IndieWire's Scores

For 5,163 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 4.5 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:
5163 movie reviews
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    With ideological clashes that span countries, Among the Believers offers an intricate and frightening look into the microcosm of our current world’s biggest international issue.
  1. If there’s any interiority to Fields, Toller isn’t interested in finding it; Danny Says would much rather provide the umpteenth account of Andy Warhol’s social circle (to mention but one of the movie’s many asides) than dig beneath the dirt in an attempt to learn more about one of the key figures who helped shape that scene.
  2. It’s every cheap, fast, loose, pointless joke in the book, and barely any of them can clear a solid laugh.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Split avoids being entirely tedious thanks to McAvoy’s standout performance as he cycles through those personalities, sometimes from line to line.
  3. “Miss Peregrine’s” is a hollow ode to wonder and weirdness that suggests we’re running perilously low on both.
  4. Kim Jee-woon will always gravitate towards the bleaker side of the things, but “The Age of Shadows” suggests that his stories might benefit from just a little bit more light.
  5. Blue Jay doesn’t lean on destiny or succumb to the easy refrain that time is a great equalizer. There’s genuine happiness here, but heartbreak is always right behind it.
  6. It’s a crime drama chewed up by a cheeky sense of humor — or, maybe it’s a quirky comedy set against the miserable campgrounds that lie on the fringes of the criminal underworld.
  7. When The Lovers and the Despot finally crawls to a close, you’re left with one thought above all others: This could make for a really great movie, some day.
  8. This quiet, difficult little movie — so stubbornly opaque that its torpedo of a last shot almost makes it feel as though Franco has been trolling us the whole time — is the rare film that has the courage to stomach the reality of life after death.
  9. 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.
  10. If nothing else, this loving — borderline fetishistic — concert movie makes a compelling case for the musicianship, artistry, and sheer athleticism of pop music. Well, good pop music, anyway.
  11. As a 92-minute commercial for a deeper look at the case, Amanda Knox is unquestionably intriguing; as a standalone offering, it makes one hell of an airtight case for something bigger and better.
  12. Bolstered by real events and true emotion, A United Kingdom opts for genuine, hard-won feeling, and the film studiously backs off from cheesy moments or over-the-top revelations.
  13. The romantic scenes are cute, but they feel at odds with the drama. The laughs land like chuckles, the love registers as mere fondness, and the salient observation that countries recast themselves during wartime is reduced to a fleeting detail.
  14. No amount of strong performances and good vibes can hide the sense that we’re just watching a paint-by-numbers routine. Nair puts so much effort into galvanizing the movie’s central figures that the slightest hints of conflict register as little more than an inconvenience.
  15. A beautiful wisp of an idea that is seldom compelling and almost never coherent, Planetarium squanders an irresistibly alluring premise.
  16. Not every moment stimulates a belly laugh, but that’s part of the point. My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea is more thoughtful than meets the eye, a cockeyed ode to what it feels like when nobody takes you seriously.
  17. With no score and zero levity, Lady Macbeth maintains a constant atmospheric dread. Oldroyd crafts a masterful sense of uncertainty about how far Katherine will go to preserve her dominance.
  18. The endless chaos of nature embodies the abstract threat of imminent destruction; by imbuing these shots with a combination of mystical allure and darker possibilities, Diaz creates a haunting atmosphere that makes it possible to absorb the story even when it slows to a crawl.
  19. Unfolding like a symphony of small humiliations, there isn’t a moment in this movie that doesn’t feel at least vaguely familiar, and there isn’t a moment in this movie that doesn’t feel completely true.
  20. A simple courtroom drama that never betrays its convictions, the film is a basic but bitterly urgent reminder that history is far more fluid than fact, a garden that must be tended to at all times lest it wither and grow weeds.
  21. The movie presents its plot like a ridiculous gamble, and keeps pulling it off, somehow managing to justify its existence.
  22. No matter its flaws, Tukel’s witty inversion of the buddy movie formula — set in an embellished world riddled by wartime dysfunction — has some legitimate ideas about the way feuds can last so long that neither side remembers what they’re fighting over.
  23. Lion, the first feature directed by Garth Davis, sufficiently realizes the emotional arc built into Brieley’s experience.
  24. Anchored by Natalie Portman’s achy-eyed performance, Jackie is, despite a few wrinkles at the end, about the best version of this story you can get.
  25. Told with the ramshackle energy of a first feature (but with a depth that hints at many more to come), Hart’s debut blossoms into a lovingly realized story of grief, getting by, and finding help in unexpected places.
  26. Cheesy without being self-aware, hobbled by rampant transphobia that the screenplay’s too dumb to address, this inane burst of campy stupidity can’t get beyond the sheer absurdity of its very existence.
  27. Wim Wenders’ 3D snoozefest The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez is not a good movie. It’s not a good movie, and at the same time, it doesn’t fail so spectacularly so to provide a compelling secondary reading.
  28. It turns a major tragedy into a minor disaster movie.
  29. Barry loses its way when it reduces itself to a tacky diorama of its protagonist’s inner turmoil, and it does so frequently enough to dismantle any sense of narrative momentum.
  30. Blair Witch is shot, constructed and executed just like the original. And the slow-build fright fest will please genre purists — perhaps enough to reinvigorate the potential franchise — even if it feels all too familiar to the rest of us.
  31. It’s a touching scenario, and one so well-acted and laced with superb special effects that even its more obvious beats cut deep.
  32. Murugadoss, famously, isn’t one for subtlety or even much logic. However, he may have reached new lows of lazy filmmaking here, delivering on virtually none of his pre-release declarations of celebrating female strength, defying gender stereotypes, or even simply entertaining.
  33. It’s a striking combination of analysis and creative innovation that communes with the past and present, uniting them as a beautiful, absurdist tone poem about the struggles facing those dealt less fortunate hands in life.
  34. Because of its vignette-based structure, the film never coalesces into a single, engaging narrative, but it’s rich with wonderful moments.
  35. 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.
  36. Wheatley’s commitment to crowdpleasing antics makes it difficult to stop and consider the lack of depth. In a universe of shootout clichés, Free Fire manages to carve out its own niche, where the proverbial last man standing matters less than the journey to get him there.
  37. It’s fine that Bonello would rather raise unsettling questions than provide unhelpful answers, but his inquiry often feels every bit as confused as his characters. Nocturama is enthralling until the bitter end, but it’s so hard to distill its purpose that you can’t tell if the film is opaque or if it simply offers nothing to see.
  38. Truly, The Magnificent Seven is a story of simple pleasures, and it gets the little things right.
  39. The film arrives at its last shot with a sense of purpose, but Cedar’s clumsy plotting and uncharacteristically sterile compositions suggest that he’s charted the least enjoyable route to the film’s satisfying finale.
  40. A blood-soaked, bone-crunching hymn to religious devotion and faith, Hacksaw Ridge doesn’t hum Mel Gibson’s favorite themes; it shouts them.
  41. There are sequences and stand-alone shots that will stick with you long after you’ve washed the insipid narration from memory.
  42. The Bad Batch further solidifies the strength of Amirpour’s idiosyncratic vision, which takes familiar details and bends them into spiky bursts of unpredictability.
  43. Shrouded in grief and chilly to the core, Andrew Dominik’s mournful documentary One More Time With Feeling is at once sobering in tone and intoxicating in style.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Once again excelling, Zellweger has much to do with the safe transition of this new Bridget, maintaining all the old quirks and sweetness, but in a believably more mature shell.
  44. Despite charming performances from Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke, this saccharine romance...rings a bit false from start to finish.
  45. Every original drop of Bleed for This is lost in a sea of cliché and convention, and Younger seems totally incapable of separating the singular verve of his protagonist from the hackneyed arc of his defining ordeal.
  46. Una
    An agile, vicious piece of work that’s anchored by extraordinary performances from Rooney Mara and Ben Mendelsohn, Una maintains its grip even when swinging a bit too hard for the fences.
  47. Moonlight transforms rage and frustration into unadulterated intimacy. In this mesmerizing portrait of a suffocating world, the only potential catharsis lies in acknowledging it as Chiron so deeply wishes he could. Despite the somber tone, Moonlight is a beacon of hope for the prospects of speaking up.
  48. With Tom Hanks appropriately cast as good-natured Sully, Eastwood delivers an earnest, straightforward look at the way the captain’s professionalism saved the day. But while that aspect of the movie hits more than a few obvious notes, the crash is the real star of the show.
  49. Nocturnal Animals is an impressively ambitious effort, one part mean Texas thriller, one part middle-age melodrama, and makes for a meta-textual riddle that is almost as pleasurable to reflect on as it to actually watch.
  50. Though the film is not more than sum of its parts, well, those parts are pretty great. You just wish they belonged to a slightly deeper film.
  51. La La Land is magically in tune with its reference points even as falls a few notes short of their greatness.
  52. This is a widescreen ode to the beauty of absolution, told with such constant sincerity that you can’t help but want to forgive its flaws.
  53. The Academy of Muses draws viewers in and forces them to take sides along with Pinto’s skeptical apprentices. By its end, the movie has transcended the boundaries of the classroom to become an educational experience in more ways than one.
  54. The film mistakes stiff, literally buttoned up acting — you’ve never seen so many starched and fully done up dress shirts in one film in your entire life — as somehow being clever, but there’s scarcely a moment of Morgan that is genuinely shocking (though the undercurrents with Amy are at least unnerving).
  55. Elizabeth Wood’s fire-breathing debut is an adrenalized shot of ecstasy and entitlement, a fully committed cautionary tale that’s able to follow through on its premise because — like the remarkable young actress who plays its heroine — the film is unafraid of being utterly loathsome.
  56. Woefully inauthentic, milquetoast as a mild breeze and far too tidy for any of its sweeping resolutions to have even the faintest hint of staying power, The Hollars takes 88 minutes to inspire the same warm and fuzzy feeling that a Hallmark card can deliver in a heartbeat.
  57. In trying to squeeze a half-dozen life stories into its running time, Hands of Stone, the new film about legendary Panamanian boxer Roberto Durán, magnifies that disappointing mistake.
  58. The film’s best moments are hollow and derivative, as borrowed from better fictions as any of the names that Alice takes for herself.
  59. Listless at times and lacking the killer instinct required to follow through on the emotional toll that the fighting took on its survivors, the documentary is far more insightful about the buildup to bloodshed than it is about the mess that was left behind in its wake.
  60. The beautifully lensed drama is, like its protagonist, compelled and often obsessed by the human shape and form, and Ahn’s film artfully uses the physical to tell a mostly standard issue coming-of-age story with style.
  61. The good news is that the story of Ben-Hur is so rock solid that not even the director of “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” can screw it up completely.
  62. 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.
  63. Radcliffe’s performance ensures that the movie is engaging from start to finish — like Letts, the lynchpin of his portrayal is in the confidence of his voice — but Ragussis is afraid to follow his lead actor down the rabbit hole.
  64. You may not want to spend more time with these characters, but you will want to sink deeper into their world — fortunately, the forthcoming videogame will allow players to do just that. Whether the game will make retroactively make “Kingsglaive” a more engaging movie remains to be seen, but there’s certainly room for improvement.
  65. This is a movie of remarkable scale; on the level of sheer craftsmanship, it offers some appeal. If only Gowarikar had put the same level of effort into the story.
  66. This is irrefutably Kinnaman’s movie, but Connolly fatally undervalues him. He doesn’t trust his actor to walk the emotional tightrope his film stretches taut before him, to sell us on the idea of a father digging himself deeper into a hole of his own design.
  67. Staggeringly beautiful and immensely true, the best animated film of 2016 — one of the year’s best films of any kind, really.
  68. This elegant and surprisingly fast-paced blend of horror and suspense overcomes some of its more ridiculous ingredients thanks to endless invention.
  69. That’s where the film truly succeeds: Frears doesn’t treat Florence like a joke, and neither does Streep.
  70. Winocour has a talent that cannot be taught, she has a gift for filtering every development through at least one character — especially those moments that other movies would mulch into the stuff of raw spectacle.
  71. Unlike so many comedies, Sausage Party only gets funnier as it goes along — there are dozens of duffed jokes along the way...but the script mines its demented premise for its full potential, and the plot crescendos to an ending so good that you’re likely to forgive many of the dull moments that came before it.
  72. Despite the film’s gripping final chapter, its heroic Czechoslovakian characters are completely disconnected from the rest of the country, much like their struggle has been omitted from the cinematic legacy of the war they helped to win.
  73. Regardless of who it sets its sights on, How He Fell in Love tells a complete tale without being tidy, fitting for a tale representative of love’s fickleness.
  74. Cats may have nine lives, but you only get one, and it’s too precious to waste on this drivel.
  75. The Little Prince is probably too opaque for children, and it’s definitely too strained for adults, but it’s still refreshing to see a movie that flies with the untamed, sometimes illogical creative impulses of its target audiences.
  76. The Girl With All the Gifts really does offer up a fleshed-out world rich with eerie implications, saving the biggest one for the memorable finale.
  77. A nuanced portrait of a city in flux (or decline) that uses the impressionableness of adolescence to shake our own understanding of gentrification and its residual effects, Little Men is that rarest of beasts: a truly hopeful heartbreaker.
  78. Suicide Squad never has the courage of its convictions — it doesn’t own anything. At best, Ayer rents some pre-existing pop iconography and charges us $15 to watch him take it around the block for a spin. Forget the “Worst. Heroes. Ever.” These guys don’t even know how to be bad.
  79. It amounts to little more than frothy summertime entertainment—occasionally fun, but almost immediately forgettable.
  80. It’s a story that has its share of unnerving sequences, but like its pivotal character, it feels stuck between two worlds.
  81. What makes Equity such a vital feminist film, even when its other qualities are often few and far between, is how defiantly it internalizes that idea.
  82. Though it falls short of its goals, Tallulah is an ambitious first film for Heder. A valiant effort, but ultimately, like its characters’ lives, a missed opportunity.
  83. Indignation doesn’t break any fresh ground, and at times plays more like a series of engaging moments than a cohesive whole, but its craftsmanship is impeccable.
  84. Clearly a dynamo in both her life and work, observing the juxtaposition between pre-cancer Jones (the film is filled with excellent performance footage of her over the years) and the still-mending Sharon is profound; Kopple resists making cheap comparisons between the two, instead opting to let the footage speak for itself.
  85. Page and Wood navigate this difficult, often half-formed material with great tenderness and surgical precision — together, through thick and thin, they convey a feeling of great personal growth, revealing new wrinkles to their roles long after Rozema’s camera has stopped looking for them.
  86. Although it often stumbles in service to delivering yet another foul-mouthed joke, its heart remains firmly in the right place.
  87. There may be individual shots in this movie that cost more than the director’s entire pre-existing output, but make no mistake: This is a David Lowery movie — a movie imbued with the same tactile nature and uniquely American flair for myth-making that characterized his Sundance breakthrough, “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints.”
  88. Blisteringly cool one moment and ridiculously silly the next (much like its high school heroine), this punchy and propulsive late summer surprise is able to capture the way we live now because it displays such a vivid understanding of the reasons why we live that way.
  89. Jason Bourne adheres to an existing format so robotically that it never manages to surprise or engage for longer than the occasional passing moment.
  90. The Seventh Fire is stirring for how it chips away at the relationship between hopelessness and helplessness.
  91. "Absolutely Fabulous” captures the irreverent fun of the series using an appropriately absurd plot device and does not read like a tired excuse to put the characters back in a room together.
  92. Dare to peek under the scales of this wholly original and ominously enchanting nightmare, and you’ll find a simple story about the things that society forces a girl to give up if she wants to be part of our world.
  93. While it may seem instinctual to want an R-rated “Batman,” especially from a graphic novel that would deserve the rating without alterations, Batman: The Killing Joke is borderline unsettling — and not in a good way.
  94. Director Jeff Feuerzeig tracks Albert’s bizarre scheme in her own words, constructing a fascinating treatise on creative desire, internal grievances and fame as compelling as anything the writer herself dreamed up.
  95. Sandberg unquestionably has an eye for a great horror motif — and, given the frequent use of absolutely gut-churning ambient sounds and hair-raising scratching noises, an ear for it, too — and he’s assembled a strong cast to tell Heisserer’s expanded story, but even those smart decisions and clear talents can’t push Lights Out to brighter heights.
  96. Hooligan Sparrow is held tight on the strength of the solidarity it finds between these women, and while many other movies have more powerfully exposed the corruption of contemporary China, few have so articulately confronted the gendered weight of these prejudices, and how women always seem to be the first citizens to have their wings clipped.
  97. The solid performances can’t distract from an overly ambitious and crowded plot.

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