Manohla Dargis
Select another critic »For 2,344 reviews, this critic has graded:
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46% higher than the average critic
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3% same as the average critic
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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
Score distribution:
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Positive: 1,182 out of 2344
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Mixed: 893 out of 2344
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Negative: 269 out of 2344
2344
movie
reviews
- By Date
- By Critic Score
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Feb 2, 2023
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Jan 19, 2023
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Jan 12, 2023
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- Manohla Dargis
In shaping this narrative, though, Lesh and Frost have left out details that would have deepened and broadened Wildcat.- The New York Times
- Posted Dec 29, 2022
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Dec 28, 2022
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- Manohla Dargis
Making Elisabeth interestingly human proves more than enough, a feat that Kreutzer and Krieps accomplish to dazzling effect.- The New York Times
- Posted Dec 23, 2022
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Dec 23, 2022
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Dec 15, 2022
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Dec 9, 2022
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Dec 8, 2022
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Dec 2, 2022
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Nov 23, 2022
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Nov 23, 2022
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Nov 17, 2022
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- Manohla Dargis
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.- The New York Times
- Posted Nov 17, 2022
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Nov 10, 2022
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Nov 3, 2022
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- Manohla Dargis
Nagy tries to push the story beyond its cautious framing, but it’s tough going.- The New York Times
- Posted Oct 27, 2022
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Oct 19, 2022
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Oct 13, 2022
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Oct 13, 2022
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- Manohla Dargis
An overlong, undercooked comedy of manners about how, yes, indeed the rich are different.- The New York Times
- Posted Oct 10, 2022
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 28, 2022
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 22, 2022
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 22, 2022
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 15, 2022
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 15, 2022
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 8, 2022
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Sep 1, 2022
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- 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.- The New York Times
- Posted Aug 25, 2022
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