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. Ham on Rye
    The film never behaves as if it is anything other than a realist coming-of-age drama but there is something else going on.
  2. In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50
    There’s nothing sentimental about this documentary, which looks at people with the clear, unflinching gaze of a portraitist.
  3. Call Me Kuchu
    The film-makers have turned what could have been a detached news report into a moving human tragedy.
  4. 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.
  5. Measures for a Funeral
    Fully committed to a radical irresolution, this simultaneously alienating and beautiful film bears repeat viewing.
  6. Mad God
    This is undoubtedly a work of historic significance, made by a master in his field – but beware that it often feels like a film-making notebook, full of doodles and ideas but not especially cohesive as a story.
  7. The Survivalist
    The physical suspense is all but unbearable: a sexualised hunger, fear and need. Fingleton writes and directs with gusto and flair.
  8. Aquarela
    Victor Kossakovsky’s Aquarela is an absorbing and disturbing spectacle, a sensory film about the climate crisis, and it begins with what might be the soundtrack to the end of the world – a persistent tinkling, crackling, trickling.
  9. Brief History of a Family
    This works well just as simple drama, directed and performed immaculately, and as a glorious promise of films to come from Lin.
  10. Other People's Children
    It is a gentle, heartfelt relationship drama about – and for – intelligent adults.
  11. The Road to Mandalay
    Compassionate and honestly told, it is a real empathy machine of a movie.
  12. Holiday
    There is no doubting the verve and style of Eklöf’s film-making – and the brutality from people on an open-ended holiday from ordinary human empathy.
  13. I Am Not a Witch
    It’s a strange witches brew of deadpan farce and arthouse stillness that some will find exasperating, and it’s not without its missteps; but there’s a confidence and clarity of vision that’s hard not to admire, especially for a first feature.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Deliverance
    For all the furious excitement of its river-rafting sequences, and the harshness and humiliation of its explosive central rape scene, Deliverance is an elegiac movie, mourning the rural mountain culture soon to be inundated by a new hydro-electric dam.
  15. Cutting Through Rocks
    While we might want to hear more about the specific cultural geography of the Azeri Turk community to which Shahverdi belongs, this remains a thought-provoking portrait of an extraordinary spirit.
  16. Clouds of Sils Maria
    If Assayas's film finally falls just shy of being great art itself, it is at least handsomely staged and played with conviction.
  17. Coraline
    It’s a nifty little tale of jeopardy and the eternally fascinating idea of breaking away from your parents: part frightening, part liberating.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Gasoline Rainbow
    The result is a movie in the tradition of “vibes” film-making, less interested in a propulsive plot than exploring the revealing and delightful moments that arise from spontaneous human interactions.
  19. Eternity and a Day
    A superbly realised picture which moves with the power and the gigantic, deliberative slowness of a wartime North Sea convoy. [14 May 1999, p.107]
    • The Guardian
  20. The Ice Tower
    It is a mesmeric melodrama, mixing sensuality with a teetering anxiety, balancing on a cliff-edge of disaster.
  21. Too Late to Die Young
    Castillo’s talent for spiritually attuned atmospherics could be her USP among Chile’s current crop of directors with idiosyncratic slants on their country’s recent past.
  22. The Nature of Love
    The fussy visual style that keeps drawing attention to itself does its best to prevent us from becoming absorbed in this tempestuous romance.
  23. Goodbye First Love
    This is a fluent, confident and deeply felt movie: unmistakably, if not exactly nakedly, autobiographical.
  24. Sweetgrass
    This beautiful and hypnotic documentary shows the agony and the ecstasy of herding sheep up into Montana's Beartooth mountains for the summer pasture.
  25. The Old Man & the Gun
    It would require a true curmudgeon to not derive pleasure from that twinkling performance from Redford, radiating smoothness, wisdom and charm to the very end.
  26. The Box
    Vigas’s direction is efficient, pedestrian, entirely built for purpose. But he manages to keep the audience on-board throughout the tale’s twists and turns.
  27. Linoleum
    The apparently depressing twist gives Linoleum’s entropy-defying optimism successful lift-off.
  28. The Other Side of the Wind
    This is a crazy, dishevelled, often hilarious film, in which lightning flashes of wit and insight crackle periodically across a plane of tedium.
  29. Cow
    There is something very heartfelt and committed about Andrea Arnold’s film: a poignancy and intimacy.
  30. West of Memphis
    A gripping documentary.
  31. Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington
    Junger articulates a number of subtle and unexpected ideas about Hetherington's work, and about combat reporting in general.
  32. Arabian Nights: Volume 3, The Enchanted One
    What a delicate, elegant marvel these movies have been.
  33. The Hard Stop
    A toxic cloud of anger, suspicion and sadness hangs over this documentary.
  34. Wildlife
    It is a quiet, subtle story and, as is so often the case when an actor takes their first trip behind the camera, a showcase for terrific performances.
  35. Get Carter
    There's no mistaking its chilling charisma and style. [11 Jun 1999, p.15]
    • The Guardian
  36. Rebel Dykes
    A judicious mix of new-minted interviews, home video footage and charming animation by Shanahan makes for a delightful, well-tempered package.
  37. Red Rooms
    A lead performance of pure sociopathic intensity is what makes this serial-killer horror stand out.
  38. Big Boys
    This debut from the writer-director Corey Sherman is a real four-leaf clover: delicate, unique and subtly magical.
  39. Mr. Nobody Against Putin
    Mr Nobody Against Putin ultimately stands as both an act of service and a tribute – to a school that once was, to students whose lives were and will be irrevocably changed for the worse by the regime, to a once fruitful job. Talankin has produced a must-watch, indelible document of ideological warfare that echoes far beyond Russia. How’s that for a nobody?
  40. The Lost Leonardo
    As with all documentaries about art, we are left uneasily wondering if the galleries of the world are full of “wrong attributions” or straight-up fakes.
  41. Beyond the Hills
    Enthralling, mysterious and intimately upsetting – a terrible demonstration of how poverty creates a space which irrational fear must fill.
  42. Wife of a Spy
    There is sweep and confidence in this movie
  43. Orlando, My Political Biography
    The film might occasionally feel a bit self-conscious, but in a way this is a by-product of the film’s experimental nature; trans people are engaging with this fictional literary text in which trans identity has a poetic reality, a visionary reality, precisely that reality which is here found to be empowering.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Objective, Burma!
    It's a piece of almost instant history – and, as such, it gets the technical and cultural details of military life spot on.
  45. The Sessions
    The Sessions can be sugary, but it's likable.
  46. Mank
    What an addictive romantic drama it is, mixing sentimentality with pure rapture.
  47. Annihilation
    Annihilation is more than mere visuals and it will shock, fascinate and haunt whatever screen it’s watched on.
  48. Lolita
    Although it is often seen as a precursor to the multiple parts played in Dr Strangelove, Sellers' turn here is a reminder of his true potential, soon to be swallowed up by a stream of ever more awful Pink Panther films.
  49. Ava
    Ava is made with superb technique and real style.
  50. Architecton
    I found something a little unfocused and even slightly indulgent or redundant in the way the images are put together (accompanied by a clamorous musical score by Evgueni Galperine) without making it clear to the viewer what we are looking at and where. Yet the film is so striking, especially on the big screen, almost itself a kind of land art.
  51. Babygirl
    The film drifts along to a strangely implausible non-denouement with impermanent effects; she has all the backstory with work and family and he is weirdly blank in ways that don’t feel entirely intended.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    El Cid
    It leaves the facts wounded and strewn haphazardly across the battlefield, but El Cid remains a flat-out terrific movie.
  53. Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV
    The overwhelming sense of vocation necessary for such a life is almost awe-inspiring, although Paik’s own jokey, opaque persona seems to exist as a rebuke to any reaction as bourgeois as that.
  54. Midnight Traveler
    A powerful, personal piece of work.
  55. Whose Streets?
    Directors and activists Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis’s outstanding and incendiary documentary about Ferguson does a tremendous end run around mainstream news outlets and the agenda-driven narratives that emerge, particularly on television.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Planet of the Apes
    A promising idea, and yet ultimately too cute: it is a one-to-one allegory, and this much of the film is spent exploring this not very rewarding vein.
  57. The Cordillera of Dreams
    This is rich and valuable testament to Chilean courage.
  58. Bad Education
    It’s a slight movie at times, unfocused at others, even plodding in parts, and I didn’t leave the cinema entirely convinced that it was the most satisfying way to tell this particular story but I did leave feeling confident in both Jackman’s prowess and Finley’s promise, yet to be fully realised.
  59. A House Made of Splinters
    The film is a fine document of a few precious lives; what comfort can be taken from that is unclear.
  60. A Most Violent Year
    JC Chandor’s period crime drama is rigorous, resourceful and as smart as a whip...But its canny tactical struggle remains a joy to behold.
  61. Io Capitano
    Seydou and the others are not exactly masters of their fate, or captains of their souls, to quote WE Henley’s Invictus. They are swept along by power and inequality, but Garrone shows that their humanity and compassion are still buoyant.
  62. Animal House
    A period piece, still reasonably funny.
  63. The Fever
    The Fever is a calm and quiet and subtle film, a little inert perhaps, but deeply engaged with the hidden lives of Brazil’s indigenous people. There is poetry in it.
  64. Gone Girl
    Gone Girl, finally, may be no more than a storm in a teacup. But what an elegant, bone-china teacup this is. And what a fearsome force-10 gale we have brewing inside.
  65. Mountains May Depart
    The pure work-in-progress energy of all this is exhilarating, and if the resulting movie is flawed in its final act, then this is a flaw born of Jia’s heroic refusal to be content making the same sort of movie, and his insistence on trying to do something new with cinema and with storytelling.
  66. The Goldman Case
    Kahn orchestrates the angry energy with an expert hand.
  67. Flux Gourmet
    Flux Gourmet is sometimes funny and always exotic, and every moment has his distinctive authorial signature. But I am starting to wonder if his style is becoming a hipster mannerism with less substance, and a less live-ammo sense of actual danger.
  68. The Auschwitz Report
    Even for those who know about the Auschwitz Protocols – a report to which the pair contributed that has a weighty legacy in Holocaust history – the film is still intensely impactful. Inevitably, it is profoundly upsetting and disturbing.
  69. Copa 71
    Copa 71 is a revolutionary political parable that goes beyond football.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Midnight Cowboy
    This is really Schlesinger's achievement. He has caught on film a slice of America as well, if not better, than one had any right to expect.
  71. Ahed's Knee
    As it begins to explain more and more about what drives its leading character, the film becomes less and less interesting and the stridently melodramatic finale, as well as being highly unlikely in ordinary plot terms, feels a little bit self-exculpatory.
  72. Nosferatu the Vampyre
    This is Herzog's journey to the heart of darkness, a film that specifically echoes his earlier offerings The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and his South American odyssey Aguirre, Wrath of God.
  73. 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.
  74. The Christophers
    The Christophers is a talky, at times incredibly funny, comedy drama with plot reversals that make it feel like it’s on the verge of a thriller. It doesn’t end up there, at least not strictly, but it’s unpredictable enough to never make us entirely sure just where it’s heading.
  75. Silence
    With ambition and reach, and often a real dramatic grandeur, Scorsese’s film has addressed the imperial crisis of Christian evangelists with stamina, seriousness and a gusto comparable to David Lean’s.
  76. The Crash Reel
    A crash reel – a greatest hits of a boarder's most dramatic falls – is meant to entertain. But Walker takes the cheap thrills of the format and flips it painfully on its head.
  77. Hitchcock/Truffaut
    A fascinating film.
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