The Guardian's Scores

Select another publication »
For 6,656 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: 2,521 out of 6656
  2. Mixed: 3,814 out of 6656
  3. Negative: 321 out of 6656
6656 movie reviews
view
per page
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Dirt
    What makes the film most successful are the four performers. The standout is Baker (better known as rapper Machine Gun Kelly) who plays Tommy Lee with both a sweet naivety and an insidious mischievousness that make some of the darker moments sneak up on you without feeling unearned.
  2. Cradle of Champions
    It’s a sentimental film about New York and the way it sees itself: tough, big-hearted, assimilated and patriotic.
  3. 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.
  4. Booksmart
    Her film reaches the audience-friendly highs of a studio comedy while retaining an indie sensibility, both in its visuals and its tone, and coupled with the script’s rooted awareness of the moment we’re now in, it feels fresh, a film that will be rewatched and quoted, held on a pedestal by those who understand its necessity.
  5. The White Crow
    Hare cleverly suggests Nureyev’s mixture of courage, hauteur, emotional damage and cool self-appraisal; the Soviet authorities cannot threaten him through his family because he long ago left them behind. An athletic, confident, undemanding film.
    • 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.
  7. Unicorn Store
    As a film-maker, Larson shows promise, and as a comic actor she shows genuine talent. With a less affected, more genuine script, Larson could star in and direct a great comedy. Unicorn Store is not it.
  8. Captive State
    Captive State is imperfectly constructed, at times frustratingly so, but it’s trying, doggedly, to do something different and given the bland efficiency of so many wide-releasing sci-fi movies, that’s hard to fault.
  9. Fisherman's Friends
    Their singing is robustly and winningly performed, and the whole thing is heartfelt. Nice also to see Maggie Steed as the local pub’s landlady. It’s pretty goofy but fun.
    • 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.
  11. Girl
    The sheer sustained intensity of the drama and performances carry it through.
  12. The Highwaymen
    Hamer and Gault won the day in a hail of submachine fire, but even their hagiography can’t hide that they’re history’s losers.
  13. The Day Shall Come
    Morris handles a delicate balancing act with an expected ease, the work of a satirist with so much to say yet with an awareness that saying less leads to so much more.
  14. Us
    The fiercely charismatic, mesmeric gaze of Lupita Nyong’o holds the movie together, and I have to say that without her presence, the movie’s final spasm of anarchic weirdness might have lost its grip. She radiates a force-field of pure defiance.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Beach Bum
    Joyous, outrageous and slyly mournful.
  16. The Kindergarten Teacher
    Gyllenhaal is terrific as a teacher and wannabe poet who exploits a child prodigy in this gripping psychological drama.
  17. Maiden
    At all events, it pays due homage to Edwards as a courageous pioneer.
  18. Triple Frontier
    It’s an enjoyable enough way to spend two hours but without any commentary or real depth, it’s in need of a bit more suspense or conflict to really oil the wheels, the film too often ambling along when it should be racing.
  19. 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.
  20. Sauvage / Wild
    What is interesting about Sauvage is that it shows how savagely boring Leo’s life is, quite a lot of the time.
  21. Hannah
    It is a haunting portrait of emotional undeadness.
  22. What They Had
    The script, inspired by Chomko’s grandparents’ marriage, throws up plenty of authentic-looking observations of life with Alzheimer’s.
  23. 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.
  24. Foxtrot
    Foxtrot is a movie from Israeli writer-director Samuel Maoz that is structurally fascinating yet also structurally flawed: its accumulations of ambiguity and mystery are jettisoned by a whimsical final reveal.
  25. Fighting with My Family
    Comedy and irony are not allowed to encroach on the film’s upbeat message, and the drama doesn’t reach out beyond a wrestling fanbase.
  26. Apollo 11
    The result is a stunning project of historical preservation – no narration, no cutaway interviews, no recreations, just original material synced with some music and the occasional diagram.
  27. The Competition
    It’s clear that they want to run it as meritocratically as possible, but what’s interesting is how the criteria for what talent is and who gets to judge it come up for debate.
  28. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
    It’s a conventional film in many ways but one that slowly and effectively builds to a remarkably rousing climax, displaying an act of overwhelming ingenuity that’s hard to deny.
  29. Cold Pursuit
    Even without Liam Neeson’s bizarre promotional “rape revenge” anecdote, this violent movie would leave a weird taste in the mouth, lumbered as it is with odd sub-Coen, sub-Tarantino stylings.
  30. Skid Row Marathon
    Undeniably uplifting, even if the string-laden score strains too hard to tweak the tear ducts, this US-made documentary tracks a running group of recovering addicts and paroled convicts who train for marathons together.
  31. Capernaum
    There is passion and compassion here, and Labaki’s film brings home what poverty and desperation mean, and conversely what love and humanity mean.
  32. On the Basis of Sex
    On the Basis of Sex is a solid, often impassioned film, but too often its worst instincts take over, and cliches stack up faster than legal documents.
  33. Paddleton
    Duplass and his co-writer, director Alex Lehmann, deliver this strange concoction – an improv bromance mixed with a tragic love story – with delicacy.
  34. An Elephant Sitting Still
    Hu provides no easy resolutions, and evidently found none himself. This epic of futility will have to stand as an epitaph for an extremely promising career cut short.
  35. The Aftermath
    It is more of a holiday romance and the well-intentioned performances lead nowhere.
  36. Varda by Agnès
    Two hours in this director’s company is a pleasure.
  37. Piranhas
    Giovannesi’s movie is watchable enough, but often looks like a smoothed-out, planed-down version of Garrone’s Gomorrah: Gomorrah without the rough edges, like a classy television version.
  38. Instant Family
    Instant Family retains the obvious appeal of watching basically nice people attempt a fundamentally decent thing for a few hours. The shamelessly optimistic finale may even leave you with something in your eye, dammit.
  39. 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.
  40. The Operative
    Audiences may come to this film expecting the conventional pleasures of a spy thriller – excitement, tension, suspense – along with the additional values associated with the very best of the genre: character nuance, emotional complexity, plausible human dilemma. The Operative utterly defeats all of these hopes, chiefly in being at all times extremely boring.
  41. Mr. Jones
    Mr Jones is a bold and heartfelt movie with a real Lean-ian sweep.
  42. The Kindness of Strangers
    The Kindness of Strangers is one of those terrible ideas for a film: ensemble dramas that are superficially attractive because of all the big names shoehorned into the cast-list.
  43. I Was at Home, But
    The movie is not without interest, but I found it mannered, derivative and opaque.
  44. Gully Boy
    In the end, Gully Boy runs on very traditional lines, and maybe comes too close to cliche, but is always engagingly dead set on entertainment.
  45. The Golden Glove
    Apart from its grisliness, its hopelessness, and its pointlessness, what strikes you most about this true-crime movie is its brownness.
  46. God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunija
    What begins as a sprightly, shrewd, visually striking satire from Macedonian director Teona Strugar Mitevska deflates in its second act into something unconvincing, sophomoric and dramatically redundant.
  47. Elisa & Marcela
    Writer-director Isabel Coixet has taken a real-life love story from 20th-century LGBT Spanish history and turned it into something bafflingly passionless, joyless and excessively tasteful, an anti-alchemy assisted by stately monochrome photography that makes every frame look like a postcard from an art shop.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    TT3D: Closer to the Edge
    The speeds on such narrow, winding public roads are hair-raising and superbly photographed, the crashes spectacular and the riders far more likable than anyone involved in Formula One. Particularly engaging is the zanily amusing, leathered lunatic Guy Martin, a Lincolnshire lorry repair mechanic by day.
  49. Patrick
    It’s a film jam-packed with very good actors and big names, and suffused with a puppyish willingness to please. But where is the bite?
  50. 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.
  51. Watergate
    In the course of a mammoth, horribly absorbing four-hour film from Charles Ferguson we are immersed in a world of milky TV news footage, big lapels, bulbous combovers, dirty tricks, sweat, jowls and guilt.
  52. Monos
    An arrestingly bizarre experience.
  53. A Private War
    The film’s relative failure to engage with the more quotidian details of Colvin’s behind-the-scenes existence is a shame, because it is here that some real clues to her personality might have been found.
  54. Mektoub, My Love: Canto Uno
    It spends its time among unfeasibly beautiful young people in microscopically tiny swimming costumes, and moves with them in a trance of heightened physicality, drifting across beaches, bars and dancefloors. The mood is dreamy unseriousness qualified occasionally by temporary stabs of jealousy or misery. The sexiness isn’t promiscuous exactly; more directionless.
  55. Happy Death Day 2U
    An inevitable yet staggeringly unnecessary follow-up to the surprise horror hit turns a nifty concept into an exhaustingly convoluted mess.
  56. Isn't It Romantic
    In a fun, glossy take down of age-old genre tropes, Rebel Wilson wakes up in an alternate universe, dominated by romantic comedy cliches.
  57. High Flying Bird
    In picking at a system until it’s threaded, High Flying Bird is a classic Soderbergh construct.
  58. If Beale Street Could Talk
    In some ways, If Beale Street Could Talk is a portmanteau movie with great performances from KiKi Layne, Regina King and Brian Tyree Henry, a succession of scenes from interrelated lives, constellated around the main narrative arc and supercharged with an ecstasy of sadness and knowledge.
  59. Boy Erased
    At all events, it shows how homophobia creates credulous, fearful people vulnerable to the snake-oil con trick of “conversion”.
  60. Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga
    After India decriminalised homosexuality last September, many wondered anew: what would a Bollywood romcom look and sound like with a non-straight protagonist? The answer, it transpires, is: much the same as any other Bollywood romcom.
  61. Native Son
    It’s a fiery, flawed, often stunningly made film that provokes uncomfortable discussion, rather like the Richard Wright novel it was based on, although purists might argue over some key changes.
  62. Them That Follow
    It’s competently made but utterly vacant, a forgettable indie fading fast.
  63. The Souvenir
    The Souvenir is an artefact in the highest auteur register. Its absence of tonal readability is a challenge. But there is also a cerebrally fierce, slow-burn passion in its austere, unemphasised plainness.
  64. The Report
    The Report is an angry, urgent film that rarely raises its voice, smartly conveying inhumanity and injustice without unnecessary drama. I found it thrilling.
  65. Official Secrets
    Official Secrets is a well-intentioned retelling of a daunting act of courage and as a vehicle for informing more people of who Katharine Gun is, it’s effective, carefully laying out the incremental stakes as well as her noble intentions. Credit for this however lies almost solely with Knightley.
  66. Late Night
    Arguably the film’s biggest problem is that it’s less laugh-out-loud hilarious and more deserving of the odd casual smirk.
  67. The Last Black Man in San Francisco
    It’s a shaggy, wistful film that acts as a heartfelt tribute to both a city and a friendship and when the cutesy quirk that surrounds it is dialled down, we’re able to appreciate the underpinning earnestness.
  68. Knock Down the House
    Knock Down The House is far more effective when it is about the people and the process, not landing quips.
  69. Where's My Roy Cohn?
    What this by-the-numbers approach lacks in artistry it makes up for in an avalanche of facts.
  70. The Farewell
    It’s a slight film at times but one that builds to a crescendo of emotion.
  71. 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.
  72. Escape Room
    A very cinematic spatial impossibility is conjured up by Robitel as he allows the audience to ponder how exactly these rooms are supposed to fit together. The film has a vicious streak of throwaway black comedy.
  73. How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
    All the fire and lifeblood of this idea has been sucked out and we are left with something bland.
  74. Animals
    Its wild nature won’t be to everyone’s taste, but that’s sort of the point. It’s not a film that cares if you find these women charming or likable – it just cares that you believe them.
  75. The Gandhi Murder
    The combination of WTF casting and glaring technical limitation proves so distracting you can barely focus on the script’s new intel.
  76. Green Book
    Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen are two excellent actors outclassing their material in this amiable feelgood-liberal entertainment, inspired by a true story.
  77. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
    The law about movie characters needing to be sympathetic is defied in this horribly fascinating true-crime black comedy.
  78. Blinded by the Light
    There’s something so constructed and suffocating about watching a tried and tested formula not working, the over-sentimental string-pulling on show for all to see.
  79. After the Wedding
    It would be difficult to invest in if not for its two main stars who work hard to elevate the overly engineered plot, filling in the emotional gaps left by the haphazard script.
  80. Velvet Buzzsaw
    Gilroy avoids the ghoulish extremes of Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals and offers up a believably pretentious battleground. He’s as invested in crafting a fully fleshed art world as he is in creating a full-on horror film and while the two often blend well, at other times, his concoction is far less effective.
  81. The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part
    The second Lego Movie is even better than the original: a sophisticated new adventure that gives us a new look at how the universality of the Lego universe was more gendered than we thought.
  82. One Cut of the Dead
    It’s a movie that rescues the tired zombie trope – without insisting on metaphor or satire.
  83. Reign of the Supermen
    If gym buff Henry Cavill really is quitting the role in the movies, as has been rumoured, the film-makers could do worse than to follow the direction here, opening a vacancy for a skinny, long-haired Superman with an earnest hipstery vibe that screams Adam Driver.
  84. The Breaker Upperers
    The Breaker Upperers is Sami and Van Beek’s show through and through. The film coasts off the energy and rapport of this affable pair, whose smart-mouthed performances are full of pep and fizz. What they lack in wit they compensate for with sheer likability.
  85. Second Act
    A truly terrible Working Girl knock-off.
  86. The Mule
    As a drama, it’s frustratingly insubstantial, failing to provide enough of an emotional centre or a convincing payoff.
  87. Destroyer
    Destroyer reverses the gender polarity and ethos of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant: with Ferrara, the cop is the abuser and with Kusama the cop is the abused, but both are cops who have descended into hell and whose compulsive, addictive behaviour may be an effort to escape it – or to enter further into hell in an attempt to cauterise the pain.
  88. On Her Shoulders
    Nadia is shown always surrounded by crowds, almost crushed by them. But her utter loneliness is heartbreaking.
  89. King of Thieves
    The job itself is bafflingly dull.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Polar
    Each assassination sequence is so ridiculously protracted and inefficiently constructed that it would make a good running gag if the violence wasn’t the one thing the film seemed to take seriously.
  91. 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.
  92. IO
    Too measured and sedate for a post-apocalyptic thriller, yet too barren for a Christopher Nolan-style space and time travel epic, IO appears most akin to The Martian in that it focuses primarily on one person’s grit and resourcefulness to endure and grow plants in an unforgiving place.
  93. Hale County This Morning, This Evening
    There is something visionary in this film.
  94. Monsters and Men
    There is humanity and complexity in this welcome movie, as well as muscular power and unreconciled anger.
  95. Glass
    Like so many of Shyamalan’s adventures, Glass starts strongly and fizzles, a dramatic droop which is initially camouflaged by the escalating grandiosity of visual rhetoric, something febrile and high-concept that is visionary in everything except having vision.
  96. Beautiful Boy
    Upper-middle-class white privilege does not exempt you from drug problems, but it looks as if it rates you a premium kind of respectful and sorrowing film treatment, something to do, I suspect, with the tremulous father-son ownership of this narrative.
  97. Mary Queen of Scots
    It is a finely constructed drama, avoiding stuffiness without slipping into camp territory and while diehard historians might disapprove, everyone else will be supremely entertained.
  98. The 12th Man
    This extraordinary story has unfortunately been turned into a handsomely produced but laborious, drawn-out and dramatically inert movie.
  99. 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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    What Is Democracy?
    An extended and good-looking essay, it serves as a sharp reminder to pay attention to politics and to remember that the personal and the local are political. If you like thinking about that sort of thing, and you care about whether your democracy means anything, this film might make you get up and take some action.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »