The Guardian's Scores

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For 6,576 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: 2,493 out of 6576
  2. Mixed: 3,764 out of 6576
  3. Negative: 319 out of 6576
6576 movie reviews
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  1. The Untamed
    In all honesty The Untamed doesn’t seem to go anywhere special. But connoisseurs of oddness may cherish it.
  2. Dark Night
    Occasionally too emblematic as individuals, the characters collectively mesh into a portrait of a dislocated society elevated by Sutton’s talent for disorienting imagery.
  3. American Made
    The beamingly ingenuous Cruise, whose character is not burdened with any doubts or an inner life, somehow sells it to you.
  4. Killing Ground
    The elegance of Power’s approach belies the extremities of his blood-splotched, hard-nosed story. Which, as the film escalates conflicts and scampers towards closure, is more than grim – borderline misanthropic, perhaps.
  5. Bushwick
    Sadly the acting and dialogue needed a little work.
  6. Logan Lucky
    It’s all wonderfully preposterous, but also endearing and gratifying.
  7. Clash
    The movie stunningly replicates that sense of inside and outside that must be felt by witnesses to any historic moment: the private debate, the enclosed conflict, and the theatre of confrontation unfolding beyond. What a dynamic piece of cinema.
  8. England Is Mine
    It’s decently and honestly acted by Jack Lowden, who keeps the film alive, but it somehow winds up being a story about always following your dream and never giving up.
  9. Marjorie Prime
    It’s a haunting little film that ends with a somewhat overwhelming poignancy.
  10. The Queen of Spain
    Cruz carries the film. She has a ridiculous kind of heroism, and her disguises are hilarious, particularly as a knight, when she insists on wearing a false beard under her helmet.
  11. Patti Cake$
    Patti Cake$ is by no means a hopelessly bad movie, it’s just hampered by its desperate need to be a crowd-pleaser.
  12. The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature
    The summer of inessential animation continues with this very middling sequel to 2014’s semi-forgotten squirrel-based timekiller.
  13. Machines
    A sombre, relevant piece of work.
  14. After Love
    After Love is intelligent, compassionate, challenging film-making.
  15. The Dark Tower
    It’s rare that a film so convoluted also manages to be so determinedly boring.
  16. The Emoji Movie
    The Emoji Movie is a force of insidious evil, a film that feels as if it was dashed off by an uninspired advertising executive.
  17. Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, the Colours of Life
    It’s a film to remind you of the almost miraculously collaborative nature of cinema, but also the radiant personalities of individuals.
  18. Detroit
    This is a sombre, grieving movie which appears to gesture to the ghost-town ruin that is still in Detroit’s future.
  19. A Family Man
    It’s run-of-the-mill, and crassly manipulative.
  20. The Midwife
    It is a very good idea for a two-hander, and Frot and Deneuve give it their considerable all.
  21. Kuso
    If the film wasn’t so cheekily self-aware it might be literally unbearable, but every so often it references its own grotesquerie.
  22. The Fencer
    The set-up is a bit schmaltzy and the only guesswork is how bitter the bittersweet ending will be, but Haro coaxes strong performances from the cast.
  23. Our Beloved Month of August
    Our ­Beloved Month Of August is a real one-off: ­eccentric and singular and ­cerebral: an arthouse event, yes, but also witty and emotionally engaged. I found myself thinking about it for days afterwards – and smiling a very great deal. Try it.
  24. Dunkirk
    This is a powerful, superbly crafted film with a story to tell, avoiding war porn in favour of something desolate and apocalyptic, a beachscape of shame, littered with soldiers zombified with defeat, a grimly male world with hardly any women on screen. It is Nolan’s best film so far.
  25. The Death of Louis XIV
    This quietly amazing film is conceived in terms of pure minimalist intimacy.
  26. To the Bone
    It’s a dismal TV movie of the week: trite, shallow, cautiously middlebrow and blandly complicit in the cult of female prettiness that it is supposedly criticising.
  27. Wish Upon
    This is carelessly made trash but worse, it’s carelessly made trash that thinks it will spawn not just a franchise but a cinematic universe.
  28. The Sea
    Hinds is a strong, wounded presence, but the laboured structure cuts insistently around him to get at a psychology mostly scrambled in translation. This Sea's just too choppy.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Chaplin
    Robert Downey Jr sparkles as the British comedy giant but Richard Attenborough's film feels somewhat dutiful around him.
  30. The House
    The exuberant comic talents of Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler are largely wasted in this uninspired addition to the frat movie canon, which resembles reheated leftovers of the Hangover, albeit with a curious detour into some heavy bloodletting.
  31. Endless Poetry
    It’s a real flight of fancy.
  32. Spider-Man: Homecoming
    Spider-Man: Homecoming is so joyously entertaining that it’s enough to temporarily cure any superhero fatigue. There’s wit, smarts and a nifty, inventive plot that serves as a reminder of what buoyant fun such films can bring.
  33. Survivor
    It’s a lumberingly dated kind of spy thriller, convoluted without ever being intriguing – and an insufficient number of bangs for your buck.
  34. Dirty Grandpa
    Some laughs – and some unintentional eeeuuuwwws.
  35. Baby Driver
    [An] outrageously enjoyable petrolhead heist caper.
  36. Stockholm, My Love
    It is a study of grief suppressed and a personality becalmed.
  37. Despicable Me 3
    Despicable Me 3 will certainly keep the younger elements of its audience happy, with its dose of aspartame-rush hyperactivity. But for everyone else it may prove decent rather than captivating.
  38. War for the Planet of the Apes
    It’s an engrossing, forthright adventure.
  39. Person to Person
    There’s little in the way of dramatic conflict or base wit to keep us hanging around to see what happens within each.
  40. In Pursuit of Silence
    The film occasionally hits a rather loud note of passive-aggressive piety, but it is very persuasive.
  41. Transformers: The Last Knight
    The final explosive showdown seems to be competing with Marvel movies for spectacle. But Marvel brings wit and fun. As far as those factors go, the Transformers franchise is in very short supply.
  42. Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press
    This documentary is an invigorating, disturbing portrait of the arrogance and sinister self-importance of rich people, bullying politicians and their battalions of lawyers.
  43. The Book of Henry
    In its pure misjudged ickiness, bad-acting ropiness, and its quirksy, smirksy passive-aggressive tweeness, this insidiously terrible film could hardly get any more skin-crawling.
  44. Rough Night
    A fun night will be had, but you’ll have trouble remembering it in the morning.
  45. Viceroy's House
    Viceroy’s House is no very profound work, but it is a nimble and watchable period drama.
  46. The Hippopotamus
    We’re mostly watching Allam scowling at the eccentrics passing through his eyeline – but it’s still a pleasure, and often a joy, to watch the star measuring out and savouring Fry’s rich wordplay like fingers of scotch.
  47. Harmonium
    Although the story unfolds at a steady pace over two hours, the filmmaking is sufficiently elegant and metronomically efficient as to make every minute gripping, especially after the tragic twist halfway through the story.
  48. The Journey
    It’s a strained, dramatically inert and often frankly silly odd-couple bromance fantasy about the Northern Ireland peace process negotiations.
  49. Strange Weather
    Katherine Diekmann’s Strange Weather is a fairly simple melodrama, and one that could use a few reminders that it is better to show not tell. But as a showcase it’s a role that would fuel actors’ dreams.
  50. Beatriz at Dinner
    This isn’t the film we need right now, that’s a meaningless statement, but it’s a film that we deserve to watch, discuss and be grateful for.
  51. The Mummy
    It’s a ragbag of action scenes which needed to be bandaged more tightly.
  52. Letters from Baghdad
    It does serve as a handy summary for those who want a cinematic introduction to Bell’s sprawling, singular story.
  53. Wonder Woman
    It’s plagued by the same problems that dragged down previous visits to the DC movie world: over-earnestness, bludgeoning special effects, and a messy, often wildly implausible plot. What promised to be a glass-ceiling-smashing blockbuster actually looks more like a future camp classic.
  54. The King
    Jarecki uses Elvis Presley’s career and influence to help us make sense of fame, power, corruption, self-destructive behaviour and pretty much all the other ills of the world.
  55. Faces Places
    If there’s a message in Visages, Villages (both to us, and from Varda to her young friend) is that one does not need to be a tortured and nasty person to make great art. She is living and still-working proof.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Barbara
    Once you settle into your bewilderment, however, Barbara an oddly alluring film that does a double backflip on hokey showbiz-bio convention: not an informative introduction to the singer by any means, but a suitably eccentric evocation of her creative essence.
  57. How to Talk to Girls at Parties
    What an extravagantly muddled, borderline incontinent film this is. You might call it genre-hopping, except that this would imply some degree of intent and control.
  58. Based on a True Story
    This is a movie which begins with confidence and style, wearing its influences pretty insouciantly; the film sashays about the screen with a kind of sexy-chic smirk, like the unvarying facial expression of its co-lead Eva Green. But it wobbles at the brink of plot-holes which undermine the vital realistic plausibility of a film like this.
  59. 24 Frames
    Yes, 24 Frames is rigorously experimental; it demands patience and engagement. But this haunted ghost-film had me completely entranced.
  60. Ismael's Ghosts
    This is an unfinished doodle of a film, a madly self-indulgent jeu d’esprit without substance: a sketch, or jumble of sketches, a ragbag of half-cooked ideas for other movie projects, I suspect, that the director has attempt to salvage and jam together. [Cannes Version]
  61. Sachin
    Prolific sports documentarian James Erskine (Pantani, The Battle of the Sexes) here takes on his most ambitious project yet: a study of Sachin Tendulkar – the closest thing Indian cricket has to a living deity – played out over Test session duration to soaring AR Rahman compositions.
  62. Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower
    Teenager vs Superpower does a solid job of contextualising this larger ideological battle, with talking heads and archive footage, but it’s always clear that the focus here is Wong.
  63. You Were Never Really Here
    It is a movie which teeters perpetually on the verge of hallucination, with hideous images and horrible moments looming suddenly through the fog; its movement is largely inward and downward, into a swamp of suppressed abuse memories which are never entirely pieced together or understood – even as the sickeningly violent action continues.
  64. Godard Mon Amour
    Michel Hazanavicius’s Redoubtable is a reasonably funny, moderately interesting movie, wearing its sprightly colourful pastiche like dry-cleaned retro couture.
  65. Jupiter's Moon
    It is a very odd, singular piece of work: not the visionary masterpiece it assumes itself to be and muddled in its effects and ideas. But certainly bold. It loses altitude yet never becomes earthbound.
  66. Happy End
    It is not a new direction for this film-maker, admittedly, but an existing direction pursued with the same dazzling inspiration as ever. It is also as gripping as a satanically inspired soap opera, a dynasty of lost souls.
  67. Loveless
    Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Loveless is a stark, mysterious and terrifying story of spiritual catastrophe: a drama with the ostensible form of a procedural crime thriller. It has a hypnotic intensity and unbearable ambiguity which is maintained until the very end.
  68. Let the Sunshine In
    This is grownup film-making, more savoury than sweet, seductive, oblique and carried by a wonderfully smart and emotionally generous performance from Juliette Binoche – who delivers the material superbly, material which from almost anyone else would sound dyspeptic or absurd.
  69. The Rider
    This is a movie using non-professionals playing versions of themselves, and under Zhao’s patient, unintrusive directorial eye they appear to be inhabiting a kind of heightened documentary.
  70. The Merciless
    By the end of this relentless, sprawling and bloody crime opera it may be you who is on your knees, begging for the damn movie to just hurry up and end it.
  71. Rodin
    It is bloated with all the artist cliches, but freighted with mind-blowing dullness and joylessness.
  72. In the Fade
    Fatih Akin’s mediocre revenge drama In the Fade is the TV movie of the week: feebly uncontentious and un-contemporary.
  73. Double Lover
    It’s a wildly dated-looking and derivative film, a quaint adventure in fantasised naughtiness.
  74. A Gentle Creature
    It is gripping and absorbing in its way, although perhaps too conscious of its own metaphorical properties and opinion may divide as to whether its expressionist element works. Yet there is no doubt as to its power, and its severity.
  75. BPM (Beats Per Minute)
    This film has what its title implies: a heartbeat. It is full of cinematic life.
  76. Filmworker
    What shines through most here is the pure sense of pride felt by Vitali, in the trust Kubrick placed in him, and in his part in creating some of the last century’s most monumental pieces of cinema.
  77. The Square
    This movie really brings some gobsmackingly weird and outrageous spectacle, with moments of pure showstopping freakiness. Eventually it loses a bit of focus and misses some narrative targets which have been sacrificed to those admittedly extraordinary set pieces.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Here After
    This knotty psychological study is an impressive debut from Poland-based Swedish director Von Horn.
  79. Good Time
    The film has its own kind of mad, migrainey energy and individuality, and Robert Pattinson gives a strong, charismatic performance.
  80. Radiance
    A gentle, thoughtful and reflective movie.
  81. The Day After
    The Day After is an elegant exercise. It feels like a chapter from something bigger.
  82. Blade of the Immortal
    If you are going to see one outlandish and occasionally nauseating bloodbath samurai pic this year, this is the one.
  83. The Florida Project
    While minimal on plot, the film digs in its nails on the day-to-day struggles of poor people in America.
  84. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
    It’s an intriguing, disturbing, amusing twist on something which in many ways could be a conventional horror-thriller from the 1970s or 1980s, or even a bunny-boiler nightmare from the 90s.
  85. The Beguiled
    Coppola tells the story with terrific gusto and insouciant wit, tying together images from the first scene and the last, so that the narrative satisfyingly snaps shut.
  86. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
    It’s a comedy that doesn’t really have, or aspire to, any very tragic dimension, but it’s touching. The quirks are underpinned by a heartfelt solidity.
  87. Wonderstruck
    Wonderstruck is sometimes sweet and well-intentioned, but more often indulgent and supercilious.
  88. Hounds of Love
    For horror aficionados it is unmissable. For others, so intense it might be unwatchable.
  89. Baywatch
    By about halfway in, the gags dry up and the story sinks like an overweight tourist who took a dip too early after the all-you-can-eat surf ’n’ turf buffet.
  90. War Machine
    Not funny enough to be satire, not realistic enough to count as political commentary, not exciting enough to work as a war movie, David Michôd’s supposedly Helleresque romp, released on Netflix, is an imperfect non-storm of unsuccess.
  91. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
    Dead Men Tell No Tales moves at a faster rate of knots than any Pirates film; trouble is, nothing has really been added. It’s the same soggy ride, set to a marginally preferable speed.
  92. Martyrs
    What’s left after the gore is stripped away is a mildly bloody, meatless horror.
  93. Okja
    The pure energy and likability of this film make it such a pleasure.
  94. The Woman Who Left
    It’s a film you have to feel your way into, like a ruined church or a haunted house.
  95. Mindhorn
    There are such great gags, and it is acted with such fanatical gusto by Barratt that it’s impossible not to root for this unlikeliest of heroes.
  96. The Wedding Plan
    The real-time agony of the wedding day itself has an edge-of-the-seat factor, and Kooler gives a sensitive, emotionally generous performance.
  97. Two Women
    It takes time to grow on you, but for me, there is a demure watchability.
  98. Whisky Galore!
    It comes across as twee, comfy-cardigan film-making. And, Eddie Izzard’s best efforts notwithstanding, it simply isn’t very funny.
  99. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
    Ritchie’s film is at all times over the top, crashing around its digital landscapes in all manner of beserkness, sometimes whooshing along, sometimes stuck in the odd narrative doldrum. But it is often surprisingly entertaining, and whatever clunkers he has delivered in the past, Ritchie again shows that a film-maker of his craft and energy commands attention.
  100. Absolutely Anything
    A huge amount of talent here, including Joanna Lumley and Eddie Izzard. Sadly it goes nowhere.
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