Richard Brody

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

T-Meter Title | Year
92% Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story By Martin Scorsese (2019) It's not a doomed mission but it's a delicate and a difficult one, and the project collapses under the weight of its contradictory goals and its scattershot strategies to meet them. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Jun 14, 2019
No Score Yet El diablo nunca duerme (2012) The emotional intensity of the passionate reminiscences and revelations that Portillo's subjects share turns them, for the time that they're onscreen, into the expressive equals of movie stars. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Jun 14, 2019
No Score Yet Baara (1978) The movie runs only ninety minutes but captures grand social forces in microcosm, evoking public and private violence, intimate and civic corruption in teeming images that fill frames with richly textured action... - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Jun 7, 2019
89% Rocketman (2019) "Rocketman" is far from a drama of introspection-and, unfortunately, Egerton's performance, as directed by Fletcher, doesn't add to the protagonist's inner life. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Jun 7, 2019
79% Late Night (2019) While "Late Night" approaches these themes mildly and cautiously, it nonetheless discerns and dramatizes some of the current-day entertainment industry's most urgent themes and conflicts. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Jun 7, 2019
93% The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) Fails has handed over to Talbot the intricate and fragile treasures of a lifetime, and Talbot has melted them down and reshaped them into something smooth, shiny, and hollow. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Jun 3, 2019
100% Il Posto (1963) Olmi's intimate camerawork captures his amateur performers' delicate range of inflections, hesitations, and glimmers of feeling as their inhibitions and embarrassments begin to curdle into weary bitterness. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Jun 3, 2019
52% The Dead Don't Die (2019) An exuberantly imaginative yet grimly political fable about a world thrown literally out of whack by "polar fracking." - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Jun 3, 2019
No Score Yet Keep It For Yourself (1991) Denis's poetic vision of downbeat downtown solitude is romantic and whimsical, lyrical and melancholy... - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Jun 3, 2019
No Score Yet Tux and Fanny (2019) Birney's direction, for all its giddy inventiveness, is also precise and emotionally calibrated. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted May 31, 2019
73% The Perfection (2019) It's a trite jumble that confronts its ripped-from-the-news theme as an impersonal check box. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted May 31, 2019
56% Ma (2019) There's nothing but the immediate mechanics of the plot and a straightforward stoking of revulsion, fear, and gratification. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted May 31, 2019
No Score Yet Interview (1971) Ranju's frantic dashes through the city are filled with the print ads, billboards, store displays, and movie posters that he sees, which Sen presents as a crucial form of political mind control and a prime target of any future revolution. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted May 28, 2019
90% The Souvenir (2019) In the end, "The Souvenir" is a movie about experience that doesn't itself offer much of an experience. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted May 27, 2019
88% Xala (1975) Sembène depicts a corrupt system that replaced white dictators and profiteers with black ones; the symbolic ending, a glimmer of revolutionary hope, is as gratifying as it is implausible. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted May 27, 2019
32% Domino (2019) The political intrigue is stale and stereotyped, the characters might as well be windup toys, and the gore is repulsive and gratuitous. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted May 27, 2019
97% Booksmart (2019) Its substance is scantly developed, its clear and simple premise dismayingly oversimplified. Despite the emotional authenticity of the protagonists' dilemma, their journey comes off as a fantasy. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted May 22, 2019
83% The Red Badge of Courage (1951) Ross's portrait of cinematic conflict and compromise yields, in passing, a portrait of true artistry in movies that stands untarnished to this day. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted May 17, 2019
78% The Boy with Green Hair (1948) Few films so daringly span the local and the universal-or look so ravishing while doing so. Its eerie palette meshes perfectly with Losey's vision of a world out of joint. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted May 13, 2019
75% Pasolini (2019) Ferrara... straining toward the sublime, stumbles into vulgarity. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted May 13, 2019
94% Last Year at Marienbad (L'année dernière à Marienbad) (1961) The story's obscurity turns out to result from its protagonists' own efforts to deny or blur their painful past. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted May 13, 2019
71% Asako I & II (Netemo sametemo) (2019) Brilliant melodramatic flourishes adorn the blank center of this passionate fable, directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted May 13, 2019
No Score Yet Return to Bollène (Retour à Bollène) (2018) Return to Bollène is filmed with a richly textured observational concentration that brings the cityscape to life along with the characters. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted May 10, 2019
81% Long Shot (2019) The movie's lack of political substance empties out the relationship at its center; having little to work with and little to hold them together, the actors appear to be meeting each other for the first time in every scene. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted May 10, 2019
No Score Yet Compensation (2000) The stories involve prejudice and discrimination in multiple dimensions. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted May 3, 2019
86% Sankofa (1993) "Sankofa" depicts the appropriation of violence by its victims-and the movie itself is an act of history, a bearing of witness, and a reminder and reinforcement of dignity. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted May 3, 2019
89% Non-Fiction (2019) Macaigne, quizzical and impulsive, invests a rote role with brilliant turns. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 29, 2019
86% Testament of Orpheus (1960) Cocteau fits a raging confession into a serene, sensuous neoclassical vessel. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 29, 2019
94% Avengers: Endgame (2019) What's missing from "Endgame" is the free play of imagination, the liberation of speculation, the meandering paths and loose ends that start in logic and lead to wonder. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 28, 2019
80% Fast Color (2019) It's the rare superhero film that proceeds without a devotion to the spectacular that filters out, from the start, all the interest that's generated from close attention to ordinary life. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 24, 2019
No Score Yet Film Catastrophe (2019) What Grivas reveals is nothing less than the radical simplicity with which Godard creates moments of breathtaking grandeur. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 23, 2019
30% The Curse of La Llorona (2019) What's missing from La Llorona is the element of world-building, the mapping of the myth onto the wider world in some more explicit and ample form than a mere sudden apparition. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 19, 2019
45% Mary Magdalene (2019) There's exactly one image in the film that reflects a modicum of directorial imagination... - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 18, 2019
No Score Yet Something Different (O Necem Jinem) (1963) The filming of dance is a severe and exemplary test of cinematic artistry, and Eva's gymnastics, with its blend of dance and sport, grace and strength, provide Chytilová with a thrilling premise for the display of her own deft and daring power. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 15, 2019
64% Peterloo (2019) Leigh's bland images are solely illustrative, and his loving depiction of workers might embarrass a Soviet-era propagandist; he seems so stirred by their speeches that he forgets to craft characters... - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 15, 2019
45% Little (2019) The cheerful action offers several moments of snappy comedy but feels largely forced; the road to the happy ending is long and narrow. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 15, 2019
95% Grass (2019) Hong turns the café and its narrow alley into a graveyard of emotion. With a disturbing simplicity, he maps a passing vortex of pain onto bare and banal places and, in the process, rescues it from oblivion. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 15, 2019
82% High Life (2019) It's as if the events of the film are excerpts from a master script emphasizing the most apparent and foregrounded...fraught with a slowed-down pace of action, to render simple actions portentous. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 11, 2019
96% Cleo From 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7) (1961) Filming the sights (and sounds) of Paris with voracious visual delight, Varda embraces the turbulent distractions of public life, even as she filters them through Cleo's shattered consciousness. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 7, 2019
82% The Brink (2019) If the barest elements of political psychology and social pathology are suggested in the course of the film, they're undercut and banalized by the movie's homogenized aesthetic... - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 5, 2019
83% Fear Strikes Out (1957) [Mulligan] reflects an intense sensitivity, a romanticism of vulnerability and innocence that flashes a political edge. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 5, 2019
53% The Best of Enemies (2019) Bissell, from the start, is interested in perpetrators, not victims, in illustrations of plot points, not curiosity about context. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 5, 2019
No Score Yet Dragnet Girl (Hijosen No Onna) (1933) Though the violence never uncorks and the story takes a sentimental turn, the deep shadows, the jarring angles and cuts, and the idiosyncratic whims of gesture evoke a sorry underworld that's out of joint, out of luck, and out of time. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 1, 2019
91% Shazam! (2019) Endearing performances... can't overcome the pedantic world-building and generic C.G.I. gyrations. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 1, 2019
93% Diane (2019) The sharp-edged bonds that hold a family and a community together are examined intimately but vaguely in this lyrical melodrama by the writer and director Kent Jones. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Apr 1, 2019
100% The Burial of Kojo (2019) In its bold and limpid lyricism, the film is both an anguished delight in itself and an exemplar of dramatic freedom that should stand as a model for some filmmakers and a reproach to others. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 29, 2019
59% Sunset (Napszállta) (2019) Nemes adds distinctive but superfluous flourishes to this meticulous, overcalculated historical drama. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 25, 2019
No Score Yet Hamlet liikemaailmassa (1987) Infusing the hysterical precision of modernism with the anarchic bitterness of punk rock, Kaurismäki comes up with clever visual incarnations of many of the play's big moments and funny twists on some of its big lines. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Mar 25, 2019
73% 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