Kyle Smith
Tomatometer-approved critic
| Publications: | New York Post, National Review, KyleSmithOnline.com |
Movie Reviews Only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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| 81% | Never Look Away (2018) |
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
Read More | Posted Jan 17, 2019
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| 37% | 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
Read More | Posted Jan 17, 2019
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| 96% | 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
Read More | Posted Jan 10, 2019
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| 31% | 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
Read More | Posted Dec 27, 2018
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| 62% | 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
Read More | Posted Dec 21, 2018
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| 71% | On the Basis of Sex (2019) |
A biopic as sturdy and unshowy as its subject.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Dec 20, 2018
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| 64% | 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
Read More | Posted Dec 20, 2018
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| 78% | 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
Read More | Posted Dec 17, 2018
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| 67% | 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
Read More | Posted Dec 13, 2018
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| 64% | 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
Read More | Posted Dec 12, 2018
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| 83% | 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
Read More | Posted Nov 19, 2018
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| 82% | 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
Read More | Posted Nov 14, 2018
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| 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
Read More | Posted Nov 5, 2018
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| 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
Read More | Posted Nov 5, 2018
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| 62% | 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
Read More | Posted Oct 31, 2018
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| 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
Read More | Posted Oct 19, 2018
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| 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
Read More | Posted Oct 18, 2018
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| 77% | Mid90s (2018) |
Mid90s thinks it's about resilience. Actually it's about stupidity.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Oct 16, 2018
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| 92% | 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
Read More | Posted Oct 16, 2018
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| 61% | 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
Read More | Posted Oct 12, 2018
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| 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
Read More | Posted Oct 9, 2018
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| 88% | First Man (2018) |
First Man is why we go to the movies.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Oct 8, 2018
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| 90% | A Star Is Born (2018) |
A Star Is Born has little insight into where stars come from and even less into how they disappear.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Oct 5, 2018
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| 89% | King Lear (2018) |
In short, Eyre's style is a superb way to approach the Bard in the age of the Shard.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Oct 3, 2018
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| 74% | Bad Times at the El Royale (2018) |
Despite some appealing qualities, it is in the end a stylish misfire.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Oct 3, 2018
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| 94% | Private Life (2018) |
Frustration is not an emotion I seek out when I go to the movies. For all of the heartache going on in Private Life, as a narrative journey it winds up traveling approximately a quarter of an inch.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Oct 2, 2018
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| 95% | If Beale Street Could Talk (2019) |
It's not a sophisticated view but a reductionist one.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Oct 2, 2018
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| 93% | The Favourite (2018) |
What [his] tools primarily do is create a fantastic sense of suspense, to have us begging to know how he could possibly wrap it all up. The answer is, he can't, not in a way that satisfies. ‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Oct 2, 2018
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| 97% | The Hate U Give (2018) |
For black people to put aside their disputes with police and work with them to clean up crime in the black community turns out to be the only solution. Makes sense to me. But I sure didn't expect to hear it in a Hollywood movie.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Sep 28, 2018
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| 85% | The Sisters Brothers (2018) |
Surely there must be more here, right? No, there really isn't. ‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Sep 21, 2018
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| 81% | Fahrenheit 11/9 (2018) |
Moore's style isn't inflammatory, it's just tedious. To the extent the film is an attempt to make conservatives angry, all I can say is, nice try, Michael. You should have called your movie Fahrenheit: Room Temperature.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Sep 20, 2018
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| 92% | Mandy (2018) |
Mandy is, like that weird little goblin, a thing of demon energy and murderous concentration, eager to get on with the business of messing with you. It's one of the wildest, weirdest, most exciting movies of the year.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Sep 19, 2018
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| 32% | The Predator (2018) |
It's just a choppy, lackluster, thinly written monster action flick peppered with the kinds of gags you thought were funny in puberty.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Sep 13, 2018
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| 60% | White Boy Rick (2018) |
Whether Rick deserves to serve ten years or 30 isn't a compelling enough question around which to build the climax of a movie.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Sep 12, 2018
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| 91% | Hal (2018) |
Makes a vigorous but somewhat unconvincing case for Ashby's importance.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Sep 6, 2018
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| 95% | Lenny (1974) |
Few films before Lenny are so ingeniously edited, and yet because the jumpy style has become so familiar in film and television, we no longer appreciate how innovative the approach of Fosse and his film editor, Alan Heim, was.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Sep 5, 2018
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| 95% | RBG (2018) |
The film relies heavily on pop-culture imagery (Ginsburg's face grafted onto Wonder Woman, Kate McKinnon doing a ridiculously extroverted Ginsburg on Saturday Night Live) to make a case for Ginsburg as icon.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Sep 4, 2018
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| 91% | Crazy Rich Asians (2018) |
It's a luxury-lifestyle catalogue on a 40-foot screen. How many other movies can say that?... We go to movies for escape, and Crazy Rich Asians provides it by letting viewers revel in limitless lucre guilt-free.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Sep 4, 2018
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| 95% | Andrei Rublev (1973) |
Draining as it is to endure, Andrei Rublev is an intensely devoted act of respect for the artists whose brilliance and courage were equally essential to keeping the Christian flame burning through the darkest hours.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Aug 30, 2018
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| 95% | BlacKkKlansman (2018) |
Spike Lee has turned in a pro-cop film has to be counted one of the stranger cultural developments of 2018, but Lee seems to have accidentally aligned with cops in the course of issuing an anti-Trump broadside. ‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Aug 29, 2018
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| 23% | The Happytime Murders (2018) |
For the most part it's just a dumb whodunnit that has as many twists and turns as a toothpick, along with inappropriate-behavior gags that lack imagination and get tiresome quickly.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Aug 23, 2018
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| 83% | Juliet, Naked (2018) |
Both Hawke and Byrne give deeply felt performances.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Aug 20, 2018
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| 96% | Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind (2018) |
The film contains plenty of revealing moments... and as a fan I was transfixed. ‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Aug 15, 2018
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| 92% | Sorry to Bother You (2018) |
I'm sorry I bothered. The comedy is not just lame, it's ringing with lameness, wearing out trite gags that were stale to begin with.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Aug 15, 2018
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| 89% | Far From the Tree (2018) |
The film is stirringly humane.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Jul 19, 2018
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| 81% | Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018) |
Let it not be said that the director, Oliver Parker, is less than fully committed to this material.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Jul 18, 2018
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| 84% | Heartbreak Ridge (1986) |
What elevates the film are its dead-on verisimilitude about 1980s military culture, its lightly-worn insights into the larger issues at stake, and its precision-lathed dialogue, which is smart but never smarmy.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Jul 13, 2018
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| 88% | Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) |
So Ant-Man and the Wasp is worthwhile, if not a must-see, appealing less for its thundering action than for its throwaway gags.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Jul 13, 2018
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| 97% | Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018) |
The M:I franchise is now 22 years old, but it isn't folding anytime soon.‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Jul 13, 2018
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| 33% | The Catcher Was A Spy (2018) |
Alas, as directed by Lewin and written by Robert Rodat, the biopic has the feel and the trappings of a thrown-together made-for-TV item: overbearing music, flat declarative dialogue, and surprisingly broad acting from its supporting players‐ National Review
Read More | Posted Jun 21, 2018
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