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 2.3 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
    • 80 Manohla Dargis
    War Game
    The first time I saw War Game, it shook me up; the second time, my visceral response was tempered by a skepticism about power that the movie doesn’t invite.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Last Summer
    Last Summer is complex, tricky, at times very uncomfortable and thoroughly engrossing.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Manohla Dargis
    Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1
    It’s easy to smirk at these and other miscues; Costner also has a weakness for speeches, like many filmmakers. But he has a feel for the western and the landscapes of the West, and among the good scenes mixed in with the groaners is a beautifully filmed chase set against a midnight-blue sky that finds two riders galloping after a third, who changes horses mid-chase.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Green Border
    The fury that radiates off Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border is so intense that you can almost feel it encasing you in its heat.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Manohla Dargis
    The Bikeriders
    Not much happens, but the people are beautiful and so too are their bikes, rumbling beasts that tribe members ride and ride on that familiar closed loop known as Nowheresville, U.S.A.
    • 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Manohla Dargis
    Banel & Adama
    As Sy continues obliquely gesturing at meaning, you remain engaged but also find yourself wishing that all these many desperate pieces fit together more coherently.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
    Miller is such a wildly inventive filmmaker that it’s been easy to forget that he keeps making movies about the end of life as we know it. It’s a blast watching his characters fight over oil, water and women, yet while I’ve long thought of him as a great filmmaker it’s only with “Furiosa” that I now understand he’s also one kick-ass prophet of doom.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Manohla Dargis
    Evil Does Not Exist
    It’s far rarer when a movie, as this one does, speaks to everyday life and to the beauty of a world that we neglect even in the face of its calamitous loss.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Manohla Dargis
    The Fall Guy
    The Fall Guy is divertingly slick, playful nonsense.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Challengers
    One of the other pleasures of Challengers is that despite some tears, tightened jaws and its fussy chronology, the movie isn’t trying to say anything important, which is a relief. It wants to engage and entertain you, and it does that very nicely.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 Manohla Dargis
    Boy Kills World
    The only point of this ridiculousness is to watch Skarsgard flex his sculpted arms and take a great deal of brutal punishment so that he can dole out more. Rinse, repeat.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Manohla Dargis
    We Grown Now
    Some of this is effective, even if too many of Baig’s filmmaking choices — the honeyed cinematography, the score’s agitated violins and Malik’s preternaturally knowing voice-over — finally overwhelm the story’s fragile lyrical realism.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Manohla Dargis
    Abigail
    A horror flick that’s serviceable enough to make you occasionally giggle or flinch, yet is also so aggressively unambitious that it scarcely seems worth griping about.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Manohla Dargis
    Civil War
    Rarely have I seen a movie that made me so acutely uncomfortable or watched an actor’s face that, like Dunst’s, expressed a nation’s soul-sickness so vividly that it felt like an X-ray.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Manohla Dargis
    Monkey Man
    Patel does some fine work in Monkey Man even if its fight sequences rarely pop, flow or impress; they’re energetic but uninspired.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Manohla Dargis
    Coup de Chance
    Coup de Chance is more sketched-in than satisfyingly detailed. Most of the characters are types, and despite some local color, the story might as well play out in New York, but it’s amusing, technically adept and looks like a professionally made movie (no small thing in the streaming age).
    • 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.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Manohla Dargis
    Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
    The movie is overflowing with ideas — about history, capitalism, cinema, representation — but it also tests your patience before amply rewarding it.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 80 Manohla Dargis
    Immaculate
    Immaculate doesn’t try to reinvent anything but instead cheerfully embraces the familiar, which is part of what makes the movie enjoyable.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Manohla Dargis
    The Shadowless Tower
    This movie opens itself to you with its feeling for people, its grace notes and a few bravura moments that close the distance between characters beautifully.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Manohla Dargis
    The Animal Kingdom
    Narrative ambiguity can be fruitful but also a cop-out, as too many would-be art films tediously demonstrate. Here, though, the movie’s vagueness dovetails with both François’s and especially Émile’s confusion, and importantly, it also serves as a counterpoint to their unshakable love for Lana.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 30 Manohla Dargis
    High & Low: John Galliano
    The director Kevin Macdonald asks Galliano questions in “High & Low,” but the answers are largely self-serving and unsatisfying in a movie that, for the most part, plays like yet another installment in a highly publicized redemption narrative.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Love Lies Bleeding
    In Love Lies Bleeding, Glass borrows liberally but not mindlessly. Instead, she takes familiar themes and more than a few clichés — romantic doom, family trauma — and playfully bends them to her purposes.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Manohla Dargis
    Dune: Part Two
    The art of cinematic spectacle is alive and rocking in Dune: Part Two, and it’s a blast.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Io Capitano
    Garrone doesn’t spare you much, but if the movie never turns into an exercise in art-house sadism, it’s because his focus remains unwaveringly fixed on his characters who, from the start, are fully rounded people, not props, symbols or object lessons.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Manohla Dargis
    Drive-Away Dolls
    Drive-Away Dolls only snaps alive when the ever-reliable Domingo is on camera and — with just a few hushed words and his trademark charisma — he inevitably draws you in with the promise of a movie that never materializes.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Manohla Dargis
    Bleeding Love
    Sincere and grindingly predictable, this particular journey mixes tears and reams of dialogue, accusations and confessions with the usual roadside attractions, including a convenience store, a quirky motel and some lightly offbeat American types.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 30 Manohla Dargis
    Madame Web
    The only real bummer about Madame Web, the latest installment in the Spider-Man chronicles, isn’t that it’s bad, but that it never achieves memorably terrible status. The story is absurd, the dialogue snort-out-loud risible, the fights uninspired. Even so, there are glimmers of wit and competency. And then there’s its star, Dakota Johnson, who has a fascinating, seemingly natural ability to appear wholly detached from the nonsense swirling around her.
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