The Independent's Scores

For 588 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 52% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0.9 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 66
Highest review score: 100 Dune: Part One
Lowest review score: 20 Snow White
Score distribution:
  1. Negative: 26 out of 588
588 movie reviews
  1. All Michael does is recreate, in mechanical style, the most famous visuals of Jackson’s career. It’s certainly easier that way. Why bother to depict a human being when you can simply turn them into a product?
  2. Adaptation or not, it’s an astonishingly hollow work.
  3. The “film” is part propaganda, sure, and part sop to Big Tech companies who require constant regulatory approval for financial manoeuvrings. Even then, it is bad.
  4. Any effort to force us to identify with Chris comes to naught. Any promising idea leads to a dead end. It’s a maddening watch.
  5. The music’s great, but this Jared Leto vehicle is otherwise an ethically dubious, horribly written nadir in franchise slop.
  6. The characters are presented in the of-the-moment style of CGI rendered to look like hand-drawn animation, but with a scarcity of detail and a flatness usually associated with preschool television.
  7. With nothing to revamp, Lilo & Stitch instead creates brand new problems for itself.
  8. What’s most disheartening about it all is how predictable Disney’s choices have become. With Snow White, they’ve finessed their formula – do the bare minimum to make a film, then simply slap a bunch of cutesy CGI animals all over it and hope no one notices.
  9. The Electric State is somehow both punishingly obvious and completely incoherent.
  10. It’s bold in theory, a struggle to sit through in practice.
  11. Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway’s script is profoundly scattered, and there’s such a ruthless amount of re-recorded dialogue inserted that there’s little cohesion between or even within scenes.
  12. Wildly miscast actors and an impenetrable script make this long-delayed actioner alienating to fans of the game and incomprehensible to the casual viewer.
  13. The Garfield Movie is stuffed with enough tragic backstories to make a therapist rich.
  14. Madame Web is fiction and has seemingly passed on the opportunity to make itself exciting – instead offering a two-hour prelude to a 30-second trailer for a sequel that will never happen.
  15. It’s a film populated by some of the Justice League Snyder Cut filmmaker’s worst impulses: a mess of imagery, some of it attempting to shock, congregated largely around the idea of what might look good in a trailer.
  16. By the end, Cat Person has killed any hope of a real conversation about modern love.
  17. There is no chemistry, sexual or otherwise.
  18. When it comes to “The Friends”, there’s some great comic timing – Iannucci, Tevlin, and Metcalfe are particular stand-outs – but it’s hard to shake how frequently these jokes are written at their expense.
  19. The Son is an ugly, blaring question mark of a film, and inexplicably terrible considering the talent involved.
  20. Bros lumbers when it should glide, lectures when it should joke. Wherever you fall on the Kinsey scale, you’ll probably find it a miserable experience.
  21. Why is Dwayne Johnson delivering every line here in an exhausting monotone?
  22. Blonde is not a bad film because it is degrading, exploitative and misogynist, even though it is all of those things. It’s bad because it’s boring, pleased with itself and doesn’t have a clue what it’s trying to say.
  23. Above all, at no point during Carrie Cracknell’s directorial debut do you ever get the sense that anyone’s actually read Persuasion.
  24. No, the problem with Home Sweet Home Alone isn’t that it had the temerity to encroach on a holiday classic. It’s that they bungled the whole thing so badly.
  25. A wrong turn was taken. And The Starling has come out the other side an utterly bizarre, tonal misfire that fumbles through several ideas before implying that it’s perfectly OK to berate the suicidal for being so suicidal.
  26. It’s irresponsible, boring and a waste of everyone’s time.

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