The Guardian's Scores

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For 6,573 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 2.3 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: 2,491 out of 6573
  2. Mixed: 3,763 out of 6573
  3. Negative: 319 out of 6573
6573 movie reviews
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  1. The Djinn
    Charbonier and Powell like moving through the apartment in Steadicam but this results in a soupy style that seeks to cover for the lack of positional imagination and rigour in the script.
  2. I Carry You with Me
    Revolving around a tender true love story, this first narrative feature from seasoned documentary director Heidi Ewing (which won a couple of awards at Sundance) is a fascinating – though at times uneven – blend of film styles.
  3. Encounter
    It all adds up to less than we hoped, though Pearce’s direction is never less than confident.
  4. The Electrical Life of Louis Wain
    Director Will Sharpe is a potent talent whose early movies Black Pond and The Darkest Universe I loved – but this is a strained film, overwhelmed with self-consciousness at its own unearned period-biopic prestige.
  5. Benediction
    Benediction is not an easy experience and some of the caustic, brittle dialogue scenes with Sassoon’s celebrity acquaintances are grating – yet deliberately so. The sadness is overwhelming.
  6. Hellraiser: Judgment
    Where the first few Hellraisers had an interesting if somewhat icky erotic tang to them – alluding to S&M/fetish culture as much as horror, and featuring female protagonists – Judgment is less about desire than just straight-up misogyny and gory, gross-out money shots.
  7. The Lost Daughter
    I’m not convinced, on balance, that Gyllenhaal’s delicious drama is finally much more than a storm in a teacup. But what a cup, what a storm. When Hurricane Colman blows in from the sea, be sure your roof’s in good shape and that all the windows are fastened.
  8. The Paper Tigers
    Tran adroitly layers the fight sequences, filmed with fluidity and at least substantially performed by the main actors themselves, between frothy layers of blokey banter.
  9. The Mad Women's Ball
    Contrived and possibly overheated though the film might be at times, there is real storytelling gusto to it, and Laurent punches it across with relish.
  10. The Eyes of Tammy Faye
    The Eyes of Tammy Faye’s focus might be all over the place, but our eyes remain trained directly on Chastain.
  11. Il Buco
    It’s not quite a documentary, yet nor is it exactly a narrative feature. It lives alone; the cinematic equivalent of a hermit on a mountaintop.
  12. The Starling
    Every implausible scene, every unconvincing character, every contrived dollop of symbolism, every toe-curlingly misjudged and unearned emotional climax seems as if it has been concocted in some secret bio-warfare lab for assaulting your mind with pure, toxic nonsense.
  13. Happening
    Adapted from Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical novel, the film plays its private trauma as a harrowing thriller, and showcases a superb performance from Anamaria Vartolomei as Anne Duchesne, the agonised student in the spotlight.
  14. The Wonderful: Stories from the Space Station
    This film is a capable, wholesome tribute to a project that is about as warm and fuzzy as space travel gets.
  15. The Last Duel
    An all-star cast and some showstoppingly horrible hair can’t save Ridley Scott’s medieval epic.
  16. The Guilty
    Perhaps to overcompensate for the lack of conventionally opened-out dramatic action, there is some big closeup acting from Gyllenhaal, but it’s a well-made and watchable picture of a man in the secular confessional box, a sinner forced to occupy the place of a priest.
  17. Malignant
    If only they’d put fuller faith in the true nature of their premise, and leaned all the way into the kookier side of body horror. Instead of trying for the sophistication of Cronenberg and coming up short, they’d be better off embracing the near-absurdity of lower-rent cult objects like Basket Case from the start.
  18. Martyrs Lane
    The film coheres quietly, thanks in no small part to the two excellent child performances.
  19. The Lost Leonardo
    As with all documentaries about art, we are left uneasily wondering if the galleries of the world are full of “wrong attributions” or straight-up fakes.
  20. Kate
    A to-the-point two-hour slab of pulp that slickly glides above a very low bar.
  21. No Man of God
    Both actors contribute knife-sharp timing and the kind of intensity needed to make this essentially two-man setup work.
  22. Herself
    There’s a strong basis of originality here, and the warmth and good nature of the movie carries it along.
  23. Respect
    In the leading role as the queen of soul, Jennifer Hudson comports herself as well as could be hoped considering the material she’s been given, which demands that she reinvigorate a rote character arc with her own passions.
  24. Yakuza Princess
    It’s been compiled with enthusiasm, flashes of skill, and a certain devil-may-care cheek – an infusion of newish blood for a Brazilian film industry that’s been badly drained in recent years.
  25. The Voyeurs
    Mohan handles his audience with care, diligence, attentiveness, creativity, smoldering passion – the mind positively swims with sexual metaphors. That’s the headspace in which this film leaves us: a well-made gutter we haven’t had the chance to visit for far too long.
  26. Halloween Kills
    Forty years after John Carpenter made the defining slasher movie, director David Gordon Green has made a creditable stab, as it were, at reanimating the title.
  27. From the Vine
    An Italian-American man in late middle age rejects the rat race and embarks on a voyage of self-discovery and winemaking in this lifelessly unfunny comedy.
  28. Copilot
    Anne Zohra Berrached’s film is ambitious and interestingly intended, but naive and flawed, with a fundamental problem, which is right up there in the title.
  29. Sweet Thing
    This small, delicate, late-blooming film is quite lovely, and a throwback to the 1990s/2000s craze for semi-improvised, rough and ready indie film-making.
  30. Sundown
    It’s pitiless and pitch-perfect, an existential tour-de-force with shades of Camus’s The Outsider.
  31. Wife of a Spy
    There is sweep and confidence in this movie
  32. Boiling Point
    The explosively potent Graham does deliver a colossal, intimate ending, acted with complete and affecting sincerity. He has presence, potency and force.
  33. Wildfire
    It’s a potent drama – and a melancholy reminder of the talent that Irish cinema and TV lost in McGuigan
  34. Last Night in Soho
    British writer-director Edgar Wright takes a grab-bag of 1960s ingredients, paints them up and makes them dance to his tune. His film is thoroughly silly and stupidly enjoyable.
  35. Spencer
    Kristen Stewart proves entirely compelling in the title role. She gives an awkward and mannered performance as Diana, and this is entirely as it should be when one considers that Diana gave an awkward and mannered performance herself, garnishing her inbred posh hauteur with studied coquettish asides.
  36. Dune: Part One
    Denis Villenueve’s slow-burn space opera fuses the arthouse and the multiplex to create an epic of otherworldly brilliance.
  37. Anthropocene: The Human Epoch
    It purports to be a “cinematic meditation” on the havoc humans have wreaked on the environment, yet the style-over-substance approach reduces these eco-conscious contemplations to a mere exercise in aesthetics, without any social or political context.
  38. The Card Counter
    The central relationships can be a little schematic, while the plot slaloms in and out of plausibility. Still, the cast keeps it honest and there is much to relish in the film’s moody, meditative intensity.
  39. The Hand of God
    The Hand of God, no surprise, is Sorrentino’s most nakedly personal film to date, almost to a fault in the way it jettisons the cool distance of The Great Beauty or Il Divo in favour of a sweaty, close-up evocation of youth. It’s a picture only Sorrentino could make. But that doesn’t necessarily make him the safest pair of hands.
  40. Enforcement
    There are plenty of heart-pumping moments, plus a fair few false notes, a couple of implausible coincidences and some exposition-y dialogue spelling out the film’s message, which is about how the two sides see each other.
  41. Misha and the Wolves
    It’s propulsively watchable if a tad light on reflection. And you may feel hoodwinked by one late reveal.
  42. Here Today
    Any movie that helps us to talk about dementia is to be welcomed, and they are becoming more commonplace. But the pure treacliness of Here Today is very dispiriting and there are some tonal missteps.
  43. 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.
  44. Parallel Mothers
    Let nobody fault Almodóvar’s ambition here. If this finally lacks the polished sweep and completeness of Pain and Glory, his previous feature, it compensates with an air of fraught intimacy and throws out a wealth of ideas, leaving some tantalising loose ends to be picked up and examined.
  45. Cinderella
    Writer-director Kay Cannon’s new Cinderella isn’t bad, and Camila Cabello makes a rather personable lead, carrying off some of the movie’s generous helping of funny lines.
  46. The Last Bus
    Try as I might, I couldn’t make friends with this weirdly unreal and sentimental Britmovie in the last-journey-with-someone’s-ashes genre. But it is certainly acted with commitment and integrity by Timothy Spall.
  47. Deception
    A film full of people smiling knowingly and laughing delightedly at each other’s not-especially-funny-or-interesting remarks, and it’s all the more insufferable for things the film gets fundamentally and structurally wrong.
  48. Ellie & Abbie (& Ellie's Dead Aunt)
    Ellie & Abbie celebrates queer love – romantic, familial, and intergenerational – in all its distinction. It’s nice, it’s different, and it’s delightful.
  49. Demonic
    The connective circuitry is too identikit for Demonic to be especially distinctive.
  50. The Nest
    This is a film that swerves away from categorisation. It’s an 80-set picture that wears its period locations and its musical references lightly. It’s a city trader film where the main bad guy doesn’t do coke. And it’s a scary movie whose disturbing supernatural interludes happen almost incidentally, a sideshow to the emotional collapse.
  51. Vacation Friends
    The base ingredients are here – a charming, comically adept cast, a fun culture clash set-up, idyllic scenery! – but they’re carelessly tossed together rather than combined with any thought, care or even slickness.
  52. He's All That
    It’s the same feeling, really, as watching a bunch of straight TikToks. While Rae offers flashes of promise, especially when she pops her genuinely winning smile, she doesn’t make the case for TikTok-to-film-stardom here. The chemistry between her and Buchanan is stilted, at best.
  53. The Macaluso Sisters
    The movie has a streak of sentimentality amid its melancholy and a certain formal theatricality: director Emma Dante has adapted the movie from her own stage play, but has opened it out very plausibly and cinematically.
  54. Who You Think I Am
    Binoche’s performance and the movie are elegant, ingenious and sexy.
  55. Surge
    Karia is a smart film-maker and this is a valuable beginning.
  56. Candyman
    This film is a very tasty confection of satire and scorn.
  57. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
    It’s an entertaining romp, although the formulaic quality is becoming a little obvious.
  58. Last Man Standing: Suge Knight and the Murders of Biggie & Tupac
    Here it seems that Death Row Records was simply a criminal organisation, of which rap music was a byproduct. The talent it somehow nurtured in this way looks even more tragically fragile.
  59. Bellbottom
    BellBottom always feels more movie than propaganda – a mission undertaken to offer audiences a good time after the longest and worst time.
  60. Sweet Girl
    Thinly etched topicality only gets the film so far (the script is very “I read an article once”) and when the action mechanics kick into gear, it’s yet more of the same with very little to distinguish it from the pack.
  61. Sabaya
    The first 20 minutes of Hogir Hirori’s extraordinary documentary has the beat of a gripping thriller, full of hushed voices, car chases, and the terrifying sounds of gunfight.
  62. Jakob's Wife
    Crampton and Fessenden’s easy, credible chemistry keeps up a steady baseline of bickering banter that’s charming throughout. The film could have been a bit more audacious about tweaking Christian pieties, but you can’t have everything.
  63. Reminiscence
    The reminders of Inception become so distracting that the film starts to border on pastiche. ... It’s overwhelming, even suffocating at times, which is a shame because there are elements here that work independently, without the need for the Nolan playbook to be so obsessively followed.
  64. The Night House
    There are enough crafty surprises buried within The Night House to just about outweigh the elements that don’t work quite as well, mainly because it’s all delivered with such fiery conviction by Hall. The house might be built on shaky foundations but its inhabitant is utterly unshakable.
  65. People Just Do Nothing: Big in Japan
    What really redeems the film are the brilliantly observed characters: these are archetypes of modern Britain that nobody really nailed before. Created by the principal actors themselves, they are generally portrayed with affection rather than condescension, and performed so convincingly that a newcomer might well believe they were real people.
  66. Beckett
    Like Beckett trying to escape his pursuers, it’s a scrappy little film but one worth keeping up with.
  67. The Fever
    The Fever is a calm and quiet and subtle film, a little inert perhaps, but deeply engaged with the hidden lives of Brazil’s indigenous people. There is poetry in it.
  68. Midnight in the Switchgrass
    Even though it’s largely deeply undistinguished work, credit is due to whoever rustled up some great supporting actors for little roles around the edges, such as Welker White as the mother of one murdered kid, and Samiah Alexander, who is a hoot as a punctilious trucking company secretary.
  69. New Order
    On the most basic level, it is a warning of what inequality can cause in the future and what it is effectively causing right now. Perhaps there is something nihilistic here, but New Order very effectively persuades you that a real-life revolution might well be every bit as ugly, horrifying and un-Hollywood as this shows – and that it is on the way.
  70. 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.
  71. WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn
    Jed Rothstein’s very entertaining documentary is another horror story from the tulip-feverish world of tech startups.
  72. Don't Breathe 2
    Don’t Breathe 2 is not only struggling for air but it’s struggling for purpose and meaning and hopefully this weekend, audiences too.
  73. Bleed with Me
    Moses’ story circumnavigates a relationship between two women, one that is charged with an intensity that’s more than platonic but less than erotic, and inflected by an unequal power distribution.
  74. Free Guy
    Free Guy isn’t going to have many MA theses written about it, but it has entertainment value.
  75. Zola
    Now this has been turned into a very entertaining lowlife crime comedy from director and co-writer Janicza Bravo, a film that preserves the fishy flavour of the online original – if perhaps only semi-intentionally – and has interesting things to say about the exhaustingly performative and self-promotional world of social media.
  76. Vivo
    The eye-popping gloss of Vivo will probably lure in impressive numbers for Netflix (the animation itself is generic but impressive) but in a genre that promises so much magic, the spell cast by Miranda and co is a brief one.
  77. The Sparks Brothers
    It is simultaneously exasperating and magnificent that he shows no interest whatever in asking the Mael brothers anything about their personal, emotional or romantic lives.
  78. Settlers
    Settlers isn’t perfect: some of the storytelling beats aren’t hit as clearly as they could have been. But it’s a quietly impressive piece of work.
  79. Spirit Untamed
    It’s a sweet, undemanding film that, despite the title, is tamer than a sedated bunny. That said, the four-year-old I watched with spontaneously yelped “this is the best!” 20 minutes in. So really, what do I know?
  80. The Suicide Squad
    Not everything works here, but the sheer crazy confidence-through-chaos of the Suicide Squad and their bizarrely dysfunctional MO makes for a mighty spectacle.
  81. The Most Beautiful Boy in the World
    It is a desperately unhappy story, sympathetically told by film-makers Kristina Lindström and Kristian Petri.
  82. Jungle Cruise
    The spark that was there in the opening section disappears and the film splutters out into something directionless and derivative and dull.
  83. Out of Death
    The film squanders one or two promising plot ideas, and winds up making a hamfisted paean of praise to the idea of “open carry” gun ownership.
  84. The Offering
    It’s a shame that Durall doesn’t find his torrid and sophisticated story the visual register it deserves, leaving The Offering with a humdrum televisual ambience that’s a bit unsatisfying.
  85. The True Don Quixote
    A whimsical, good-natured romp, sure, but one that’s only mildly amusing.
  86. The Garden Left Behind
    It’s not reasonable to ask that the film keeps Tina safe, but a sense from the start that things might end badly for her made me wince a little even during the lovely, authentic-feeling scenes of her life.
  87. Man Under Table
    Money can’t buy you good comic instincts, inventiveness or a sense of playful whimsy, but, fortunately, Taylor and his handful of collaborators have all that for free.
  88. The Boy Behind the Door
    In the end this is a fundamentally genre-subservient film, staying within the safe lines that absolves it from getting close to the true horrors it hints at.
  89. The Green Knight
    David Lowery’s complex, visually sumptuous and uncommercial tale of Arthurian legend revels in upending expectations.
  90. Off the Rails
    The net effect of Debbie Harry popping up at 10-second intervals on the soundtrack to top up levels of ironic sass is to highlight how that quality is in generally short supply in the script.
  91. The World to Come
    Fastvold’s film is distinctive in that she shows us how physical constraint and violence are part of the fabric of living.
  92. Val
    It’s pure hagiography and taken as that, it’s skillfully assembled, even stylishly so at times, and Kilmer’s insights into his art skirt just the right side of Inside the Actors Studio indulgence but as a portrait of a star known for his rough edges, it’s all far too smooth.
  93. Riders of Justice
    There are action thrills, to be sure, but they are folded into what becomes a sort of group therapy session on the psychology of grief, guilt, vengeance, chance and coincidence. Even more blessedly, it’s often hilarious.
  94. Bye Bye Morons
    Some French films, like wine, don’t travel. This one turns to vinegar.
  95. Last Letter from Your Lover
    The central romance here is, on paper, a love for the ages, a story of all-consuming passion. It’s not quite so in practice.
  96. Old
    The elements of silliness and deadly seriousness are nicely balanced and although I wasn’t absolutely sure about the ending, which has maybe too neat a bow tied on it, this is just very enjoyable and I was on the edge of my seat, not knowing whether to flinch or laugh, though I did both.
  97. Jolt
    Altogether, this is flyweight fun.
  98. Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins
    The script’s attempts at wisdom amount to little more than dime-store platitudes, and the internecine turmoil of the Arashikage clan never comes close to anything like emotional heft.
  99. Kandisha
    The closing stretch – including an exorcism in an imam’s incantation-lined apartment (interior design goals!) – is brutally effective. By this time, Aisha Kandisha is a towering succubus; postcolonial theory stomping in on a pair of terrifying goat’s hooves.
  100. Luz: The Flower of Evil
    The film is depressingly thin on the women; often it seems more interested in arranging them in arty tableaux than investigating the way that isolation has shaped their personalities and how they see the world.
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