The Irish Times' Scores

  • Movies
For 562 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 54% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 43% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 5.2 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 70
Highest review score: 100 The Lighthouse
Lowest review score: 20 The Turning
Score distribution:
  1. Negative: 14 out of 562
562 movie reviews
  1. There’s something of the Greek weird wave or Wes Anderson in Cavalli’s deadpan humour, which is offset by Porcaroli’s wildly energetic central turn.
  2. The film is ultimately a showcase for Sweeney, however. You can see the panic rising beneath the young actor’s calm, collected front. It’s a brilliantly measured turn that couldn’t be further from Sweeney’s iconic breakdown as the vulnerable Cassie on Euphoria.
  3. None of these bits fit together. Each is tolerably entertaining on its own terms.
  4. The main body of Across the Spider-Verse is, however, so endlessly, dizzyingly imaginative that few will lose hope at the mildly disappointing denouement. There is surely more to come, and the potential is there for endless variation. Excelsior!
  5. At 76, more than 20 films into his storied career, Paul Schrader can still deliver a sucker punch.
  6. Jalmari Helander, who previously scored an international hit with his Santa-themed horror, Rare Exports, mines every gory set piece for squeals of delight and revulsion. Styled as a midnight movie, Sisu makes terrific use of limited military hardware and a forbidding Lapland landscape.
  7. It helps that the 1989 flick had a score to equal that of any contemporaneous Broadway hit. And, Bailey, who will surely profit from this opportunity, knows how to build the blowsier numbers through show-stopping crescendos. All that should be enough to satisfy indulgent fans.
  8. Anderson’s 11th movie is simultaneously furiously busy and curiously uneventful.
  9. Those who do stick with Killers of the Flower Moon – and you all should – when it opens later in the year will, however, be rewarded with the most ingenious of closing codas. There are issues here, but the great man has still got it.
  10. A lovely, pastoral pleasure that admits its share of blood-drawing barbs.
  11. Trust Kelly Fremon Craig, the writer-director of The Edge of Seventeen, the best teen movie of the past decade, to translate Blume’s seminal novel into a funny, exhilarating coming-of-age movie that will charm all genders.
  12. Keeping up with the many, many characters and their peccadillos is dizzying.
  13. Nobody with a brain in their heads will compare Dial of Destiny favourably to the first three films. There is a sense throughout of a project struggling to stand beneath the weight of its history. But Mangold, director of Logan and 3.10 to Yuma, knows how to keep his foot on the pedal. The recreations of the 1960s vistas are gorgeous. The agreeable cameos keep coming.
  14. Beau Is Afraid is all clatter and stress and movement, but the director is in control throughout, engineering both comic set pieces and existential show trials with equal invention.
  15. There are few reveals, but narrative restraint is commendable in the telling of this almost unbearably unhappy tale.
  16. Pray for Our Sinners (clever title, incidentally) is not a shocker on the scale of clerical-abuse documentaries such as Mea Maxima Culpa or Deliver Us from Evil. It is a smaller story that connects directly with a tight community. Its power lies in its intimacy and, ultimately, in its cautious hopefulness.
  17. Happily, Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi put in mountain-sized performances to offset the film’s silences and propensity for postcard shots, bringing heart and guts to the chilliest scenery. A worthwhile hike through many obstacles to friendship.
  18. The high concept becomes a near irrelevance as we struggle with a humanist story that lacks the emotional zest Hirokazu Koreeda habitually brings to related material. The messages are inarguable. The means of delivery leaves something to be desired.
  19. One of the more enjoyable dreadful films of the season.
  20. For all the interesting biographical details unpacked here, Harris remains a strangely elusive presence, as if he’s refusing to co-operate from beyond the grave.
  21. It is the relationship between Grace and Cian that most engages. Galligan, seen recently in the TV series The Great and Kin, exhibits a rare charisma and a gift for dry comedy that should take her far.
  22. A triumvirate of superb performances and the warmth of Maryam Touzani and Nabil Ayouch’s screenplay offset the clumsier tropes. Virginie Surdej’s cinematography bathes daylit scenes in golden light to match the thread Halim uses on his petroleum-blue creation.
  23. An ambivalent, accusatory depiction of intercountry adoption, Return to Seoul mines South Korea’s controversial adoption history to craft a smart if maddening character study.
  24. For all the extravagant special effects and efforts to tug at our heartstrings, what we get is more of an epic variety show than coherent space opera.
  25. Lisa Cortés’ fond, scholarly, starry documentary not only ensures that the innovator behind Tutti Frutti and Good Golly, Miss Molly gets his due but also provides a rip-roaring bow for the artist variously known as the Georgia Peach, the Living Flame and the Southern Child.
  26. One is tempted to demand a dramatic movie based on these yarns, but Castro’s Spies tells its story so compellingly that no such compromise is necessary.
  27. Every scene, every ride and every development feels dangerous and combustible.
  28. Evil Dead Rises is not quite so unambiguously comic as that early work, but Cronin never forgets we are here to have a bloody good time.
  29. Writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s pitch-black comedy makes merry with malignant narcissism and the worried well.
  30. This meandering, mysterious 164-minute meditation on French imperialism is not for everyone.

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