The Guardian's Scores

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For 6,576 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: 2,493 out of 6576
  2. Mixed: 3,764 out of 6576
  3. Negative: 319 out of 6576
6576 movie reviews
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  1. Fatherland
    Here is an impossibly elegant, poised historical vignette whose brevity and control can hardly contain its characters’ personal and historical pain.
  2. First Cow
    It is a tremendously engaging story which does something that very few movies do: mention money. Something very palpable is at stake, the jeopardy is real and it’s a question of survival.
  3. Mad Max: Fury Road
    That adjective in the title is accurate. Extravagantly deranged, ear-splittingly cacophonous, and entirely over the top, George Miller has revived his Mad Max punk-western franchise as a bizarre convoy chase action-thriller in the post-apocalyptic desert.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Le Samouraï
    Le Samourai is as efficient a piece of cinema as it is darkly romantic.
  5. The Queen
    The film is a sharp reminder that the Queen has doggedly survived, because she has never been required to expend mental energy and political capital in shows of sincerity.
  6. I Called Him Morgan
    Kasper Collin’s I Called Him Morgan isn’t just the greatest jazz documentary since Let’s Get Lost, it’s a documentary-as-jazz.
  7. All of Us Strangers
    The film is an enormously satisfying and affecting experience.
  8. The Godfather: Part II
    It is even better than the first film, and has the greatest single final scene in Hollywood history, a real coup de cinéma.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Hustler
    The film is marred slightly by an over-abrupt ending and the irritating device of speeded-up clocks, but these are minor flaws in a film that has grown in stature over the years.
  10. Blue Is the Warmest Color
    Blue Is the Warmest Colour really is an outstanding film and the performances from Exarchopoulos and Séydoux make other people's acting look very weak.
  11. 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.
  12. Monsieur Hulot's Holiday
    The movie is perfectly composed with a light touch that is the work of a certain kind of gravity and sophistication.
  13. 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.
  14. It's Such a Beautiful Day
    Funny, oddly affecting and cherishably personal.
  15. The Souvenir: Part II
    This rich and mysterious film is a real achievement.
  16. This Is Not a Film
    This Is Not a Film is a compelling personal document, a quietly passionate statement of artistic intent, and an uncompromising testament to his belief in cinema.
  17. Sound of Falling
    It is dense with fear and sadness.
  18. Sugarcane
    [A] deeply disquieting and indeed enraging documentary.
  19. Small Axe: Mangrove
    As with McQueen’s previously premiered Small Axe film, Lovers Rock, there is real fervour and real meaning here: it is film-making with visceral commitment and muscular storytelling.
  20. 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.
  21. Days and Nights in the Forest
    Ray's language of cinema is a kind of miraculous vernacular, all his own. It has mystery, eroticism and delight.
  22. Oppenheimer
    Oppenheimer is poignantly lost in the kaleidoscopic mass of broken glimpses: the sacrificial hero-fetish of the American century.
  23. Paths of Glory
    It is arguably the best film about the first world war, and still has a reasonable claim to being Stanley Kubrick's best film.
  24. 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.
  25. Sorry, Baby
    Sharply written, smartly structured and well-acted, with a star-making turn from Victor herself, the 93-minute black comedy is not only nimble and consistently funny, but one of the best, most honest renderings of life after sexual assault that I’ve seen.
  26. 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.
  27. Paterson
    What a lovely film Paterson is.
  28. The Fits
    Holmer draws confident, luminous performances from the cast that rise to the occasion but never seem over-coached or phony.
  29. Raging Bull
    I can still remember my 19-year-old self's awe at how Jake provokes a gorgeous, reluctant smile from the incandescently beautiful Moriarty. Throughout university, I was obsessed with this film, and watched it about once a month.
  30. United 93
    Paul Greengrass and his cinematographer Barry Ackroyd have created an intestinally powerful and magnificent memorial to the passengers of that doomed flight. It is the film of the year. I needed to lie down in a darkened room afterwards. So will you.
  31. The Lavender Hill Mob
    It's tremendously good fun, though lighter in tone than Ealing's two scabrous masterpieces Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers, and not quite matching their elegant perfection; I've never been able to rid myself of the feeling that, however superbly set up, the aftermath of the heist itself is ever so slightly lacking in tension.
  32. American Hustle
    It is an intriguing confection of a movie, announcing its influences candidly, but exerting its originality too.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope
    It is, on the other hand, enormous and exhilarating fun for those who are prepared to settle down in their seats and let it all wash over them. Which I firmly believe, with the extra benefit of hindsight, is more or less exactly what the vast majority of the cinema-going public want just now.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Age of Innocence
    I love all those close-ups of fires blazing when the mood gets frosty. I love the lavish operas they attend, using the glasses to spy on each other. I love Elmer Bernstein's score, its ghostly waltzes and the way it seems to inspire the birds to soar upwards in the final heartbreaking scene in Paris, Wharton's adopted home.
  35. The Deer Hunter
    The idea of sacrifice permeates everything, along with the cruelty and horror. This is Cimino's masterpiece.
  36. Whiplash
    It's rare to see a film about music that professes its love for the music and its characters equally.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Two-Lane Blacktop
    Two-Lane Blacktop should have established Hellman as one of the great directors of his generation. Instead, its box-office failure made him an enduring cult figure.
  38. 63 Up
    Apted has honed his skills over the years, becoming less presumptive and more content to let narratives unfold naturally. And, of course, the unprecedentedly long relationship between the maker and his subjects has led to more give and take between them.
  39. Minding the Gap
    This is a fluent, watchable piece of work, though not quite as lucid as it might have been. A poignant tribute, at any rate, to the lost innocence of skateboarding.
  40. Two Days, One Night
    A tense dramatic situation and a subtly magnificent central performance from Marion Cotillard add up to an outstanding new movie from the Dardenne brothers.
  41. Killers of the Flower Moon
    This is an utterly absorbing film, a story that Scorsese sees as a secret history of American power, a hidden violence epidemic polluting the water table of humanity.
  42. For Sama
    Sifting six years’ worth of rubble, al-Kateab turns up beauty and one earthly miracle to set alongside the horrors, but horrors there are.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    White Heat
    Cagney builds a weird tragedy, and there is no more apocalyptic ending than when he and his world blow up to his triumphant cry, "Made it, Ma! Top of the world!"
  44. The Hidden Fortress
    The comedy co-exists with a dark view of life's brevity, and Kurosawa devises exhilarating setpieces and captivating images. Arthouse classics aren't usually as welcoming and entertaining as this.
  45. Elle
    The film is utterly gripping and endlessly disturbing.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Gangs of Wasseypur
    Slightly overlong and convoluted at times, it presents compelling, sexy characters spouting sharp, believable dialogue.
  47. After Hours
    A peculiar, potent film.
  48. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
    This is a heartfelt movie, a documentary unafraid to spread itself across its vast subject matter, and a fierce denunciation of the arrogant political classes, still in denial about one of the biggest tragedies in American history.
  49. Minari
    Chung’s nuanced portrait of a family figuring out their place in the world is both small and somehow rather grand.
  50. Barry Lyndon
    Barry Lyndon is an intimate epic of utter lucidity and command.
  51. The Farewell
    It’s a slight film at times but one that builds to a crescendo of emotion.
  52. Marty Supreme
    The pure craziness is a marvel.
  53. Uncertain
    Uncertain is a vivid, pungent ode into a world that is fast disappearing.
  54. Great Freedom
    Great Freedom is a formidably intelligent and well-acted prison movie and also a love story – or perhaps a paradoxically platonic bromance, stretching from the end of the second world war to the moon landing.
  55. System Crasher
    A grisly, gripping watch.
  56. It's a Wonderful Life
    The film is gripping enough simply with the telling of George's lifestory. A genuine American classic.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Madness of King George
    The 1994 film of the play by Alan Bennett is a model of historical accuracy and psychological tact. A triumph.
  58. Phoenix
    It’s a testament to Petzold’s sane head, steady hand and effortless storytelling skill that implausible plot-points are smuggled past us in their own blood-soaked bandages.
  59. Gunda
    The secret life of farm animals remains a secret, but a fascinating and even poignant one, in this strange and unexpectedly subtle film from the Russian documentary-maker Viktor Kossakovsky.
  60. The Power of the Dog
    It’s a brawny, brooding drama about the wreckage caused by men, beautifully framed in muted neutral tones as the camera circles the ranch-house with a deliberate, stealthy tread.
  61. Sullivan's Travels
    There are some marvellous supporting performances. This film comes as close as possible to a distillation of pure happiness.
  62. Alien
    Editors Terry Rawlings and Peter Weatherley cut the film so cleverly so that we never have a clear notion of what the alien actually looks like until the very last shots.
  63. Columbus
    Columbus is an engrossing and unexpectedly passionate film, although much of the passion is displaced outwards into a feeling for space, for mass, for building materials. It is a static passion, but not inert.
  64. 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.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Foreign Correspondent
    A breathless yarn with the most serious of intents that soars well beyond mediocrity but just below genius, yet remains a film that I feel should be included on the master of suspense's top table.
  66. 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.
  67. Dead Souls
    Wang’s film is a vital excavation of history in danger of being eroded away.
  68. Cameraperson
    To make the movie work, the audience needs to put in a little effort, but a philosophy of connectedness is present.
  69. Dick Johnson Is Dead
    It all builds up to a remarkable coup de cinéma: a Buñuelian finale that is startling and moving. This is both an exploratory personal project and a thought-experiment of a film.
  70. Rebel Without a Cause
    There is some stuffy, faintly reactionary stuff in this famed 1955 teen drama, but James Dean is truly extraordinary, and it has some brilliant scenes
  71. The Quiet Girl
    This beautiful and compassionate film from first-time feature director Colm Bairéad, based on the novella Foster by Claire Keegan, is a child’s-eye look at our fallen world; already it feels to me like a classic.
  72. 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.
  73. Anomalisa
    Anomalisa is a movie with wit to burn (look out for the Sarah Brightman line and the meeting room pit) and enough incidental touches that the total achievement feels immense.
  74. Funny Girl
    While the 1960s swung, this spirited, good-natured but creakily old-fashioned picture lived in a different zeitgeist.
  75. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
    A classic, not to be missed.
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