The Guardian's Scores

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For 6,656 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: 2,521 out of 6656
  2. Mixed: 3,814 out of 6656
  3. Negative: 321 out of 6656
6656 movie reviews
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  1. About Elly (2009)
    About Elly confirms Farhadi's shrewd judgment of pace, dramatic technique and formal control of an ensemble cast.
  2. Paddington
    Full credit to the film-makers, who manage to map their digital bear against his human co-stars and marry Bond’s antique conceit to a high-concept story.
  3. Night Will Fall
    This is an extraordinary record. But be warned. Once seen, these images cannot be unseen.
  4. The King and the Mockingbird
    It's a richly conceived treat.
  5. Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets
    You can't help thinking he's missed the point of Pulp. Their music denigrated the people as much as it celebrated them. Habicht leaves the city in love with a surface-level reading of Cocker's take on it.
  6. The Rewrite
    Perhaps any screenwriting teacher could explain why romantic comedies such as this frontload it with all the jokes in the first act, and then get progressively sentimental and humourless. This one becomes gooier and squishier until the comedy has entirely gone.
  7. Dumb and Dumber To
    I’d be lying if I said this movie didn’t crack me up on more than a few occasions.
  8. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
    Director Francis Laurence ekes a paltry story out. The special effects are limp and the script a little creaky, although somehow it still manages to thrill.
  9. A Most Violent Year
    JC Chandor’s period crime drama is rigorous, resourceful and as smart as a whip...But its canny tactical struggle remains a joy to behold.
  10. The Better Angels
    There’s slow cinema and there is boring cinema, and this is an unfortunate example of the latter.
  11. Private Peaceful
    Private Peaceful is a small-scale story in essence, which works efficiently on the non-epic scale in which it's presented.
  12. Plot for Peace
    It's a fascinating story.
  13. Interstellar
    It’s a glorious spectacle, but a slight drama, with few characters and too-rare flashes of humour. It wants to awe us into submission, to concede our insignificance in the face of such grand-scale art. It achieves that with ease. Yet on his way to making an epic, Nolan forgot to let us have fun.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Trash
    As a mystery, Trash is compelling enough though its milieu and the outstanding performances at the centre of the movie are what set it apart.
  15. 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.
  16. Still Alice
    This is an effortlessly excellent film, about a horribly hard subject.
  17. Citizenfour
    Citizenfour is a gripping record of how our rulers are addicted to gaining more and more power and control over us – if we let them.
  18. Fury
    Fury is a punchy, muscular action film, confidently put together and never anything other than watchable.
  19. Before I Go to Sleep
    It aims for sexy and/or dangerous, but the tone is dry and the pace lags.
  20. The Innocents
    Clayton brilliantly uses slow dissolves to create ghostly superimpositions, and the harmless squeals of bath-time fun, or squeakings of a pencil, suggest uncanny screams.
  21. Inherent Vice
    Anderson has all manner of fun with the tale's whirling, blurring trajectory. His film is like a jubilant spin painting in which the characters have been scattered and splattered to the furthest reaches of the frame.
  22. Bad Turn Worse
    There is talent and ambition here: the film has style, mood, references – and, inevitably, a great opening and credit sequence – though it's short on substance.
  23. Haider
    It makes the text feel newly alive, bristly, radical. A palpable hit, in any language.
  24. For Those in Peril
    The movie is intensely acted, with a sense of interior longing possibly inspired by Terrence Malick, but it is also sometimes contrived and straining self-consciously for dramatic mood and moment.
  25. Dracula Untold
    It’s no-frills, B-movie modesty might have been winning, if it weren’t so dashed-off.
  26. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
    For family entertainment, you could do a lot worse.
  27. Kill the Messenger
    It’s a great story that lends itself to some striking scenes. Yet the film in total – if I may paraphrase Webb’s critics – has a number of holes.
  28. Plastic
    Just occasionally, the story accelerates to a canter,and Gilbey works hard to deliver some bangs for your buck. But it soon collapses into cliches. "Plastic" just about covers it.
  29. Advanced Style
    It doesn't reflect too deeply on age and aging, doesn't dwell on the sadder and complicated side of things, and perhaps gravitates towards self-conscious eccentricity, but it's affectionate and watchable enough.
  30. Bachelorette
    Headland has comic smarts enough to venture both filthily revisionist readings of My So-Called Life and riffs on the Potsdam conference, while refusing her audience any comforting safety nets.
  31. The Kings of Summer
    The director's background in online shorts manifests itself in an occasional, montage-heavy scattiness, and the broadly conventional closing act can't quite maintain the laugh rate, but there's a lot of warm-hearted and commendably daft business along the way.
  32. 42
    Boseman hits his key scenes out of the park, making a swell couple with Shame's Nicole Beharie, while Helgeland stages Robinson's signature base-stealing with undeniable aplomb.
  33. 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.
  34. God's Not Dead
    Ban this sick filth.
  35. In Bloom
    The film finds the subtle tells that suggest these free-roaming girls might themselves have become prisoners of war, while enveloping its heroines in a persuasive turbulence: unpredictable, never forced, and forever compelling.
  36. Next Goal Wins
    As an antidote to Premier League cynicism, it couldn't be bettered.
  37. In Secret
    It's imprisoned by its own glibness, grabbing for sensation over emotion, and looking silly whenever it misses.
  38. Run & Jump
    Peake, warmly sketching a woman busy fooling herself that everything will work out, and Forte, as precise as he was in Nebraska, keep it honest, and within touching distance of real poignancy.
  39. Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return
    Even by the standards of allowance-snatching half-term filler, this is pretty indifferent.
  40. Blended
    It proves very much un film de Sandler: so lazy you feel unconscionably guilty for snorting at the three jokes in its two hours that merit any response.
  41. Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys
    It sometimes strays off the beaten track into shapelessness, but Oreck lends individual segments a quiet fascination.
  42. 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.
  43. 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.
  44. Mariachi Gringo
    Tom Gustafson's film proves genial to a fault.
  45. 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.
  46. I Am Divine
    Schwarz offsets the camp with a sincere appreciation of both the obvious, larger-than-life personality and this performer's oft-overlooked skills.
  47. The Purge: Anarchy
    The franchise is a low-risk work-in-progress, but DeMonaco is improving as a shotmaker.
  48. The Nut Job
    The absence of new or sustainable ideas dooms it to instant mediocrity.
  49. Planes: Fire & Rescue
    The action is colourful, the vistas as organic as pixels will allow and, once it gets past the quickfire editing of the early stages, considered application of 3D heightens the sense of space and glide. Not much magic, but an appreciable level of polish.
  50. Underdogs
    Ping-ponging camera moves temporarily distract from the haphazard structuring and translation.
  51. Dinosaur 13
    If it all feels too anomalous to seal its case against today's big legal and corporate predators, it never lacks for diverting turns and quirks.
  52. Hector and the Search for Happiness
    Whatever enlightenment there is here proves far too easily gained. Keep looking, folks.
  53. 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.
  54. Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
    The weakness is in the material: these are second-string Miller yarns... But the vision remains uncompromising and it dazzles far more than any sequel should.
  55. 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.
  56. If I Stay
    The smart cast occupy themselves with the dog-eared emotions scattered around the waiting rooms.
  57. Watermark
    It’s not as focused as its predecessor, but its best sequences rehydrate the mind.
  58. The Boxtrolls
    Set it against the shiny blandishments that have passed for family fun this season, and it starts to look vaguely radical.
  59. Wilde Salomé
    Too much chaos ultimately prevails, but the rehearsal sequences at least forsake vapid luvvie-isms for close, instructive study of how to pull the best out of actors and text alike.
  60. Gone Girl
    Gone Girl, finally, may be no more than a storm in a teacup. But what an elegant, bone-china teacup this is. And what a fearsome force-10 gale we have brewing inside.
  61. Red Army
    Red Army is executive produced by Werner Herzog and Polsky borrows some his impishness. He makes sport of the old guard's rebuffs, glories in the occasion when Fetisov gives him the finger. This, he seems to say, is the attitude that made these guys.
  62. 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.
  63. While We're Young
    An almost perfect 90-minute hit of confident and inspired comedic commentary.
  64. The Theory of Everything
    It's a film to leave you reeling but cheered, too. It's about battling love, as well as illness. A universal story, extracted from a unique one.
  65. The Riot Club
    The Riot Club hands its audience a ticket, as well as a free pass to pour scorn over proceedings. That's a double-bill which should prove pretty irresistible.
  66. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
    What a bold, beguiling and utterly unclassifiable director Andersson is. He thinks life is a comedy and feels it’s a tragedy, and is able to wrestle these conflicting impulses into a gorgeous, deadpan deadlock.
  67. Pawn Sacrifice
    Maguire flails around obligingly, happy to trade amiability for a decent fist at capturing the difficult, prickly Fischer. But he can’t quite carry it off, and the way the script dances around the edge of his illness, exploring the surface symptoms without trying for deeper psychology, leaves the actor exposed.
  68. Pasolini
    It’s a work of startling maturity from this incorrigible tearaway, a minor-key dream that finally turns towards darkness.
  69. Nightcrawler
    From a subdued start Nightcrawler unfurls into a ghoulish and wickedly funny satire on journalism, the job market and self-help culture.
  70. Men, Women & Children
    A huge improvement on the muddled melodrama of Labor Day, Men, Women and Children is still a flawed Jason Reitman film. Its scope is too big, his ambitions too high.
  71. Madame Bovary
    The presence of Sophie Barthes behind the camera does not amplify sympathy for our heroine. Rather, the opposite: if anything Barthes seems less in her allure, less tolerant of her tiffs, full-throttle with the vanity and the selfishness.
  72. Love & Mercy
    It’s creative and experimental in just the right spirit, though with an asymmetric flaw. The film is a kind of diptych in which one of the panels is more fully achieved than the other.
  73. A Little Chaos
    It has to be said, the performances are excellent. Winslet manages emotional honesty within anachronistic confines, and Schoenaerts escapes with dignity.
  74. Hungry Hearts
    It is a tense, claustrophobic nightmare, played with sincerity and force, particularly by Adam Driver. But a strident orchestral score keeps intruding, dark chords telling us how scared we ought to be, and it is as if Costanzo is not content with an ultra-real relationship drama, and wants his film to be some kind of heavy-handed horror-thriller too.
  75. Goodnight Mommy
    Perhaps a more unassuming genre director would have tightened this movie’s cables a little, so that it had more tension and less revulsion. At all events, it delivers some nasty shocks.
  76. Good Kill
    Niccol creates an atmosphere that is airless and dull, an unusual tone for a modern war film, but one that fits the subject matter perfectly.
  77. Eden
    Hansen-Løve has an acute eye for the details of Paul’s world. Glamour is twinned with mundanity, beauty with boorishness and friendship with selfishness, while artistic endeavour is undercut by self-indulgence.
  78. The Duke of Burgundy
    The Duke of Burgundy will have its detractors. But this is not just a filthy movie. It's a considerable work of art, and one that touches on a rarely discussed side of human sexuality completely free of judgement.
  79. The Cut
    It’s a big, ambitious, continent-spanning piece of work, concerned to show the Armenian horror was absorbed into the bloodstream of immigrant-descended population in the United States, but it is a little simplistic emotionally.
  80. Cake
    Aniston’s drab-act is diverting, but it’s not enough to sweeten a character who is one hell of a pill.
  81. The Hole
    With playful touches of Spielberg, Shyamalan and even Hitchcock, veteran director Joe Dante has confected a neat little scary movie, not explicitly violent, but pretty scary nonetheless.
  82. Believe
    Cox's guardedly avuncular turn might have sustained a more rigorous endeavour, but the attempt to evoke the trauma of the Munich air disaster is rendered wholly insupportable by the trifling hooey around it.
  83. 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.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Guest
    It all escalates into an arch, knowing throwback to 80s horror-thrillers that's muddled in parts but never less than entertaining.
  85. Wild
    Vallée, in collaboration with screenwriter Nick Hornby, gives the film its energy by pulling the narrative apart. They create a two-hour hallucinatory montage of the hike and Cheryl's back story that's wound together with the songs, phrases and poetry that she recited to herself as she walked.
  86. The Imitation Game
    What Cumberbatch delivers is an impressively rounded character study of someone variously kind, prickly, aggressive, awkward and supremely confident. But it's almost too nuanced. Accuracy isn't all, but fumbling in the dark isn't always fun.
  87. 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.
  88. Think Like a Man Too
    Put bluntly, Tim Story's film wears you down until you relent and say, yes, I like these people and it's fun to watch them all have such a good time.
  89. And So It Goes
    Embarrassing for everyone involved not because of any squeamish subject matter – quite the contrary, seeing retirement-age characters are refreshing – but because the story structure is so fake and so plodding.
  90. Finding Fela!
    Finding Fela does an exemplary job of explaining, in musical terms, what made Fela standout, a simple enough step that most music documentaries ignore.
  91. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
    Young kids will find the second, more action-heavy half of the film entertaining, but everyone else will want to crawl into their shell.
  92. 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.
  93. The Giver
    By the end of the movie few won’t be rolling their eyes or checking their watch, but there’s enough that’s fundamentally good in the meat of film not to wholly reject what The Giver is giving us.
  94. 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.
  95. St. Vincent
    There is a contrivance to both story and script that grates, rubs up against Murray’s appeal as a loose cannon.
  96. 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.
  97. The Identical
    The corn in The Identical is as tall as an elephant’s eye – but there’s nothing that says the story of a man torn between his religious upbringing and his desire to be a musician can’t make for a good movie. In fact, considering a little movie called "The Jazz Singer," there’s ample proof that it can be groundbreaking.
  98. Thunder and the House of Magic
    It is soulless, like something that has been generated by a computer programme.
  99. 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.
  100. 99 Homes
    This is a tough, muscular, idealistic drama that packs a mighty punch, and Shannon and Garfield are excellent.
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