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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    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    There’s a whole lot of everything in the Mission: Impossible — Fallout, an entertainment machine par excellence that skitters around the world and has something to do with nuclear bombs, mysterious threats and dangerous beauties. Mostly, it has to do with that hyper-human Tom Cruise, who runs, drives, dives, shoots, flies, falls and repeatedly teeters on the edge of disaster, clinging to one after another cliffhanger.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Manohla Dargis
    Grizzly Man
    Mr. Herzog is also no ordinary filmmaker. It is the rare documentary like Grizzly Man, which has beauty and passion often lacking in any type of film, that makes you want to grab its maker and head off to the nearest bar to discuss man's domination of nature and how Disney's cute critters reflect our profound alienation from the natural order.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Manohla Dargis
    Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese
    Dylan was interested in how movies stop time, but he also told Ginsberg that he wanted “to be entertained,” adding, “If I see a movie that really moves me around I’m totally astounded.” To watch Rolling Thunder Revue is to understand what he meant.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Manohla Dargis
    My Journey Through French Cinema
    Its explanatory title doesn’t begin to convey just how exhilarating or inspiring a documentary this truly is, and how excellent a trip this well-respected French director takes you on.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Manohla Dargis
    The Diary of a Teenage Girl
    The novel is life-specific, but what makes Minnie — on the page and now on the screen — greater than any one girl is how she tells her own story in her own soaringly alive voice.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 Manohla Dargis
    Listen to Me Marlon
    While its subject means that "Listen to Me” is easy to like, Mr. Riley’s shaping of Brando’s words can make the movie, every so often, difficult to fully embrace.
    • 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.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Manohla Dargis
    Caught by the Tides
    A tour de force that is at once an affecting portrait of a people in flux and a soulful, generous-hearted autobiographic testament from one of our greatest living filmmakers.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Manohla Dargis
    The Kid with a Bike
    A quietly rapturous film about love and redemption.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Manohla Dargis
    Moneyball
    It's hard to imagine anyone but Mr. Pitt in the role. He's relaxed yet edgy and sometimes unsettling.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
    In many respects Ceausescu turns out to be as much the author of this brilliant documentary as the director, Andrei Ujica, who waded through more than 1,000 hours of filmed state propaganda, official news reports and home movies to create a cinematic tour de force that tracks the rise, reign and grim fall of its subject.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Resurrection
    Strange describes the world of “Resurrection,” as does entrancing, tender, surprising, mournful and, at times, mystifying; it too is a labyrinth of a kind, one that Bi has filled with abrupt turns, elusive figures and shattering moments.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Manohla Dargis
    Rushmore
    A beautifully off-center movie.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Manohla Dargis
    My Golden Days
    My Golden Days is a memory movie, a story told through a glass darkly.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Manohla Dargis
    Ten
    One of the best films to open so far this year, but greeting each new work from a favored director as if it were equally brilliant can't be good for anyone, the director included.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Manohla Dargis
    Playground
    This is the first feature from the writer-director Laura Wandel, and it’s a knockout, as flawlessly constructed as it is harrowing.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Manohla Dargis
    Tangerine
    Tangerine encompasses dizzying multitudes — it’s a neo-screwball chase flick with a dash of Rainer Werner Fassbinder — but mostly, movingly, it is a female-friendship movie about two people who each started life with an XY chromosome set.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 80 Manohla Dargis
    Rock Star
    Wahlberg has turned into one of the most sympathetic and persuasive young actors around, and while his new movie remains safely, even shrewdly, in the middle of the road, he rocks.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Manohla Dargis
    Room
    While it flickers with grace and imagination during its initial half, largely because of Jack, it devolves into a dreary, platitudinous therapy movie in its second, largely because of Ma.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Fallen Leaves
    Fallen Leaves is consistently funny, but its laughs arrive without fanfare. They slide in calmly, at times obliquely in eccentric details, offbeat juxtapositions, taciturn exchanges, long pauses and amiably barbed insults.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Manohla Dargis
    Krisha
    When Krisha stands in the kitchen, wild-eyed amid all these human sights and sounds, you see a woman overwhelmed by life itself, as well as a movie that is an expressionistic tour de force.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Manohla Dargis
    Manakamana
    By focusing on such a narrow slice of Nepali life, Ms. Spray and Mr. Velez have ceded any totalizing claim on the truth and instead settled for a perfect incompleteness.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Manohla Dargis
    Cave of Forgotten Dreams
    The 3-D is sometimes less than transporting, and the chanting voices in the composer Ernst Reijseger's new-agey score tended to remind me of my last spa massage. Yet what a small price to pay for such time traveling!
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Showing Up
    Together, Reichardt and Williams — with little dialogue and boundless generosity — lucidly articulate everything that Lizzy will never say and need not say, opening a window on the world and turning this wondrous, determined, gloriously grumpy woman into a sublime work of art.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Manohla Dargis
    Barbara
    Barbara is a film about the old Germany from one of the best directors working in the new: Christian Petzold. For more than a decade Mr. Petzold has been making his mark on the international cinema scene with smart, tense films that resemble psychological thrillers, but are distinguished by their strange story turns, moral thorns, visual beauty and filmmaking intelligence.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Manohla Dargis
    The Apostle
    An effortlessly complex portrayal that relishes the contradictions and complexities of someone capable of both exalted and debased behavior, a shape-shifter it is possible to be fascinated, repelled and compelled by, all at the same time.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    The Beaches of Agnès
    The images are as delightful, unexpected and playfully uninhibited as Ms. Varda, perhaps the only filmmaker who has both won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and strolled around an art exhibition while costumed as a potato (not at the same time).
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    May December
    Moore and Portman are tremendous, but it’s Melton’s anguished performance that gives the movie its slow-building emotional power.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Manohla Dargis
    Sex and the City
    I wish Ms. Parker had let that bee in her bonnet go silent, because the movie that she and Mr. King have come up with is the pits, a vulgar, shrill, deeply shallow -- and, at 2 hours and 22 turgid minutes, overlong -- addendum to a show that had, over the years, evolved and expanded in surprising ways.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Manohla Dargis
    Drug War
    The brilliant, unsettling action scenes — ugly, savage, dehumanizing — speak volumes.
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