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. Ender's Game
    The movie's apocalyptic finale indicates that it's bitten off considerably more than it can chew in terms of ideas, but it looks good, and the story rattles along.
  2. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2
    Fortunately, the animators get stuck in: the foodscape Flint's party passes through is again wittily realised, each frame sprinkled with colourful hybrid creations, from "flamangos" to "shrimpanzees".
  3. Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa
    Sacha Baron Cohen's "Borat" set the bar very high for this type of narrative-driven prankery, and in comparison, Bad Grandpa comes across as disjointed and aimless.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wolf Children
    Telling the story through the eyes of the harried, bereaved but indomitable mother gives this calm, funny, only occasionally schmaltzy family film a maturity Twilight never reached.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Muscle Shoals
    A stubborn charmer whose life was a magnet for tragedy, Hall is the emotional centre not only of the Muscle Shoals sound but of this film.
  6. Closed Circuit
    It plays as cut-price Le Carré; a recording of a recording of superior films. The picture is fuzzy, and the plot becomes garbled.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Thor: The Dark World
    No amount of tool-wielding heroism can save The Dark World from being a startlingly unbalanced movie.
  8. Saving Mr. Banks
    Saving Mr Banks is an indulgent, overlong picture which is always on the verge of becoming a mess. Thankfully, reliable old Tom Hanks snaps his fingers and – spit, spot – everything more or less gets cleared away.
  9. Seduced and Abandoned
    It's a guilty-pleasure romp of a documentary, filmed at last year's Cannes film festival, all about the gorgeous, deadly and heartbreaking business of cinema itself.
  10. One Chance
    The movie is strongest is when it strips away the facts and focuses on the emotional notes.
  11. Belle
    Amma Asante's second feature tells Dido's extraordinary story in handsome, if formulaic, style.
  12. Our Day Will Come
    It's a road movie that runs out of road – and out of ideas.
  13. Baggage Claim
    Romcom fans deserve something with more heart.
  14. V/H/S/2
    There are some dull stretches here, but also some grisly instant hits: nasty, deplorable, vulgar and sometimes brilliant.
  15. Machete Kills
    The odd vivid shot reminds you of Rodriguez's dynamic visual imagination, but also what it's wasted on here: a project as indifferent as some of the trash that inspired it.
  16. Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington
    Junger articulates a number of subtle and unexpected ideas about Hetherington's work, and about combat reporting in general.
  17. 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.
  18. Captain Phillips
    This a quasi-war movie set in peacetime; these men are fighting to the death, but not for nation or principle or ideology — or at least, not a conscious ideology: they are caught in larger economic currents.
  19. In the Name Of
    Co-writer/ director Malgorzata Szumowska, improving upon 2011's Elles, downplays the conflicts in a scenario apparently ripe for torrid melodrama, allowing the story and characters to reveal themselves at their own pace.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Emperor
    Thank heaven for Jones's reliable grouchiness, his bloodhound eyes, high-belted paunch, and deader-than-deadpan drawl offering welcome relief from the historical schmaltz.
  21. 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.
  22. Metallica: Through the Never
    In between songs there's a movie within a movie as Dane DeHaan silently takes on the forces of anarchy on behalf of the band. Awesome.
  23. The To Do List
    A few laughs.
  24. Sunshine on Leith
    A remorselessly rousing attempt to do for the Scottish pub rock twins what Mamma Mia! did for Abba or Tommy for The Who.
  25. Girl Most Likely
    Odd zingers and residual eccentricities (a Whit Stillman cameo, anyone?) stand as traces of the blast it might have been, but this cast surely signed on in anticipation of many more laughs than there are in the final cut.
  26. Hannah Arendt
    This is a formal and pedagogic production, but worthwhile nonetheless.
  27. Greedy Lying Bastards
    We call our House of Commons proceedings Punch and Judy: but the climate-change deniers on Fox News are Punch on steroids. It's a chilling and depressing picture.
  28. Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers
    The casefile remains open, but this considered investigation matches the Panthers' bravura with an organisational flair of its own.
  29. Nothing But a Man (1964)
    An enormous pleasure. The performances are so fresh and natural – yet so subtle and delicately judged. The direction is superb in its control and the cinematography creates a gripping docu-realist vision.
  30. Blue Jasmine
    After all those false dawns, non-comebacks and semi-successful Euro jeux d'esprit, Allen has produced an outstanding movie, immensely satisfying and absorbing, and set squarely on American turf: that is, partly in San Francisco and partly in New York.
  31. Runner Runner
    This is a lazy, trashy film that barely goes through the motions.
  32. Le Week-End
    For all its flaws - in fact, perhaps because of them - Le Week-End is a work borne from, and provoking, real feeling.
  33. Great Expectations
    A watchable and accessible revival, though not groundbreaking, and not quite matching the story's passionate fear and rapture.
  34. 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.
  35. How I Live Now
    A gooey love story is pitted against the end of the world. No wonder the romance comes up wanting.
  36. Child of God
    Child of God is a shocking tale of backwoods lunacy and one man's descent into hell. Perhaps the most shocking thing about it is that it's really rather good.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Armstrong Lie
    Succeeds as a probing look into the mechanics of an epic lie, and because of the emotion at its heart.
  38. Under the Skin
    Under the Skin is perhaps best viewed as an icy parable of love, sex and loneliness.
  39. The Zero Theorem
    The film has a ragged charm, a Tiggerish bounce, and a certain sweet melancholy that bubbles up near the end.
    • 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.
  41. Philomena
    Its main focus is the sparky, shifting relationship between its two protagonists and its trump card the startling chemistry between its two main stars.
  42. Life of Crime
    It gleams with a faintly-tacky, country club sheen, as if it'd been sheep-dipped in essence of 70s and come out feeling peachy.
  43. Parkland
    If the film finally doesn't tell us anything we did not already know, the approach makes a worn-out old tragedy feel supple and urgent.
  44. Night Moves
    This director, in the past, has shown herself to be an ace with the teasing, hanging ending and Night Moves saves the best for last.
  45. Labor Day
    With its frank approach to the basics of human desire, its steady, intense focus on a small-town story which could have come straight from Douglas Sirk, Reitman's fifth feature appears to bear little resemblance the four that went before.
  46. Joe
    Joe also stands as a reminder of what a terrific actor Cage can be when he is able to harness and channel his wilder impulses.
  47. The Invisible Woman
    The Invisible Woman shies from propaganda just as Nelly shies from impropriety. Fiennes has done the right and proper thing here. He has, at 50, made a mature movie, prudent in the best possible sense.
  48. The Fifth Estate
    This is highly competent catnip for the watercooler crowd.
  49. Fading Gigolo
    Turturro has given Allen his biggest and best on-screen turn in years: the part was written for him and it's full of scope for amiable kvetching and nimble slapstick.
  50. 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In a World...
    A cameo from Geena Davis is particularly tart, and all the better for it.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    White House Down
    This bona-fide big-budget Hollywood flop at least has the good grace to laugh at itself as it rolls out the dingbat-daft action-movie cliches.
  53. The Double
    The Double isn't an original idea. It wasn't even in Dostoyevsky's time. But it's a great story. And Ayoade has produced a brilliant copy.
  54. Devil's Knot
    It reduces a complex and extraordinary case to soap. It makes you care less, for all its heavy-breathing and cheapo coaxing.
  55. Dallas Buyers Club
    [McConaughey] delivers a twitchy, hostile performance on par with anything he's done since he escaped the rom com cul-de-sac.
  56. Begin Again
    The film's sole saving grace is, of course, Ruffalo.
  57. 12 Years a Slave
    Stark, visceral and unrelenting, 12 Years a Slave is not just a great film but a necessary one.
  58. Enough Said
    All in all a comedy that starts out like a pudding made of first world problems ends up warming your heart and that is in no small part down to the strength of its two leads. As a final act, it's a touching one.
  59. August: Osage County
    It's bracing, but it does feel closer to panto than melodrama, more exhausting than illuminating.
  60. The Railway Man
    From time to time, the script contextualises a little clumsily...but the playing and pacing are terrific.
  61. Insidious: Chapter 2
    Wan remains a crafty enough director to draw your eye warily across the frame. You shouldn't feel so daft for flinching this time.
  62. The Wind Rises
    A gorgeous yet ultimately frustrating tribute to the Japanese airplane designer Jiro Horikoshi.
  63. Out in the Dark
    There's romance and tragedy, but little depth and no nuance.
  64. No One Lives
    Director Ryuhei Kitamura ladles on the entrails like a ghoulish dinnerlady, but his three-way narrative strategies lead nowhere.
  65. Museum Hours
    Like José Luis Guerín's brilliant 2007 curio "In the City of Sylvia," this is one of those rare films that may change the way you view the world.
  66. More Than Honey
    The mystery and beauty of bees emerge strongly enough. But should we be seriously concerned, or not?
  67. Diana
    Poor Princess Diana. I hesitate to use the term "car crash cinema". But the awful truth is that, 16 years after that terrible day in 1997, she has died another awful death.
  68. Rush
    What Rush has to offer is a great human drama, two dangerously talented men pushing each other to risky victory and a superb script, delivered with some mastery by Hemsworth and Brühl.
  69. Prisoners
    In his first English language film, Quebeçois director Denis Villeneuve has produced a masterful thriller that is also an engrossing study of a smalltown America battered by recession, fear and the unrelenting elements.
  70. Kill Your Darlings
    Though it begins as a murder-mystery, Kill Your Darlings may be best described as an intellectual moral maze, a story perfectly of its time and yet one that still resonates today.
  71. Riddick
    The results are by turns boring and bizarre, although Diesel still has some presence.
  72. I Am Breathing
    The directors' intimate domestic images only occasionally match the humour and ruminative poetry of their subject's own, blog-published words, but ghoulishness and undue sentimentality are kept at bay.
  73. My Father and The Man In Black
    For Cash devotees who want a hitherto-hidden perspective on their man, though, this is invaluable viewing.
  74. Upstream Color
    It is invigoratingly freaky and strange, with a Death-Valley-dry sense of humour somewhere underneath — though a little derivative sometimes. More than once, Carruth gives us a close-up on a hand ruminatively stroking a surface: very Malick. And the shots of creepy creatures swarming under the skin are very Cronenberg.
  75. Pain & Gain
    The movie needed some more detachment – and brevity – but Wahlberg shows once again he has the comedy chops.
  76. One Direction: This Is Us
    I suspect a previous, wackier idea for the film was ditched in favour of a slick promotional video about their jaw-dropping global tour, but I also have to admit that this is a rather watchable record of a phenomenon.
    • 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.
  78. Populaire
    You'll need to have a very sweet tooth for this, and it makes light of those difficult sexual politics that Mad Men attacked with such fierce satire.
  79. Fire in the Blood
    As the indignation rises, the outcome of this battle cannot entirely be guessed, although one closing credit appears to address Big Pharma directly: "Help prevent a sequel."
  80. Gravity
    The film thrums with an ongoing existential dread. And yet, tellingly, Cuaron's film contains a top-note of compassion that strays at times towards outright sentimentality.
  81. 2 Guns
    There is a fair amount of not sufficiently witty or lovable banter, and Paula Patton gets to play Katharine Ross to their Butch and Sundance. She really has nothing to do except pose fetchingly in her underwear. Not much firepower.
  82. 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.
  83. We're the Millers
    Hang on for the outtake bloopers over the credits and you'll see Aniston momentarily unsure how to take a joke at her expense.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
    This is film-making at its most cynical. But none of it actually makes much sense.
  85. Elysium
    Nothing in the movie matches the fascination of its premise and its opening 10 minutes: the undisturbed status quo is mesmeric. Once the narrative grinds into gear, however, the film's distinctive quality is lost.
  86. Wadjda
    You'd need a heart of stone not to be won over by Wadjda, a rebel yell with a spoonful of sugar and a pungent sense of a Riyadh society split between the home, the madrasa and the shopping mall.
  87. Escape from Tomorrow
    The acting isn't perfect (which is perhaps understandable under the circumstances), and the film's dream states sometimes try too hard, but Escape From Tomorrow has an otherworldly atmosphere that both hooks and engages.
  88. 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.
  89. Paradise: Faith
    There are plenty of Seidl's signature grotesques, extended uncomfortable scenes and hardcore imagery owing something to Lucian Freud and Diane Arbus. But perhaps for the first time there is also a hint of ordinary human heartbreak.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A.C.O.D.
    [An] amusing but formulaic man-in-crisis comedy.
  91. Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters
    The kids are charmless, the adults bemused.
  92. About Time
    Curtis's heart is in the right place. In fact, it's all over the place – front and centre and backlighting the whole thing with a benevolent glow. But it is hard not to watch this, read the news that it will probably be his last as a director, and look to the future.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Lee Daniels' The Butler
    A great film about the American civil rights movement is way overdue. The Butler, overwhelmed by flash and good intentions, doesn't even come close.
  94. Jayne Mansfield's Car
    It's ambitious enough to aim at polished, intelligent character drama, and pulls it off successfully.
  95. From Up on Poppy Hill
    It's a light, breezy 1960s-set coming-of-age tale that strives to convey something of how Japan rebuilt itself after the traumas of the second world war.
  96. The Smurfs 2
    The interplay between animated and live-action elements remains a selling point: Hank Azaria again gives exemplary pantomime as Gargamel.
  97. RED 2
    Like the first one, it's played for laughs in-between bouts of mayhem; most of the gags are off-target, though Mirren's Nancy Mitfordesque assassin gets a pretty good kill ratio.
  98. The Frozen Ground
    Nicolas Cage, Vanessa Hudgens and John Cusack give solid performances in this Prime Suspect-like thriller.
  99. Our Children
    Émilie Dequenne is the young actor who made a powerful debut in the Dardenne brothers' prize-winning film "Rosetta" in 1999, and what a superb performance she gives now in this inexpressibly painful drama.
  100. Alan Partridge
    The genius of Alpha Papa, then, is in remaining faithful to Partridge's small-screen soul while also managing the demands of a big-screen Alan.
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