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. Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami
    It’s a celebration of her musicality and extraterrestrial scariness, and a reminder that films about female singing stars need not be gallant tributes to tragically doomed fragility.
  2. Cocote
    It is a film with its own miasma of unease.
  3. John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection
    McEnroe makes a fascinating focal point.
  4. Ava
    Ava is made with superb technique and real style.
  5. Upgrade
    At its best – in a boundless chase round a hackers’ hangout, and a high-speed freeway pursuit – Upgrade is as fluid and exhilarating as anything the Wachowskis signed their names to in the days when they were brothers: the kind of nifty, sometimes nasty surprise our multiplexes sorely need.
  6. Cargo
    Nevertheless Cargo is a very strong, at times stirring achievement: a zombie film with soul and pathos.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mountain
    Despite its glorification of thrill-seeking, the message that runs through Mountain like rivulets over rocks is that our highest peaks are places to be revered and respected.
  8. Prick Up Your Ears
    This 1987 adaptation of John Lahr's biography of rebel playwright Joe Orton still stands up extraordinarily well: mostly because of two outstanding central performances, Gary Oldman as the talented, blase Orton, and Alfred Molina as his thwarted, Hancock-esque murderer Kenneth Halliwell.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The China Syndrome
    Very convincing, deeply disturbing tale. [31 Dec 2005, p.49]
    • The Guardian
  10. The Escape
    A superlative performance from Gemma Arterton is at the centre of this almost unbearably painful and sad film from writer-director Dominic Savage.
  11. Cake
    Uncommonly alert to small, telling details, while more expansive in its attitudes, the result proves far richer and worldlier than anything previously observed coming down the Khyber Pass.
  12. McQueen
    [A] sombre, thorough, intelligent and informative documentary.
  13. August 32nd on Earth
    Charming and intriguing tale of undeclared love, full of haunting set pieces that stayed in my mind for hours afterwards. [11 June 1999, p.15]
    • The Guardian
  14. Crane World
    First-time director Pablo Trapero has crafted an impressive debut - one that emphasises the dignity of his subject without lapsing into agit-prop.
  15. Born and Bred
    Trapero creates a cinematic eco-system that moment by moment, scene by subtle scene, completely enfolds you.
  16. The Sound of Music
    Robert Wise's adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical still has a little soul in its bones, with its reactionary nature tempered by Ernest Lehman's supple screenplay, and its elephantine running-time eased by a set of songs that lodge in your system like hookworms.
  17. Good Boys
    Some massive laughs, a huge Stephen Merchant cameo and the most impressive school play on film since Wes Anderson’s Rushmore are all on offer in this very funny teen – or rather tween – comedy.
  18. Climax
    It is as if Noé has somehow mulched up the quintessence of dance, coke and porn together and squooshed it into his camera. If that sounds horrible, then yes it is, but also, often, demonically inspired.
  19. Arctic
    Mikkelsen hurls himself into proceedings. It’s a performance of intense commitment, one where every grunt and yowl feels agonisingly authentic.
  20. Ash Is Purest White
    What does the ending of Ash Is Purest White mean — and what does its middle or beginning mean? I’m not sure. It feels like a gripping parable for the vanity of human wishes, and another impassioned portrait of national malaise.
  21. Birds of Passage
    In the most reductive way, it is another mafia story. But as with their previous film, it is the specificity that counts, and while certain genre tendencies prevent the narrative from truly unmooring, hardly a scene goes by without something fundamentally familiar being rendered in a unique fashion.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Harold and Maude
    It's to director Hal Ashby's credit that he succeeds in maintaining an unsettling tone of pre-Lynchian absurdism throughout, while also pulling the viewer into a touching love story between perhaps the most unlikely couple in cinema history.
  23. Burning
    This is a gripping nightmare.
  24. Donbass
    Donbass is a flawed, but vivid achievement.
  25. Girl
    The sheer sustained intensity of the drama and performances carry it through.
  26. Girls of the Sun
    Girls of the Sun is a feminist war movie: impassioned, suspenseful, angry.
  27. Happy as Lazzaro
    With Happy as Lazzaro, Rohrwacher has crafted a magic-realist fable that doubles as an origin myth for a modern Italy subsumed by corruption and decline.
  28. The Image Book
    It is bewildering. I’m not sure I understood more than a fraction and of course it can be dismissed as obscurantism and mannerism. But I found The Image Book rich, disturbing and strange.
  29. Treat Me Like Fire
    Monge has created a satisfying drama of doomed obsession, the gambler’s thrill that staves off, for a few moments, a weariness with life. It’s a film with, as they say, something of the night about it.
  30. The World Is Yours
    Gavras has seized his chance, staging this uptempo, carnivalesque crime pic with panache and wit.
  31. Capernaum
    There is passion and compassion here, and Labaki’s film brings home what poverty and desperation mean, and conversely what love and humanity mean.
  32. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
    An ambitious, respectful account of the life and work of Yukio Mishima, the prolific Japanese author who made a romantic cult of Japan's lost world of martial glory and spartan warrior-manhood.
  33. The Sisters Brothers
    Audiard’s storytelling has an easy swing to it, his dialogue is garrulous and unsentimental, and the narrative is exotically offbeat.
  34. Breath
    It is the rarest kind of sports movie, in that it will encourage in participants a different, thoroughly thoughtful perspective with which to view their pastime. Breath is a surfer film with soul and gravitas.
  35. The Truth
    This movie is an absorbing serio-comic flourish.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Workers Cup
    Though there are moments of real joy and liberation during the games, everything outside of the matches is cloaked in a mood of lost dreams and stunted futures.
  37. Pet Sematary
    It’s a supernatural chiller about our fear of death - and our longing for death as an end to this fear. This brutally effective and convulsively disturbing story is something to compare with WW Jacobs’s classic Edwardian ghost story The Monkey’s Paw or maybe even Franz Kafka’s stage-play The Guardian of the Tomb.
  38. Path of Blood
    As a film this is anything but banal, and operates as a potent reminder of the randomness, and casual cruelty of modern terrorism, the way it leeches out the humanity of victims and perpetrators on both sides.
  39. The Hate U Give
    The Hate U Give is a fierce, dynamic movie with a terrific performance from Amandla Stenberg as Starr.
  40. The Captain
    It is a horrifying parable, with chilling moments, although the story is structurally uneven.
  41. Calibre
    On a beat-by-beat basis, writer-director Matt Palmer’s feature debut skates close to the edge of cliche – only to swerve suddenly in an interesting new direction almost every time.
  42. Fahrenheit 11/9
    The danger of the whole thing collapsing under the weight of its own convolutedness is ever present. That it doesn’t is due to the power of Moore’s closing argument.
  43. Milford Graves Full Mantis
    This delightfully entertaining and idiosyncratic music documentary ought to banish the stereotype of drummers as talentless thickos. It’s also one of those films you can happily watch without having a jot of prior interest in its subject.
  44. Mirai
    Hosoda’s delicate, painterly style is perfect for capturing Kun’s evanescent imaginary haven – and conveying the message about the moral courage needed to leave it.
  45. Bad Reputation
    The big treat is seeing Jett herself talk and watching her still-strong bond with producer and best friend Kenny Laguna: two leather-clad old mates, constantly bickering but inseparable.
  46. Science Fair
    Entirely riveting. It made me nostalgic for the BBC’s Young Scientists of the Year programme, which ran from 1966 to 1981. Can’t we revive it?
  47. A Streetcar Named Desire
    Brando tends to upstage and upend the whole picture in his way.
  48. Undertow
    What could have been a who’s-sleeping-with-who, tangled-web-we-weave drama quickly evolves into something much more compelling as Nation blurs the line between thriller, psychological drama and character study.
  49. Vox Lux
    It’s part satire, part social comment, all fragmented and downright inconclusive.
  50. Gold
    It’s spry, stirring entertainment foremost – arguably indulging its star with one drunk number too many – but also evidence of a country beginning to tell its own stories with confidence and justifiable pride.
  51. Destroyer
    Destroyer reverses the gender polarity and ethos of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant: with Ferrara, the cop is the abuser and with Kusama the cop is the abused, but both are cops who have descended into hell and whose compulsive, addictive behaviour may be an effort to escape it – or to enter further into hell in an attempt to cauterise the pain.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Landlord
    A still wonderfully penetrating, wise and exact meditation on race relations at the end of the 1960s.
  53. 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.
  54. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
    The Coens have given us a hilarious, beautifully made, very enjoyable and rather disturbing anthology of stories from the old west, once planned for television but satisfyingly repurposed for the cinema: vignettes that switch with stunning force from picturesque sentimentality to grisly violence.
  55. The Front Runner
    There’s an authenticity underpinning the portrayal of events in The Front Runner that lifts it above the less-than-groundbreaking set-up.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Strangers on a Train
    Strangers is full of marvellous set pieces and uses the architecture of Washington to dramatic effect.
  57. A Quiet Place Part II
    The dual storylines are wrapped up together ingeniously with images and ideas slyly implanted at the very beginning. And there are some jump scares that had me Fosbury-flopping out of my seat with a yelp.
  58. In Like Flynn
    This is a fun film constructed in a smart way: an anti-high art picture that happily prioritises embellishing legend over recreating life.
  59. Dragged Across Concrete
    This is a long film, but there is something so horribly compelling about its unhurried slouch towards the precipice.
  60. Dead Souls
    Wang’s film is a vital excavation of history in danger of being eroded away.
  61. Gloria Bell
    Whether or not you have seen the original film, there is a terrific performance here from Moore, and an equally good one from Turturro, who may be entering into his own golden years of bittersweet character work.
  62. In Fabric
    In Fabric is indulgent, certainly, and I regretted the fact that the excellent Jean-Baptiste is not as centrally important to the film as I had assumed she would be. When she is gone, the voltage drops a bit. But it is just so singular, utterly unlike anything else around.
  63. The Command
    It’s a heartbreaking, troubling film about men whose lives were cruelly deprioritised and whose families remain ever altered as a result. It ends on a note of melancholy but the burning anger also remains, the final scenes tinged with a painful awareness of wounds that may never heal.
  64. High Flying Bird
    In picking at a system until it’s threaded, High Flying Bird is a classic Soderbergh construct.
  65. J.T. Leroy
    JT LeRoy may have been an elaborate fib, but Kelly finds a genuine pearl of wisdom in the web of deception.
  66. Black '47
    It is a harrowingly effective film, though flawed by the actions of Weaving’s officer being unconvincingly motivated at the end, and perhaps born of an emollient screenwriting need to split the difference between the Irish avenger-hero and his enemies.
  67. Vice
    Bale brilliantly captures the former vice-president’s bland magnificence.
  68. On Her Shoulders
    Nadia is shown always surrounded by crowds, almost crushed by them. But her utter loneliness is heartbreaking.
  69. Aladdin
    It is lively, colourful and genuinely funny, and doesn’t break what didn’t need fixing about the original.
  70. Watergate
    In the course of a mammoth, horribly absorbing four-hour film from Charles Ferguson we are immersed in a world of milky TV news footage, big lapels, bulbous combovers, dirty tricks, sweat, jowls and guilt.
  71. A Season in France
    The habitual calm and gentleness of Mahamat Saleh Haroun’s film-making here has a sharp edge and an overtly political point – as well as a flourish of violent destruction and despair that blindsided me.
  72. Under The Wire
    This is a heart-stoppingly suspenseful story. Conroy is a superb commentator on war and all its cruelties and absurdities.
  73. Anchor and Hope
    It’s a thoughtful, honest and touching work, especially for women who love women, and also love canals.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Magnificent Ambersons
    This is Welles's warmest, most personal film.
  75. Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché
    Pamela B Green’s hectic, garrulous, fascinating documentary recovers the story of French film-maker Alice Guy-Blaché.
  76. The Good Liar
    This movie rattles along with terrific energy and dash and the flashback sequences show that it’s actually far more daring and ambitious that you might expect. It’s a great duel between McKellen and Mirren.
  77. The Mustang
    Brilliantly, Schoenaerts almost underplays Roman’s anger, lumbering slowly like a wounded animal, the downward slope of his eyes conveying a howl of rage. It’s an electrifying performance.
  78. Native Son
    It’s a fiery, flawed, often stunningly made film that provokes uncomfortable discussion, rather like the Richard Wright novel it was based on, although purists might argue over some key changes.
  79. Late Night
    At heart, Late Night is a romcom and like so many romcoms, the funny stuff recedes after the first act, as the plot and its relatability imperative gets into gear. Yet Kaling is very good at conveying the paradoxical misty-eyed idealism of those working for this long-running TV institution.
  80. Aniara
    With Aniara, the Swedish writing-directing team Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja deliver a cold, cruel, piercingly humane sci-fi parable that’s both bang on the zeitgeist and yet also unnervingly original.
  81. All Is True
    All Is True is sentimental, theatrical, likable – and unfashionable.
  82. Okko's Inn
    Kōsaka keeps Okko’s quest light and perky, not fully drilling into the vein of childhood trauma-induced fantasy that the best of Ghibli and Pixar hit upon. It proposes attentiveness to others as a means of self-care, but it has the same brisk impatience with real inner conflict that the grandmother has towards Okko’s outbursts.
  83. Hail Satan?
    With her funny, light-hearted documentary, Penny Lane lets the sunshine in, focusing on the Temple’s message of open-mindedness and inclusivity – LGBTQ followers speak of a sense of belonging.
  84. The Venerable W.
    The Venerable W does not explicitly debate the existence of evil as such, but it certainly argues that nationalism, ignorance, arrogance, dogmatic religion and fear are its constituent elements. This is a sombre, pessimistic but necessary film.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Mission
    Powerful and atmospheric, if oddly structureless, The Mission is a magnificently filmed and strongly political view of the conflict between church, state and capitalism.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rolling Thunder
    Devane gives a performance of anguished depth, the final carnage is spectacular and it's a time capsule of a movie.
  87. Fyre
    Fyre allows you to marvel, and to feel – how spectacular the hubris, how gross the unfairness – while reminding that whether you bought a ticket or not, you were the audience the whole time.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    What Is Democracy?
    An extended and good-looking essay, it serves as a sharp reminder to pay attention to politics and to remember that the personal and the local are political. If you like thinking about that sort of thing, and you care about whether your democracy means anything, this film might make you get up and take some action.
  89. Bergman: A Year in a Life
    There are some riveting revelations here.
  90. Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga
    After India decriminalised homosexuality last September, many wondered anew: what would a Bollywood romcom look and sound like with a non-straight protagonist? The answer, it transpires, is: much the same as any other Bollywood romcom.
  91. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
    Chiwetel Ejiofor has made his debut as writer-director, and the result is exhilarating and rather inspiring – a story of success against the odds, of ingenuity and resourcefulness, of a father and son painfully coming to terms with each other.
  92. An Elephant Sitting Still
    Hu provides no easy resolutions, and evidently found none himself. This epic of futility will have to stand as an epitaph for an extremely promising career cut short.
  93. One Cut of the Dead
    It’s a movie that rescues the tired zombie trope – without insisting on metaphor or satire.
  94. Knives Out
    A contemporary whodunnit that both respects and revises the subgenre. ... It’s such a rare pleasure to see a director so in love with a genre without slipping into Tarantinoesque fanboy indulgence, remembering his audience is bigger than himself and also that his film requires both head and heart.
  95. The Hole in the Ground
    It always finds new, invariably cinematic ways to nudge us towards its final leap into the abyss. Cronin feels like a real find for our especially insecure moment.
  96. Wine Country
    Wine Country is scrappy and, at times, misjudged but it’s also very, very funny with a cast of women whose collective charm makes the patchier moments forgivable. Watching it with wine helps too.
  97. Animals
    Its wild nature won’t be to everyone’s taste, but that’s sort of the point. It’s not a film that cares if you find these women charming or likable – it just cares that you believe them.
  98. Clemency
    There’s little room to breathe in writer-director Chinonye Chukwu’s constricting, devastating drama Clemency, an intentionally airless film processing a tough subject through an unusual viewpoint.
  99. The Farewell
    It’s a slight film at times but one that builds to a crescendo of emotion.
  100. Honey Boy
    Honey Boy is a fluent, heartfelt, tightly structured and well acted personal story.
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