Armond White

Tomatometer-approved critic

Publications: National Review, NPR's Fresh Air, New York Press, Out Magazine, CityArts, First Things

Critics' Group: New York Film Critics Circle, New York Film Critics Online

Movie Reviews Only

Movies
TV

T-Meter	Title \| Year	Review
39%	Downhill (2020)	This film's smarter-than-thou revelations of human foible, personal pretense, and selfishness suggest sketch comedy... Faxon, Rash, Louis-Dreyfus, and Farrell show little imagination or originality. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 14, 2020
88%	Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (2020)	Allows us to focus on how Hollywood sexuality stemmed from biblical, Freudian, Jungian foundations. In every scene, the astoundingly gorgeous Gardner embodies all those ideals in contradiction. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 7, 2020
79%	Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (2020)	Birds of Prey cheapens Robbie's razzle-dazzle characterization by politicizing it; Quinn's personal passion gets reduced to the childish inanity of out-of-control petulance. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 7, 2020
79%	The Traitor (2020)	This year's first great movie... By inquiring into the morality of the gangster film, Bellocchio is not a traitor to his art. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 31, 2020
88%	Beanpole (Dylda) (2020)	Beanpole is a Russian dossier that damns its source as well as its target. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 29, 2020
91%	Clemency (2019)	Clemency is art-movie activism, and it collapses from the lack of emotional grace. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 24, 2020
61%	Brian Banks (2019)	Director Tom Shadyac respects the moral clarity in the Brian Banks screenplay by Doug Atchison, who also wrote the moving Akeelah and the Bee, another keen observation of individual action over activism. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 24, 2020
83%	Just Mercy (2020)	Not even Michael B. Jordan, the charismatic star of Creed, can lift Just Mercy out of do-gooder drudgery. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 24, 2020
89%	1917 (2020)	Mendes's prowling-camera vision of trench and field warfare offers jolts but never surprise; as Roger Deakin's adaptable camera surges through variously lighted locales, one's suspension of disbelief is dispelled by the photogenic stunt. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 17, 2020
92%	Uncut Gems (2019)	Uncut Gems diminishes one of the richest comic sensibilities in modern cinema. It turns Sandler, the smartass who always chooses family and friendship over streetwise selfishness, into an icon of grungy nihilism. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 10, 2020
95%	Little Women (2019)	The crazy, boring, laughable thing about Greta Gerwig's version of Little Women is that casual racism is merely the start of its problems. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 27, 2019
80%	A Hidden Life (2019)	A Hidden Life is so detached from our spiritual and political needs that it feels similarly useless. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 26, 2019
52%	Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)	Through J. J. Abrams's visually inert busyness, it heralds the death of cinematic communication, if not narrative coherence - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 20, 2019
70%	Bombshell (2019)	Roach's blonde-bot casting coup cannot fake its way past the film's basic dishonesty about the corruption of journalism. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 18, 2019
76%	Richard Jewell (2019)	This late phase of Eastwood's directorial career is his best because he resists moralistic grandstanding to achieve plainness and depth. Richard Jewell is like the finest, boldest, streamlined, and conscientious B-movie. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 13, 2019
98%	Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu) (2020)	Fact is, Sciamma doesn't trust the expressiveness of her medium; despite deft technique, she stages obvious agitprop. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 6, 2019
83%	Queen & Slim (2019)	Instead of urging viewers to question media accounts and move toward self-reflection, Queen & Slim uses marketing iconography to make up for what lead actors Kaluuya and Turner-Smith lack in charisma. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 2, 2019
95%	A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)	The movie seems wary of faith (it briefly mentions that Rogers was an ordained minister) and settles for secular sentimentality to account for his sensibility and behavior. This not only weakens the film, but it also hobbles Hanks's characterization. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 2, 2019
92%	Ford v Ferrari (2019)	When it concentrates on aspects of American exceptionalism -- the personal appreciation of how America once thought itself great -- it reminds viewers of what pundits and anti-American politicians would have us forget. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Nov 22, 2019
81%	The Report (2019)	Burns lacks a sense of urgency, so the movie feels like something that sat on a shelf since 2004. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Nov 20, 2019
95%	Marriage Story (2019)	Marriage Story falls short of its models because it doesn't reflect contemporary -- Millennial -- problems surrounding intimacy. Hence, Baumbach's reluctance to call the movie what it is. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Nov 15, 2019
63%	Motherless Brooklyn (2019)	Edward Norton's Motherless Brooklyn is an embarrassment to white liberalism. Yet the film's shameless conceit is also a monument to white liberal narcissism. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Nov 13, 2019
97%	Dolemite Is My Name (2019)	While watching Dolemite Is My Name, one holds to the hope that Murphy will connect with Moore's shtick, but this film steadily disappoints its promise. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Nov 8, 2019
73%	Harriet (2019)	In Harriet, Millennial hindsight and historical revision come off as pompous and patronizing. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Nov 7, 2019
96%	The Irishman (2019)	The overwrought Irishman resembles an American kabuki play about sin that also relishes sin. It epitomizes the degradation of "where we are today." - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Nov 1, 2019
83%	Jesus is King (2019)	Jesus Is King is a spiritual work thanks to its deep feeling -- pure expression brought to today's calamitous social condition. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 30, 2019
52%	Black and Blue (2019)	Black and Blue represents a form of commercial and political calculation too amateurish to call irresponsible; it's merely desperate. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 25, 2019
70%	The Cotton Club Encore (2019)	Encore is a social-consciousness musical, brought back to challenge an era in which social consciousness itself isn't enough. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 23, 2019
96%	By the Grace of God (Grâce à Dieu) (2019)	Ozon counters the trendy notions of "toxic masculinity" and victims seeking justice. This insight into masculine vulnerability makes the film remarkable. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 18, 2019
80%	Jojo Rabbit (2019)	Waititi's simplistic view of human behavior and political history isn't even as sophisticated as Indiana Jones's witty cultural summation: "Nazis -- I hate those guys!" - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 16, 2019
99%	Parasite (Gisaengchung) (2019)	Bong is an unfunny extremist. In Parasite, he annihilates the concept of the nuclear family by setting a brood of lower-class con artists against an upper-class family unit. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 11, 2019
97%	Pain and Glory (Dolor y gloria) (2019)	All these performances (Pain and Glory is the best-acted film of year) idealize complicated human relations. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 4, 2019
68%	Joker (2019)	Phoenix and Phillips turn Joker into a sociopolitical mishmash. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 2, 2019
82%	Judy (2019)	Judy's lapidary construction is a setting for Renée Zellweger's performance, which attempts a precarious tribute... Zellweger's sensitivity ensures that only a cruel viewer could ignore Garland's struggle against common obstacles. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 27, 2019
84%	Socrates (2019)	Trading on sentimentality, this type of storytelling coerces viewers by projecting social consciousness through juvenile media icons. Above all, the ploy is politically devious; the idea of innocence is manipulated as rhetoric. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 25, 2019
No Score Yet	Tattoo of Revenge (Rencor tatuado) (2019)	Tattoo of Revenge's kaleidoscopic cross-section of bohemian, underworld, and media types is such a sensual feast that it evokes the troubled temperaments of today's social disorder. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 20, 2019
91%	Nashville (1975)	Works of popular art are rarely so pertinent as to make viewers rethink their own lives. Seen today, Nashville fills in the intellectual, spiritual, and political chasm caused by Hollywood's juvenile Millennial escapism. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 19, 2019
87%	Hustlers (2019)	Hustlers is appalling. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 13, 2019
86%	Where's My Roy Cohn? (2019)	Now that the fashionable Left has abandoned compassion -- and complexity -- this slicker-than-Michael Moore doc buries Roy Cohn as a paradigm for Machiavellian ruthlessness. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 12, 2019
88%	Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice (2019)	Ronstadt speaks of herself honestly and modestly, but the talking-heads tributes in this doc are trite. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 10, 2019
69%	Bottom of the 9th (2019)	A rare, affecting baseball film, it's also an unapologetic, unhip redemption tale. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Sep 6, 2019
89%	Blinded by the Light (2019)	Blinded by the Light actually avoids everything that is interesting about cross-ethnic pop culture. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 29, 2019
96%	American Factory (2019)	[A] facile, generalized survey. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 23, 2019
100%	Olivia (The Pit of Loneliness) (2019)	Director Audry and her sister, screenwriter Colette Audry, made Olivia as artists, not activists. And the cast of exquisitely nuanced actresses exercised imaginative understatement. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 22, 2019
79%	Good Boys (2019)	Thor's final school pageant performance of "I Want To Know What Love Is," intended to express his sense of growing apart, is the single most mawkish and dishonest movie ending so far this year. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 19, 2019
100%	Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles (Buñuel en el laberinto de las tortugas) (2019)	Children could enjoy watching the story as an ever-changing fable, but adults will get more out of its depiction of multifaceted political art. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 15, 2019
23%	The Kitchen (2019)	The Kitchen is neither a good movie nor a reliable dramatization of female power. It is, in fact, a laughable insult to women and their social circumstances. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 9, 2019
91%	Luce (2019)	More than a battle of wills between a high-school teacher and her star pupil, the movie Luce uses that familiar premise to explore the beliefs -- and the fears -- by which our enlightened, progressive society lives. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Aug 2, 2019
85%	Once Upon a Time In Hollywood (2019)	Finally, Tarantino asks audiences to think about life -- not just the movies. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 26, 2019
94%	Mike Wallace Is Here (2019)	Thanks to Belkin, we can appreciate the difference between what Wallace called "tough questions" and what an irate interview subject called "rude." - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Jul 26, 2019