The Guardian's Scores

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For 6,571 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: 2,490 out of 6571
  2. Mixed: 3,762 out of 6571
  3. Negative: 319 out of 6571
6571 movie reviews
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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. St. Vincent
    There is a contrivance to both story and script that grates, rubs up against Murray’s appeal as a loose cannon.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. Thunder and the House of Magic
    It is soulless, like something that has been generated by a computer programme.
  19. 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.
  20. 99 Homes
    This is a tough, muscular, idealistic drama that packs a mighty punch, and Shannon and Garfield are excellent.
  21. Manglehorn
    Pacino's Manglehorn is a subtle master class in neutral shading, with none of the garish flashes that sometimes bedevil his work.
  22. 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.
  23. The Look of Silence
    The Look of Silence — like The Act of Killing — is arresting and important film-making.
  24. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
    There’s no doubt it makes for a jubilant ride, a galvanic first blast. But it remains a film which feels deeply thought rather than deeply felt; a brilliant technical exercise as opposed to a flesh-and-blood story.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Patema Inverted
    The animation is intricate and beautiful but the narrative is clunky and heavy-handed in places.
  26. The Two Faces of January
    There are many attractive parts to this thriller – handsome leads, a meaty Patricia Highsmith plot, Mediterranean sunlight on cream linen suits – but it's no greater than the sum of them.
  27. The Inbetweeners 2
    Yes, the franchise's appeal lies in watching very ordinary boys making prats of themselves – but couldn't the vehicles transporting them to the wider world display slightly more ambition?
  28. Lilting
    This debut feature from the Cambodian-born, London-based film-maker Hong Khaou is heartfelt, intelligent film-making on a shoestring budget.
  29. Metro Manila
    It's a resourceful, distinctive film that builds to a satisfying crescendo.
  30. Jealousy
    It's certainly atmospheric and cool in a new-New Wave way, but really, what's the point?
  31. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them
    While Benson treats his characters with care and respect, his depiction of grief can feel studied and not felt.
  32. 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.
  33. The Expendables 3
    [A] blundering jackhammer of a film.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    War Story
    Jackson is wise to keep Keener's pushy, desperate Lee in centre focus.
  35. The Killer Inside Me
    The Killer Inside Me is a particular distillation of male hate, as practised by repulsive and inadequate individuals who have been encouraged to see themselves as essentially decent by virtue of the trappings of authority in which they have wrapped themselves. And Winterbottom is tearing off the mask.
  36. Guardians of the Galaxy
    The movie practically satirises itself as it goes along, glossing over its own absurdity in the process.
  37. Hercules
    There are some rousing battle scenes, preceded by stirring addresses on the subject of going to Elysium – all cheekily borrowed from Ridley Scott's "Gladiator."
  38. Lucy
    The end of the movie goes completely off the rails, but in a way that is charming in its stupidity.
  39. Horns
    Horns plays instead like a high concept beer advert – breezily stylish, memorable in its time, but a bit too full of gas.
  40. Salvo
    Salvo is a strange, involving, if flawed movie.
  41. The Green Prince
    Schirman's film (produced by the team behind Man on Wire and Searching For Sugarman) is as gripping as any high-concept Hollywood thriller and as psychologically knotty as Greek tragedy.
  42. Honour
    It's as if the film-makers felt they couldn't deliver the didactic lesson unless they wrapped this up in pulpy, thriller trappings.
  43. Beyond the Edge
    It's a testament to the film-making that, despite the fact that we know the outcome, there's a great sense of relief when they finally reach the summit.
  44. Marius
    Not just cinéma de papa, but cinema de grand-papa.
  45. Deliver Us From Evil
    This is television-level moviemaking top to bottom, from its preposterous premise, scenery-chomping performances, idiotic sound cues and force-fed jump-scares. Deliver Us From Evil delivers formula, and in a formulaic fashion.
  46. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
    Just as 2011's Rise of the Planet of the Apes surpassed expectations, so this sequel delivers on its promise and leaves us wanting more – which we'll almost certainly get.
  47. 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.
  48. Archipelago
    There is something exacting and audacious in it, something superbly controlled in its composition and technique. The clarity of her film-making diction is a marvel – even, or perhaps especially, when the nature of the story itself remains murkily unrevealed.
  49. Unrelated
    As if from nowhere, a first-time British film-maker has appeared with a tremendously accomplished, subtle and supremely confident feature, authorially distinctive and positively dripping with technique.
  50. 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.
  51. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus
    Da Sweet Blood of Jesus isn't entirely successful – and certainly offers few new insights into the nature of addiction – but it remains a welcome change of pace.
  52. Me and You
    A slight but engaging two-hander.
  53. Yves Saint Laurent
    The film's purpose is the reverent mystification of everything that avowedly makes YSL special.
  54. Snowpiercer
    The way the allegory works out is not exactly subtle or unexpected, but is strangely moving, despite the gruesomeness that has gone before. All in all, a treat.
  55. 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.
  56. The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet
    The two adjectives in the title should be replaced with "annoying" and "unendurably tiresome".
  57. Exhibition
    Exhibition is challenging, sensual, brilliant film-making.
  58. 22 Jump Street
    It certainly provides that rarest of things: relaxing enjoyment. In all its uncompromising goofiness, 22 Jump Street brings onstream a sugar-rush of entertainment.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Fault in Our Stars
    The film works on only one level, but so completely on that level that the rest doesn’t seem to matter: Woodley and Egort have terrific chemistry.
  60. Jimi: All Is by My Side
    The result is an unpredictable film, a difficult approximation of a biopic. But it delivers a Jimi Hendrix experience somehow the richer for sidelining the man and subverting his music.
  61. Willow Creek
    As a horror film using that now-tired device, "found footage" supposedly shot by the characters themselves, it's quite passable.
  62. Edge of Tomorrow
    It is basically deadly serious, and after some moderate knockaboutfun, settles into something pretty dull. Where's the edge?
  63. The Blue Room
    Amalric's handling is cool, studied and perhaps a little self-conscious. But he does a good job of showing how adultery is a noose that tightens at the throat even before an actual crime is committed - at which point the film grows altogether less interesting.
  64. White God
    White God works as an ambiguous satire of power relations generally: eventually the lower orders will rise up. The film has a flair and a bite which I have found lacking in Mundruczó's earlier films.
  65. Grace of Monaco
    It is a film so awe-inspiringly wooden that it is basically a fire-risk. The cringe-factor is ionospherically high.
  66. 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.
  67. Timbuktu
    Abderrahmane Sissako's passionate and visually beautiful film Timbuktu is a cry from the heart.
  68. Still the Water
    Kawase's film is sometimes beautiful and moving but I couldn't help occasionally finding it a little contrived and self-conscious.
  69. 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.
  70. The Homesman
    Tommy Lee Jones shows some true storytelling grit in this superbly watchable frontier western; he has a muscular and confident command of narrative, driving the plot onward with a real whip-crack, and easily handles the tonal swings between brutal shock, black comedy and sentimentality.
  71. Clouds of Sils Maria
    If Assayas's film finally falls just shy of being great art itself, it is at least handsomely staged and played with conviction.
  72. Saint Laurent
    Saint Laurent is a well made but bafflingly airless and claustrophobic film.
  73. Two Days, One Night
    A tense dramatic situation and a subtly magnificent central performance from Marion Cotillard add up to an outstanding new movie from the Dardenne brothers.
  74. The Captive
    As a straight procedural, this might have worked if Egoyan did not try the audience's patience and insult their intelligence with how utterly implausible his drama is. But line by line, scene by scene, it is offensively preposterous and crass.
  75. Maps to the Stars
    The status-anxiety, fame-vertigo, sexual satiety and that all-encompassing fear of failure which poisons every triumph are displayed here with an icy new connoisseurship, a kind of extremism which faces down the traditional objection that films like this are secretly infatuated with their subject.
  76. Mr. Turner
    What a glorious film this is, richly and immediately enjoyable, hitting its satisfying stride straight away. It's funny and visually immaculate; it combines domestic intimacy with an epic sweep and has a lyrical, mysterious quality that perfumes every scene, whether tragic or comic.
  77. Leviathan
    Leviathan is acted and directed with unflinching ambition, moving with deliberative slowness and periodically accelerating at moments of high drama and suspense. It isn't afraid of massive symbolic moments and operatic gestures.
  78. Goodbye to Language 3D
    It is an uncompromising and exasperating 70-minute cine-collage placed before us on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, composed of fragments of ideas, shards of disillusionment.
  79. Mommy
    Dolan's energy and attack is thrilling; his movie is often brilliant and very funny in ways which smash through the barriers marked Incorrect and Inappropriate.
  80. Winter Sleep
    In fits and starts, this is a stunning picture. At its best, Winter Sleep shows Ceylan to be as psychologically rigorous, in his way, as Ingmar Bergman before him.
  81. Coming Home
    A sweet yet suspect romantic drama.
  82. The Rover
    Michôd creates a good deal of ambient menace in The Rover; Pearce has a simmering presence. But I felt there was a bit of muddle, and the clean lines of conflict and tension had been blurred: the dystopian future setting doesn't add much and hasn't been very rigorously imagined.
  83. Foxcatcher
    It is a gripping film: horrible, scary and desperately sad.
  84. Wrinkles
    This movie has the same desolate quality as Philip Larkin's poem The Building, and yet it is tender and lovable, too.
  85. Welcome to New York
    Welcome to New York proves thoroughly engrossing. Here is a work of ragged glory; dirty and galvanic. [Unrated Version]
  86. X-Men: Days of Future Past
    Non-devotees might well give up, but director Bryan Singer always has a neat special effect, a well-timed gag or an action set piece around the corner, whipping up the action towards a symphonic climax.
  87. Half of a Yellow Sun
    the film is often stately and sluggish with some very daytime-soapy moments of emotional revelation.
  88. 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.
  89. The Wedding Video
    We get one or two outrageous sight gags and massive "getting progressively drunk" montages, and some neatly managed comedy on the laugh-with/laugh-at borderline.
  90. Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas
    Perhaps as a parable, simplicity is what is required, although sometimes the film does not rise to tragedy. Visually, Age of Uprising is classy and plausible, but delivers less than it promises.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ping Pong Summer
    It's gawky and awkward, but just like Rad's breakdancing worm, this one gets better as it goes along.
  92. The Other Woman
    The Other Woman scrawls out a dumb dumb-feminist message with a big, fat marker pen.
  93. The Bachelor Weekend
    One or two set pieces don't quite have the requisite heft, yet the movie clicks whenever co-writer/director John Butler stops to admire the scenery.
  94. Last Passenger
    Nooshin holds on to a strain of logic that doesn't often survive at this level of filmmaking.
  95. The Quiet Ones
    The arrestingly fierce Cooke, in particular, is surely a star in the making.
  96. Obvious Child
    A glorious jumping bean comedy that moves from the profane to the poignant in the blink of an eye.
  97. Third Person
    Third Person is a work of staggering trash; an ensemble drama with the aesthetic of an in-flight magazine, but less classy writing.
    • 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.
  99. The Lunchbox
    The Lunchbox is perfectly handled and beautifully acted; a quiet storm of banked emotions.
  100. The Players
    If only the transitions in and out of the dollops of broad sex comedy weren't such a bumpy ride.
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