Richard Brody

Richard Brody's reviews only count toward the Tomatometer when published at the following Tomatometer-approved publication(s): New Yorker

Publications: New Yorker

Movie Reviews Only

Movies
TV

T-Meter	Title \| Year	Review
80%	Dragged Across Concrete (2019)	There's no shortage of significant works of art in which characters voice repellent ideas and do repellent things that, however, are distinguished artistically from the artist's own point of view. This isn't one of them. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 20, 2019
67%	Thunderbolt (1929)	With streaks of shadow and jolting contrasts of light to match the film's eccentric lurches between violence, comedy, and onscreen musical performance... Sternberg evokes a nerve-jangling city of macabre menace. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 18, 2019
99%	Apollo 11 (2019)	Fascinating shots of hundreds of scientists glued to rows of video terminals and switchboards are reduced to mere wallpaper; the work at hand remains a mystery. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 18, 2019
79%	Captain Marvel (2019)	The problem is with the corporate anticulture that controls these productions-and the fandom-targeted demagogy that they're made to fulfill-which responsible casting can't overcome alone. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 12, 2019
No Score Yet	Pilgrimage (1933)	A powerful fable of political progress. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 11, 2019
100%	The Juniper Tree (1990)	Keene films the supernatural tale of timeless rusticity with fanatical attention to the barren and craggy seaside setting; her stunningly spare yet phantasmagorical images fuse the forces of nature with the spirit of mystery. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 11, 2019
97%	Ash Is Purest White (2019)	Jia films the stern, grand drama with an avid eye for telling details that reflect stifled political protest, the nexus of business and crime, and the high-handed dictates of ruthless officials. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 11, 2019
97%	3 Faces (2019)	Unquestioned patriarchal tradition and desperate responses to its oppressive power are dramatized in the Iranian director Jafar Panahi's sly and defiant metafictional road movie. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 11, 2019
60%	Poor White Trash (2000)	Despite its vulgarizing touches, it's a crudely effective story about tradition and modernity, misogyny and resistance. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 5, 2019
54%	Greta (2019)	it leaves the impression of a cinematic elevator pitch in which some wonderful actors are cast in the role of stick figures and given hardly a chance to humanize them. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 5, 2019
94%	An Elephant Sitting Still (Da xiang xi di er zuo) (2019)	One of the great achievements of recent cinema. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 4, 2019
72%	Climax (2019)	This numbingly dull drama, directed by Gaspar Noé, decorates its petty moralism with flashy displays of violence. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 4, 2019
100%	Black Mother (2019)	Allah-the movie's director, cinematographer, sound recordist, and editor-assembles a grand-scale and intricately detailed mosaic of personal, civic, and mythic portraiture in a mere seventy-six minutes. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Mar 4, 2019
83%	Coincoin and the Extra-Humans (Coincoin et les Z'inhumains) (2018)	A cinematic universe that's intensely personal and full of its creator's observations and insights. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 28, 2019
83%	The Hours and Times (2019)	The film delivers intellectual archeology, a rediscovery of states of mind and mood that shook the world; Münch's calm, contemplative, and quietly astonished direction vibrates with the historic excitement of the moment. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 25, 2019
99%	They Shall Not Grow Old (2019)	"They Shall Not Grow Old" is a nearly great talking-head documentary in which the talking heads are never seen, only heard. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 22, 2019
60%	Alita: Battle Angel (2019)	Rather than explore complex issues and troubling experiences by way of sci-fi future-historical fantasy, Battle Angel debases them-and its exemplary character-under the force of a blinkered and reactionary model. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 13, 2019
85%	The Graduation (Le concours) (2016)	The system that Simon analytically probes appears mainly to perpetuate itself. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 11, 2019
94%	Birds of Passage (Pájaros de verano) (2019)	Richly textured images both unfold the action in tense detail and enmesh it in its social context, rescuing cultural memory from tragic devastation. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 11, 2019
46%	What Men Want (2019)	Henson brings strength, radiance, precision, and presence to the gags and playful situations and to the drama, however mild it is; she lends the movie's artifices a surprising illusion of substance. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 9, 2019
64%	Querelle (1982)	A work of bold artistic self-renewal. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 4, 2019
71%	Piercing (2019)	For every clever twist, there's a dead giveaway; the movie's high-style décor is more alluring than the drama. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 4, 2019
93%	High Flying Bird (2019)	Using his iPhone to create urgent, luminous images of power-brokering amid gleaming glass-and-steel buildings, Soderbergh gives the intricate, pugnacious drama a mighty sense of swing. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 4, 2019
80%	The Gospel of Eureka (2019)	The movie's vision of varieties of religious experience and celebrations of identity is matched by its fervent embrace of community in the shift from hatred to acceptance. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Feb 4, 2019
19%	Serenity (2019)	"Serenity" is, instead, full of ludicrous trivializations that bypass the story's troubling implications. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 31, 2019
88%	Arctic (2019)	The latest entry in the hackneyed lone-survivor genre offers little to revitalize it. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 28, 2019
37%	Glass (2019)	Hollywood and its superhero franchises are all but coextensive, and Shyamalan's confrontation with the ubiquity, popularity, and dominance of superheroes gives "Glass" a second-level urgency. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 21, 2019
87%	The Image Book (Le livre d'image) (2019)	Centering film history on the Second World War, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, and the Cold War, Godard pursues an alternative history that relates cinematic failings to political ones. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 21, 2019
No Score Yet	Histoires D'amerique (1989)	Akerman highlights the forthright display of a distinctive Jewish-American diaspora culture, which she contrasts with the private and wary sense of Jewish identity on view in her European work. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 21, 2019
No Score Yet	Jobe'z World (2019)	Its inspirations, almost all of which are centered on Bouloukos's performance, redeem its longueurs and virtually blast them off the screen and out of memory. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 14, 2019
33%	Rockaway (2017)	Rockaway is a survivor's film, and it's seemingly warped by the agony of the experiences that Budion is trying to relate. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 11, 2019
80%	Pig (2018)	It is rare for a film to put forth so boldly precise a vision of society; it's also rare to find a satire that hardly ever falls into mere ridicule or pathos. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 10, 2019
No Score Yet	Young Solitude (Premières solitudes) (2018)	Simon elicits discussions of a novelistic depth; her assertive images give the students' words physical impact. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 7, 2019
62%	Bird Box (2018)	Unfortunately, Bird Box puts these performers through familiar paces, in roles of such tight typecasting that they seem like recurring characters in an extended TV series... - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 2, 2019
87%	L' Avocat de la Terreur (Terror's Advocate) (2007)	The story Schroeder unfolds is also his own-that of a generation that had its humanistic sympathies manipulated by unscrupulous people with agendas of horror. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Jan 2, 2019
No Score Yet	Cane River (1982)	Jenkins's spare, frank lyricism foregrounds the couple's tense discussions about the traumas of history, the weight of cultural memory, and the pressure of racial injustice; he lends the intimate tale a vast and vital resonance. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 31, 2018
93%	Bumblebee (2018)	Where the Bay "Transformers" movies alternated between ecstasy and dullness, "Bumblebee" is consistently middling. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 31, 2018
65%	Aquaman (2018)	Through it all, Jason Momoa... tosses off coyly bluff one-liners with understated humor that goes to waste in this bloated and sludgy movie. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 31, 2018
32%	Welcome to Marwen (2018)	A well-meaning, heartfelt, and vigorously engaged tribute to a remarkable person... - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 24, 2018
100%	Dead Souls (2018)	In addition to being a work of memory that brings the past imaginatively to light, "Dead Souls" is a film of resistance that, in discussing the past, also confronts the present-day activities of the Chinese government. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 20, 2018
96%	Roma (2018)	For all its worthy intentions, "Roma" is little more than the righteous affirmation of good intentions. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 19, 2018
97%	Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)	The spectacularly colorful, varied, and busy animation is impressive but bombastic, leaving little room for wonder and suggesting exertion rather than inspiration. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 17, 2018
73%	On the Basis of Sex (2019)	Sacrifices character for intricate, and often fascinating, behind-the-scenes legal maneuvers... - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 17, 2018
88%	Female Trouble (1974)	The resulting feast of sex, violence, cruelty, and frivolity mocks sentimental notions of family, work, and love, and turns the egomaniacal furies of pop culture inside out. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 17, 2018
58%	The House That Jack Built (2018)	Von Trier... simply dallies with disgusting images and ideas in a carefully calibrated, ante-upping ploy to attract attention... - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 14, 2018
70%	The Mule (2018)	Plays less like the clever action film it is than like a personal work-a movie of self-retrospection with a resonant, romantic air of regret. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 13, 2018
67%	The Great Pretender (2018)	Flashbacks and fantasies, plus wry inserts of film clips and complex overlaps of art and life, adorn-for that matter, overwhelm-the story, which is built on flimsy psychological clichés amid the implacable imperatives of desire and disease. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 10, 2018
89%	Capernaum (Capharnaüm) (2018)	Labaki depicts underworld barbarity, official indifference, and the crushing weight of traditional misogyny through Zain's ferociously intelligent, deeply principled perspective. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 10, 2018
59%	Vox Lux (2018)	"Vox Lux" sinks under the weight of its own bombastic earnestness. Unfortunately, it pulls one of the best modern actresses, Portman, down along with it. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 7, 2018
No Score Yet	Ten Days' Wonder (1972)	It's a minor masterwork of freakazoidal cinema. - New Yorker EDIT Read More \| Posted Dec 3, 2018