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. A Magnificent Life
    Biographies of great artists often try to define their subjects via grand dramas and dark, defining moments. A Magnificent Life’s perspective is right there in the title: Even in its darkest moments, it’s a hopeful, comforting success story, framed in a way that encourages viewers to look back to their own childhoods, and confront their own wistfully ambitious ghosts.
  2. Funny Pages
    Kline’s movie works best when it blurs the lines between the people of a nerdy subculture and the style of their obsessions.
  3. She Dies Tomorrow
    Seimetz has crafted the perfect anxious monster, repeating an idea often enough to let it take root without explaining so much about it that it can be rationalized away. It’s all nestled within a dark — and at times, darkly funny — psychological horror movie.
  4. Thanksgiving
    Few movies have ever struck that balance quite as well as Craven’s four Scream movies. Thanksgiving doesn’t quite reach that series’ meteoric heights, but it comes far closer than anything else in recent years — including the Scream franchise itself.
  5. The Cursed
    The Cursed has its own mythology and some unnerving, bloody innovations around what’s basically a werewolf story, but Ellis gets a lot of his mileage around the standard creature-feature horror-story things he doesn’t do.
  6. Blink Twice
    Its statements about gender, violence, trauma, and entitlement are blaring and blatant, with little room for ambiguity or interpretation. And that absolutely seems to be the movie’s primary point.
  7. Bad Boys for Life
    In an exhausted, introspective, dad-jokey way, Bad Boys for Life gives these boys a definitive ending. It isn’t one fans ever expected, but it’s highly watchable.
  8. Skywalkers: A Love Story
    It helps a lot that the filmmakers have footage of the couple and their climbs going back to 2015. That sense of scale does a lot to put their growth, both personally and professionally, on full display.
  9. Ghosted
    This is a rom-com, formulaic and comforting and breezy, with some action trappings, but with no expectations that anyone needs to care about the results of that action.
  10. Spiderhead
    In spite of the dystopian premise, Kosinski brings a light touch to Spiderhead. Colorful cinematography and spirited editing contrast with the characters’ tragic backstories and bleak living conditions, and highlight the disparity between the chemically induced highs and nightmarish lows of Abnesti’s experiments.
  11. The School for Good and Evil
    Designed to fit, then subvert and smash, archetypes, the two leads of The School for Good and Evil and their strong friendship turn the movie from fantastical fun to memorable delight.
  12. The Main Event
    The concept of a kid getting magical powers that help him escape his mundane life isn’t anything new, but The Main Event stands out by avoiding overplayed clichés and focusing on the emotional message.
  13. Archive
    It’s highly competent throughout, and outright brilliant at times, but it lacks the necessary level of connection with the real world. And by the end, it’s lost track even of its own hard-earned but fragile sense of emotion.
  14. Finding 'Ohana
    For the most part, Weng weaves adventure and sentimentality together, but when it comes down to it, Finding ’Ohana works when it focuses on the ohana at its core.
  15. Sisu: Road to Revenge
    This movie does one thing, and does it well, via methods that escalate to nearly cartoonish proportions. And it’s clear in absolutely every grim, gory, gutting-it-out scene that Helander and Tommila know exactly who they’re making this movie for.
  16. Earthquake Bird
    All three leads are terrific — especially Vikander, whose Japanese is impressive — but they’re working with material that doesn’t measure up to their talents.
  17. No Hard Feelings
    Sometimes, for a good time, all you need is a great actor and a story that seems like a real bad idea.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Let's Scare Jessica to Death
    Director John Hancock and lead actress Zohra Lampert collaborate to produce something stranger and vaguer than the film’s countless contemporaries, giving the heroine far greater agency.
  19. The Bob's Burgers Movie
    The animation is gorgeous and crisp, and the script keeps its referential nature low-key. This could easily be someone’s first Bob’s Burgers experience, and it remains likable enough throughout that it probably wouldn’t be their last.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Wonder Woman 1984
    The current DC movie universe is always dark, but it seems that with a movie drenched in the neon aesthetic of the ’80s, they’ve finally found a way to dim even Wonder Woman’s light.
  21. Lost Girls
    The goal isn’t to find a killer, so much as it is to emphasize the ways women’s stories are often dismissed, and how people who aren’t well-off aren’t offered the same institutional consideration and care as the rich. It’s a compelling point to make, but one almost lost in the movie’s murky execution.
  22. War Machine
    War Machine hits all the right spots for this kind of movie. It’s lean and propulsive. The practical stunts are impressive and immersive. And Ritchson, even playing a man so throttled by his own past that he doesn’t want to feel anything, is a compelling screen presence.
  23. Unicorn Wars
    The latest from Spanish writer-director Alberto Vázquez is transgressive and aggressive to a degree that’s hard to fathom: It weaponizes cute cartoon creatures against its audience, and introduces innocence and beauty in order to tear it apart on screen in the most horrific ways possible. The film isn’t an easy watch, but it is a bold and memorable one.
  24. Ron's Gone Wrong
    Ron’s Gone Wrong could be a movie about the perils of social media, but it works better as a movie about recognizing that friendship requires work, no matter whether the connection blossoms through a high-tech device, or the old-fashioned way, in person.
  25. Master
    As Jasmine, Zoe Renee gives Master its naked emotional center. But its anchor is the terrific Regina Hall, as quietly magnetic here as she was in the underseen Support the Girls.
  26. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
    Shang-Chi is refreshing in how little it’s concerned with big-picture universe-building details. Instead, the movie focuses on an extremely personal story that also implies exciting things about the future of Marvel movies.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Harbinger
    With The Harbinger, Andy Mitton depicts a world where closeness to others is everyone’s undoing, which turns a standard haunting tale into a profound time capsule of modern dread.
  28. Hellraiser
    It has some great, grotesque visuals, which makes it a real shame that this film isn’t getting a theatrical release. And it accomplishes what many fans (including this one) wanted for the series, which was to pull it out of the creative purgatory where it’s been stuck for a couple of decades now.
  29. The Sparks Brothers
    Wright takes an exhaustive approach to the band’s career, going album by album, talking to collaborators and supporters as well as to the Maels. Throughout, Russell and Ron remain somewhat aloof, perhaps by design. They’re more open about their past and their intentions here than they’ve ever been in interviews, but they aren’t about to give away all their secrets.
  30. Mayday
    Goth is a scene-stealer, and some of Levy’s visuals are memorable in their otherworldly quality. Cinorre’s initially provocative vision of vengeance at least makes Mayday worth a look.
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