The Guardian's Scores

Select another publication »
For 6,577 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: 2,494 out of 6577
  2. Mixed: 3,764 out of 6577
  3. Negative: 319 out of 6577
6577 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. 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.
  2. Varda by Agnès
    Two hours in this director’s company is a pleasure.
  3. The Delinquents
    This is a deadpan comedy which strides off down its own confident, eccentric path, and actually the whole heist trope is subverted from the outset by the purely un-tense way the robbery is shown.
  4. Close Your Eyes
    It is a mysterious, digressive, long and baggily constructed film possessed of a distinctive richness and humanity, all about the balance between memory and forgetting which we all negotiate as we come to the end of our lives.
  5. A Canterbury Tale
    A Canterbury Tale may be the most loving and tender film about England ever made. It’s a picture that’s steeped in nature, in thrall to myth and history; a re-affirmation of the English character, customs and countryside from a time when many viewers may have wondered whether this underpinning had been kicked clean away.
  6. Eighth Grade
    Elsie Fisher is magnificent as a vulnerable teenager facing trouble at school and at home in Bo Burnham’s gripping drama.
  7. The Novice
    It’s hard to deny Fuhrman’s pinch-faced vehemence and the film’s hallucinatory verve.
  8. Let's Get Lost
    It's not exactly a documentary, more a lovingly-filmed homage, but some candid interview material allows scraps of Baker's story to emerge.
  9. Kiki's Delivery Service
    This sunny 1989 fantasy by master animator Hayao Miyazaki broaches the issue of female sexuality more boldly than any Western children’s movie would dare.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mona Lisa
    Ultimately, there is something trite at the centre of the movie, most especially in the overuse of Nat King Cole’s haunting Mona Lisa to suggest Tyson’s ambiguity and Hoskins’s puzzlement. But this is almost concealed by Tyson’s sense of desperation and Hoskins’s painful sincerity.
  11. Yes
    With icy provocation, Israel’s ruling classes are presented as decadent and indifferent to the slaughter and suffering of Gaza. But the film is also in some ways a sympathetic study of a people haunted by the antisemitic butchery of 7 October.
  12. The Wild Robot
    Clever, heartfelt and frequently stunning, The Wild Robot offers the type of all-ages-welcome animated entertainment that will delight kids and leave a lump in one’s throat.
  13. Support the Girls
    Support the Girls is a shrewdly observed, day-in-the-life-style portrait of a woman under pressure. It’s way too early to be thinking about awards season, but Regina Hall could be in line for some silverware.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Fabulous Baker Boys
    The film clearly nods to old-school Hollywood and Vegas, but it has a sharp edge that keeps it funny and authentically modern, with Steve Kloves's streetwise and sometimes surprisingly elegiac script summing up the seediness and melancholy of 80s glamour.
  15. Victim
    This gripping thriller, part of the BFI's Bogarde retrospective, daringly smashed through 1961's homosexual taboos, but has weathered best as a study of blackmail and paranoia.
  16. Return to Homs
    Admittedly, there are a lot of documentaries like this, made by citizen journalists recording uprisings in their homelands, but this is one of the best of the recent crop, and a timely reminder of a conflict that's slipped out of the headlines of late.
  17. The Asphalt Jungle
    An early masterclass in the art of the caper movie, John Huston's 1950 thriller stands up wonderfully well, even if we've got used to far more convoluted scheming by movie robbers in the intervening period
  18. Alcarràs
    It is a deeply intelligent, humane drama.
  19. Homebound
    Bring tissues for a doozy of an ending that will have everyone bawling in the aisles.
  20. Hale County This Morning, This Evening
    There is something visionary in this film.
  21. The Taste of Things
    There is charm and delicacy here and Magimel and Binoche perform impeccably, though I wasn’t entirely sure they go together as the ingredients of a love story.
  22. Mudbound
    Mudbound is absorbing: the language, performance and direction all have real sinew.
  23. Passing
    As compelling and as complicated as this fraught friendship might be, Hall’s script can’t quite find a way to take it – and the other pieces of Larsen’s novel – and turn them into something deservedly substantial.
  24. In the Same Breath
    Business as usual has largely resumed in Wuhan, but Wang’s film contends that that’s just the problem. The same apparatuses of messaging and censorship are still in operation, ensuring that the full extent of the malfeasance may never be fully known
  25. Honeyland
    Honeyland really is a miraculous feat, shot over three years as if by invisible camera – not a single furtive glance is directed towards the film-makers.
  26. The Beasts
    The Beasts is a strange film in many ways, difficult to pin down tonally or generically, but it leaves a trail of unease in the mind.
  27. Holy Motors
    Weird and wonderful, rich and strange – barking mad, in fact. It is wayward, kaleidoscopic, black comic and bizarre; there is in it a batsqueak of genius, dishevelment and derangement; it is captivating and compelling.
  28. God's Own Country
    This debut feature from Yorkshire-born actor and first-time director Francis Lee is tough, sensual, unsentimental, with excellent lead performances from Josh O’Connor and Alec Secareanu.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Wages of Fear (1953)
    The inspired calculation of action and agonised human reaction is irresistible and inescapable. It is a film that leaves the audience shattered and exhausted.
  30. Everybody Wants Some!!
    If the lads were insufferable misogynistic pricks, Everybody Wants Some!! would make for horrible viewing. Thankfully they’re all intensely lovable.
  31. Two Prosecutors
    It is a very disturbing parable of the insidious micro-processes of tyranny.
  32. Behemoth
    What this exceptionally lucid film-survey reveals is what has to go on at ground level, and beneath the surface, in order to power a powerhouse.
  33. The Past
    It is an intricate and often brilliant drama, with restrained and intelligent performances; there is an elegantly patterned mosaic of detail, unexpected plot turns, suspenseful twists and revelations.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Oasis Knebworth 1996
    The joy of live music is in immediate, fleeting sensation, which doesn’t need to get caught on the hide of history. But that sensation is something Carruthers captured brilliantly in 1996.
  35. Pillion
    It is a real love story, and the movie amusingly and touchingly takes us through the final stages and out the other side.
  36. Black Bag
    Steven Soderbergh’s downbeat, affectless tongue-in-cheek spy comedy (“caper” isn’t quite right) is in this new mode, though taking itself to the edge of self-satire, with a few 007 refugees in the cast, efficiently scripted by David Koepp.
  37. One Child Nation
    I would have liked (in a spirit of devil’s advocacy) to hear from an economist about the measurable benefits or otherwise of this brutal approach, and perhaps to ponder the climbing global population. These reservations hardly diminish the film’s force.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Vengeance Is Mine
    Mysterious, complex and brilliant: the disquieting portrait of a serial killer, seducer and con-man in Japan whose motivation remains an enigma. [9 Sept 2005, p.13]
    • The Guardian
  39. The Sacrifice
    It is brilliant and audacious, with one of the most extraordinary final sequences in modern cinema, and all in a manner which Hollywood in the succeeding decade would learn to call "high concept".
  40. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
    At 37 minutes long, its brevity perhaps exposes or even creates a flimsiness in his signature style that in a longer film would have more space to breathe and parade itself.
  41. The Tree of Life
    This is visionary cinema on an unashamedly huge scale: cinema that's thinking big. Malick makes an awful lot of other film-makers look timid and negligible by comparison.
  42. Decision to Leave
    It’s a gorgeously and grippingly made picture and Tang Wei is magnificent.
  43. Daughters
    It’s a tender, painful, intimate film, made over several years as we watch four girls in the months before the dance.
  44. The Fabelmans
    There remains a remove though still, Spielberg giving us a slightly too stage-managed version of himself and his family, some gristle missing from the darkest moments.
  45. Naked
    This is a movie of virtuoso nihilism and scorn.
  46. Blaze
    The result is a hot, sticky, trippy fusion of wild style and painfully genuine emotion, with plenty of moments that take your breath away.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Starless Dreams
    [A] brilliant documentary.
  48. Beyond Utopia
    It’s an outstanding documentary.
  49. Vermiglio
    It is wonderfully acted with unaffected naturalism by its cast of professionals and newcomers and plays an extravagant, almost shameless pizzicato on the audience’s heartstrings.
  50. Stalker
    Like Solaris, his earlier meditation on the future, Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker is mysterious and compelling though in my view not, like Andrei Rublev, in the realms of greatness: a vast prose-poem on celluloid whose forms and ideas were to be borrowed by moviemakers like Lynch and Spielberg.
  51. Beanpole
    Beanpole is moving, disturbing, overwhelming.
  52. Won't You Be My Neighbor?
    This documentary by Morgan Neville reveals that he really was just what he seemed to be at first innocent sight: a kind-hearted, square but saintly man who genuinely loved and understood children.
  53. Fruitvale Station
    The robust acting and sharp sense of the Bay Area milieu glides us nicely over the film's few soft patches.
  54. I'm Still Here
    The subtlety and dignity of Fernanda Torres’s Oscar-nominated performance in Walter Salles’s new film have been rightly praised.
  55. Atlantic City
    Sarandon’s force and confidence are undeniable, and she easily holds her own against Burt Lancaster.
  56. The Eternal Memory
    Sometimes God is just too on the nose when he makes his creations suffer; but at least Alberdi’s humane, profoundly empathic film-making offers some balm.
  57. The Handmaiden
    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.
  58. EO
    I’m not sure this is my favourite Skolimowski film, but it is engaging in many ways: beautifully photographed, sentimental and surreal in equal measure; and also stubborn – as stubborn as its hero – in its symbolism and stark pessimism.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Is King
    It is compelling in every sense and takes you on a moving journey: not only through the story of The Lion King, but through a small portion of the beautiful cultures and traditions that exist within black communities globally.
  60. The Work
    The dry, strictly observational shooting style means the doc stays in the moment and rarely ventures out of the room where the programme unfolds, adding immediacy.
  61. White on White
    Director Théo Court does a fine job of capturing the barren beauty of this landscape and using it to suggest the broader moral vacuum.
  62. The Plains
    This extraordinarily mundane film – a combination of words I’m fairly certain I’ve never used before – is a tremendous achievement and, in a subtle way, an amazing work of art.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Giant
    It must be added that Giant, in spite of its length, seldom seems long – its story is too eventful, its effects too picturesque, and its director too skilful for that even over so long an expanse of time. It may not be a great film but it is certainly an awesome one.
  64. 76 Days
    76 Days is not a hard-hitting documentary about the centre of the Covid-19 pandemic – maybe such a film will be slower to arrive than the vaccine – but it’s a potent human-interest story, and a portrait of a city under siege.
  65. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
    A sweet, eminently sensible film.
  66. The Truffle Hunters
    A strange, funny, mysterious and rather beautiful film about an activity that’s recherché to say the least.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »