Polygon's Scores

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For 731 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 70% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 27% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.2 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 69
Highest review score: 100 Spencer
Lowest review score: 0 Red Notice
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 530 out of 731
  2. Mixed: 141 out of 731
  3. Negative: 60 out of 731
731 movie reviews
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  1. 1917
    1917 is a noble, failed experiment in breaking the rules.
  2. Nope
    Nope is an idea more than a story. It’s a collection of individually captivating scenes, as opposed to an intriguing whole. It’s a handsome picture, but Peele is far too impressed with its handsomeness to work on populating it with fully felt characters.
  3. The White Tiger
    The film is full of potent human drama (largely coming from Gourav’s performance), but as an examination of the world’s intersection with modern India, it usually lands on the wrong side of inauthentic.
  4. The French Dispatch
    The French Dispatch is probably the worst film of the director’s career. But even his worst effort is worth biting the bullet for.
  5. Origin
    The movie, which chronicles the personal tragedies of Wilkerson’s life as she conceives and researches the book, is an awkward hybrid of these two approaches, neither of which fully succeeds. It’s a drama that wants to be a documentary, and it’s at its best when it’s just reeling off Wilkerson’s fascinating ideas at full flow.
  6. The Sea Beast
    Like The Prince of Egypt or Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas before it, The Sea Beast ditches talking animals and funny sidekicks, but it can’t fully shake off its Disney influences. It’s a whole lot of well-animated beasts and water, with nowhere to flow.
  7. Hoppers
    Pixar has been alternating between playing things safe with sequels to its hits and taking bigger swings with emotional human stories. Hoppers sits awkwardly between these impulses, recycling emotional moments and plots from other films while eschewing any clear moral or big moments of character growth.
  8. The Killer
    What’s especially strange about The Killer is that Fincher achieves almost everything he sets out to, but he sets that bar dispiritingly low.
  9. Ammonite
    Whether strictly factual or broadly truthful in a poetic sense, its approach to queer history as coded, long-buried document is its most exacting facet. But as a story of science, hidden desire, and sparks re-igniting the soul, it’s a languid affair.
  10. Candyman
    The film is missing out on a cohesive vision, to the point where the audience will spend the entire film waiting for the flashbacks and summaries to end, and for DaCosta’s movie to finally begin. But by the end, she’s only offered a visually stunning homage to the original film. For a director of her talent, that isn’t enough.
  11. Predator: Badlands
    While there’s plenty of CGI-packed action, there’s no real tension.
  12. Sisu
    Helander’s camera work and the fight choreography from veteran stuntman Ouli Kitti are surprisingly restrained in an action movie whose creatives were clearly delighted to find as many ways to kill people as possible.
  13. The Show
    Moore and Jenkins are obviously aiming higher than a self-aware noir pastiche, or at least something off to the side of one. Yet those elements of the movie are a lot more enjoyable than sort-of-dream sequences featuring yet another guy in clown makeup.
  14. Cha Cha Real Smooth
    This is a story written and directed by a 23-year-old. That reality defines Cha Cha Real Smooth’s truest virtue (blissful naïveté) and its grandest flaw — a blithering unawareness of reality. It’s a film defined by its myopic, narrow bandwidth.
  15. The Sadness
    [Rob Jabbaz] can’t find the proper measure of finesse and shamelessness to marry his grotesque gore and violence to, given the moral lessons he seems to think he’s obligated to offer.
  16. No Time to Die
    It would be easier to be less cynical if No Time to Die convincingly delivered on its commitments to Bond’s humanity, rather than nudging it into a handful of scattered scenes, around a lumbering, half-baked drama spiked with explosions and car chases.
  17. Dumb Money
    Craig Gillespie’s Dumb Money is neither dumb enough to capture the bonkers nature of the story nor smart enough to turn it into an entertaining or even informative tale.
  18. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
    Kingdom merely seems like an act of franchise maintenance, a reversal for a series of unusually thoughtful blockbusters. Every frame is a technical marvel. And every minute of it is probably better spent watching something else.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Last Night in Soho
    This is certainly Edgar Wright at his Edgar Wright-iest, but even as he’s arguing against celebrating the past in Last Night in Soho, he’s celebrating it himself, in ways that are hard to escape, and at times, harder still to enjoy.
  20. Vengeance
    The movie isn’t easy to dismiss. Its awkward comedy is often funny, and its shadowy mystery is compelling, because Abilene’s death does become more of an enigma to Ben as he learns more about her. Performers as eclectic as Holbrook, J. Smith-Cameron, Isabella Amara, and Ashton Kutcher all do their best to bring these potentially elusive characters to life.
  21. To All the Boys: Always and Forever
    While the movie contains some genuine heartfelt moments, the thread connecting them all is flimsy, and the core conflict is overdone. By focusing on a clichéd dilemma and doing nothing to make it particularly unique, Always and Forever concludes the trilogy on a flat note.
  22. Bombshell
    Apart from some compelling procedural elements, the movie is mostly style, and that style is a generic mess of tics: pseudo-documentary quick zooms, exchanges of fraught glances, and handheld camera work.
  23. Shepherd
    Shepherd is more of a bandwagon-jumping exercise in arthouse horror films about grief than a truly bone-chilling example of one.
  24. Amulet
    Amulet attempts to yoke together serious drama with over-the-top genre satisfaction. Instead, it winds up tying itself in unsatisfying knots.
  25. The Rental
    Unfortunately, The Rental unravels. Rather than building on the characters’ moralistic inequities, and relating them to their unknown voyeurist, Franco lets the final act wither under the weight of facile jump scares and an unimaginative killer who apes one of horror’s iconic maniacs.
  26. Addams Family Values
    By zeroing in on the eldest Addams child, the new Addams Family 2 exposes just how clunky and wrongheaded its take on Wednesday is — and what the animated movies get wrong about the family in general.
  27. Stargirl
    The plot about being true to yourself is still relevant, but Stargirl addresses it at a surface level, without ever really going beyond the main character’s mildly quirky aesthetic.
  28. Tetris
    Despite Baird and Pink’s best attempts at cinematic tension and surprise twists, this story plays better elsewhere, in the retellings with a firmer grip on reality.
  29. The Whale
    In The Whale, Aronofsky posits his sadism as an intellectual experiment, challenging viewers to find the humanity buried under Charlie’s thick layers of fat. That’s not as benevolent of a premise as he seems to think it is. It proceeds from the assumption that a 600-pound man is inherently unlovable.
  30. Lux Æterna
    It might leave audiences feeling brutalized, exhilarated, amused, annoyed, or all of the above, but will it leave them feeling like they want to drop a thousand dollars on a handbag? They will certainly feel like they’ve just watched a Gaspar Noé film.
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