IndieWire's Scores

For 5,235 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 La Gradiva
Lowest review score: 0 Pixels
Score distribution:
5235 movie reviews
  1. 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.
  2. It turns a major tragedy into a minor disaster movie.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. It’s a touching scenario, and one so well-acted and laced with superb special effects that even its more obvious beats cut deep.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. Because of its vignette-based structure, the film never coalesces into a single, engaging narrative, but it’s rich with wonderful moments.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. Truly, The Magnificent Seven is a story of simple pleasures, and it gets the little things right.
  13. 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.
  14. A blood-soaked, bone-crunching hymn to religious devotion and faith, Hacksaw Ridge doesn’t hum Mel Gibson’s favorite themes; it shouts them.
  15. There are sequences and stand-alone shots that will stick with you long after you’ve washed the insipid narration from memory.
  16. The Bad Batch further solidifies the strength of Amirpour’s idiosyncratic vision, which takes familiar details and bends them into spiky bursts of unpredictability.
  17. 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.
  18. Despite charming performances from Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke, this saccharine romance...rings a bit false from start to finish.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. La La Land is magically in tune with its reference points even as falls a few notes short of their greatness.
  26. 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.
  27. 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.
  28. 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).
  29. 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.
  30. 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.
  31. 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.
  32. The film’s best moments are hollow and derivative, as borrowed from better fictions as any of the names that Alice takes for herself.
  33. 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.
  34. 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.
  35. 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.
  36. 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.
  37. 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.
  38. 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.
  39. 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.
  40. 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.
  41. Staggeringly beautiful and immensely true, the best animated film of 2016 — one of the year’s best films of any kind, really.
  42. This elegant and surprisingly fast-paced blend of horror and suspense overcomes some of its more ridiculous ingredients thanks to endless invention.
  43. That’s where the film truly succeeds: Frears doesn’t treat Florence like a joke, and neither does Streep.
  44. 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.
  45. 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.
  46. 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.
  47. 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.
  48. Cats may have nine lives, but you only get one, and it’s too precious to waste on this drivel.
  49. 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.
  50. 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.
  51. 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.
  52. 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.
  53. It amounts to little more than frothy summertime entertainment—occasionally fun, but almost immediately forgettable.
  54. It’s a story that has its share of unnerving sequences, but like its pivotal character, it feels stuck between two worlds.
  55. 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.
  56. 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.
  57. 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.
  58. 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.
  59. 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.
  60. Although it often stumbles in service to delivering yet another foul-mouthed joke, its heart remains firmly in the right place.
  61. 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.”
  62. 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.
  63. Jason Bourne adheres to an existing format so robotically that it never manages to surprise or engage for longer than the occasional passing moment.
  64. The Seventh Fire is stirring for how it chips away at the relationship between hopelessness and helplessness.
  65. "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.
  66. 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.
  67. 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.
  68. 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.
  69. 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.
  70. 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.
  71. The solid performances can’t distract from an overly ambitious and crowded plot.
  72. As a documentary determined to damn the Democratic Party, “Hillary’s America” is a profound failure of unprecedented proportions, an embarrassment for Republicans, Americans and pretty much the rest of humankind. As a parody of right-wing conspiracy theorists, this knotted spiderweb of ideological garbage is practically “Citizen Kane.”
  73. Summertime owes less to its plot development than the credibility of its performances among this trio of women as they present a fascinating set of conflicting perspectives.
  74. For almost 45 minutes, Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan is on pace to become the best, most urgent zombie movie since “28 Days Later.” And then — at once both figuratively and literally — this broad Korean blockbuster derails in slow-motion, sliding off the tracks and bursting into a hot mess of generic moments and digital fire.
  75. Rather than proposing solutions or envisioning a tight happy ending, Sand Storm lingers in the crevices of a fascinating cultural challenge.
  76. Between the setting, the production design and a majority of the cast, Outlaws and Angels has the individual pieces to be something of merit. This particular revenge tale isn’t an example of incompetent filmmaking, just sadly misfocused storytelling.
  77. If Star Trek Beyond existed outside the arena of reboots and sequels that mandated its existence, the movie’s casual air might be downright radical for such an extensive production. Instead, it’s just a sturdy riff on the same old routine.
  78. Undrafted is a baseball movie that never wants you to forget that it’s about baseball, even if that reminder comes with lengthy dugout anecdotes delivered to teammates who are surprisingly indifferent to the outcome of a game that’s supposed to mean so much.
  79. Ultimately, Robbins’ domineering character is so well-calculated that it appears Berlinger couldn’t peer beyond the curtain even if he tried. That fascinating dilemma makes the movie worth watching even though it presents an incomplete picture.
  80. There’s just enough history about lucha libre to make you curious to learn more.
  81. It’s hard to understand why Doremus, whose Sundance-winning “Like Crazy” was an effective reminder that emotion can be a narrative unto itself, would regress towards a story in which he renders that idea redundantly literal.
  82. A stylish and well-acted espionage thriller, The Infiltrator is also naggingly familiar.
  83. While the new Ghostbusters successfully empowers female movie stars, that’s not the movie’s selling point. However, it’s the only justification for its existence.
  84. This is the undead equivalent of fast food. Some might find comfort in all these known quantities. Those looking for anything of substance would do better to wait for an upgrade.
  85. As much a film about crises of faith as it is the powerful friendships between women, The Innocents steadily unfolds over its nearly 120-minute runtime, revealing new secrets and new surprises (most of them, but not all, appropriately gut-wrenching) at every turn.
  86. Life, Animated may be the best commercial Disney could ask for, but that’s only a side effect. The purity of Owen’s relationship to the material transforms it into something more powerful than the company itself could ever accomplish.
  87. Above all else, however, Mortensen gives Captain Fantastic its underlying credibility.
  88. You might as well be watching the last 15 minutes with your eyes closed, which is a shame, as the first half of Carnage Park makes a strong case that Keating is someone whose stuff is worth seeing.
  89. Commissioned as propaganda, Under the Sun instead documents life inside its grip.
  90. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates may not be the first Apatow-era comedy about twentysomethings coming to grips with the fact that they won’t live forever (and it’s certainly not the deepest, as it lingers in your memory for about as long as a Snapchat), but it might just be one of the funniest.
  91. Part of the problem is that films like Marauders have become so synonymous with cut-rate mediocrity that their awfulness is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  92. At nearly 105 minutes, Microbe and Gasoline runs out of steam in its second act, but the majority of this sweet, sensitive ride is a real treat.
  93. In theory, Election Year offers a form of catharsis from contemporary anxieties by turning them into entertainment. Instead, this latest entry in a ridiculous franchise has become a victim of its own sick joke.
  94. Don’t be fooled by the lack of spandex: The Legend of Tarzan turns the Lord of the Apes into just another superhero, the newest movie about fiction’s greatest wild man memorable only for the dull irony of how housebroken it feels.
  95. Just like To’s characters all have a little something to learn from each other, Three is a master class in how movies can be as unique and infinite as the people who make them.
  96. An immaculate case-study in how far blockbusters have fallen.
  97. 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.
  98. The Phenom wanders through a series of half-formed ideas. When Buschel narrows his focus and has a handle on these characters’ essences, there are flashes of greatness. All he needs is a tighter grip.
  99. Collet-Serra ensures that we feel the risk of every stroke between his heroine and her safety. The action is visceral and immediate, but crucially contextualized by a helpful array of wide shots and bird’s-eye views.

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