The Guardian's Scores

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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
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  1. Wyrmwood: Apocalypse
    Kiah Roache-Turner keeps the camera moving and the cuts regular, setting a cracking energy that’s particularly important for midnight movies like this, concerned more with relishing carnage than telling a story.
  2. 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.
  3. Wakefield
    Cranston acts the hell out of the role, like he’s performing Macbeth in a room. Unfortunately his commitment isn’t enough to sell Wakefield as anything more than a hollow character study, with an unappealing tool at its core.
  4. Yakuza Apocalypse
    For all its berserk energy, you will need a very particular sense of humour not to lose patience with the prolific Takashi Miike’s latest.
  5. Darling
    John Schlesinger’s winsome adventure from 1965 still has verve and ambition, a romantic satire of swinging London.
  6. Romeo + Juliet
    DiCaprio’s performance is excellent; his Romeo is transformed and astonished by the real thing; he has play-acted at love until now, and he hasn’t realised how vulnerable it would make him. Danes looks more mature than he does (though in fact six years younger) and she is such a smart, stylish player, even at this age. The Luhrmann R+J is a tonic and a delight.
  7. Ip Man 4: The Finale
    Given that a fair amount of creative licence has been exercised here, it is strange that Bruce Lee has such a small part to play.
  8. Being Eddie
    Being Eddie, a new Netflix documentary on Eddie Murphy, isn’t his best movie. It isn’t his worst.
  9. The Five-Year Engagement
    As for Violet, Emily Blunt brings to the role genuine sympathy, and she continues to thaw out the ice-queen hauteur of her earlier movies.
  10. Free Guy
    Free Guy isn’t going to have many MA theses written about it, but it has entertainment value.
  11. The Salt of Tears
    It is a watchable, insouciant love story with some great incidental performances, although there is a sense of the shark being jumped 30 minutes from the end.
  12. I Want You Back
    It’s a far better version of a romantic comedy than we’re used to streaming of late.
  13. Yomeddine
    It is a rather slight dramatic experience.
  14. Lost & Found
    It’s written and directed by Liam O Mochain with the kind of inoffensive hot-water-bottle-laughs you wouldn’t think possible after Father Ted. Well, I say inoffensive, but one of the vignettes – about an uptight bridezilla whose sole character trait is her desperation to get married – is depressingly unfeminist.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Mummy
    Alternately corny and magical, scary and comic, naive and perverse, elegant and clumsy, The Mummy is always stylish and atmospheric, and Cushing and Lee became enduring world stars.
  16. Sly
    Zimny could have mined some more intimate profundity from Stallone’s determined political fence-sitting, the reluctance of a born entertainer to alienate any faction of his fandom with vocal partisanship.
  17. Una
    Mara and Mendelsohn have a compellingly toxic chemistry together and their initial confrontation is intriguingly tense. But once we’re locked into the meat of the story, the film has nowhere else to go, at least anywhere that’s of interest and the pace becomes laborious as their discussions turn repetitive.
  18. Loving Highsmith
    It is basically droningly reverent, as well as sometimes bland and naive.
  19. Plane
    It’s just about diverting enough for the most part but there’s something a little off about its pacing, French director Jean-François Richet (who peaked a while back with his propulsive Mesrine movies) struggling to corral his moving parts, suspense never really arriving as it should.
  20. The Mafia Only Kills in Summer
    It’s a winning and likable film.
  21. Labyrinth of Lies
    While the topic of mass delusion is fascinating, this film is too unfocused to turn it into compelling drama.
  22. 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    McLintock!
    One of John Wayne's jobbing westerns, a would-be comic transplanting of The Taming Of The Shrew. [08 Aug 2009, p.53]
    • The Guardian
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Madame X
    You find yourself admiring Madonna’s desire to focus forward artistically and to recast her music as expressly political, while wondering if the songs from Madame X are really good enough to warrant so much of the spotlight.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Mouse on the Moon
    Jolly sequel to the superior The Mouse That Roared, which flaunted a Peter Sellers tour de force. This returns to the little Duchy of Fenwick, where the inhabitants - by virtue of their wine, which makes rocket fuel of a rare vintage - beat the superpowers to the moon. [04 Mar 2006, p.53]
    • The Guardian
  26. Lu Over the Wall
    It seemed overextended and self-conscious.
  27. 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.
  28. Daddio
    While Hall’s script might keep us at a remove, her direction takes us closer to something that feels more real, managing to conjure the specific thrill of travelling from the airport to the city at night, the hum of possibility increasing with every mile and finding ways to make what could have felt like a static location come alive, putting us in the car right next to her characters.
  29. Lan Yu
    It remains among the strongest of the wave of gay-themed Chinese features from the late-20th and early-21st century (along with Fish and Elephant and East Palace, West Palace), elegantly interleaving its social and political commentary.
  30. The King
    Chalamet gives it his all as the pudding-bowl-hairstyled young king. But so much of the poetry and the sense of loss has gone from this decaffeinated version of the story.
  31. A Glitch in the Matrix
    What’s missing from this fecund brew, which you could imagine being twice as long, is any kind of judgment or analysis of the subjects.
  32. Sick
    Williamson knows how to write a horror script – Sick offers moderate to intense thrills delivered in a compact frame whose Covid 2020 specificity adds more to the tension than it distracts.
  33. Abigail
    As the plotting falls apart and the wheels truly come off, there’s nothing that strong direction and a work-hard cast can do to keep Abigail from sucking. There’s a lot of blood here but very little else.
  34. Destroyer
    Kidman fearlessly commits to the filth of it all, whether it’s drunkenly fighting off her daughter’s sleazy boyfriend or jerking off a bed-ridden informant, but her radical transformation and some timeframe trickery can’t mask a plot that feels rather empty.
  35. On Chesil Beach
    It is a tender and valuable film, well acted, with a shrewd eye for how naive you can be in your early 20s, how impatient, how pompous, how tragicomically un-self-aware.
  36. Things Will Be Different
    Despite an intriguing high-concept lo-fi premise, its oddities and uninteresting superfluities mean that it never really emerges from its self-imposed inertia and gloom.
  37. The Rental
    It’s pretty basic boilerplate, scary-movie stuff, with tropes and tricks that have already been extensively satirised elsewhere.
  38. Cuckoo
    But as effective as the film might be in the moment, Singer’s increasingly sloppy plotting starts to get in the way of the bigger picture by the frantic last act, which is both strangely filled with exposition info dumps yet still lacking in much sense.
  39. The Monkey
    The deaths here are neither funny nor scary or even gross enough to linger, we’re all rendered unshockable far too soon.
  40. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    It is oddly like an Agatha Christie thriller with all the pasteboard characters, 2D backstories and foreign locale, but no murder.
  41. The Bad Batch
    The film doesn’t quite live up to its creepy, savage opening, or carry through its best ideas.
  42. 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.
  43. Mission to Lars
    The peripheral interviews with the extended Spicer family are as compelling as the central quest; this is a film with rare honesty and nuance in a field that frequently feels queasy.
  44. Bouchra
    Far from reiterating tired binaries – tradition versus modernity, elders versus youngsters – the film embraces the beauty of contradictions with open arms. Even when the possibility of reconciliation appears out of reach, it is the effort to communicate – whether through words or art – that brings peace.
  45. Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles
    Interview With the Vampire is still horribly exciting, shocking and funny.
  46. Never Goin' Back
    Watching Never Goin’ Back, it’s easy to see the frames of reference Frizzell pulled from, besides her own teenage escapades. But the film also defies easy categorization; it’s not consistently funny enough to be a comedy, nor lively enough to be a drama.
  47. Lucy
    The end of the movie goes completely off the rails, but in a way that is charming in its stupidity.
  48. A Million Miles Away
    In the hands of director Alejandra Márquez Abella, it is impossible not to be charmed by this tale of tenacity, commitment and community
  49. Apostle
    Polarizing yet undeniably fascinating, the bait-and-switch horror film lures its viewer into a false sense of terrified security before pouncing in an anything-goes frenzy, and Evans’s latest is a prime specimen.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Anderson Tapes
    A clever caper movie. [08 Oct 2011, p.46]
    • The Guardian
  51. 2 Days in New York
    We've rarely seen comedy this smart since Woody Allen and Seinfeld left New York.
  52. How to Train Your Dragon
    The script, the gags and the action remain mostly intact. But this time around, real actors and sets become deadweight to a story that soared in larger-than-life animated form.
  53. Department Q: The Absent One
    An awful number of cliches are being ticked off here (the Fincher-esque lighting, the dogged and socially inept cop), but it’s a diverting potboiler for crime drama completists.
  54. August 32nd on Earth
    Charming and intriguing tale of undeclared love, full of haunting set pieces that stayed in my mind for hours afterwards. [11 June 1999, p.15]
    • The Guardian
  55. All the Bright Places
    Haley, who last directed the sweet and underseen Hearts Beat Loud, gives the film a stronger aesthetic than most Netflix teen offerings, and Fanning and Smith work hard at charming us into submission, but their hard-to-buy relationship isn’t quite the immersive ride-or-die love connection it needs to be, given the melodrama of the last act.
  56. Long Weekend
    A masterpiece in minimalist horror.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Day of the Locust
    A tale of the losers and chancers rattling around Hollywood's fringe, the film fatally lacks the black humour and nightmarish edge of Nathanael West's source novel. But there are some good elements swarming through the muddle, not least the performances from Karen Black as a lowly starlet and Donald Sutherland as the emotional wreck who falls under her spell.
  58. Pelé
    This valedictory film allows sober recognition for all that he did.
  59. My Sailor, My Love
    My Sailor, My Love is worth watching for Walker’s excellent portrayal of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown and the damage accruing from being the perpetual caretaker of the family.
  60. We Bury the Dead
    In a genre plagued by a lack of effort, I’ll take a solid try.
  61. A Boy Called Christmas
    It feels kid-gloves at times: big-hearted and entertaining, but possibly lacking a little fun or oomph. A lovely warming film, though.
  62. The Boxtrolls
    Set it against the shiny blandishments that have passed for family fun this season, and it starts to look vaguely radical.
  63. Rosaline
    Rosaline . . . understands what makes a good adaptation: a sense of humor at least on par with if not exceeding the original, lighthearted lines with serious delivery, crackling romantic chemistry. And in the case of Rosaline, an unmissable lead in Kaitlyn Dever as a lovelorn medieval schemer left on read.
  64. Good Fortune
    There are noble intentions to Good Fortune, in ways related to both the resurrection of the big-screen comedy and its of-the-moment through-line about the increasingly untenable class divide in America, but also not a lot of laughs, the idea of its existence more appealing than the experience of watching it.
  65. Aniara
    With Aniara, the Swedish writing-directing team Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja deliver a cold, cruel, piercingly humane sci-fi parable that’s both bang on the zeitgeist and yet also unnervingly original.
  66. He Named Me Malala
    Guggenheim largely dodges lodging her story within a greater political context; a choice, but a shame, for when he does, the movie gains tension.
  67. WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn
    Jed Rothstein’s very entertaining documentary is another horror story from the tulip-feverish world of tech startups.
  68. Land
    There’s just not enough here to make it a worthwhile retread through familiar territory, proof of Wright’s basic competency as a director but nothing more.
  69. Headshot
    It’s a very good iteration of the genre, with moody lighting, razor sharp editing and great fight sequences, but be advised that only the strongest of stomachs need apply: it is excessively gory and amoral, even by the standards of such fare.
  70. Horse Girl
    The ambition of Horse Girl ultimately gets the better of it, turning what could be a dark but insightful depiction on signs missed in a mental health crisis into an agreement on one’s madness – a game of what’s real, and what’s not, that feels unsettling to play.
  71. The True Adventures of Wolfboy
    First time director Martin Krejci draws lovely performances from his cast, and the whole thing looks dreamy and splendid thanks to Andrew Droz Palermo’s cinematography – but the last act could have done with some serious workshopping to smooth out the motivational kinks and deflationary resolution.
  72. Americana
    It doesn’t quite lasso the bronco, but the ambitions of writer-director Tony Tost’s yarn are ambitious and interesting, and he has at least assembled a cracking cast to tell it.
  73. Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!
    This time, his journey doesn’t send him to the ends of experience. Instead, he goes on a smug odyssey of know-it-all-ism that yields a scant few factoids we didn’t already learn from his first film.
  74. In Your Dreams
    This is a little too slight and breezy to really make much of an impression, like a dream you’ll forget as soon as you open your eyes.
  75. 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.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Hammett
    It's a stylish, entertaining movie, starring Frederic Forrest (a dead ringer for Hammett, bar the height) as a drinking, smoking, coughing and typewriter-bashing writer lured back into detection by an old Pinkerton associate (Peter Boyle) and stumbling into the plot of The Maltese Falcon.
  77. Song Sung Blue
    This is a never-say-die story and its cheerful optimism makes it a calorific Christmas treat.
  78. Dreams
    It is quite a vision: mordant, satirical, brutal.
  79. Köln 75
    Here is a niche drama about one of the most important chapters in the history of experimental jazz. It is however watchable, well acted and avoids the music-movie cliches – though I could have done without the fourth-wall-breaking lectures about the nature of jazz improvisation.
  80. Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band
    As in Scorsese’s rock docs, there are reams of archive footage and rare snapshots to swoon over (Dylan’s striped trousers from 1967 never get old), all seamlessly edited together by Roher and Eamonn O’Connor.
  81. PVT Chat
    Ben Hozie makes his feature debut with this semi-insightful, uncomfortably funny indie drama about a man who becomes obsessed with an online sex worker. It’s a film with a slackerish mumblecore vibe, and Hozie is refreshingly grown up about sex. But it’s hard to see how his film adds much to the conversation about intimacy in the internet age.
  82. Avatar: Fire and Ash
    Avatar is as gigantically uninteresting and colossally impervious to criticism as ever: a vast, blank edifice that placidly repels objection.
  83. At War
    This is a stridently, bafflingly cacophonous movie which despite some smart, shrewd touches, is pretty much content with its single note of shouting acrimony and finishes by immolating itself in martyred self-pity.
  84. The Uninvited
    We’re invited to laugh at the characters gently but The Uninvited never goes for all-out satire and is all the better for it, even if the last act is overly neat.
  85. The Universal Theory
    The script, by Roderick Warich and Kröger, isn’t quite as nifty as its famous models, but it has its own grim integrity, especially with the jarring last frames.
  86. 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.
  87. 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.
  88. Earwig
    A fog of menace descends on this hauntingly photographed, oppressive and driftingly directionless movie from Lucile Hadzihalilovic. It has the intensively curated atmosphere of body-horror noir – if not the conventional plot structure – and some way into the running time you might find yourself awakened from its reverie of formless anxiety by a sudden, horrifying stab of violence.
  89. The Secret Life of Pets
    It’s not ground-breaking, but there are laughs, and it is a good audience movie.
  90. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
    This Anchorman sequel knows who its fans are, and does its best to keep them happy. No one will be complaining.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Jerk
    Like Woody Allen's "Take The Money and Run", The Jerk is basically designed to allow Martin to use as many of his standup jokes and routines as possible, but his charm and timing makes this cleverly constructed movie seem fantastically loose and easy.
  92. Heart Eyes
    Whatever might have made sense on paper just doesn’t translate to screen, a fun little concept that ends up being something of a drag.
  93. The Man from Mo'Wax
    Ego, money, drugs: Lavelle’s story has the makings of an entertaining account of the music business. But this film feels too much like a promo for a comeback attempt.
  94. Sputnik
    A smart and satisfying movie, although the crashy-bashy deafening score is so loud you can probably hear it in space.
  95. Babylon
    Babylon is a film that’s thinking big, aiming big, acting big: but feeling medium, and finally ordering us to care about the celluloid magic, a secondary emotional response which should be happening without any explicit instruction. Yet it’s always a pleasure to be in the presence of such black-belt movie stars as Pitt and Robbie and there is something funny in Babylon’s wild, event-movie gigantism.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    36 Hours
    George Seaton's 1964 36 Hours is complete tosh but clever and zestful tosh, and there's not a lot of that about. [13 Apr 1999, p.20]
    • The Guardian
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Assassination Bureau
    Done in a hip, glossy, none-too-witty style, though the support acts - Curt Jurgens, Philippe Noiret, Warren Mitchell, Telly Savalas - help it along.
  98. Skincare
    Skincare is a worthy contribution to the growing microgenre of female-led beauty-themed horror, and some of us out here are ready for more.
  99. Last Breath
    This is a workmanlike iteration somewhat ploddingly true to its genre, from the style of lighting used for the interviews, to the sweeping, keening strings-led soundtrack, to the almost shocking moments of humour and honesty.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Bluff
    Chopra Jonas gamely commits to the pulpiness of The Bluff, even as it doesn’t ask much of her beyond its impressive action sequences and a few tart one-liners. But there’s cinematic swoop to the movie that you might not expect in a straight-to-streaming swashbuckler, and you feel the grisliness as she drags herself along the ground in blood-splattered clothes like so many final girls of gory slashers before her.
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