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. This Is 40
    It's not bad, exactly – but it is boring and very rarely funny. This is laboured. This is aimless. This Is 40. It's really quite a grind.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Hysteria
    Gyllenhaal rises above the tedium; sadly, not far enough. Great English accent, though.
  3. Trishna
    Winterbottom's location work in Jaipur and Mumbai has richness and spectacle, but somehow this does not come fully to life.
  4. Bullet to the Head
    Even Stallone's rumbling voiceover possesses the drooping tone of a lullaby – like 45rpm vinyl played at 33. And if you think that reference is retro, you should see the actual movie.
  5. The Lady
    One of those agonisingly well-intentioned films whose heart is in the right place, but everything else is wrong.
  6. Hope Springs
    As the couple try to rekindle the bedroom flame the note of cutesy comedy kicks in and the movie gets phonier and phonier.
  7. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
    It feels as if you've seen it many times before. Bill Nighy isn't in it, for example, and yet afterwards I had an intense memory of Bill Nighy being in it, the way amputees can feel their toes itching.
  8. Taken 2
    The premise is looking pretty tired.
  9. Chasing Mavericks
    The script's a drowner, the acting's awash. Again and again Butler returns to the sea. He just about survives the buffeting.
  10. Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters
    The kids are charmless, the adults bemused.
  11. To Rome with Love
    Baldwin has some brilliant moments as he icily dismisses Monica's posturing: his final closeup – heavy-lidded, undeceived – is fascinating and rather chilling.
  12. Now You See Me
    Overcooked, overcomplicated and underinteresting, this heist caper turns into a mess.
  13. RED 2
    Like the first one, it's played for laughs in-between bouts of mayhem; most of the gags are off-target, though Mirren's Nancy Mitfordesque assassin gets a pretty good kill ratio.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Lawless
    Star-studded and violent yet empty as a broken whisky bottle.
  15. Pixels
    Pixels is a casually sexist, awkwardly structured, bro-centric comedy, starring some of Sandler’s buddies. The only difference this time is that state-of-the-art CGI has been added to the mix.
  16. We Have a Pope
    Nanni Moretti's new film is occasionally amusing, but is also a frustrating and directionless experience.
  17. A Good Day to Die Hard
    I don't think it knows where it's going. I'm not even sure it cares.
  18. Sinister
    The snuff-porn aesthetic might suggest a realist drama, but a supernatural dimension is brought into play, making the plot directionless. There isn't an ounce of ingenuity in the way the movie is concluded, but some generic expertise in the way it is put together.
  19. The Wolverine
    The flat hammerblows of The Wolverine bear little relation to the zing and pop of Matthew Vaughn's colourful treatment. Inconsistency is inevitable in a world that's constantly being dug up and done over, but it leaves us no time to fall in love with anything being flung at us.
  20. The Samaritan
    A clotted, knotted, twisty noir that is, unfortunately, short on the required atmosphere.
  21. Intruders
    This is really very humdrum stuff compared to the electric strangeness of "Intact."
  22. Beautiful Creatures
    The plot is wildly silly and shot full of holes, maundering endlessly on its slow trawl towards the climax. But the cast at least play it like they mean it, and keep it honest for a spell.
  23. Iron Sky
    It's not terrible, by any means: just not nearly as funny or cruel as its killer premise suggests.
  24. Elles
    Binoche rises above the lubricious material by giving a thoroughly detailed and committed performance as the journalist.
  25. Headhunters
    The film doesn't merit chinstroking: it's stuffed with Troma-style riffs around schlock, gore and human effluvia, bookended by Shallow Grave-like sections full of cynical machinations. The parts barely relate, never mind work together.
  26. End of Watch
    Despite the violence and procedural detail, this is about as gritty as Dixon of Dock Green.
  27. Polisse
    A drama with interesting moments, but also some false notes and a wildly bizarre ending.
  28. Bel Ami
    Robert Pattinson has to do an awful lot of hollow-eyed smouldering in this hammily enunciated French period drama, taken from the 1885 novel by Guy de Maupassant.
  29. 300: Rise of an Empire
    It really is pretty dull, though, with the same moments of campy silliness: the same frowning gym bunnies with the same digitally enhanced abs.
  30. The Good Dinosaur
    The Good Dinosaur looks great, of course, but it’s not in the league we’ve come to expect.
  31. The Perks of Being a Wallflower
    The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a perfect fit for its target audience – the Harry Potter kids who are following Emma Watson through her baby steps towards the stronger stuff.
  32. Dark Horse
    There is little in the film's pitch-black interior that wasn't tackled better – with more bite, wit and abandon – in "Happiness," "Welcome to the Dollhouse," or "Storytelling."
  33. The Pact
    Nicholas McCarthy's The Pact is a horror film developed from a short, and unfortunately it splits apart while being stretched out to feature length.
  34. Cloud Atlas
    Tykwer and the Wachowskis' other twist on this karmic hokum - to cast each of their actors in multiple roles across the stories, regardless of age or race - is less successful.
  35. Starbuck
    Almost all the charm of the real story is lost through the contrivances and overacting.
  36. Runner Runner
    This is a lazy, trashy film that barely goes through the motions.
  37. The Equalizer
    Denzel is so cool, so made of pure nails he can make even the most preposterous action scene feel thrilling. But Denzel's strength is also his weakness.
  38. Mama
    It has been converted into a proficient, machine-tooled horror flick, stuffed full of shocks and buttressed with back-story. Mama got so flabby the second time around.
  39. About Time
    Curtis's heart is in the right place. In fact, it's all over the place – front and centre and backlighting the whole thing with a benevolent glow. But it is hard not to watch this, read the news that it will probably be his last as a director, and look to the future.
  40. 2 Guns
    There is a fair amount of not sufficiently witty or lovable banter, and Paula Patton gets to play Katharine Ross to their Butch and Sundance. She really has nothing to do except pose fetchingly in her underwear. Not much firepower.
  41. Little White Lies
    Little White Lies unspools as glossy, high-grade tosh, a sun-dappled Big Chill, without the rigour or insight required to make you care about these people and wonder which bed they will eventually wind up in.
  42. The Oranges
    Janney steals the movie in the scene in which she discovers the awful truth.
  43. Lay the Favorite
    Stephen Frears is a supremely accomplished director, but perhaps there was little he could do with this garbled and unsatisfying story about gambling.
  44. The To Do List
    A few laughs.
  45. Rio 2
    It's hard to ascribe much art or wit to a franchise that retains the services of will.i.am as comic relief – and a thoroughly inorganic talent-show subplot feels like another attempt to groom youngsters for life in the Cowell jungle.
  46. [REC] 3: Genesis
    The dancefloor's full of bodies, the bride and groom have been backed into a corner by relatives desperate for their pound of flesh. Pretty much your average wedding, then.
  47. 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.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Divergent
    How Orwellian is college? Very, if Divergent is to be believed.
  49. Snitch
    Good intentions are all but submerged in nonsense.
  50. Admission
    The comic material really isn't there, and the plot transitions feel forced and uncomfortable.
  51. Hitchcock
    A disappointing excursion into movie history.
  52. Smurfs: The Lost Village
    Fans of smurfiness may well like it, and Gargamel gets some nice lines, but I have to say that both script and animation are entirely predictable, as if generated by some computer software.
  53. Edge of Tomorrow
    It is basically deadly serious, and after some moderate knockaboutfun, settles into something pretty dull. Where's the edge?
  54. Ant-Man
    Ant-Man is a cut-and-shut muddle, haunted by a ghost, produced by a high-end hot dog factory, by turns giddying and stupefying. Watching it is like channel-surfing between "Hot Fuzz", a duff early 90s Michael Douglas drama and the very schlockiest bits of "Interstellar".
  55. Getaway
    You watch the resultant, wholly bloodless carnage with brain in neutral and eyes glazing over, as you would a re-run of Police, Camera, Action! at two in the morning.
  56. Olympus Has Fallen
    Part of the weirdness of this film lies in the fact that the tense North Korean situation in the real world gives it no realism or satirical edge, or prophetic authority of any kind.
  57. Closed Circuit
    It plays as cut-price Le Carré; a recording of a recording of superior films. The picture is fuzzy, and the plot becomes garbled.
  58. The ABCs of Death
    The most intentional fun comes courtesy of N (for Nuptials).
  59. Parked
    Parked putters, but doesn't go anywhere.
  60. The Purge
    The film doesn't develop its one good idea so much as stumble around in the dark with it for 85 minutes, crashing noisily into the furniture.
  61. Like Someone in Love
    It is a beautifully shot, and very nicely acted beginning to something: but finally frustrating.
  62. Welcome to the Punch
    It runs out of steam, with plot revelations visible from a mile away and a bit of a plausibility gap.
  63. The Last Exorcism Part II
    It's competently made, but pointless.
  64. 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.
  65. Machete Kills
    The odd vivid shot reminds you of Rodriguez's dynamic visual imagination, but also what it's wasted on here: a project as indifferent as some of the trash that inspired it.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Emperor
    Thank heaven for Jones's reliable grouchiness, his bloodhound eyes, high-belted paunch, and deader-than-deadpan drawl offering welcome relief from the historical schmaltz.
  67. At Any Price
    Some of the acting isn't bad, but the story is messy and unsatisfying with a plot-hole you could drive a dozen combine harvesters through, the ending is an outrageous fudge and the lead performance from Dennis Quaid is strange to say the least.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Jobs
    This is far from the bomb some would have envisaged, but neither is it the character illumination one would wish for. Jobs appears so consumed by his work here that little else mattered in his life. That may be true, but we're left none the wiser as to what made the man tick, beyond what we already know.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Counselor
    Working as a screenwriter for the first time after years of seeing his novels successfully adapted to the screen, McCarthy is stretching his powers of language and mood – and, all too quickly, stretching his slim story and cast of characters way too far.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Lee Daniels' The Butler
    A great film about the American civil rights movement is way overdue. The Butler, overwhelmed by flash and good intentions, doesn't even come close.
  71. Trance
    Trance is a disappointment: a strident, chaotic, frantically overcooked film with an almost deafeningly intrusive ambient soundtrack. There is some embarrassing, eyeball-swivelling acting from the male leads, and the elegance of the film's premise is quite obliterated by its crude and misjudged violence.
  72. The Maze Runner
    The Maze Runner is not a good movie, but it wins points for omitting much of what makes typical teen films excruciating.
  73. Into the White
    It's all a bit tame, predictable and muted; the inevitable revelation of German decency seems contrived and there's an outrageous plot cop-out towards the end. It's a reminder of how David Lean exploited this kind of drama with more potency in "The Bridge on the River Kwai."
  74. The Way, Way Back
    There are plenty of comic moments...But The Way, Way Back is very rarely laugh-out-loud funny. Unfortunately, neither is it very involving.
  75. Erased
    This semi-efficient, Belgian-set timewaster fuses Taken with Unknown, and almost works.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Transcendence
    Transcendence suffers from terrible timing, arriving a few months after Spike Jonze charmed audiences with his semi-futuristic love story "Her," which flipped a century’s worth of technophobia on its back.
  77. August: Osage County
    It's bracing, but it does feel closer to panto than melodrama, more exhausting than illuminating.
  78. Populaire
    You'll need to have a very sweet tooth for this, and it makes light of those difficult sexual politics that Mad Men attacked with such fierce satire.
  79. Black Nativity
    Beneath middling songs – walloped out in the artless, post-Cowell manner – there's something faintly touching about its vision of broken homes.
  80. Stitches
    There are some gruesomely ingenious moments in this gleefully yucky horror-comedy from director Conor McMahon, starring the standup comic Ross Noble. But I have to say it somehow wasn't funny or scary enough – though I do have to admit it is always more than revolting enough.
  81. Mariachi Gringo
    Tom Gustafson's film proves genial to a fault.
  82. Something in the Air
    This is a great-looking movie with a sure sense of time and place; it is obviously a personal, and in fact, autobiographical work about Assayas's own youth. But for all its flair, I came away dissatisfied at its colossal self-indulgence and creamy complacency, and the way historical perspective and meaning are permitted to dissolve in its sunlit nostalgia.
  83. Paris-Manhattan
    By itself, this would just be one of those workmanlike relationship films the French turn out by the yard; but all the Allen stuff throws its mediocrity into sharp relief.
  84. Love Is All You Need
    It looks weirdly like a romcom pastiche, not cynical, but not properly inhabited; it doesn't taste of romance or comedy any more than Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup cans taste of soup.
  85. Stuck in Love
    The sharp edges of the story are sentimentally sanded down; there's a fair bit of slush, and it's a pretty quaint view of what writers and a writer's life are actually like.
  86. Renoir
    A syrupy drizzle of tasteful prettiness covers this cloying movie about the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Michel Bouquet) and his film-maker son Jean Renoir (Vincent Rottiers).
  87. Riddick
    The results are by turns boring and bizarre, although Diesel still has some presence.
  88. Antiviral
    Brandon Cronenberg's movie is made with some technical skill and focus, but it is agonisingly self-regarding and tiresome.
  89. No One Lives
    Director Ryuhei Kitamura ladles on the entrails like a ghoulish dinnerlady, but his three-way narrative strategies lead nowhere.
  90. Short Term 12
    There's a too-cute-to-be-true ending to this US indie movie by the much-acclaimed young director Destin Cretton; I couldn't buy it, and found myself wondering if I had kept the receipt for the rest of the film too.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Prince Avalanche
    The best reason to see this misconceived film is its location.
  92. Girl Most Likely
    Odd zingers and residual eccentricities (a Whit Stillman cameo, anyone?) stand as traces of the blast it might have been, but this cast surely signed on in anticipation of many more laughs than there are in the final cut.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Cockneys vs Zombies
    Like Snakes on a Plane, this is a film that seems content to sit back and let the title do all the work – the flat direction does little to imbue the proceedings with any feeling of tension or surprise.
  94. 1st Night
    Grant plays it with manic glee and full-throated gusto.
  95. Dracula Untold
    It’s no-frills, B-movie modesty might have been winning, if it weren’t so dashed-off.
  96. Heaven Is for Real
    Wallace permits some debate as to what this tale represents – miracle? horror show? evidence of declining anaesthesiology standards? – yet that titular conclusion depends entirely on faith: what's on screen peters out.
  97. A Million Ways to Die in the West
    Spiritually, it's closer to a mid-range crowd-pleaser such as City Slickers than Blazing Saddles, too enamoured of genre convention to reach for the comic dynamite.
  98. Blood
    Originality may be out of Blood's jurisdiction, but it manages to plod on, dutifully walking a tired old beat.
  99. Devil's Due
    It's as substantial as seeing "The Exorcist" redone on Snapchat – and let's not even consider the implication of casting black and Latino performers as Satan's minions, because clearly its makers haven't.
  100. Bastards
    Denis's drama intrigues more than it actually delivers...Sleight of hand is all well and good. But sooner or later a film must pay up.
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