The Guardian's Scores

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For 6,656 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: 2,521 out of 6656
  2. Mixed: 3,814 out of 6656
  3. Negative: 321 out of 6656
6656 movie reviews
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  1. Pain Hustlers
    Blunt remains committed to the end but even she can’t add a shine to the drab last act, the pleasure of seeing her on screen replaced with the pain of another undeserving project.
  2. The Critic
    The fizz of the first half might not go completely flat in the second but that’s only because of McKellen, who relishes another devious character to sink his teeth into, devouring every scene, a deliciously caustic turn that will provide him with nothing but the finest notices.
  3. Khan's Flesh
    Considering the complex sociopolitics of the region, this representation of community and geographical identity is much more fragile than it seems, and should not be taken for granted.
  4. The Pigeon Tunnel
    Perhaps there is nothing very new in this film, but it’s a very civilised experience.
  5. Wicked Little Letters
    There’s something equally impressive and depressing about the squandered potential of misfiring period comedy Wicked Little Letters, a joyless waste of cast, premise and setting.
  6. Lee
    The life it’s focused on, that of model turned second world war photographer Lee Miller, is an undeniably interesting one, but it’s only in the briefest of moments that the film justifies why it’s a narrative endeavour rather than a documentary and every one of those moments comes courtesy of its lead.
  7. Woman of the Hour
    It’s a fascinating and frightening stranger-than-fiction tale and is an unusual choice for Kendrick’s directorial debut. She makes a convincing first-time film-maker, capturing the feel of a time and a number of places with ease.
  8. Les Indésirables
    Rejecting partisanship to affect the appearance of balance doesn’t make sense when dealing with situations defined by imbalance. Both Ly’s Hollywood bombast and impulse to undue generosity in his political convictions fight the vulcanized hardness of his bracing outrage, and ultimately prove little about today’s powder kegs.
  9. A Haunting in Venice
    No amount of spooky jump-scares can save Kenneth Branagh’s latest Christie adaptation, which wastes its atmospheric setting and stellar cast.
  10. Dumb Money
    It’s perilously close to being overstuffed (one more introduction would have tipped it over the edge) but a controlled and nimble script justifies the large ensemble, using each thread to quickly switch back and forth between the anger, ecstasy, disbelief and fear that seeped from conference to dorm room at the time.
  11. Dicks: The Musical
    Every second Mullally and Lane spend onscreen should be preserved in the library of Congress so that future generations of thespians might learn from their example.
  12. Green Border
    Green Border is a tough watch: a punch to the solar plexus. But a vital bearing of cinematic witness to what is happening in Europe right now.
  13. Finally Dawn
    Not a terribly profound film, but delivered with real brio.
  14. Jawan
    A star vehicle that functions like a runaway train, Jawan covers a lot of ground in surprising fashion at full throttle – but that’s also a polite way of admitting it’s utterly all over the place.
  15. Sitting in Bars with Cake
    Sitting in Bars with Cake careens from zany bar-hopping to hospital, cake baking ASMR to cancer weepie. You could argue that that’s life itself – a lot of chaos, bathos amid the profound – but that’s giving too much credit to the film’s murkier, underdeveloped bits. Still, it has a lasting bittersweetness to it.
  16. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3
    Its brief, brushed-off moments of anti-levity stand out, maybe because as a director, Vardalos does not have the comic touch required to provide the escapist distraction the movie is going for.
  17. The Nun II
    In neglecting to vary her routine, she is not unlike the film-makers behind this ninth visit to the Conjuring universe – although “universe” is a misleadingly large word for a franchise that is impoverished in all but its box-office gross.
  18. DogMan
    I’m sure there’s a way to make this theoretically fun premise work better, but regrettably Besson hasn’t found it.
  19. Coup de Chance
    The strong, credible performances oil the wheels during these clattering shifts of gear and serve to distract from its occasional moments of implausibility.
  20. Evil Does Not Exist
    It’s a complex drama, a realist film teetering on the edge of the uncanny, whose very title points the way towards the idea that there are shades of grey in every judgment we make.
  21. Origin
    The result is a film with urgency and heartfelt sympathy, but one which I couldn’t help thinking may have been better served as a documentary to focus more directly on the issues involved.
  22. A Life on the Farm
    The documentary’s director, Oscar Harding, explains that his grandfather was a neighbour of Carson’s in the wonderfully named village of Huish Champflower, and he was first shown A Life on the Farm age six. Stretching this curiosity of a man and his work into a full-length documentary is perhaps pushing it.
  23. Blood Flower
    As Blood Flower trudges towards its conclusion, the film turns out to be a lacklustre trauma-as-plot horror.
  24. Sympathy for the Devil
    If you were programming a season of the best of the worst from Nicolas Cage’s filmography – in other words, his most interesting/outlandish/crazed performances in low-budget films – this kooky thriller would certainly be a good candidate.
  25. Past Lives
    This heart-meltingly romantic and sad movie from Korean-Canadian dramatist and filmmaker Celine Song left me wrung out and empty and weirdly euphoric, as if I’d lived through an 18-month affair in the course of an hour and three-quarters.
  26. Hit Man
    Richard Linklater’s latest is a jaunty action comedy that spins its machine-tooled high concept like a bicycle wheel – sometimes with shrewd intent, sometimes for pure fun.
  27. The Beast
    The Beast may not add up to a cogent or thoroughgoing critique of all the ideas it invokes, but it’s such a luxurious cinematic experience; it’s created with such elan and attack, and the musical score amplifies its throb of fear.
  28. 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.
  29. 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.
  30. 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.
  31. Once Upon a Time in Uganda
    It’s nice to see the old tension between selling out and staying pure never goes away in any corner of the film-making world.
  32. Swing and Sway
    Pessoa and Barbosa’s earnestness shines through. Swing and Sway may be a visually and politically derivative work, but it also serves as a beguiling pandemic time capsule.
  33. Outpost
    Initially performed with a slightly incongruous general chirpiness, the film then blazes over the top into a cartoonish frenzy. But otherwise it’s a well-conceived disintegration, with clear sight of the terrain, both outer and inner.
  34. No More Bets
    It is a shame that either Chinese authorities had a word, or producers decided to aim for brownie points by fitting No More Bets out as an anti-fraud public-messaging spot – because Ao Shen’s thriller is otherwise a snappily directed and intriguing entrée to the industry of online deception.
  35. Good Boy
    Both leads are good, but the ultra-controlled Løkke – with his poster-boy looks and too-timely smiles – is pivotal to stringing out the farce.
  36. Priscilla
    Coppola’s portrait is absorbing, especially in Priscilla’s child phase, and if it is less distinctive in its final section, as Priscilla becomes more briskly disillusioned and realistic about what to expect, then that is to be expected.
  37. The Killer
    It is all entertainingly absurd and yet the pure conviction and deadpan focus that Fassbender and Fincher bring to this ballet of anonymous professionalism makes it very enjoyable. And there are moments when the veneer of realism is disquieting.
  38. Maestro
    In the end, Cooper’s Maestro succeeds because it is candid about the sacrifices which art demands of its practitioners, and the sacrifices these practitioners demand of their families and partners
  39. Poor Things
    Everything in it – every frame, every image, every joke, every performance – gets a gasp of excitement.
  40. All of Us Strangers
    The film is an enormously satisfying and affecting experience.
  41. Choose Love
    It struggles to feel at all like a genuine story.
  42. Ferrari
    Cruz brings gall, spite and passion to the role of Laura, but there’s not much for Woodley to do in the thankless role of Lina. And Driver is a remote and unengaging paterfamilias. But no one could doubt the style with which Mann stages those race scenes, with their danger and horror.
  43. El Conde
    This is another powerful addition to Larraín’s movies about the ongoing agony of Chile, and the Chilean people’s struggle to confront the past, armed with the hammer and the sharpened stake.
  44. Comandante
    De Angelis offers some muscular film-making, with decent action sequences.
  45. Maigret
    Depardieu brings his natural charisma and watchful presence to the role, and he can bring off Maigret’s air of worldly, tolerant bemusement and distaste at the transparently guilty people he comes across.
  46. Passages
    In Passages the sex is the plot: the plot of all our lives.
  47. Sound of Freedom
    This is just a dull and badly acted movie.
  48. Cobweb
    Cobwebbed would be more accurate, perhaps: every detail is secondhand, if not downright hoary.
  49. Bobi Wine: The People's President
    It’s an intimate portrait combined with increasingly shocking footage as his opposition movement comes under attack.
  50. The Equalizer 3
    Like McCall, [Washington] knows his tools, an arsenal not of guns and blades but of withering stares and crumpled smiles. It’s almost enough to outshine everything else.
  51. Vacation Friends 2
    The bar was low after the first, a half-assed waste of actors who deserve better, but the sequel is somehow even worse, a maddeningly unfunny string of bad decisions, the worst of which was deciding to make it in the first place.
  52. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!
    It’s both amiable and original enough to distinguish itself from the slush pile of youth-appealing Netflix content. Couple that with a moving finale on the supreme joys of best friendship, and that’s reason to celebrate.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Theater Camp
    It’s a zippy 90 minutes or so, and packed with jokes. Gordon is note perfect as Rebecca-Diane, the camp’s folksy music teacher.
  54. The Innocent
    It’s a broad, enjoyable, lighthearted movie with a fair few not-insignificant plot holes, but a genuinely surprising storyline that keeps you guessing to the end.
  55. 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.
  56. Mob Land
    It all hangs together and the final shot rounds it off nicely enough.
  57. The First Slam Dunk
    Fleshed out in 3D animation, the action – feinting, pivoting and occasionally soaring high above the stands – feels resplendently immediate.
  58. Scrapper
    The gentleness of the connection between Jason and Georgie gives Scrapper its warmth. Just hanging out together on camera is much more difficult than it looks, and Dickinson and Campbell manage it well. Regan looks like a very impressive and capable movie talent.
  59. Strays
    It is an entirely outrageous film with a lot of bad-taste laughs along the way, and a bizarrely real dramatic impact when Reggie finally confronts Doug in the horrendous finale.
  60. The Monkey King
    The latest in a 10,000-mile-long line of adaptations of Journey to the West, the 16th-century Chinese novel attributed to Wu Cheng’en, bounces along energetically, and has some exceptionally fun frills around the edges, such as a flouncy vocal performance from Bowen Yang as spiteful, effete baddie the Dragon King, who gets to sing the film’s best musical number.
  61. You Hurt My Feelings
    You Hurt My Feelings is a movie about emotional pain, and there is something very astringent in it, a salty tang which isn’t really effaced by the later plot transitions whose emollient message is that we all fib a bit to our loved ones and it doesn’t mean we love them any the less.
  62. Blue Beetle
    But there’s a perkiness that’s hard to resist and a base-level competency that’s hard not to appreciate, a small beam of blue light in an otherwise dark time for superheroes.
  63. Bad Things
    Some of the storytelling gets clotted, leaning too much on the girls shrilly screaming at each other. Bad Things, though, is sharply filmed, with cinematographer Grant Greenberg feng-shuiing the hotel spaces into tone-setting tableaux (with a touch of Twin Peaks’ kitsch).
  64. The Last Voyage of the Demeter
    It’s ultimately a doomed voyage: for the crew, for the audience and for Universal’s monster movie strategy at large.
  65. Red White & Royal Blue
    Red, White and Royal Blue just isn’t the fun, brain-disengaged romp it could have been, any praise going toward intention rather then execution.
  66. Heart of Stone
    Gal Gadot leads the streamer’s latest ambitious franchise-starter that delivers just about enough dumb summer fun to have us curious for more.
  67. Gran Turismo
    Commerce contaminates the whole endeavour.
  68. LOLA
    Despite beings shaky in terms of tone – as well with its occasionally obtrusive handheld camera movements – Lola impresses with its refreshing blend of analogue and digital flourishes.
  69. Meg 2: The Trench
    The sequel alternately treads water and splashes around frantically in search of an identity. Never settling on whether he wants his film to be Alien, Jaws, Jurassic Park or Sharknado, Wheatley serves up a bouillabaisse of all four.
  70. Bad City
    Some viewers may find it a little too pulpy, reliant as it is on boilerplate dialogue, and it is not exactly rich in subtlety. All the nuance is in the grace of the fight scenes, as lovingly choreographed as a production of Swan Lake.
  71. Kokomo City
    Truly, this covers the whole spectrum of experience, all of it eloquently explained by the subjects, an assortment of women who tell their truths about clients who can’t be honest with themselves, their complicated relationships with friends, family and cis women, the legacy of slave culture, and their favourite portable electric shavers.
  72. Revoir Paris
    It’s a measured, quietly powerful film with a performance from Virginie Efira that seems almost telepathic at times; in scenes where she doesn’t say a word, barely twitching a muscle in her face, yet somehow you know what she’s feeling.
  73. Zoey 102
    At worst, as often is the case with the finished product, it’s so focused on recapturing long past, hazily remembered magic as to be cringe-inducing.
  74. North Circular
    What distinguishes North Circular is the overwhelming importance of music: there’s a musical tradition here that is not simply commemorative and static, but vital and evolving, and given a fresh burst of creativity by the emerging status of women in Ireland.
  75. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
    This new animated origin story for the chelonian adventurers is unexpectedly funny, with a rather stylish crepuscular design.
  76. Happiness for Beginners
    Throughout it all, Kemper visibly strains to temper her comedic impulses. Sometimes she delivers her lines with a quickness that feels refreshingly out of place, but it’s mostly call-and-response songs along the trails and heart to hearts under the stars.
  77. Medusa Deluxe
    Without a doubt, it is an impressive debut from director Thomas Hardiman, even if his script doesn’t quite pull off a first-class whodunnit.
  78. Haunted Mansion
    Lakeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Owen Wilson and Jamie Lee Curtis cannot save this laborious story of a creepy old dwelling and the awful Hatbox Ghost.
  79. Pretty Red Dress
    It’s a movie about masculinity that could have been solemn and prescriptive; instead it’s pulsing with humanity, thanks in great part to tremendous performances from its leads Natey Jones, Alexandra Burke and smart newcomer Temilola Olatunbosun.
  80. Miraculous: Ladybug & Cat Noir, The Movie
    With Ladybug doing as much mooning as superheroing the girl power message feels more afterthought than heartfelt.
  81. Talk to Me
    Talk to Me is freaky and confrontational and hilariously crass; it crashes through its plot progressions with tactless verve.
  82. Greatest Days
    It’s at least as enjoyable as the much-hyped Mamma Mia! movies.
  83. Return to Dust
    With a cast largely made up of the director’s relatives as well as villagers from the landlocked province, this deeply personal work on the plight of rural farmers has a striking feel of authenticity and poetry.
  84. While We Watched
    It’s a valuable view on how easy it is for the news media to become sycophantic mouthpieces for the right.
  85. The Beanie Bubble
    Some deeply muddled non-storytelling and tonal blandness pretty much sink this movie from the outset, despite its decent cast and origins in a potentially fascinating true story.
  86. Oppenheimer
    Oppenheimer is poignantly lost in the kaleidoscopic mass of broken glimpses: the sacrificial hero-fetish of the American century.
  87. Barbie
    It’s entertaining and amiable, but with a softcore pulling of punches: lightly ironised, celebratory nostalgia for a toy that still exists right now.
  88. My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock
    Well, point-by-point, clip-by-clip, this film remains brilliant. As ever, there is real evangelism in Cousins’s work and in My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock there is so much to learn and enjoy. You come away from it with your senses fine-tuned.
  89. They Cloned Tyrone
    It all bounces along amiably enough, due to the high-octane work of Boyega, Foxx and Parris. Perhaps they deserve to be in a more serious film or in a comedy that was skewed more to grownups. Well, it’s a film with its own peculiarly unexpected innocence and charm.
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