The Guardian's Scores

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For 6,577 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 41% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 54% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 London Road
Lowest review score: 0 Melania
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2,494 out of 6577
  2. Mixed: 3,764 out of 6577
  3. Negative: 319 out of 6577
6577 movie reviews
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  1. John Candy: I Like Me
    There’s an amazing lineup of collaborators and stars, and it’s good to see Candy’s uniquely likable and buoyant screen personality, but the tone borders on the stultifyingly reverential.
  2. Bulk
    You have to make friends with the jauntiness and zaniness of this film and to forgive its sometimes rather laborious quality, and Lara’s deadpan drollery is always watchable.
  3. The Fifth Estate
    This is highly competent catnip for the watercooler crowd.
  4. See You Then
    Despite its flaws, See You Then is an interesting opportunity to see trans talents in front of and behind the camera.
  5. The Other Lamb
    Gliding close to genre tropes but moving more comfortably as an uneasy drama about the alarming power of blind faith, The Other Lamb is an intriguing mood piece, strikingly made and well-performed if not quite as powerful as it could have been.
  6. Meet the Blacks
    Meet the Blacks is an asinine film (though with a kernel of seriousness) but whenever it feels like it is running out of steam, something strange and surreal will happen to elevate it above a typical spoof movie.
  7. Nowhere Special
    It’s tender and poignant, but might be a bit cloying were it not for Norton, who underplays it beautifully with a performance of tremendous depth and empathy.
  8. Casablanca Beats
    It is all presented earnestly and engagingly, though self consciously, and if the political debates are unsolved, well, that could be because they are unsolved in real life. It’s certainly a heartening demonstration that new ideas can flourish in a religious society.
  9. Last and First Men
    Last and First Men is an interesting if minor work, perhaps comparable to Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Homo Sapiens or Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Mummy
    Alternately corny and magical, scary and comic, naive and perverse, elegant and clumsy, The Mummy is always stylish and atmospheric, and Cushing and Lee became enduring world stars.
  11. Honour
    It's as if the film-makers felt they couldn't deliver the didactic lesson unless they wrapped this up in pulpy, thriller trappings.
  12. Liberté
    This film is an ordeal that I never want to go through again, but it’s undoubtedly executed with a cerebral conviction and uncompromising seriousness that no Anglo Saxon film-maker could approach.
  13. Love Sarah
    There’s nothing to fault in the performances, but the characters are filo pastry thin and slightly bland-tasting – like less complicated, less interesting versions of actual people.
  14. Stowaway
    The focus on the job at hand works until it doesn’t as with just the slightest of characterisation, we’re invested in the problem rather than those solving it and the grip of the first two acts loosens as the finale beckons.
  15. The Banker
    Inspiring until the end if not entirely entertaining.
  16. What They Had
    The script, inspired by Chomko’s grandparents’ marriage, throws up plenty of authentic-looking observations of life with Alzheimer’s.
  17. Viceroy's House
    Viceroy’s House is no very profound work, but it is a nimble and watchable period drama.
  18. Spa Night
    Despite its setting and Korean American cast, Spa Night unfurls in a largely expected manner, with David struggling to embrace his identity because of his strict religious upbringing, while trying to make his family proud. He’s portrayed so opaquely that’s it’s difficult to connect with his dilemma.
  19. Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me
    It’s an effective retelling, though the film could have concentrated more on her tragicomic relationship with her oil plutocrat husband. Could it actually have been a love story after all?
  20. 6 Underground
    For pure gonzo outrageousness and steroidal silliness, this action spectacular made for Netflix by Michael Bay has a certain amusement factor and thumpingly unsubtle oomph.
  21. The Bad Guys
    This is Tarantino for ankle-biters with a bit of Ocean’s 11 thrown in: funny, energetic and just smart enough.
  22. True Things
    Wilson and Burke give formidably good performances: a woman who desperately wants to give and receive love, and a man who hasn’t the smallest idea what any of that means.
  23. Among the Believers
    What I like about Among the Believers, a portrait of radical Islam in Pakistan, is how the first two-thirds of the movie strives to remain as balanced as possible.
  24. LifeHack
    It is efficiently executed, though its relentless cursor-nudging will probably make older viewers want to unplug and retreat into an 18th-century novel.
  25. Isn't It Romantic
    In a fun, glossy take down of age-old genre tropes, Rebel Wilson wakes up in an alternate universe, dominated by romantic comedy cliches.
  26. The Viewing Booth
    Not just a valuable crash course in digital-age hermeneutics, this is a gauntlet thrown down to film-makers with an old-fashioned belief in the truth.
  27. The Second Act
    It’s a sprightly meta gag, a movie about a movie, or perhaps a movie about a movie about a movie – or perhaps just a movie, full stop, whose point is to claim that reality as we experience it inside and outside the cinema is unitary despite the levels of imposture and role-play we bring to it.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    What's Up, Tiger Lily?
    Woody Allen acquired the rights to a terrible Japanese Bond-style extravaganza, re-edited it and provided an incongruous soundtrack full of New York Jewish gags. The joke wears thin, but there are good laughs along the way. Allen's then-wife Louise Lasser and friend Mickey Knox help out.
  29. The Audition
    In light of the strange, brutal ending that’s more foreshadowed than it seems, it’s hard to work out where Weisse wants to land on issues around the best way to coax talent, especially in fields such as music where you have to put in a relentless amount of hours to achieve the highest results.
  30. Still the Water
    Kawase's film is sometimes beautiful and moving but I couldn't help occasionally finding it a little contrived and self-conscious.
  31. More Than Honey
    The mystery and beauty of bees emerge strongly enough. But should we be seriously concerned, or not?
  32. Project Hail Mary
    This is a Hail Mary pass that Gosling just about manages to catch.
  33. The Yellow Birds
    Yellow Birds goes heavy on the brooding, and even though a lot of it looks gorgeous and carries the whiff of great importance it is ultimately stunted by a central event that isn’t worth the mystery that surrounds it.
  34. Dalíland
    The cleverness of Kingsley’s performance is the twinkle in his eye that leaves you wondering whether Dalí has disappeared entirely up his own myth. How much of the eccentricity is a put-on, brazen self-publicity to maximise sales? Disappointingly, the script invents a fictional art school dropout to be our guide to Dalí’s universe.
  35. Sauvage / Wild
    What is interesting about Sauvage is that it shows how savagely boring Leo’s life is, quite a lot of the time.
  36. Sisu
    It’s super fun entertainment, which mostly disguises the fact it’s not going to stick in the mind for long.
  37. Joy
    It’s a somewhat stagey reconstruction but an approachable and humane account of a great moment in scientific history.
  38. Kick Out!: The Newtown Neurotics Story
    Here’s a fascinating time-capsule of a documentary about an admittedly niche-interest band who achieved their most valuable cultural currency during the politically-charged 1980s, and who achieved a subsequent second act that achieves considerable emotional heft.
  39. Brabham
    This is a documentary about Australian motor sports legend Jack Brabham that aims to finesse the usual greatest-hits highlights by including some darker material: family strife, on-track bad behaviour, behind-the-scenes fallouts.
  40. Loving
    Here is a film with its heart in the right place, an anatomical correctness coexisting with heartfelt, forthright conviction and an admirable belief in the virtue of simplicity and underplaying.... But this restraint sometimes sags into a kind of absence, and means the film itself is a bit rhetorically underpowered.
  41. France
    Dumont’s secular crisis-of-faith drama has much to say about the corrosive effect of our 24-hour news culture. But it is also indecisive and compromised and plays out as a prolonged admission of defeat.
  42. An American Werewolf in London
    For me, it tends to be a recipe in which you can't taste either of the constituent ingredients. The big man-to-wolf transformation scene is still a marvel.
  43. Hedda
    This is a movie whose absurdities need to be indulged.
  44. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
    For a film renowned for its violence, Garcia unfolds at a leisured, almost lugubrious, pace with scenes allowed to unspool at a length that would never be allowed in any Hollywood thriller today.
  45. The Perfect Find
    The Perfect Find is as much a tribute to Black love as it is a salute to the Roaring 20s – a fine romance to build a night in around. It meets the give-me-something-old-but-different Hollywood brief with style and wit, and takes care of anyone who might find family here.
  46. A Cure for Wellness
    The movie’s operatic claustrophobia makes its mark. Cult status beckons.
  47. Man on the Run
    Interviews with various journalists, local law enforcers, politicians and FBI agents lay out the nitty-gritty of the story. Lashings of onscreen text spell out the statistics and figures, which is helpful. The caricatures of the various grifters are distractingly tacky, though, and somewhat lower the film’s tone.
  48. Human Capital
    It may be no more than the sum of its parts, and the slightly soap-operatic finale doesn’t entirely distract your attention from untied plot threads, but there is some great fancy footwork in the narrative and fierce satirical strokes that recall Tom Wolfe.
  49. The Guilty
    Perhaps to overcompensate for the lack of conventionally opened-out dramatic action, there is some big closeup acting from Gyllenhaal, but it’s a well-made and watchable picture of a man in the secular confessional box, a sinner forced to occupy the place of a priest.
  50. Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel
    It’s a melancholy, dreamy study.
  51. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
    The routine is more familiar and the semi-staged stunts – which faintly undermine the credibility of all but the most spectacular moments – are more conspicuous. But there are still some real laughs and pointed political moments on the subject of antisemitism and online Holocaust denial (though I was disappointed to see the film go along with a dodgy “Karen” gag).
  52. Save Yourselves!
    For the most part it manages an adept balance between satire, sincerity and sheer silliness that’s ultimately winning.
  53. Blood & Gold
    It’s predictable but tightly staged and well paced, and if you’re scrolling through the streaming platform looking for something fresh, it’s not a bad choice for switch-your-brain-off entertainment.
  54. Swimming with Men
    This film floats, but, like a synchro-swimmer doing the “egg beater” leg movement, it needs a fair bit of strenuous activity to keep it upright.
  55. Faust
    This Faust is part bad dream, part music-less opera: sometimes muted and numb, though with hallucinatory flashes of fear.
  56. Urban Hymn
    A mixed bag, but one that comes good in its closing stretch, working its way towards a place of quiet power.
  57. The Amazing Maurice
    This is a film with a lot of charm, and gives cinema its most lovable rats since Ratatouille. But I did wonder at points who the audience is.
  58. Tokyo Tribe
    Amusingly tacky and offensive though it is, proceedings grow a bit monotonous, because all the tunes have pretty much the same beat and everything is pitched at the same hysterical, OTT level.
  59. Not Going Quietly
    Smart, funny and endearingly sweary even when he loses the power to speak without computer assistance, Barkan is a charismatic character who’s easy to like, although one wonders how much the documentary crew resisted showing anything that might dent the halo the film sets round his head.
  60. The Boy and the Heron
    The Boy and the Heron is a gentler and slower though no less soulful addition to his canon.
  61. McFarland USA
    There’s more to this movie than sweeping music and celebrating in slow motion. It all stems from Costner’s remarkable, taciturn performance as Coach White.
  62. The Raven
    It runs out of steam in the final 10 minutes, but there's some gruesome drama and Cusack is on decent form.
  63. Sightseers
    Sightseers is funny and well made, but Wheatley could be suffering from difficult third album syndrome: this is not as mysterious and interesting as Kill List.
  64. Youth
    Youth has a wan eloquence and elegance, though freighted with sentimentality and a strangely unearned and uninteresting macho-geriatric regret for lost time, lost film projects, lost love and all those beautiful women that you never got to sleep with.
  65. The Pale Blue Eye
    As things turn out, this case turns on a rather ridiculous coincidence: but never mind, it’s an entertaining piece of counter-factual noir.
  66. Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver
    Rebel Moon almost certainly didn’t need to be two multiple-cut movies. It probably could have gotten by as zero. But as a playground for Snyder’s favorite bits of speed-ramping, shallow-focusing and pulp thievery, it’s harmless, sometimes pleasingly weird fun.
  67. The Phantom of the Open
    Rylance is good casting as Maurice: his delicate sing-song voice and sometimes faintly unfocused gaze fit nicely with our hero’s lovably awkward determination, as well as Flitcroft’s sense as a natural comedian that there is something more than a little absurd in the game of golf.
  68. Turtles All the Way Down
    The successes are in large part owed to Merced’s sensitive, grounded performance, her open face able to pass amusement, anxiety, self-loathing vitriol, panic attack and relief like quicksand. Her performance alone can absorb the film’s rougher edges, vaguer lines and dramatic whiffs, especially when assisted by a strikingly natural Cree.
  69. Monsters University
    A fun, disposable watch.
  70. Magazine Dreams
    Killian’s spiral is intense and unpleasant but we’re not left at the end with much other than respect for technique. The film, like Killian, is all muscle.
  71. Clifford the Big Red Dog
    It’s watchable and even occasionally amusing.
  72. Rules Don't Apply
    It doesn’t make sense as a comedy, it doesn’t quite work as a drama, and it doesn’t follow the typical roadmap of a biopic, but Rules Don’t Apply is strangely compelling nonetheless.
  73. DJ Ahmet
    The script steadily goes about its mission of freeing its characters from all forms of oppression – but it’s generous and unpatronising too.
  74. Ghost Killer
    Sonomura was the action director for three Baby Assassins features, which might explain that this, his third gig as a main director, feels more weighted towards scenes that showcase fisticuffs and fancy fight choreography rather than character development and emotional nuance.
  75. The Catcher Was a Spy
    The film isn’t a home run, but with Rudd in the lead in something so out of the ordinary for him, it’s fair to call a ground rule double.
  76. The True Don Quixote
    A whimsical, good-natured romp, sure, but one that’s only mildly amusing.
  77. The Disciple
    I wish that I enjoyed The Disciple as much as I admired it. The film is a labour of love insofar as it feels overthought and overburdened, with all the rough edges planed down.
  78. 13 Assassins
    Over the past decade, director Takashi Miike has churned out gleefully extreme films Audition, Ichi the Killer and Visitor Q, but it's difficult to detect much subversion in this sober, classical effort
  79. Ne Zha
    I enjoyed the jolt of strangeness delivered by this world of demons stalking the Earth. But the action is hit-and-miss.
  80. Active Measures
    Bryan’s done his homework, mapping out an elaborate network of past wrongdoings with news clippings and TV footage. If the just deserts that this film demands ever come to pass, it will almost certainly be the most copiously photographed treason in a long and illustrious American tradition.
  81. Even Mice Belong in Heaven
    It’s a shame that after that killer start, this wimps out of saying anything interesting about death or the adventure on the other side.
  82. Citizen Ashe
    The issues involved here might have been discussed a little more extensively and the provenance and context of the TV interview archive material could have been labelled more clearly. But this is a decent film.
  83. 42
    Boseman hits his key scenes out of the park, making a swell couple with Shame's Nicole Beharie, while Helgeland stages Robinson's signature base-stealing with undeniable aplomb.
  84. Benedetta
    At the risk of insulting Benedetta, it’s mostly good, clean, wholesome fun.
  85. The Piano Lesson
    The ensemble cast work wonderfully and intuitively together; I loved the surges of emotion, and then the palate-cleansing moments of silence and calm. The song is a tremendous setpiece and the dialogue has a music of its own.
  86. Dumb and Dumber To
    I’d be lying if I said this movie didn’t crack me up on more than a few occasions.
  87. Downsizing
    This long film is blisteringly brilliant for the first hour or so. Then there are shark-jumping issues.
  88. The Dive
    What follows is a race against the clock, cleverly constructed by director Maximilian Erlenwein and co-writer Joachim Hedén. Their script throws in plenty of calamities to nobble the diver’s escape, but didn’t quite manage – for me at least – to spark a vertiginous clammy terror.
  89. Becoming Led Zeppelin
    Overall, this is a likable and well-researched film, but there is something unsatisfying in ignoring the band’s later stages. Perhaps Part II is in the works.
  90. My Sailor, My Love
    My Sailor, My Love is worth watching for Walker’s excellent portrayal of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown and the damage accruing from being the perpetual caretaker of the family.
  91. The Offering
    It’s a shame that Durall doesn’t find his torrid and sophisticated story the visual register it deserves, leaving The Offering with a humdrum televisual ambience that’s a bit unsatisfying.
  92. Simon Killer
    Brady Corbet is excellent as thoroughly unlikable Simon.
  93. Despicable Me 3
    Despicable Me 3 will certainly keep the younger elements of its audience happy, with its dose of aspartame-rush hyperactivity. But for everyone else it may prove decent rather than captivating.
  94. Fast Charlie
    You’ll spend the next 90 minutes finding out, and for the most part that’s a brisk and painless journey that romps merrily along, powered by its own cliches and memories of better movies, in a way that’s more comfortingly familiar than wearisome.
  95. Slumber Party Massacre
    It all playfully flirts with horror film conventions, offering up a winking orgy of patently fake gore and irony that’s for the most part pretty fun. At least the cast seem well in on the joke and are clearly having a blast, although the package could have been improved with a fewer sharper one-liners and tauter comic timing.
  96. Coraline
    It’s a nifty little tale of jeopardy and the eternally fascinating idea of breaking away from your parents: part frightening, part liberating.
  97. Michael Moore in TrumpLand
    Moore doesn’t want to tear Trump down so much as he wants to build Clinton up, and however much of a dingus he may be (some of his jokes really don’t work), he is sincere in his optimism and empathy. That’s something that you just can’t fake.
  98. The Kings of Summer
    The director's background in online shorts manifests itself in an occasional, montage-heavy scattiness, and the broadly conventional closing act can't quite maintain the laugh rate, but there's a lot of warm-hearted and commendably daft business along the way.
  99. Jules
    This is a sentimental and folksy film, and the ending is a little garbled, but there is a gentleness and sweetness there, and Kingsley carries it off very well.
  100. Tornado
    The pure strangeness of the movie commands attention and there is a charismatic lead performance by Japanese actor-musician Mitsuki Kimura, or Kôki.
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