Manohla Dargis

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L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times
For 2,344 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 51% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 2.4 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Manohla Dargis' Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 The Fits
Lowest review score: 0 Lolita
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,182 out of 2344
  2. Mixed: 893 out of 2344
  3. Negative: 269 out of 2344
2344 movie reviews
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    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Everyone Else
    A sun-kissed German film about a young couple in love and in doubt, might not be perfect, but so much is right and true in this lovely, delicate work that it comes breathtakingly close.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    The Sun
    The movie is best understood not in banal docudrama terms but as an impressionistic portrait of a man who, stripped of power, is revealed as grotesquely human.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    21 Grams
    What gives the film a formalist kick is that the story unfolds piecemeal as a series of nonlinear moments. What gives it soul are the three lead actors who pull the pieces together with devastating power.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Vengeance
    Both newcomers to Mr. To and longtime admirers should be prepared for a master class in directing.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    I'm Going Home
    By far the most approachable of the director's recent films, with an emotional depth that's true to life and a streamlined narrative that for long stretches barely contains a word.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    The Witch
    With a gentle rap-rapping, Mr. Eggers intensifies the shivers with art-film moves, genre shocks and an excellent cast that includes a progressively rowdy menagerie.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Inside Out 2
    Franchises often bank on nostalgia, so it’s easy to fall for “Inside Out 2,” which works largely because the first one does wonderfully well. The new movie conforms to the original’s ethos as well as inventive template, its conceit and visual design, so its pleasures are agreeably familiar.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Vera Drake
    The English director Mike Leigh's best work in a decade.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Knock Down the House
    Exuberant.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Master Gardener
    Part of the kick of “Master Gardener” is that the writer-director Paul Schrader manages to pull off this improbable movie. It shouldn’t work and, even after seeing it twice, I don’t think that it entirely does, which only makes it more fascinating and strengthens its power.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    A House of Dynamite
    Bigelow’s work here is superb. She puts the many moving parts into coordinated place and keeps them coherently spinning even as she switches out some elements and introduces others; she doesn’t drop a single plate. The script occasionally gets in her way, which sometimes happens in her work.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Get Out
    Part of what makes Get Out both exciting and genuinely unsettling is how real life keeps asserting itself, scene after scene.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    When We Were Kings
    When We Were Kings is a wonderfully entertaining, at times thrilling, film. Ali is magnificent, Foreman oddly touching, and their fight, which is shown almost in total, makes for superb, nail-biting suspense--even two decades after the fact.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Encounters at the End of the World
    Like many of Mr. Herzog's movies, fiction and nonfiction, Encounters at the End of the World itself has the quality of a dream: it's at once vivid and vague, easy to grasp and somehow beyond reach.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    The Girl Cut in Two
    An erotically charged, beautifully directed story of a woman preyed upon by different men and her own warring desires.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Tokyo Godfathers
    As with the greatest animated films, the triumph of Kon's work lies not just in its beauty and singularly sophisticated storytelling but in how that beauty and storytelling combine to give the films a sting so human you can forget you're watching a cartoon.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Raising Victor Vargas
    His film may be something of a beautiful lie, but what's true about Sollett's characters is that their dreams, their grace and their struggles are as real as it gets.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Origin
    It is a great big swing about taking a great big swing, and while the film is more persuasive as a drama than the argument it relays, few American movies this year reach so high so boldly.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Flight
    Flight is freakishly real; it's one of those big-screen nightmares that will inspire fear-of-flying moviegoers to run home and Google car rental deals and Greyhound schedules.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    The Super 8 Years
    Memory is also, I think, one reason we watch movies like this, which with its lapidary narration and melancholic images — with its laughing children, its difficult smiles and its ghosts — movingly pairs you with Ernaux and with the world that she has so brilliantly made.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Yi Yi
    Generous, soulful film.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    La Chimera
    Rohrwacher’s digressive storytelling can make La Chimera seem unstructured, but she’s going where she wants to go and at her own pace. She likes detours, lived-in (nonplastic) faces and the kind of revelatory details that might go unnoticed, if she didn’t direct your gaze at them.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Magellan
    The most arresting way that Diaz telegraphs, though, is through the sheer beauty of his images. The movie is often visually intoxicating, at moments gasp-out-loud ravishing, especially in its presentation of the natural world, which can have a soft visual quality that deepens the sense of otherworldliness.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    The Pirates! Band of Misfits
    The movie is a curiosity cabinet of visual pleasures but so breezy and lightly funny that you may not realize at first how good it is.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    The Door in the Floor
    Bridges turns a two-dimensional image into a presence so vital, so filled with breath and blood, that you uneasily fall in love with his character and abandon all thought of the artifice that's brought it to life.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Dos Estaciones
    At once specific and expansive, Dos Estaciones can be described several ways: as a drama, a character study, a meditative exploration of the ravages of globalization. At the same time, part of the movie’s pleasure is how it avoids facile categorization.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
    A pleasurably sly and involving puzzler - a mystery about mysteries within mysteries.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Bernie
    Gaudily vibrant, at times morbidly funny.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
    Filmmaker Kevin Rafferty makes the case for remembrance and for the art of the story in his preposterously entertaining documentary Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, preposterous at least for those of us who routinely shun that pagan sacrament.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Ex Machina
    [Mr. Garland] plays with visual contrasts — Mr. Isaac’s compact, muscled body and Mr. Gleeson’s long, drooping one, picture windows that look out onto an expansively lush landscape and windowless rooms that register as upmarket prison cells — that dovetail with the narrative’s multiple, amusingly deployed dualities: confinement and liberation, agency and submission, mind and body.
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