The Independent's Scores

For 590 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 590
590 movie reviews
  1. It feels like She Will spends its entire runtime on the very cusp of a completed sentence. I was desperate for an explanation, but the film is frustratingly secretive – those answers, it seems, are still buried deep.
  2. Blighted by development problems and a star whose downward spiral has been widely dissected by all, this superhero blockbuster emerges just as confused as predicted.
  3. Ambulance is a purely aesthetic beast, made for those who like their films to look like they’ve been edited by someone in the middle of a panic attack.
  4. Wish, clearly, has been made with care, but as its credits offer a whistle-stop tour through Disney’s history, it’s hard not to think – god, wasn’t it great when they made stuff as weird and fun and daring as, say, The Emperor’s New Groove?
  5. Most of the callbacks are played for light humour, not self-importance. Yes, it’s easy to tell you’re being manipulated. But it’s just as easy to respond with: so what?
  6. It’s well-performed and efficiently emotive. Just like the music of Take That, I guess.
  7. Warfare’s violence feels unmoored without its context.
  8. The Boogeyman is conventional horror, comfortably elevated – the same old monster in a shiny, new hat.
  9. The tension of Thirteen Lives is implicit, and ramps up like a vice – how long until all these people’s luck finally runs out? But I do wonder whether all this soberness has prevented a good film from being an extraordinary one.
  10. In Sing 2’s defence, the film is at least enthusiastic about its own overabundance, and the new celebrity voice additions – Halsey’s mollycoddled, rich-girl wolf or Letitia Wright’s street-dancing lynx – fit nicely into the mix.
  11. Franco provides a platform for his two leads, Jessica Chastain and Isaac Hernández, to give blisteringly intense performances. But the film would surely have benefitted from a little more nuance and delicacy.
  12. In The Idea of You, it’s actually fun to buy into the fantasy.
  13. The Nun II, unlike Malignant or M3GAN, is unfortunately tethered to seven previous films of demonic activity, and suffers for it. There are too many established rules to follow. You can almost feel the film squirming around in those restraints, trying its best to claw at something new without violating any preexisting evil nun lore.
  14. Beast represents the apex of low-expectation cinema.
  15. It does, in its DNA, certainly feel like a part of the Wickiverse, even if Reeves’s inevitable cameo feels forced. And while it doesn’t add much depth to the world, it at least gives credence to the amusing suggestion that these films do, in fact, take place in an alternate dimension where every person on the planet is a professional assassin.
  16. It’s a joy to watch Julia Roberts and George Clooney fall in love. It’s an even greater joy to watch them bicker.
  17. All those technical triumphs only complicate what feels like an unanswerable question: how can a film look this good, feel so moving, and still come up lacking?
  18. It’s when the film veers into more serious territory that it becomes unstuck.
  19. What’s frustrating about Romulus is to see that the reaction to unpopular ideas wasn’t to come up with more, but to simply recycle the old ones as nostalgia.
  20. True, grief is universal – but To Olivia never embraces the fact that stories draw their power from specificity. It’s what makes them feel real.
  21. The real selling point is a romance so dorky, sweet, and likeable that, well, maybe only Taylor Swift could have written it.
  22. In an era in which many of Lopez’s romcom peers – namely the Witherspoons and the Bullocks – have pivoted to dark dramas, it’s lovely to see her still banging the drum for a genre that’s never earned the respect it’s deserved. Then again, she knows what that feels like.
  23. A great actor shouldn’t only be judged on what they can do with a masterful script, but also on how they can take a lesser work and still let it soar. Anthony Hopkins has achieved this with grace in One Life, a somewhat thin, reductively sentimental retelling of the life of British humanitarian Sir Nicholas Winton, which its star has empowered with raw, much-needed complexity.
  24. Ferrari drives determinedly in an uncertain direction.
  25. Boxing Licorice Pizza inside the realm of juvenile memory more often feels like an excuse than a conceit.
  26. Rebuilding, instead, is a lovely rendering of what feels like half a story. It’s not the action its title promises, but the preceding moment of retreat to lick one’s wounds.
  27. As Jodi, Kazan gives the film’s standout performance, delicate and affecting, and when we’re in her company, the stakes of the investigation feel gravest.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    [Harris's] loud, rough, energetic tale of 'girlz n the hood' is low on polish and production values but certainly drawn from life.
  28. At times, it plays more like a sitcom than a story about the legacy of the death camps. Thankfully, it still provides probing insight into everything from casual antisemitism to the plague of historical forgetfulness.
  29. No one involved in Murder Mystery 2 seems to have worked with any real sense of direction, since the film is more than happy to let Sandler and Aniston take the steering wheel. There’s an easy chemistry to the pair.

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