IndieWire's Scores

For 5,167 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 59% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 37% 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:
5167 movie reviews
  1. Cave has an imaginative sense of camera placement, and she’s an expert at inserting ultra-close-up shots at precisely the right moment to induce a laugh, gasp, or shiver. Her camera is always in service of the story, rather than distracting from it with artifice.
  2. 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.
  3. Abrupt to a fault but still unexpectedly moving, their perpendicular journeys back to a place of mutual appreciation ring true enough in a time when narcissism can bring joy to people around the planet, and altruism isn’t enough to guarantee a connection with your own kids.
  4. Both Dickey and Studi shoulder the lesser material through a charming naturalism that papers over the script’s artificiality.
  5. Every interaction is rip-roaringly funny — even the more disquieting ones — resulting in a film where you can’t help but laugh at the riveting absurdity.
  6. While the movie finale may not come in a package that satisfies every diehard fan, it wraps up its compelling portrait of an eccentric working-class family as emotionally chaotic as should be expected; although the specifics still may come as a shock to some.
  7. Scream makes so many references to its predecessors, along with plenty of other horror flicks both lowbrow and high, it’s impossible to forget you’re watching a fictional film. It may be exciting to let the audience in on the joke, but it’s hard to get lost in this world.
  8. Though Gerbase has conceived of a fascinating, timely inciting incident for her film, much of “The Pink Cloud” eventually melts into all the beats of a standard relationship drama. (And, yes, we mean all the beats.)
  9. See for Me wastes no frame in its brisk 92 minute running time, it’s a tightly-wound thriller propelled by enough turns that you won’t want to miss a beat.
  10. While The 355 might not be the boundary-busting breakthrough it was sold as, it’s something better: a solid spy flick that adds something new to the genre without totally upending it. That’s refreshing in its own way.
  11. Whether it prompts genuine introspection, or even inspires further conversation on what Tesson argues, may provide some measure of how effective the film is. But whether or not viewers put any stock in his proclamations, it’s also perfectly OK to simply celebrate the grandeur in nature that the documentary exalts.
  12. If Spider-Man: No Way Home is the poison, this is its antidote.
  13. Like so many of the faith-based biopics that have helped turn the genre into a flyover-state phenomenon, American Underdog is sustained by a vaguely fetishistic enthusiasm for its subject’s hardships.
  14. A forgettable post-apocalyptic pastiche that borrows liberally from “The Terminator,” “The Last of Us,” and “A Quiet Place” without building upon those influences with any new ideas of its own, Mattson Tomlin’s Mother/Android is the sort of mediocre streaming fare that might appease genre fans for 100 minutes or so, but will almost certainly leave them pining for the days when original sci-fi movies demanded (or at least encouraged) a modicum of originality.
  15. No, it’s not what you’re expecting, and what it is isn’t very good, either.
  16. The film’s tone is less cheeky and more serious, especially in the first half, but Vaughn and co-screenwriter Karl Gajdusek have their cake and eat it too by doling out standard “Kingsman”-esque thrills in between heady conversations about non-violence, colonialism, and the horrors of war.
  17. The road to the closing moments of “No Way Home” — both warm-hearted and heartbreaking — might have hit a few bumps, but the darkness is worth it. After all, when was the last time the third film in a franchise got audiences truly thrilled for what comes next?
  18. Thorne’s novel might be best known for its hot-and-bothered sex scenes, but she also built a romance with real stakes and big emotion, and Hutchings and his stars translate that to the big screen with ease. Why can’t every rom-com make it look so easy?
  19. Agnes may start as a slaphappy pastiche of a particular horror sub-genre, but — like Anna Biller’s “The Love Witch” before it — the film’s veil of irony proves sneakily disarming.
  20. Layering the spectral hush of “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” over the elegiac domesticity of a late Ozu film like “An Autumn Afternoon,” the Honolulu-born filmmaker’s singularly Hawaiian second feature is haunted and haunting in equal measure — a reckoning pitched at the volume of a whisper.
  21. And so we’re left with a very sweaty film that strains to be funny, but one that’s also itching to argue that it’s lack of funniness is precisely the point. Some problems can’t be solved by celebrities alone, and the most subversive thing about “Don’t Look Up” is ultimately how — in its own impotent way — it weaponizes its wild star power to make that point.
  22. While the filmmaker’s affection for full circle moments can be charming, within the context of “Being the Ricardos,” it all feels like a cheat. The film might not opt to get as obvious as Lucy muttering to herself, “Yes, I do love Lucy!,” but it gets damn well close, and that’s sillier than anything Ball ever dreamed up.
  23. Once Encounter reveals its destination, there aren’t many places for the script to go, though there’s a savage little side trip to a rural militia during which it becomes clearer that this Ahmed acting showcase is also interested in touring the American psyche
  24. Though the title may be the cleverest thing about this cookie cutter affair, it’s refreshing to see a gay family film that doesn’t use its characters’ sexuality for dramatic conflict.
  25. It’s a wonderful musical, and an unabashed Steven Spielberg movie. And the moments in which it most comfortably allows itself to be both of those things at once leave you convinced that some harmonies are worth waiting for, even if it seems like they’ve been always been around the corner and whistling down the river.
  26. This sordid excavation into the hollowness of a human soul is a strange fit for a director who’s spent his career searching for magic in the darkest margins of our world, but del Toro’s natural empathy for even the most damnable creatures he finds there sparks new life into “Nightmare Alley” as it narrows towards its inevitable dead end.
  27. It’s a wrenching look at the perils of prohibition, and who wins when all is said and done.
  28. Adrienne is a beautiful testament to the power of Adrienne Shelly and will hopefully inspire fans, new and old, to revisit her work. Andy Ostroy’s documentary certainly emphasizes the emotional and sentimental, but that intimacy bonds the audience to Shelly as a woman. Bring tissues.
  29. It’s here, in these more high-altitude and less high-minded passages that “The Summit of the Gods” reaches the peak of its power, as the lush 2D animation indulges in the kind of ecstatically true vistas that live action would never allow, while Amine Bouhafa’s gorgeous and beguiling score makes every step feel like a spiritual proposition before exploding into an avalanche of synths.
  30. The moral is clear as day to any kid, though plenty of adults could use the reminder: Never judge any creature by the way they look. And, for animation devotees, the lesson is the same: Never judge a cute animated offering by its platform.

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