The Independent's Scores

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For 588 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: 287 out of 588
  2. Mixed: 275 out of 588
  3. Negative: 26 out of 588
588 movie reviews
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  1. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
    What really caught me off guard about The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is its sweetness.
  2. Benedetta
    In Benedetta, master provocateur Paul Verhoeven demolishes the line between the sacred and the profane. The breast becomes holy, a source of nourishment from which religious fervour can stem. The Virgin Mary, in turn, inspires not only boundless grace but sexual desire.
  3. To Olivia
    True, grief is universal – but To Olivia never embraces the fact that stories draw their power from specificity. It’s what makes them feel real.
  4. The Lost City
    Unfortunately, the further away from Tatum and Bullock you get, the more the film struggles.
  5. The Northman
    It’s a big risk to spend that much cash on an auteur-driven historical epic at a time when historical epics have largely fallen by the wayside. But what a beautiful risk it is. I call upon Odin: may The Northman make a billion dollars.
  6. The Outfit
    Even when Leonard’s chatting away with his semi-captors, his words seem rather weightless, as if they were something simply to fill the air while his mind quietly calculates his next move. He’s like a chess master, in a way, and few actors could maintain that magnetic stillness quite like Rylance, who always seems to express so much while doing so little.
  7. True Things
    True Things isn’t quite as effective as the director’s 2018 debut, Only You, which tracked the fluctuating desires of a couple (played by Laia Costa and Josh O’Connor) undergoing IVF treatment. But it does reiterate Wootliff’s fluency in the unvarnished, messy spaces of female desire, operating in a way that doesn’t sacrifice the actual sexiness of her work.
  8. 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.
  9. Sonic the Hedgehog 2
    At no point here – or during the last film – does it feel like anyone actually figured out how Sonic works as the centre of a live-action movie.
  10. Morbius
    ‘Spider-Man’ spin-off is too flavourless to even be the wild, untethered disaster some were secretly hoping for.
  11. The Worst Person in the World
    The Worst Person in the World carries a shimmery feeling of definitiveness to it. It’s the rare piece of art actually invested in why an entire generation can seem so aimless and indecisive.
  12. Ambulance
    Ambulance is a purely aesthetic beast, made for those who like their films to look like they’ve been edited by someone in the middle of a panic attack.
  13. Fresh
    To frame it in Fresh’s own language, all we get here is a single bite – not the whole steak.
  14. 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.
  15. Red Rocket
    Rex actively underplays Mikey’s self-interest and cruelty, so that – in a way – the audience becomes an equal target of his manipulation.
  16. 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.
  17. Turning Red
    In its earliest stages, Turning Red is bracingly different, and filled with an earnest warmth when it comes to themes of girlhood and the panic-inducing weirdness of the human body. That it becomes a loud and action-driven spectacle seems disappointingly inevitable for a Disney film.
  18. The Duke
    The Duke reminds us once more, [Michell] knew how to get the very best out of his actors without forcing unnecessary dramatics.
  19. The Batman
    Matt Reeves’s take on the Caped Crusader may not be a genre-defining miracle, but it delivers a tapered-down, intimate portrait, while Zoe Kravitz’s Catwoman brings an almost-extinct sensuality to the role.
  20. 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.
  21. The Real Charlie Chaplin
    The conclusion that Chaplin remains inscrutable feels neither new nor substantial.
  22. Kimi
    Soderbergh may not have intended Kimi to be a film primarily about the pandemic, but it understands intimately what it’s felt like to live through it.
  23. Uncharted
    There’s a lot, in fact, to Uncharted that feels haphazard or under-considered.
  24. Death on the Nile
    The film is perfectly adequate. Branagh’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1937 murder mystery is texturally conventional, even if he’s made his own adjustments to the cast of suspects.
  25. Marry Me
    In an era in which many of Lopez’s romcom peers – namely the Witherspoons and the Bullocks – have pivoted to dark dramas, it’s lovely to see her still banging the drum for a genre that’s never earned the respect it’s deserved. Then again, she knows what that feels like.
  26. The Souvenir: Part II
    It is a tender, sprawling drama that feels less inert than its predecessor and far more compelling.
  27. The Eyes of Tammy Faye
    The Eyes of Tammy Faye has done right by its subject, but only at the cost of shrinking down her world.
  28. Moonfall
    It’s exhausting. It’s exhilarating. And it’s exactly as absurd as you could ever hope it would be.
  29. Sing 2
    In Sing 2’s defence, the film is at least enthusiastic about its own overabundance, and the new celebrity voice additions – Halsey’s mollycoddled, rich-girl wolf or Letitia Wright’s street-dancing lynx – fit nicely into the mix.
  30. Parallel Mothers
    Parallel Mothers, in that way, brings a new sense of depth to Almodóvar’s gallery of fearless women – suggesting that their strength is not always by choice.
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