Peter Bradshaw

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The Guardian
For 2,850 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 44% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 53% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.9 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Peter Bradshaw's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 66
Highest review score: 100 Fatherland
Lowest review score: 20 Red Dawn
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,315 out of 2850
  2. Mixed: 1,403 out of 2850
  3. Negative: 132 out of 2850
2850 movie reviews
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    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Chinatown
    The dialogue is crackling ("Are you alone?" – "Isn't everyone?") and the set pieces, like the one in the antisemitic old people's home, are just superb. Polanski brilliantly shows that money and power are not what's motivating everyone after all. There's a lower stratum of sexual dysfunction and fear at work, which is difficult, if not impossible to understand:: the ultimate meaning of the chaotic "Chinatown" of the title. Unmissable.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    Here
    It crept up on me at its own measured walking pace – and it incidentally has the best and cleverest last line of any film I have seen this year.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Apocalypse Now: Final Cut
    Brando’s charisma sells the climactic scenes with Willard; without his presence, the literary musings would be a little callow.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    Timbuktu
    Abderrahmane Sissako's passionate and visually beautiful film Timbuktu is a cry from the heart.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Brief Encounter
    The film is thrillingly, unapologetically about decency and honour, about, as Laura heartrendingly puts it, controlling oneself.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The Act of Killing
    It is a gut-churning film: and a radical dive into history, grabbing the past in a way a conventional documentary would not.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    De Humani Corporis Fabrica
    Much of the film immerses us in an unknowable, unrecognisable world under the skin, without shape, without what Vesalius wanted to show us in the 16th century. It is an uncanny spectacle.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    Maborosi
    It is a sombre and painful drama, enacted with reserve. There are no closeups, and it is fully one hour into the running time before we get even a medium shot of the female lead’s face. Even then there are shadows.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    Never Rarely Sometimes Always
    Music is where the film’s emotional meaning is unveiled.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Annie Hall
    Lovely performances, and more superb gags in one minute than most movies manage in 90. It's like drinking champagne.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    The Zone of Interest
    The film, with its superb score by Mica Levi and sound design by Johnnie Burn, has undoubted power but might well revive the debate about conjuring slick movie effects from the horrors of history.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
    No other later horror film – and certainly none of the many sequels to this one – captured so well the strangeness of living through a long night of evil and emerging into bright sunlight, with its tacit promise of restorative justice or virtue, or just normality.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Threads
    It wasn’t until I saw Threads that I found that something on screen could make me break out in a cold, shivering sweat and keep me in that condition for 20 minutes, followed by weeks of depression and anxiety.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Leviathan
    Leviathan is acted and directed with unflinching ambition, moving with deliberative slowness and periodically accelerating at moments of high drama and suspense. It isn't afraid of massive symbolic moments and operatic gestures.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The Souvenir
    The Souvenir is an artefact in the highest auteur register. Its absence of tonal readability is a challenge. But there is also a cerebrally fierce, slow-burn passion in its austere, unemphasised plainness.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Goodfellas
    Goodfellas is a compelling, black-comic nightmare.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The Look of Silence
    The Look of Silence — like The Act of Killing — is arresting and important film-making.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The Secret Agent
    This movie, visually and dramatically superb in every way, moves with unhurried confidence across the screen, pausing to savour every bizarre bit of comedy or erotic byway, or note of pathos, on its circuitous path to the violent finale.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    Burning
    This is a gripping nightmare.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Drive My Car
    Where once Hamaguchi’s film-making language had seemed to me at the level of jeu d’esprit, now it ascends to something with passion and even a kind of grandeur.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    It Was Just an Accident
    It’s another very impressive serio-comic film from one of the most distinctive and courageous figures in world cinema.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Saint Omer
    The severity and poise of this calmly paced movie, its emotional reserve and moral seriousness – and the elusive, implied confessional dimension concerning Diop herself – make it an extraordinary experience.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Three Colors: White
    What a strange confection White is – an opera of male agony and outrageously implausible picaresque adventure. Yet it succeeds amazingly on its own melodramatic terms.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    Time
    The point of the film is Sibil’s decades-long ordeal and she emerges with heroic and compelling dignity.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Lost in Translation
    Sofia Coppola's second movie as a director is more than a breakthrough: it's an insouciant triumph. She conjures a terrifically funny, heartbreakingly sad and swooningly romantic movie from almost nowhere and just makes it look very easy - as well as very modern and very sexy. It is a funky little Brief Encounter for the new century.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Son of Saul
    By any standards, this would be an outstanding film, but for a debut it is remarkable.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 60 Peter Bradshaw
    Her
    I wished I liked it more. It is engagingly self-aware and excruciatingly self-conscious, wearing its hipness on its sleeve; it's ingenious and yet remarkably contrived. The film seems very new, but the sentimental ending is as old as the hills. There are some great moments.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
    Jane Schoenbrun unveils a very enjoyable display of transformative ecstasy and submissive rapture, treating us to a bizarre pop-cultural black mass of fiercely believed-in trash and kink.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Little Women
    This is such a beguiling, generous film from Gerwig. There is a lot of love in it.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    I Am Cuba
    It is strident, yes, and naive, too perhaps; but lyrical and passionate and visually dazzling.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The African Queen
    A ripping, gripping yarn, a surprisingly erotic love story and, as it happens, a premonition of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat
    I last encountered the work of the Belgian artist and film-maker Johan Grimonprez in the documentary-reverie Double Take from 2009, which imagined an encounter between two Alfred Hitchcocks. Now in this fascinating and valuably informative film, he amplifies what he sees as the mood music that lay behind the assassination of the leftist Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Monty Python and the Holy Grail
    The material is superb, Neil Innes’ music is tremendous and Gilliam’s animations are timelessly brilliant.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Flee
    This animated documentary from Danish film-maker Jonas Poher Rasmussen is an irresistibly moving and engrossing story, whose emotional implications we can see being absorbed into the minds of the director and his subject, almost in real time.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    All Quiet on the Western Front
    An ambitious epic of tremendous sweep and scope, with trench-warfare battle scenes comparable to Kubrick's Paths of Glory.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi
    The Last Jedi gives you an explosive sugar rush of spectacle. It’s a film that buzzes with belief in itself and its own mythic universe – a euphoric certainty that I think no other movie franchise has. And there is no provisional hesitation or energy dip of the sort that might have been expected between episodes seven and nine.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 60 Peter Bradshaw
    Tótem
    This is clearly a very personal project for Avilés, and the heartbreak feels very real.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Stories We Tell
    Polley tackles painful issues with candour and tact. She has a gripping tale to tell. It's a film that raises questions about the ownership of memory and ownership of narrative.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Nickel Boys
    This is a survivor’s coming of age: tough, disillusioned, brilliant.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    The Boy and the Heron
    The Boy and the Heron is a valuable new addition to this unique film-artist’s canon, about confronting a terrible sadness and finding a way to replace it with wonder and joy.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    Jafar Panahi's Taxi
    Taxi grew on me. It is not as angry and painful as his previous work, the samizdat This Is Not a Film, but it is subtle, humorous and humane. It tells you more about modern Iran, I think, than you’ll discover on the news.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    Ida
    Every moment of Ida feels intensely personal. It is a small gem, tender and bleak, funny and sad, superbly photographed in luminous monochrome: a sort of neo-new wave movie with something of the classic Polish film school and something of Truffaut, but also deadpan flecks of Béla Tarr and Aki Kaurismäki.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
    Goldin shows that maybe there is always more bloodshed than beauty.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Hit the Road
    This family could be blown into pieces. And yet an irrepressible defiance and comic energy bubbles under every scene.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    They Shall Not Grow Old
    Peter Jackson has created a visually staggering thought experiment; an immersive deep-dive into what it was like for ordinary British soldiers on the western front.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    An Autumn Afternoon
    Ozu shows how fragile and yet burdensome the institution of the family is.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    Anora
    What would Pretty Woman look like if it bore the smallest resemblance to the reality of sex work? Maybe something like this, Sean Baker’s amazing, full-throttle tragicomedy of romance, denial and betrayal.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    The Favourite
    The Favourite may have corrected Lanthimos’s tendency towards arthouse torpor. It is a scabrous and often hilarious film, made loopier by the nightmarish visions and wide-angle distortions contrived by the cinematographer Robbie Ryan.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Halloween
    The unmasking "reveal" at the beginning of the movie is a great coup, and the film continues to be very scary, helped by Carpenter's own theme: a trebly plinking of piano notes and that buzzy synth in low register.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Nostalgia for the Light
    It is deeply intelligent, intensely and painfully political, and yet attempts, and succeeds, somehow to transcend politics and perhaps even history itself.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The Brutalist
    This is a film with thrilling directness and storytelling force, a movie that fills its widescreen and three-and-a half-hour running time with absolute certainty and ease, as well as glorious amplitude, clarity and even simplicity – and yet also with something darkly mysterious and uncanny to be divined in its handsome shape.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    La Chimera
    La Chimera is a film that utterly occupies its own fictional space; it expresses its eccentric romance in its own fluent movie dialect. I was utterly captivated by this sad, lovelorn adventure.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The Worst Person in the World
    Trier has taken on one of the most difficult genres imaginable, the romantic drama, and combined it with another very tricky style – the coming-of-ager – to craft something gloriously sweet and beguiling.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Licorice Pizza
    It’s such a delectable film: I’ll be cutting myself another slice very soon.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Peter Bradshaw
    Ride Like a Girl
    It’s a bit hammy and TV-movie-ish, but you can’t help smiling at its feelgood directness and warmth.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    Great Expectations
    It is a wonderfully fluent, engaging story, with beautiful cinematography by Guy Green.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    First Cow
    It is a tremendously engaging story which does something that very few movies do: mention money. Something very palpable is at stake, the jeopardy is real and it’s a question of survival.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    Mad Max: Fury Road
    That adjective in the title is accurate. Extravagantly deranged, ear-splittingly cacophonous, and entirely over the top, George Miller has revived his Mad Max punk-western franchise as a bizarre convoy chase action-thriller in the post-apocalyptic desert.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    The Queen
    The film is a sharp reminder that the Queen has doggedly survived, because she has never been required to expend mental energy and political capital in shows of sincerity.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    All of Us Strangers
    The film is an enormously satisfying and affecting experience.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The Godfather: Part II
    It is even better than the first film, and has the greatest single final scene in Hollywood history, a real coup de cinéma.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Blue Is the Warmest Color
    Blue Is the Warmest Colour really is an outstanding film and the performances from Exarchopoulos and Séydoux make other people's acting look very weak.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Phantom Thread
    There is such pure delicious pleasure in this film, in its strangeness, its vehemence, its flourishes of absurdity, carried off with superb elegance.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Monsieur Hulot's Holiday
    The movie is perfectly composed with a light touch that is the work of a certain kind of gravity and sophistication.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Fatherland
    Here is an impossibly elegant, poised historical vignette whose brevity and control can hardly contain its characters’ personal and historical pain.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The Souvenir: Part II
    This rich and mysterious film is a real achievement.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    This Is Not a Film
    This Is Not a Film is a compelling personal document, a quietly passionate statement of artistic intent, and an uncompromising testament to his belief in cinema.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    Sound of Falling
    It is dense with fear and sadness.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    Sugarcane
    [A] deeply disquieting and indeed enraging documentary.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Small Axe: Mangrove
    As with McQueen’s previously premiered Small Axe film, Lovers Rock, there is real fervour and real meaning here: it is film-making with visceral commitment and muscular storytelling.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    Green Border
    Green Border is a tough watch: a punch to the solar plexus. But a vital bearing of cinematic witness to what is happening in Europe right now.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Days and Nights in the Forest
    Ray's language of cinema is a kind of miraculous vernacular, all his own. It has mystery, eroticism and delight.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    Oppenheimer
    Oppenheimer is poignantly lost in the kaleidoscopic mass of broken glimpses: the sacrificial hero-fetish of the American century.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Paths of Glory
    It is arguably the best film about the first world war, and still has a reasonable claim to being Stanley Kubrick's best film.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Cold War
    The crystalline black-and-white cinematography exalts its moments of intimate grimness and its dreamlike showpieces of theatrical display. It is an elliptical, episodic story of imprisonment and escape, epic in scope.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    Paterson
    What a lovely film Paterson is.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Raging Bull
    I can still remember my 19-year-old self's awe at how Jake provokes a gorgeous, reluctant smile from the incandescently beautiful Moriarty. Throughout university, I was obsessed with this film, and watched it about once a month.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    United 93
    Paul Greengrass and his cinematographer Barry Ackroyd have created an intestinally powerful and magnificent memorial to the passengers of that doomed flight. It is the film of the year. I needed to lie down in a darkened room afterwards. So will you.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    The Lavender Hill Mob
    It's tremendously good fun, though lighter in tone than Ealing's two scabrous masterpieces Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers, and not quite matching their elegant perfection; I've never been able to rid myself of the feeling that, however superbly set up, the aftermath of the heist itself is ever so slightly lacking in tension.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    American Hustle
    It is an intriguing confection of a movie, announcing its influences candidly, but exerting its originality too.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The Deer Hunter
    The idea of sacrifice permeates everything, along with the cruelty and horror. This is Cimino's masterpiece.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 60 Peter Bradshaw
    Minding the Gap
    This is a fluent, watchable piece of work, though not quite as lucid as it might have been. A poignant tribute, at any rate, to the lost innocence of skateboarding.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Two Days, One Night
    A tense dramatic situation and a subtly magnificent central performance from Marion Cotillard add up to an outstanding new movie from the Dardenne brothers.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Killers of the Flower Moon
    This is an utterly absorbing film, a story that Scorsese sees as a secret history of American power, a hidden violence epidemic polluting the water table of humanity.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Peter Bradshaw
    The Hidden Fortress
    The comedy co-exists with a dark view of life's brevity, and Kurosawa devises exhilarating setpieces and captivating images. Arthouse classics aren't usually as welcoming and entertaining as this.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    After Hours
    A peculiar, potent film.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
    This is a heartfelt movie, a documentary unafraid to spread itself across its vast subject matter, and a fierce denunciation of the arrogant political classes, still in denial about one of the biggest tragedies in American history.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Minari
    This is a wonderfully absorbing and moving family drama with a buttery, sunlit streak of sentimentality.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Barry Lyndon
    Barry Lyndon is an intimate epic of utter lucidity and command.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Marty Supreme
    The pure craziness is a marvel.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Peter Bradshaw
    The Alto Knights
    There is a kind of solidity and force to the film in its opening act, but its interest dwindles and we get little in the way of either ambition or moment-by-moment humour.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    Great Freedom
    Great Freedom is a formidably intelligent and well-acted prison movie and also a love story – or perhaps a paradoxically platonic bromance, stretching from the end of the second world war to the moon landing.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    System Crasher
    A grisly, gripping watch.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    It's a Wonderful Life
    The film is gripping enough simply with the telling of George's lifestory. A genuine American classic.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    Gunda
    The secret life of farm animals remains a secret, but a fascinating and even poignant one, in this strange and unexpectedly subtle film from the Russian documentary-maker Viktor Kossakovsky.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The Power of the Dog
    The Power of the Dog is a made with artistry and command: it is one of Jane Campion’s best.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Sullivan's Travels
    There are some marvellous supporting performances. This film comes as close as possible to a distillation of pure happiness.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Alien
    Editors Terry Rawlings and Peter Weatherley cut the film so cleverly so that we never have a clear notion of what the alien actually looks like until the very last shots.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Peter Bradshaw
    Columbus
    Columbus is an engrossing and unexpectedly passionate film, although much of the passion is displaced outwards into a feeling for space, for mass, for building materials. It is a static passion, but not inert.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Peter Bradshaw
    The House That Jack Built
    It is an ordeal of gruesomeness and tiresomeness that was every bit as exasperating as I had feared.
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