The Independent's Scores

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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. Positive: 289 out of 590
  2. Mixed: 275 out of 590
  3. Negative: 26 out of 590
590 movie reviews
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  1. Fountain of Youth
    This is a film that’s fun to complain about.
  2. 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.
  3. Alpha
    Alpha has some tremendous moments, but the movie is undermined by its own dense and impenetrable storytelling style. It would surely have worked far better as an immersive installation piece than as a two hour feature.
  4. The Salt Path
    There’s little effort to make us understand the failed systems that led them to this point, or the new normalcy they’re forced to adjust to – indeed, any of the more subtle, complex facets of this story.
  5. The Lost King
    Its self-congratulatory crusade to restore its subject’s reputation has, for the sake of entertainment, distorted reality to the point that it borders on farce.
  6. 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).
  7. 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.
  8. Strays
    The film has a tendency to circle around the same jokes like a dog chasing its own tail (the film reminds us that they like to do this, too).
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Magic Flute
    Most unwary cinema-goers who see The Magic Flute will vow never to cross the threshold of an opera house as long as they live.
  10. The Super Mario Bros. Movie
    It’s hard to demand all that much from a Mario Bros film when its source material has been historically devoid of plot, but shouldn’t we be allowed to demand a little more than mere competency?
  11. A Minecraft Movie
    There’s a through line, buried in here somewhere, about how it’s harder to be creative, easier to destroy. Unfortunately, A Minecraft Movie proves its own point. Creativity took too much effort. Easier to destroy the spirit of the video game instead.
  12. The Exorcist: Believer
    This is a toned-down, more limply palatable iteration of William Friedkin’s 1973 classic: the projectiled pea soup is gone, the verbal abuse has been whittled down to a single ‘c***ing’, and any and all acts committed with crucifixes barely register a shock.
  13. My Policeman
    There are major moments of pain and betrayal that should feel like a punch but remain curiously ineffective. Sussex’s wonderful secret beaches and pockets of drizzly suburbia somehow seem strangely anonymous here. And Ron Nyswaner’s script is full of lines of clunking portent.
  14. Captain America: Brave New World
    The latest Marvel blockbuster – starring Anthony Mackie and Harrison Ford – has drawn backlash from all political corners. But a film this bland and flavourless doesn’t warrant such handwringing.
  15. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
    Jason Schwartzman, as “weatherman and amateur magician” Lucretius Flickerman, lands some surprisingly good one-liners. Their performances hint at the true narcissism of Panem – something you’ll struggle to find in any of the limp, neutered romantics of The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.
  16. Goodnight Mommy
    All in all, the film is exactly as you’d imagine a Hollywood remake to be. It’s too po-faced, too stripped of its meanness. And so drearily inevitable.
  17. Wolf Man
    Whannell has the right idea. Wolf Man just needed a little more time in the lab.
  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. Wham!
    In trying to limit the scope – and offer Ridgeley his moment in the sun – Wham! inadvertently becomes a music documentary without much interest in music. Like the band themselves, this is a breezy watch, but if there’s profundity beneath the perms and the cut-offs, the film struggles to find it.
  20. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
    Ramos and Fishback are talented enough actors that they are able to perforate the chaos with some genuine emotion.
  21. Civil War
    We’re never told what this conflict is about, who might be oppressed, or what freedoms have been stolen away. All we’re given is violence.
  22. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
    The Super Mario Galaxy Movie offers very little to audiences, young or old, who don’t already know these characters and spaces like the back of their hand. But, hey, if you take a tequila shot every time something explodes, you’ll have a great drinking game on your hands.
  23. Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu
    With The Mandalorian and Grogu, Star Wars has lost all sense of wonder.
  24. Emancipation
    Emancipation never feels as if it’s truthfully telling the story behind the photograph. Or how one man’s pain became emblematic of an entire nation’s evil.
  25. Air
    It’s hard to land on a reason for any of this to exist beyond a goosing up of Nike’s own image.
  26. The Miracle Club
    The Miracle Club certainly seeks to capture a feeling of “home” – but it’s not entirely clear for whom.
  27. The History of Sound
    Hermanus gestures towards a sweeping story and in the process loses the pulse of the material that is there. As the window dressing is lavishly built up, the love story itself slips away.
  28. The Great Escaper
    Caine, as Bernie, allows his natural, domineering presence to carry most of the performance.
  29. Nightbitch
    When its conclusions end up so tidy and emotionally pat, you can’t but wonder what it’d be like if Nightbitch were actually allowed to run free.
  30. Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody
    I Wanna Dance with Somebody strips Houston of her messy, beautiful humanity. All it offers instead is a product to market.
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