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. A Minecraft Movie
    There’s a through line, buried in here somewhere, about how it’s harder to be creative, easier to destroy. Unfortunately, A Minecraft Movie proves its own point. Creativity took too much effort. Easier to destroy the spirit of the video game instead.
  2. Warfare
    Warfare’s violence feels unmoored without its context.
  3. The End
    There’s no room for the sentimental here. No Grinch hearts suddenly grow three sizes. That’s not how it works in the real world, and Oppenheimer is interested instead in the smaller, more subtle shifts.
  4. Holland
    Holland, with its floral wallpapers and porcelain figurines, and scenes that consistently end with a flare of violins, gestures aggressively towards kitsch. But Sodorski’s story is plain, dry melodrama. There’s not a lick of the camp, the satirical, or the demented in sight.
  5. Snow White
    What’s most disheartening about it all is how predictable Disney’s choices have become. With Snow White, they’ve finessed their formula – do the bare minimum to make a film, then simply slap a bunch of cutesy CGI animals all over it and hope no one notices.
  6. The Alto Knights
    Pileggi’s screenplay and Levinson’s scattershot direction, like De Niro, make little out of the clash of ideologies at the film’s centre. What could be biblical, feels passionless.
  7. Opus
    There’s not much about Opus, really, that fully convinces.
  8. One Of Them Days
    One of Them Days is funny as hell, but it also speaks to something sharply honest when Dreux sighs and mutters, “It shouldn’t have to be this hard.”
  9. The Last Showgirl
    The director shows great empathy for the pull of self-romanticisation, even when it wounds the dreamer.
  10. The Electric State
    The Electric State is somehow both punishingly obvious and completely incoherent.
  11. Black Bag
    While the supporting cast are impeccable across the board, it’s really Blanchett and Fassbender’s film to command, with performances that drip with old-school star power.
  12. The Monkey
    It’s a busy catalogue of gruesome absurdities that’s more consciously surrealist than the Final Destination series’s Mouse Trap-style executions, akin instead to the bizarro corpses crowding the afterlife’s waiting room in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988), with a splash of Peter Jackson’s early, gore-splattered horror-comedies.
  13. I'm Still Here
    Torres, in her masterfully controlled performance, offers up all we could possibly require.
  14. Blue Moon
    The Texan auteur’s new film – his 22nd, and the first of two due for release in this year alone – boasts a fine, quirky and courageous performance from Ethan Hawke, but it’s a stagey affair which at times becomes very stilted.
  15. Bring Them Down
    In Christopher Andrews’s stark, haunted debut – anchored by two soulfully frayed performances by Abbott and Keoghan – violence becomes the only language left to speak when shame, resentment, and desperation have stripped the words right out of these people’s mouths.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. Mickey 17
    For all the cruelty and buffoonery that might surround his hero, Bong lets us in on a revelation: what we’re really watching is a man learning that it’s OK for him to be happy.
  19. Captain America: Brave New World
    The latest Marvel blockbuster – starring Anthony Mackie and Harrison Ford – has drawn backlash from all political corners. But a film this bland and flavourless doesn’t warrant such handwringing.
  20. 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.
  21. Hard Truths
    Hard Truths withholds catharsis, instead choosing simply to let the shutters swing open on its protagonist’s psyche for a brief interlude.
  22. 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.
  23. The Brutalist
    It’s not a film to devour, but to be devoured by. There’s such a weight to it that it creates its own field of gravity.
  24. Wolf Man
    Whannell has the right idea. Wolf Man just needed a little more time in the lab.
  25. Here
    It’s bold in theory, a struggle to sit through in practice.
  26. We Live in Time
    All emotions here are predetermined. The point is that we’ve simply been given licence to feel.
  27. Nickel Boys
    A feat of full-bodied immersion, using a point-of-view camera, finely tuned sound design, and cinematic illusion to create a reality that takes hold of and then never quite leaves its audience’s souls.
  28. 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.
  29. 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.
  30. Better Man
    The unexpected advantage here is that, when Williams wants to be truly upfront about his struggles, that veneer of fantasy shields us from the more harrowing details of his life, so that we can confront them yet still enjoy that “right f***ing entertaining”.
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