The Independent's Scores

Select another publication »
For 591 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 591
  2. Mixed: 276 out of 591
  3. Negative: 26 out of 591
591 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Empire of Light
    Mendes’s script, his first as a solo writer, deals with a sort of formless empathy – what it’s like to witness injustice and feel very, very bad about it. But it lacks necessary self-interrogation. There’s no real sense of purpose beyond the soothing of a privileged viewer’s guilt. The emotions are too thin, a set of codes to interpret rather than anything raw or real.
  2. September 5
    The idea that it serves a film like September 5 to tell its story through an apolitical lens isn’t just wrong: it’s laughable.
  3. Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken
    Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken fails to see its own potential – it’s never quite sharp enough to work as a parody, nor sincere enough to make its adolescent insecurities relatable.
  4. You People
    You People carries the unresolved, disjointed tension of a sitcom that’s been stretched to the two-hour mark.
  5. Plane
    Plane is stifled by just how ordinary it is, and how closely it hews to the standard tropes of action films with longer, more descriptive – yet less ridiculous – titles.
  6. Mufasa: The Lion King
    The Oscar-winner behind ‘Moonlight’ and ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ can barely be found in this dreary and anonymous bit of franchise mining.
  7. Morbius
    ‘Spider-Man’ spin-off is too flavourless to even be the wild, untethered disaster some were secretly hoping for.
  8. Run Rabbit Run
    Run Rabbit Run is certainly fluent in the visual language of eerie, effective horror. Its metaphors, though, are all mumbled.
  9. Remarkably Bright Creatures
    While Marcellus, an ageing octopus feeling stifled in his imprisonment, is meant to act as a spiritual mirror to Tova, the film ultimately isn’t all that interested in the more delicate work of making peace with what can’t be brought back.
  10. Jimpa
    Jimpa is a film about a director who’s too afraid of conflict that is, itself, too afraid of conflict.
  11. F1: The Movie
    While director Joseph Kosinski and cinematographer Claudio Miranda can certainly shoot cars as well as they can planes – it’s all plumes of smoke from the tyres and the bone-rattling rumble of starting engines – F1 represents the spiritually bone-dry, abrasive inverse to all of Maverick’s giddy pleasures.
  12. Ricky Stanicky
    Good comedies, of course, can make the tragic feel bittersweet, but Ricky Stanicky bungles its tone to the point that the whole affair comes across a little depressing. It’s like watching a bedraggled widower perform close-up magic at his spouse’s funeral.
    • 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.
  14. Five Nights at Freddy's
    What should’ve been an intricate, twisted, and absurd treat is demoted to generic horror movie sludge, in no way discernible from any of the other spooky titles lining the October release schedule.
  15. Swiped
    Swiped is far more interested in convincing us that Bumble’s earned its feminist credentials than in exploring what being a “feminist company” actually means when there are billions of dollars on the table.
  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. Rust
    What is meaningful, I suppose, is that you never once stop thinking about Hutchins while watching Rust, nor the shoddy work environment that led to her death. . . But this is a very hollow, very dark victory.
  18. Shazam! Fury of the Gods
    Fury of the Gods lands in the frustrating middle: a film that isn’t without promise, but feels far too messy and corporatised to have any real affection for.
  19. Hocus Pocus 2
    Hocus Pocus 2 doesn’t hit the extremes that made the original a critical flop, but such an enduring rewatch. It’s less menacing. It lacks the exquisite cuteness exuded by a middle-grade Thora Birch. There are zero talking cats. But that’s unlikely to matter much to most audiences.
  20. The Adam Project
    The tone here aims for a vague combination of time-travelling romps like Back to the Future and Flight of the Navigator plus time-travelling weepies like Forever Young and The Lake House. It wears both those tones unconvincingly, like a serial killer in a skin suit.
  21. Gran Turismo
    It’s a film that might as well have been the marketing department’s power-point presentation.
  22. Damsel
    It’s hard to imagine what anyone could get out of Damsel that isn’t already liberally covered by Brown’s other projects. There’s a sweetness to Stranger Things’s Eleven, and a wit to Enola, that offer the actor a hell of a lot more to do than Damsel’s mean-mugging to camera.
  23. 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.
  24. Foe
    Any desire to see two of Ireland’s bright, young things – Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal – finally united on screen will be swiftly drained by Foe, a sci-fi drama desiccated of meaning.
  25. 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.
  26. The Bubble
    The Bubble’s script is credited to Apatow and Team America co-writer Pam Brady, and there are occasional flashes of barbed, satirical wit here. Generally, though, The Bubble resembles a flutter of loose ideas, to which a vast ensemble of reliably funny actors have been tasked with adding colour.
  27. Bullet Train
    Pitt’s funny here – there’s a precise comic timing to the way he shoves a venomous snake down a toilet bowl – but Bullet Train feels so try-hard in its quirky theatrics that it’s a little like watching a kid repeatedly calling for their mother’s attention before they cartwheel into a brick wall.
  28. Song Sung Blue
    The problem with this brand of Hollywood tale is that, by excessively romanticising their subjects, they diminish their humanity.
  29. Caught Stealing
    Whatever the genre, Aronofsky tends to oscillate between two modes: the savagely harrowing or the savagely sentimental. And it’s all there in Caught Stealing, but at such a low simmer that the film feels almost vacant.
  30. Magic Mike's Last Dance
    The aggressive air-humping of its past films is replaced by ballet and interpretive dance in this sanitised final instalment.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »