Peter Bradshaw

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The Guardian
For 2,849 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: 67
Highest review score: 100 Fatherland
Lowest review score: 20 Red Dawn
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,315 out of 2849
  2. Mixed: 1,402 out of 2849
  3. Negative: 132 out of 2849
2849 movie reviews
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    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The Irishman
    No-one but Scorsese and this glorious cast could have made this movie live as richly and compellingly as it does, and persuade us that its tropes and images are still vital.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The Great Beauty
    This movie looks and feels superb, it is pure couture cinema. But there is also a excess of richness and bombast and for all its sleekness I felt that the spark of emotion was being hidden, and there is a kind of frustration in the operatic sadness.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Marty Supreme
    The pure craziness is a marvel.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    A Complete Unknown
    Interestingly the story, despite the classic music-biopic tropes that Mangold did so much to popularise, does not conform to the classic rise-fall-learning-experience-comeback format. It’s all rise, but troubled and unclear. You might not buy Chalamet’s Dylan at first; I didn’t, until that Guthrie bedside scene. There is amazing bravado in this performance.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The Beast
    The Beast may not add up to a cogent or thoroughgoing critique of all the ideas it invokes, but it’s such a luxurious cinematic experience; it’s created with such elan and attack, and the musical score amplifies its throb of fear.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Shoplifters
    It is a movie made up of delicate brushstrokes: details, moments, looks and smiles.
    • 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.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Call Me by Your Name
    There is such tenderness to this film. I was overwhelmed by it.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Spartacus
    A stirring classic.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Tale of Tales
    It is a masterpiece of black-comic bad taste and a positive carnival of transgression. The secret is the deadpan seriousness with which everything is treated.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The Exorcist
    The Exorcist is diabolically inspired: it’s still capable of making you jump and yelp.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The Green Knight
    The visual brilliance of this film combines with shroomy toxicity and inexplicable moral grandeur: what a stunning experience.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    No Time to Die
    No Time To Die is startling, exotically self-aware, funny and confident, and perhaps most of all it is big: big action, big laughs, big stunts and however digitally it may have been contrived, and however wildly far-fetched, No Time To Die looks like it is taking place in the real world, a huge wide open space that we’re all longing for.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Shallow Grave
    Shallow Grave is persistently cynical and uningratiating, a tale of nasty, greedy, stupid people who don’t realise that the finders-keepers rule doesn’t apply to a suitcase full of cash whose criminal owners will not merely want it back but want to create the specific circumstances in which Juliet, David and Alex will be unable to testify against them in a court of law.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Cairo Station
    Chahine conducts his big cast with uproarious energy, immediacy and freshness; he has tremendous stylised set pieces, including a railway-carriage rock'n'roll number performed by a group gloriously credited as Mike and his Skyrockets.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Paris, Texas
    It is an eerie, sad story whose meaning disappears over the vast horizon as if on a highway heading away through the desert.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Persona
    Persona is a film to make you shiver with fascination, or incomprehension, or desire.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The Look of Silence
    The Look of Silence — like The Act of Killing — is arresting and important film-making.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Local Hero
    It has a claim to be the last movie with the authentic spirit of the Ealing comedies; although with a longer perspective we can also see how it’s also indirectly influenced by producer David Puttnam in its high-minded spirit of Anglo-American amity.
    • 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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Loveless
    Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Loveless is a stark, mysterious and terrifying story of spiritual catastrophe: a drama with the ostensible form of a procedural crime thriller. It has a hypnotic intensity and unbearable ambiguity which is maintained until the very end.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Inside Llewyn Davis
    Brilliantly written, terrifically acted, superbly designed and shot; it's a sweet, sad, funny picture about the lost world of folk music which effortlessly immerses us in the period.
    • 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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    SPECTRE
    It’s deeply silly but uproariously entertaining. At the end, I almost felt guilty for enjoying it all quite so much - almost.
    • 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.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The Apartment
    It's still luminous, 52 years on.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The Last Picture Show
    Peter Bogdanovich's 1971 ode to a Texan small town is still a masterpiece whichever way you look at it.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Amy
    It is an overwhelming story, and despite everyone knowing the ending, it is as gripping as a thriller: Kapadia has fashioned and shaped it with masterly flair.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Occupied City
    In its scale and seriousness, Occupied City allows its emotional implication to amass over its running time. The effect is mysterious and moving.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Nickel Boys
    This is a survivor’s coming of age: tough, disillusioned, brilliant.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Long Day's Journey Into Night
    There is such artistry and audacity in this new film by the 30-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan. Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a hallucinatory experience whose sinuous camera movements take you on a long journey into memory and fear and a night full of dreams.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
    It is a wildly silly, wildly entertaining adventure which periodically gives us a greatest-hits flashback montage of the other seven films in the M:I canon - but we still get a brand new, box-fresh Tom-sprinting-along-the-street scene, without which it wouldn’t be M:I.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Citizenfour
    Citizenfour is a gripping record of how our rulers are addicted to gaining more and more power and control over us – if we let them.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Do the Right Thing
    Sal is not ready for a new political world, whose dawn Lee sketches out here, in which it is not enough simply to refrain from making overtly racist gestures: omission or erasure is equally insulting.
    • 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.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    45 Years
    It could be the finest hour for both of its lead actors.
    • 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
    • 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.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Gone with the Wind
    Some elements seem grotesquely dated, but this restoration of the 1939 classic finds the film as powerful and mad as ever.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The Graduate
    The excellence of Katherine Ross as Mrs Robinson’s daughter, Elaine, is often overlooked. A hugely pleasurable film.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Rashomon
    Akira Kurosawa's 1950 masterwork is a chilling, utterly memorable dissection of the nature of human communication.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Calamity Jane
    The tunes are gold, and as Jane approaches a local creek, resplendent in her gorgeous yellow gown, we get one of the most famous visual gags in the history of the musical.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    8½
    It exerts an irresistible pull.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    There Will Be Blood
    This is a dark, uncompromising film, thrillingly original and distinctive, with a visionary passion. It is a movie against which all directors, and all moviegoers, will want to measure themselves.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    I Know Where I'm Going!
    The happiness and innocence in this film are beyond compare.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Quo Vadis, Aida?
    There’s a real tragic power in this almost unbearably brutal and shocking movie from writer-director Jasmila Žbanić.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    mother!
    As horror it is ridiculous, as comedy it is startling and hilarious, and as a machine for freaking you out it is a thing of wonder.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The Hateful Eight
    Tarantino has created another breathtakingly stylish and clever film, a Jacobean western, intimate yet somehow weirdly colossal, once again releasing his own kind of unwholesome crazy-funny-violent nitrous oxide into the cinema auditorium for us all to inhale.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Napoleon
    Phoenix is the key to it all: a performance as robust as the glass of burgundy he knocks back: preening, brooding, seething and triumphing.
    • 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.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Spirited Away
    Spirited Away is fast and funny; it's weird and wonderful. Mostly wonderful.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The Northman
    The Northman is a horribly violent, nihilistic and chaotic story about the endless cycle of violence, the choice between loving your friends and hating your enemies – which turns out to be no choice at all, and the thread of fate down which masculinity’s delicious toxin drips. It’s entirely outrageous, with some epic visions of the flaring cosmos. I couldn’t look away.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    A Star Is Born
    For one star to get an award, a handful of defeated nominees have to swallow their pain, as the spotlight moves away from them. For one star to deliver the shock of the new, another one has to receive the shock of the old. A Star Is Born turns that transaction into a love story.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    BPM (Beats Per Minute)
    This film has what its title implies: a heartbeat. It is full of cinematic life.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Berberian Sound Studio
    Utterly distinctive and all but unclassifiable, a musique concrète nightmare, a psycho-metaphysical implosion of anxiety, with strange-tasting traces of black comedy and movie-buff riffs. It is seriously weird and seriously good.
    • 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.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Mulholland Dr.
    Mulholland Drive is as brilliant and disquieting as anything Lynch has ever done. It is psychotically lucid, oppressively strange, but with a powerfully erotic and humanly intimate dimension that Lynch never quite achieved elsewhere. It is a fantasia of illusion and identity, a meditation on the mystery of casting in art as in life: the vital importance of finding the right role.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Leave No Trace
    It’s a movie that will live with me for a long time.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Happy End
    It is not a new direction for this film-maker, admittedly, but an existing direction pursued with the same dazzling inspiration as ever. It is also as gripping as a satanically inspired soap opera, a dynasty of lost souls.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Dear Comrades!
    It is a passionate drama of fear and rage.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The Revenant
    What is so distinctive about this Iñárritu picture is its unitary control and its fluency: no matter how extended, the film’s tense story is under the director’s complete control and he unspools great meandering, bravura travelling shots to tell it: not dissimilar, in some ways, to his previous picture, Birdman. The movie is as thrilling and painful as a sheet of ice held to the skin.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
    Part of the film's brilliance is its stunning and unforgiving transmission of the great truth that for most of us, death is not a single, flatline moment, but a gradual, insidious process of deterioration.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Peter Bradshaw
    Pulp Fiction
    In 1994, all the talk was of former video store clerk Tarantino's indifference to traditional culture. That patronised his sophisticated cinephilia, and in fact, twenty years on, the writerly influences of Edward Bunker, Elmore Leonard, and Jim Thompson seem very prominent. Don DeLillo began the '90s by warning that the U.S. is the only country in the world with funny violence. Maybe Pulp Fiction was the kind of thing he had in mind. Unmissable.
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