Manohla Dargis

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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:
2344 movie reviews
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Manohla Dargis
    Godland gestures at several intersecting themes — belief, the struggle to hold onto faith, the impermanence of being — with greater suggestiveness than depth. It’s a sharp, dryly funny, at times cruel exploration of human arrogance and frailty.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Manohla Dargis
    The larger problem is that there’s not enough here — in story terms or in the filmmaking — to sustain even the movie’s 90 minutes.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Manohla Dargis
    It doesn’t add up to much, despite the appealing young cast and the handsome cinematography that brings texture and visual interest to every grubby corner.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Manohla Dargis
    In shaping this narrative, though, Lesh and Frost have left out details that would have deepened and broadened Wildcat.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Hogg’s greatest stroke in The Eternal Daughter is her casting of Swinton in both lead roles. Swinton is a wonderful chameleon and while she can go as big and showy as any Oscar contender, she is also a brilliant miniaturist.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Manohla Dargis
    Making Elisabeth interestingly human proves more than enough, a feat that Kreutzer and Krieps accomplish to dazzling effect.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Manohla Dargis
    There isn’t much going on other than the spectacle of its busily spinning parts, which might be tolerable if the first two hours weren’t so unrelievedly unmodulated, with everything synced to the same monotonous, accelerated pace. This hyperventilated quality initially serves the story and Chazelle’s concept of the era’s delirious excess, but the lack of modulation rapidly becomes enervating. After a while, it feels punishing.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 40 Manohla Dargis
    It’s evident that the filmmakers wanted to create a different, tougher and putatively more serious Pinocchio than the Disney version that has been lodged in the popular imagination for decades. But the movie’s decontextualized and disturbingly ill-considered use of Fascism is reductive and finally grotesque.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    The story’s ellipses and graceful structure are certainly admirable, but what elevates One Fine Morning is the texture of Sandra’s emotions, the revelation of her character, the hunger of her embrace, the wildness of her mouth, the stillness of her sated body, and the love that she gives and will movingly embrace once more.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Manohla Dargis
    Part of this movie’s power comes from its insistence that you look at the near-unbearable, that you confront slavery as a crime against humanity rather than the perverse myth of the so-called Lost Cause enshrined in countless paintings, books, films and statues.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    The movie’s bifurcated shape isn’t novel, but Poitras’s marshaling of all this information is exceptionally graceful. She has an abundance of fantastic material at her disposal — including a generous selection of Goldin’s artwork — but what makes the movie work so well is how Poitras seamlessly uses the different sections of Goldin’s life to weave a coherent portrait of the artist.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Jusu draws fluidly from different genres and modes in “Nanny” — from scene to scene, the movie plays like an immigration drama, a lonely woman melodrama and a cruel labor farce — but at one point you realize that what you are watching looks, sounds and feels like a horror movie.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Manohla Dargis
    Anchored by Lelio’s intelligent filmmaking — and by Pugh’s beautifully calibrated mix of physical vigor and temperamental astringency — Lib embodies the story’s arguments, themes and power with vivid clarity. There’s no denying her or her ravenous hunger for life.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Manohla Dargis
    EO
    No movie that I’ve seen this year has moved me as deeply, made me feel as optimistic about cinema or engaged me with such intellectual vigor as “EO,” whose octogenarian genius auteur and all the donkeys who play EO — Hola, Tako, Marietta, Ettore, Rocco and Mela — deserve all the love and the carrots, too.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    The Fabelmans is, as the title says, somewhat of a fable and wonderful in both large and small ways, even if Spielberg can’t help but soften the rougher, potentially lacerating edges. It’s what he does; it’s also what the audience expects of him, and he’s nothing if not obliging.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Manohla Dargis
    While climate change shadows every anxious discussion here, it also remains at a safe remove, a vague threat embedded in an aesthetically soothing package and gently salted with tears.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Manohla Dargis
    Nagy tries to push the story beyond its cautious framing, but it’s tough going.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Manohla Dargis
    Throughout, Russell keeps going and moving, moving and going, but the momentum never builds the way it should, and the big reveal lands flat partly because he never seems taken with the history he’s latched onto or comfortable with its heaviness. Or perhaps it’s the contemporary parallels that make him uneasy and why, again and again, he returns to the faces and filigree that he gets just right.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Manohla Dargis
    From the very first destabilizing moments of this movie, Park dazzles you with the beauty of his images and the intoxicating bravura of his unfettered imagination. And then, just when you think you have found your bearings, he unmoors you yet once more, blowing minds and shattering hearts, yours included.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Chukwu revisits the past while doing something extremely difficult. She makes this grim American history insistently of the moment — and she does so by stripping the story down to its raw, harrowing emotional core.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Manohla Dargis
    An overlong, undercooked comedy of manners about how, yes, indeed the rich are different.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 20 Manohla Dargis
    If Dominik isn’t interested in or capable of understanding that Monroe was indeed more than a victim of the predations of men, it’s because, in this movie, he himself slipped into that wretched role.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    Despite the grimness, the violence and the grotesque bleating of some hateful, prejudiced trolls, the movie never drags you down (though it might exhaust you) because it’s buoyed by Serebrennikov’s bravura, unfettered filmmaking.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Manohla Dargis
    Wilde does some fine work here, despite hammering the same notes early and often . . . But she isn’t a strong enough filmmaker at this point to navigate around the story’s weaknesses, much less transcend them. That’s especially tough on the actors.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Manohla Dargis
    The movie works best when it doesn’t over-explain and instead lets the land and the characters, the wide open spaces and the performances — especially Newton’s meticulously controlled turn — speak for themselves.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Manohla Dargis
    The kinetic action adventure The Woman King is a sweeping entertainment, but it’s also a story of unwavering resistance in front of and behind the camera.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    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.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Manohla Dargis
    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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Manohla Dargis
    Despite Miller’s talent and feverish enthusiasm, and the gravitational pull of his stars, the movie’s colorful parts just whir and stop, a pinwheel in unsteady wind.

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