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. Belfast
    Branagh doesn’t seem as eager as Cuaron to interrogate his own memories, or to reckon with how the protective veil of one’s parents can shield a child from reality.
  2. Nightmare Alley
    Del Toro can do worldbuilding in his sleep, but you might also find Cooper’s brittle performance, filled with such elemental sadness, hard to shake off. Nightmare Alley is the shadow that lingers.
  3. Cow
    Arnold’s Cow is grimy and unvarnished where it counts, laced with poeticism whenever the banal cruelty threatens to leave its audience numb.
  4. Scream
    It’s a little metatextual analysis served up with a generous side of guts and gore, stabbing its cake and eating it with gleeful abandon.
  5. 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.
  6. The 355
    The 355 is a mark of progress only in how wholly unremarkable it feels.
  7. Licorice Pizza
    Boxing Licorice Pizza inside the realm of juvenile memory more often feels like an excuse than a conceit.
  8. The Electrical Life of Louis Wain
    The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is also disarmingly tender, blessed with a deep affectation for its subject that feels fuller and more romantic in its nature than straightforward respect.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. The Matrix Resurrections
    The fourth ‘Matrix’ film offers a volcanic cluster of ideas with ambition – and a reminder that long black coats and tiny sunglasses are, indeed, very cool.
  12. Swan Song
    The film’s most interesting onscreen partnership is Ali and, well, Ali. He essentially delivers the same performance twice, but with variations so minute that you’re left to wonder whether you simply imagined them.
  13. 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.
  14. Spider-Man: No Way Home
    Most of the callbacks are played for light humour, not self-importance. Yes, it’s easy to tell you’re being manipulated. But it’s just as easy to respond with: so what?
  15. The King's Man
    All the pleasures of The King’s Man find themselves inevitably undermined by its hollowness.
  16. Don't Look Up
    There’s something oddly satisfying about the way McKay's film lets us laugh at our own doom.
  17. Being the Ricardos
    It is, at the very least, far more interested in words than ideas – perhaps the defining feature of Sorkin’s work.
  18. Robin Robin
    Robin Robin may be short, but it’s rich and satisfying – maybe one to serve alongside the pudding on Christmas Day.
  19. A Boy Called Christmas
    It’s surprising how much the film can flit between clangingly obvious bits of exposition – aha! The source of the floppy red hat! A reindeer that happens to be named Blitzen! – and more mature perspectives on the holidays.
  20. The Hand of God
    The film is bawdy and wistful, with a rich vein of melancholy running through it.
  21. Boxing Day
    It’s a rare achievement contained within an even rarer type of film: a Black-led, British romantic comedy. But there are, unfortunately, limits to how new and invigorating Boxing Day actually feels.
  22. Silent Night
    Most of Silent Night’s pleasures are to be found in the strength of its cast – Knightley, whose comic talent is frequently underused, can turn on a kind manic perkiness that’s as endearing as it is absolutely terrifying. It’s a smile that says, yes, if I ever were to murder you, they’d never find the body.
  23. C'mon C'mon
    C’mon C’mon is a great big bear hug wrapped in celluloid.
  24. West Side Story
    All those technical triumphs only complicate what feels like an unanswerable question: how can a film look this good, feel so moving, and still come up lacking?
  25. House of Gucci
    Gaga plays the film’s early scenes with a winking, playful innocence, consciously mirroring Patrizia’s story with that of Ally, her character in 2018’s A Star is Born – another ordinary woman plucked from relative obscurity.
  26. Home Sweet Home Alone
    No, the problem with Home Sweet Home Alone isn’t that it had the temerity to encroach on a holiday classic. It’s that they bungled the whole thing so badly.
  27. Encanto
    Encanto bursts with colour and abstract flights of fantasy.
  28. 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.
  29. 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.
  30. Ghostbusters: Afterlife
    Ghostbusters: Afterlife is simply the things you already knew and liked, but repeated with unearned gravitas.
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