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. The Pirate Fairy
    Business concerns sit close to the surface throughout, unmasked by much in the way of artistry.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Non-Stop
    Non-stop is the flimsiest of black box recorders, by contrast, that never threatens to make even intermittent sense, but it hangs together on the bulky shoulders of its star.
  3. Cuban Fury
    This comedy never quite relaxes or convinces or comes together, despite a blue-chip pedigree and a great cast.
  4. Her
    I wished I liked it more. It is engagingly self-aware and excruciatingly self-conscious, wearing its hipness on its sleeve; it's ingenious and yet remarkably contrived. The film seems very new, but the sentimental ending is as old as the hills. There are some great moments.
  5. The LEGO Movie
    An unexpected joy.
  6. '71
    It's a film that holds you in a vice-like grip throughout; only wavering towards the end with a faintly preposterous climactic shootout.
  7. A Long Way Down
    A genial, lightweight farce, which largely approximates Hornby's distinctively bittersweet tone.
  8. Mr. Peabody & Sherman
    It's a headspinningly wacky premise, and it takes a little while for the audience to get up to speed, but once this is achieved, there's an awful lot of unexpected fun to be had, boasting zany adventures with various historical figures.
  9. The Grand Budapest Hotel
    With this film, Anderson has built a thoroughly likable vision of a prewar Europe – no more real, perhaps, than the kind of Viennese light-operetta that sustained much of 1930s Hollywood – but a distinctive, attractive proposition all the same. It's a nimblefooted, witty piece, but one also imbued with a premonitory sadness at the coming conflagration.
  10. RoboCop
    A deafening, boring action pile-up that is more Call of Duty than Robocop.
  11. That Awkward Moment
    In the main, it's the usual story – much more rom than com.
  12. May I Kill U?
    All the material about social media looks forced and behind the curve, and nothing about the movie is really convincing or entertaining on any level, making it valueless as drama or satire.
  13. Mitt
    How ironic to realise that the greatest Mitt Romney campaign ad should arrive too late to save him.
  14. White Bird in a Blizzard
    Nothing really adds up to much, past a solid performance from Woodley and the energetic - if out-of-place - turn from Green.
  15. Song One
    Writer-director Kate Barker-Froyland's debut feature is a mournful number, held back by an uncertain performance by Flynn and an alienating reverence for the restorative power of middling indie-folk.
  16. Infinitely Polar Bear
    Infinitely Polar Bear is heartfelt and honest, but it's too cute by half.
  17. Imperial Dreams
    Vitthal's film is full of heart, but overly ambitious. He could have made it easy on himself and steered us down a much more familiar route. Instead he delivers a moralistic story that's pure in its intention and a real slog to watch.
  18. Happy Christmas
    Joe Swanberg's follow-up to Drinking Buddies is short and slight, but undeniably charming.
  19. Camp X-Ray
    Sattler's film leans on its actors too heavily. It heaps too many implausibilities upon their trembling shoulders. After an hour in Camp X-Ray, the strain starts to show.
  20. Boyhood
    What an astonishing achievement; what a beautiful movie.
  21. Calvary
    Calvary boasts a sharp sense of place and a deep love of language. It's puckish and playful, mercurial and clever, rattling with gallows laughter as it paints a portrait of an Irish community that is at once intimate and alienated.
  22. God Help the Girl
    God Help the Girl comes loose and easy, verging on the slipshod. It's warm and generous, verging on the sentimental; a film that crystallises the best and worst of Belle and Sebastian's songwriting skills.
  23. The Raid 2
    The Raid 2's faults are not in Evans's technique – he's unusually adept at capturing the art of violence. Instead, the film suffers from too much potential.
  24. A Most Wanted Man
    It's a professional old-school espionage outing, intricate as clockwork and acted with relish by the ever-watchable Hoffman. But it remains an oddly anonymous enterprise from this talented and distinctive director.
  25. Whiplash
    It's rare to see a film about music that professes its love for the music and its characters equally.
  26. A Coffee In Berlin
    This debut for German writer-director Jan Ole Gerster seemingly aims to transplant a mumblecore aesthetic into Berlin, with all the requisite aimless hipsters, whimsical touches and rambling narrative dips and dives; but someone forgot to add spontaneity or edge.
  27. Maladies
    This is basically a studied and serious film, but there's a feyness to its tone, and a lethargy to its pacing that make it difficult to warm to, even if the principal actors give it their all.
  28. Devil's Due
    It's as substantial as seeing "The Exorcist" redone on Snapchat – and let's not even consider the implication of casting black and Latino performers as Satan's minions, because clearly its makers haven't.
  29. Stranger by the Lake
    The tired old trope "erotic thriller" does no justice to how confrontationally and explicitly sexual this movie is — nor how thrilling, nor how menacing and complex.
  30. 47 Ronin
    Hollywood's latest play for the growing Asian market revisits the ancient Japanese legend of self-sacrifice, hoping to offset its garbled narrative and grinding humourlessness with 3D and Keanu Reeves as a samurai Jesus.
  31. How to Make Money Selling Drugs
    Various colourful characters including Freeway Rick Ross, the man who invented crack, and ex-cop Barry Cooper explain the tricks of the trade, but none of it will be news to anyone who's watched "Breaking Bad" or "The Wire."
    • 47 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Interior. Leather Bar.
    Interior. Leather Bar ultimately rings hollow in its diatribe and agenda because its chief instigator refuses to open up.
  33. The Best Offer
    Filmed in what you might call the international hotel style, Tornatore's idiotic premise is entertaining if you don't inspect it too carefully, or look for anything beneath the portentousness.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
    It's too airless, too perfect, a dream of connection with humanity that flees contact with actual people.
  35. Nymphomaniac: Volume II
    It is so laden with highly charged set pieces, so dappled with haunting ideas and bold flights of fancy that it finally achieves a kind of slow-burn transcendence.
  36. Nymphomaniac: Volume I
    Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac bludgeons the body and tenderises the soul. It is perplexing, preposterous and utterly fascinating.
  37. The Wolf of Wall Street
    The Wolf of Wall Street, for all its abundant appeal, is no Greek tragedy. It lacks the wildness of Taxi Driver, the jeopardy of GoodFellas and the anguish of Raging Bull. Far better to view this as a stylistic homage, a remastered greatest hits compilation, an amiable bit of self-infringement.
  38. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
    This Anchorman sequel knows who its fans are, and does its best to keep them happy. No one will be complaining.
  39. A Fantastic Fear of Everything
    Crispian Mills's London-based horror-comedy is so spectacularly bungled that it leaves the viewer in a state of advanced petrification.
  40. The Christmas Candle
    A real Christmas miracle would cause every copy of this film to spontaneously burst into flames.
  41. Fill the Void
    The story unfolds intriguingly within an intimate, almost claustrophobic environment. There is perhaps something ultimately undeveloped about it, but the film is a well acted, well presented piece of work.
  42. Big Bad Wolves
    The actors lend it a sick heft, and there are droll, region-specific footnotes...but one senses the sniggering film-makers playing variably funny games with our phobia of pedophiles, rather than having anything lasting to say about it.
  43. Black Nativity
    Beneath middling songs – walloped out in the artless, post-Cowell manner – there's something faintly touching about its vision of broken homes.
  44. Getaway
    You watch the resultant, wholly bloodless carnage with brain in neutral and eyes glazing over, as you would a re-run of Police, Camera, Action! at two in the morning.
  45. Homefront
    [Jason Statham] has some nice, relaxed moments with onscreen daughter Izabela Vidovic, and gets to fulfil half his audience's fantasies in wiping the smirk from James Franco's face.
  46. Trap for Cinderella
    Looks dated and clunky, like a drawn-out episode of Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected on TV, and the direction doesn't have Softley's usual drive.
  47. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
    The Desolation of Smaug is a cheerfully entertaining and exhilarating adventure tale, a supercharged Saturday morning picture: it's mysterious and strange and yet Jackson also effortlessly conjures up that genial quality that distinguishes The Hobbit from the more solemn Rings stories.
  48. American Hustle
    It is an intriguing confection of a movie, announcing its influences candidly, but exerting its originality too.
  49. Cold Comes the Night
    Even Cranston looks to be on auto-pilot here: he comes stomping through the action with a perma-scowl that suggests that his break from playing Walter White is little more than a busman's holiday.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Oldboy
    Oldboy is lively but numb — checked out, as if Lee were directing it following a period of intense convalescence.
  51. Dirty Wars
    The movie has rather silly, Bourne-style thriller graphics, which are unnecessary: it has an important story to tell.
  52. Free Birds
    Enjoyable, with some funny lines.
  53. Leviathan
    Not an easy watch, and something in which you must make an investment of attention – but a fascinating piece of work.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Frozen
    Frozen hews to real, recognisable plumb-lines and casts a lingering spell.
  55. Flu
    Coughs and sneezes do indeed spread diseases in this amusingly feverish thriller, a Korean attempt to take back some of those lurgies let loose by Soderbergh's colder-blooded "Contagion."
  56. The Family
    Robert De Niro does further damage to a reputation much battered by "The Big Wedding."
  57. Anton Corbijn Inside Out
    At times it looks like a parade of celebs, but the film comes belatedly to the point when it discusses Corbijn's parents, particularly his late father, whose approval Anton sought but perhaps never quite got.
  58. In Fear
    Lovering coolly sticks to a rule often disregarded by horror movies looking for an instant scare: the weird, tense build-up is just as disturbing as the reveal.
  59. Dom Hemingway
    Everyone is trying way too hard and Dom's final speech is toe-curlingly misjudged and charmless.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Best Man Holiday
    The Best Man Holiday takes advantage of the actors' pre-existing chemistry to add zing to standard tropes of midlife crisis and melodrama.
  61. Weekend of a Champion
    The movie has some real archival value and the simple juxtaposition of Polanski and Stewart – the oddest couple in Cannes, surely – has a surreal impact. But I wonder if there isn't something a little bit placid and self-satisfied about the film, which is paced remarkably slowly, given the subject matter.
  62. Everyday
    A valuable, meticulously observed and wonderfully acted social-realist feature about a family under pressure.
  63. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
    What lets the movie down is its heart, or lack thereof. The reprise of the Games introduces new adversaries (and some allies) but has exactly the same dynamic as in the first movie.
  64. How to Survive a Plague
    As activist Larry Kramer remarked, the movement had "its good cops and its bad cops", and there is a remarkable, angry, passionate funeral speech from campaigner Bob Rafsky that helped mobilise Act Up and awaken America's conscience.
  65. Love Tomorrow
    Frankly, the performances and line-readings are uneven. The couple's journey through night-time London is interesting: both have a painful past that they are at first reluctant to discuss, especially Maya, but these disclosures are not dramatically developed in any really satisfying way.
  66. Pandora's Promise
    This film certainly chops up a few sacred cows. Could it be that the anti-wind brigade will have to make common cause with climate change scientists?
  67. Paradise: Hope
    The love story – and it can be called that – between the doctor and Melanie is presented with candour and tenderness. There is a new humanity to Seidl's work; it could be his best film so far.
  68. Milius
    Fantasy invigorates reality in this fond retrospective of the director who embodied the renegade heart of 70s Hollywood.
  69. A Touch of Sin
    This is a bitter, jagged, disaffected drama, pessimistic about China, pessimistic about the whole world. One characters asks another if he ever feels like travelling abroad. "Why would I?" he replies. "Everywhere is broke. Foreigners come here now." Jia Zhang-ke's movie gives us a brutal unwelcome.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Last Vegas
    Last Vegas is a good-natured bimbo of a movie, it'll do just about anything to please you, though luckily that includes delivering the 20 big laughs you feel you're owed (unlike The Hangovers), and gently jerking a tear or two. You enjoy it in spite of yourself.
  71. Cutie and the Boxer
    Alternately rueful and whimsical documentary.
  72. Drinking Buddies
    It's an intriguing and distinctive story, soberly told.
  73. Gloria
    Gloria is a sad, painful romantic story.
  74. Child's Pose
    Calin Peter Netzer's Child's Pose is a gripping new drama from Romania and another demonstration of how that country's new wave is developing a distinctive kind of real-time slice-of-life cinema with characterisation in extreme, pitiless closeup.
  75. Short Term 12
    There's a too-cute-to-be-true ending to this US indie movie by the much-acclaimed young director Destin Cretton; I couldn't buy it, and found myself wondering if I had kept the receipt for the rest of the film too.
  76. Faust
    This Faust is part bad dream, part music-less opera: sometimes muted and numb, though with hallucinatory flashes of fear.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Running from Crazy
    The only new titbit of information for Hemingway-philes is that none of his grandchildren read his books.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Counselor
    Working as a screenwriter for the first time after years of seeing his novels successfully adapted to the screen, McCarthy is stretching his powers of language and mood – and, all too quickly, stretching his slim story and cast of characters way too far.
  79. The Taste of Money
    It is a strange slo-mo farce, well directed, highly sexualised – shallow, but sleek.
  80. 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.
  81. 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".
  82. 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.
  85. 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.
  87. 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.
  88. 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.
  89. One Chance
    The movie is strongest is when it strips away the facts and focuses on the emotional notes.
  90. Belle
    Amma Asante's second feature tells Dido's extraordinary story in handsome, if formulaic, style.
  91. Our Day Will Come
    It's a road movie that runs out of road – and out of ideas.
  92. Baggage Claim
    Romcom fans deserve something with more heart.
  93. V/H/S/2
    There are some dull stretches here, but also some grisly instant hits: nasty, deplorable, vulgar and sometimes brilliant.
  94. 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.
  95. 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.
  96. 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.
  97. 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.
  98. 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.
  100. 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.
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