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. Presence
    Presence’s greatest feat, and presumably Soderbergh’s main interest in the project, is in how alive and defined a character our ghost is.
  2. Boiling Point
    The film is always on the move, and yet somehow oppressively claustrophobic, as the tension gradually builds to the point of no return suggested by its title.
  3. Twisters
    The callbacks, thankfully, are fairly minimal – but it’s still a comfortingly old school affair, in which its CGI feels at home next to a host of traditional practical effects, including that old gem of a slowly collapsing water tower. No bulging-to-the-point-of-bursting muscles needed.
  4. The Fabelmans
    Spielberg’s motivation for The Fabelmans has little to do with cementing his own myth – it’s a more tender, more bittersweet journey towards the realisation that, though the camera never lies, what it shows us can be hard to swallow.
  5. Alice, Darling
    With Alice, Darling, director Mary Nighy (daughter of actor Bill) delicately exposes how internalised and invisible the experience of narcissistic abuse can be.
  6. Knock at the Cabin
    With barely a twist to speak of (at least in the traditional sense), his latest film Knock at the Cabin feels like a repudiation of the past.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. Pamela, a love story
    Pamela, A Love Story may not feel particularly revelatory, but its sheer pathos is undeniable.
  10. Friendship
    Robinson, really, is a genius at all this – the way he extends his “f***”s like he’s watching the fabric of the universe collapse around him, or how his smile can both burn with frightening intensity or the fragility of a lost little child.
  11. Babygirl
    Nothing is off the table, really, ethically or psychoanalytically. Yet Babygirl isn’t guiding us confidently to some fixed destination. It’s simply feeling its way forward, orgasm by orgasm.
  12. A Real Pain
    Eisenberg fills that anxious blank space with genuine questions seeking genuine answers, delivered by the comforting typewriter patter of his own voice, and a poignant, wrecking ball performance by Culkin.
  13. After Yang
    As After Yang gently suggests, there’s no longer a way to conceive of ourselves that’s entirely detached from technology. Nerves and circuits, inevitably, all work towards the same goals.
  14. The Holdovers
    It’s lovely, if a little practised. Yet, the real gutting here comes courtesy of the film’s miniature thesis on grief, and how privilege determines the channels of its pain.
  15. The Marvels
    While Marvel’s been busy flooding us with endless, exhaustive content, DaCosta’s movie offers us the one thing that made this franchise work in the first place – heroes we actually want to root for.
  16. Cocaine Bear
    Cocaine Bear is a film worthy of its title, and perfectly constructed to feel like the kind of cult horror movie you’d find on a dusty VHS tape somewhere in a stoner’s basement. It’s bloody and grotesque, at times quite dark, but also surprisingly endearing.
  17. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
    The Final Reckoning, final or not, presents us with a fascinating contradiction: Ethan Hunt is both a pure singular and a state of mind. He’s cinema as the madman dreamer’s paradise.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1945)
    Though it was out of step with contemporary sensibilities, Powell and Pressburger's Technicolor epic increasingly seems the Citizen Kane of English war movies. [19 Mar 2011, p.26]
    • The Independent
  19. Elvis
    By framing Elvis’s story through Parker’s, Luhrmann’s film is cannily able to take a step back from the intimate details of the musician’s life. Instead it views him as a nuclear warhead of sensuality and cool, someone stood at the very crossroads of a fierce culture war.
  20. Crime 101
    Crime 101 is sleek like a Michael Mann venture, but with a healthy dose of 2020s nihilism.
  21. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
    This is, dare I say it, how fan service should be done. It’s far easier to overlook the usual nostalgic pandering when it’s taken a backseat to genuine creativity.
  22. Timestalker
    Timestalker certainly puts on a show.
  23. Anatomy of a Fall
    It’s hard not to be drawn in. That’s the trick of Anatomy of a Fall. Sandra is a fascinating, one-woman puzzle box, thanks largely to the strength of Hüller’s performance.
  24. How to Have Sex
    What isn’t said in How to Have Sex, and what isn’t openly felt, is the stuff that really hurts.
  25. Longlegs
    Nicolas Cage stars as a Satanic serial killer in a movie that is nasty, precise and as subtle as a magic trick.
  26. The Fire Inside
    The Fire Inside is a sports biopic with the nerve to ask, “What happens after the win?” It’s a simple shift in emphasis, but an unexpectedly transformative one, which forces us to reckon with how shortsighted we can be in our assumptions that victory creates a certain kind of immortality.
  27. Bottoms
    Despite the performative feminism, and beyond the black eyes and broken noses, the girls still work naturally towards clique-defying female solidarity. It’s the small, sincere thought behind the joke: you don’t have to master the theory to know that women are stronger together.
  28. Bodies Bodies Bodies
    Bodies Bodies Bodies is damn funny, often deliriously so.
  29. Janet Planet
    The emotions in Janet Planet creep up on you.
  30. Scrapper
    Scrapper is a solar system of a film, with Campbell’s playful and defiant Georgie shining bright at its centre. You’ll not find many characters this year quite as likeable.
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