The Guardian's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Hello Dankness
    There’s a sense everything is up for grabs and the end is nigh: of consensus reality; of cinema and copyright legislation as we know it. Pop culture’s infinite cycle always spits out and reassembles content; here the process is explicit, amplified, and turbocharged.
  2. 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.
  3. Monos
    An arrestingly bizarre experience.
  4. Il Buco
    The film declines to offer up its meaning, or its reason for being, and asks us to think about something outside the passage of time.
  5. 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.
  6. Overseas
    It is hauntingly sad.
  7. Junun
    It’s a good, solid little picture, but it’s not that great, and certainly not noticeably more accomplished or compelling than many of the other music-themed docs that come out each week with less fanfare.
  8. Servants
    Pure evil permeates this brief, 80-minute film, whose cold visual brilliance reminds me of the recent movies of Paweł Pawlikowski. It wasn’t until some time after it had finished that I grasped one of the reasons it was so oppressive: there are no women in it at all. There is a chill of political fear.
  9. Beyond The Visible: Hilma af Klint
    This documentary makes a pretty convincing case for the admission of the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint into the boys’ club of abstract art, alongside Kandinsky, Mondrian et al.
  10. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
    Perhaps Good Luck to You, Leo Grande does not aspire to a piercingly profound analysis of sex and the human condition. It is, however, an amusing, compassionate and humane drama acted and directed with terrific panache.
  11. The Elephant Man
    It is an absorbing and satisfying drama, and Hurt’s Merrick is very powerful.
  12. Predator: Killer of Killers
    The only problem with this stuff is that you can’t help picturing how much more spectacular it would look in live action. The animation is all perfectly competent but it’s lacking a little something – that spark of life and ingenuity that can make even flawed animation so fascinating.
  13. John Wick: Chapter 4
    Those who appreciated the original for its brutal, sinewy agility have another thing coming: a lumbering, stultifying gargantua of a film willing to kill everything except its darlings.
  14. Enys Men
    It is not exactly a horror film, despite some spasms of disquiet, but an uncanny evocation of how, when left utterly on our own, we spiral inwards into our memories, dreams and fears.
  15. Clash
    The movie stunningly replicates that sense of inside and outside that must be felt by witnesses to any historic moment: the private debate, the enclosed conflict, and the theatre of confrontation unfolding beyond. What a dynamic piece of cinema.
  16. Young Plato
    The school is no more dysfunctional than any other institution and a lot more intelligent and self-questioning than many. A very engaging film.
  17. Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain
    The film is a reminder of just what a brilliant writer Bourdain was.
  18. Amanda Knox
    It’s a carefully balanced and frightening film with Knox a terrifyingly unknowable character at the grisly centre.
  19. Queens of the Qing Dynasty
    It’s a disorientating, unrelaxing two-hour experience, but rewarding.
  20. High Flying Bird
    In picking at a system until it’s threaded, High Flying Bird is a classic Soderbergh construct.
  21. The Humans
    Very real issues are suffused with an oppressive, unearthly, compelling unreality.
  22. The Card Counter
    Schrader has carpentered a strong and vehement film, hypnotically watchable and squalid with nightmarish flashbacks and a typically apocalyptic ending that grows plausibly enough out of what has gone before. There’s a horrible, queasy urgency to this high-stakes game.
  23. Beatles '64
    What is still amazing is how brief an instant it was; in just a few years, the Beatles and their music would evolve into something completely different. A few years after that, they would break up, while still only in their 20s. An amazing split-second of cultural history.
  24. Babette's Feast
    Twenty-five years on, the story is still charming and beguiling.
  25. In Between
    The script’s nuanced treatment of the complex relationships and a feel for the many-faceted, multicultural city in which it’s set – a unique urban blend of hedonism and tradition, bound together by hummus and history – redeem any shortcomings.
  26. The Chronology of Water
    It borders on cliche a little, but there is compassion and storytelling ambition here.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Trouble in Mind
    Some may think it precious, but it's the haunting, poetic product of an original imagination.
  28. Diego Maradona
    Kapadia’s film is a gripping account of Maradona’s playing career until the mid-90s, though it is flawed by a lack of new material of the sort he had for his previous film about Amy Winehouse.
  29. Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle
    Here is a really well-made, old-fashioned anti-war epic in a forthright and robustly enjoyable style from director and co-writer Arthur Harari.
  30. A Silent Voice
    It’s a beguiling film: subtle, sensuous and delicate.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Spellbound
    With Hitch letting rip on the imagery - including a Dali-designed dream sequence - it's as colourful as black-and-white gets. [07 Aug 2010, p.43]
    • The Guardian
  32. I, Daniel Blake
    The story is told with stark and fierce plainness: unadorned, unapologetic, even unevolved. Loach’s movie offends against the tacitly accepted rules of sophisticated good taste: subtlety, irony and indirection.
  33. Alice in the Cities
    It is an intriguing movie that lives in the mind for hours after the lights have come up.
  34. The Dark Knight Rises
    The Dark Knight Rises may be a hammy, portentous affair but Nolan directs it with aplomb. He takes these cod-heroic, costumed elements and whisks them into a tale of heavy-metal fury, full of pain and toil, surging uphill, across the flyovers, in search of a climax.
  35. The Lost City of Z
    Much will be said about Gray’s cinematic craft (as is often the case when a director works with cinematographer Darius Khondji) but beneath the slow roll down the river pierced by arrows from unseen, defensive natives, there’s a fascinating, mercurial screenplay that offers just enough to keep you journeying for more insight.
  36. Girl Picture
    This is such a vivid, lovable triple-decker performance from Milonoff, Kauhanen and Leino.
  37. Miroirs No. 3
    It is highly diverting, elegantly contrived study of an unhappy family group and the cuckoo in its nest.
  38. 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.
  39. Donbass
    Donbass is a flawed, but vivid achievement.
  40. The Ballad of Wallis Island
    A funny but also melancholy piece of work. It’s more interested in maintaining a consistent and sincere emotional connection than in wild virtuoso showboating.
  41. Blue Ruin
    The endgame is disappointingly predictable, but writer-director-cinematographer Jeremy Saulnier has a lovely touch with faces, light and telling details.
  42. Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda
    Stephen Schible’s documentary portrait follows the musician in the calm and introspective period forced on him – but it also shows him participating in post-Fukushima demonstrations.
  43. We
    It’s a film which needs an investment of attention, but there is a great observational intelligence and sympathy at work.
  44. Ex Machina
    With a sly dreaminess, Vikander steals the movie from the two males.
  45. Oldboy
    It's a movie that you feel you're not so much watching on screen as having beamed directly into your skull from some malign, alien planet of horror.
  46. A Gentle Creature
    It is gripping and absorbing in its way, although perhaps too conscious of its own metaphorical properties and opinion may divide as to whether its expressionist element works. Yet there is no doubt as to its power, and its severity.
  47. Saloum
    Saloum does not stop at simply reinterpreting the tropes of the western but wholly retools its influences with local flavours.
  48. The Sisters Brothers
    Audiard’s storytelling has an easy swing to it, his dialogue is garrulous and unsentimental, and the narrative is exotically offbeat.
  49. It's Not Me
    C’est Pas Moi amuses – and discomfits.
  50. Blue Moon
    It’s a terrific performance from Hawke.
  51. Zootopia
    It’s somewhat heavy material for a film aimed at children, but perhaps very necessary in an age where a beer-stained uncle might have ruined Thanksgiving wearing a Make America Great Again baseball cap.
  52. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
    By the end it’s nearly impossible not to shed a tear after the touching finesse and shape of this story.
  53. Chariots of Fire
    A bold, intelligent, romantic film with all the lineaments of a classic, and a score by Vangelis as instantly hummable as the music for Jaws.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pit and the Pendulum
    Corman enhances the narrative with assorted shocks and tinted flashbacks reminiscent of the silent cinema.
  55. I'm Your Man
    I was disappointed with a film whose crises and dilemmas seem laborious and essentially predictable; it does not fully work as sci-fi or satire or comedy.
  56. Never Look Away
    This documentary about [Moth's] life, directed by the actor Lucy Lawless, is a fascinating portrait of a woman who had two mottoes: “no regrets” and “don’t be boring”.
  57. The Eight Mountains
    This film has mystery and passion, it climbs mountainous heights and rewards you with the opposite of vertigo: a sort of exaltation.
  58. A Love Song
    The landscape has a certain gaunt beauty and so does Dickey’s performance.
  59. Non-Fiction
    It’s a film that ostentatiously concerns itself with contemporary, zeitgeisty issues such as digital culture and the internet, and whether this is undermining the world of reading and books. But strip out the strained speechifying on that subject and it could have been made at any time in the last 40 years.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Dr. No
    The other is a scene, improvised on the set, when Bond does a double take on seeing Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington (recently stolen from London's National Gallery) in Dr No's palatial living room. It's the funniest moment in any Bond picture and one of cinema's great art jokes.
  61. The Earth Is Blue as an Orange
    A halo of kinship, love and the tenacious power of art is gathered around this film.
  62. Much Ado About Nothing
    But Whedon's key coup is in simply directing a very good version of the play. He's got a keen ear for comedy, a no-nonsense approach to ditching the gags that don't work, a deft hand for slapstick and an eagerness to use it.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Scum
    This grim picture of borstal life packs a real punch. And kick, and headbutt. [13 Feb 2010]
    • The Guardian
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Window
    Tight, claustrophobic direction by Ted Tetzlaff. [12 Apr 1990]
    • The Guardian
  65. Holding Liat
    Holding Liat is a valuable work, not least for showing us that Israel and Netanyahu are not synonymous.
  66. Endless Poetry
    It’s a real flight of fancy.
  67. Spontaneous
    This debut feature from writer-director Brian Duffield (best known for his screenplays for Underwater, The Babysitter and Jane Got a Gun) has plenty of gallows humour to leaven the gore and tragedy, and plenty of subtexts swimming under the surface like glittering, metaphorical koi.
  68. Beach Rats
    Beach Rats is a captivating character study and one that feels vital.
  69. Rodney King
    The performance is austere and challenging, it takes us through the grim events, their aftermath and the long endgame of King’s life, but without the emollient or lenient notes that a Hollywood treatment might attempt. It is a requiem of a sort, and a sombre indication of all that has not yet healed, or been fixed.
  70. Barbarian
    There are depressingly few pleasures to be had here, and one of them is at least, for a while, playing detective trying to figure out just what on earth is buried at its centre.
  71. We're All Going to the World's Fair
    What an uncanny, exhilarating experience.
  72. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
    In just under two hours with a plate filled a little too high, not everything here quite works as well as Byrne, but Bronstein clearly hasn’t made something to be liked, she’s made something to be experienced. I can’t say I’ll forget that experience easily.
  73. Frankenstein
    Finally, inevitably, at the end of the protracted tale, we get to the question of which of the two is the “real” monster. The answer, in this high-minded and eventually rather sanctified romance, would appear to be – neither of them.
  74. Sorry to Bother You
    Despite being about serious matters (labor relations, systematic oppression, racial microaggressions), Sorry to Bother You is slight and raggedy, but when it leans into its surreal, midnight movie instincts it proves engaging and amusing.
  75. 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.
  76. Away
    Not a word is spoken throughout, which harkens back to an older era of cinematic storytelling. At the same time, the extreme frame-to-frame fluidity of the computer-assisted animation style, composed entirely of fields of subtly modulated colour, no outlines and minimal modelling, looks completely 21st century.
  77. The Human Factor
    It’s a blow-by-blow account in measured – but nailbiting – detail, told by the American diplomats in charge of the high-stakes negotiations. You could imagine John le Carré basing a character on one of these polite, ferociously bright people.
  78. Only You
    It’s a poignant and compelling Venn diagram of passion and heartache.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    All That Heaven Allows
    This 1950s melodrama – as underscored by Todd Haynes' modern riff, Far from Heaven – offers smart insights into the American class system and carries a powerful emotional clout way beyond the usual limitations of its genre.
  80. MadS
    The film has so much energy that its overall tone is fundamentally invigorating; this is the cinema of euphoric nihilism, and it’s a welcome return to form for Moreau.
  81. 1917
    1917 is Mendes’s most purely ambitious and passionate picture since his misunderstood and under-appreciated Jarhead of 2005. It’s bold, thrilling film-making.
  82. A Simple Life
    A Simple Life is a tear-jerker, but thoughtful and intelligent, with an anti-sentimental dimension.
  83. Love Exposure
    Deeply strange and politically incorrect, ­baffling, and often funny.
  84. Goldstone
    It’s a gorgeous film to watch, but a better and bigger one to think about. The key to unlocking this hugely ambitious genre hybrid – a classic Australian film and a masterpiece of outback noir – is understanding that Goldstone is a country, not a town, and its name is Australia.
  85. Limbo
    The cast, in weather-beaten and woebegone mode, are uniformly excellent, directed by Sen in beautiful unison, their performances different notes in the same melody.
  86. The Substance
    In its trashiness – and, yes, its refusal of serious substance – The Substance should really be put out on VHS cassettes and watched at home in homage to the great era of home entertainment pulp and video-store masterpieces of weirdness and crassness.
  87. Paradise: Hope
    The love story – and it can be called that – between the doctor and Melanie is presented with candour and tenderness. There is a new humanity to Seidl's work; it could be his best film so far.
  88. Logan Lucky
    It’s always supremely watchable, but rarely, if ever, commits itself to genuine jeopardy or suspense. Instead of edge-of-the-seat moments, there are gags and clever touches and excellent performances.
  89. The Starling Girl
    The Starling Girl, anchored by a bristling performance from the always solid Scanlen, is at its best when it hews to the combustible suspense of a teenage girl glimpsing her own instincts – for honesty, for autonomy, and most threateningly for pleasure.
  90. High Life
    As with so many of Denis’ films, the point is to contrive an overwhelmingly powerful mood and moment, an almost physiological sensation, this one incubated in the vast, cold reaches of space. It throbbed and itched with me long after the film was over.
  91. Nosferatu
    It is an interesting new Nosferatu for our age of pandemic fear, with some beautiful images and striking moments, particularly in the eerie moonlit hallucination sequence at the beginning, which makes the rest of the story feel slightly literal and self-conscious.
  92. The Blue Trail
    The Blue Trail is a generic mashup: it partly has the bittersweet tone of many films about defiant old people, and partly it has something far more subversive and disquieting. The mix of tones is interesting, like chewing cake and cheese at the same time.
  93. The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart
    An interesting, grown-up musical profile.
  94. A Quiet Passion
    It is Davies’ ability to invest even the most apparently-humdrum moments with some form of intense radiance that sustains his film.
  95. Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan
    In the end, the film operates best as an act of ancestor-worship to an extraordinary musician whose best days – we are forced to sadly conclude – appear to be behind him.
  96. The Personal History of David Copperfield
    Everything rattles and zings like a pinball machine, and it’s a bracing, entertaining, richly satisfying experience.
  97. Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It
    [A] televisual but still touching documentary tribute.
  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. Fancy Dance
    Gladstone’s performance is looser, more open, less reserved. Simply put: she does more acting, and gives strength and substance to a dense, knotty family drama which though maybe anticlimactic in the final act – and too reliant on a handgun plot-point – is fluent and heartfelt.
  100. Till
    It is as noble an execution of tragic historical record as one could hope for within the limits of a biopic – neither confirmation of doubters nor enough justification to relive it.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »