Kyle Smith

Tomatometer-approved critic

Publications: New York Post, National Review, KyleSmithOnline.com

Movie Reviews Only

Movies
TV

T-Meter	Title \| Year	Review
88%	John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019)	So the writing is video-game thin. But if you take the film in the spirit in which it is intended, as a series of elaborately choreographed set pieces, it's thrilling enough, at least at the beginning and the end. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted May 16, 2019
50%	Tolkien (2019)	A pleasing if somewhat routine bildungsroman about the disturbingly Dickensian youth and happily Dickensian rise of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted May 8, 2019
85%	Meeting Gorbachev (2019)	The director's sympathetic attitude toward his subject makes the film that much more damning. Herzog was not seeking to nail Gorbachev... Like other Herzog subjects, the former Soviet leader loosened up enough to reveal more than he intended. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted May 3, 2019
87%	Non-Fiction (2019)	The films of writer-director Assayas are subtle to the point of inviting varied interpretations... I'm not sure being hard to pin down is admirable, but as usual his latest effort rewards attentive viewers. It's pleasingly tricksy and loaded with subtext. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted May 2, 2019
73%	Iron Man 2 (2010)	Iron Man 2 would be surpassed by some other offerings in the MCU, notably the first two Captain America movies, but it remains one of the smartest and least silly chapters in the 22-film extravaganza. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 26, 2019
94%	Avengers: Endgame (2019)	This three-hour epic is more or less what we were all looking for. Regardless of whether the Avengers saga goes on, this one satisfyingly closes the book on its first era, eleven years that remade the movies. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 24, 2019
45%	Mary Magdalene (2019)	One glance at Joaquin Phoenix being morose and anguished and weirdly sinister and the people of Judea would not have said, "Tell us more, teacher." They would have dialed IX-I-I. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 22, 2019
98%	The Searchers (1956)	Apart from its stunning Monument Valley photography, The Searchers is mostly hokey and thinly written. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 17, 2019
86%	Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (Préparez vos Mouchoirs) (1978)	Get Out Your Handkerchiefs is a farce played absolutely deadpan, with such an exaggerated solemnity that it baffled the kinds of critics who like to be properly alerted when it's time to laugh. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 17, 2019
100%	Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists (2018)	To guys like Breslin and Pete Hamill, a dive bar was an office where you met the characters, learned the secrets. Who does that anymore? - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 17, 2019
93%	Support the Girls (2018)	A canny, sophisticated, well-observed workplace comedy. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 17, 2019
90%	Shazam! (2019)	The screenwriters, Henry Gayden and Darren Lemke, prove unable to elevate the material beyond its 1970s Saturday-morning-television feel. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 12, 2019
63%	The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2019)	What the point of any of it is, I couldn't say. It's all jumble and stumble. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 9, 2019
65%	Peterloo (2019)	It may be that Leigh thinks Peterloo is so criminally neglected by history that he had to abandon his customary understatement and grab us by the lapels. Unfortunately for him, nobody likes a two-and-half-hour rant, no matter how loudly delivered. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 8, 2019
57%	The Highwaymen (2019)	It's a pleasing tale of resourceful, hard-nosed cops that's also something of an essay on cinema and society. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Apr 4, 2019
83%	The Brink (2019)	Director Klayman is less tendentious than most political documentarians, eschewing narration and not pushing viewers too hard... - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 29, 2019
47%	Dumbo (2019)	Confronted with an already-thin story, Burton decided to stretch it out, creating a movie that's neither grand nor a waste of time. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 27, 2019
94%	Us (2019)	I didn't find any of it particularly engaging despite Peele's nudging us to attach some sociopolitical importance to developments. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 22, 2019
73%	Dragged Across Concrete (2019)	Dragged Across Concrete doesn't gush with blood, but that doesn't mean it isn't gratuitously unpleasant... So beware, but also take notice, because Zahler is the most bewitching maker of B movies working right now. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 21, 2019
77%	The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019)	In his penetrating new HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, the Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney weighs Holmes' alleged fraud in the context of the fantasyland that is Silicon Valley. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 19, 2019
71%	Triple Frontier (2019)	A movie about super-soldiers going up against the odds might have been formulaic, but it would have been more interesting than this one, which is about tough-talking incompetents. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 15, 2019
78%	Captain Marvel (2019)	The trap the filmmakers set for themselves is this: They set out to make a girl-power statement - but feared acknowledging any differences between men and women. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 5, 2019
59%	Greta (2019)	Huppert at her worst is still pretty good. Not that her latest film is much of anything, except trash. It's debatable whether Greta is intended to be as ridiculous as it is, but it may appeal to fans of preposterous, catty, campy thrillers. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 4, 2019
98%	Apollo 11 (2019)	I doubt that any other film released in 2019 will be as breathtaking as Apollo 11, a glorious IMAX documentary that simply flings you into the excitement of what Walter Cronkite is heard calling "man's greatest adventure." - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 1, 2019
85%	The Tree of Life (2011)	Malick makes some daring, strange, brilliant choices whose connections reveal themselves only gradually and obliquely. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 21, 2019
92%	Fighting with My Family (2019)	Fighting with My Family puts a British sense of humor inside a chassis of American gusto. It's as if Hugh Grant became a NASCAR driver. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 13, 2019
100%	They Shall Not Grow Old (2019)	This monumental cinematic achievement re-creates the experience of war like no documentary I've ever seen... Don't miss it. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 6, 2019
63%	Velvet Buzzsaw (2019)	This sketch of the art world feels true enough, but so what? Contemporary art long ago shrank itself down to the size of a softball, and a softball is pretty easy to hit. A softball that insists it is edgy is just pathetic. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 5, 2019
76%	Never Look Away (2019)	It's about the biggest themes (art, war, love, death), it's emotionally overwhelming, its dialogue is lapidary, its musical score transporting. It's one of the best films of the decade. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 17, 2019
38%	Glass (2019)	In part an oblique reflection on all that is happening in its genre, and I consider it [Shyamalan's] most mature and interesting film since The Sixth Sense. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 17, 2019
97%	Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018)	A pointillist portrait of black life in Alabama in which a series of bright little moments together form a broad and gorgeous tableau. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 10, 2019
33%	Welcome to Marwen (2018)	This theater-emptier must be one of the most bizarrely misconceived attempts at blockbuster entertainment ever released by a major studio... Those who complain that studio movies have gotten stale and formulaic, here's your punishment. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 27, 2018
63%	Bird Box (2018)	Frequently takes breaks for levity... I didn't mind. I appreciated the throwback quality. Directed by Susanne Bier, Bird Box is shameless entertainment, so hurrah for that. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 21, 2018
73%	On the Basis of Sex (2019)	A biopic as sturdy and unshowy as its subject. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 20, 2018
67%	Vice (2018)	Blinded by his need to make sure you really, really get that Cheney is evil, McKay has characters just spell it out for you, as though putting it on a blackboard. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 20, 2018
79%	Mary Poppins Returns (2018)	I hope today's kids will flock to Mary Poppins Returns, not to teach them any lessons about How Things Were but to remind them how much the imagination can do without a single electronic gizmo. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 17, 2018
69%	The Mule (2018)	The final images of The Mule may be the last we see of [Clint Eastwood] at the movies. If so, what an exit: understated perfection, with a playful hint of subverting his screen image. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 13, 2018
65%	Aquaman (2018)	Aquaman is such an eyeball-scald and an eardrum-shiv it makes me long for the relative excellence of Justice League. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 12, 2018
84%	Creed II (2018)	A surprise-free movie can be a satisfying one, if the grace notes are played with care. They are in Creed II. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Nov 19, 2018
78%	Green Book (2018)	Green Book is a film that instructs us in the voice of a kindergarten teacher, expecting that we'll respond like five-year-olds. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Nov 14, 2018
82%	The Other Side of the Wind (2018)	Wind... contains enough inspiration and beauty to provide fodder for a film-school paper, but like (almost) everything [Welles] did it's undisciplined to the point of exasperation. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Nov 5, 2018
59%	The Front Runner (2018)	Reitman cops to modeling his film after The Candidate, which was considered the cutting edge of cynicism in 1972 but today seems naïve. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Nov 5, 2018
61%	Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)	So I enjoyed the film, even as I wished for more from the director, Bryan Singer, than lackluster cinematic and thematic choices. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 31, 2018
80%	At Eternity's Gate (2018)	If Schnabel, the director of one of the few truly sublime films released this century, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, is a shaky writer he brings the appropriate visual allure to the story. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 19, 2018
79%	Halloween (2018)	It's the kind of movie where if someone says he'd rather have dance lessons than shooting practice, he'll soon be corrected. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 18, 2018
80%	Mid90s (2018)	Mid90s thinks it's about resilience. Actually it's about stupidity. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 16, 2018
91%	The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)	With all the clashing of styles and moods, Buster Scruggs is like a digest of the Coen brothers' entire opus, currently in its fourth decade of excitedly exploring one genre after another. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 16, 2018
62%	The Oath (2018)	If anything, the movie is even more tiresome and frustrating than the most fraught Thanksgiving gathering, and I spent the early scenes longing to be somewhere, anywhere, else. Then the movie gets even worse. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 12, 2018
96%	Roma (2018)	Roma is a film that relegates politics to its proper place. Cuarón's women understand that what matters most is what happens in your family, not this week's march in the streets. It's a useful insight, maybe now more than ever. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 9, 2018
87%	First Man (2018)	First Man is why we go to the movies. - National Review EDIT Read More \| Posted Oct 8, 2018