tale, and a sophisticated human drama about societies struggling to live." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 84 out of 100, based on 38 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade "B−" on an A+ to F scale. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars out of four, writing, "Cuarón fulfills the promise of futuristic fiction; characters do not wear strange costumes or visit the moon, and the cities are not plastic hallucinations, but look just like today, except tired and shabby. Here is certainly a world ending not with a bang but a whimper, and the film serves as a cautionary warning." Dana Stevens of Slate called it "the herald of another blessed event: the arrival of a great director by the name of Alfonso Cuarón". Stevens hailed the film's extended car chase and battle scenes as "two of the most virtuoso single-shot chase sequences I've ever seen". Manohla Dargis of The New York Times called the film a "superbly directed political thriller", raining accolades on the long chase scenes. "Easily one of the best films of the year" said Ethan Alter of Film Journal International, with scenes that "dazzle you with their technical complexity and visual virtuosity". Jonathan Romney of The Independent praised the accuracy of Cuarón's portrait of the United Kingdom, but he criticized some of the film's futuristic scenes as "run-of-the-mill future fantasy". Film Comments critics' poll of the best films of 2006 ranked the film number 19, while the 2006 readers' poll ranked it number two. On their list of the best movies of 2006, The A.V. Club, the San Francisco Chronicle, Slate, and The Washington Post placed the film at number one. Entertainment Weekly ranked the film seventh on its end-of-the-decade top 10 list, saying, "Alfonso Cuarón's dystopian 2006 film reminded us that adrenaline-juicing action sequences can work best when the future looks just as grimy as today". Peter Travers of Rolling Stone ranked it number two on his list of best films of the decade, writing: According to Metacritic's analysis of the films most often noted on the best-of-the-decade lists, Children of Men is the 11th greatest film of the 2000s. In the wake of the European migrant crisis of 2015, the British withdrawal from the European Union of the late 2010s, the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and