The Independent's Scores

Select another publication »
For 595 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 0.8 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: 291 out of 595
  2. Mixed: 278 out of 595
  3. Negative: 26 out of 595
595 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. 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.
  2. Bad Boys: Ride or Die
    Bad Boys: Ride or Die has learned a few valuable lessons from the Fast & Furious franchise – dumb and loud, executed with right enthusiasm, can feel like a warm hug.
  3. The Garfield Movie
    The Garfield Movie is stuffed with enough tragic backstories to make a therapist rich.
  4. Hit Man
    Arjona matches Powell’s passions, while Linklater, with a touch of his signature nonchalance, sprinkles in a few of Gary’s classroom musings on whether people can truly change.
  5. Megalopolis
    Ultimately, this isn’t the car crash it could have been. It is, though, deeply flawed and very eccentric.
  6. IF
    It’s intended to be disarmingly sincere – yet the director-writer-actor is so single-mindedly intent on delivering “wonder” that what he’s ended up with isn’t so much a film but a series of emotional cues. It’s the same experience, really, as sitting down to watch an hour-and-a-half video loop of dogs being adopted.
  7. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
    Director George Miller combines speed, grace and explosive violence, emulating Sam Peckinpah westerns and even, at times, the work of Charles Dickens – Furiosa is a bit like a young Artful Dodger, using her wits and courage to stay alive.
  8. La Chimera
    There’s something to this film, and to director Alice Rohrwacher’s work at large, that feels as delicate, as enigmatic, and as spiritually charged as these millennia-old artefacts. It stirs up a fierce protectiveness in the viewer. Treasure this now, hold it, turn it, and examine it from all sides, or it may slip beyond your grasp.
  9. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
    Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a patchwork quilt of familiar notions.
  10. Treasure
    At times, it plays more like a sitcom than a story about the legacy of the death camps. Thankfully, it still provides probing insight into everything from casual antisemitism to the plague of historical forgetfulness.
  11. Love Lies Bleeding
    Love Lies Bleeding bottles that hot, feverish, salvatory desire, only to shake it like soda pop and then ping off the cap.
  12. The Idea of You
    In The Idea of You, it’s actually fun to buy into the fantasy.
  13. The Fall Guy
    If the film results in stunt performers gaining a little more respect from the public, that’s the ideal. If it merely reminds them how likeable Gosling is, that’s good, too.
  14. Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver
    The Scargiver is at least basic enough to feel relatively inoffensive; the first film’s uncomfortably vague deployment of racist and sexual violence has been reduced to a single reference to the empire’s hatred of “ethnic impurity” (never to be picked up again).
  15. Civil War
    We’re never told what this conflict is about, who might be oppressed, or what freedoms have been stolen away. All we’re given is violence.
  16. Challengers
    It’s the most gripping sports movie in years.
  17. Back to Black
    Back to Black is a fitfully enjoyable little package that will do wonders for the careers of Abela and O’Connell. But unlike Winehouse’s oeuvre, it’s not worth taking seriously. It’s just too afraid of the dark.
  18. The First Omen
    The film is also bold and clear cut about the way women’s bodies are made into objects of both reverence and shame – but its pièce de résistance is the shot of a vagina during birth, an entirely natural part of human existence that, in America, caused such a fuss that The First Omen was nearly slapped with an extreme NC-17 certificate. What a way to prove this film’s point.
  19. Mothers' Instinct
    There’s an odd timidity here that borders on self-denial.
  20. Road House
    It’s Road House by name, but certainly not by nature.
  21. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
    Frozen Empire is a notable improvement on Afterlife – funny, silly, and a little scary, with its pockets full of hand-built doodahs and the occasional excursion into the realm of pseudo-mythology and parapsychology.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lovely Rita (2001)
    This black comedy about the travails of the teenage Rita (a marvellously taciturn Barbara Osika) captures beautifully the awkward ugliness of adolescence before a brutal final punch. [11 Aug 2001, p.8]
    • The Independent
      • Posted Mar 15, 2024
  23. Damsel
    It’s hard to imagine what anyone could get out of Damsel that isn’t already liberally covered by Brown’s other projects. There’s a sweetness to Stranger Things’s Eleven, and a wit to Enola, that offer the actor a hell of a lot more to do than Damsel’s mean-mugging to camera.
  24. Ricky Stanicky
    Good comedies, of course, can make the tragic feel bittersweet, but Ricky Stanicky bungles its tone to the point that the whole affair comes across a little depressing. It’s like watching a bedraggled widower perform close-up magic at his spouse’s funeral.
  25. Memory
    Together, both actors rise above the most blatant of Memory’s manipulations.
  26. 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.
  27. Dune: Part Two
    Part Two is as grand as it is intimate, and while Hans Zimmer’s score once again blasts your eardrums into submission, and the theatre seats rumble with every cresting sand worm, it’s the choice moments of silence that really leave their mark.
  28. Madame Web
    Madame Web is fiction and has seemingly passed on the opportunity to make itself exciting – instead offering a two-hour prelude to a 30-second trailer for a sequel that will never happen.
  29. The Iron Claw
    A moving, sentimental work that also chills to the bone, powered by the inevitability of tragedy when familial loyalty becomes tethered to self-destruction.
  30. Bob Marley: One Love
    Marley, as played by Kingsley Ben-Adir, is presented as a centrifugal force in Jamaican art, culture and political thought, but the film also threatens to flatten him into just another tortured male genius.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »