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. Cheap Thrills
    The script is smarter than the premise sounds, with writers David Chirchirillo and Trent Haaga dispensing enough information to make victims both sympathetic and despicable, the instigators charismatic and sinister.
  2. Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.
    Black church is all about feeling – the building, the people, the message. But Honk has none of that soul. At best, the film is an abstract commentary on a culture it doesn’t fully understand; at worst, it’s half-hearted creative license. And at this late stage, sadly, not even Jevus could save it.
  3. Downton Abbey: A New Era
    As hammy, silly, and undeniably entertaining as ever.
  4. Pope Francis - A Man of His Word
    Access to the great man has clearly been provided with an undertaking not to challenge, not even to ask questions, in the normal interview sense.
  5. 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.
  6. The Sound of Music
    Robert Wise's adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical still has a little soul in its bones, with its reactionary nature tempered by Ernest Lehman's supple screenplay, and its elephantine running-time eased by a set of songs that lodge in your system like hookworms.
  7. I Want Your Sex
    It’s certainly a return to what many know him for – vibrant colours, unfettered sex, madcap plotting – but it’s also missing that same sense of infectiously boisterous energy. The parts are here but there’s nothing to truly animate them, just the vague hope that maybe nostalgia might be enough.
  8. Path of Blood
    As a film this is anything but banal, and operates as a potent reminder of the randomness, and casual cruelty of modern terrorism, the way it leeches out the humanity of victims and perpetrators on both sides.
  9. A Coffee In Berlin
    This debut for German writer-director Jan Ole Gerster seemingly aims to transplant a mumblecore aesthetic into Berlin, with all the requisite aimless hipsters, whimsical touches and rambling narrative dips and dives; but someone forgot to add spontaneity or edge.
  10. 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.
  11. Anna Karenina
    The Wright/Stoppard Anna Karenina is not a total success, but it's a bold and creative response to the novel.
  12. California Schemin'
    California Schemin’ is, in the end, a kindhearted film about integrity, about art for art’s sake, about embracing one’s roots.
  13. Burning Sands
    There’s no clumsy exposition here to explain motivations but delicately scattered crumbs involving status, family and the crippling strain of competitive masculinity.
  14. Banana Split
    There is no law that says a movie like this has to be funny exactly, and it needn’t be something in the style of Booksmart – but there is something rather solemn about it.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Beach Boys
    Perhaps the last 48 years are omitted for reasons of space. The film would need to be twice as long to cover them, and the second half would feel more like a particularly lurid soap opera than a music documentary. But it seems more likely it’s out of a desire to append a happy ending on to a story that doesn’t really have one.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Gaga: Five Foot Two
    Five Foot Two never quite shakes the feel of a longform advert for Gaga’s new phase that’s preaching to the converted.
  17. 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.
  18. Lupin III: The First
    Forgettable story aside, the film is a visual treat, full of joy and zaniness.
  19. The Eyes of My Mother
    Pesce asks viewers to go along with the absurdity while offering nothing to justify any of it. It’s a murder ballad gone out of tune.
  20. Les Miserables
    By the end, you feel like a piñata: in pieces, the victim of prolonged assault by killer pipes.
  21. Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge
    It’s an amusing, affectionate tribute.
  22. Your Monster
    As fun as the boys are, this is Barrera’s show. She is tremendous, and seemingly having a tremendous amount of fun.
  23. Simon Killer
    Brady Corbet is excellent as thoroughly unlikable Simon.
  24. Knock at the Cabin
    The Sixth Sense director’s apocalyptic mystery horror is short on both mystery and horror and the ambiguous finale is deeply ridiculous.
  25. Where Eagles Dare
    The development of Bond films in the early 1960s brought a new dimension to espionage-oriented cinema. Where Eagles Dare brings these strands together - fusing the spy story with war action - and helped create a wave of patriotic cold war thrillers that arguably climaxed with The Spy Who Loved Me.
  26. Flathead
    The film’s poetry resides in its thoughtful inactivity, its vernacular spirituality and its gentleness.
  27. Pee-wee's Big Holiday
    The film plays like nirvana for Pee-wee fans.
  28. Kiss of the Spider Woman
    We’re in safest hands with Lopez and Condon when he’s playing in that sandbox as the cell-based scenes can be a little stagey and rushed in comparison.
  29. The Congress
    The Congress contains tricks aplenty and ideas in abundance. The problem comes in herding these scattered, floating elements towards a satisfying whole.
  30. Tallulah
    Yes, the story has the makings of a Lifetime movie; what grounds it are the terrific performances and Heder’s rich direction and screenplay.
  31. Hannah
    It is a haunting portrait of emotional undeadness.
  32. Blood Quantum
    Barnaby’s colonialist take on the formula is far from subtle, and at times a little too bluntly on the nose, but he’s a film-maker with both something to say and the skillset to say it in a distinctive way, offering up an initially engaging alternative to mere guts and shock tactics.
  33. 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.
  34. Master Gardener
    Perhaps Schrader will indeed defiantly return to his accustomed theme for his next film – and this brilliant, restless director might well make it work. Sadly, this one doesn’t.
  35. Weekend of a Champion
    The movie has some real archival value and the simple juxtaposition of Polanski and Stewart – the oddest couple in Cannes, surely – has a surreal impact. But I wonder if there isn't something a little bit placid and self-satisfied about the film, which is paced remarkably slowly, given the subject matter.
  36. The Limehouse Golem
    There are a lot of twists and turns in the plot, but not all of them are satisfying. What does work are the performances, specifically Cooke and the richly sympathetic character she creates.
  37. The Ones Below
    The Ones Below is an intimately disturbing nightmare of the upper middle classes, with tinges of melodrama and staginess, entirely appropriate for its air of suppressed psychosis.
  38. Borg vs. McEnroe
    This tennis film feels like a two-hour baseline rally, and it’s not just the rackets that are made of wood.
  39. H Is for Hawk
    Audiences might, by the closing credits, think they still don’t quite know what happens to Helen and Mabel in the end, or perhaps at any time, but then again real life can feel messy and unfinished in just this way.
  40. Falling
    It’s a really valuable work, beautifully edited and shot, with a wonderful performance by the veteran actor Lance Henriksen: a sombre, clear-eyed look at the bitter endgame of dementia.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Unsane
    The absurdity and the galaxy of plot holes in the farcical final act just undermine everything.
  42. Blizzard of Souls
    Brantevics convincingly portrays Arturs’ four-year transformation from a callow youth to a war-weary one, but as a national coming-of-age story, The Rifleman never quite outgrows its innocent, uncritical patriotism.
  43. Spring Breakers
    Full credit to Korine, who sustains this act of creative vandalism right through to the finish. Spring Breakers unfolds as a fever dream of teenage kicks, a high-concept heist movie with mescal in the fuel tank.
  44. Fingernails
    The evasive, guarded acting from the main players can only do so much to elevate the paltry material Nikou gives them to work with. A long, fitfully amusing walk down a short road.
  45. Someone Great
    Despite fine performances from Gina Rodriguez and Lakeith Stanfield, the debut film from Jennifer Kaytin Robinson never strays from the genre’s cliches.
  46. Stowaway
    The focus on the job at hand works until it doesn’t as with just the slightest of characterisation, we’re invested in the problem rather than those solving it and the grip of the first two acts loosens as the finale beckons.
  47. Triangle of Sadness
    Strident, derivative and dismayingly deficient in genuine laughs, Ruben Östlund’s new movie is a heavy-handed Euro-satire, without the subtlety and insight of his breakthrough movie Force Majeure, or the power of his comparable Palme-winning spectacle about the art world, The Square.
  48. Let Him Go
    With its handsome, and expensive, period recreation, a wide rural American canvas and an audience-provoking last act, it’s a shame that more of us won’t get to enjoy Let Him Go on the big screen, where it truly belongs. But for those who will, they’re in for a wild ride.
  49. World War Z
    While some of World War Z is rotten, the whole stands as a punchy, if conventional action thriller.
  50. Maria
    Maria is the most persuasive and seductive of Larraín’s trilogy of great women at bay, after Jackie about Jackie Kennedy, and Spencer about Princess Diana.
  51. 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.
  52. Bring Them Down
    In plot terms there is something unsubtle, unconvincing and even absurd in where it’s all heading.
  53. Split
    Split goes all-in on McAvoy slipping from persona to persona, and luckily he’s got the acting chops to sell it.
  54. Normal
    It’s entertaining and bizarre chaos, anchored by Odenkirk’s hangdog air of gloomy resignation to the violent mess which he has to clean up.
  55. Until the End of the World
    The scenes of artistic, scientific and communal triumph were significant. The isolated, solipsistic anger of each character, lost in their own identity loop, seemed like a perfect analogy for the conflicts in eastern Europe in the mid-1990s.
  56. Alpha
    It is a bit silly, but is likable hokum.
  57. The Hole in the Ground
    It always finds new, invariably cinematic ways to nudge us towards its final leap into the abyss. Cronin feels like a real find for our especially insecure moment.
  58. Scoop
    The drama is smothered by its own overwhelming sense of importance.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    How to Get Ahead in Advertising
    How To Get Ahead In Advertising is often an uneasy mixture of satire and parody that plunges past anarchy into the most foursquare polemic imaginable. But at least it has the courage of every one of its convictions and Grant's doughty performance at its centre almost persuades one that he was not a little miscast. [27 Jul 1989]
    • The Guardian
  60. The Rip
    A movie to be enjoyed on Friday night and forgotten all about by Saturday morning.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Eureka
    Mesmerising mosaic of a thriller-plus from Nicolas Roeg, bringing dazzling (blinding, to a nervous studio and some critics) new reflections on the woes of wealth. Gene Hackman is excellent as Citizen Kane-ish figure atop mountain of gold and amidst nest of vipers. [07 Sep 1989]
    • The Guardian
  62. The Devil Wears Prada 2
    This is good-natured, buoyant entertainment. It’s wearing well.
  63. Free Fire
    There’s something lacking, a touch of the bizarre or the perverse, with just one particularly nasty death to serve as a reminder that you’re watching a Ben Wheatley film.
  64. Keanu
    If there was a strong enough story to latch the jokes on to, Keanu might have worked. As it stands, it reeks of a grossly underdeveloped sketch extended to feature length.
  65. In the Earth
    In a flawed yet fierce return to form, Ben Wheatley has crafted a phantasmagoric treat with In the Earth, an ambitious, atmospheric little woodland horror.
  66. Beau Is Afraid
    Joaquin Phoenix is on really uninteresting form, playing to his weaknesses as an actor as he gives a narcissistic performance of pain, sporting a permanently zonked expression of anxiety and torpid self-pity at the misery that surrounds him.
  67. A Haunting in Venice
    No amount of spooky jump-scares can save Kenneth Branagh’s latest Christie adaptation, which wastes its atmospheric setting and stellar cast.
  68. 12 Hour Shift
    It’s a throwaway film that perhaps I shouldn’t have enjoyed as much as I did, but Mandy is such a deliciously sour character.
  69. The Matrix Resurrections
    This is a heavy-footed reboot which doesn’t offer a compelling reason for its existence other than to gouge a fourth income stream from Matrix fans, submissively hooked up for new content, and it doesn’t have anything approaching the breathtaking “bullet time” action sequences that made the original film famous.
  70. Peter von Kant
    There is something lighter, almost flippant and French-farcical about this new Von Kant: a man brought low by l’amour, inviting from the audience hardly more than a worldly, sympathetic shrug.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Brand: A Second Coming
    Even if you’re cynical about Brand’s motives, or just think that he’s a bit of berk, the film convinces you of the almost alarming sincerity of his political mission.
  72. Station to Station
    The artists’ blathering about the creative process and the nature of existence gets monotonous. It’s the ordinary folk that keep the film on-track.
  73. Margarita with a Straw
    Margarita, With a Straw is a sturdily conceived, emotionally direct drama.
  74. Padmaavat
    While it’s unfolding before us, it provides – whatever else the courts insist we call it – stirring, seductive spectacle.
  75. Amanda
    [A] good-natured and well-intentioned film.
  76. The Man from Snowy River
    More than just an Aussie horse opera, this film employs stunning scenery, technical flair and Kirk Douglas in two roles in its pursuit of an uplifting conclusion.
  77. Sing Me a Song
    A thoughtful portrait of separate lives and destinies.
  78. Tove
    Where biopics often end up with a cardboard-tasting blandness, the focus on Jansson’s interior world gives this film moments that really come to life.
  79. 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.
  80. Convergence: Courage in a Crisis
    Even in terms of its attempted emotional cross-section of the pandemic, Convergence spreads its net too wide.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told
    Director Jack Hill went on to make plenty of classic exploitation movies, such as the more marketable Foxy Brown and Switchblade Sisters, but Spider Baby is him at his trashy, most eccentric best. [15 Jun 2013, p.23]
    • The Guardian
  82. Money Shot: The Pornhub Story
    For me it never gets to grips with the real issue for Pornhub, OnlyFans or indeed Facebook: are these sites publishers or platforms? If they derive profit from the content they host, then should they be responsible for it, or not?
  83. Butterfly Vision
    Though she might have turned the dial up, Burkovska conveys Lilya’s depression and anxiety, and finally her resilience, with a muted, powerful performance. This might be one to file away for the future, when the current conflict has ended.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Frankenstein Created Woman
    Terence Fisher conjures up his customary dark fairytale atmosphere in one of Hammer’s best Frankenstein sequels. 
  85. Bone Lake
    It always feels as if the people making this movie are having fun, and while that’s never a guarantee that the audience will too, it’s certainly the case here.
  86. 18½
    It’s entertaining enough and you never know where the story is headed, but it doesn’t quite hold together.
  87. Thanksgiving
    Roth thinks in hooks and punchlines, which keeps the copious slayings inventive and gratifying while also enlivening the connective tissue between them.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Stage Fright
    Stage Fright has serious fun with the business of acting, a trade that calls for both the cold, calculating Charlotte and the committed, caring Eve alike to transform into other people. And Hitchcock appreciates the charged atmosphere of an empty theatre, as well as the frisson when the doors are closed, the lights go down and audiences wait expectantly in silence, never knowing quite what will happen next.
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