The Guardian's Scores

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For 6,581 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: 2,495 out of 6581
  2. Mixed: 3,767 out of 6581
  3. Negative: 319 out of 6581
6581 movie reviews
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  1. The LEGO Ninjago Movie
    There’s a lingering sense of familiarity that persists and what felt fresh in the first film, and tweaked in The Lego Batman Movie, is at risk of feeling tired here.
  2. Still the Water
    Kawase's film is sometimes beautiful and moving but I couldn't help occasionally finding it a little contrived and self-conscious.
  3. Coming Home
    A sweet yet suspect romantic drama.
  4. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water
    It isn’t just the sheer density of jokes that is impressive, but the diversity.
  5. Jealousy
    It's certainly atmospheric and cool in a new-New Wave way, but really, what's the point?
  6. Joy
    David O Russell’s Joy is an intriguing but weirdly subdued and stylised film.
  7. Straight Outta Compton
    The first half of Straight Outta Compton, F Gary Gray’s two-and-a-half hour opus about the birth of west coast gangsta rap, is bursting with energy, exuberance and inspiration. The second half is immobilised by bloat and sanctification.
  8. Selma
    Unimpeachably important, ambitious in its scope and handsomely presented, it has all the hallmarks of a trophy winner, for better and worse.
  9. Beyond the Edge
    It's a testament to the film-making that, despite the fact that we know the outcome, there's a great sense of relief when they finally reach the summit.
  10. Me and You
    A slight but engaging two-hander.
  11. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus
    Da Sweet Blood of Jesus isn't entirely successful – and certainly offers few new insights into the nature of addiction – but it remains a welcome change of pace.
  12. Honour
    It's as if the film-makers felt they couldn't deliver the didactic lesson unless they wrapped this up in pulpy, thriller trappings.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    War Story
    Jackson is wise to keep Keener's pushy, desperate Lee in centre focus.
  14. Demonic
    Fashioned out of well-worn, if not hackneyed, horror tropes, Demonic is no meta-level deconstruction of the genre, but it’s a more than competent, fugue-like manipulation that freshens familiar components with a tricky structure.
  15. Clifford the Big Red Dog
    It’s watchable and even occasionally amusing.
  16. The Martian
    A wide-eyed tribute to human ingenuity that packs enough snark to pull itself out of the black hole of earnestness, even if its fuel runs out partway through.
  17. Paper Towns
    The best parts of Paper Towns are also the best part of being young – just hanging out doing nothing with friends who know you too well to allow for any lies.
  18. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them
    While Benson treats his characters with care and respect, his depiction of grief can feel studied and not felt.
  19. Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods
    This has cosmic charm aplenty.
  20. Ben-Hur
    Surprisingly, many of Bekmambetov’s updates work well.
  21. American Sniper
    [Clint Eastwood's] gripping, incurious film gives the impression of having not so much been directed as dictated. It stares so fixedly down the rifle sight that it is finally guilty of tunnel vision.
  22. The Age of Adaline
    Age of Adaline, which starts off looking like a frothy series of excuses to put Blake Lively in some fabulously timeless gowns, ends up an emotional and even bold chamber drama. Its ending is ludicrous, but also perfect, and I’d be lying if I didn’t get a little choked up.
  23. Krampus
    It's nowhere near as good as many of the films it so wants to be positioned next to, but it's nasty enough to leave an impression.
  24. The Croods: A New Age
    There is just too much going on, and the movie doubles in hecticness with every minute that passes, which may have you rummaging around for a couple of paracetamol.
  25. Men, Women & Children
    A huge improvement on the muddled melodrama of Labor Day, Men, Women and Children is still a flawed Jason Reitman film. Its scope is too big, his ambitions too high.
  26. McFarland USA
    There’s more to this movie than sweeping music and celebrating in slow motion. It all stems from Costner’s remarkable, taciturn performance as Coach White.
  27. Lilting
    This debut feature from the Cambodian-born, London-based film-maker Hong Khaou is heartfelt, intelligent film-making on a shoestring budget.
  28. The Inbetweeners 2
    Yes, the franchise's appeal lies in watching very ordinary boys making prats of themselves – but couldn't the vehicles transporting them to the wider world display slightly more ambition?
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Patema Inverted
    The animation is intricate and beautiful but the narrative is clunky and heavy-handed in places.
  30. Good Kill
    Niccol creates an atmosphere that is airless and dull, an unusual tone for a modern war film, but one that fits the subject matter perfectly.
  31. Goodnight Mommy
    Perhaps a more unassuming genre director would have tightened this movie’s cables a little, so that it had more tension and less revulsion. At all events, it delivers some nasty shocks.
  32. A Little Chaos
    It has to be said, the performances are excellent. Winslet manages emotional honesty within anachronistic confines, and Schoenaerts escapes with dignity.
  33. Madame Bovary
    The presence of Sophie Barthes behind the camera does not amplify sympathy for our heroine. Rather, the opposite: if anything Barthes seems less in her allure, less tolerant of her tiffs, full-throttle with the vanity and the selfishness.
  34. Pasolini
    It’s an intriguing, startlingly restrained and even cerebral piece of work from Ferrara, an unimpeachably serious homage, with an assured lead performance from Willem Dafoe.
  35. The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death
    This inevitably doesn’t have the charge of the first story, but it is still interestingly weird and dreamlike, and quite disturbing. A commercially driven sequel, sure – but still effective.
  36. The Hole
    With playful touches of Spielberg, Shyamalan and even Hitchcock, veteran director Joe Dante has confected a neat little scary movie, not explicitly violent, but pretty scary nonetheless.
  37. Advanced Style
    It doesn't reflect too deeply on age and aging, doesn't dwell on the sadder and complicated side of things, and perhaps gravitates towards self-conscious eccentricity, but it's affectionate and watchable enough.
  38. Haider
    It makes the text feel newly alive, bristly, radical. A palpable hit, in any language.
  39. The Water Diviner
    A handsome crowdpleaser with a big heart.
  40. The Way He Looks
    You can’t help feeling you’ve seen variations on this coming-out story too many times (which applies to the gay theme as much as the disability one), and everyone is just a little too nice to be true, even the bullies.
  41. Bad Turn Worse
    There is talent and ambition here: the film has style, mood, references – and, inevitably, a great opening and credit sequence – though it's short on substance.
  42. The Night Before
    Surprisingly, for a movie this ephemeral, the closing sequences, which consist of flashbacks and confrontations, are actually quite touching.
  43. Jem and the Holograms
    This movie sure means well, and it’s just entertaining enough to (slightly) slip off the shackles of the great cultural conformity factory it ultimately represents.
  44. Moana
    Its cultural setting is fresh; its storytelling, less so. It navigates the reefs but it doesn’t discover a whole new world.
  45. Suicide Squad
    It’s a clotted and delirious film, with flashes of preposterous, operatic silliness. But it doesn’t have much room to breathe; there are some dull bits, and Leto’s Joker suffers in comparison with the late Heath Ledger.
  46. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
    It’s fun, though GOTG2 doesn’t have the same sense of weird urgency and point that the first film had. They’re still guarding, although the galaxy never seems in much danger.
  47. Shazam!
    It’s a film in need of a tighter edit with a script in need of a sharper polish, an imperfect franchise-launcher that nonetheless represents significant progress for DC.
  48. Private Peaceful
    Private Peaceful is a small-scale story in essence, which works efficiently on the non-epic scale in which it's presented.
  49. Thor: Ragnarok
    Comic book movies have spent a long time striving to be taken as serious, grown-up entertainment but Thor: Ragnarok is almost an admission that you can’t play this material straight. This is probably the wisest strategy with Thor.
  50. Ex Machina
    With a sly dreaminess, Vikander steals the movie from the two males.
  51. Captain Marvel
    I wanted a clearer, more central story for Captain Marvel’s emergence on to the stage, and in subsequent films – if she isn’t simply to get lost in the ensemble mix – there should more of Larson’s own wit and style and, indeed, plausible mastery of martial arts. In any case, Captain Marvel is an entertaining new part of the saga.
  52. We Are the Giant
    Greg Barker’s documentary is a heartfelt, if historically disjointed, tribute to individuals who took part in the Arab Spring.
  53. Zootopia
    It’s somewhat heavy material for a film aimed at children, but perhaps very necessary in an age where a beer-stained uncle might have ruined Thanksgiving wearing a Make America Great Again baseball cap.
  54. Son of a Gun
    McGregor, who is having a bit of comeback moment right now, is kind of great as the ruthless antihero, and the action set pieces have plenty of fizz.
  55. Predestination
    Even if Predestination is distinctive chiefly for Snook’s excellent performance, it’s still a tricksy story well-handled by its directors. It doesn’t offer any new twists on the genre, but it is clever enough to leave you satisfied that you don’t want the time back.
  56. She's Beautiful When She's Angry
    Despite the desultory nature of the film, it is sure to hammer home some key points.
  57. Human Capital
    It may be no more than the sum of its parts, and the slightly soap-operatic finale doesn’t entirely distract your attention from untied plot threads, but there is some great fancy footwork in the narrative and fierce satirical strokes that recall Tom Wolfe.
  58. Difret
    It’s tempting to give this more of a pass because the subject is so noble and so few African-made films make it over here, but it has to be admitted that the some of the acting is a bit ropey and the script is a little too on-the-nose at times.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Great Wall
    It won’t be remembered as Zhang’s best film, but the director’s artistic touch is on display in his long panoramic sweeps and artful use of colour. Simultaneously futuristic and historic, the visual spectacle carries the film.
  60. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip
    The Road Chip isn't exactly what I'd call a good film and has almost nothing going on in the visual department, but for those saddled with kids for an afternoon, you could do a lot worse.
  61. Star Trek Beyond
    This new movie could arguably have given Elba more to do, earlier in the picture, but it is the inter-relationship of the Enterprise’s crew which is the real source of drama. An entertaining adventure.
  62. The Greatest Showman
    It’s not a film to break moulds or test boundaries. Yet Jackman’s real charm will carry you along.
  63. The Mountain Between Us
    As an unpretentious and unashamedly mainstream romantic adventure, it’s a solidly entertaining diversion, old-fashioned in its no-frills brand of storytelling and direction.
  64. Jason Bourne
    The Snowden/social media plotline of this film does a bit to make Bourne more relevant. But the ingredients are basically the same.
  65. Effie Gray
    It’s a little hammy and soapy, with an occasional Pythonesque sense of its own importance but this film, directed by Richard Laxton, is performed with gusto.
  66. Ghost in the Shell
    It’s a spectacular movie, watchable in its way, but one which – quite apart from the “whitewashing” debate – sacrifices that aspect from the original which over 20 years has won it its hardcore of fans: the opaque cult mystery, which this film is determined to solve and to develop into a resolution, closed yet franchisable.
  67. Queen and Country
    Queen and Country is an entertaining and sympathetic guide to a lost world: a rite of passage that Britain was to find it could do without.
  68. Rings
    This offshoot is essentially a well-produced, easily accessed B-movie. Still, it wouldn’t kill you to watch it, and it does more than expected to reinvent its particular wheel.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Stockholm, Pennsylvania
    The premise is ripped from the headlines; the treatment is delicate and astute. Then we take a turn. Stockholm, Pennsylvania veers into movie-of-the-week melodrama and never finds its way safely back to shore.
  70. Christmas, Again
    Poekel’s style is far too authentic-indie and unaffected to get slushy or sentimental about Christmas; through his lens Christmas tree lights blink like police lights. But in its own low-key way, he pitches his film just right for a little squeeze of festive warmth.
  71. Entertainment
    The on-stage moments of Entertainment are revelatory but, unfortunately, some of the in-between meat of the film doesn’t quite connect.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Grandma
    Grandma is fun and brisk, though sometimes the encounters seem a little pat, and Elle’s grief about the death of her partner a year earlier is way overdone.
  73. How to Change the World
    There’s no missing the polemical points being made or doubting the film is meant to inspire further action, but even hardened whale-eating oil oligarchs are likely to be charmed by the idealism and smarts of these audacious activists.
  74. I Smile Back
    This is a case of good acting saving a movie from its own poor choices.
  75. Knock Knock
    Little here is going to challenge the opinion of Roth as a bratty provocateur, but it’s still fun to experience a latter-day thriller pushing so many buttons in broadly the right order: if Knock Knock’s no more than a sick joke, it’s been very shrewdly constructed.
  76. What Happened, Miss Simone?
    Clearly there is entertainment value in this documentary, but it’s very much of a “behind the music” calibre.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    People Places Things
    Clement’s unique comic timing and his character’s wonderful artwork add to this film, whose aim is to communicate how relationships work, rather than to create fake movie magic.
  78. Steve Jobs
    Sorkin’s heavily heightened sense of drama works best when the stakes are equally aligned but, despite the film constantly informing you of just how incredibly important everything all is, it’s disappointingly difficult to truly care about what’s taking place.
  79. Creed
    The script may feature numerous wobbly passages in which everyone eerily states precisely what they are thinking (an unfortunate tradition that runs throughout the series) but if anyone can sell it, it’s Stallone and Jordan.
  80. Mr. Holmes
    It is an elegant if slight piece of work, touching and intriguing by turns, but hampered structurally in that it relies on two separate flashback sections.
  81. Queen of Earth
    It’s a one-note drama of simmering resentment. That note is sustained with impressive conviction.
  82. Diary of a Chambermaid
    Léa Seydoux, in all her haughty and sullen sexiness, dominates this well-crafted piece of suspenseful if curiously pointless hokum from French director Benoît Jacquot; it leads its audience up an elegantly tended garden path to nowhere in particular.
  83. Hot Pursuit
    I can’t believe just how dumb Hot Pursuit is. Moreover I can’t believe just how much I laughed.
  84. Catch Me Daddy
    Opinions will divide as to the film's final moments: some may find it all too much, and the film does not quite digest everything it wants to encompass. But there an energy and boldness in the debut work from Daniel Wolfe.
  85. The Mafia Only Kills in Summer
    It’s a winning and likable film.
  86. Hyena
    The movie moves on to some grandstanding moments, before finally painting itself into a corner. The ending is frustrating: it runs out of ideas before the final credits. But Johnson packs an almighty punch.
  87. Beauty and the Beast
    The whole movie is lit in that fascinatingly artificial honeyglow light, and it runs smoothly on rails – the kind of rails that bring in and out the stage sets for the lucrative Broadway touring version.
  88. Trumbo
    [Jay Roach] wants the film to be fun, while the story is serious. It’s a good idea and an admirable intention. But it does suffer the odd wobble.
  89. Central Intelligence
    The result, while instantly forgettable, is a fundamentally pleasurable experience.
  90. 52 Tuesdays
    The use of video diaries and the expository speeches are painfully on the nose at times, and dramatically spins a bit out of control by the end, while some of the acting is patchy. Still, one can’t but fail to be impressed with the film’s commitment to investigate its issues with subtlety and frankness.
  91. Kung Fu Killer
    The fight scenes are terrific, but the haphazard plotting, off-the-peg characterisations and drippy music elsewhere lack flavour.
  92. Suffragette
    Director Sarah Gavron does well to galvanize her story with a degree of urgency: the result of swift, assured camerawork and a brilliantly understated performance by Carey Mulligan.
  93. Zoolander 2
    There are always some laughs to be had here, and Ben Stiller’s couture legend now has an endearingly muppety look.
  94. Shut In
    It’s low-key and modestly budgeted, but perfectly well made, and Watts maintains a cool and steady presence.
  95. Dior and I
    The spectacle of highly competent professionals going about their work is always absorbing, and Simons is an interesting man: reticent, calm, shy, intensely focused but apparently never losing control until the end.
  96. The Magnificent Seven
    There’s a fine line between a slowburn and dull, and this Magnificent Seven frequently finds itself on the wrong side.
  97. Robot Overlords
    The film is never less than amiable, and rather more spirited and nonconformist than the Transformers movies.
  98. I'll See You in My Dreams
    The three leads draw you in. The pace gives these actors time to breathe, show nuance and make their characters human.
  99. The Secret Life of Pets
    It’s not ground-breaking, but there are laughs, and it is a good audience movie.
  100. The Great Museum
    A pleasing, high-minded film; also something of a palate-cleanser.
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