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. Joker: Folie à Deux
    Phoenix’s performance remains powerful and stirring, too. The genius of it is that we can’t help but care for Arthur despite his neediness and derangement. Even during the film’s most apocalyptic and violent moments, we’re always aware that, underneath Joker’s gaudy warpaint, lurks little, feeble Arthur. Against the odds, this ingenious and deeply unsettling film even turns into a bit of a weepie by the final reel.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
    Many of [Hitchcock]'s signature motifs were established with this film, including a memorable climax with Novello almost killed by a bloodthirsty mob, and Hitchcock’s first trademark cameo appearance.
  3. Beau Is Afraid
    Beau Is Afraid is an Oedipal farce hysterically outsized in its execution.
  4. Cyrano
    The very best moments of Cyrano take place in near-silence, when all we can hear is the breathing of lovers enraptured by each other’s gazes.
  5. Splitsville
    There’s an argument to be made that Splitsville’s noncommittal on the subject of polyamory. I think that might, in fact, be the point: Covino and Marvin aren’t interested so much in whether polyamory is the solution to, or destruction of, a longterm relationship, but more the fact people’s stated beliefs and innate desires tend to be two entirely different and conflicted concepts.
  6. King Richard
    Who’s really at the wheel of Richard’s ambition? His love for his children or his own ego? It’s a testament to both Green and Smith that the question is allowed to linger so potently.
  7. Leave the World Behind
    Esmail goes big and bold with his Hitchcock allusions and showy camera work, not unlike M Night Shyamalan. At times, he’s a little on the nose, also not unlike M Night Shyamalan. It suits his vision.
  8. The Magic Faraway Tree
    Farnaby keeps it fresh and witty, combining the wordplay and low-stakes surrealism of his roots in The Mighty Boosh and Horrible Histories with a keen eye for literary adaptation.
  9. The Power of the Dog
    All the characters’ feelings here are very deeply sublimated. The fascination of The Power of the Dog lies in its ambiguity and its depth of characterisation. Nothing is obvious here, not even the title.
  10. Encanto
    Encanto bursts with colour and abstract flights of fantasy.
  11. Nitram
    Nitram is a stark, difficult, but deeply reflective film that asks sincerely why we describe these crimes as incomprehensible at the very same time as we watch the same patterns unfold, again and again.
  12. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
    When it comes to Mad About the Boy, it’s less that Bridget Jones has finally matured, and more that she’s shown us how human she really is.
  13. tick, tick...Boom!
    Miranda’s film finds a graceful balance between fact and fiction, framing art as a heightened form of self obsession and the most magical and important thing in the world.
  14. The Ballad of Wallis Island
    It’s a real feat that Griffith always manages to steer the boat away at just the right moment, choosing emotional nuance over manipulation.
  15. The Watchers
    Sure, there’s a kind of “gotcha” twist here that tethers The Watched back to M Night’s work, but Ishana’s real focus is on where Mina’s sorrows take her, deep into the old, pagan world and its stories of slippery natures and shifting identities. Do we define ourselves or are we defined by others? It’s a pertinent question for the director, as she takes her first promising steps into the future.
  16. The Lost Daughter
    That’s the wonderful thing about The Lost Daughter – it embraces thorniness. It treats it not as a personality flaw but as a badge of survival. Sadness is lanced through the heart of Gyllenhaal’s film, which she both adapted and directed, but it’s rich and luxurious in its texture.
  17. Weapons
    Zach Cregger’s follow-up to the monstrous Airbnb hijinks of 2022’s Barbarian is easily as weird, wicked, and fun – what it’s not, however, is the chilly, nightmare headf**k we’ve been told it is.
  18. Cow
    Arnold’s Cow is grimy and unvarnished where it counts, laced with poeticism whenever the banal cruelty threatens to leave its audience numb.
  19. Fast X
    No, there are no dinosaur cameos, but this 10th lap – now with added Brie Larson – is relentlessly fun.
  20. Inside Out 2
    Sure, there’s nothing in the film that matches the pure heartbreak of the first, when Riley’s imaginary friend Bing Bong (Richard Kind) disappears into nothingness. But Inside Out 2 proves that it’s ludicrous, at this point, to accuse the studio of having run out of ideas.
  21. The Wild Robot
    It preserves DreamWorks’s broad, direct appeals to sentimentality while weaving in a little more of the thematic maturity and subtlety you might see over at Ghibli or Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon.
  22. Bird
    Bird is for every lost child who wishes someone would have stood up and defended them. It’s a fragile but beautiful vision, and marks the strongest blend yet of Andrea Arnold’s primary directives as a filmmaker.
  23. The Tragedy of Macbeth
    McDormand carves out a little space for anger, though underplaying her performance so early on gives her further to leap when Lady Macbeth must succumb to her eventual madness. But, if anything, it only adds to the terrible weight of inevitability that hovers over Coen’s film.
  24. Titane
    It’s a body horror that’s really a family drama; that’s really a sly comedy about the discomfort of being trapped inside all this vulnerable, imperfect flesh.
  25. Eileen
    The thrill of Eileen lies in how McKenzie plays off the film’s inciting spark, a blonde-bobbed enigma played by Anne Hathaway.
  26. Barbarian
    As a filmmaker, Cregger seems conscious of embracing and then twisting an audience’s expectations, leaning into certain tropes of the genre before forcefully pushing towards something far more realistic.
  27. Corsage
    History might not have allowed Elisabeth the kind of power she wanted, her death in 1898 also bringing her life to a violent close. But Corsage reimagines it all, granting her unexpected agency and, in eventual death, one moment of pure, well-earned freedom. There’s something magnificently empowering about that.
  28. Rose of Nevada
    Rose of Nevada is Jenkin’s most conventional narrative film so far, which is to say it’s still filled to the brim with dreams, visions, and ambiguities. It’s a Cornish The Great Gatsby, in its own mesmeric way, though its boat bearing us back ceaselessly into the past is a literal one.
  29. Deep Water
    Lyne can laugh at these people because he holds little respect for them, and there’s a general sense of revulsion directed here towards the rich and reckless. His camera navigates queasily through the film like he’s capturing a natural disaster in action.
  30. They Cloned Tyrone
    This is a story, ultimately, that drives home the idea that solidarity can exist even when there’s no sense of community – and particularly when that community has been systematically dismantled by the powers that be.
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