IndieWire's Scores

Select another publication »
For 5,173 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 59% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 38% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.3 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 69
Highest review score: 100 The Only Living Pickpocket in New York
Lowest review score: 0 Pixels
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3,574 out of 5173
  2. Mixed: 1,333 out of 5173
  3. Negative: 266 out of 5173
5173 movie reviews
view
per page
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Barbarians
    Nothing about this moodily lit, dinner-party-from-hell film can compete with the real-life drama that unfolded in the middle of the Academy Awards. Or with any other home invasion thriller, for that matter.
  2. Cold Pursuit
    Cold Pursuit resolves as a riotously fun example of a director remaking their own film for the right reasons.
  3. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
    The House with a Clock in Its Walls is at its best when it foregrounds the adults and gives Black and Blanchett ample time to bicker with one another.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 83 Critic Score
    Robin Hood
    Robin Hood isn’t a history lesson, it’s a jaunty, beautifully animated series of very funny set pieces that remain effective, perhaps more so to younger audiences unfamiliar with the strong personalities doing the voices.
  5. Dog Pound
    Chapiron stubbornly avoids an uplifting message, portraying his dangerous setting as a demonstration of virility that leads to madness.
  6. The Wall
    The director’s instincts are a bit too broad to sell the full psychic horror of this scenario, and Taylor-Johnson will never be accused of being able to shoulder a movie by himself, but a super coherent sense of space and a vivid feel for the environment help The Wall to remain upright to the end.
  7. Charlie Says
    If nothing else, Charlie Says succeeds in demystifying the man with a pentagram carved into his skull: He may be society’s go-to conception of evil, but he was also a drugged-out racist who wrote forgettable songs that even his acolytes probably didn’t enjoy as much as they were letting on.
  8. Ordinary Angels
    Maybe Ordinary Angels is so accessible to godless critics and church-going civilians alike because it focuses on a circle of hell that everyone in this country has to enter at some point, no matter what they might believe in: the American healthcare system.
  9. Tornado
    Despite considerable thrills throughout, Maclean’s writing makes it seem as though his characters never actually existed in their world before the film started.
  10. Finch
    A broadly safe film like “Finch” might roll into its destination with an ease that belies the risks of getting there, but sometimes the real treasure is the friends we build along the way.
  11. How It Ends
    The pandemic spawned plenty of run-and-gun projects. Many of them chart the circumstances that made them possible, but Wein and Lister-Jones’ winsome spin on a well-trod concept is as fresh and funny as anything inspired by the last few wretched months.
  12. Lorne
    Though “Lorne” is prone to some overly relaxed pacing, the film is held tight enough by the grip that Michaels has maintained over his little fiefdom for more than half a century.
  13. The Perfect Find
    Director Perrier (“Jezebel,” “Unprisoned”) has helmed a standout rom-com, bolstered by Union’s vision as a producer and lead star. The perfect find for those seeking a smart, sexy rom-com respite? Pretty close.
  14. Somebody I Used to Know
    Somebody I Used to Know doesn’t chalk up a failed relationship to circumstance or even bad choices. It’s simply the respectful endurance of love even though that person may not be “the one.”
  15. Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl
    Nash is very easy to invest in, even in surface-level observations — before the other shoe drops and “Underestimate the Girl” goes somewhere much more raw and rewarding.
  16. The Dinner
    Moverman’s discordant structure constantly veers from clumsy moments to fascinating exchanges. As an experiment, it never finds a complete shape, and ends on a frustratingly abrupt note.
  17. The Quiet Ones
    By the time this hard-nosed genre exercise arrives at its ambivalent final scene, whether or not the criminals get away with stealing a few million Krone feels all but irrelevant to a world in which real fulfillment is so hard to keep.
  18. Hell of a Summer
    Even the worst capitulations to convention are short-lived, just as even its most eye-rolling moments can be seen as more of a feature than a bug toward the end of a fun sleepover movie that never forgets how hard it is to grow up without losing your head.
  19. Sting
    There’s decent fun to be had in this crafty and contained Aussie skin-crawler (a low-budget affair that doesn’t scrimp when it comes to its WETA-created monster), but Sting is a bit too small for its massive alien spider to maneuver itself in unexpected ways, and the tender human story that Roache-Turner weaves around her lacks the bite it needs to melt your heart or liquify any of your other organs.
  20. Memoir of War
    Anchored by a brilliant Mélanie Thierry, whose stone-eyed lead performance is at the center of almost every frame, Finkiel’s film never betrays the distance that Duras inserted between herself and her own experiences, or that she wrote from the perspective of a vessel as much as she did a subject.
  21. Wrath of Man
    The ultimate sin of Wrath of Man is that it doesn’t realize it’s really a story about pride.
  22. Jules
    Sometimes, this peculiarly amusing film argues in its own special way, coming face-to-face with the weirdness that life throws your way can be the most important step towards learning how to live with it.
  23. Butterfly Jam
    It’s only once Butterfly Jam seems doomed to repeat the same dark fatalism of Balagov’s earlier work that it suddenly affirms itself as the bittersweet fable that it’s been all along.
  24. Them That Follow
    After a slow-burn first hour, Poulton and Savage unfurl a climax that unexpectedly brings together all of the pieces fighting for Mara. It’s nerve-jangling and raw, and the filmmakers earn their tension and the gruesome harm that comes with it. (There are plenty of snakes.) All that goodwill comes close to collapse, however, as Poulton and Savage charge toward the finale.
  25. Proxy
    Increasingly silly even as it maintains a grave tone, Proxy doesn't always work, but its commitment to unpredictable twists and pushing beyond morbid extremes bears the stamp of showmanship sorely lacking from many other examples of the genre.
  26. Galveston
    It takes far too long for Galveston to emerge from the novocaine of its various clichés and allow us to feel the tender flesh that bleeds across every scene of this seedy road noir, but — in fairness to director Mélanie Laurent — some filmmakers are never able to break the leathered skin of a Nic Pizzolatto story.
  27. Burden
    As Burden, Garrett Hedlund astonishes in a nuanced portrait of a man resistant to change, until he finally comes to understand that hatred is literally killing him.
  28. The Strange Ones
    Its atmospheric sophistication holds strong throughout, channeling a wonder for the natural world reminiscent of Terrence Malick with an air of existential dread straight out of Andrei Tarkovsky.
  29. Magic Hour
    Written alongside her real-life husband (and fellow filmmaker) Mark Duplass, Aselton has made it clear in press materials that the film, about a loving if troubled married couple (played by Aselton and Daveed Diggs) isn’t explicitly about her actual marriage. But it’s also not not about her and Duplass’ long-running relationship. Still, once you see where Aselton and Duplass’ script takes their characters, the differentiation becomes easier to swallow, if not all the more intriguing.
  30. Havoc
    Rote as Evans’ plot might be, and wasteful as its treatment of certain characters definitely is . . . he has a well-developed ear for ice-cold gangster speak, and he isn’t afraid to make people pay a steep price for their penance. It’s enough to forgive him — and/or the movie gods — for making us wait so long to see him do it again.
  31. I Origins
    While still invested in grandiose swipes at big ideas and the epistemological babbling of a late night college dorm room conversation, Cahill generates an authentic sense of mystery by keeping a tighter lid on the secrets of the universe.
  32. War Dogs
    Hill embodies everything that’s best about the film around him: He’s funny, daft and broken in a way that’s more fun to gawk at than it is to fix. In a story that’s supposedly about the payoffs and perils of taking big risks, he’s the only one who puts his money where his mouth is.
  33. Rubberneck
    Rubberneck has more in common with the growing Karpovsky oeuvre than it may appear -- and even inadvertently critiques it.
  34. Immaculate
    It is in the third act that Immaculate delivers a gonzo, rock-smashing, fiery, crucifix-stabbing and all-out bloody good time. Unfortunately, by that point, it’s too late to save the soul of this movie, which is condemned not to go to hell, but remain in dull horror movie purgatory.
  35. Little Death
    There’s a perplexing choice at the heart of Little Death, directed by Jack Begert, best known for his work in music videos. That choice is essentially to make two very different movies and smash them together.
  36. Sweethearts
    The central premise of the friends’ dropping their high school relationships never takes off when the film has so little interest in fleshing those connections out even slightly, but it’s easy to root for the two of them to find happiness.
  37. Extraction
    There’s a fine line between awe and tedium, and sometimes not even Chris Hemsworth is able to blur it for us.
  38. Mufasa: The Lion King
    Mufasa has hidden charms that are arguably best described as Jenkins released straight to VHS.
  39. Minions: The Rise of Gru
    It’s colorful and madcap and zany, and while that might not make it suitable for all audiences, it will delight the very one it is made for. That’s fine for now, but if this franchise wants to survive, the next entry will have to take on a much tougher mission: stay silly, but get a whole lot smarter.
  40. Infinite Storm
    Despite the refreshingly experiential flavor of Szumowska’s approach, her film is handcuffed by the facts of its true story, and Pam remains at such a pronounced emotional remove that it sometimes feels as if she’s only hiking up that mountain because the facts of the matter demand that she must.
  41. The Commuter
    This may be a forgettable movie about the forgotten man — a blue-collar morality play disguised as a very contrived hostage crisis — but at least it’s shlock with something on its mind.
  42. I Am Michael
    Anchored by a remarkably convincing performance by James Franco in the lead role, I Am Michael manages to explore Glatze's story without condemning him, even as it foregrounds the troubling nature of his path.
  43. ACORN and the Firestorm
    Reuben Atlas and Sam Pollard’s convincing but unfocused documentary “ACORN and the Firestorm” firmly contextualizes the group’s targeted debasement and eventual downfall as a landmark event of this modern political moment — not the epilogue of the previous era, but rather the prologue of the current one.
  44. Reality Winner
    United States vs. Reality Winner is less expose than repudiation of a system that lacks the humanity to address the subtleties of her case.
  45. Diary of a Chambermaid
    Benoît Jacquot’s The Diary of a Chambermaid is a gorgeously mounted and dramatically inert bit of fluff that drapes itself over a smoldering Léa Seydoux but never manages to catch fire.
  46. The 24th
    The 24th means well, and while it, sadly, mostly elicits a shrug, what the film lacks in pizzaz it more than makes up for in educational value, for better or worse.
  47. Scarlet
    Scarlet amounts to a frustrating waste of animating and directorial skill for the price of an excessively ordinary story.
  48. Wine Country
    A pleasant and perfectly watchable comedy that would have died on the vine in theaters, Wine Country is casual viewing done right.
  49. It's What's Inside
    It’s a loud, colorful, frantic and pitch black horror comedy about identity that mercilessly critiques modern anxiety about desirability and success.
  50. Alpha
    The maddening frustration of her first unambiguous misfire — which is worse than bad because it could have been good — is that it feels so much, but conveys so little.
  51. Escobar: Paradise Lost
    Di Stefano's memorable debut feature makes up for its lack of sophistication with constant forward motion.
  52. Adrift
    Adrift is told with an inimitable sense of place and a rare attention to detail, both of which help to ensure that we never lose sight of the terror at hand. When all else fails, which it sometimes does, Woodley is there to right the ship.
  53. Hard Luck Love Song
    Justin Corsbie’s debut would buy you a drink if you couldn’t afford one, hustle you for a hundred bucks in the backroom if you could, and leave you with a big hug on the way out either way just cause it was so grateful not to spend the night alone.
  54. In the Land of Blood and Honey
    The most impressive thing about In the Land of Blood and Honey is that Jolie makes you feel it.
  55. Monster
    Harrison is one of our finest young actors, capable of eliciting great empathy and always conveying deep interiority, and saddling him with a derivative monologue only serves to take us out of his head, and mostly out of his performance.
  56. Tag
    Stuck between a hangout movie and an out-and-out caper romp, Tag settles for something in the middle — there are worse ways to spend your time, but the result is taking an outrageous premise and making it seem ordinary.
  57. Migration
    It is very silly and often strange, but it’s also sweet and funny, and damn it all if you don’t start to really care about this odd little family.
  58. Jupiter's Moon
    Jupiter’s Moon is no simple story of escape, in part because Mundruczó’s script (co-written with Kata Wéber) has no real idea where it’s going.
  59. Capital
    Gavras never forces the material into allegorical turf; it's a relatively straightforward look at the ramifications of getting blinded by dollar signs, with perhaps one of the most clearly defined visions of economic depravity since "Wall Street."
  60. After Blue (Dirty Paradise)
    A kaleidoscopic fantasy warped through the lens of a 1970s sci-fi Western, After Blue is a synthetic siren song for the freaks of the future and the past.
  61. Tiger Eyes
    Directed by Blume's son Lawrence, this gentle drama based on Blume's 1981 novel works surprisingly well considering the numerous trappings of the material, while demonstrating exactly why it's so difficult to bring Blume's work to the screen.
  62. The Glass Castle
    Even when the the music swells and people talk through their problems to reach unremarkable conclusions, there’s an undercurrent of emotional authenticity.
  63. Sonic the Hedgehog 3
    It might be enough to entertain young children or diehard SEGA loyalists, but the rest of us are left to lament that the running time isn’t as fast as its blue protagonist.
  64. Ibiza
    It’s as wild and unhinged as the other films in its brethren (the MPAA does not typically rate original Netflix films, but “Ibiza” would absolutely be on the receiving end of an R). However, Ibiza subverts plenty of expectations in service to a story that’s both funny and sweet.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 58 Critic Score
    The Cut
    Akin ultimately fails to make the material work, especially in the second half of the film, when it develops into a disappointing adventure story.
  66. Radioactive
    As directed by Marjane Satrapi, this discursive biopic struggles whenever it cuts away from her drama to explore the bigger picture — with peculiar flash-forwards to a nuclear future — but Pike helps fuse it together.
  67. Winner
    [A] frustratingly glib biopic.
  68. Our Time
    Nuestro tiempo ultimately feels like an extended couples-therapy session that we were invited to by mistake, with Reygadas playing both doctor and patient in a conflict of interest that goes unresolved.
  69. The End of Love
    There are powerful ingredients here, certainly enough to create a deeply felt work, but The End of Love lacks the additional layers of storytelling necessary for Webber to make the audience feel as close to the material as he does to his son.
  70. Midnight's Children
    At times Midnight's Children balances off its earnestness with a sweeping view of history and tangible human drama, but the allegorical qualities of Rushdie's novel fail to translate as anything but a shrill, on-the-nose instance of thematic overreaching.
  71. The Human Surge
    This is a heckuva stimulating cinematic achievement for a relative newcomer. The Human Surge offers a shrewd commentary on the dissonance of technological connectivity and personal communication.
  72. Bad Behaviour
    Perhaps it’s the talent in her genes, perhaps it’s her unique life experience, perhaps some combo of that and more, but Englert is already a formidable, fully formed filmmaker. Dumb labels be damned: She’s the real deal, and Bad Behaviour is proof positive of that.
  73. On the Road
    Overlong and unfocused in parts, Salles' adaptation nonetheless holds together about as well a movie can when the odds are so heavily stacked against it.
  74. The Details
    It's a familiar mold: the perils of suburban discontent have been so thoroughly explored that The Details plays like a hodgepodge of familiar circumstances on an assembly line to disaster.
  75. Nightbitch
    Marielle Heller’s version of the story — Yoder is listed as a co-writer — could have taken the magical realist element out entirely, and the film would have played exactly the same. The body horror is downplayed to the point of being functionally nonexistent.
  76. Crush
    Crush is, for better or worse, just like every other teen rom-com, extraordinary in its ordinariness. It succeeds at what it sets out to do: Give queer kids a totally enjoyable, and often quite funny, mainstream love story with a happy ending.
  77. Deadpool & Wolverine
    Yes, the story of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has long been more compelling than any of the stories told in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and — in the process of reconciling those two stories as only Marvel Jesus could — Deadpool makes a very persuasive case that this should be the last superhero movie ever made. It won’t be. It already isn’t. The best we can probably hope for is that “Deadpool 4” is similarly willing to die for all of the sins that its genre will commit between now and then.
  78. Focus
    It never loses the dazzling surface polish, but without trying to dig deeper, the movie strings us along in the hopes of something more, not unlike one of the cons at its center.
  79. Live Cargo
    Fortunately, the black-and-white debut of writer-director Logan Sandler is just sharp enough to complicate its clichés with strong performances and a mesmerizing tone that pushes the mopey proceedings into psychological thriller territory.
  80. The Wizard of the Kremlin
    It’s not a thriller, it’s not really a comedy, and it’s unlikely to start a revolution despite a cruel jolt of a final shot.
  81. Spinster
    The film’s inherent messiness and unpredictability eventually settles into more expected charms, but Spinster is at its most appealing when leaning into the very ideas it seemed hellbent on rejecting early on.
  82. Hocus Pocus 2
    The fun continues with a totally satisfactory sequel that brings the Sanderson sisters back to life one more time. OK, so the plot is basically the same and the jokes mere updates to the original. Why mess with a good thing when you can simply recreate it?
  83. The Fate of the Furious
    F8 is the worst of these films since “2 Fast 2 Furious,” and it may be even worse than that. It’s the “Die Another Day” of its franchise — an empty, generic shell of its former self that disrespects its own proud heritage at every turn.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Little Accidents
    Little Accidents takes its time, but Holbrook’s confident performance makes his story riveting throughout, reflecting both the gravity of his situation and the enormous consequences his choice will have on the entire town — certain individuals in particular.
  85. DC League of Super-Pets
    While this new release confirms that DC will stop at nothing to keep its superhero franchise going — stretching their source material so thin that they’re not even making movies about superheroes, but their pets — the studio was at least wise enough to tap Stern for the task, who breathes a bit of (adorable) life into the tired good vs. evil tropes we’ve become accustomed to in the overstuffed superhero space.
  86. Storks
    Neither wacky enough to work as pure punchline, nor smart enough to bend its looniness into something more substantial, Storks views the world with the same confused outlook of its wide-eyed infants.
  87. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
    Largely a cut-and-paste affair, although useful for that very reason; it provides a glaring reminder that scary movies have evolved, both in terms of style and expectations, but the evolution isn't worth the effort.
  88. Drive-Away Dolls
    Fiery, fiendish, and flawed, “Drive-Away Dolls” could do more and less, but delivers definitive prove that these atypical authors of lesbian film have something and want to use it.
  89. Mosquito State
    Some movies try to entertain you; this one holds your attention like a bite that you can’t stop yourself from scratching even though you know it’s only going to make things worse. It’s hostile and off-putting to the extreme, but also too aggravating to ignore or stop watching.
  90. French Exit
    The result is an anodyne if increasingly tender little film that would have been lost in its own lineage if not for the strength of its cast.
  91. Remarkably Bright Creatures
    Maybe it’s something about seeing Sally Field bond with an octopus, or watching a true inter-generational friendship blossom on screen, or maybe it’s just something more obvious: taking the best parts of a sweet story, and paring it down to its best bits. Or, well, best arms? Tentacles? Whatever can reach out and touch you, just as this film will.
  92. Towheads
    In Towheads, every comic bit is weighted with an awkward blend of sadness and irreverent humor.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    I Only Rest in the Storm
    Overall, the big swings this wending odyssey takes in merging genres and weighty ideas do pay off — it’s a gargantuan, continent-crossing feat.
  94. Forbidden Fruits
    Alloway’s debut is a beautiful disaster that even at its weakest points has just enough glamor and guts to justify most genre girlies taking the journey eventually. Just don’t expect to find anything especially ripe, or rotten, once you check it out.
  95. War Machine
    The movie veers from the broad doomsday satire of the “Dr. Strangelove” variety to a more subtle portrait of institutional failure, and doesn’t always succeed at modulating its tones, but it’s nevertheless a searing critique.
  96. The Fence
    The deterministic narrative drive of “The Fence” ultimately proves to be the film’s undoing. At some point, the film eventually goes through the motions until its inevitable downbeat climax, at which point its dramatic shortcomings become difficult to ignore.
  97. The Rum Diary
    The result is a subpar comic adventure that's nonetheless admirable for its restrained vision of Thompson in his early gestation period.
  98. Frank & Lola
    Frank & Lola is scattershot from the start, and never makes a compelling case for why its story is being told.
  99. Return to Space
    The film’s scattershot focus — in stark contrast to the breathless immediacy of “The Rescue” — and advertorial tone diminish the sheer thrill of watching the company land an orbital class rocket for the first time.
  100. The Croods: A New Age
    The Croods: A New Age ultimately spins that off into a wacky adventure that somehow involves aforementioned punch monkeys (cute, but very punchy indeed), a revelation that the “Croods” franchise might intersect with the world of “Mad Max,” and a generous dash of female empowerment (plus awesome fake heavy-metal music to go with it). It’s a little silly, very colorful, and entertaining enough to deliver some good-hearted ideas that aren’t beholden to any period in time. Worth nearly a decade of push-pull to get here? Probably not, but on its own merits it’s a charming throwback — not necessarily a “new age,” but the remnants of a classic one.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »