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. Mudbound
    A hundred well-placed plot breadcrumbs lead us to our perfect ending, but apart from scriptwriting craft Rees gets in some bravura scenes of high tension.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Casting JonBenét
    This isn’t really a film in search of a definitive truth – it’s a deliberate provocation to the conventional notion of truth in the age of media frenzies over salacious crime.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    City of Ghosts
    The film is about more than simply personal loss and Heineman’s admiration of journalist activists. It’s a guide to the media war being fought between Isis’s video team and RBSS.
  4. 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.
  5. Phantom Thread
    There is such pure delicious pleasure in this film, in its strangeness, its vehemence, its flourishes of absurdity, carried off with superb elegance.
  6. mother!
    As horror it is ridiculous, as comedy it is startling and hilarious, and as a machine for freaking you out it is a thing of wonder.
  7. A Fantastic Woman
    A Fantastic Woman is a brilliant film: a richly humane, moving study of someone keeping alive the memory and the fact of love.
  8. Okja
    The pure energy and likability of this film make it such a pleasure.
  9. The Sting
    The Sting is the most purely enjoyable film in Oscar history – and that, I think, puts it in the most valuable American film-making tradition of all.
  10. The Death of Louis XIV
    This quietly amazing film is conceived in terms of pure minimalist intimacy.
  11. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
    Those familiar with McDonagh’s work will be unsurprised to learn that Three Billboards is a bold and showboating affair, robustly drawn and richly written; a violent carnival of small-town American life. Yet it has a big, beating heart, even a rough-edged compassion for its brawling inhabitants.
  12. BPM (Beats Per Minute)
    This film has what its title implies: a heartbeat. It is full of cinematic life.
  13. Happy End
    It is not a new direction for this film-maker, admittedly, but an existing direction pursued with the same dazzling inspiration as ever. It is also as gripping as a satanically inspired soap opera, a dynasty of lost souls.
  14. Loveless
    Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Loveless is a stark, mysterious and terrifying story of spiritual catastrophe: a drama with the ostensible form of a procedural crime thriller. It has a hypnotic intensity and unbearable ambiguity which is maintained until the very end.
  15. The Florida Project
    While minimal on plot, the film digs in its nails on the day-to-day struggles of poor people in America.
  16. Gone with the Wind
    Some elements seem grotesquely dated, but this restoration of the 1939 classic finds the film as powerful and mad as ever.
  17. Casablanca
    Seventy years on, this great romantic noir is still grippingly powerful: a movie made at a time when it was far from clear the Nazis were going to lose.
  18. Faces Places
    If there’s a message in Visages, Villages (both to us, and from Varda to her young friend) is that one does not need to be a tortured and nasty person to make great art. She is living and still-working proof.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Blow Out
    This is one of the finest films about the process of movie-making, a bleak, complex work that gives Travolta his most challenging role.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Thing
    The menace of the dark polar night and the claustrophobic confines of the base are utilised to raise the fear, tension and paranoia to unbearable heights. This is a creature that doesn't just hide in the dark, but could be your friend, your colleague, or the girl beside you whose hand you are breaking in a terrified vice-like grip.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Psycho
    It was Anthony Perkins's maternally obsessed misfit in Psycho who most perfectly distilled the modern fear of the monster who looks just like you.
  22. It's a Wonderful Life
    The film is gripping enough simply with the telling of George's lifestory. A genuine American classic.
  23. Stand by Me
    The resulting adventure – bizarre, mysterious and moving – is about lost youth and the recovery of innocence through writing and memory. It is also one of those vanishingly rare films where child actors have to carry almost the entire drama.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Rosemary's Baby
    This is horror rooted not in misty Carpathian castles, but in recognisable modern life, with the satanists depicted not as outlandish fiends but the sort of everyday folk you might encounter on any urban street.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Goldfinger
    Not just my favourite Bond movie, but the standard by which all other Bond movies must be judged. It has Sean Connery, of course, and the best theme song, incorporating Shirley Bassey and lashings of John Barry brass...And it has the best villain.
  26. Spartacus
    A stirring classic.
  27. Night of the Living Dead
    It remains a nightmare experience that’s not easily brushed off. And despite its ramshackle scrappiness in production terms, and some dated gender politics, the storytelling is first class, pitching us straight into the action, but only revealing its full hand gradually.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    After Life
    Afterlife is an immensely suggestive picture about the role of memory, the function of cinema and the limits of our imagination.
  29. No Time to Die
    No Time To Die is startling, exotically self-aware, funny and confident, and perhaps most of all it is big: big action, big laughs, big stunts and however digitally it may have been contrived, and however wildly far-fetched, No Time To Die looks like it is taking place in the real world, a huge wide open space that we’re all longing for.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Dressed to Kill
    This ingenious erotic thriller full of unexpected shocks is best seen with no foreknowledge and even better at a second viewing.
  31. The Death of Stalin
    The Death Of Stalin is superbly cast, and acted with icy and ruthless force by an A-list lineup. There are no weak links. Each has a plum role; each squeezes every gorgeous horrible drop.
  32. 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.
  33. Sicario: Day of the Soldado
    This movie channels the paranoia and bad faith that’s in the air at the moment and converts it into a thriller of visceral hostility and overwhelming nihilism. It’s all killer, no filler.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Bullitt
    Blessed with the fresh eyes of newly landed Englishman Yates (and genius cameraman William Fraker), the movie makes San Francisco fresh and alive, but also completely remakes and modernises the bleak, sleazy gangster demimonde in which Bullitt does his hunting.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Strong Island
    It would be too simplistic to call it brave. Ford excels, and shows us why we should be angry at America’s indifference to dead black men. The documentary won’t bring William Ford back, and it may give Yance Ford some catharsis, but more importantly it could and should lead to greater justice and empowerment.
  36. EX LIBRIS: The New York Public Library
    Ex Libris rolls out like a collection of short films.... It’s like watching Wiseman skip along through the stacks of all accumulated human knowledge.
  37. Sweet Country
    This is fiercely powerful storytelling, simple and muscular in one way, but also conveying nuance and sophistication in its depiction of character.
  38. Zama
    [Martel's] film is haunted, haunting and admittedly prone to the occasional longueur insofar as it runs to its own peculiar rhythm; maybe even its own primal logic.
  39. Ad Astra
    It’s an extraordinary picture, steely and unbending and assembled with an unmistakable air of wild-eyed zealotry. Ad Astra, be warned, is going all the way - and it double-dares us to buckle up for the trip.
  40. Some Like It Hot
    Reinvented by Wilder and co-screenwriter co-writer IAL Diamond, Some Like It Hot is effortlessly fluent, joyous and buoyant: a high-concept comedy that stays as high as a kite, while other comedies flag. "Nobody's perfect" is the last line. Wilder, Lemmon, Curtis and Monroe come pretty close.
  41. The Birds
    The essential Hitchcock movie, the purest and most confident, a brilliant distillation of the themes that had fueled him ever since he sent the lodger creeping to his upstairs room.
  42. Distant Voices, Still Lives
    Its austere beauty, artistry and wrenching sadness are undimmed after 30 years, and there is nothing distant or still about it.
  43. Destination Unknown
    Claire Ferguson’s documentary is a powerful, valuable addition to the Holocaust testimony genre.
  44. The Seventh Continent (1989)
    A chilling and utterly brilliant film whose final, excoriating sequence is frankly sufficient on its own to justify the genius tag.
  45. A Quiet Place
    In its simplicity and punch, this is a film that feels as if it could have been made decades ago, in the classic age of Planet of the Apes or The Omega Man.
  46. Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood
    Quite simply, I just defy anyone with red blood in their veins not to respond to the crazy bravura of Tarantino’s film-making, not to be bounced around the auditorium at the moment-by-moment enjoyment that this movie delivers.
  47. Heaven's Gate
    It is a demanding film, without a doubt – but a passionate one.
  48. The Muppet Christmas Carol
    Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy are joined by Caine as a hilarious Scrooge in this irresistibly sweet musical adaptation of Dickens’ festive tale.
  49. Broadway Danny Rose
    This story is not about consummation, but about reconciliation; it's a recognition that we want wrongs to be righted, that good will prevail, and that the faithless will be punished or reformed.
  50. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
    The law about movie characters needing to be sympathetic is defied in this horribly fascinating true-crime black comedy.
  51. Doctor Zhivago
    It’s impossible not to be swept along and caught by the details: the pompous army officer falling into the barrel, the anarchist (played by a young Klaus Kinski) watching an old couple affectionately cuddling on the train, Zhivago himself suddenly shocked at his own haggard reflection in the mirror. Lean was hunting big game, and catching it.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    All About Eve
    If you're not interested in all the backstage tittle-tattle, just settle back and enjoy a film whose script is studded with barbed and quotable bons mots, the finest ever part by suave cad George Sanders and a memorable cameo by Marilyn Monroe as an aspiring starlet (practically everyone was playing variations of themselves).
  53. 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.
  54. Leave No Trace
    It’s a movie that will live with me for a long time.
  55. Roma
    At times it feels novelistic, a densely realised, intimate drama giving us access to domestic lives developing in what feels like real time. In its engagingly episodic way, it is also at times like a soap opera or telenovela. And at other times it feels resoundingly like an epic.
  56. The African Queen
    A ripping, gripping yarn, a surprisingly erotic love story and, as it happens, a premonition of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo.
  57. The Maltese Falcon
    The strange, dreamlike tension of the film escalates with each new confrontation, each new tailing, each new beating, with Gutman and Cairo shot from a queasy low angle, and the nightmare culminates in a gripping series of closeups on each strained face.
  58. American Animals
    I was utterly absorbed in this teeth-clenchingly exciting story and the “heist” sequence itself stands up really well – as well as anything I’ve seen.
  59. Hereditary
    Hereditary is basically a brilliant machine for scaring us, and Collette’s operatic, hypnotic performance seals the deal every second she’s on the screen.
  60. Persona
    Persona is a film to make you shiver with fascination, or incomprehension, or desire.
  61. The Tale
    I want more people to see The Tale because it’s such an innovative, honest and important film. It is a landmark, and Laura Dern is absolutely extraordinary. But I know for certain I’ll never watch it again.
  62. The Kindergarten Teacher
    The Kindergarten Teacher is probably the only movie about poetry with an ending as tense as any thriller.
  63. The Irishman
    No-one but Scorsese and this glorious cast could have made this movie live as richly and compellingly as it does, and persuade us that its tropes and images are still vital.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Pass Over
    As a drama, Pass Over is a masterful tragedy. As a reflection of the world, it is all too real and utterly woeful.
  65. It Happened One Night
    As buoyant and elegant as bubbles in a glass of champagne, Frank Capra's sublime 1934 comedy, written by long-time collaborator Robert Riskin, survives triumphantly because of its wit, charm, romantic idealism and its shrewd sketch of married life.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Shirkers
    This is so much more than a film about a film, it’s about young women breaking the rules set in a conservative country - the process of doing that was a lot more powerful than finishing the actual film.
  67. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
    This is a gripping and sad drama that puts a tremendous amount of faith in its performers and audience, and for all the emotion and tenderness in the rest of this year’s Sundance crop, this is the first film that left me a complete broken-down mess by the end.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Double Indemnity
    I love Double Indemnity because it's about a couple who are cheap and greedy, but achieve a kind of tragic heroism; because it has one of the great father-son relationships (although they aren't actually father and son); because it's a thoroughly cynical thriller redeemed by just a fading touch of romance. And it also has a trio of superb performances.
  69. North by Northwest
    [A] sublime classic.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Rear Window
    What's extraordinary, for a film that works on these different levels, is that it also manages to be a riveting thriller.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Steel Magnolias
    This film is a true story and a brilliant depiction of friendship that manages to be witty, warm, uplifting, and, just when you thought you were safe, utterly heartbreaking. It’s also frequently laugh-out-loud funny.
  72. Threads
    It wasn’t until I saw Threads that I found that something on screen could make me break out in a cold, shivering sweat and keep me in that condition for 20 minutes, followed by weeks of depression and anxiety.
  73. 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.
  74. My Neighbor Totoro
    This inspirationally lovely and gentle film has a real claim to be Miyazaki’s masterpiece, or first among equals in his collection, with a simple hand-drawn design whose innocence only becomes more beguiling with repeated viewings, along with its bright, expansive, Gershwin-esque musical score.
  75. My Beautiful Laundrette
    It is a sharp, smart picture, with English eccentricity, sly quirk and political subversion, that represents a brilliant and almost unique engagement with contemporary history in 80s British cinema.
  76. Prick Up Your Ears
    Gary Oldman’s superb livewire performance is now virtually an authentic testament of the man himself. Alfred Molina’s morose, self-hating Halliwell is also utterly convincing: Bennett’s script cleverly conveys their long years of bickering domesticity.
  77. The Wife
    It is a smart, supremely watchable and entertaining film, and Close gives a wonderful star turn.
  78. The Elephant Man
    It is an absorbing and satisfying drama, and Hurt’s Merrick is very powerful.
  79. Eraserhead
    It's beautiful and strange, with its profoundly disturbing ambient sound design of industrial groaning, as if filmed inside some collapsing factory or gigantic dying organism.
  80. Mean Streets
    The movie's blazing energy is still astounding; the vérité street-scenes are terrific and Scorsese's pioneering use of popular music is genuinely thrilling.
  81. Cold War
    The crystalline black-and-white cinematography exalts its moments of intimate grimness and its dreamlike showpieces of theatrical display. It is an elliptical, episodic story of imprisonment and escape, epic in scope.
    • 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.
  83. Happy as Lazzaro
    Happy As Lazzaro itself is a weightless enigma, an unfathomable promise of happiness, gently tugging you upward, like a balloon on the end of a string.
  84. Long Day's Journey Into Night
    There is such artistry and audacity in this new film by the 30-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan. Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a hallucinatory experience whose sinuous camera movements take you on a long journey into memory and fear and a night full of dreams.
  85. Shoplifters
    It is a movie made up of delicate brushstrokes: details, moments, looks and smiles.
  86. The Wild Pear Tree
    The Wild Pear Tree is a gentle, humane, beautifully made and magnificently acted movie.
  87. Dogman
    A movie with incomparable bite and strength.
  88. Five Easy Pieces
    This superbly composed film comes as close to perfection as it gets.
  89. The Last Picture Show
    Peter Bogdanovich's 1971 ode to a Texan small town is still a masterpiece whichever way you look at it.
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