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. Manglehorn
    Pacino's Manglehorn is a subtle master class in neutral shading, with none of the garish flashes that sometimes bedevil his work.
  2. 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.
  3. The Look of Silence
    The Look of Silence — like The Act of Killing — is arresting and important film-making.
  4. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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?
  8. Lilting
    This debut feature from the Cambodian-born, London-based film-maker Hong Khaou is heartfelt, intelligent film-making on a shoestring budget.
  9. Metro Manila
    It's a resourceful, distinctive film that builds to a satisfying crescendo.
  10. Jealousy
    It's certainly atmospheric and cool in a new-New Wave way, but really, what's the point?
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. Guardians of the Galaxy
    The movie practically satirises itself as it goes along, glossing over its own absurdity in the process.
  17. 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."
  18. Lucy
    The end of the movie goes completely off the rails, but in a way that is charming in its stupidity.
  19. Horns
    Horns plays instead like a high concept beer advert – breezily stylish, memorable in its time, but a bit too full of gas.
  20. Salvo
    Salvo is a strange, involving, if flawed movie.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. Marius
    Not just cinéma de papa, but cinema de grand-papa.
  25. 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.
  26. 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.
  27. 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.
  28. 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.
  29. 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.
  30. 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.
  31. 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.
  32. Me and You
    A slight but engaging two-hander.
  33. Yves Saint Laurent
    The film's purpose is the reverent mystification of everything that avowedly makes YSL special.
  34. 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.
  35. 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.
  36. The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet
    The two adjectives in the title should be replaced with "annoying" and "unendurably tiresome".
  37. Exhibition
    Exhibition is challenging, sensual, brilliant film-making.
  38. 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.
  40. 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.
  41. Willow Creek
    As a horror film using that now-tired device, "found footage" supposedly shot by the characters themselves, it's quite passable.
  42. Edge of Tomorrow
    It is basically deadly serious, and after some moderate knockaboutfun, settles into something pretty dull. Where's the edge?
  43. 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.
  44. 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.
  45. Grace of Monaco
    It is a film so awe-inspiringly wooden that it is basically a fire-risk. The cringe-factor is ionospherically high.
  46. 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.
  47. Timbuktu
    Abderrahmane Sissako's passionate and visually beautiful film Timbuktu is a cry from the heart.
  48. 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.
  49. 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.
  50. 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.
  51. 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.
  52. Saint Laurent
    Saint Laurent is a well made but bafflingly airless and claustrophobic film.
  53. 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.
  54. 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.
  55. 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.
  56. 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.
  57. 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.
  58. 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.
  59. 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.
  60. 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.
  61. Coming Home
    A sweet yet suspect romantic drama.
  62. 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.
  63. Foxcatcher
    It is a gripping film: horrible, scary and desperately sad.
  64. Wrinkles
    This movie has the same desolate quality as Philip Larkin's poem The Building, and yet it is tender and lovable, too.
  65. Welcome to New York
    Welcome to New York proves thoroughly engrossing. Here is a work of ragged glory; dirty and galvanic. [Unrated Version]
  66. 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.
  67. Half of a Yellow Sun
    the film is often stately and sluggish with some very daytime-soapy moments of emotional revelation.
  68. 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.
  69. 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.
  70. 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.
  72. The Other Woman
    The Other Woman scrawls out a dumb dumb-feminist message with a big, fat marker pen.
  73. 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.
  74. Last Passenger
    Nooshin holds on to a strain of logic that doesn't often survive at this level of filmmaking.
  75. The Quiet Ones
    The arrestingly fierce Cooke, in particular, is surely a star in the making.
  76. Obvious Child
    A glorious jumping bean comedy that moves from the profane to the poignant in the blink of an eye.
  77. 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.
  79. The Lunchbox
    The Lunchbox is perfectly handled and beautifully acted; a quiet storm of banked emotions.
  80. The Players
    If only the transitions in and out of the dollops of broad sex comedy weren't such a bumpy ride.
  81. 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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Magic Magic
    The script unsettles, but never scares, so it doesn't work as a horror film. It's also not a convincing chronicle of deteriorating mental illness.
  83. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
    Webb's film is bold and bright and possesses charm in abundance. It swings into the future and carries the audience with it.
  84. 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.
  85. Young & Beautiful
    François Ozon's new film is a luxurious fantasy of a young girl's flowering: a very French and very male fantasy, like the pilot episode of the world's classiest soap opera... But this is well-crafted and well-acted.
  86. Ida
    Every moment of Ida feels intensely personal. It is a small gem, tender and bleak, funny and sad, superbly photographed in luminous monochrome: a sort of neo-new wave movie with something of the classic Polish film school and something of Truffaut, but also deadpan flecks of Béla Tarr and Aki Kaurismäki.
  87. Noah
    Impressive as much of his film is, however, Aronofsky never quite solves the main challenge of the semi-literal biblical adaptation: what is so economical, and beautifully expressed, on the page can become a heavy, lumbering beast when translated into conventional narrative.
  88. Muppets Most Wanted
    A wasted opportunity.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Divergent
    How Orwellian is college? Very, if Divergent is to be believed.
  90. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
    In the first movie, an injection transformed wimpy Steve Rogers into strapping Captain America; similarly, this sequel gives the flagging comic-book movie an adrenaline shot of relevance. You've got to hand it to them.
  91. Veronica Mars
    Proves more footnote than fresh start.
  92. Need For Speed
    Subtle it isn't. But the entertainment rev counter more or less keeps turning over.
  93. Frank
    For a film that champions talent that takes risks, Frank can sometimes feel a little too conventional. The real Sidebottom's wayward genius would be a hard fit for any story arc, but Frank does a good job of dipping into surrealism and pop in equal measure.
    • 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.
  95. Suzanne
    The brilliance of Quillévéré's direction is in the performances she coaxes from her cast, and the clear-eyed, non-judgmental way she presents them.
  96. Himizu
    Sono retains his go-for-the-throat approach, but the violence here somehow connects with the brutal economic conditions, and he fosters very tender, affecting performances from Shôta Sometani and Fumi Nikaidô as his crushed young lovers.
  97. 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.
  98. 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.
  99. Neighbors
    In its current state, Neighbors is filthy, nasty and a bit too sloppy. But it’ll scrub up lovely.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    River of Fundament
    For all its abstruse content and excruciating length, the film has both the ambition and a sufficient amount of breathtaking cinematography to make even the boldest claims it makes for itself seem valid.
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