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. What's Love Got to Do with It?
    The tone is distinctly feelgood, but the film, directed by Shekhar Kapur, thoughtfully explores the different ways that relationships can be built, and what cultures can teach one another.
  2. No Hard Feelings
    Behind the lazy, shock-tactic humour lies a streak of genuine humanity, something to carry the film beyond mere butts and boobs.
  3. Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
    Deliver Me from Nowhere’s Springsteen is untouchable and untethered – little more than a bundle of hurt feelings floating aimlessly across the Garden State.
  4. The Drama
    It’s conflicted, messy, ambiguous, and imperfect, but it’s treated with enough of a delicate, scrupulous hand to test the moral waters and not degrade itself in the process.
  5. The Forgiven
    It’s obvious why this cast were attracted to The Forgiven – an actor’s most thrilling challenge is to find the brokenness hidden in between the cruellest of words. Fiennes and Chastain have always excelled in this area, as they do here. But the ugliness quickly wears thin.
  6. Ballerina
    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.
  7. The Little Mermaid
    Nice casting can’t cover up the ugly visuals and lack of creative risk.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Magician
    It's something of a personal triumph: Scott Ryan not only wrote and directed, but puts on a superbly believable turn as Ray - a low-rent, swaggering psycho, a long way from the suit-wearing assassins of Hollywood myth.
  9. The Roses
    The pair operate at a low simmer of hysteria that feels farcical without ever losing believability, while treating sincere emotion like the bursting of a dam that threatens to drown them together. They love as they hate in The Roses, decadently and without restraint.
  10. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come
    It’s not a matter of vengeance against the elite but survival. And Weaving bellows and grunts like a wounded creature trying to get the boot off their back.
  11. The Accountant 2
    The bigger crisis at the heart of the film is its inability to justify why we should have come back here in the first place.
  12. Flamin' Hot
    The most effective scenes in Flamin’ Hot prod gently at how disharmonious the relationship between the man on the floor and the man in the boardroom can be.
  13. My Best Friend's Exorcism
    It’s a devilishly smart and self-aware take on the current trend for Eighties horror homage, lovingly adapted from Grady Hendrix’s 2016 novel of the same name.
  14. Wicked Little Letters
    If there are no other pleasures to Wicked Little Letters beyond the tome’s worth of expletives launched by Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, then so be it. That’s plenty enough to sustain this witty, joyously written piece of forgotten history, scripted by comedian Jonny Sweet.
  15. Moana 2
    Moana 2 would have made for a very nice television series – as it was originally meant to be. But as a reskinned theatrical sequel to one of Disney Animation’s biggest hits, it’s a little harder to justify.
  16. Mean Girls
    This is exactly your mother’s Mean Girls – just repackaged with a bunch of TikTok cameos and some of Fey’s B-tier jokes.
  17. The Equalizer 3
    The Equalizer 3 is about as good as the first film – it neatly counterbalances Fuqua’s baroque, blood-and-guts action with Washington’s ability to command attention while sitting perfectly still.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Three Faces of Eve
    This 1950s Hollywood examination of mental illness won an Oscar for Joanne Woodward, who plays a frumpy housewife, a sultry seductress and an urban sophisticate, giving a virtuoso performance which manages to compensate for Nunnally Johnson's flat direction. [25 Jun 1999, p.21]
    • The Independent
  19. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
    The movie consists of a series of chases and fights linked by ever more improbable plot twists. The action is often very inventively staged. James Mangold, who has taken over directing duties from Steven Spielberg, sets a breakneck tempo.
  20. Wicked: For Good
    I guess we should at least be thankful we’ve been spared the monstrosity of a CGI-rendered Judy Garland as Dorothy (that said, there is some extremely disconcerting use of de-ageing tech elsewhere). But, as those witches might say, one good deed hardly changes things for the better.
  21. Elemental
    Elemental overcomplicates itself. It’s a straightforward romcom that’s also about culture clashes. And the systemic racism in city infrastructures. And the expectations immigrant parents place on their children.
  22. Spinal Tap II: The End Continues
    Then again, could a film in which a band of elder statesmen consider a loose collection of half-baked thoughts to be art itself be a satire of how some music legends like to conduct themselves? Maybe. But then you’d think under those circumstances I’d be laughing more.
  23. I Came By
    The film’s distractingly scattered in its attempt to capture the full breadth and width of its social commentary. In fact, it’s so stuffed with tangentially related ideas that even its timeline feels confusing and difficult to follow, signalled only by the erratic changes in McKay’s hair colour.
  24. Antlers
    There are measured performances here by both Russell and Plemons, two unfailingly talented actors, and a host of well-crafted practical effects that explain why producer and horror veteran Guillermo del Toro would take such an interest in the project. But all the trickery in the world can’t conceal how inauthentic Antlers feels at heart.
  25. Road House
    It’s Road House by name, but certainly not by nature.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Space Jam
    Space Jam is nothing if not a product made by men who gauge a film's success by how many soft toys it spawns.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Little Buddha
    This is an audacious project and one which, for all its flaws, has much to commend it.
  28. Thor: Love and Thunder
    Of course, Ragnarok’s distinctive humour is carried over, and there’s a blissfully dumb running joke about a pair of giant, heavy metal-screaming goats. But, really, it’s the heart that matters here.
  29. Paperback Hero
    It's not that Paperback Hero is a duff film, exactly. Just a little flimsy, a trifle slight, a mite schematic. The story turns dog-eared midway through. [03 Sep 1999, p.19]
    • The Independent
  30. Finch
    It’s fitfully moving – a monologue in which Finch recalls witnessing the worst of human behaviour and doing nothing about it is powerful – but there’s often a sense of a darker, less gentle film aching to get out from beneath the sop.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »