The Guardian's Scores

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For 6,581 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 2.1 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: 2,495 out of 6581
  2. Mixed: 3,767 out of 6581
  3. Negative: 319 out of 6581
6581 movie reviews
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  1. Citizen Kane
    Sublime moments, of which the most extraordinary must still be Everett Sloane, playing Kane's former business manager Mr Bernstein, remembering the girl in the white dress on the Jersey ferry: "I only saw her for one second and she didn't see me at all – but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl." I'll bet a week hasn't gone by when I haven't thought about that line and pictured the girl so clearly that she has become a false memory of the movie itself.
  2. Vertigo
    Vertigo also combines in an almost unique balance Hitchcock’s brash flair for psychological shocks with his elegant genius for dapper stylishness. Like Psycho, it ends in an “o”, or maybe “oh!” The ancient house adjoining the Bates motel in Psycho certainly has an unearthly similarity to San Francisco’s creepy old McKitterick Hotel in Vertigo. [Rerelease]
  3. Wake in Fright (1971)
    It comes from the age of Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange, but none of those movies can match the sheer hardcore shock of the Australian New Wave nightmare Wake in Fright from 1971.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Bay
    Levinson has always been acutely interested in the minutiae of human behaviour, and it's this concern that makes The Bay the triumph that it is.
  5. Nothing But a Man (1964)
    An enormous pleasure. The performances are so fresh and natural – yet so subtle and delicately judged. The direction is superb in its control and the cinematography creates a gripping docu-realist vision.
  6. Before Midnight
    Before Midnight is intimate and intelligent, and also undemanding in the best possible way,
  7. Blue Jasmine
    After all those false dawns, non-comebacks and semi-successful Euro jeux d'esprit, Allen has produced an outstanding movie, immensely satisfying and absorbing, and set squarely on American turf: that is, partly in San Francisco and partly in New York.
  8. Blancanieves
    It is extremely pleasurable to watch, and shows every sign of having been extremely pleasurable to make.
  9. Badlands
    An unmissable, transcendentally beautiful classic. [28 Aug. 1998]
  10. 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.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ain't Them Bodies Saints
    The film is so singular, it's hard to place. At times, its elegiac visual quality evokes Terrence Malick, but Lowery's scripting is tighter and more accessible. His is truly a fresh voice, exhilarating to hear.
  12. 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.
  13. Only God Forgives
    Only God Forgives will, understandably, have people running for the exits, and running for the hills. It is very violent, but Winding Refn's bizarre infernal creation, an entire created world of fear, really is gripping. Every scene, every frame, is executed with pure formal brilliance.
  14. 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.
  15. Scarecrow
    This is a jewel of American cinema.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. Naked
    This is a movie of virtuoso nihilism and scorn.
  19. SPECTRE
    It’s deeply silly but uproariously entertaining. At the end, I almost felt guilty for enjoying it all quite so much - almost.
  20. The Servant
    It is a brilliant, subversive account of class relations and the changing times.
  21. Foxcatcher
    It is a gripping film: horrible, scary and desperately sad.
  22. The Double
    The Double isn't an original idea. It wasn't even in Dostoyevsky's time. But it's a great story. And Ayoade has produced a brilliant copy.
  23. Under the Skin
    It sure as hell got under mine. Jonathan Glazer's sci-fi horror is loosely adapted, or atmospherically distilled, by Walter Campbell from the 2000 novel by Michel Faber. The result is visually stunning and deeply disturbing: very freaky, very scary, and very erotic. It also comes with a dog whistle of absurdist humour that I suspect has been inaudible for some American reviewers on the international festival circuit so far.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Intolerance
    A powerful humane statement and a towering work of art.
  25. Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
    The Force Awakens is ridiculous and melodramatic and sentimental of course, but exciting and brimming with energy and its own kind of generosity. What a Christmas present.
  26. Let's Get Lost
    It's not exactly a documentary, more a lovingly-filmed homage, but some candid interview material allows scraps of Baker's story to emerge.
  27. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
    Birdman is a delicious and delirious pleasure.
  28. Boyhood
    What an astonishing achievement; what a beautiful movie.
  29. Carol
    It is a creamily sensuous, richly observed piece of work, handsomely detailed and furnished: the clothes, the hair, the automobiles, the train carriages, the record players, the lipstick and the cigarettes are all superbly presented. The combination of all this is intoxicating in itself.
  30. 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.
  31. Mr. Turner
    What a glorious film this is, richly and immediately enjoyable, hitting its satisfying stride straight away. It's funny and visually immaculate; it combines domestic intimacy with an epic sweep and has a lyrical, mysterious quality that perfumes every scene, whether tragic or comic.
  32. 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.
  33. 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.
  34. Withnail and I
    It had a miraculously literate script whose every line deservedly became a quotable classic and the film boasts a once-in-a-lifetime combination of perfect performances from Paul McGann and Richard E. Grant as the loafing actors heading for a terrible bucolic weekend, Ralph Brown as drug-dealing Danny and Richard Griffiths as predatory Uncle Monty.
  35. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
    That entertainment enchanter JK Rowling has come storming back to the world of magic in a shower of supernatural sparks - and created a glorious fantasy-romance adventure.
  36. It Follows
    Mitchell brings off some sensational setpieces of fear and suspense. I can’t remember when I was last so royally freaked out in the cinema.
  37. 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.
  38. Manuscripts Don't Burn
    Putting aside the worthiness of its politics, this is also a crackling, tense thriller, graced with beautifully measured performances, that explores with wisdom and sorrow the best and worst in human nature.
  39. A League of Their Own
    It’s a great piece of Hollywood confectionery, and you might well find yourself choking up a little at the end.
  40. Exhibition
    Exhibition is challenging, sensual, brilliant film-making.
  41. Bridge of Spies
    Bridge of Spies has a brassy and justified confidence in its own narrative flair.
  42. Archipelago
    There is something exacting and audacious in it, something superbly controlled in its composition and technique. The clarity of her film-making diction is a marvel – even, or perhaps especially, when the nature of the story itself remains murkily unrevealed.
  43. The Look of Silence
    The Look of Silence — like The Act of Killing — is arresting and important film-making.
  44. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
    What a bold, beguiling and utterly unclassifiable director Andersson is. He thinks life is a comedy and feels it’s a tragedy, and is able to wrestle these conflicting impulses into a gorgeous, deadpan deadlock.
  45. While We're Young
    An almost perfect 90-minute hit of confident and inspired comedic commentary.
  46. The Innocents
    Clayton brilliantly uses slow dissolves to create ghostly superimpositions, and the harmless squeals of bath-time fun, or squeakings of a pencil, suggest uncanny screams.
  47. 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.
  48. Avengers: Endgame
    I have to admit, in all its surreal grandiosity, in all its delirious absurdity, there is a huge sugar rush of excitement to this mighty finale, finally interchanging with euphoric emotion and allowing us to say poignant farewells.
  49. Night Will Fall
    This is an extraordinary record. But be warned. Once seen, these images cannot be unseen.
  50. 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.
  51. Hard to Be a God
    Hard to Be a God creates its own uncanny world: it is beautiful, brilliant and bizarre.
  52. The Diary of a Teenage Girl
    It’s morally complex and sometimes uncomfortably close to the bone, but also lushly bawdy and funny, and packaged together with an astonishing degree of cinematic brio by first-time writer-director Marielle Heller.
  53. The Wolfpack
    Not since Grey Gardens has a film invited us into such a strange, barely-functioning home and allowed us to gawk without reservation. This is a nosy movie, but it is altogether fascinating.
  54. 45 Years
    It could be the finest hour for both of its lead actors.
  55. Aferim!
    It’s worth mentioning again that, somehow, this movie, with all its full-frontal historical horror, is still loaded with laughs.
  56. Victoria
    Despite the strong performances, it’s Schipper’s single-shot conceit - and the fact that he and his team pulled it off with aplomb - that makes Victoria such a bracing triumph. While the entire enterprise is inarguably a stunt, Victoria manages to overwhelm in ways that few films do.
  57. Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi
    While there are some solid nuggets of deep-cut easter eggs for hardcore fans, what is so extraordinary about The Last Jedi is that this is the first post-Lucas Star Wars film that feels free to dance to its own beat.
  58. La La Land
    I was utterly absorbed by this movie’s simple storytelling verve and the terrific lead performances from Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone who are both excellent – particularly Stone, who has never been better.
  59. 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.
  60. 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.
  61. Son of Saul
    By any standards, this would be an outstanding film, but for a debut it is remarkable.
  62. Embrace of the Serpent
    Ciro Guerra’s gorgeous picture just has that ripped-from-your-dreams sensibility, where surprising turns float alongside a story you feel like you’ve known your whole life. Embrace of the Serpent is the type of film we’re always searching for, yet seems so obvious once we’ve found it.
  63. The Club
    The Club sees the film-maker at his most masterful, steering the picture through complex tonal shifts without letting it capsize into hysteria, even when the characters do.
  64. Chi-Raq
    While formally quite different from his more universally-respected early work, Chi-Raq has the exuberance and wit you’ll find in Do The Right Thing and Crooklyn. It’s the best film he’s made in a very long time.
  65. The Falling
    This is terrific film-making – enough to bring a rush of blood to the head.
  66. Baby Driver
    [An] outrageously enjoyable petrolhead heist caper.
  67. Anomalisa
    Anomalisa is a movie with wit to burn (look out for the Sarah Brightman line and the meeting room pit) and enough incidental touches that the total achievement feels immense.
  68. Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker
    The movie snaps together like a jigsaw puzzle, a series of concluding beats that seem inevitable and perfect, and designed to please all parties, so long as you don’t dwell on the logic too much.
  69. Dunkirk
    This is a powerful, superbly crafted film with a story to tell, avoiding war porn in favour of something desolate and apocalyptic, a beachscape of shame, littered with soldiers zombified with defeat, a grimly male world with hardly any women on screen. It is Nolan’s best film so far.
  70. Little Men
    Sachs’ approach is so humane, and his characters so fully rendered, that an agenda never announces itself; instead, Sachs’ worldview seeps into you. He’s that skilled a film-maker.
  71. Songs My Brothers Taught Me
    It’s a deeply intelligent and sympathetic rendering of real-life situations, using nonprofessionals playing approximations of themselves.
  72. Christine
    In Hall, [Campos] has the perfect actor to convey Chubbuck’s internal struggle in a manner that’s devastating.
  73. Weiner
    A riveting excursion into fear and loathing on the campaign trail.
  74. Blade Runner 2049
    Blade Runner 2049 is a narcotic spectacle of eerie and pitiless vastness, by turns satirical, tragic and romantic.
  75. Fire at Sea
    Fire at Sea is masterly film-making.
  76. Richard III
    The “fascist” staging could have been hackneyed, but Loncraine carries it off superbly as the showcase for action-thriller noir.
  77. Graduation
    Graduation is an intricate, deeply intelligent film, and a bleak picture of a state of national depression in Romania, where the 90s generation hoped they would have a chance to start again. There are superb performances from Titien and Dragus.
  78. Elle
    The film is utterly gripping and endlessly disturbing.
  79. Personal Shopper
    It is actually Assayas’s best film for a long time, and Stewart’s best performance to date.
  80. Nocturnal Animals
    Some of the scenes in the LA art world are a bit broad. But this is a terrifically absorbing thriller with that vodka-kick of pure malice.
  81. Life, Animated
    It’s a beguiling mix of animated storytelling and narration that doesn’t flinch from exploring the emotional highs and lows that accompany a life with autism.
  82. The Love Witch
    LA film-maker Anna Biller achieves an ecstasy of artificiality in this amazing retro fantasy horror, delivered with absolute conviction.
  83. London Road
    London Road was a mighty success on stage. Now it is a unique triumph on the movie screen.
  84. Barry Lyndon
    Barry Lyndon is an intimate epic of utter lucidity and command.
  85. Sid and Nancy
    Tremendously acted by Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb with exactly the right absence of sympathy, although Cox arguably loses his nerve on this score in the film’s dying moments.
  86. Moonlight
    It’s a thrilling, deeply necessary work that opens up a much-needed and rarely approached on-screen conversation about the nature of gay masculinity.
  87. Three Colors: Blue
    There is a wonderful reach and flair in Kieślowski’s film-making.
  88. 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.
  89. Three Colors: Red
    With music by Zbigniew Preisner, it is an almost supernatural contrivance: brooding on coincidence, fate and the insoluble mystery of other people’s lives, with some cosmic parallels and existential echoes that recall his earlier film The Double Life of Véronique. And all in a tone somehow both playful and laden with gnomic seriousness.
  90. The Double Life of Veronique
    The elusiveness of the film is precisely the point: it is as beautiful and mysterious as a poem and its formal elegance and conviction are unarguable. What makes it a must-see, however, is the generous, unselfconscious passion of Jacob's performance as a young woman - two young women - in love.
  91. I Called Him Morgan
    Kasper Collin’s I Called Him Morgan isn’t just the greatest jazz documentary since Let’s Get Lost, it’s a documentary-as-jazz.
  92. Jackie
    It’s a singular vision from an uncompromising director that happens to be about one of the most famous women in American history. Jackie is not Oscar bait – it’s great cinema.
  93. Lady Macbeth
    Cleverly, it gives us enigmatic backstory hints that may or may not help explain the sudden direction change the film takes in its third act, leading to a denouement of toxic ingenuity. And of all it driven by the sensuality and rage of Pugh’s performance.
  94. Get Out
    Get Out is very creepy, very funny and as pitiless as a surgeon’s scalpel.
  95. I Am Not Your Negro
    It is a striking work of storytelling. By assembling the scattered images and historical clips suggested by Baldwin’s writing, I Am Not Your Negro is a cinematic séance, and one of the best movies about the civil rights era ever made.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Tampopo
    A self-assured gem constructed like the bowl of classic ramen the characters strive to cook: a collection of individual parts perfectly arranged.
  97. Downsizing
    A less polished director might have become lost and confused along the film’s lengthy running-time. But Payne’s handling is perfect. He never puts a foot wrong, rustling up a picture that is as bright as a button and as sharp as a tack.
  98. 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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Starless Dreams
    [A] brilliant documentary.
  100. Call Me by Your Name
    There is such tenderness to this film. I was overwhelmed by it.
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