The Guardian's Scores

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For 6,577 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: 2,494 out of 6577
  2. Mixed: 3,764 out of 6577
  3. Negative: 319 out of 6577
6577 movie reviews
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  1. Happy New Year, Colin Burstead.
    Ben Wheatley’s Happy New Year, Colin Burstead is a hothouse flower of misery, sprouting dozens of resentment-buds under artificially controlled conditions.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cop Car
    The movie culminates in a tense, protracted standoff that keeps the audience on edge for way longer than is comfortable. I mean that as a compliment.
  3. Werewolves Within
    This goofy horror comedy, based on an online game of the same name, just goes to prove that if you have a great cast, smart direction and witty script you can just about get away with murder.
  4. Avengers: Age of Ultron
    It’s all operatically mad, and the city-destroying final confrontation is becoming a bit familiar, but Whedon carries it off with such joy and even a kind of evangelism.
  5. Captain America: The First Avenger
    The movie cleverly spins a meta-fictional "origin" myth for Captain America: explaining that he was in fact a propagandist comic-book superhero before becoming a real one. The final scene of the film, and Captain America's very last line, are rather brilliant – though admittedly less brilliant if their sole purpose is to set up sequels.
  6. Glassland
    Like the emotional equivalent of a massage with a sandpaper loofah, the film leaves you feeling raw and tender, thanks particularly to the knockout performances from the small cast, especially Collette.
  7. Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers
    The casefile remains open, but this considered investigation matches the Panthers' bravura with an organisational flair of its own.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Our New President
    It’ll annoy many with its refusal to take a stance beyond the absurdity of it all, but that lack of easy outrage makes it a true original. An important documentary for our times too, taking us deep into the heart of a bubble far from our own.
  9. Brian and Charles
    It isn’t easy to develop a sketch-length idea into a feature film and not easy to pivot from ironic comedy into dark Straw Dogs-style menace, and then into a sweet-natured happy ending. But Earl, Hayward and Archer have managed it. It’s the bromance of the year.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Boston Strangler
    Harrowing, low-key dramatisation of the serial killer's reign of terror in Boston in the early 1960s. [07 Aug 2004, p.53]
    • The Guardian
  11. The Kitchen
    A worthwhile, engaged film.
  12. Missing
    Sighs at incongruously dumb behaviour and groans at the family soap are eventually drowned out by audible gasps at some of the wild twists, the kind that might not make much sense on reflection but do deliver cattle-prod shocks along the way.
  13. Never Here
    Thoman coolly creates an oppressive atmospheric charge, as well as a deadpan satiric view of a certain kind of chillingly affectless conceptual art. A disquieting and mysterious mirage of a film.
  14. Sausage Party
    Seth Rogen’s naughty food cartoon Sausage Party is, like much of his best work, deceptive packaging.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Imaginary
    The Imaginary may not be a standout in the rich and wide-ranging oeuvre of its makers, but it is a moving and charming testament to the delights of dreaming.
  16. Sunshine on Leith
    A remorselessly rousing attempt to do for the Scottish pub rock twins what Mamma Mia! did for Abba or Tommy for The Who.
  17. The Pass
    The film is a bit stagey sometimes, but ambitious and insightful. Tovey is excellent as he shows someone progressing from innocence to fear and then to loneliness.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dark Star
    It's a smart, cynical look at space travel, treating it as a blue-collar job and not a divine calling as Kubrick and others would have you believe.
  19. The Life Ahead
    Loren still has an imperious address to the camera. I spent much of this film wishing she were allowed to let rip with something more spirited, but it’s a heartfelt performance. Loren has an undiminished screen presence and it’s great to see her with a substantial role.
  20. Peterloo
    Mike Leigh brings an overwhelming simplicity and severity to this historical epic, which begins with rhetoric and ends in violence. There is force, grit and, above all, a sense of purpose; a sense that the story he has to tell is important and real, and that it needs to be heard right now.
  21. Cordelia
    Perhaps this film doesn’t entirely work all the way through, but it is a shard of malevolence that jabs into your skin.
  22. Yossi
    It's a film full of tenderness, resting on a tremendous, sad performance from Knoller.
  23. Alan Partridge
    The genius of Alpha Papa, then, is in remaining faithful to Partridge's small-screen soul while also managing the demands of a big-screen Alan.
  24. Devotion
    Training its crosshair on the ingrained prejudice of the military and the question of how well-meaning white allies can best support its undoing, the film compensates for relatively middling action set pieces with a stolid maturity.
  25. Dark Horse
    There is little in the film's pitch-black interior that wasn't tackled better – with more bite, wit and abandon – in "Happiness," "Welcome to the Dollhouse," or "Storytelling."
  26. The Rule of Jenny Pen
    Film-maker James Ashcroft has created a scary and intimately upsetting psychological horror based on a story by New Zealand author Owen Marshall set in a care home, a film whose coolly maintained claustrophobic mood and bravura performances make up for the slight narrative blurring towards the end.
  27. Creed II
    There’s a delicate intimacy between the characters that feels raw and authentic and like Coogler, Caple Jr’s indie beginnings seem to steer him toward filling a big film with small moments.
  28. Ben Is Back
    There are good intentions and good performances here, but they’re squandered in a movie that isn’t quite sure what it should be and how far it should go.
  29. Wiener-Dog
    Wiener-Dog doesn’t find Solondz going light to deliver an inspirational medley. Instead, he’s created arguably his most caustic film since Happiness.
  30. Pamela, a love story
    Gentle, friendly, faintly bleary – and sans makeup – Pamela Anderson is an authentically likable screen presence in this intimate, if somehow elusive, documentary portrait from Ryan White; it is about her life and times and the super-strength misogyny she has faced from liberals and satirists in the long endgame of her celebrity career.
  31. The Founder
    The Founder is an absorbing and unexpectedly subtle movie about the genesis of the McDonald’s burger empire.
  32. Rabin, the Last Day
    Gitai has chosen stylistic cinema over propaganda, and he is a director who regularly gets bogged down a bit in form.
  33. Charlatan
    Charlatan is a film that does not quite satisfy the curiosity it arouses.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lewis Capaldi: How I'm Feeling Now
    Pearlman shows that Capaldi has become even more of a celebrity cliche, the star who’s been on a journey and come out the other side – but you imagine Capaldi, with his indefatigable wryness, is all too aware of that.
  35. Mulan
    An entertaining if straightforwardly glossy action-adventure from the Disney workshop.
  36. The Angels' Share
    Ken Loach's latest collaboration with screenwriter Paul Laverty is warm, funny and good-natured. It's a freewheeling social-realist caper – unworldly and at times almost childlike.
  37. Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall
    It’s a brazen celebration of Jackson, which unlike Lee’s other documentary work doesn’t look under the hood to tell the whole story and examine some of the more uncomfortable inner workings.
  38. Wander Darkly
    Miller is at the heart of the film; her natural and believable performance touches so many emotions, and makes them all look so real.
  39. The Last Showgirl
    The commentary on gender and age feels easy and unspecific and the world of the Vegas showgirl created from too great of a distance to really ring true.
  40. Fast Five
    For all its absurdity and the family friendly bloodlessness (despite the copious violence), it spins along very smoothly and efficiently.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Roberta
    Scintillating partnership of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, here still in supporting roles (to Irene Dunne), gives substance to otherwise flimsy fashion-set musical. [04 Oct 1990]
    • The Guardian
  42. Sasquatch Sunset
    It is entirely gripping and a witty and unnerving way of representing the mysterious silence of animals and a future world in which human beings can no longer exist.
  43. Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes
    This is a very entertaining account of an actor who appeared to ascend, singly, to a higher plane than all others of the Hollywood golden age.
  44. Seven Psychopaths
    There are scenes of complete brilliance, Walken is better than he's been in years, cute plot loops and grace notes.
  45. Bumblebee
    While Knight and team duck origin-story slavishness that has dogged so much recent franchise work, they succeed in reviving the playful Saturday-morning-serial spirit of the original 80s Transformers.
  46. Holy Spider
    Abbasi undoubtedly conveys the brutal attitudes which create victimhood.
  47. Cowboys
    Cowboys is a film that relaxes into its ideas and themes, and the performances from Knight, Zahn and Bell – with Ann Dowd as the cop on Troy’s trail – are all tremendous.
  48. The Bling Ring
    The final notes of irony and repudiation may be laboured and obvious, but this is an intriguingly intuitive and atmospheric movie.
  49. Dinosaur 13
    If it all feels too anomalous to seal its case against today's big legal and corporate predators, it never lacks for diverting turns and quirks.
  50. The Report
    The Report is a cool, dry look at the facts.
  51. Causeway
    Everything about this film means well and it is acted with professionalism and commitment. But there is something too easy about it.
  52. It Feeds
    It may not stick around in your memory with the persistence demonstrated by the entity towards its victims, but it passes the time chillingly enough.
  53. You Don't Nomi
    I’m not sure that this documentary completely nails the movie’s attraction, and it can’t quite bring itself fully to condemn the misogyny or the rape scene, in which a woman of colour is assaulted (so that the white heroine can get her revenge) and is then forgotten. But there are plenty of insights.
  54. After Love
    After Love is intelligent, compassionate, challenging film-making.
  55. Tales of the Night
    The pick-and-mix approach is limiting, but there's no denying these are gorgeous amuse-bouches, likely to be devoured by older, more discerning children and dyed-in-the-wool stoners alike.
  56. The Midwife
    It is a very good idea for a two-hander, and Frot and Deneuve give it their considerable all.
  57. Crimson Peak
    Guillermo del Toro’s gothic fantasy-romance Crimson Peak is outrageously sumptuous, gruesomely violent and designed to within an inch of its life.
  58. Cyrano
    Dinklage always holds the screen with his natural charisma.
  59. The Two Faces of January
    There are many attractive parts to this thriller – handsome leads, a meaty Patricia Highsmith plot, Mediterranean sunlight on cream linen suits – but it's no greater than the sum of them.
  60. The Great Museum
    A pleasing, high-minded film; also something of a palate-cleanser.
  61. The BFG
    It seems pointless to say that the big friendly giant is the star of The BFG. But casting has never been more crucial. A typically distinctive, eccentric and seductive star performance from Mark Rylance absolutely makes this movie what it is.
  62. The Kid Who Would Be King
    None of the young stars shine as John Boyega did in ATB, but this movie is sentimental in all the right places, and impossible to dislike.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley
    The fascinating story of Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scandal is frustratingly underexplored in Alex Gibney’s disappointing new film.
  64. Audrey
    By and large, it’s an exasperating, simpering, Hello-magazine-interview of a film, blandly celebrating her “iconic” presence in the horribly overrated Breakfast at Tiffany’s, in which she was absurdly unrelaxed and self-conscious.
  65. The Danish Girl
    Well-meaning and polished as it is, The Danish Girl is a determinedly mainstream melodrama that doesn’t really offer new perspectives on its theme.
  66. Game Night
    The Jason Bateman comedy model hasn’t quite been radically altered in Game Night but it’s one of his more entertaining outings. Just don’t count on remembering much of it once the night is over.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Don Jon
    A fun, occasionally flabby romp that should find its audience.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Driller Killer
    If Ferrara is indeed a Van Gogh, then The Driller Killer is his Potato Eaters – an early work that displays, in rudimentary form, all the groundbreaking innovation of the mature works.
  69. I Get Knocked Down
    Chumbawamba split up in 2012. They’re still mates and come across here as extremely likable, not taking themselves at all too seriously. Scenes of them nattering together, having a giggle now, are lovely.
  70. Judy
    Zellweger gives us a tribute to Judy Garland’s flair and to that ethos of the show needing to go on being both a burden and driving force. Yet Garland’s terrible sadness is mostly invisible.
  71. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die
    Even if much of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is in need of a rethink, it’s hard not to enjoy the scrappy, animated brainstorm taking place in front of us. The mess of it all is at least a very human one.
  72. Wonka
    I enjoyed this more than either of the two earlier filmed versions, with Gene Wilder in 1971 and Johnny Depp in 2005. It supplies the chocolate-endorphins.
  73. Kung Fu Killer
    The fight scenes are terrific, but the haphazard plotting, off-the-peg characterisations and drippy music elsewhere lack flavour.
  74. The Judge
    The Judge is a thoughtful, sympathetic study.
  75. Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap
    With a very simple premise, rapper Ice-T – this film's presenter and co-director with Andy Baybutt – has created a very enjoyable and often fascinating movie.
  76. Truth
    As high-class cheese goes, Truth slips down fine. It’s a noisy, one-note rally for the converted that gets your pulse racing even if you’re rolling your eyes.
  77. Disorder
    Winocour’s ability to build suspense is solid but she’s less confident when it comes to following through. She toys with perversity but sticks to formula.
  78. In Fear
    Lovering coolly sticks to a rule often disregarded by horror movies looking for an instant scare: the weird, tense build-up is just as disturbing as the reveal.
  79. Landline
    The movie itself is a retread of indie story beats we’ve all seen time and again. Slate’s tornado of a central character doesn’t quite overcome the rote aspects of this production.
  80. In Like Flynn
    This is a fun film constructed in a smart way: an anti-high art picture that happily prioritises embellishing legend over recreating life.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rolling Thunder
    Devane gives a performance of anguished depth, the final carnage is spectacular and it's a time capsule of a movie.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
    The characters are entirely credible and likable, the simply drawn figures highly effective against the lush background artwork. Time travel has rarely seemed so joyous.
  83. Last Swim
    Last Swim looks slightly callow sometimes, but forthright and likable and Hekmat’s performance has delicacy and intelligence.
  84. Pieces of a Woman
    The film is like an intensively bred hothouse flower that can’t exist in the open air.
  85. 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.
  86. Slack Bay
    Ma Loute is a fascinatingly made film, theatrically extravagant and precise, although perhaps a little over-extended.
  87. 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.
  88. White Noise
    Baumbach has landed a sizeable white whale in his tremendously elegant and assured adaptation.
  89. Roofman
    Another, more textured film might have tried to paint him as more than just lovable rogue but Roofman is too focused on making us feel good rather than bad. I would have settled for conflicted.
  90. Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers
    It’s not quite on par with Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the film it undoubtedly wants to be likened to, but it’s infinitely better than it had any right to be.
  91. Swan Song
    Mahershala Ali gives a heartfelt performance in this elegant and rather melancholy sci-fi mystery with which Irish film-maker Benjamin Cleary makes his impressive feature debut.
  92. VS.
    A movie with flair and force.
  93. The Integrity of Joseph Chambers
    The minute Joseph steps into this disenchanted forest, tripping over every tree root, you can sense the impending disaster, and the horror that Machoian’s movie is moving towards.
  94. 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.
  95. Ultraman: Rising
    It drags a little in places, despite the appealing animation style, which really comes into its own during the action sequences.
  96. Dumb Money
    It’s perilously close to being overstuffed (one more introduction would have tipped it over the edge) but a controlled and nimble script justifies the large ensemble, using each thread to quickly switch back and forth between the anger, ecstasy, disbelief and fear that seeped from conference to dorm room at the time.
  97. The Good Dinosaur
    The Good Dinosaur looks great, of course, but it’s not in the league we’ve come to expect.
  98. Skinamarink
    There is without a doubt something uncanny, almost seance-like, in the way Canadian film-maker Kyle Edward Ball evokes childhood fear of the dark.
  99. The Archies
    The whole shebang is quite bizarre but sort of works, thanks to the brisk pacing of the editing and the joie de vivre that directors Zoya Akhtar and Ryan Brophy inject into the proceedings.
  100. 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.
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