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. Summer of 85
    Unlike the woozy love at its centre, Summer of 85 doesn’t haunt in the way that it should. It fades when it should burn.
  2. Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful
    A fascinating film.
  3. Honest Thief
    This film’s real propulsive, emotional motor is nothing to do with a woman, but rather the age-old entanglement of lawman and outlaw.
  4. Rams
    Rams is a lovely, even-tempered drama about men and rural life, gentle but firm of spirit, with a down-to-earth pith and a way of entertainingly and unpretentiously exploring potentially difficult subjects such as masculinity.
  5. The Craft: Legacy
    There’s ultimately too much in the film’s rushed 94-minute runtime for anything to really breathe.
  6. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
    The routine is more familiar and the semi-staged stunts – which faintly undermine the credibility of all but the most spectacular moments – are more conspicuous. But there are still some real laughs and pointed political moments on the subject of antisemitism and online Holocaust denial (though I was disappointed to see the film go along with a dodgy “Karen” gag).
  7. The Climb
    Tragedy and slapstick run through the film and it is very funny.
  8. The Witches
    The spell does not get cast.
  9. Blood and Money
    Cinematographer turned director John Barr serves up a generic thriller: the title lets you know that what you’ve got on the label is what you’ve got in the can.
  10. Time
    The point of the film is Sibil’s decades-long ordeal and she emerges with heroic and compelling dignity.
  11. I'm Your Woman
    Even when it’s coasting, the cast still works hard to sell what they’re given and it remains visually handsome until the very end, an immersive and slickly captured last-act car chase proving a standout.
  12. The Devil Has a Name
    Any poignance Stern’s David-v-Goliath fight might have possessed is undermined by a flowery script that’s over-fond of quick comebacks. To hear Bosworth curl her lips around some of these zingers though, almost makes for a fair trade-off.
  13. White Riot
    An excellent brief documentary about a heroic grassroots political movement whose importance reveals itself more clearly in retrospect with every year that passes.
  14. Over the Moon
    It’s all very spectacular – but nothing much happens in the second half, and back on Earth, the movie’s message about loss and the power of letting go feels over-sweetened, more Disney than Disney.
  15. Rebecca
    Rebecca 2.0 is sometimes quite enjoyable in all its silliness and campiness and brassiness, and in some ways, gets closer to the narrative shape of the original novel than the Hitchcock film, which rather truncated the third act.
  16. Under the Shadow
    It is elegantly shot and very well acted. A definite frisson.
  17. 2067
    If all the money in the world is no guarantee of a good story, all the technical innovations – the dressing of sets, the creation of effects, the careful management of what is in and out of the frame – is of course no guarantee of one either.
  18. The Kid Detective
    In writer-director Evan Morgan’s unusual neo-noir The Kid Detective, it’s not just a suspect or a motive that’s a red herring, it’s an entire genre, a strange rug-pull of a movie that starts in the middle of the road before ending up off a cliff, in a way that both works and doesn’t, a fascinating gambit nonetheless.
  19. French Exit
    A defiantly unbelievable and drably directed heap of quirk that’s as overstuffed as it is underpowered, a head-scratching failure for all involved.
  20. Soul
    It’s a deeply sweet, happy, gentle film.
  21. Nocturne
    Nocturne is simpatico with a protagonist who, in lieu of greatness, decides to steal – then play it like she owns it. An elegant, forking finale proves as much.
  22. Evil Eye
    With scant visual bite, perhaps it should’ve been called Evil Ear.
  23. Sylvie's Love
    It’s a film that both looks and feels the part, a handsomely made love story that’s easy to fall in love with.
  24. Kajillionaire
    I have taken some time to acclimatise to her distinctive, affectlessly sentimental film-making, but it is growing on me, and Kajillionaire is intriguing.
  25. I Am Woman
    Each scene needed a jolt of music or energy that just wasn’t there.
  26. The War with Grandpa
    It’s a very minor victory to report that rather than being bad, it’s merely bland, an adequate milquetoast time-waster for a very young and very undiscerning audience.
  27. South Terminal
    An intriguing, somewhat abstract drama about a country descending into chaos.
  28. Beyond The Visible: Hilma af Klint
    This documentary makes a pretty convincing case for the admission of the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint into the boys’ club of abstract art, alongside Kandinsky, Mondrian et al.
  29. Saint Maud
    The film punches out its warped drama with amazing gusto and Clark is lethally assured: not Saint Maud really, but Saint Joan, a spectacular horror heroine.
  30. Dirt Music
    Dirt Music eventually arrives at a deep, thought-provoking moment – but it takes the entire film to get there.
  31. Totally Under Control
    All said, there are less educational ways to raise your blood pressure for two hours, and the masochistic Twitter-refreshers nourishing themselves with a steady drip of maddening headlines will have plenty to fume over. Starting with the sniggering title, this torturous rehashing of yesterday’s history all seems to be for them.
  32. Cats & Dogs 3: Paws Unite
    Given how much CGI has come along since 2010, you’d expect a more convincing presentation of moving animals’ lips and eye muscles mimicking human expressions, but clearly the budget didn’t reach much beyond the tea budget for Tenet.
  33. Spontaneous
    This debut feature from writer-director Brian Duffield (best known for his screenplays for Underwater, The Babysitter and Jane Got a Gun) has plenty of gallows humour to leaven the gore and tragedy, and plenty of subtexts swimming under the surface like glittering, metaphorical koi.
  34. David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet
    It is a personal film – and political, too. There is emotion and urgency in that familiar soothing voice.
  35. Black Box
    Without any real stylisation to shake up Nolan’s inner realities beyond bog-standard techno-realism, this sunken place has no strong signature of its own – and little to add to the African American experience.
  36. The Lie
    Sud – with plenty of inexorable tracking shots through the family’s chilly condo – efficiently tightens the screw as the twitchy mother and indulgent father first bicker, then are doomed together by their blood allegiances.
  37. Small Axe: Red, White and Blue
    Boyega carries the film with a compelling authority of his own.
  38. The Forty-Year-Old Version
    This is a very unhurried film (I wondered if it might have been better to lose 20 or so minutes) but it has a distinctive language of its own, and a feel for the city.
  39. 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.
  40. Eternal Beauty
    This is substantial and rewarding.
  41. Rocks
    This film is such a rush of vitality. It rocks.
  42. The Glorias
    Another film might have mined Steinem’s remarkable life for its complications and contradictions, but The Glorias settles for slapdash iconography.
  43. Scare Me
    It works for the most part because of Ruben and Cash and the spiky chemistry they share.
  44. Tesla
    To watch Tesla the film is to admire its ambition while regretting its follies. Much like Tesla the man, perhaps?
  45. Miss Juneteenth
    For anyone who values diverse storytelling, Peoples’ portrait of a hardworking woman on the up is a tale of hopefulness – and a reason to hope in itself.
  46. Capital in the Twenty-First Century
    Justin Pemberton’s documentary, based on the bestselling book by French economist Thomas Piketty, tells us a story no less depressing or gruesomely hypnotic for being so familiar – like observing a slo-mo driverless car crash from the passenger seat.
  47. 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.
  48. The Boys in the Band
    It is all unexpectedly potent, particularly in the absurdity and petulance and pain that Parsons crams into his performance. It’s a strange, compelling dose of unhappiness.
  49. Misbehaviour
    If there is a tonal uncertainty in this comedy, then that’s because there was a tonal uncertainty in the real-life events, and the movie nicely conveys how they were at one and the same time deadly serious and Pythonically silly.
  50. Bird Island
    Slow paced and deploying minimal sound – apart from gentle bursts of voiceover and the sound of wings and planes taking off – this Swiss-set quasi-documentary about a bird sanctuary is relaxing to watch, like one of those machines that plays the sound of waves breaking to help you fall asleep.
  51. The Trial of the Chicago 7
    He [Sorkin] can also become fantastically ponderous, bloated with finger-waggingly self-important liberal patriotism. Sadly, that is the tone with this exasperatingly dull, dramatically inert and faintly misjudged re-creation of the “Chicago Seven” trial in the US, which Sorkin has written and directed.
  52. Becky
    Becky’s crazed kills get more and more gimmicky, and there’s nothing in the script to indicate what has turned her into a pint-sized death-dealer.
  53. Rifkin's Festival
    By Allen’s lamentable recent standards, this fitfully entertaining film could be called adventurous, while the reliably cranky Shawn and a stately, vampish Gershon are clearly having a good time and letting us in on it.
  54. Supernova
    Lovely, heartfelt performances from Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth carry this intimate movie.
  55. Enola Holmes
    It all rattles along amiably enough.
  56. On the Rocks
    There are some cheerfully amusing moments . . . . But really the banter and the elegance needs some substance in the script and it really isn’t here, or not enough of it, and the serious moments seem glazed in a kind of negligent unseriousness.
  57. Joe Bell
    Good Joe Bell is a generous film about an outsider travelling across the country realising the importance of listening and learning from others (as well as his own guilty conscience).
  58. 76 Days
    76 Days is not a hard-hitting documentary about the centre of the Covid-19 pandemic – maybe such a film will be slower to arrive than the vaccine – but it’s a potent human-interest story, and a portrait of a city under siege.
  59. Monday
    All of this film’s various moods – erotic, euphoric, tragic – are unearned and despite what is clearly strenuous effort from the performers themselves, the acting is hammy and undirected.
  60. Small Axe: Lovers Rock
    McQueen’s compositional sense is a marvel; the movie’s period and location is evoked with masterly skill, and the romance is wonderful. What a cure for lockdown depression.
  61. Residue
    Residue is a fleeting and haunting lament for what is lost to gentrification, and other tolls on black life in America. But at the same, it’s exhilarating and monumental, laced with the sensation that we’re discovering a bold and sensitive new voice.
  62. H is for Happiness
    There is much to appreciate in this film; much to like. You don’t just watch it in big bright colours; you remember it in big bright colours too.
  63. I Am Greta
    Despite being a valuable reminder of Thunberg’s idealism and unselfconscious courage, the film doesn’t entirely work.
  64. The Eight Hundred
    With so much intense focus lavished on the action, there’s none to spare for the characters’ emotional lives, and it’s hard to care much about who lives or dies.
  65. The Devil All the Time
    There is something weirdly pointless about it all, and there is a kind of tonal gap where, in another kind of film, the humour might go – which would counterweight the nasty violence. But it sure does pack a punch.
  66. The Truffle Hunters
    A strange, funny, mysterious and rather beautiful film about an activity that’s recherché to say the least.
  67. Mandibles
    Mandibules is a rollicking, rambunctious tequila-dream of a movie.
  68. Limbo
    What a thoroughly wonderful sophomore feature from the British director Ben Sharrock – witty, poignant, marvellously composed and shot, moving and even weirdly gripping.
  69. Bill & Ted Face the Music
    It’s amiably amusing, and Bill and Ted’s Peter Pannish inability to accept the ageing process is enjoyably surreal, with a weird tinge of not-entirely-intentional tragedy.
  70. Concrete Cowboy
    This is an old-fashioned father-son story and none the worse for that, but there is something a little slick and subdued about the way the story is resolved.
  71. Hopper/Welles
    The restored footage is an intriguing relic – an offcut, raw copy. There’s something pleasingly voyeuristic about the experience of being allowed behind the velvet rope to watch these blusterers hold forth, although I expect their charms may be limited to die-hard devotees.
  72. Final Account
    Explicitly, his film shows how a hundred shades of grey combine to make a darkness. Implicitly, it warns that it could well happen again.
  73. Another Round
    The performances are persuasive and watchable, especially Mikkelsen, the guys’ alpha-leader, who ruinously makes being drunk look pretty acceptable until it is too late.
  74. Cuties
    The film and its accusers turn out to be on the same side: Mignonnes attacks the pornification of girls and young women by social media and society in general; it is about the false promise of liberation in this kind of sexualised display. The offending scenes are gruesomely unwatchable – deliberately so.
  75. The Duke
    What a lovely, rousing, finally moving film this is.
  76. Apples
    What prevents Apples from becoming a simple Lanthimos copycat is its comparative kindness and its abiding direction of travel.
  77. And Tomorrow the Entire World
    The tale drifts and falters when I wished it would have hit home with more conviction, but that may be partly the point. The struggle is endless, unwinnable. Everybody is compromised.
  78. The World to Come
    The World to Come is a ravishingly beautiful love story set in 1850s America, with painterly visuals that nod to the work of Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent.
  79. The Roads Not Taken
    Sally Potter’s The Roads Not Taken is a sad, painful, self-conscious vignette of a film with forthright performances; it’s a chamber piece in many ways, but with bold flashback excursions that come close to causing its emotional engine to overheat.
  80. The Painted Bird
    The Painted Bird is a brutal kind of ordeal, but eerie, unearthly and even beautiful sometimes: a bad dream that leaks into waking reality.
  81. Sun Children
    Energetic and heartfelt, tipping towards tragedy, Sun Children crawls through the mud and emerges all the stronger. The quest is a red herring; the real treasure is the film.
  82. Padrenostro
    What can’t be faulted is Noce’s sheer boldness and ambition. If Padrenostro winds up as a bit of a mess, it’s a beautiful mess, a glorious mess.
  83. The Disciple
    I wish that I enjoyed The Disciple as much as I admired it. The film is a labour of love insofar as it feels overthought and overburdened, with all the rough edges planed down.
  84. Nomadland
    Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland is an utterly inspired docu-fictional hybrid, like her previous feature The Rider. It is a gentle, compassionate, questioning film about the American soul.
  85. Ammonite
    It is a love story that is also a fascinating artefact: quixotic, romantic, erotic.
  86. David Byrne’s American Utopia
    There is no moment where Byrne dramatically opens up, either on stage or off, but perhaps that’s not the point. It’s a treat for Byrne fans, and could well make converts.
  87. Unpregnant
    It’s an uneven ride, rocky in places, but it’s one that’s also unquestionably worthwhile, a progressive, witty and timely way of reminding many of us how antiquated women’s healthcare still is while also alerting a younger audience that there’s more to the teen movie than Netflix.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Space Dogs
    It’s hard to shake the feeling that a genuinely arresting documentary was cast adrift somewhere along the line.
  89. I Used to Go Here
    What’s so funny about the film is that it shows how very little divides your early-twentysomething self from your mid-thirtysomething self – you’re never too old to be humiliated.
  90. Hard Kill
    Look beyond the lifelessly choreographed shootouts and you keep catching glimpses of ghosts: those of American industry, yes, but also those of the American action movie, once manufactured with a skill, verve and wit wholly absent from these painfully long 98 minutes.
  91. The Broken Hearts Gallery
    It is something of a letdown: a funny but conventional glossy romcom. But there is no messing with Viswanathan, who is undoubtedly the main attraction.
  92. Sputnik
    A smart and satisfying movie, although the crashy-bashy deafening score is so loud you can probably hear it in space.
  93. She Dies Tomorrow
    It’s not a reassuring film. But it has a chilling brilliance and relevance.
  94. Hope Gap
    The performances are terrific, especially from Bening who adds yet another deeply nuanced study to her gallery of complicated, smart women of a certain age.
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