The Irish Times' Scores

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For 1,136 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 53% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 43% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.8 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 70
Highest review score: 100 Son of Saul
Lowest review score: 20 The Turning
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 641 out of 1136
  2. Mixed: 469 out of 1136
  3. Negative: 26 out of 1136
1136 movie reviews
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  1. Herself
    Dunne’s script, co-written with Malcolm Campbell, packs too much plot in its final 10 minutes, but it hits the emotional beats with gusto throughout. It was, when it was shot two years ago, an effective comment on an absurd crisis. Sadly, it is still that.
  2. Copilot
    Technically impressive and anchored by two terrific turns, Copilot walks a fine line as it attempts to delve into the humanity under extremism.
  3. Respect
    What Respect does have going for it is Jennifer Hudson and some stirring musical sequences. Just as these films have become loaded with cliches, the reviews have too often lazily argued that “[Lead Actor X] just about saves the day”. Well, here we are again.
  4. Sweet Thing
    A lively, coming-of-age fable featuring Rockwell’s family – including wife and former Fresh Prince star Karyn Parsons, daughter Lana and son Nico – Sweet Thing has been described by Tarantino as one of the most powerful new films to emerge in years. It’s certainly memorable.
  5. Wildfire
    Appearing opposite Nora-Jane Noone in a film that twists the actors round each other like competing bindweed, McGuigan could hardly have delivered a more bracing final performance. So savage is her turn that you expect water drops to hiss off her broiling skin.
  6. Here Today
    At times, Here Today feels like looking at a tableau vivant or courtly fool antics. No matter: Crystal is still the jester to beat.
  7. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
    Destin Daniel Cretton, director of Just Mercy and Short Term 12, continues Marvel’s reasonably successful practices of unlikely hires from the indie sector. The dialogue is snappy. The action has real kinetic clatter. What a strange industry this has become.
  8. Annette
    Working from a libretto by the cult band Sparks, cult director Leos Carax’s English-language debut is unlikely to please mayonnaise mainstream tastes. But for those seeking surprises, spectacle, and shadows, Annette is a marvel like no other.
  9. Demonic
    Co-written with Blomkamp’s District 9 collaborator Terri Tatchell, the film has agreeably creepy blurred ideas about the human experience and the simulated experience. And it’s never dull.
  10. The Nest
    Jude Law channels swaggering disquiet, resembling both the tormentor and tormented of a Harold Pinter play.
  11. Redemption of a Rogue
    Here is a film clawed up from the damp soil and smeared imaginatively across the screen. It is unlikely to be confused with Wild Mountain Thyme.
  12. Candyman
    Nia DaCosta, young director of the fine Little Woods, is behind the camera and she shows a real gift for gruesome showboating.
  13. Pig
    The film built around the actor’s affecting turn works equally hard at upending expectations.
  14. Censor
    A clever concept carried out with great invention and some emotional honesty.
  15. People Just Do Nothing: Big in Japan
    Rather than just pushing the characters through their familiar beats, the well-judged narrative arc takes them on something like a proper journey.
  16. Sweet Girl
    Too often this feels like a project that insists on delivering poor facsimiles of iconic scenes.
  17. Wendy
    The idiosyncratic Beasts of the Southern Wild is a tough act to follow, but Wendy’s similarly anthropological approach reinvigorates its overworked source material where others have floundered.
  18. New Order
    It remains a fascinating, stylish, uncompromising thriller for all its repugnant prejudices: punk rock movie-making for the ruling elite.
  19. CODA
    Coda is an unqualified success in its relaxed, almost matter-of-fact treatment of how deaf families move through a largely uncomprehending society.
  20. Free Guy
    There is a fair degree of fun to be had before the script gets too caught up in its own mythology.
  21. Antebellum
    The big narrative rug-pull isn’t quite as smooth as it ought to be, but there’s plenty to admire here, including Monáe’s expressive eyes, Pedro Luque Briozzo’s unsettling camerawork, and a thrillingly vicious turn by Jena Malone.
  22. Zola
    Time will tell if the social media thread is set to become the epic poem of the new millennium. For now, Zola feels like a triumphant lunge into fresh territory.
  23. Boys from County Hell
    The unreal feels real. The real feels even more real. A decidedly decent slice of bog horror.
  24. Last Letter from Your Lover
    It’s certainly not the film we were expecting from the talented Augustine Frizzell, writer-director of the giddy stoner-girl comedy Never Goin’ Back and the pilot episode of Euphoria. It is, rather, a moneyed, sumptuous diptych of temporal-jumping love stories.
  25. Limbo
    This is a wonderful comedy that savours its remote environment while keeping its subjects at the centre of the story. There are always new ways of telling the era’s most unavoidable sad stories. Not to be missed.
  26. The Suicide Squad
    Hardcore fans will rejoice in telling us it is not for children. It’s not really for adults either. But the eternal inner adolescent that lives within us all will almost certainly have a swell time.
  27. The Sparks Brothers
    It shouldn’t work, but it’s infectious fun for all of its not inconsiderable run time. The eccentric format double-jobs as a Sparks primer for the novice, and as a greatest hits package for the hardcore fan.
  28. Jungle Cruise
    Collet-Serra, who directed The Shallows and the Liam Neeson thrillers Unknown, Non-Stop, and The Commuter, keeps up a lively pace. That, and the capable cast, ensure that Jungle Cruise passes the time, much like the old-fashioned, uneventful ride that inspired it.
  29. I Never Cry
    I Never Cry works best as a showcase for a terrific young actor with a nuanced grasp of a complex character.
  30. The World to Come
    Arriving as part of the recent vogue for historical lesbian romances, The World to Come is better than Ammonite and rather more carnal than the chilly Carol, if not nearly as swooning as Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, nor as fascinating as Fastvold’s own writing.
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