The Guardian's Scores

For 6,573 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 2.3 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:
6573 movie reviews
  1. If this film were a person, you’d want to give it a big hug, as you would a gawky teenager, and reassure it that it will be tough out there, that not everyone is going to get its idiosyncratic charms, but that’s OK because it’s awesome just the way it is.
  2. Director Susanna White favours a generic spy-movie look: those chilly blue filters surely need resting now. Yet she works smartly with her actors: while Skarsgård wolfs down great handfuls of scenery, McGregor effectuates a thoughtful transformation from ineffectual tourist to man in the field.
  3. Eat That Question does a good job of giving us just a taste of nearly every era in Zappa’s multifaceted career.
  4. It’s a beguiling mix of animated storytelling and narration that doesn’t flinch from exploring the emotional highs and lows that accompany a life with autism.
  5. The result, while instantly forgettable, is a fundamentally pleasurable experience.
  6. As the violence escalates, an absurdist dose of humor is added to the mix, injecting the film with a distinctly modern sensibility that is welcome and does not let up.
  7. 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.
  8. The will-they-won’t-they dynamic of the film grips you and it’s almost impossible not to root for Strompolos and Zala, especially when things on set get hairy.
  9. The problem with Finding Dory is it doesn’t know when enough is enough. Its believe-in-yourself message is pounded with the subtlety of a hammerhead shark and the final action sequence is really too far-fetched to fathom.
  10. For me, King Jack relies too much on violence for its dramatic voltage, but it’s a well-acted movie with heart – and it doesn’t outstay its welcome.
  11. Léa Seydoux, in all her haughty and sullen sexiness, dominates this well-crafted piece of suspenseful if curiously pointless hokum from French director Benoît Jacquot; it leads its audience up an elegantly tended garden path to nowhere in particular.
  12. Caton is a perfect fit; he is touching, tender and a little bedraggled, emoting with a worn-out visage that looks like the 71-year-old has been marinated in beer and left in the sun to dry.
  13. Q’s morality tale isn’t without laughs. The quizzers are adept at alluding to and meshing together the greats of English literature with crude dick jokes.
  14. It’s a charming and engaging mix – the antithesis of Metallica’s ego overload, and just as watchable.
  15. The President is a striking movie - and a bold and challenging change of directorial pace from Mohsen Makhmalbaf.
  16. Despite an idiocy metastasized into the marrow of its script impervious to any radiation, there is, as with many of Sandler’s productions, at least something of an upbeat quality to its reprehensibility.
  17. There are laughs found in almost every scene, though not many big ones. There’s also the problem that no amount of parody can top the real thing.
  18. It’s soon clear that OOTS follows the model of Bay’s Transformers sequels. Longer, louder and boasting even more hardware, it does everything to generate the illusion of bleeding-edge bang-per-buck, while cribbing shamelessly from 1991’s Secret of the Ooze.
  19. A deafening explosion of energy, gruesome violence and chaos.
  20. Director Duncan Jones, a self-professed Warcraft fan, has clearly put a lot of love and care into fleshing out a story, but it’s questionable whether it was ever really merited. There’s a terminal flimsiness, as if this virtually-derived world hasn’t quite assumed three dimensions.
  21. Most people will find Thru You Princess inspirational. A few will find it infuriating. But that’s frequently the case with a good documentary.
  22. 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.
  23. Zero Days is an intriguing, disturbing watch.
  24. Graduation is an intricate, deeply intelligent film, and a bleak picture of a state of national depression in Romania, where the 90s generation hoped they would have a chance to start again. There are superb performances from Titien and Dragus.
  25. The film is utterly gripping and endlessly disturbing.
  26. It’s terrifically watchable, a high-octane automobile of a film with dodgy steering, but exciting in a world of dull and prissy hybrids.
  27. This is a ferociously well-made film right through to the bitter end.
  28. As comeback projects go, Blood Father is stellar. It’s a wonder Quentin Tarantino, the king of career resurrection, didn’t get to Gibson first. The actors completely tears into the role of Link, a battered and disgruntled ex-con. Richet matches him, delivering a muscular and deliriously entertaining B-movie that is sure to play like gangbusters with genre aficionados.
  29. The Salesman is a well-crafted, valuable drama.
  30. An incoherent, inconsequential picture which sometimes looks worryingly as if it is being made up as it goes along.
  31. Ma Loute is a fascinatingly made film, theatrically extravagant and precise, although perhaps a little over-extended.
  32. The proceedings are claustrophobic, intense and alienated – often brilliant, sometimes slightly redundant.
  33. What we have here is an embedded report that sacrifices impartiality for access. But what access.
  34. What a lovely film Paterson is.
  35. Neruda takes a lot of wild chances and, like the poet whose life acts as inspiration, it’s unwilling to play by the rules. Dizzily constructed and full of more life and meaning than most “real” biopics, it’s a risk worth taking.
  36. Nothing about the film comes close to authenticity and it’s largely down to Penn’s remarkably amateurish direction.
  37. Ma’Rosa is made with control and clarity, a narrative purpose which is held on to despite an apparently aimless docu-style, and a clear sense of jeopardy. My reservation is that it doesn’t reveal much of what is going on in Rosa’s mind and heart.
  38. The story is told with stark and fierce plainness: unadorned, unapologetic, even unevolved. Loach’s movie offends against the tacitly accepted rules of sophisticated good taste: subtlety, irony and indirection.
  39. Given the nudity on show, some are already quick to criticise Park’s direction as gratuitous and to claim that his male gaze is affecting the depiction of lesbian romance. But the impotency of the male characters helps to counter this while the sex scenes themselves, as lovingly shot as they might be, feel vital to the narrative.
  40. The film takes on Gabrielle’s listlessness, slumps into an opiated fug. The malady is mysterious and not easily treatable. It just exhausts you. It transforms from a story about release to just another jail. At times it felt like there was no escape.
  41. It’s a richly detailed character study, immersing the audience in the life and mind of its imperious main character.
  42. Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the End of the World is histrionic and claustrophobic: deliberately oppressive and pretty well pop-eyed in its madness – and yet a brilliant, stylised and hallucinatory evocation of family dysfunction.
  43. It’s an action-thriller with punch; Bridges gives the characterisation ballast and heft and Pine and Foster bring a new, grizzled maturity to their performances.
  44. It is actually Assayas’s best film for a long time, and Stewart’s best performance to date.
  45. There is a great performance here from Sasha Lane and this is another step onwards and upwards for Andrea Arnold herself.
  46. Here is a film with its heart in the right place, an anatomical correctness coexisting with heartfelt, forthright conviction and an admirable belief in the virtue of simplicity and underplaying.... But this restraint sometimes sags into a kind of absence, and means the film itself is a bit rhetorically underpowered.
  47. When Fanning is off screen, we are marooned in a fashion shoot in a hell of silliness. Yet her star quality gives The Neon Demon what substance it has, and Refn’s film-making has self-belief and panache. Take it or leave it.
  48. It’s a film tremendously out of step with current tastes, and while I doubt that was its goal, this peculiarity makes it strangely watchable – even enjoyable.
  49. Margarita, With a Straw is a sturdily conceived, emotionally direct drama.
  50. The Unknown Woman is an odd, dramatically stilted and passionless quasi-procedural concerning a mysterious death; it depends on a series of unconvincing, and in fact borderline-preposterous, encounters and features a bafflingly inert performance from Adèle Haenel, whose usual spark appears to have been doused by self-consciousness.
  51. The film is very funny – but asks its audience to wonder if being funny, if wanting to make people laugh, and particularly if using comedy for family-bonding, really is the sign of being relaxed and life-affirming in the way people who are talented at comedy often assume.
  52. What a delicate, elegant marvel these movies have been.
  53. Considering this is the first biopic of one of the world’s most beloved athletes, it’s too bad such a predictable and ham-fisted kids’ flick was the goal.
  54. You might argue that there is a kind of hubris in all this, and its very giganticism condemned it to marginal status and a kind of cultural smallness. But what excitement there is in these folies de grandeur.
  55. This is not as richly compelling as other Almodóvar films, but it’s a fluent and engaging work.
  56. It’s the same low-budget horror flick you’ve seen many times before, but it’s nice to see some local variants on a familiar theme.
  57. His fly on the wall approach never feels exploitative – in instances, it yields surprising empathy. In spite of his characters’ actions, Minervini miraculously captures traces of profound humanity.
  58. [Black] creates some outrageously contrived and protracted shootouts and one or two good old fashioned action explosions. But he also keeps the dialogue cracking along.
  59. It seems pointless to say that the big friendly giant is the star of The BFG. But casting has never been more crucial. A typically distinctive, eccentric and seductive star performance from Mark Rylance absolutely makes this movie what it is.
  60. Bacon, Mitchell and especially young Lucy Fry are all quite effective in these dramatic scenes. But this isn’t a drama. It’s a dumbass, inexpensive horror flick which means anything real is thrown away so that poorly rendered CG ghosts can hover about and smash up windows.
  61. It’s a tight, slick polemic which doesn’t shy from the complexity surrounding the debate or the fact it wants you the viewer to get up and do something about it.
  62. These films were always down on women – Armstrong squanders the peerless Krysten Ritter as eye candy – but this slovenly runaround only exposes the low opinion they’ve harboured of their target male demographic. We’re meant to identify with them?
  63. This is no masterpiece, but it’s amiable slice of popcorn entertainment.
  64. Woody Allen’s Café Society is a sweet, sad, insubstantial jeu d’ésprit, watchable, charming and beautifully shot by Vittorio Storaro – yet always freighted by a pedantic nostalgia for the 1930s golden age in both Hollywood and New York, nostalgia which the title itself rather coercively announces.
  65. The studio has managed to deliver a follow-up that’s even weaker than its predecessor. In crude terms: Alice’s second trip to Underland wasn’t worth the wait.
  66. The idea of an apocalypse means every dial has to be turned up to 11 and this film certainly provides bangs for your buck, although there is less space for the surreal strangeness of the X-Men to breathe, less dialogue interest, and they do not have the looser, wittier joy of the Avengers. But the more playful episodes with Cyclops and Quicksilver are welcome and everything hangs together.
  67. The pleasure in watching this documentary is derived from its countless twists.
  68. The movie cleverly spins a meta-fictional "origin" myth for Captain America: explaining that he was in fact a propagandist comic-book superhero before becoming a real one. The final scene of the film, and Captain America's very last line, are rather brilliant – though admittedly less brilliant if their sole purpose is to set up sequels.
  69. This pretty routine follow-up has some decent material and amiable bad taste, heavily diluted with gallons of very ordinary sequel product: more of the same.
  70. It’s a bit silly maybe, with a plot that requires you to overlook the implausibility of a certain smartphone with no passcode protection. But there is a nifty premise.
  71. We leave the documentary loving the films rather than the film-maker.
  72. You’ll shed a tear or two, possibly more.
  73. Special Correspondents shows that Gervais has a plausible Hollywood career, but there’s a baffling lack of real laughs and performance chemistry between the leads, and very little of the acid characterisation and cynical discomfort which is vital to his screen presence.
  74. It’s a huge aspartame rush of a film: a giant irresistible snack, not nutritious, but very tasty.
  75. Tom Tykwer’s adaptation is a meandering mess of half-baked storylines that amount to little. Hanks’s affable presence keeps it all afloat.
  76. When you have two of today’s best working actors acting on a high-wire to do justice to two of the most recognisable figures of the 20th century, it’s best to keep the focus solely located on them.
  77. It’s an engaging and garrulous film, and Hockney is now a cheerful, grandfatherly figure, and an object lesson in taking the boy out of Bradford, and not the other way around.
  78. This feature is a very funny, if derivative panto-ish romp about the early life of Shakespeare.
  79. A gentle and charming entertainment.
  80. Barbershop: The Next Cut is hardly subtle, but it is more nuanced than you might expect.
  81. A terrifically enjoyable piece of old-fashioned storytelling and a beautiful-looking film: spectacular, exciting, funny and fun.
  82. While some viewers may complain that the action is too heavily weighted toward the ending, I’d argue that this is a strong example of destination-not-the-journey film-making.
  83. Many of The Boss’s troubles stem from its constant, unpredictable shifts in tone.
  84. There’s something inherently fishy about a movie that claims our facts are drawn from an inefficient data set which then turns around and uses the same methodology.
  85. It really is a nuclear war of dullness.
  86. Meet the Blacks is an asinine film (though with a kernel of seriousness) but whenever it feels like it is running out of steam, something strange and surreal will happen to elevate it above a typical spoof movie.
  87. God’s Not Dead 2 is a much better movie than God’s Not Dead, but that’s a bit like saying a glass of milk left on the table hasn’t curdled and is merely sour.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    This is a visually sumptuous kids’ film that will also charm adults.
  88. It is a high-minded, often touching movie which replaces the nihilism and miserabilism often to be found in social realism, and replaces them with a positive vision of what the state can – and can’t – do to help.
  89. It’s a film of remarkable idiocy, most notably in the portrayal of the local police who are so incredibly unhelpful that it borders on parody.
  90. This movie doesn’t really follow through with its own ideas, either in the natural realm of the ageing couple’s relationship or the supernatural arena of an eerily possible apparition.
  91. It forces viewers to take long looks at his most controversial imagery, proving that he still has the power to provoke, seduce and enrage.
  92. It’s tough to take all the hardcore emoting seriously, particularly as the emotional heavy lifting is designed to be done by the occasional maudlin line in brief pauses between the explosions. For a film so concerned with its characters’ inner lives, there’s a fundamental disconnect going on here – enough to make you yearn for the lighter touch of the Marvel films.
  93. The film plays like nirvana for Pee-wee fans.
  94. In addition to being a funny, invigorating and inspirational ode to being the cleverest kid in the room, it’s a remarkable testament to the suspension of disbelief.
  95. The first act of the film wins some laughs on surrealist shock humour, but at the expense of ever accepting this character and her world as real.
  96. It is a bravura debut from a young film-maker, proving that one can still make a movie for no money at a family member’s house and come away with a work of art, not just a calling card.
  97. While engaging, this Desierto is a little dry.
  98. This is a thoroughly engrossing and densely textured drama, showing Farhadi's cool skill in dissecting the Iranian middle classes and the unhappiness of marriage.
  99. Big but boring, expansive but cheap-looking, Allegiant spins in place, waiting for next year’s Ascendent to come along and offer resolution. In all candour: you can do without it.

Top Trailers