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. Smallfoot
    The conceit is nicely done, and the film’s unexpectedly heartfelt message about empathy and looking at the world through someone else’s eyes just about makes up for its bland animation, smart-arsed script and generic clappy-blah songs.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Bounty
    The Bounty has an incredible cast and a fabulously well-put-together production, and pays impressive attention to historical accuracy – more than any of the previous cinematic recreations. With all this going for it, it's a pity that the drama falls flat.
  3. The Goldfinch
    It’s neither a rousing success nor an embarrassing failure, falling somewhere in between, closer to admirable attempt.
  4. Alita: Battle Angel
    Alita: Battle Angel is a film with Imax spectacle and big effects. But for all its scale, it might end up being put on for 13-year-olds as a sleepover entertainment. It doesn’t have the grownup, challenging, complicated ideas of Ghost in the Shell. A vanilla dystopian romance.
  5. Pokémon Detective Pikachu
    Without Reynolds this would be pretty run-of-the-mill; with him it’s a perfectly acceptable family movie. Given the history, that’s a giant leap for Pokémon-kind.
  6. What They Had
    The script, inspired by Chomko’s grandparents’ marriage, throws up plenty of authentic-looking observations of life with Alzheimer’s.
  7. Ethel & Ernest
    It’s an engaging film, but it leaves you with a feeling that there might be a deeper, darker, more specific story yet to be told.
  8. Oh Lucy!
    Oh Lucy!’s plot feels overthought. The tone see-saws wildly. What prevents it collapsing are the warm, heartfelt performances, together with Hirayanagi’s obvious affection for her chief protagonist.
  9. Blumhouse's Truth or Dare
    The director, Jeff Wadlow, has a puppyish eagerness to impress, shock and entertain and as silly as the film might get, it’s never dull.
  10. The Spy Who Dumped Me
    It’s pretty much impossible for Kate McKinnon to dip below a basic level of funny, and her presence keeps the fizz in this spy spoof action-comedy from director and co-writer Susanna Fogel.
  11. Teen Titans Go! To the Movies
    A handful of jokes in this minipop Ragnarok, like the crack at Gene Hackman’s role in the 1978 Superman, land at the exact sweet spot where fond fanboy scholarship meets sublime goofiness.
  12. The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl
    It is romantic and hallucinogenic, with an edge of softcore erotic sleaze.
  13. Breaking In
    These 88 minutes never drag their heels long enough for us to get hung up on their myriad implausibilities. One of those low-expectation releases that’ll see you right if Infinity War remains sold out.
  14. Minding the Gap
    This is a fluent, watchable piece of work, though not quite as lucid as it might have been. A poignant tribute, at any rate, to the lost innocence of skateboarding.
  15. 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.
  16. BlacKkKlansman
    It’s an entertaining spectacle but the brilliant tonal balance in something like Jordan Peele’s satire Get Out leaves this looking a little exposed. Yet it responds fiercely, contemptuously to the crassness at the heart of the Trump regime and gleefully pays it back in its own coin.
  17. Hold the Dark
    While the shifts in genre, plot and location do prove intriguing for much of the film, they ultimately result in a feeling of mild dissatisfaction, the whole never quite the sum of its parts.
  18. Outlaw King
    David Mackenzie’s retelling of the Robert the Bruce story for Netflix is bold and watchable, with a spectacular final battle scene shot with flair by the cinematographer Barry Ackroyd
  19. Suspiria
    There are smart moments of fear and subliminal shivers of disquiet, the dance sequences are good and of course Guadagnino could never be anything other than an intelligent film-maker. But this is a weirdly passionless film.
  20. Damsel
    Damsel doesn’t go quite where we think it will, but then, surprise detours are rather to be expected in this kind of anti-quest story, and the film sometimes comes across – for all its grotesque, scabrous or surreal touches – as a little more benign than it might have been.
  21. The Banishment
    There is an outstanding film somewhere inside this sprawling mass of ideas, which might have been shaped more exactingly in the edit.
  22. Piercing
    It all works pretty well until the abrupt ending lets all the air out of the balloon. The dream-team pairing of Abbott and Wasikowska, two of the most interesting, subtle and risk-loving performers of their generation, is a huge compensation.
  23. Skate Kitchen
    Moselle is at her most astute when concentrating on the fragile social dynamics that govern the tribes adolescents divide themselves into for survival’s sake.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Generation Wealth
    An ambitious essay documentary that is often brilliant but is let down by a parallel focus on Greenfield’s own family and career which becomes too sentimental and stretches the film out beyond its natural length.
  25. MATANGI/MAYA/M.I.A.
    There’s a made-by-a-mate feel to the film, which jumps around confusingly: if you’re not a fan it might help to read her Wiki page for context. Perhaps there is just too much MIA for one film to handle. One thing’s for sure, in an era of manufactured pop stars, she is resplendently unfiltered.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind
    This desire to pull punches in presenting his darker side beyond occasional lip service makes for a viewing experience where we often feel we aren’t getting the whole picture for fear of offending the recently deceased.
  27. Sorry to Bother You
    Despite being about serious matters (labor relations, systematic oppression, racial microaggressions), Sorry to Bother You is slight and raggedy, but when it leans into its surreal, midnight movie instincts it proves engaging and amusing.
  28. Wildlife
    It is a quiet, subtle story and, as is so often the case when an actor takes their first trip behind the camera, a showcase for terrific performances.
  29. The Catcher Was a Spy
    The film isn’t a home run, but with Rudd in the lead in something so out of the ordinary for him, it’s fair to call a ground rule double.
  30. RBG
    For good or ill, the film does not directly engage with Ginsburg’s views on contemporary feminism and sexual harassment and what is sometimes derisively called identity politics.
  31. The Nothing Factory
    Worryingly, there is an actual film-maker in the story who appears to be intervening in the action and The Nothing Factory appears to retreat into self-reference when it could be offering concrete ideas on the issue of people keeping their jobs.
  32. Searching
    Chaganty’s tab-toggling is pacy enough, but he gets pedantic about tying up unfinished digital business, and Unfriended’s pulse-raising wildness is beyond him.
  33. Assassination Nation
    Assassination Nation has got some gross-out chutzpah, and the surreal marching band scene over the final credits is inspired.
  34. Hearts Beat Loud
    You might need a sweet tooth for this gentle, Hornbyesque drama from writer-director Brett Haley. But it’s a likable heartwarmer and very decently acted.
  35. Nancy
    An interesting and worthwhile drama.
  36. Puzzle
    There is modest craft and genuine heart here, not to mention an eye-catching centrepiece: an actor growing more certain of herself, and more capable than ever of holding an entire picture together – even one as unusual, and sometimes as unlikely, as this.
  37. Seeing Allred
    This woman, for all her flaws, is clearly a warrior first and foremost.
  38. Serenity
    The cinema calendar is chockablock with faulty efforts built around perfectly serviceable ideas, but realized without a modicum of distinction. Serenity offers the less-common inverse: a magnificently terrible idea, executed to perfection.
  39. El Mar La Mar
    Their film pushes the limits of documentary filmmaking and will likely push the tolerance of viewers. This is a demanding watch, the arthouse cinema equivalent of the marshmallow experiment, testing the attention span of audiences.
  40. Yardie
    A debut of unarguable promise, though – plenty to build on if Elba can resist the adolescent lure of running round with 007’s PPK.
  41. Infinite Football
    Infinite Football is an austere 70-minute experience, but the eccentric idealism of Laurențiu Ginghină lingers in the mind.
  42. Profile
    Profile is a pretty conventional thriller with pretty conventional stereotypes.
  43. Season of the Devil
    Season of the Devil is the work of a real auteur: every millisecond of his film has been rigorously created. There are moments of dreamlike intensity and the despair of the period is genuinely conveyed. Only the strongest devotee of Diaz could however deny the presence of longueurs in this film.
  44. Dark River
    Wilson and Stanley are both excellent performers and they are the mainstays of a valuable piece of work, but I felt the ending was contrived and a bit grandiloquent. However, the visual style and fluency of the film are obvious.
  45. Dance Academy: The Movie
    Subversive entertainment it ain’t. But nor is this well-paced yarn – with pleasing albeit narrowly scoped performances from a perky cast – bereft of pleasantries and surprises.
  46. Dora and the Lost City of Gold
    The knowing tone again feels like Hollywood confessing to trading in material few could take seriously, yet a certain sincerity is evident in Moner’s winning performance.
  47. The Seagull
    Mayer’s The Seagull is not a masterpiece, but it is impressive, and for those who agree that it is important to check back in with the classics, the whole company deserves its huzzahs.
  48. Unfriended: Dark Web
    Even if some of the late-stage plotting seems sloppy and increasingly preposterous, there’s a callousness to the brutal last act that, together with the far patchier, yet similarly hard-edged First Purge, feels like a definite product of the time we’re in, as war on terror-era torture porn did in the mid-2000s.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Whitney
    It’s a film principally and poignantly focused on the absence of Whitney, an aching void felt as much in life as in death. Many of us missed Whitney even before she left; this imperfect documentary preys calmly and effectively on that longing.
  50. Fireworks
    It’s confusing and disorientating but brings back dreamy teen angst like the strongest of madeleines.
  51. Thunder Road
    Cummings presents us with a guy whose heart is in the right place – he just can’t control himself. But, like me, others may find their tolerance for a clueless white man’s anger issues has maxed out.
  52. Summer in the Forest
    This is a calm and often affecting study of L’Arche, a community of people with learning disabilities in Trosly-Breuil, northern France.
  53. Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero
    Stubby’s minimal anthropomorphism makes him a believably doggy sort of dog, whose expressions and behaviour clearly indicate that the animators spent many hours studying the real thing.
  54. Revenge
    A well made film, which slithers confidently in its slick of blood.
  55. The Informer
    The Informer is spread over a big canvas, but by the time of its big finale it is leaking energy. It might have made better sense as an episodic drama on television but it is brash and watchable, its world reeking with cynicism and fear.
  56. A Simple Favor
    Kendrick and Lively have never been funnier, snapping one-liners at each other like elastic bands; the script is hyper-alert to the undercurrent of competitiveness between stay-at-home and working mums.
  57. Bad Times at the El Royale
    For all its twisty unexpectedness, it didn’t deliver a really satisfying denouement. The performances are interesting.
  58. Beautiful Boy
    There are moments of crushing emotional weight but as the film progresses, they start to carry less power.
  59. Dune
    This is a film that doesn’t dramatically harness the vast forces it’s gesturing at, but trundles determinedly along with very little variation of tone or pace.
  60. The Gospel According to André
    Talley strikes you as a man of sincerity and depth behind all the air-kissing and lamé.
  61. Upgrade
    Whannell’s finite reserves of creativity have been meted out in an imbalance, going all in on world-building while giving the fight choreography and the cinematography listlessly documenting it the short shrift.
  62. Greyhound
    As well as death and tragedy, war is full of absurdity, indignity, chaos, all sorts of bizarre and embarrassing things that don’t get mentioned in the official record. Greyhound is content with its keynote of sombre reverence.
  63. Journeyman
    Journeyman is flawed, but intelligent and heartfelt.
  64. The Judge
    The Judge is a thoughtful, sympathetic study.
  65. Hotel Artemis
    For all of its faults, there’s still plenty here to praise, the result of so much being thrown at the wall is that some of it will stick. Pearce has a sharp creative flair and a head full of ideas but he feels somewhat hemmed in by the constraints of a short running time and a high profile release date.
  66. Pick of the Litter
    The finale is more of a schmaltzy salute to the guide-dog ethos than intimate documentation of the new owners’ stories. The street training sequences, though – shot in swooping knee-high Steadicam – are thrilling; mini kerbside action movies.
  67. In the Last Days of the City
    It’s a melancholy, interesting film, slightly opaque, a cine-journal about the way youth is clouded by experience.
  68. October
    If October feels more tentative than Piku, which had rock-solid star turns to ground it, its emotion is at the last earned honestly: any structural wobbles will be nothing compared with the audience’s lower lips come the finale.
  69. Woman Walks Ahead
    Woman Walks Ahead is a solidly crafted and well shot, if basically unchallenging film.
  70. Under the Tree
    Sigurðsson is no misanthrope and his humane message – that everyone is muddling along as best they can – makes all the feuding and bile easier to stomach. Some may prefer a little more bite.
  71. The Party's Just Beginning
    I can’t help thinking Gillan’s superpower as a writer and performer might actually be comedy. Still, always a compelling screen presence, she’s now a film-maker to watch.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Porco Rosso
    The plot is hardly the point here - the animation is delightful, colourful and detailed and the flying sequences in seaplanes as old-fashioned as this style of animation are exhilarating.
  73. Lion's Den
    Frustratingly, the film tells us little about the crime itself and the denouement is a little unconvincing. The taste of sweat and fear is, however, real enough.
  74. Active Measures
    Bryan’s done his homework, mapping out an elaborate network of past wrongdoings with news clippings and TV footage. If the just deserts that this film demands ever come to pass, it will almost certainly be the most copiously photographed treason in a long and illustrious American tradition.
  75. Ibiza
    The three leads are so strong that one wishes Netflix had granted them a whole series to live in, their everyday lives worthy of a deeper dive. Ibiza is a fun, far-fetched frippery but I’d rather see what happened to them if they’d stayed at home.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Good Boys
    There’s just one problem. It’s mostly the same jokes over and over: cute kids cursing and not understanding sex stuff.
  77. Nervous Translation
    An opaque, but beautifully composed film.
  78. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
    Some enjoyable stuff, although a slightly weird deployment of Jim Croce’s bittersweet song Time in a Bottle at the film’s beginning and end – perhaps inspired by its use for Quicksilver’s slo-mo scene in X-Men: Days of Future Past.
  79. 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.
  80. This Is Congo
    A difficult, depressing watch.
  81. Get the Gringo
    However agonising it is to admit it, this film isn't half bad, a sparky black-comic actioner with a cute "con trick" scene showcasing Gibson's Clint Eastwood impression.
  82. 3 Faces
    Jafar Panahi has here created a quietly engaging quasi-realist parable, part of his ongoing and unique creative cine-autobiography, full of intelligence and humility and a real respect for women and for female actors. It is gentle, elusive, and redolent of this director’s mysterious Iranian zen.
  83. Destination Wedding
    The pair share an easy, spiky chemistry and Reeves in particular shows himself to be surprisingly skilled at delivering such bile-filled dialogue.
  84. The Bookshop
    It is a strange, subdued, rather miserable film, interestingly perceptive on conformism and philistinism as a way of life, and on the disconcerting wiles the inhabitants use in order to thwart Florence’s entirely reasonable plans.
  85. Asako I & II
    This is an amusing essay in amorous delusion.
  86. Leto
    Leto is a film with some wonderful moments and some slightly forgettable stretches – like an album with one or two wonderful tracks.
  87. Rafiki
    What Kahiu’s film lacks in originality, it makes up for in its depiction of the giddy flush of first love. Mugatsia and Munyiva have an easy, unfussy chemistry that overcomes some creakier moments of dialogue.
  88. Sauvage / Wild
    What is interesting about Sauvage is that it shows how savagely boring Leo’s life is, quite a lot of the time.
  89. Woman at War
    It is an attractive and sympathetic performance from Geirharðsdóttir as Halla.
  90. Diamantino
    The film is fun, but, for all its inventiveness, it’s a bit tame, with its nice-but-dim hero. But Diamantino is never dull.
  91. Capernaum
    It’s a simplistic film in some ways, with a naive ending – but there is energy and vigour, too.
  92. The Truth
    It’s handsome, it’s amusing, it knows exactly where it’s going. All that is missing is that crucial fifth gear.
  93. McKellen: Playing the Part
    McKellen occasionally slips into the part of twinkly super-cool gay uncle that he tends to play in interviews these days. But mostly he’s thoughtful and self-reflective (and not at all gossipy about his theatrical chums, disappointingly).
  94. Rocketman
    Rocketman is an honest, heartfelt tribute to Elton John’s music and his public image. But the man itself eluded it.
  95. We the Animals
    It is a thing of beauty: too beautiful perhaps, running a real danger of prettifying poverty.
  96. Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich
    The incessant bloodshed is delivered with imaginative aplomb in this witty reboot of the 90s trash franchise.
  97. In the Heights
    It’s impossible to object to In the Heights with its almost childlike innocence. Ramos is very good and it is great to see Stephanie Beatriz (from TV’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine) and Dascha Polanco (from Orange Is the New Black) round out the supporting cast. But this is a pretty quaint image of street life, whose unrealities probably worked better on stage.
  98. Love, Cecil
    The film is intelligent, thorough and sympathetic, with Rupert Everett narrating Beaton’s diaries. But it never quite persuades you that Beaton really deserves to be considered a substantial artist.
  99. Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts
    Eventually, the drama closes in on itself and attains the logic of a dream, though a dream that dissipates quickly on waking.
  100. Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda
    Stephen Schible’s documentary portrait follows the musician in the calm and introspective period forced on him – but it also shows him participating in post-Fukushima demonstrations.
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