Richard Brody Movie Reviews & Previews

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Richard Brody

Agrees with the Tomatometer 81% of the time.

Publications:: New Yorker

Total Reviews:: 158

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Showing 1 - 50 of 158

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T-Meter	Title \| Year	Add Date
90%	Wanda (1971)	" If there is a female counterpart to John Cassavetes, Barbara Loden is it." — New Yorker Posted May 3, 2013
——	Crime in the Streets ()	" The film is built around long takes of tightly composed performances, culminating in a bravura four-minute shot with entrances and exits brilliantly orchestrated by the commanding presence of Cassavetes." — New Yorker Posted May 3, 2013
94%	A Woman Under the Influence (1975)	" The primal violence that binds men and woman has rarely been evoked as plausibly or intensely as in this 1974 drama." — New Yorker Posted May 3, 2013
71%	Husbands (1970)	" Few films capture with such life-affirming wonder the despair, hatred, and incomprehension that drives the sexes together and apart." — New Yorker Posted May 3, 2013
81%	The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)	" John Cassavetes, who made much of his money performing in action films, put that experience to work as the director of this hard, brooding crime drama" — New Yorker Posted May 3, 2013
93%	The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)	" There's much to say about it; the simplest is that it's both the most romantic of Westerns and the greatest American political movie." — New Yorker Posted Apr 29, 2013
51%	Post Tenebras Lux (2013)	" The premise is realized with a sludgy, bombastic portentousness; the images, for all their strained rhapsody, show little, and merely recite a thesis." — New Yorker Posted Apr 29, 2013
46%	Pain & Gain (2013)	" A brash, vulgar, exhilaratingly vigorous, spontaneously complex hoot of a true-crime movie." — New Yorker Posted Apr 25, 2013
100%	Rio Bravo (1998)	" The movie is simultaneously an apogee of the classic Western style, with its principled violence in defense of just law, and an eccentrically hyperbolic work of modernism, which yokes both bumptious erotic comedy and soul-searing rawness to the mission." — New Yorker Posted Apr 23, 2013
79%	An Oversimplification Of Her Beauty (2013)	" This brisk and self-searching, sharply intelligent and deeply vulnerable romantic comedy is a masterwork of reflexive construction." — New Yorker Posted Apr 22, 2013
——	Meshes of the Afternoon ()	" Deren is one of the great screen presences; with her billowing hair and lugubrious gaze, she incarnates the eternal bohemian, rendering morbidity alluring and turning the air of idealistic purpose into a dance of seduction." — New Yorker Posted Apr 22, 2013
54%	At Any Price (2013)	" Warm-hearted performances ... are squandered in this sermon on the plain." — New Yorker Posted Apr 22, 2013
100%	Portrait of Jason (1967)	" A masterwork of grand-scale intimacy ..." — New Yorker Posted Apr 15, 2013
——	Duch, le maître des forges de l'enfer (Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell) ()	" The twist at the end, in which he explains his newfound Christian devotion, adds a bitter irony." — New Yorker Posted Apr 15, 2013
91%	A Woman of Paris (1923)	" Chaplin's manner is deft and witty, but the depiction of unchecked wealth and the moral rot it breeds links this drawing-room romance to the fierce political comedies in which he stars." — New Yorker Posted Apr 2, 2013
43%	Admission (2013)	" The many strands of this amiable yet overstuffed romantic comedy don't hang together, though each, on its own, has a modest charm." — New Yorker Posted Apr 1, 2013
87%	Upstream Color (2013)	" A vision as vast and as natural as it is reflexively cinematic and fiercely compassionate." — New Yorker Posted Apr 1, 2013
100%	Guelwaar (1992)	" Sembène, with a tense restraint, evokes a dependent country that maintains its dignity through nationalist pomp and local pride, and portrays one long-suffering family that bears Senegal's burdens in microcosm." — New Yorker Posted Apr 1, 2013
100%	Le Pont du Nord (2013)	" In Rivette's rhapsodically probing view, the labyrinthine city of recondite romanticism and the bloody ideals of revolutionary heroism appear fated to vanish together ..." — New Yorker Posted Mar 25, 2013
——	Wichita (1955)	" Daniel Ullman's script turns backroom political dealings into high drama; Tourneur's poised and lyrical direction elevates it to a sort of secular scripture." — New Yorker Posted Mar 25, 2013
91%	Gimme The Loot (2013)	" The idea is good but the result is saccharine; the movie plays more like an outline that's still awaiting its point of view." — New Yorker Posted Mar 25, 2013
33%	Don Quixote (Don Quijote de Orson Welles) (1992)	" This assemblage of Welles's footage by Jess Franco, from 1992, is crude, gappy, and slapdash, but it hardly matters: the pathos of Welles's thinly veiled self-portrait is almost unbearable." — New Yorker Posted Mar 11, 2013
80%	La Mariée était en Noir (The Bride Wore Black) (1968)	" Truffaut suggests a nation straining to burst its carapace of moralism. The film's subject and its object converge in the same self-liberating social revolution that would shake the country the following year." — New Yorker Posted Mar 11, 2013
81%	Mr. Arkadin (Confidential Report) (1962)	" This fractured Citizen Kane, built of frames within frames and mirrors within mirrors, is aptly brought to life by Welles's later style, born of low budgets and high anxiety, its grotesque closeups and cocked angles suggesting worlds and minds askew." — New Yorker Posted Mar 11, 2013
71%	The Wedding March (1928)	" As this extravagant, wickedly ironic 1928 melodrama shows, Erich von Stroheim was not only a supreme (if typecast) actor but one of the greatest silent-era directors." — New Yorker Posted Mar 7, 2013
85%	The Devil Probably (Le diable probablement) (1977)	" Both the world and Bresson's cinema are in disarray, and the signs of his inner conflict are deeply troubling and tremendously moving." — New Yorker Posted Mar 5, 2013
100%	Tôkyô boshoku (Tokyo Twilight) (1957)	" This turbulent and grim family melodrama, from 1957, is steered away from the maudlin and given emotional depth and philosophical heft under the direction of Yasujiro Ozu." — New Yorker Posted Mar 4, 2013
99%	Metropolis (1927)	" Lang hardly moves the camera; he knows all the angles, and keeps the focus on the overwhelming, colossal contrivances that arise from an ambient megalomania and the infinitesimally calibrated, razor-sharp machinations that they provoke." — New Yorker Posted Feb 25, 2013
78%	Red Flag (2013)	" [A] loose-limbed, whiplash-funny scant-budget road movie." — New Yorker Posted Feb 19, 2013
——	Gebo et l'ombre ()	" An exquisite yet anguished spectacle, a grand piece of cinematic chamber music for a cast of mighty soloists." — New Yorker Posted Feb 4, 2013
16%	A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III (2013)	" The imaginative twists, histrionic inventions, and decorative whimsy have a winningly ingenuous and energetic cleverness; through it all, this ebulliently overblown character never manages to cut himself down to size." — New Yorker Posted Feb 4, 2013
——	Rome Burns: A Portrait of Shirley Clarke ()	" Well-chosen clips from the films confirm the power of her techniques, as well as their evolution on the basis of her own changing aesthetic pleasures." — New Yorker Posted Jan 28, 2013
4%	Movie 43 (2013)	" Deadly dull, unfunny, offensive, and stultifyingly clumsy." — New Yorker Posted Jan 25, 2013
97%	Paul Williams Still Alive (2012)	" The insightful, rueful, intensely self-critical and self-aware Williams delivers a harsh look at his own accomplishments, as well as at Kessler's process." — New Yorker Posted Jan 21, 2013
100%	Tarnished Angels (1958)	" An enduring philosophical strain of proto-feminist endurance in a land that's both made and menaced by its intrepid warriors." — New Yorker Posted Jan 21, 2013
30%	Broken City (2013)	" [An] overproduced, underobserved, yet agreeably twisty new political thriller ..." — New Yorker Posted Jan 21, 2013
85%	Blast of Silence (1961)	" This compact and forceful low-budget film noir ... compresses a week in a hit man's bitter life into a dazzlingly brisk yet richly nuanced seventy-seven minutes." — New Yorker Posted Jan 14, 2013
——	Un monde sans femmes ()	" [A] bittersweet, delicately observed pair of involuted comedies ..." — New Yorker Posted Jan 14, 2013
92%	Night Across the Street (2013)	" Ruiz's final film is one of the cinema's grandest, most graceful farewells to life." — New Yorker Posted Jan 7, 2013
——	Le marin masqué ()	" This medium-length film, directed by Letourneur, brings a bracingly droll inventiveness to its tender intrigue." — New Yorker Posted Jan 7, 2013
86%	Edipo re (Oedipus Rex) (1967)	" Pasolini both humanizes the classical legend and reaches deep into the modern psyche to find its origins in ancient agonies." — New Yorker Posted Dec 31, 2012
51%	Promised Land (2013)	" Whatever ambiguity the movie's core lacks is rebalanced at the surface; its organic textures are woven on a conspicuously synthetic frame." — New Yorker Posted Dec 17, 2012
70%	Cheyenne Autumn (1964)	" A sort of frontier Exodus that's filmed with a majestic passion for the wild lands and for its indigenous dwellers." — New Yorker Posted Dec 17, 2012
50%	Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012)	" Several sequences of this gorefest, which is posed between hyperkinetic martial-arts mayhem and near-static moments of confusion and terror, have a gleeful virtuosity that nearly redeems its lumbering longueurs and generic splatter." — New Yorker Posted Dec 10, 2012
88%	Vivement dimanche! (Finally, Sunday)(Confidentially Yours) (1983)	" With the clack of spike heels on pavement and the shadow of bare legs through frosted glass, Truffaut evokes the spontaneous sexual spectacle of city life." — New Yorker Posted Dec 3, 2012
53%	Love, Marilyn (2012)	" Monroe's vulnerability and sense of inadequacy, her frustration and solitude, come through poignantly." — New Yorker Posted Dec 3, 2012
100%	The Whole Town's Talking (Passport to Fame) (1935)	" Satirically yet trenchantly embraces a wide range of modern experience, from the political to the intimate." — New Yorker Posted Dec 3, 2012
100%	Shadow of a Doubt (1943)	" Peels back the welcoming warmth and sincere innocence of small-town life to reveal the gullibility and the naïveté underneath; it's a fiction about the perpetuation of fictions." — New Yorker Posted Dec 3, 2012
73%	Skammen (Shame) (1968)	" Ingmar Bergman stretches a classic Bergman couple on the tightening rack of war." — New Yorker Posted Dec 3, 2012

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