The Guardian's Scores

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For 6,581 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: 2,495 out of 6581
  2. Mixed: 3,767 out of 6581
  3. Negative: 319 out of 6581
6581 movie reviews
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  1. The Final Stand
    Here’s a tale of chest-puffing courage and one-dimensional heroism from Russia during the second world war: an old-fashioned patriotic epic with slo-mo action scenes, intestines spewed on the battlefield and a soppy sentimental romance.
  2. I'm Your Man
    I was disappointed with a film whose crises and dilemmas seem laborious and essentially predictable; it does not fully work as sci-fi or satire or comedy.
  3. Thunder Force
    This is by-the-numbers stuff, not quite funny enough for comedy or having enough of the crazed seriousness that marks out a successful superhero franchise.
  4. Next Door
    It’s not a vanity project (Brühl does not seem in the least vain) but an actor’s project, nonetheless.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Grass Is Greener
    The classy cast is willing enough, but let down by Hugh and Margaret Wilson's stodgy adaptation. [28 Jun 2008, p.53]
    • The Guardian
  6. Every Breath You Take
    The whole thing hangs on a twist that anyone who has ever watched a trashy thriller will have cottoned on to at around the 20-minute mark.
  7. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
    There are some entertaining meta-touches here, but the entire Gutierrez plot is strained and borderline dull. Pascal isn’t a natural comic and the movie winds up fudging his crucial bad-guy status.
  8. Stay Out of the Attic
    Strictly in terms of generating jumpscares and gross-out moments this is efficient enough as a cinematic machine, but the script credited to four different people including Lauder hasn’t got a lot of finesse or subtlety.
  9. Six Minutes to Midnight
    A lively idea for a drama, but the sheer oddity of the real-life premise slows it down.
  10. Long Weekend
    Chao is the standout here. She deserves more – a leading role of her own, at the very least, and a character with an inner life and interests of her own.
  11. Vanquish
    Rose looks great – her androgynous poise reminiscent of the young Angelina Jolie – and does a capable job carrying Vanquish. But you wonder if this noir-filtered, John Wick-apeing thriller is a little too stripped-back for its own good to advance her career.
  12. The Man Who Sold His Skin
    The supposedly important themes of immigrants and Syria are cancelled by its naive flippancy.
  13. Here Are the Young Men
    There’s certainly an impressive cast lineup for this one, but there’s also something weirdly formless and frustrating about it as well; the film gestures at some dark and disturbing possibilities in human nature without quite knowing if or how to follow through.
  14. The Tunnel
    All the traditional ingredients are there, and I do have to say that the film does a good initial job of being claustrophobic and spectacular at the same time.
  15. He's All That
    It’s the same feeling, really, as watching a bunch of straight TikToks. While Rae offers flashes of promise, especially when she pops her genuinely winning smile, she doesn’t make the case for TikTok-to-film-stardom here. The chemistry between her and Buchanan is stilted, at best.
  16. Cry Macho
    There’s a creak of old leather (and other things) in this outrageously dated and hokey sentimental western, made from a script that’s been knocking around the industry for decades; it’s a Swiss cheese of bizarre plot-holes set in 1979, clearly because that is when it was conceived.
  17. The Virtuoso
    When it’s all over and the big twist you saw coming in the first 15 minutes has been revealed, you feel empty, a bit depressed, and like you need another cup of coffee.
  18. The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard
    There are some almost-laughs here and there, but please tell me that we aren’t in for The Hitman’s Mother-In-Law’s Agent’s Bodyguard in 2023.
  19. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City
    The competence of the action sequences compensates somewhat for the underlying lack of wit or humour throughout, unless you count the smile-inducing call backs to ancient 90s technology.
  20. Things Heard & Seen
    Berman and Pulcini bank on suspense, despite a queasy inevitability being the strongest thing this retread of the familiar has going for it.
  21. Demonic
    The connective circuitry is too identikit for Demonic to be especially distinctive.
  22. The Columnist
    Ivo van Aart’s movie gives full rein to that desire and is snappily directed – but in the end there is something self-satisfied and sententious about his feminist revenge flick.
  23. The Djinn
    Charbonier and Powell like moving through the apartment in Steadicam but this results in a soupy style that seeks to cover for the lack of positional imagination and rigour in the script.
  24. Here Today
    Any movie that helps us to talk about dementia is to be welcomed, and they are becoming more commonplace. But the pure treacliness of Here Today is very dispiriting and there are some tonal missteps.
  25. Naked Singularity
    Not even an impending apocalypse adds much in the way of urgency. Still, Boyega is very credible and at 29 he’s beginning to look like a leading man with real gravitational pull. Likely he’ll file this on his CV under misfire.
  26. For the Sake of Vicious
    The daft title tries to promise splatterhouse brazenness, but actually fesses up to the film’s lack of imagination.
  27. Dear Evan Hansen
    In the end, this film suffocates you with ersatz compassion and personal growth.
  28. The Scary of Sixty-First
    To me this feels like a silly smirking film with zero insights into abuse or conspiracy theories.
  29. Last Letter from Your Lover
    The central romance here is, on paper, a love for the ages, a story of all-consuming passion. It’s not quite so in practice.
  30. Edge of the World
    Edge of the World fails to do justice to this fascinating and deeply complex chapter in British colonial history.
  31. Good on Paper
    It all goes off the rails in the worst way in the chaotic final act, as Schlesinger invents a farcical, and increasingly ludicrous, way to wrap things up, the truth of what happened proving far too pedestrian for the framework she’s created.
  32. The Ice Road
    While The Ice Road might not be quite as cut-and-paste as some of the others (there’s less revenge-taking, skill-listing and name-taking than usual), it’s still familiar enough for it to feel like we’ve seen him do this exact thing before.
  33. America: The Motion Picture
    Under Callaham’s inelegant pen, the characters all speak in this overexcited 13-year-old’s vernacular, prone to F-bombs and dick-talk.
  34. Sweet Girl
    Thinly etched topicality only gets the film so far (the script is very “I read an article once”) and when the action mechanics kick into gear, it’s yet more of the same with very little to distinguish it from the pack.
  35. False Positive
    As the film crashes to a conclusion, early promise fading away, the film has the feeling of a valiant, but misguided, post-Get Out attempt to infuse social commentary within the framework of well-worn genre territory, aiming high but landing low.
  36. The God Committee
    The dialogue is earnestly on-the-nose, and there is little in the way of visual excitement in what’s essentially a static board meeting (the story was adapted from a stage play).
  37. P!nk: All I Know So Far
    There is little narrative, beyond the Wembley gig approaching; and, more crucially, little conflict, outer or inner.
  38. Rogue Hostage
    The whole shooting match is pretty bloody, and as cheesy as the dairy aisle, but decent fun to watch.
  39. Where the Crawdads Sing
    Where the Crawdads Sing never really had an interest in complications, or hardship, or racism as anything beyond wallpaper for its central nature girl fantasy of self-reliance. It would rather stay above the fray, gliding prettily along the marsh without actually getting dirty.
  40. Samaritan
    It’s a fresh spin that feels awfully stale, a Samaritan less good and more mediocre.
  41. The Birthday Cake
    Odd though the film is and full of peculiar needle drops showcasing classic tunes that don’t especially fit the action, the whole thing looks pretty good thanks to cinematographer Sean Price Williams.
  42. 65
    It’s not quite the toxic disaster it’s being treated as but 65 is nowhere near the giddy lark it should have been, crash-landing somewhere in the middle instead.
  43. JFK Revisited: Through The Looking Glass
    Did the whole nation and its governing class go into denial after the Kennedy assassination as a way of managing their shock and grief? Perhaps. But this documentary, for all its factual material, is frustrating.
  44. Titane
    For its sheer silliness and towering pointlessness, Julia Ducournau’s gonzo body-horror shaggy-dog story deserves some points.
  45. All My Friends Hate Me
    This struck me as that kind of comedy horror in which (like much romantic comedy) the “comedy” half of the equation has gone missing.
  46. Shock Wave 2
    Despite a few modish touches, this feels fundamentally very old-school, and not necessarily in a good way, right down to the repeated shots of people running away from fireballs in the background.
  47. Midnight in the Switchgrass
    Even though it’s largely deeply undistinguished work, credit is due to whoever rustled up some great supporting actors for little roles around the edges, such as Welker White as the mother of one murdered kid, and Samiah Alexander, who is a hoot as a punctilious trucking company secretary.
  48. A Nightmare Wakes
    It’s a dry and somewhat lifeless tableau.
  49. Vacation Friends
    The base ingredients are here – a charming, comically adept cast, a fun culture clash set-up, idyllic scenery! – but they’re carelessly tossed together rather than combined with any thought, care or even slickness.
  50. Agony
    It’s a shame that, for all of its unnerving tonal registers, not to mention a gorgeous score, Agony winds up with a painfully predictable ending.
  51. Bullet Train
    It rattles strenuously on and on and on with unexciting and uninterestingly choreographed fights, cameos which briefly pep up the interest and placeholder non-lines where the funny material should have gone.
  52. We Need to Do Something
    It’s moderately diverting Halloween filler – earning points for reviving Taco’s electropop cover of Puttin’ on the Ritz – but still way too static to become actually entertaining.
  53. The Superdeep
    To begin, there are a couple of genuinely repulsive horror moments, but things get silly very quickly.
  54. Battle of the Bulge: Winter War
    It all feels very dated and artless, like someone’s grandpa wrote the script 50 years ago and it was found in a drawer, then financed and made with a not inconsiderable budget for extras, vintage tanks and lots of old uniforms.
  55. Unearth
    Like the drilling operation, this was a script in sore need of a clean-up operation.
  56. Triumph
    This underdog, coming-of-age sports movie has a big heart but lacks the competency to execute its aspirational premise.
  57. Out of Death
    The film squanders one or two promising plot ideas, and winds up making a hamfisted paean of praise to the idea of “open carry” gun ownership.
  58. The Addams Family 2
    As charmless as its predecessor, The Addams Family 2 is without an iota of ooky, nor any shred of kooky. Really, it’s just kind of ghastly – and not in the intended way.
  59. Encanto
    There are some nice moments and sweet showtunes, but Encanto feels like it is aspiring to exactly that sort of bland frictionless perfection that the film itselfis solemnly preaching against, with a contrived storyline which wants to have its metaphorical cake and eat it.
  60. Mosley: It's Complicated
    The film feels more like an authorised biography than a documentary, and for that reason it’s a little dull.
  61. Plurality
    Plurality could have put a fresh twist on big-budget Hollywood efforts, but falls flat on both the production design and the narrative front.
  62. Toofaan
    Partly set in the Mumbai underworld, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s boxing drama aims at Raging Bull grit but has an unfortunately irresistible drift towards late-Rocky melodrama.
  63. The East
    Covering the Indonesian war of independence through the viewpoint of the occupier, The East is yet another pale addition to the format, rehashing empty metaphors that are barren of emotional complexity, historical poignancy or visual ingenuity.
  64. The Divide
    This is a well-intentioned film with some forthright performances, although there’s a fair bit of actorly shouting going on and the smiley spaciness of Bruni-Tedeschi can sometimes feel a bit affected.
  65. Petrov's Flu
    No one could doubt the technical mastery of this movie and its formal audacity. But for all that, I found something unliberating in its mercurial restlessness.
  66. Between Two Worlds
    Neither of the two worlds of the film’s English title is illuminated clearly enough
  67. Luz: The Flower of Evil
    The film is depressingly thin on the women; often it seems more interested in arranging them in arty tableaux than investigating the way that isolation has shaped their personalities and how they see the world.
  68. Nope
    There is something clotted and heavy about this film, with sadly not enough of the humour for which Peele justly became celebrated in his double-act days with Keegan-Michael Key. It’s not the positive response I wanted to have.
  69. Off the Rails
    The net effect of Debbie Harry popping up at 10-second intervals on the soundtrack to top up levels of ironic sass is to highlight how that quality is in generally short supply in the script.
  70. The Electrical Life of Louis Wain
    Director Will Sharpe is a potent talent whose early movies Black Pond and The Darkest Universe I loved – but this is a strained film, overwhelmed with self-consciousness at its own unearned period-biopic prestige.
  71. Zone 414
    The script feels completely devoid of ideas about what the future of AI might look like. But what it does prove is that Pearce adds a basic layer of credibility to any film simply by showing up.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Voyage of the Damned
    The problem is that Rosenberg's drama all but sinks under the weight of its serious subject matter and ponderous script; and there are too many iffy performances from the big-star cast (Faye Dunaway, James Mason, Orson Welles and all). [04 Feb 2006, p.53]
    • The Guardian
  73. The Survivalist
    The head of steam Keeyes endeavours to build up gets drained away by the endless barely relevant flashbacks.
  74. The Unforgivable
    The plot’s twists and turns, which were manageable in a three-part TV drama, look contrived and unlikely in a feature film and Bullock has little to do but look self-consciously solemn and martyred for the entirety of it.
  75. There's Someone Inside Your House
    Director Patrick Brice is so distracted with trying to be of the moment that he forgets to make his film base-level fun or at times even base-level coherent, its thesis crammed into a laughably on-the-nose killer speech where buzzwords are clumsily crashed together, trying to make a point about something but ultimately saying not a lot about anything.
  76. Night Teeth
    Night Teeth isn’t quite as dreadful as its truly dreadful title but it’s just as forgettable.
  77. Best Sellers
    It is mainly a rather silly high-concept dramedy intercut with maudlin moments, and the sentimental keynote inevitably dominates by the end.
  78. Back to the Outback
    The aesthetic of the animation is, like the script, rather nondescript, with boilerplate-looking gloss and shine – like any number of less memorable DreamWorks or Pixar productions
  79. Single All the Way
    It’s pure mass market Christmas cookie cutter stuff that’s only made vaguely interesting in very short bursts because of its queerness.
  80. The Deer King
    Juggling palace politics, magical animals and medical ethics, The Deer King can’t get over major pacing problems: the emotional moments are not given enough time to land, as the plot rushes to its next world-building intrigue.
  81. Clean
    Apart from the occasional bit of voiceover from Clean, our hero barely says much at all, leaving it to Brody to do a lot of acting with those big sad eyes. It makes the film feel a bit like a silent movie but not one of the good ones.
  82. The Last Bus
    Try as I might, I couldn’t make friends with this weirdly unreal and sentimental Britmovie in the last-journey-with-someone’s-ashes genre. But it is certainly acted with commitment and integrity by Timothy Spall.
  83. Julia
    Without that initial fanbase buy-in, Julia feels like a redundant tribute, with something very indulgent about the “foodie” rhapsodising.
  84. Copilot
    Anne Zohra Berrached’s film is ambitious and interestingly intended, but naive and flawed, with a fundamental problem, which is right up there in the title.
  85. Encounter
    It all adds up to less than we hoped, though Pearce’s direction is never less than confident.
  86. The Desperate Hour
    Before things go south, there’s an effectively clammy escalation of panic as Watts leaps from call to call . . . But the script, from Chris Sparling . . . isn’t quite ingenious enough to find ways to involve her in the drama.
  87. Don't Worry Darling
    Directed by Olivia Wilde, it superciliously pinches ideas from other films without quite understanding how and why they worked in the first place. It spoils its own ending simply by unveiling it, and in so doing shows that serious script work needed to be done on filling in the plot-holes and problems in a fantastically silly twist-reveal.
  88. Dashcam
    Nasty, brutish and mercifully short, but occasionally mildly amusing, Dashcam represents another dollop of pandemic-themed shock schlock from writer-director Rob Savage, recently renowned for his lockdown-set horror pic Host.
  89. Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin
    Without the franchise pull behind it, Next of Kin is a rather anonymous horror of demonic possession, competently made and with decent acting but indistinguishable from the pack, where predictability wins over personality.
  90. Old Henry
    Old Henry is a determinedly low-aiming affair.
  91. True Things
    True Things is not a bad film, exactly. The actors play it like they mean it, while the drama itself carries a natural dry charge. But it’s unambitious, sometimes clunky and doesn’t wrong-foot us once.
  92. The Tender Bar
    George Clooney has long been a force for good in movies and public life – but what a bafflingly bland, indulgent, gritless oyster of a film he’s directed here.
  93. Being the Ricardos
    An oddity, in which all the characters seem to be avatars for the loquacious Sorkin himself.
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