Richard Brody

Richard Brody
Tomatometer-approved critic
Publications: New Yorker

Movie Reviews Only

T-Meter Title | Year
70% Stromboli (1950) Far from disguising or downplaying the production's methods and realities, Rossellini puts them into the foreground and builds upon them the movie's grand emotional world-and his grand social and spiritual vision. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 6, 2021
52% Coming 2 America (2021) What puts comedy to sleep isn't the respectfulness that wrongly gets derided as political correctness; it's nostalgia, which provides the false good feelings that turn comedy into self-satisfaction. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 5, 2021
No Score Yet Thomasine and Bushrod (1974) The horrific landscape of lynchings and summary executions puts their impulsive energy and taut composure into fatal focus. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 1, 2021
82% Comedy of Power (2006) Drawing on the real-life prosecution of a recent scandal, Chabrol, a former law student, seems to be having more fun with a film than he's had in years, and it's contagious. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 1, 2021
No Score Yet The Perfumed Nightmare (Mababangong Bangugot) (1980) An audacious classic of independent filmmaking. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 1, 2021
No Score Yet Dons of Disco (2021) Sutak tells this amazing story with an admirable directness and simplicity; he avoids the sense of documentary convention and seems to be following the urgency of his own sense of wonder. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 28, 2021
75% The Cat's Meow (2001) Bogdanovich ruefully links the allure of classic Hollywood and the ruthlessness of its potentates. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 22, 2021
94% Test Pattern (2021) Reveals, with fiercely focussed observation, the combined breakdown of public institutions and private life. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 22, 2021
94% Nomadland (2021) In the end, "Nomadland" delivers a liberal-libertarian longing for a vague, undefined restoration of what was. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 20, 2021
100% Lola (1981) The self-aware candor of the actors' efforts converges with Fassbinder's cinema of consciousness, not cynical or knowing cinema but a critical one... - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 13, 2021
98% Minari (2020) Chung's teeming recollections and extrapolations are muted by the reductive conventionality of their depiction. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 12, 2021
93% Saint Maud (2020) In providing the jolts that Maud's terrifying actions and fantasies provoke rather than the taut and complex web of life that they wrench apart, the movie suggests less interest in Maud than in images of Maud which, as a result, feel nearly empty. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 8, 2021
100% Master of the House (1925) Dreyer's small-scale comedy, with its meticulous depiction of the thousand little chores of domestic order and occasional flashes of visual brilliance and startling symbolism, is nothing less than a child's muted cry of rage against the eternal elders. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 8, 2021
96% Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) The film is mainly a collection of sketch-like scenes; the protagonists are given traits in lieu of depth, and the results are informative but unenlightening. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 8, 2021
86% I Was a Simple Man (2021) Yogi creates a cinema that is simultaneously meticulously physical and wildly metaphysical, offering passionate dramatic correlates and symbols for the unrepresentable-for the subjective experience of death. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 2, 2021
100% All Light, Everywhere (2021) For all its analytical focus and leaps into epistemological abstractions, "All Light, Everywhere" is a film of individual and immediate fascinations. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 2, 2021
97% In the Same Breath (2021) "In the Same Breath" is a fervent work of reporting, filled with shocking revelations on both a close-up, experiential level and on the level of overarching statistics and trends. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 2, 2021
88% My Brother's Wedding (1984) Burnett fills the film with voices and memories, humor and rage; his vision of neighborhood life has an ample, passionate generosity. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 1, 2021
58% Malcolm & Marie (2020) Levinson's reduction of Malcolm to his mouthpiece, and of Marie to Malcolm's conscience, rings hollow and vain. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 1, 2021
90% Dishonored (1931) The elaborate disguises, sophisticated ruses, and arachnid schemes... display the elegant beauty of fakery; their ultimate truth is disclosed in Dietrich's insolent smile when facing down men with guns. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Feb 1, 2021
No Score Yet Whispers (1980) It achieves its many layers of introspective reflection and wide-ranging observation with a sophisticated and intricate sense of cinematic composition. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 29, 2021
55% King Lear (1987) Godard's King Lear may be...extraordinarily timely. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 26, 2021
No Score Yet Enormous (2020) The director Sophie Letourneur, French cinema's near-mumblecorean, fuses sketch comedy with documentary inquiry in this tale of an odd couple's tangled journey to parenthood. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 26, 2021
95% You Will Die at Twenty (2021) Abu Alala's ardent attention to daily details, rooted in political and cultural history, offers a powerful symbolic vision of the tormented and violent legacy of dogmatism and dictatorship. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 25, 2021
46% Locked Down (2021) It strains to dramatize the emotional emptiness of isolation and, instead, uses it as a facile premise. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 25, 2021
No Score Yet About Some Meaningless Events (1974) Further proof (as if it were ever needed) that aesthetic imagination and civic engagement aren't opposed, but, rather, are mutually reinforcing. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 22, 2021
No Score Yet Success Is The Best Revenge (1985) With a florid style and a pugnacious tone, Skolimowski evokes the tangled paradoxes of freedom and the illusions of nostalgia alike. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 18, 2021
76% Pieces of a Woman (2020) Its effortful grandiosity transforms it into something hollow and even, at times, risible. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 15, 2021
100% Mandabi (1969) Sembène looks ruefully yet tenderly at the ruses and wiles of the poor, whose desperate struggles-with the authorities and with one another-distract them from political revolt. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 11, 2021
90% Luxor (2020) The dialogue is thin and the action is patchy, but Durra films Hana's travels-and the places that she visits-with an ardent attention that fuses emotional life with aesthetic and intellectual exploration. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 11, 2021
44% The Long, Long Trailer (1954) [A] frenetic and intricate comedy... - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 4, 2021
74% Rumble Fish (1983) A myth-infused coming-of-age story that's directed with a grandly imaginative visual repertoire to match. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Jan 4, 2021
No Score Yet The Belovs (1994) Kossakovsky shares an empathetic complicity with Anna and looks at Mikhail with gimlet-eyed reserve; he views the relentless labor of farm life as a mark of devoted humanity and cosmic futility. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 21, 2020
93% Sylvie's Love (2020) The movie rushes through its plot and keeps character development spare, but its imaginative flair packs great emotional power. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 21, 2020
95% Soul (2020) Far from teaching children to follow their dreams, the movie... advocates leaving the dreaming to the pros. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 21, 2020
98% One Night in Miami (2020) The fervent performances, which King passionately and probingly spotlights, match the momentousness of the high-stakes dialectical wrangling. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 21, 2020
86% Mutual Appreciation (2006) Bujalski has a logical eye for parsing casually unfolding events with visual coherence, and his dryly satirical view of grownups' fatuities doesn't lose sight of the charming vanity of youthful illusions. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 21, 2020
89% Let Them All Talk (2020) "Let Them All Talk" offers enough surprises of tone, pleasures of mood, and piquantly composed images to carry the film through with a sort of visual music, compensating for the dramatic thinness without overcoming it. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 18, 2020
88% THE GODFATHER, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (2020) The film's tautly controlled turbulence guides the eye to salient details, its clarified lines of dramatic tension calmly burst into images of an explosive yet nearly static intensity. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 13, 2020
95% To the Ends of the Earth (Tabi no Owari Sekai no Hajimari) (2020) Kiyoshi Kurosawa's contemplative and critical melodrama is a travelogue about a travelogue, a tale of the fabrications of reality TV and their effect on the fabricators. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 7, 2020
91% She Done Him Wrong (1933) With a tantalizing control of tempo, West sashays and quips her way through a web of crime and local politics, flaunting a carefree erotic radiance that mixes business and pleasure with gleefully feigned indifference. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 7, 2020
83% Mank (2020) An astutely probing and pain-filled work of speculative historical psychology-and a vision of Hollywood politics that shines a fervent plus ça change spotlight on current events. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 4, 2020
100% Talking About Trees (2019) Some of the best talk, and some of the most dedicated collaborations, and some of the warmest friendships that I've seen in a movie in quite a while. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Dec 4, 2020
89% Black Bear (2020) The drama's rapt focus on Allison, along with its depiction of high-risk cinematic adventures, is its hot emotional core, and only an excess narrative wink or two dampen its energies. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 30, 2020
97% Billie (2020) Despite some dubious editing (including the colorization of images), Erskine aptly anchors the movie in Holiday's art, with well-chosen clips of her startlingly intense performances. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 30, 2020
25% Hillbilly Elegy (2020) With his soupy, impersonal manipulations of memory and experience, void of the burrs that attach them to the world at large, Howard, whether intentionally or not, has made a libertarian's fantasy. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 28, 2020
100% La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV (The Taking of Power by Louis XIV)(The Rise of Louis XIV) (1970) Rossellini deftly and briskly turns ideas into action... - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 20, 2020
86% The Scarlet Empress (1934) Josef von Sternberg makes the cruelty the point in his lurid and macabre spectacle about the rise to absolute power of Catherine the Great, of Russia, who's played with an arachnid subtlety by Marlene Dietrich. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 20, 2020
98% Chimes at Midnight (1965) ...multiple dimensions of tragedy and devises a passionately vigorous repertory of images to embody it... - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 20, 2020
No Score Yet The Princess Yang Kwei Fei (Yôkihi) (1955) Mizoguchi films the imperial romance with robust ardor and delicate humor; he delineates the cruelly punitive constraints of law that are placed on women at court with bitter clarity... - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 20, 2020