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
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
|---|---|---|---|
| 92% | Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) |
A strangely oblivious film, one that undercuts its story with exactly the sort of praise-hungriness that its hero learns to overcome.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Jul 17, 2017
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| 54% | Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) |
The overwhelming quantity of effects offers little style or surprise; the movie is a joyless, effortful slog.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Jul 17, 2017
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| 97% | The Big Sick (2017) |
"The Big Sick" suffers from an excess of pleasantness, and this very pleasantness thins out its substance, blands out its tone, weakens its comedy.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Jul 3, 2017
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| 45% | It's Only the End of the World (Juste la fin du monde) (2016) |
A stellar cast of French actors is mainly left to run lines and hyperventilate in Xavier Dolan's turgid yet occasionally affecting melodrama.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Jul 3, 2017
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| 78% | The Beguiled (2017) |
"The Beguiled," in its quasi-mathematical abstraction, amounts to little more than the baseline proof of [Coppola's] method-a reductio ad absurdum.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Jun 26, 2017
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| 75% | The Little Hours (2017) |
The good-natured comedy has only occasional outbursts of wildness; the cheerfully playful ribaldry of the writing and the performances can't quite overcome the mere efficiency of the filmmaking.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Jun 26, 2017
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| 100% | The Hole (Le Trou) (1964) |
Becker details the ambient violence of prison life, the hidden negotiations between captives and captors, and the solidarity of detainees, but his deeply empathetic, fanatically specific view of his protagonists leaves out some elements.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Jun 26, 2017
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| 95% | The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography (2017) |
The depth of her art reflects a life richly lived, as does the wisdom of her epigrammatic musings.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Jun 26, 2017
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| 93% | The Beguiled (1971) |
The story may sometimes come off as a ribald soldiers' tale that Siegel ... had been awaiting a sexual revolution to tell; still, his intense, intelligent breakdown of the film's wild outbursts reveals subtleties of love, despair, and shame ...‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Jun 26, 2017
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| 15% | Transformers: The Last Knight (2017) |
All the best moments in the movie-pure images, devoid of symbol and, for that matter, nearly empty of sense-go by too fast, are held too briefly, are developed too little.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Jun 22, 2017
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| 91% | Mauvais Sang (2013) |
A masterpiece of ecstatic cinema from 1986, directed by Leos Carax at the age of twenty-five.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Jun 19, 2017
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| 44% | The Bad Batch (2017) |
Amirpour ... delivers this imaginative tale as a simplistic allegory of the haves and the have-nots; she ruefully delights in the wasteland's postindustrial wreckage while leaving characters' thoughts and motives blank.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Jun 19, 2017
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| No Score Yet | Angel (1937) |
Lubitsch sees the round of coincidences as a game of cruel destiny, albeit one that's played on the world stage against a backdrop of looming war.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Jun 19, 2017
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| 100% | Dawson City: Frozen Time (2017) |
In "Dawson City," Morrison offers a fiercely precise and discerning look at movies themselves as embodiments of history.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Jun 15, 2017
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| 92% | Wonder Woman (2017) |
"Wonder Woman" is a superhero movie, and it fulfills the heroic and mythic demands of that genre, but it's also an entry in the genre of wisdom literature that shares hard-won insights and long-pondered paradoxes of the past with a sincere intimacy.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Jun 12, 2017
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| 88% | Monkey Business (1952) |
A summit of comic invention.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Jun 12, 2017
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| 54% | War Machine (2017) |
The absolute absence of intimacy, of psychology, of characters' self-revelation in thought and desire, is a failure of form and style as much as of content.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Jun 5, 2017
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| 88% | It Comes At Night (2017) |
This modest science-fiction thriller brings the hands-on vigor of independent filmmaking to a high-concept premise, but the results are insubstantial and impersonal.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Jun 5, 2017
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| No Score Yet | Johanna D'Arc of Mongolia (Joan of Arc of Mongolia) (1989) |
For all its outwardly probing observation and decorative delights, the movie concludes with an abstract touch that's as breathtaking as any of its sights and sounds.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted May 29, 2017
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| 71% | Alien: Covenant (2017) |
In space, no one can hear you laugh.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted May 29, 2017
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| 67% | Lions Love (1969) |
More than a time capsule of events and moods-it's a living aesthetic model for revolutionary times.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted May 29, 2017
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| 82% | The Woman Who Left (Ang babaeng humayo) (2017) |
The pace is an anti-ornamental affectation that artificially distends an hour's worth of action.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted May 22, 2017
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| 83% | Hermia & Helena (2017) |
Piñeiro conjures a cogently realistic yet gloriously imaginative vision of youthful ardor in love and art alike.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted May 22, 2017
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| 62% | An Affair to Remember (1957) |
McCarey plays the shipboard courtship for generous and tender laughs-the wryly staged first kiss is one of the sweetest in all cinema-but the comedy that follows on dry land is mostly inadvertent.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted May 22, 2017
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| 89% | Icaros: A Vision (2017) |
The hallucinatory power of ayahuasca and the incantatory lure of rituals fuse with existential dread in this darkly hypnotic drama.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted May 15, 2017
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| No Score Yet | Bless Their Little Hearts (2008) |
Woodberry crafts a passionately pensive realism-nearly every scene of action is matched by a long one in which one character or another, in observant repose, looks back and sees their self reflected in society's mirror.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted May 15, 2017
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| 35% | Snatched (2017) |
Schumer and Hawn go dutifully through the film's paces, animating the movie with their mere presence while the best elements of their art stay in the closet for next time.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted May 12, 2017
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| 86% | The Lovers (2017) |
The movie exhausts itself in its conception and sits inert on the screen like an undigested mass of script pages.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted May 8, 2017
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| 75% | A Woman's Life (Une vie) (2017) |
Brizé pays more attention to the tasteful costumes and the alluring settings than to the drama or the images.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted May 8, 2017
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| 95% | Léon Morin, Prêtre (Leon Morin, Priest) (The Forgiven Sinner) (1961) |
Melville films the religious dialectics with remarkable but dispassionate skill, and he uses the story of Barny and Morin to skew the postwar political context ...‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted May 8, 2017
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| 71% | Taboo (2000) |
A spare and cruel drama about sex and violence within the ranks of the samurai.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted May 8, 2017
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| 88% | Close-up (Nema-ye Nazdik) (1999) |
In Kiarostami's furiously clear view, religious dogma suppresses the eye's observations through the dictate of the word; his calmly unwavering images, with their wry humor and generous sympathy, have the force of a steadfast resistance.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted May 8, 2017
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| No Score Yet | Bush Mama (1979) |
Gerima's great achievement is to compose a cinematic style that's simultaneously observational and subjective, dramatic and internalized.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted May 1, 2017
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| 82% | Casting JonBenét (2017) |
"Casting JonBenet," is in many ways a deeply unsatisfying, even infuriating film, but I wouldn't want not to have seen it.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted May 1, 2017
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| 67% | Thirst Street (2017) |
Burdge infuses her rigidly and scantly defined role with tremulous vulnerability, and Silver, aided by the splashy palette of Sean Price Williams's cinematography, evokes derangement with a sardonic wink.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Apr 24, 2017
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| No Score Yet | Hospital (1970) |
Reveals the decisive impact of the art and science of medicine-and the ways of government-on the lives of ordinary people.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Apr 24, 2017
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| 28% | Sandy Wexler (2017) |
There's no way to recommend it, yet I wouldn't ask for my two hours back (though I do wish that they could have been sped up somewhat).‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Apr 17, 2017
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| 87% | The Lost City of Z (2017) |
With its bluff, romantic resuscitation of the cinema's classic adventure-tale genre and tone, it's perhaps Gray's most radical attempt at abstraction and displacement.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Apr 17, 2017
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| 67% | Free Fire (2017) |
A smug knockoff of Quentin Tarantino's brand of ironic violence, at several degenerations' remove.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Apr 17, 2017
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| 80% | Colossal (2017) |
At its best, it achieves a rare synthesis of virtues that is a primal value of the cinema: it revels in the power of cinematic artifice to tell a story that confronts big questions about real life.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Apr 10, 2017
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| No Score Yet | Welfare (1975) |
The psychology of poverty has rarely been so well depicted, along with the inadequacy of the bureaucracy itself: the ostensible objectivity of the law rests on the subjective judgments, even the good will, of the caseworkers.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Apr 10, 2017
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| 89% | Norman (Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer) (2017) |
Cedar plays Norman's story for tragedy but never develops his inner identity, his history, or his ideals; the protagonist and his drama remain anecdotal and superficial.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Apr 10, 2017
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| 68% | Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary (2017) |
A dully conventional film about a brilliantly unconventional musician.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Apr 10, 2017
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| 95% | L'Avventura (1960) |
Rightly considered to be a cinematic landmark.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Apr 5, 2017
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| 92% | Win It All (2017) |
Swanberg-aided greatly by Johnson's vigorous performance-makes the gambler's panic-stricken silence all the more agonizing, balancing the warm veneer of intimate normalcy with the inner chill of secrets and lies.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Apr 3, 2017
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| 100% | The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979) |
Schatzberg directs the film with a sleek yet relaxed precision that mirrors Joe's own breezy confidence.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Apr 3, 2017
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| 95% | Prevenge (2017) |
If metaphors were movies, Alice Lowe's new film would be a masterwork. Instead, it's just smart fun-as well as a promising début.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Apr 3, 2017
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| 57% | i hate myself :) (2017) |
Despite some memorably painful moments and underlying artistic urgency, the film's implications remain unprocessed and unquestioned.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Apr 3, 2017
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| 84% | The Death of Louis XIV (La mort de Louis XIV) (2017) |
Serra's ideas are serious but simple, and his movie seems to illustrate them in slow motion.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Apr 3, 2017
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| 65% | Carrie Pilby (2017) |
A core of substance and a fine cast are squandered in the relentless hard-sell perkiness of this mild comic drama.‐ New Yorker
Read More | Posted Apr 3, 2017
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