in which brief moments of loyalty flicker between repeated acts of betrayal." — New Yorker
Posted Dec 5, 2011
94% Hugo (2011) " In Hugo, the hero has a terrifying dream, perhaps an unconscious recollection of that event. Reality, filmed illusion, and dreams are so intertwined that only an artist, playing merrily with echoes, can sort them into a scheme of delight." — New Yorker
Posted Nov 22, 2011
83% My Week with Marilyn (2011) " It's an expertly made, intentionally minor movie, though when Monroe, doping herself with everything available, lies in bed, confused and hapless, there are depressing intimations of the end to come." — New Yorker
Posted Nov 22, 2011
44% J. Edgar (2011) " The film moves fast, but Eastwood's touch is light and sure, his judgment sound, the moments of pathos held just long enough. And he cast the right star as his equivocal hero-fool." — New Yorker
Posted Nov 7, 2011
90% Into The Abyss (2011) " You come out shaken by the fathomless destructiveness of idiocy and the healing powers of belief and remediation." — New Yorker
Posted Nov 7, 2011
47% Anonymous (2011) " The more far-fetched the idea, it seems, the more strenuous the effort to pass it off as authentic." — New Yorker
Posted Oct 24, 2011
89% Margin Call (2011) " Margin Call is one of the strongest American films of the year and easily the best Wall Street movie ever made." — New Yorker
Posted Oct 24, 2011
81% The Skin I Live In (2011) " The most spontaneous of all movie artists has succumbed to "art," and the results are a disaster." — New Yorker
Posted Oct 17, 2011
92% Take Shelter (2011) " The movie makes you uncomfortable, but in a good way. Nichols has turned the current moment of American unease into a powerful metaphor." — New Yorker
Posted Oct 17, 2011
95% Moneyball (2011) " One of the most soulful of baseball movies -- it confronts the anguish of a very tough game." — New Yorker
Posted Sep 27, 2011
93% 50/50 (2011) " A small winner; the director, Jonathan Levine ("The Wackness"), has a great touch, mordant but light-handed." — New Yorker
Posted Sep 27, 2011
84% Contagion (2011) " The presence of movie stars helps: their authority is part of what keeps us fascinated by the gruesome fable, juicing it a bit, so that we can actually enjoy it." — New Yorker
Posted Sep 13, 2011
83% Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) " Rise of the Planet of the Apes is spectacle with a kick: the transcendence of the normal in creatures so like ourselves is both an entertainment and a needling rebuke to human vanity." — New Yorker
Posted Aug 30, 2011
50% Chasing Madoff (2011) " The hero has a colorless, off-rhythm voice, dead eyes, disorderly hair. He's not, we gather, an imaginative man, but, a religious Greek Orthodox and a former Army officer, he's propelled by a strong sense of rectitude, an ethos of duty." — New Yorker
Posted Aug 30, 2011
53% Brighton Rock (2011) " The extreme innocence of Rose (Andrea Riseborough), the young girl whom Pinkie seduces in order to keep her quiet, is no longer very convincing, or even interesting." — New Yorker
Posted Aug 22, 2011
76% The Help (2011) " [The Help] is, in some ways, crude and obvious, but it opens up a broad new swath of experience on the screen, and parts of it are so moving and well acted that any objections to what's second-rate seem to matter less as the movie goes on." — New Yorker
Posted Aug 10, 2011
25% The Change-Up (2011) " This comedy doesn't work very well." — New Yorker
Posted Aug 8, 2011
79% Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) " It doesn't try too hard for irony or style; the comic-book sensibility remains pure, square, and happily stupid." — New Yorker
Posted Aug 1, 2011
71% Friends With Benefits (2011) " Friends with Benefits is fast, allusive, urban, glamorous -- clearly the Zeitgeist winner of the summer." — New Yorker
Posted Jul 25, 2011
78% Crazy, Stupid, Love. (2011) " A genial, messy comedy of marital discord and mismatched lovers. " — New Yorker
Posted Jul 25, 2011
91% Tabloid (2011) " Morris's subject is sexual fantasy and a particular kind of American stupidity-the ability to substitute self-justification for self-knowledge. His tone is merry." — New Yorker
Posted Jul 24, 2011
96% Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 (2011) " When the movie was over, a young boy sitting behind me said, "That was great!" He was satisfied, and rightly so." — New Yorker
Posted Jul 15, 2011
87% X-Men: First Class (2011) " Looks and feels like a very cheesy Cold War-era B movie..." — New Yorker
Posted Jun 27, 2011
Showing 1 - 50 of 441
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