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. Josep
    It’s a delicate, thoughtful film, moving and real.
  2. Jujutsu Kaisen 0: The Movie
    Bloody, action-packed and tragicomic all at once, this dazzling coming-of-age tale masterfully contemplates the knotty process of coming to terms with past traumas through a horror-fantasy lens.
  3. Deep Water
    Just occasionally, Lyne brings the right kind of flash, brash and trash to this fantastically silly and unbelievable story. But the film plods along in such a disconcerting way: there is no ratcheting up of tension, or plausible psychology.
  4. Cyrano
    Dinklage always holds the screen with his natural charisma.
  5. The Duke
    There is a fair bit of sentimentality here, but an awful lot of affection and energy as well.
  6. Streamline
    Streamline’s narrative doesn’t go in the expected direction, with structural and emotional surprises making good on its promise to deliver a different kind of sports story, even if its final stretch is a tad neat.
  7. The Adam Project
    It’s spectacle coasting on the evergreen draw of time travel paced with beats of occasionally effective human emotion – grief, regret, self-loathing and acceptance in sometimes moving, very manageable amounts.
  8. A Banquet
    Paxton’s movie sketches out the sinister dread just under the happy-family surface; she is in expert control of her film, achieving her effects with economy and force. It is really unnerving.
  9. 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.
  10. Gold
    Gold is a minimalistic production, story and setting wise, with an interesting kind of contextual ambiguity: we know there is a wider world beyond the frame, though we don’t know what it looks like. Sparseness is intriguing, but this film is so damn sparse.
  11. Turning Red
    The journey is slick and diverting, and at times incisive, but Turning Red is yet another Pixar film that coasts rather than glides. Hopefully its next offering can turn into something more.
  12. Rebel Dread
    Letts is a brilliant entrepreneur, an inter-disciplinary artist and eloquent speaker about what life was like in the punk era, and despite his (correct) refusal to see things in these tiresomely nostalgist or sentimental terms, there is a pang in recognising the spark of that time.
  13. The Weekend Away
    It’s a thriller by name but less edge-of-your-seat than lounging on the couch, absorbing beats of plot like the ocean tide. A little provocation with slight commitment – that’s not a bad night in by any means.
  14. Nightride
    There’s a propulsive, driving force to the way the film is directed, but there are some things that don’t entirely track.
  15. The Scary of Sixty-First
    To me this feels like a silly smirking film with zero insights into abuse or conspiracy theories.
  16. Aline
    Lemercier’s weirdly grinning, gurning face superimposed on the child’s head creates an unnatural chill that the film fails to shrug off, even after Aline as an adult is supposed to be glammed up with her teeth fixed.
  17. Against the Ice
    Against the Ice is a Danish story flattened for a global audience.
  18. Zeros and Ones
    This film may stretch your patience to the limit and beyond. It’s minor work – but there is always something there, some restless wounded intelligence, a pugnacious worrying-away at something.
  19. Lucy and Desi
    For all the amazement at Ball’s tireless hustle and explosive originality, there’s a terminal lack of both in this monument to her memory.
  20. F@ck This Job
    Narrating the film with occasional gonzo outbursts (“We were so fucking stupid”), Krichevskaya is perhaps over-infatuated with her subject, but then Sindeeva seems like quite a character.
  21. La Mif
    This is an engaging ensemble piece, acted with vehemence and sincerity, though it concludes a little melodramatically.
  22. The Batman
    The ending is tiresome and shark-jumping in the extreme.
  23. 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.
  24. No Exit
    It’s an airport novel that’s now an airplane movie.
  25. Ronnie's
    Much of the film’s pleasure lies in the glimpses of Soho over the decades: a wealth of photographs, sound clips and archive footage bring the club and the neighbourhood to life. Free of obtrusive talking heads, contributors feature as voices only, and none overstays their welcome.
  26. Hellbender
    Although made on a tiny budget, this highly original exercise in folk horror punches well above its weight with snappy dialogue, trippy visual effects and impressive camerawork.
  27. Studio 666
    The estimable Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters has bafflingly decided to try everyone’s patience with this insufferable vanity project: a violent gonzo grossout that sadly conforms to the horror-comedy tendency of being neither properly scary nor properly funny.
  28. The Beatles: Get Back - The Rooftop Concert
    This engrossing film is a time capsule of London itself – the faces not so very different from those you would see in the 40s or 50s.
  29. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
    Against considerable odds, a very, very low bar has been met and then shuffled over with this mostly effective and incredibly nasty update, a jolting little slasher that should repulse and satisfy those with a suitably depraved idea of what they are clicking into.
  30. Dog
    Dog lovers eager for a dog movie primarily about a dog will be reassured by the knowledge that Dog does feature plenty of dog but they might be a little surprised about what else the film has to offer, an odd and atonal ramble across the US where the dog comes first and plotting comes a long way after.
  31. For Lucio
    Perhaps it’s more for insiders and specialists, but this film is a taste of Italian life.
  32. Robe of Gems
    It is a disturbing and unsettling piece of work, a psycho-pathological moodboard of a film, in which guilt, horror and shame poison the atmosphere.
  33. Rimini
    Perhaps this one doesn’t take Seidl’s creative career much further down the road to (or away from) perdition, but it is managed with unflinching conviction, a tremendous compositional sense and an amazing flair for discovering extraordinary locations.
  34. Peter von Kant
    There is something lighter, almost flippant and French-farcical about this new Von Kant: a man brought low by l’amour, inviting from the audience hardly more than a worldly, sympathetic shrug.
  35. The Passengers of the Night
    This is a film that doesn’t set out to push your emotional buttons all that hard, or even at all. But it covers a surprising amount of narrative ground and there is always something engaging and tender to it.
  36. Nobody's Hero
    The film stands or falls by its claims to deadpan comedy – but this is heavy-handed and unsatisfying.
  37. The Real Charlie Chaplin
    This film may not have all that much new material but it piercingly asks the right questions about Chaplin’s elusive reality.
  38. The Line
    [An] engrossing, unnerving but unexpectedly sympathetic drama of family dysfunction.
  39. They Live in the Grey
    In a way the film’s best bits are the quiet scenes where the audience is primed to expect something awful is about to happen, only to find the point is not a jump scare but a harrowing emotional insight.
  40. The Outfit
    It’s an entertaining, fairly overwrought piece, a little tightly buttoned.
  41. Dark Glasses
    Dario Argento’s return to directing after a 10-year absence has its moments of macabre and melodramatic invention.
  42. Both Sides of the Blade
    Claire Denis’s new film is a seductively indirect love triangle, a drama of the mind as much as the heart. It’s intriguing if contrived and anticlimactic, though acted at the highest pitch of sensual conviction.
  43. The Chaperone
    All the corny romance stuff is about as intrinsic to the film’s soft appeal as the scrupulously well-made frocks, encompassing late Edwardian lace and flapper-style dropwaist numbers, and dozens of well-turned cloche hats.
  44. Here Before
    The question of whether this is a ghost story or if Laura is experiencing a kind of psychological breakdown twists and turns in ways that lost me by the end. Still, it’s is a very accomplished debut from Gregg, and acted with subtlety and sensitivity by Riseborough.
  45. Flux Gourmet
    Flux Gourmet is sometimes funny and always exotic, and every moment has his distinctive authorial signature. But I am starting to wonder if his style is becoming a hipster mannerism with less substance, and a less live-ammo sense of actual danger.
  46. Incredible But True
    Incredible But True has a wacky premise that Dupieux very possibly had no idea how to develop. And yet I found myself laughing quite a lot of the time. The sheer silliness and zen pointlessness is entertaining.
  47. Froth
    The threading together of the different stories is overly opaque at times, but Evgeny Rodin’s atmospheric cinematography is a marvel, imbuing a Tarkovsky-esque ethereality to a land that has fallen out of step with the modern world.
  48. Gehraiyaan
    While the lurid twists and turns are enjoyable in a 90s erotic thriller kind of way, the sudden shift towards suspense hampers Padukone’s performance.
  49. Bigbug
    With his work now migrating online and his jerry-rigged methods increasingly outsourced to post-production effects, Jeunet can’t avoid the impending digitization of cinema, nor life. Still, he’s not going down without landing a few good fingers to the ribs first.
  50. Uncharted
    It’s a huge greenscreen action-adventure with a reasonable bang-buck ratio, but a box office algorithm where its heart is supposed to be.
  51. Marry Me
    Jennifer Lopez is radioactively humourless and Owen Wilson is robotically bland in this stinker.
  52. The Sky Is Everywhere
    Decker infuses Nelson’s screenplay with a potent dose of whimsical fantasy, morphing Lennie’s tortuous bereavement into a lonely house, a romantic musical journey and a garden where other complicated, confusing emotions grow.
  53. I Want You Back
    It’s a far better version of a romantic comedy than we’re used to streaming of late.
  54. Flee
    This animated documentary from Danish film-maker Jonas Poher Rasmussen is an irresistibly moving and engrossing story, whose emotional implications we can see being absorbed into the minds of the director and his subject, almost in real time.
  55. Death on the Nile
    Branagh brings something spirited and good-humoured to the role of Poirot, but the film’s attempt to create some romantic stirrings to go with the activities of those little grey cells is not very convincing.
  56. Demon Slayer -Kimetsu no Yaiba- The Movie: Mugen Train
    Squint a bit, relax your mind and you might find in it a touching allegory that accidentally corresponds to our own, collective emergence from the oneiric, mesmeric lull of lockdown life, in which sleeping too much and dreaming about dead loved ones could have become the new going out.
  57. Belle
    It is an intriguing story, although I have to admit to feeling a bit bemused at the arbitrary way the Beast story is inserted into the already tense and interesting situation of Suzu/Belle and her relationships with people at home and school.
  58. Moonfall
    Here the formulaic silliness, sometimes part of the enjoyment, is just tiring.
  59. Jackass Forever
    “This isn’t a Mensa convention!” says one player. Is that disingenuous? Isn’t there, in fact, some advanced showbiz intelligence and surrealist savvy in the way Jackass is set up and edited? Either way, it has a horror-comedy impact.
  60. Resurrection
    It has the feeling of a short film stretched beyond its limit, with all that early tension dissipating, and while there’s certainly something jolting about the gonzo violence in the finale, it’s otherwise ineffectual.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Nanny
    Nanny, as a whole, packs a rather toothless punch. It feels loosely assembled – chock-full of original ideas, intriguing imagery and plot devices, many of which either oddly wind up as loose ends or get resolved in a hurry.
    • The Guardian
      • Posted Jan 28, 2022
  62. Nothing Compares
    Nothing Compares is simply more about the Sinéad you already know. But a critic’s original sin is to review the movie you want to see, not the movie that exists. To that end, with expectations managed, Nothing Compares is a quite engaging document.
  63. Palm Trees and Power Lines
    It’s trite to say a debut performance is a revelation, but the whole film simply does not work without McInerny, who is fully convincing as a girl on an emotional precipice. It’s an astoundingly calibrated turn, one of barely lidded emotions that eventually skitter about
  64. Parallel Mothers
    The film allows you to ponder not just the mother-child bond – strong enough to confront fascism – but the way everyone has to let their children be influenced by strangers; the unintended upbringing of being out in the world. What an emotional experience.
  65. Sing 2
    It feels like a screensaver, a movie generated by an algorithm, the same algorithm that calculated the likely profit on extending the Sing franchise.
  66. You Won't Be Alone
    It’s a deft and thrilling conceit, experiencing the highs and lows of life through different people. Stolevski, in a film that feels less like a debut and more a late-stage magnum opus, has found an ingenious vessel to make profound observations on gender, sex and being.
  67. Emily the Criminal
    Ford has a knack for making us sweat without relying on an over-egged score or over-stacked stakes. It’s a genre movie with its feet firmly on the ground, small in scale and tight in focus.
  68. Am I OK?
    Am I OK? is strongest when embedded in the two friends’ well-worn, effusive bond, in sickness or in health – when the fight comes the barbs are believably lacerating, the kind only best friends can wield.
  69. One Shot
    It has risibly cliched dialogue and wooden, poorly directed acting from a B-to-G list cast, but it appears to be shot in one continuous take and strictly as an example of choreography and technical skill it’s pretty nifty.
  70. Call Jane
    Call Jane never quite rises to the level of a rousing battle cry, but does offer a studious examination of a past that could, terrifyingly, become our future.
  71. 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.
  72. Cha Cha Real Smooth
    At a young age, Raiff still remains an exciting up-and-coming film-maker of note and even in his sophomoric slump, there’s enough, coupled with his standout debut, to suggest that better things will come. Hopefully better titles too.
  73. Sharp Stick
    This awkward, misjudged, occasionally sexy film has seeds of a radical, fresh story and flashes of directorial brilliance but is hobbled throughout by the confounding decision to write her 26-year-old main character as either insensitively neuro-divergent or more sheltered child than adult.
  74. Living
    A gentle, exquisitely sad film.
  75. Breaking
    Boyega’s performance has an essential sympathy and dignity that are vital to this drama; an unshowy sense of self-worth that keeps it together.
  76. Fresh
    For those who like their dating movies with a bit of gristle, Fresh is a perfect match.
  77. Emergency
    A ride somehow both warm and stressful, and an inviting mashup of familiar beats made fresh by a trio of grounded, endearing performances.
  78. The Rescue
    Not only is the story compelling, but thanks to how much the event captured the interest of the world’s media, there is a lot of archive footage to splice in among the generous wodges of talking-heads narration from the main participants.
  79. Four Hours at the Capitol
    The underlying collective testimony furnished by Four Hours at the Capitol is that the age of Trump has not yet ended – and the true day of reckoning in the United States is still to come.
  80. A Journal for Jordan
    Director Denzel Washington and his stars do their best with this bland, shallow and awkwardly structured film.
  81. The Last Thing Mary Saw
    The trouble with the film is that beneath the surface lurks … well, perhaps not quite enough to keep the momentum going.
  82. Memory Box
    Edited with minute attentiveness, the film switches back and forth between time periods adroitly in a way that always moves the story forward, while the outstanding performances from the whole ensemble, especially the watchful Vauthier and the fierce Issa, anchor the film.
  83. Mass
    Mass is performed with impeccable intelligence and sensitivity, although sometimes it feels like an exercise in award-winning acting. But I admit it: the final, unexpected dialogue scene, though arguably as stagey and showy as everything else, does deliver a punch.
  84. Nightmare Alley
    It’s [Del Toro’s] most strikingly beautiful film yet, a velvety, precisely styled noir with the year’s most impressively stacked cast (two Oscar winners and six nominees, all bringing their A game) but its sleek shell is sadly as duplicitous as its untrustworthy conman protagonist, blinding us with dazzle but leaving us tricked.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road
    Despite Fine’s conversational interviewing, Wilson is still not enormously articulate or forthcoming, though it’s nice to see him reminisce, however simply, and there are plenty of powerful, telling moments.
  86. Scream
    Perhaps there is less zap in Scream nowadays and archly invoking the newer generation of indie horror - Jordan Peele is mentioned, with absolute respect - only serves in the long run to remind you how elderly Scream is. But it’s still capable of delivering some piercing high-pitched decibels.
  87. Save the Cinema
    A well-meaning but hammy and perfunctorily sentimental heartwarmer in the familiar Britfilm style.
  88. Survive the Game
    Bruce Willis continues his campaign of reputation self-ruin – not that he has that far to fall – with this cruddy, derivative action thriller.
  89. President
    What President does well is show that linear narrative is not necessarily the point in the fight for democracy. Victory might not be immediate, but the people’s hope for change will never die.
  90. The Legend of La Llorona
    Although it’s always a treat to see veteran character actor Danny Trejo doing his stuff – playing an ambiguous figure attached to the hotel – both he and most of the rest of the cast deliver their lines with the flat, enthusiasm-free cadences of an ensemble cheesed off with the size of their paycheques and the quality of the catering.
  91. Lola
    Bollaers works well with co-star Benoît Magimel and together they do their best to raise the standard of this well-meaning but basically unsatisfying work.
  92. The Humans
    Very real issues are suffused with an oppressive, unearthly, compelling unreality.
  93. The Devil to Pay
    Deadwyler’s soulful performance really grounds The Devil to Pay even as it cranks into revenge-movie mode. That said, if you want a slice of grim Americana to hunker down with, I’d go with Winter’s Bone or Frozen River.
  94. Ascension
    Part of the film’s genius is in how the images are put together, sometimes to absurd effect, at other times unnervingly.
  95. Hotel Transylvania: Transformania
    Cue all sorts of strangely tired, laugh-free goofiness, with none of the funny lines and wit that come as standard with Pixar/Disney films. I guess it would pacify very young children.
  96. The 355
    Films such as The 355 live and die by the quality of their action set pieces and while there’s a propulsive pace to the proceedings, there’s never quite enough genuine excitement.
  97. Minyan
    Steel brings a very distinctive kind of control and restraint to his film, both in terms of its subdued colour palette and an emotional language which despite explicit scenes of both sex and homophobic tension and paranoia, has something opaque and elliptical about it.
  98. Resistance: 1942
    Patric’s inscrutable performance recedes intriguingly while Elwes over-reaches, suggesting a man locked in internal combat.
  99. American Siege
    The problem with Bruce Willis in the movie is that he’s not doing something that he is supposed to be doing: acting. He puts in a such a wooden performance playing a washed-up, burnt-out cop that I could have screamed in frustration.
  100. Munich: The Edge of War
    An ingenious, elegant counterfactual drama.
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