The Independent's Scores

Select another publication »
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 0.8 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. Positive: 289 out of 590
  2. Mixed: 275 out of 590
  3. Negative: 26 out of 590
590 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. The Monkey
    It’s a busy catalogue of gruesome absurdities that’s more consciously surrealist than the Final Destination series’s Mouse Trap-style executions, akin instead to the bizarro corpses crowding the afterlife’s waiting room in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988), with a splash of Peter Jackson’s early, gore-splattered horror-comedies.
  2. How to Train Your Dragon
    All that’s really changed is that How to Train Your Dragon is now distinctly less charming and less playful than before, with even its pièce de résistance Toothless losing some of the cute factor (he looks real mean when he growls).
  3. A Boy Called Christmas
    It’s surprising how much the film can flit between clangingly obvious bits of exposition – aha! The source of the floppy red hat! A reindeer that happens to be named Blitzen! – and more mature perspectives on the holidays.
  4. Song Sung Blue
    The problem with this brand of Hollywood tale is that, by excessively romanticising their subjects, they diminish their humanity.
  5. Dreams
    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.
  6. Avatar: Fire and Ash
    Fire and Ash, I’m sure, will find its place in the canon. But that doesn’t excuse its flaws.
  7. Babylon
    The film’s vision of the Twenties may be propelled to the very border of believability, but it’s rarely inauthentic. This is a work of studious imagination.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson
    Bitter and twisted and a visual marvel. [18 Jul 1996, p.6]
    • The Independent
  9. John and the Hole
    Director Pascual Sisto has achieved something a little more clever than pure imitation. He takes his audience’s expectations, that his film can only lead to bloodshed and despair, and leaves them hanging in the air for as long as he likes – it’s both tantalising and deliberately unsatisfying. You’re never given the comfort of knowing what comes next.
  10. Respect
    This project should have been relatively straightforward: to provide a worthy showcase for Hudson, who is tremendous in exactly the kind of way that grabs the attention of awards show voting bodies.
  11. Nuremberg
    While it pleads for us to reckon with the ugliest of truths, it shuts the curtains before its own reckoning is done.
  12. Blue Beetle
    There is something pleasantly nostalgic about the film’s straightforwardness.
  13. Scream VI
    It’s both wholly satisfying and ridiculously fun.
  14. Saltburn
    As a class satire, it reaches no conclusions. But it’s filled to the brim with darkly funny, bile-slicked revulsion.
  15. The Thursday Murder Club
    No matter how enticing the prospect may sound on paper, and even with the efforts of director Chris Columbus (of Home Alone and Mrs Doubtfire fame), the whole affair is so flimsy you’ll lose nothing from watching it on an iPad while cooking dinner.
  16. The Lost City
    Unfortunately, the further away from Tatum and Bullock you get, the more the film struggles.
  17. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
    It turns out that the point of the multiverse, and of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, isn’t its creative potential. It’s its cameos. A million universes could exist, and they’d all contain surprise appearances by people and things fans can hoot and holler over, before being purchased as toys on the way out of the cinema.
  18. Freakier Friday
    The talent of tomorrow has to play second fiddle to a generation’s inability to let go of the past. And that’s something a quick body swap can’t solve.
  19. See How They Run
    The film’s so plain in its ambitions – in its sense of giddy, well-intentioned fun – that it feels a little pointless to scorn its more superficial choices.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Johnny Handsome
    It all makes for an admirable rather than a likeable work, one which hardens its heart against contentment and even good luck. [13 May 1990, p.21]
    • The Independent
  21. The Many Saints of Newark
    The Many Saints of Newark is both instantly recognisable and somehow unplaceable. It’s fierce and brilliant, too – a work that both expands on and complicates the cultural legacy of The Sopranos.
  22. Scream
    It’s a little metatextual analysis served up with a generous side of guts and gore, stabbing its cake and eating it with gleeful abandon.
  23. Lightyear
    Nostalgia rarely factors into Lightyear, which makes the franchise connection feel almost like a bit of window dressing slapped on to an entirely unrelated sci-fi story. Maybe that’s the only way to get butts in seats these days. Especially to watch what is, at the end of the day, a film that does the job it needs to do but without a crumb of anything more.
  24. The Whale
    The pathos is laid on very thick. At times, you wonder why a filmmaker as sophisticated as Aronofsky is resorting to such manipulative tactics. Beneath all its blubber, though, this turns out to be a film with a very big heart.
  25. Three Thousand Years of Longing
    What’s surprising is that, though Miller’s imagination remains entirely untarnished, Three Thousand Years of Longing stands in defiance of all of Fury Road’s sagest lessons. The film sags where it should speed; it mumbles when it should pronounce; it narrows when it should expand.
  26. Saw X
    Returning director Kevin Greutert knows what’ll satisfy his audience: a few buckets of blood and the gag-inducing sound of crunching bone. Here, they’ll get exactly what they want.
  27. House of Gucci
    Gaga plays the film’s early scenes with a winking, playful innocence, consciously mirroring Patrizia’s story with that of Ally, her character in 2018’s A Star is Born – another ordinary woman plucked from relative obscurity.
  28. Being the Ricardos
    It is, at the very least, far more interested in words than ideas – perhaps the defining feature of Sorkin’s work.
  29. We Live in Time
    All emotions here are predetermined. The point is that we’ve simply been given licence to feel.
  30. Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man
    What’s worked before works here just as well. Tommy Shelby persists.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »