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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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Half Nelson
    What makes Half Nelson both an unusual and an exceptional American film, particularly at a time when even films about Sept. 11 are professed to have no politics, is its insistence on political consciousness as a moral imperative.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Momma's Man
    Mr. Jacobs has succeeded at one of the most difficult tasks given a director, which is to make a character come alive through the filmmaking, not exposition.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
    Mr. Abrams may be as worshipful as any Star Wars obsessive, but in The Force Awakens he’s made a movie that goes for old-fashioned escapism even as it presents a futuristic vision of a pluralistic world that his audience already lives in. He hasn’t made a film only for true believers; he has made a film for everyone (well, almost).
    • 50 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    For Colored Girls
    As it turns out, Mr. Perry, while busily establishing his economic independence, has been finding his voice as a filmmaker. And here, working with fine performers like Ms. Elise, Anika Noni Rose, Phylicia Rashad and Kerry Washington, he sings the song the way he likes it - with force, feeling and tremendous sincerity.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Cold Weather
    With no grand speeches or oversized gestures, Mr. Katz creates a specific world that gracefully enlarges with universal meaning.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Escapes
    Mr. Fancher’s movie love and way of spinning a yarn to its near-breaking point — one detour opens onto another — dovetail nicely with the cinephilia and playfulness that characterize Mr. Almereyda’s movies.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Megalopolis
    In the end, what matters is the movie, a brash, often beautiful, sometimes clotted, nakedly personal testament. It’s a little nuts, but our movies could use more craziness, more passion, feeling and nerve. They could use a lot more of the love that Coppola has for cinema, which he continues to pry from the industry’s death grip by insisting that film is art.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Ghost World
    Zwigoff pulls off something in Ghost World that seems a minor miracle -- he creates someone with a complex inner life.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Hilary and Jackie
    This sensitively directed film is one of those rarest of accomplishments: a graceful work of art about the very creation of art itself.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
    Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is a perfect entry point into Hamaguchi’s work. Not every episode works equally well or hits as hard, but both times I watched this movie, I found something to admire, consider, argue with and weep over.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Dogtown and Z-Boys
    Enormously enjoyable, high-adrenaline documentary.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Flight of the Red Balloon
    In the end what elevates Mr. Hou’s films to the sublime -- and this one comes close at times -- are not the stories but their telling.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Cover-Up
    Cover-Up is a model of efficient, engaging documentary filmmaking; it looks good, for starters, and it moves energetically.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    How to Draw a Bunny
    A seamless model of form and content. (My only quibble is the poor quality of the digital video, which doesn't do justice to Johnson's work.)
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Foxcatcher
    Mr. Miller does his finest work with his three superb leads.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Almost Famous
    Crowe has made a hugely entertaining, nearly pitch-perfect film about rock & roll.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Reprise
    An exuberant, exhilaratingly playful testament to being young and hungry -- for life and meaning and immortality, and for other young and restless bodies -- Reprise is a blast of unadulterated movie pleasure.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    The Cathedral
    What distinguishes Jesse’s story is the striking way that the writer-director Ricky D’Ambrose tells it — its ellipses, voice-over, visual precision and an emotional reserve that can feel like clinical detachment but is more rightly described as an aesthetic.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Clouds of Sils Maria
    The three women in Clouds of Sils Maria love, talk and move, move, move, sharing lives, trading roles and performing parts. The lives they lead are messy and indeterminate, but each woman’s life belongs to her.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    A Star Is Born
    This latest and fourth version is a gorgeous heartbreaker (bring tissues). Like its finest antecedents, it wrings tears from its romance and thrills from a steadfast belief in old-fashioned, big-feeling cinema. That it’s also a perverse fantasy about men, women, love and sacrifice makes it all the better.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Starlet
    The bright sun that blasts through Starlet, a thrillingly, unexpectedly good American movie about love and a moral awakening, bathes everything in a radiant light, even the small houses with thirsty lawns and dusty cars.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    The Brutalist
    Many movies offer up a slice of reality; true to the architectural aesthetic that its title invokes, this one offers a slab.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    City Hall
    City Hall runs four and a half mostly engrossing hours, making it one of Wiseman’s longest. That sounds daunting, but I could have watched hours more of people simply talking to one another in auditoriums and across conference-room tables.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Us
    A vibrant, appealing screen presence, Nyong’o brings a tremendous range and depth of feeling to both characters, who she individualizes with such clarity and lapidary detail that they aren’t just distinct beings; they feel as if they were being inhabited by different actors.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
    [Nyoni] says all she needs to with each lapidary image, with every resonant silence and with the undaunted power of Shula’s gaze.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Time of the Wolf
    One of the most harrowing and plausible visions of apocalypse since George A. Romero's 1968 zombie shocker, "Night of the Living Dead."
    • 68 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    The Conjuring
    The dread gathers and surges while the blood scarcely trickles in The Conjuring, a fantastically effective haunted-house movie.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Murderous Maids
    A true rarity, Murderous Maids is an intelligent, moral shocker.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Emily
    Building on a series of oppositions — nature and culture, realism and romance, duty and freedom — O’Connor brings Emily the myth to vibrant life, persuasively suggesting that this ostensibly strange and cloistered genius came into being not despite her contradictions but through them.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Flags of Our Fathers
    If Flags of Our Fathers feels so unlike most war movies and sounds so contrary to the usual political rhetoric, it is not because it affirms that war is hell, which it does with unblinking, graphic brutality. It’s because Mr. Eastwood insists, with a moral certitude that is all too rare in our movies, that we extract an unspeakable cost when we ask men to kill other men. There is never any doubt in the film that the country needed to fight this war, that it was necessary; it is the horror at such necessity that defines Flags of Our Fathers, not exultation.
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