Richard Brody

Richard Brody
Tomatometer-approved critic
Publications: New Yorker

Movie Reviews Only

T-Meter Title | Year
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
92% 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
45% 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
77% 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
91% 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
92% 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
96% 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
82% 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
88% 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
26% 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
89% 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
85% Orlando (1993) Potter's ironies, veering between the blunt and the exquisite, the oblique and the confrontational, expose the cruel hazards of nature and the perversities of culture. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 20, 2020
88% The Nest (2020) Durkin builds his discerning observations on a dramatic foundation that's no less unchallenged, and no less rickety, than the social fictions on which it depends. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 20, 2020
No Score Yet Malina (1990) One of the most fertile and furious blends of literature and cinema... - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 16, 2020
No Score Yet Wojnarowicz (2020) Prominently features self-depictions taken from his copious audio and visual archives to evoke his life and work with a bracing, tragic sense of immediacy. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 9, 2020
89% The Climb (2020) Though the characters range from ciphers to clichés, they nonetheless get caught in some unusual comedic tangles that Covino laces with heartfelt observations. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 9, 2020
No Score Yet The Bride Wore Red (1937) The director Dorothy Arzner infuses this glossy romantic comedy, from 1937, set in the pleasure domes of Europe, with acrid insight and theatrical flair. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 9, 2020
100% The American Sector (2020) Stephens and Velez's ultimate subject is the real-world stakes of the ongoing struggles between historical myths and historical knowledge. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 9, 2020
80% Six in Paris (Paris vu par...) (1969) Rouch poses weighty challenges to the unquestioned routines of daily life; his small-scale film has the rich social, political, historical, and psychological implications of an epic feature. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Nov 9, 2020
No Score Yet The Unseeable (2006) Sasanatieng uses long and languid takes with a roving, floating camera to evoke invisible spirits surrounding the characters... and clever effects of appearance and disappearance to conjure the mental disturbances that the haunted property provokes. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 30, 2020
82% Eve's Bayou (1996) Lemmons pursues the story with a sharp-eyed, naturalistic clarity that emphasizes the family's authentic emotional pressures along with the strangeness of the supernatural powers that impose a higher responsibility-and a grim burden-on the young heroine. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 30, 2020
67% The Rapture (1991) It's one of the most terrifying of religious films; an astounding synthesis of style and subject, it merges the meticulously practical and the terrifyingly visionary with a breathtaking audacity. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 30, 2020
98% The Vanishing (Spoorloos) (1988) Sluizer isn't among the more original stylists, but the literalness of his direction suffices to evoke the horrific and monstrous possibilities lurking behind the façades of ordinary life. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 30, 2020
No Score Yet The Other Side of the Underneath (1972) Terrifying performances of dissociated patients veer into theatrical tableaux of double-talk and outlandish costumes, of religious rites merging with marriage fantasies, music-hall bawdiness with rock-club slasher games. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 30, 2020
86% Carnival of Souls (1962) With boldly imaginative effects that defy the scant budget, Harvey leaps out from the company of Ed Wood and George Romero to join that of Michelangelo Antonioni as a poet of post-industrial alienation. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 30, 2020
97% Vampyr - Der Traum des Allan Grey (1932) "Vampyr" is perhaps the most effective and most radical Surrealist movie ever made. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 30, 2020
No Score Yet Red Squad (1972) An extraordinary work of investigative journalism, in which the filmmakers themselves and their process become part of the story-in fact, become more of the story than they had intended or hoped. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 30, 2020
69% Daybreakers (2010) The conceit is worked out in whiz-bang diabolical detail... and brought to life with imaginative effects. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 26, 2020
90% Crossing the Line (2007) The vertiginous play of ideology and identity and the sheer strangeness of Dresnok's experience (as well as that of three other American defectors from the sixties) make this film absorbing; the glimpses of life in North Korea make it important. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 26, 2020
84% Martin Eden (2020) What ideas "Martin Eden" has are borrowed straight from the novel; what substance the novel has the movie removes, leaving its one big, notable idea emblazoned on it like a sticker on the bumper of a car being sold in a commercial... - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 25, 2020
100% Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) (1955) [It] fuses present-tense scenes and archival images, evoking the Holocaust, and the politics that led to it, in terms of the struggle to recover stifled memories and presenting the clarity of memory as essential to political progress. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 19, 2020
No Score Yet Salt for Svanetia (1930) The film is a work of overt political propaganda, yet Kalatozov gives the impression of filming in a state of horror and shock. - New Yorker EDIT
Read More | Posted Oct 19, 2020