IndieWire's Scores

Select another publication »
For 5,171 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:
  1. Positive: 3,572 out of 5171
  2. Mixed: 1,333 out of 5171
  3. Negative: 266 out of 5171
5171 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Silver Linings Playbook
    Incredibly heartfelt to a large degree because of its cast.
  2. Sirens
    With the band’s headstrong co-founders leading their tale, Sirens is a powerful reminder that punk isn’t dead if you know where to look.
  3. Homemade
    A dense collection of inquisitive, unpredictable and often life-affirming responses to the pandemic from some of the most astute directors working today, Homemade is pure filmmaking talent in bite-sized pieces that doubles as a lively, scattershot collage of the world in 2020.
  4. Blue Jean
    Featuring a stirring breakout performance from the luminous Rosy McEwan, Blue Jean grounds the political with the personal — without losing sight of queer joy.
  5. The Boys in the Band
    The result is a sophisticated, tart-tongued revival, and a gayed-up “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” that surmounts the challenges faced by stage-to-screen adaptations, specifically the utter confinement to a single space.
  6. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter
    Striking a complex tone of tragedy and uplift at the same time, Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter both celebrates the escapist power of personal fantasies and bears witness to their dangerous extremes. It's the rare case of a story that's inspirational and devastating at once.
  7. En el Séptimo Día (On the Seventh Day)
    Once the movie arrives at its brilliant climax, the cumulative effects of passing details lead to sweeping payoff.
  8. High Life
    High Life is fixated on the hypnotic rhythms of oblivion, and the human desires it brings to the surface.
  9. Touch
    Spanning 50 years and multiple continents without ever shifting its focus from the universal human urge to ponder what could have been, Touch is an ode to accepting your life story without losing sleep over the things you couldn’t change.
  10. Amour
    Although not exactly heartwarming, Amour has a more contained vision of human relationships than Haneke's previous films without sacrificing its bleak foundation. It's his most conventional movie about death -- and the most poignant.
  11. The Grand Budapest Hotel
    While it has many familiar ingredients — from the atmosphere to the ensemble of Anderson regulars in nearly every role — in its allegiance to Anderson's vision, everything about The Grand Budapest Hotel is a welcome dose of originality.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Escape from the Planet of the Apes
    Escape from Planet of the Apes is, in fact, a superior film in many ways to the first, but is lacking that film’s freshness and originality. Still: an undeniable high watermark for the franchise.
  13. Fire of Love
    At an economical 90-minute running time, Fire of Love packs a visual and emotional wallop, with enough close-ups on erupting volcanoes — one, at a point, is called “a bathtub with a hole in it, sowing death all around” — to leave you slack-jawed, terrified, and awe-inspired.
  14. Aquí y Allá (Here and There)
    It's incredibly uneventful and devastating all at once.
  15. 100 Nights of Hero
    This is a film of rare joy and spirit, and one that deserves to be celebrated as both a feminist fairytale and a manifesto that will inspire a myriad of future stories.
  16. Enough Said
    Gandolfini deserves an Oscar for Enough Said not because it's the culmination of everything that came before it but rather because it goes in a completely different direction. And his least characteristic achievement is also one of his best.
  17. The Time That Remains
    Suleiman's most poignant moments are largely wordless. Nothing feels more affecting than Suleiman's ubiquitous frozen stare. Although he never utters a sound, his silence speaks volumes about the inability to resolve the social ramifications of Middle Eastern strife.
  18. Wildlife
    Dano crafts an unsparing portrait that’s harsh and humane in equal measure.
  19. Rewind
    A wrenching self-portrait of inherited abuse that joins “The Tale” and “Leaving Neverland” on a growing list of essential and unfathomably brave films about the internalization of sexual trauma. What “Rewind” sometimes lacks in elegance, it makes up for in immediacy.
  20. For Ellen
    Nobody else could fit the role of a crestfallen rocker that Paul Dano embodies in director So Yong Kim's remarkable For Ellen.
  21. Never Rarely Sometimes Always
    Yes, it’s a searing examination of the current state of this country’s finicky abortion laws and the medical professionals tasked with enforcing them (from the small-minded to the big-hearted), and if art can have any impact on its consumers, the film will stick with many of its viewers, perhaps even changing long-held beliefs. But it’s also a singular look at what it means to be a teenage girl today, and with all the joy and pain that comes with it.
  22. Monos
    Aided by “Under the Skin” composer Micah Levi’s thunderous score, Landes delivers a suspenseful encapsulation of alienated youth enmeshed in pointless battles that can only lead to further destruction.
  23. Annihilation
    At once a gripping jungle survival thriller and an alluring sci-fi puzzle, Garland’s heady gambit confirms he’s one of the genre’s best working filmmakers.
  24. Certified Copy
    A comedy of remarriage buried in intellectual abstraction and cinephilic obsessions, Certified Copy wanders a bit but never loses focus, with the only certainty being that its gimmick is genuine.
  25. Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi
    Under the fastidious guidance of writer-director Johnson, The Last Jedi turns the commercial restrictions of this behemoth into a Trojan horse for rapid-fire filmmaking trickery and narrative finesse. The result is the most satisfying entry in this bumpy franchise since “The Empire Strikes Back” in 1980.
  26. I Don't Understand You
    Outrageously snappy and unapologetically fun, I Don’t Understand You is a must-see for anyone who likes queer romance, horror-comedy, and/or hot Italians.
  27. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
    Moment to moment, Birdman manages to shift gears, its roaming camera revealing new surprises as it glides along. That degree of unpredictability provides it with the ultimate response to the sea of formulaic mediocrities at the center of its critique.
  28. Broker
    It’s one of the master’s most transparent and — when it comes to confrontations about what parents, and specifically women, can or should do for themselves and for the babies they are forever bound to — brave films of his career.
  29. Under the Shadow
    Under the Shadow smartly observes the emotions stirred up by a world defined by restrictions, and the terrifying possibility that they might be inescapable.
  30. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
    Observing a nation’s shortcomings is not typically this fun. Yet — unlike latter-day miserabilist works by the likes of Ken Loach — Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World and its barbs stick entirely because Jude trusts his audience to appreciate tonal scope.
  31. Last and First Men
    Guided by Jóhannsson’s ethereal score, this dazzling apocalyptic immersion blends cosmic 16mm black-and-white images of Yugoslavian architecture with a deadpan Tilda Swinton voiceover, resulting in a profound lyrical rumination on the end of days.
  32. An Elephant Sitting Still
    Hard to sit through and impossible to forget, this torpid four-hour anti-drama is suffused with the sort of hopelessness that cinema only sees every once in a long while .
  33. The Trip
    Cheeky and inventive in equal measure, with brilliant performances all around, a whipsmart script and sharp pacing make The Trip one of the most fun watches of the year.
  34. Nuts!
    Brilliantly combining archival material, voiceovers, contemporary interviews and a variety of hand-drawn animation, the movie deconstructs the process of self-mythologizing from the inside out.
  35. The Zone of Interest
    The Zone of Interest insists that all of history’s most abominable moments have been permitted by people who didn’t have to see them, and while the film’s ultimate staying power has yet to be determined, its vision of normality is — as Hannah Arendt once described that phenomenon — “more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”
  36. Yes
    As sincere in its satire as it is satirical in its sincerity, the deliriously provocative Yes is a veritable orgy of self-loathing surrender that reaffirms Lapid as the world’s most visceral director on a shot-by-shot basis.
  37. Is God Is
    Harris refuses easy answers, and announces herself as a singular cinematic force in the hell her story brings just the same.
  38. Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation
    With plenty of laughs, truly dazzling animation, and some more of the franchise’s signature dance sequences, Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation is a summer treat worth savoring, and a reminder that if we can see past our differences, we’ll find we’re not that different after all.
  39. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
    Rasoulof crafts an extraordinarily gripping allegory about the corrupting costs of power and the suppression of women under a religious patriarchy that crushes the very people it claims to protect.
  40. Won't You Be My Neighbor?
    In Won’t You Be My Neighbor, the touching and insightful survey of Rogers’ decades-spanning career from Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville (“Twenty Feet From Stardom”), the filmmaker highlights Rogers’ capacity to explore complex themes through the lens of a kid’s program that took a dead-serious approach to his young viewers’ needs.
  41. Seymour: An Introduction
    On the whole, by ceding control to his subject, Hawke makes a persuasive case for Bernstein's guru-like outlook on the value of finding personal gratification in art above all else.
  42. The World to Come
    The World to Come is at its sharpest when trying to articulate the alchemy that happens when theory and sensation collide with each other and morph into something new.
  43. 10 Cloverfield Lane
    Filled with considerable dread and mystery, 10 Cloverfield Lane functions just fine as a standalone genre title. But as a spiritual sequel to the original, it builds out the so-called "Cloververse" far better than could be expected from even the most straightforward of tales.
  44. Return to Seoul
    It’s the rare movie that can drop a long-take dance sequence into the middle of a pressing conversation without seeming the least bit mannered or aloof; the rare movie that only feels more honest as a result of its most flamboyant choices, and only makes its heroine more empathetic as a result of how she pushes other people away.
  45. Hamilton
    This is Hamilton as you always wanted to see it, and it always will be.
  46. Inside Llewyn Davis
    An ode to art for art's sake, Inside Llewyn Davis is the most innocent movie of the Coens' career, which in their case is a downright radical achievement.
  47. Dear Zindagi
    Sincere, intelligent, and moving, it’s a welcome way to cap off a year in which we could all use a little solace like this.
  48. TransFatty Lives
    TransFatty Lives stands out less for its inherently emotional topic than the appealing personality at its center.
  49. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
    Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets may not be the straight-faced documentary it looks like, but it’s a sober-eyed document of our times nonetheless.
  50. Aftershock
    Aftershock is a powerful project inspired by loss, one that aims to move us closer to a world where all women, and especially Black women, are listened to and given the birthing experiences they deserve, so that we can one day begin to see an end to the abysmal statistics on maternal mortality in the United States.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow
    While five-plus hours of mostly hanging out in strangers’ apartments might seem like an increasingly tedious invitation, Loktev ends up justifying the running time as her “undesirable friends” soon become ours as well. Smartly structured so that different “foreign agents” take centerstage from episode to episode, we’re forever kept on our toes (right through to a finale that hints at a part two, currently in the works).
    • 83 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Soul
    Like some of the best jazz compositions, it uses a traditional framework to veer off in many unexpected directions, so that even the inevitable end point feels just right.
  53. Last Night in Soho
    Left behind is [Wright's] trademark hyperactive editing and insistent post-modernism; in its place is flowing movement and intense emotion.
  54. Rye Lane
    Delightful ... [Rye Lane] takes a simple premise and infuses it with warm performances and a distinct sense of place.
  55. Decision to Leave
    Park’s funny, playful, and increasingly poignant crime thriller is less interested in what Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) knows about his suspect than in how he feels about her
  56. The Nightmare
    Cutting between various chilling anecdotes of sinister late night visions and horrifying reenactments, The Nightmare manages a tricky balance of visceral fright and sincere investigation. It's a rare non-fiction achievement that earns the ability to freak you out.
  57. The Love Witch
    Biller spins an archly funny — but also hyper-sincere — story about the true price of the patriarchy. There hasn’t been anything quite like it in decades.
  58. Don't Think Twice
    A delicately wrought ensemble piece with first-rate turns by Gillian Jacobs, Keegan-Michael Key, and Birbiglia himself, Don't Think Twice scrutinizes its playful setting and finds an ideal entry point for exploring creative desperation.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Kiki's Delivery Service
    Much of Kiki’s charm comes from Miyazaki’s understated approach to the material. Instead of grabbing the viewer by the lapels and insisting everyone’s having a great time, Miyazaki leads the audience into the story with unobtrusive grace.
  60. Winter Sleep
    While it doesn't always earn its heft, Winter Sleep is both subdued and rich in details, its plot growing slowly over a series of extensive conversations. It's a robust, challenging experience he's been building toward with his previous features, as well as an adventurous step above them.
  61. The Keeping Room
    Even as The Keeping Room plays with formulaic ingredients, it manages to combine them into an eloquent portrait of gender, race and the constant march of time without overstating any of its potent themes.
  62. Wiener-Dog
    Bizarre and challenging when it's not outright goofy, Wiener-Dog never feels remotely compromised. Somehow hilarious and gloomy at the same time, it represents a big middle finger to anyone who wishes Solondz would lighten up.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Bedknobs and Broomsticks
    The script is tight and witty with sparks of sophistication. This is a film that, while never quite given the rightful place in the Disney canon it deserved, had a positive influence on many lives over the decades, including that of this writer.
  64. We Are What We Are
    Representing lower-class violence taken to an extreme, the cannibalism cannot be contained by police work. The movie's gradual build to a thrilling, appropriately bloody climax intensifies this disconnect.
  65. De Humani Corporis Fabrica
    As much as the new technology that prolongs our lives, and makes a film like De Humani Corporis Fabrica possible exists, there is a devastating truth about the vulnerability of the flesh that lingers.
  66. Barbie
    “Barbie” is a lovingly crafted blockbuster with a lot on its mind, the kind of feature that will surely benefit from repeat viewings (there is so much to see, so many jokes to catch) and is still purely entertaining even in a single watch.
  67. Mickey 17
    This isn’t just another great Bong Joon Ho movie about how much he hates capitalism (though it definitely is that too), it’s the first Bong Joon Ho movie about how much he loves people.
  68. The Climb
    This sharp two-hander veers from caustic to sweet with acrobatic filmmaking to spare.
  69. Sound of Metal
    [A] mesmerizing debut ... Sound of Metal injects visceral, edgy circumstances with remarkable sensitivity.
  70. Pillion
    It also never hurts to be anchored by two actors who are totally game and committed to that vision, and willing to go there, chains, gags, assless chaps and all.
  71. The Shrouds
    Sardonic, unsentimental, and often so cadaverously stiff that the film itself appears to be suffering from rigor mortis, as if its images died at some point along their brief journey from the projector to the screen.
  72. You Won't Be Alone
    It’s a challenging movie, but one so overflowingly empathetic for even its cruelest characters that the emotional beats outweigh the headier structural conceits that make for a narrative often hazy, out of reach, and gorgeously weblike.
  73. Titane
    Whatever you’re willing to take from it, there’s no denying that Titane is the work of a demented visionary in full command of her wild mind; a shimmering aria of fire and metal that introduces itself as the psychopathic lovechild of David Cronenberg’s “Crash” and Shinya Tsukamoto’s “Tetsuo: The Iron Man” before shapeshifting into a modern fable about how badly people just need someone to take care of them and vice-versa.
  74. We the Animals
    While Zagar doesn’t force the material into many surprising places, it’s a fully realized tapestry, owing much to the complex, layered score by Nick Zammuto that hums through nearly every scene, and frequent cutaways to hand-drawn animation based on the scrapbook that Jonah stores under his bed at night.
  75. Five Star
    As a sociological experiment, Five Star offers plenty of talking points, but its real triumph is that the cast delivers, yielding a story in which the heightened suspense emerges organically from a gritty foundation of realism.
  76. Atlantis
    Atlantis is a political howl from the soul about a decaying Europe. But its cold, violent exterior turns out to be a bleak disguise for what is an unexpectedly sweet love story at its molten core.
  77. To Die Like a Man
    To Die Like a Man deserves your attention for showcasing a filmmaker with the capacity for bold narrative trickery that doesn't come at the expense of emotional investment.
  78. Suspiria
    Guadagnino dredges up the dead with such crazed purpose that his magnum opus is able to dance through its rough spots and make good on its foreboding promise.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
    Fireflies is, at times, unbearably sad, a eulogy for a bleeding nation but also a hugely imaginative tale that reminds us of art’s power to lift us from the ramparts of our own devastation.
  80. The Beast
    The film’s true power stems from and speaks to our specifically present condition as people beset on all sides by the fears of our own imagination. By the trauma of something that already happened, or the terror of something that might.
  81. Shoplifters
    A master of threading the needle between conflict and contrivance, Kore-eda manages to turn this drama inside out without every betraying its most resonant truth.
  82. Past Lives
    The absolute immediacy of Lee’s performance allows you to feel every frame of Past Lives on your skin, which is crucial to a film that conveys the brunt of its meaning through sense instead of story; a film that commands its placid rhythms and ethereal fussiness with a confidence that elevates Song’s “people don’t talk like that” dialogue into a decisive plus.
  83. My Sunshine
    The filmmaker creates a tactile universe of nostalgia and regret, heavier on suggestion than explication.
  84. Zero Charisma
    Directors Katie Graham and Andrew Matthews' directorial debut (from Matthews' screenplay) centers on a highly unlikable character who has alienated himself from social responsibility -- and forces you to sympathize with him against all odds.
  85. A Ghost Story
    Lowery manages to find entertainment value and genuine intrigue from his outlandish scenario, synthesizing the magical realism of his earlier films with a tighter grasp of tone.
  86. Gemini
    Gemini resists easy categorization, evades tidy plot points and sometimes lead to frustrating dead ends. But it’s an absorbing world defined by open-ended possibilities, a kind of comedic psychological thriller in which the thrills exist in air quotes.
  87. Frances Ha
    At times, Frances Ha strains from emphasizing the characters' snarkiness and disregarding plot. By routinely going nowhere, however, the movie eventually finds a distinctive voice that carries it through.
  88. A Bigger Splash
    A Bigger Splash has neither a clear center nor a clear moral, and it's all the better for it. This is a film about behavior, not plot — and how people are ruled by emotion, and not logic.
  89. Nosferatu
    Eggers doesn’t want us to see in the darkness, he wants us to see the darkness itself. To recognize it not as the absence of light, but rather as a feral and undying force all its own — one that we carry within ourselves like a secret corseted in virtue.
  90. Love After Love
    In its way, this small, handcrafted, and immaculately well-realized feature challenges the limited way that movies tend to depict loss.
  91. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
    And if all of this sounds like a tremendous amount to pack into a single film, there’s the rub. In a somewhat disappointing twist, “Across the Spider-Verse” isn’t really a single film, it’s instead one-half of a planned two-film sequel.
  92. Of Gods and Men
    Ignore the precise religious context and it stands perfectly well as a restrained look at personal convictions in the face of certain death.
  93. Ruby Sparks
    Kazan has fun with a silly premise and smartly plays it straight when the occasion calls for it, while keeping the cutesy, fantastical extremes of the material at bay. It's less fairy tale than shrewd exaggeration on the pratfalls of desire.
  94. High Flying Bird
    The film is funny, quick-witted, and even throws in a little sex for good measure. Best of all, its various competing ideas eventually knot together in such satisfying ways that the didacticism required to bind them up feels more like a feature than a bug.
  95. The Visitor
    By positioning the Visitor as a racial minority specifically, LaBruce also pushes back against Britain’s colonial past and present while urging us to wrest free of the norms that suppress and oppress our daily lives.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 91 Critic Score
    Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
    The Planet of the Apes films had always been political, but with Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, things got angry. And it was awesome.
  97. Notturno
    Despite the sound of gunfire off in the distance, Notturno is less a film about life during wartime than the life that subsequently follows it, as those damaged by the violence try to move forward.
  98. Vitalina Varela
    As Vitalina Varela proves, Costa empowers his subjects by framing them as majestic storytellers and letting their stories take charge.
  99. Creed
    Creed does justice to its roots while trying something new.
  100. Nope
    It doesn’t hurt that Peele’s latest boasts some of the most inspired alien design since H.R. Giger left his mark on the genre, or that Kaluuya’s eyes remain some of Hollywood’s most special effects, as “Nope” gets almost as much mileage from their weariness as “Get Out” squeezed from their clarity. It’s through them that “Nope” searches for a new way of seeing, returns the Haywoods to their rightful place in film history, and creates the rare Hollywood spectacle that doesn’t leave us looking for more.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »