David Edelstein Movie Reviews & Previews

Critics » David Edelstein

Send Email

David Edelstein

Agrees with the Tomatometer 75% of the time.

Biography:: I started way back at the Harvard Crimson, then moved on to the Boston Phoenix, then the Village Voice, then the New York Post, then oblivion, then Slate and Fresh Air. I also wrote a book with Christine Vachon called Shooting to Kill and a couple of plays, chiefly Blaming Mom (a comedy).
Favorites:: The Lady Eve, The General, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Shop Around the Corner, The Godfather, Smiles of a Summer Night, Rules of the Game, Jaws, Ride the High Country, His Girl Friday, Bride of Frankenstein, Seven Samurai, Ashes and Diamonds, Touch of Evil, Singing in the Rain, Night of the Living Dead, and about 100 others.
Publications:: New York Magazine , NPR's Fresh Air , Slate
Critics' Group:: National Society of Film Critics

Total Reviews:: 1183

Listing Of All Reviews & Articles

Showing 1 - 50 of 1183

Previous | Next

T-Meter	Title \| Year	Add Date
66%	The Dictator (2012)	" The Dictator is loose and slap-happy and full of sharp political barbs and has funny actors moving in and out - and at a lickety-split 83 minutes, it doesn't wear out its welcome." — NPR Posted May 16, 2012
41%	Dark Shadows (2012)	" The script by Seth Grahame-Smith is witless and meandering - and I wouldn't mind the witless so much if it moved, or the meandering if it were droll." — NPR Posted May 10, 2012
95%	First Position (2012)	" This is yet another competition doc in the unending legacy of Spellbound, but Kargman is light on her feet, and she has chosen to follow a fascinating group of kids preparing for the 2010 Youth America Grand Prix." — New York Magazine Posted May 7, 2012
50%	Small, Beautifully Moving Parts (2012)	" The film would be better if it were gentler. It's broadly written and played, the actors too busy telegraphing their characters' emotions to let us contemplate their faces in peace." — New York Magazine Posted May 7, 2012
29%	Girl In Progress (2012)	" The movie goes soft. But it has the unpretentious energy and charm of a good YA girls' novel." — New York Magazine Posted May 7, 2012
86%	I Wish (2012)	" You can contemplate the wonder in these glowing young faces without feeling as if you're on an intravenous drip of corn syrup." — New York Magazine Posted May 7, 2012
93%	Marvel's The Avengers (2012)	" I had a blast at The Avengers." — NPR Posted May 3, 2012
63%	The Five-Year Engagement (2012)	" A charming, funny, reactionary mating comedy from the Judd Apatow factory..." — New York Magazine Posted Apr 30, 2012
93%	Marvel's The Avengers (2012)	" Comic-Con nerds will have multiple orgasms. I had a blast." — New York Magazine Posted Apr 30, 2012
75%	Sound of My Voice (2012)	" Batmanglij keeps the movie even-keeled, full of medium close-ups, underscored by ambient plinks and shimmers, with nothing to break the trance until a last scene that upends everything we thought we knew." — New York Magazine Posted Apr 23, 2012
93%	Headhunters (2012)	" The compact Hennie is a wonderful actor, smoothly congenial when confident, uproarious when rattled. And he will be rattled-as well as stabbed, shorn, bitten, mangled, and worse." — New York Magazine Posted Apr 23, 2012
21%	Darling Companion (2012)	" It has the shapeless spread of nonfiction, of a home movie with a hint of that newfangled mumblecore thing the kids these days are into." — New York Magazine Posted Apr 15, 2012
81%	Goodbye First Love (2012)	" There's nothing like a film about wayward passions to remind you how differently people feel things." — New York Magazine Posted Apr 15, 2012
90%	The Cabin in the Woods (2012)	" Is it scary? Not especially. But there are enough gory surprises around every bend to keep you laughing/screaming/cringing." — New York Magazine Posted Apr 9, 2012
96%	Monsieur Lazhar (2012)	" Ineffably sad-yet there's almost no loitering. The film is crisp, evenly paced, its colors bright, as sharp as the winter cold." — New York Magazine Posted Apr 9, 2012
79%	The Deep Blue Sea (2012)	" This is Rachel Weisz's movie. She's as luminous as a Pre-Raphaelite portrait, yet she brings to Hester a high-wire, modern tremulousness..." — NPR Posted Apr 6, 2012
76%	Damsels in Distress (2012)	" Damsels in Distress is wobbly and borderline twee, but it deepens as it goes along and becomes rich." — New York Magazine Posted Apr 2, 2012
87%	Bully (2012)	" Bully is repetitive and not especially artful, but children who allow themselves to see the world through the eyes of the film's victims will never be the same." — New York Magazine Posted Mar 26, 2012
84%	The Hunger Games (2012)	" Watching The Hunger Games, I was struck both by how slickly Ross hit his marks and how many opportunities he was missing to take the film to the next level -- to make it more shocking, lyrical, crazy, daring." — New York Magazine Posted Mar 22, 2012
85%	21 Jump Street (2012)	" It has a bad, slapstick first act but by midpoint becomes strangely compelling, tapping into the fantasy of reliving one's high-school years (which did a number on us all) and getting it right." — New York Magazine Posted Mar 5, 2012
96%	The Kid with a Bike (2012)	" The film is not just in the tradition of Pinocchio and A.I.: It is a worthy successor." — New York Magazine Posted Mar 5, 2012
63%	Friends With Kids (2012)	" Westfeldt, now 42, belongs to a generation (and class) of people for whom nothing about having kids is easy. Her intensity feels just right -- better than in any film I've seen in years -- for How We Breed Now." — New York Magazine Posted Mar 5, 2012
56%	The Lorax (2012)	" The badness of the picture is a shock." — New York Magazine Posted Mar 2, 2012
100%	This Is Not a Film (2012)	" An extraordinary film, and one of the few in which boredom in the face of static camerawork and lack of narrative adds to the emotional wallop." — New York Magazine Posted Feb 27, 2012
60%	Wanderlust (2012)	" Rudd might not be the subtlest straight man in movies, but, as of this moment, he's the best." — New York Magazine Posted Feb 27, 2012
60%	Wanderlust (2012)	" It takes guts to do a comedy this big without gross-out slapstick, and the writers and the actors are all in." — NPR Posted Feb 24, 2012
25%	This Means War (2012)	" Not a distinguished addition to director McG's oeuvre." — New York Magazine Posted Feb 13, 2012
86%	The Forgiveness of Blood (2012)	" [A] compelling film touching on the perils of being young-that's it, merely young-in a culture without justice." — New York Magazine Posted Feb 13, 2012
82%	Return (2012)	" This quiet, naturalistic film has a classical arc and a lingering sting." — New York Magazine Posted Feb 13, 2012
76%	Rampart (2012)	" Bad Lieutenant made by a tediously finger-wagging Jew instead of a tediously desecrating Catholic." — New York Magazine Posted Feb 6, 2012
90%	In Darkness (2012)	" In outline, In Darkness is a standard conversion melodrama, but little within those parameters is easy. The darkness lingers into the light." — New York Magazine Posted Feb 6, 2012
51%	Perfect Sense (2012)	" You've got to make room in your heart for a film in which the world ends with neither a bang nor a whimper but a cuddle." — New York Magazine Posted Jan 30, 2012
74%	Kill List (2012)	" The final twist is both baffling and repulsive, but as an evocation of the triumph of evil, it's peerless." — New York Magazine Posted Jan 30, 2012
77%	The Innkeepers (2012)	" A poky but blood-freezing throwback to the gothic horror films of the seventies, when ing�nues moved tremulously down dark corridors without holding digital video cameras." — New York Magazine Posted Jan 30, 2012
78%	The Grey (2012)	" The Grey, despite moments of sublimity, is as predictable as a funeral. When Ottway angrily calls out to God, the nonanswer is sadly redundant." — New York Magazine Posted Jan 30, 2012
55%	Albert Nobbs (2012)	" Close resembles no man I've ever seen, or woman either. She's the personification of fear-the fear of being seen through, seen for what she is." — New York Magazine Posted Jan 23, 2012
33%	Joyful Noise (2012)	" You'll find yourself rolling your eyes, but you'll have more fun if you try to roll them in time with the rollicking numbers." — New York Magazine Posted Jan 15, 2012
99%	A Separation (2011)	" What makes it so good is that no one is bad. These humans, desperate to do right, are caught up in a perfect storm of inhumanity. The evil is in the ecosystem." — New York Magazine Posted Jan 9, 2012
67%	We Bought a Zoo (2011)	" Damon and Colin Ford as his teen son have an affecting hesitancy, their hearts hovering between the living and the dead." — New York Magazine Posted Dec 30, 2011
47%	Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2012)	" Homes in on a middle ground between jumpy postmodernism and Oscar-bait uplift." — New York Magazine Posted Dec 30, 2011
77%	War Horse (2011)	" Amid the incomprehensible slaughter, it's a horse that reminds these warriors of their humanity." — New York Magazine Posted Dec 30, 2011
54%	The Iron Lady (2012)	" The Iron Lady is shallow but satisfying, largely because of Meryl Streep and her big fake English teeth and gift for using mimicry as a means of achieving empathy." — New York Magazine Posted Dec 29, 2011
83%	Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)	" It's a treat to be back in Le Carr�'s world, where amid the tangle of plots and counterplots there are moments of lucidity when you sit up and say, "I've got it now!"" — New York Magazine Posted Dec 12, 2011
94%	Hugo (2011)	" For all the wizardry on display, Hugo often feels like a film about magic instead of a magical film..." — New York Magazine Posted Nov 28, 2011
93%	Coriolanus (2011)	" Fiennes and Logan haven't made a definitive Coriolanus, but they've made a sensationally gripping one. They have the pulse of the play, its firm martial beats and its messy political clatter. They tell a damn good story." — New York Magazine Posted Nov 28, 2011
94%	Hugo (2011)	" For all my cavils, this is one of those wonders of the world you need to see." — Vulture Posted Nov 23, 2011
26%	Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 (2011)	" The last twenty minutes of Breaking Dawn are so harrowing that it's possible to forget that most of the acting is soap-operatic (the guy who plays Carlisle is aging to look like Liberace) and the dialogue from hunger." — New York Magazine Posted Nov 20, 2011
89%	The Descendants (2011)	" Mockery and empathy seesaw, the balance precarious -- and thrillingly so. It's the noblest kind of satire: cruel and yet, in the end, lacking the killing blow." — New York Magazine Posted Nov 14, 2011
44%	J. Edgar (2011)	" It's too bad J. Edgar is so shapeless and turgid and ham-handed, so rich in bad lines and worse readings." — New York Magazine Posted Nov 6, 2011

Showing 1 - 50 of 1183

Previous | Next

Sort by Rating:

Sort results by this critic's rating. This option is only available for critics with a rating system (4 star, letter grade, 1-10, etc.)
Sort by T-meter:

Sort results by the Tomatometer (percentage of critics recommending a certain movie)