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David Edelstein

David Edelstein is a film critic for New York magazine and for NPR's Fresh Air, and an occasional commentator on film for CBS Sunday Morning. He has also written film criticism for the Village Voice, The New York Post, and Rolling Stone, and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times' Arts & Leisure section.

A member of the National Society of Film Critics, he is the author of the play Blaming Mom, and the co-author of Shooting to Kill (with producer Christine Vachon).

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Movie Reviews
1:08 pm
Thu February 16, 2012

A Vet's 'Return' To The Front Lines Of Home

Credit Dada Films
Linda Cardellini plays a vet who comes back after being overseas with no way to make sense of where she was and what it meant, in director Liza Johnson's new drama Return.
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The coming-home genre is so rife with stock ingredients that first I'd like to tell you what Liza Johnson's very fine drama Return doesn't do. The camera doesn't move in on returning-vet Kelli, played by Linda Cardellini, as the sound of battle rises and she's back in her head on the front lines. The film doesn't give you what I call the "psychodrama striptease," in which a past trauma is revealed piece by piece until you're finally, at the end, shown the essential bit.

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Movie Reviews
9:11 am
Thu February 9, 2012

'Safe House,' 'Haywire': Watch Them Back To Back

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Credit Claudette Barius / Relativity Media
Mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano stars as Mallory Kane, a highly trained covert operative, in a twisty, tautly wrought thriller.
Credit Universal Pictures
Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) is a frustrated junior CIA agent trying to corral the traitorous spy Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington) in Daniel Espinosa's thriller Safe House.
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The flashy Denzel Washington thriller Safe House will probably gross in a few hours what Steven Soderbergh's Haywire has made in several weeks, but if you like action you ought to catch both back to back. Soderbergh's film is a reaction to the jangled, high-impact style of Safe House and its ilk.

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Movie Reviews
8:23 am
Thu January 26, 2012

In 'Albert Nobbs,' Glenn Close Does More Than Pass

Credit Patrick Redmond / Roadside Attractions
Albert Nobbs (Glenn Close) and Helen (Mia Wasikowska) go on a series of awkward dates in Albert Nobbs, a film based on a 1918 George Moore story.
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Originally published on Thu January 26, 2012 10:39 am

As Albert Nobbs, Glenn Close has hair that's cropped and orangey, and a voice that rarely rises above a nasal croak. She lives and works as a waiter in a high-toned hotel, where she stands with lips pressed together, tight yet tremulous, her searching eyes her only naturally moving parts. She resembles no man I've seen, but no woman, either. She's the personification of fear — fear of being discovered to be a woman. Because hers is a society that treats all poor people badly, but poor women worse.

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Movie Reviews
8:57 pm
Thu January 19, 2012

'Coriolanus': A People's Hero Turns On His Own

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Credit Larry D. Horricks / The Weinstein Co.
Bare-Knuckle Politics: The battle-hardened Roman general Coriolanus (Ralph Fiennes) runs for office at the urging of his mother (Vanessa Redgrave) — but it turns out he's no booster of majority rule.
Credit Larry D. Horricks / The Weinstein Co.
Can't Get Used To These Clothes: Coriolanus (Fiennes), receiving a hero's welcome, poses — awkwardly — with his mother (Redgrave), wife (Jessica Chastain), and son (Harry Fenn).
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Ralph Fiennes showed up for a frenzied cameo near the end of Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, and her hand-held, adrenaline-charged approach clearly inspired his film of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, which he both acts and directs the bloody hell out of.

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Movie Reviews
12:02 pm
Thu January 12, 2012

An 'Iron Lady' Fully Inhabited By Meryl Streep

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Credit The Weinstein Co.
Meryl Streep (center) stars as Margaret Thatcher in Phyllida Lloyd's biopic about the former prime minister of the United Kingdom.
Credit Alex Bailey / The Weinstein Co.
Streep plays Margaret Thatcher — and Jim Broadbent her supportive husband, Denis — in The Iron Lady.
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I admit I was biased against the Margaret Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady. Not, you understand, against Thatcher and her Tory politics. Against Meryl Streep and her accents. Which are great, no doubt. But I went in resolved not to fall for her pyrotechnics yet again. I wanted realism.

Well, it didn't take long to realize that I was watching not only one of the greatest impersonations I'd ever seen — but one that was also emotionally real.

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