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. 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.
  2. The Immigrant
    The Immigrant is certainly different: but Gray seems to run out of ideas and the film is shapeless and unsatisfying.
  3. American Mary
    It's made with gusto, but there's little dramatic interest for non-enthusiasts.
  4. The Prey
    Director, Eric Valette, is an exuberant market-stall trader, hawking knock-off ingredients.
  5. You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet
    Despite its moments of charm and caprice, the film is prolix, inert, indulgent and often just plain dull.
  6. The Expendables 3
    [A] blundering jackhammer of a film.
  7. That Awkward Moment
    In the main, it's the usual story – much more rom than com.
  8. Terminator Genisys
    Salvation was boring, but Genisys makes you sad. Risk-averse Hollywood has made a crash-test dummy of a once great franchise, simply throwing everything at it to see what it stands.
  9. The Nut Job
    The absence of new or sustainable ideas dooms it to instant mediocrity.
  10. Filth
    For the first half-hour it's got a full-on horrible energy, but there isn't enough humour for it to qualify as comedy, and not enough reality or plausible characterisation to justify calling it any sort of procedural noir.
  11. Broken
    There are some good ideas, strong moments and a blue-chip cast in Broken, the feature-film debut from award-winning theatre and opera director Rufus Norris. But they somehow don't come together successfully.
  12. Godzilla
    While many people might want to go to the cinema to see Godzilla, what they get instead is a load of homosapiens desperately trying to put a human face on the drama.
  13. Romeo & Juliet
    It has a sort of soapy reliability, but compare it to the blazing passion of Baz Luhrmann's modern-day version with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danesin gangland LA and it looks pretty feeble. Plus, the liberties taken with the text mean that it might not even be all that suitable for school parties.
  14. Dom Hemingway
    Everyone is trying way too hard and Dom's final speech is toe-curlingly misjudged and charmless.
  15. The Judge
    The Judge is a timeless film, in that it could have been made at almost any point over the past 80 years: rote plot, functional support, well-signalled twists. It’s a two-seater star vehicle offering little legroom for other passengers.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Winnie Mandela
    The source material is Anne Marie du Preez Bezdrob's biography, and the period detail is spot on. Yet Winnie: the movie opts to wear its heart openly on its sleeve, and play it absurdly safe.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A.C.O.D.
    [An] amusing but formulaic man-in-crisis comedy.
  18. Zaytoun
    It's quite a sweet idea, with a liberal attempt at balance, though Palestinian audiences may query the idea of making their half of this equation a child, and Fahed's motivation for defying his elders in quite so disloyal and dangerous a way, is never convincingly explained.
  19. Million Dollar Arm
    Hamm and Alan Arkin's grouchy scout conclude these deals with unarguable professionalism, but we can spot the manoeuvres required to magic neocolonialist playbook into heartwarming fairytale.
  20. Weekender
    It's rammed with cliches and silliness and conforms to a lot of stereotypes, the most suspect being the obligatory scene in Ibiza whose only purpose is to show loads of young women with no tops on.
  21. Search Party
    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?
  22. Flu
    Coughs and sneezes do indeed spread diseases in this amusingly feverish thriller, a Korean attempt to take back some of those lurgies let loose by Soderbergh's colder-blooded "Contagion."
  23. Begin Again
    The film's sole saving grace is, of course, Ruffalo.
  24. What If
    It's pulled this way and that by a hiddly-fiddly soundtrack, spun senseless by scene after scene of Radcliffe and Kazan trading flirtatious banter.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Are You Here
    You Are Here ultimately suffers from a problem of tone. It wants to be a stoner bromance, a pastoral romcom and an incisive drama about mental illness.
  26. Locke
    Full credit to Hardy and Knight for making a film such as Locke. Low-budget film-makers could learn a lot from their method. And yet – having stripped away all but the bare necessities, having reduced the components to a car and a man – they make a classic error of overcompensation.
  27. Maggie
    I give the odd, small film Maggie all the points in the world for experimenting with genre-blending and subverting audience expectations, but there’s just too much about it that fails to connect.
  28. In Secret
    It's imprisoned by its own glibness, grabbing for sensation over emotion, and looking silly whenever it misses.
  29. Warcraft
    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.
  30. Our Day Will Come
    It's a road movie that runs out of road – and out of ideas.
  31. Endless Love
    A certain doofy sincerity – all fairy lights and lakeside kisses – and Wilde's nervy, natural responses keep matters semi-watchable. As a romance, though, it's by-the-book.
  32. Love Tomorrow
    Frankly, the performances and line-readings are uneven. The couple's journey through night-time London is interesting: both have a painful past that they are at first reluctant to discuss, especially Maya, but these disclosures are not dramatically developed in any really satisfying way.
  33. Live by Night
    By the end of a long two hours, there’s not much life left.
  34. Fantastic Four
    The cast are some of the most promising actors of their generation, but what chemistry there is between them is swept away by wave after wave of expository dialogue and ludicrous exclamation.
  35. Cuban Fury
    This comedy never quite relaxes or convinces or comes together, despite a blue-chip pedigree and a great cast.
  36. Passengers
    Stalking tactics bolstering romantic comedies are by no means new, and over the decades, film-makers have proved adept at somehow planing down real-world nastiness, but here it’s gruesomely inescapable.
  37. Alice Through the Looking Glass
    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.
  38. This Is Where I Leave You
    This is Where I Leave You is totally aimble, utterly unmoving filler given a major shot in the arm by its cast, people it’s simply a pleasure to watch, even with the creeping feeling they’re better than this.
  39. Cold Comes the Night
    Even Cranston looks to be on auto-pilot here: he comes stomping through the action with a perma-scowl that suggests that his break from playing Walter White is little more than a busman's holiday.
  40. The Mummy
    It’s a ragbag of action scenes which needed to be bandaged more tightly.
  41. Blackhat
    Blackhat can’t decide if it is a grim, realistic story from the trenches or cyberwarfare or a giddy, “who cares if that makes sense?” Bond film.
  42. Veronica Mars
    Proves more footnote than fresh start.
  43. 1,000 Times Good Night
    Binoche's performance – tiresomely radiating a martyred integrity – is mannered and self-conscious, and her character's professional work is naively imagined.
  44. Self/less
    Ryan Reynolds does the best he can with the material.... But any intelligence is tossed once we get mired in a series of dull chase scenes.
  45. Trap for Cinderella
    Looks dated and clunky, like a drawn-out episode of Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected on TV, and the direction doesn't have Softley's usual drive.
  46. The Sacrament
    Ti West's latest feels both more expansive – choppering Vice reporters into a seemingly progressive tropical utopia raises intriguing social themes – and yet a marked disappointment.
  47. Step Up: All In
    This really doesn't have the fun or the zip of that earlier Miami adventure. The dialogue is even more tired and, crucially, the dance sequences themselves are looking less fresh this time around.
  48. Ice Age: Collision Course
    This could provide some small-screen entertainment for bored kids on a rainy day. But really: enough.
  49. The Best Offer
    Filmed in what you might call the international hotel style, Tornatore's idiotic premise is entertaining if you don't inspect it too carefully, or look for anything beneath the portentousness.
  50. Everest
    Everest is a frustrating movie in many ways – despite some lurches and shocks, it doesn’t quite deliver the edge-of-your-seat thrills that many were hoping for, and all those moderately engaging characters mean that there is no centrally powerful character.
  51. Lost River
    It is colossally indulgent, shapeless, often fantastically and unthinkingly offensive and at all times insufferably conceited. Yet it is frustrating precisely because it sometimes isn't so bad. There is something in there somewhere - striking images and moments, and the crazy energy of a folie de grandeur.
  52. Before I Go to Sleep
    It aims for sexy and/or dangerous, but the tone is dry and the pace lags.
  53. Knight of Cups
    There are moments of visual brilliance here, moments of reverence and even grandeur. He is always distinctive, and anything he does must be of interest. But his style is stagnating into mannerism, cliche and self-parody.
  54. Midnight Special
    There’s an absence of fun here, and for what is ultimately a chase movie, a severe lack of pace. Nichols doesn’t feel like a strong match for the genre or for the very specific type of fantasy movie he wants to make.
  55. She's Funny That Way
    Bogdanovich is a formidable figure, but with this movie he’s just coasting. He surely needs to find a screenplay more attuned to his brilliance, rather than a derivative, low-octane comedy.
  56. Song One
    Writer-director Kate Barker-Froyland's debut feature is a mournful number, held back by an uncertain performance by Flynn and an alienating reverence for the restorative power of middling indie-folk.
  57. Life After Beth
    Life After Beth, a frustrating affair due to its waste of resources, feels rushed and under-rehearsed. It is a style of film-making that hopes it can glide its way into your good graces on ad-hoc performance flourishes, a wall-to-wall audio mix and editing patches. One soon recognizes this all a cover for one key issue: a lack of original ideas.
  58. White Bird in a Blizzard
    Nothing really adds up to much, past a solid performance from Woodley and the energetic - if out-of-place - turn from Green.
  59. Equals
    Equals doesn’t really work as either a plausible attempt at rendering some sort of future society, nor as a really convincing thwarted-love story.
  60. The Better Angels
    There’s slow cinema and there is boring cinema, and this is an unfortunate example of the latter.
  61. Camp X-Ray
    Sattler's film leans on its actors too heavily. It heaps too many implausibilities upon their trembling shoulders. After an hour in Camp X-Ray, the strain starts to show.
  62. Infinitely Polar Bear
    Infinitely Polar Bear is heartfelt and honest, but it's too cute by half.
  63. Maladies
    This is basically a studied and serious film, but there's a feyness to its tone, and a lethargy to its pacing that make it difficult to warm to, even if the principal actors give it their all.
  64. A Coffee In Berlin
    This debut for German writer-director Jan Ole Gerster seemingly aims to transplant a mumblecore aesthetic into Berlin, with all the requisite aimless hipsters, whimsical touches and rambling narrative dips and dives; but someone forgot to add spontaneity or edge.
  65. 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.
  66. Imperial Dreams
    Vitthal's film is full of heart, but overly ambitious. He could have made it easy on himself and steered us down a much more familiar route. Instead he delivers a moralistic story that's pure in its intention and a real slog to watch.
  67. As Above, So Below
    There are some interestingly contrived moments of claustrophobia and surreal lunacy, but this cliched and slightly hand-me-down script neither scares nor amuses very satisfyingly.
  68. The Pirate Fairy
    Business concerns sit close to the surface throughout, unmasked by much in the way of artistry.
  69. Yves Saint Laurent
    The film's purpose is the reverent mystification of everything that avowedly makes YSL special.
  70. The Legend of Tarzan
    The Legend of Tarzan ends up being a garbled, clunky production that tries to please everyone and ends up pleasing no one.
  71. The Brothers Grimsby
    Grimsby has the occasional laugh and a succession of finely wrought grossout spectaculars which are reasonably entertaining.... But with its cod-Bond and mock-action material it carries a weird overall feel, like kids’ TV but produced on a lavish scale with added filth.
  72. Monster Trucks
    It has tentacles and hot wheels, yes, but not the legs or bright ideas to sustain itself.
  73. Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return
    Even by the standards of allowance-snatching half-term filler, this is pretty indifferent.
  74. Guilty of Romance
    The pungent, ponderous final chapter of Sono's "Hate" trilogy (following Love Exposure and Cold Fish) bows out with lots of bangs and plenty of whimper.
  75. Ride Along 2
    This laid-back amusement should not be misinterpreted as competent storytelling. Though some of the jokes land, that’s entirely due to the performances; there’s not one example of clever writing in the entire picture.
  76. Hotel Transylvania 2
    By the end of this 89-minute film, I was absolutely on the edge of my seat. Not due to suspense, but due to my utter disdain for the infantile plotting.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Hateship Loveship
    For most of its length, in fact, the film seems to boil beneath its quiet surface like a Munro tale, and indeed like Joanna herself. Wiig carries this apparently unresolved tension in physical form: a wonderfully mannered performance of short steps and furious scrubbing and standing defensively behind chairs.
  78. Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger
    Dense thickets of information, told via rostrum-shot photos and documents plus angry mob’s worth of witnesses, become a grind after a while, as does the trite guitar-led mystery music.
  79. Into the Storm
    Its destructive setpieces may loose the odd popcorn kernel on to the multiplex carpet, but it's really just an effects reel: the weather – cloudy wisps turning to massive, fiery hellblasts – is considerably better developed than its quarry. Stick with Twister.
  80. Underdogs
    Ping-ponging camera moves temporarily distract from the haphazard structuring and translation.
  81. Half of a Yellow Sun
    the film is often stately and sluggish with some very daytime-soapy moments of emotional revelation.
  82. The November Man
    There’s no way around this: The November Man is asinine. It is not without its pleasures – if you like seeing people get hit in the face with shovels, that is – but it might be the most irresponsibly dumb spy thriller I’ve seen in some time.
  83. The Love Punch
    Sometimes it works - Brosnan and Thompson are sedately charming, Spall and Imrie are naturally funny together - but there's only so much humour you can squeeze out of Pierce's dicky prostate.
  84. 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.
  85. If I Stay
    The smart cast occupy themselves with the dog-eared emotions scattered around the waiting rooms.
  86. Magic Mike XXL
    We’re always waiting for something important or interesting to happen, but it never really does.
  87. London Has Fallen
    There is some surreal fun at the beginning as everything collapses.... But then it’s the same thing over again.
  88. Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F
    Murphy’s maverick cop – and his theme music – are back to fight corruption, but four decades on there’s little energy to enliven their formulaic reunion.
  89. Geostorm
    We have been sold a false bill of goods.
  90. The Walk
    The story The Walk tells is, admittedly, an unbelievable one, so it’s understandable Zemeckis should choose to leave subtlety at the door. Sadly, such an approach strips the film of tension, especially at the crucial moment.
  91. Saint Laurent
    Saint Laurent is a well made but bafflingly airless and claustrophobic film.
  92. The Search
    It could be that Hazanavicius wanted, once again, to channel some of that Old Hollywood big-hearted sincerity — just as he did with his silent-movie triumph The Artist. But the outcome here is naive and misjudged.
  93. Fonzy
    Watch all of them back to back and it's the tiny details that start to become fascinating, like the way Fonzy's version of the climax is fractionally less sentimental, how lead Garcia is more sympathetic than Vaughn but less engaging than Starbuck's schlubby Patrick Huard.
  94. Postman Pat: The Movie
    I'd never want to stand in the way of artists pushing things, but messing with Postman Pat is probably a step too far.
  95. Marius
    Not just cinéma de papa, but cinema de grand-papa.
  96. Fanny
    Auteuil has fashioned hidebound museum pieces that expand the backdrop with sun-dappled glimpses of port activity, while generally resisting any notes of modernity or change of emphasis. What modicum of cosy Sunday-afternoon pleasure they provide stems from the performers.
  97. Hector and the Search for Happiness
    Whatever enlightenment there is here proves far too easily gained. Keep looking, folks.
  98. Horns
    Horns plays instead like a high concept beer advert – breezily stylish, memorable in its time, but a bit too full of gas.
  99. Uncharted
    It’s a huge greenscreen action-adventure with a reasonable bang-buck ratio, but a box office algorithm where its heart is supposed to be.
  100. Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle
    No songs at all now, and not much fun.
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