The Guardian's Scores

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For 6,585 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: 2,496 out of 6585
  2. Mixed: 3,770 out of 6585
  3. Negative: 319 out of 6585
6585 movie reviews
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  1. Songwriter
    There is no romantic tragedy, nor even a visible grit in the oyster: just a dogged, talented, unassuming professional showing us that it’s about the perspiration, not just the inspiration.
  2. Superintelligence
    It speaks to the extremely low bar set by Falcone and McCarthy’s previous films together that something as forgettable and unfunny as Superintelligence won’t be filed as a total disaster. Instead, it’s just another regrettable waste of her talent and another reminder that the best marriages can lead to the worst movies.
  3. Cinderella
    Writer-director Kay Cannon’s new Cinderella isn’t bad, and Camila Cabello makes a rather personable lead, carrying off some of the movie’s generous helping of funny lines.
  4. The Other Side of the Door
    There are no prizes for guessing what happens, but it’s a smart scary movie that relies on atmosphere and characterisation – not just jump-scares – for its effect.
  5. Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan: Ghost War
    The movie does set up potential for a continuing movie franchise. Mostly, though, Jack Ryan: Ghost War feels like a sad state of affairs for the world’s dads (and dads at heart), who deserve to see airport-novel espionage brought to less chintzy life.
  6. Fountain of Youth
    Amid interminable chases and fisticuffs, and tourist-board jaunts to Bangkok, Vienna and Cairo, there is the odd bright spot.
  7. 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.
  8. Consecration
    The world of the film feels real, a splendid argument for less green screen, more green fields – kudos to veteran British horror helmer Christopher Smith (Severance).
  9. A Castle in Italy
    A strained jeu d'ésprit which is smug, precious, carelessly constructed, emotionally negligible, and above all fantastically annoying. It's a terrible waste of real acting talent.
  10. Venom: The Last Dance
    It’s quick and brash and seemingly aware of how goofy so much of it is but it’s also awkwardly overstuffed.
  11. Marlowe
    There’s a little bit of fun and interest along the way and Lange has some fun with her eccentric persona, but this feels under-energised.
  12. In the Lost Lands
    German screenwriter Constantine Werner has adapted a story from fantasy author George RR Martin and the resulting dialogue lands like a series of sandbags on a concrete floor; director Paul WS Anderson handles the material with stolid determination.
  13. The Purge
    The film doesn't develop its one good idea so much as stumble around in the dark with it for 85 minutes, crashing noisily into the furniture.
  14. Stand Up Guys
    Some nice touches, though it needs to be indulged.
  15. Tonight You're Mine
    A jaw-droppingly self-indulgent, shallow, smug if mercifully brief feature with a plot that looks like the outline for a pop video.
  16. That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime the Movie: Scarlet Bond
    Compensating for there being nothing in the way of any Narnia or Harry Potter-style flitting between realities, this film has crunchily animated brawls every five minutes and a playful embrace of sword’n’sorcery hokum that gives it a little lift.
  17. Love Wedding Repeat
    The film’s drunken lurch into earnest romance near the end, after leaning on bawdy humour for the most part, requires us to see these characters as something other than farcical chess pieces, an uphill battle for all involved.
  18. Jumanji
    As for Williams himself, his wild-man routine is only in evidence in his opening scenes; otherwise he dials it down, perhaps sensing that the way to upstage the loony creatures is to be relatively rational. There is something touchingly innocent in his performance.
  19. The Exorcism of God
    Right down to its blaspheming finale, The Exorcism of God burns with a subversive desire to rip back the veil on the church’s earthly corruption – but the iconoclasm is somewhat undermined by the daft horror mechanics Venezuelan director Alejandro Hildalgo props it up with.
  20. Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse
    There’s not much real spark to it.
  21. Moonfall
    Here the formulaic silliness, sometimes part of the enjoyment, is just tiring.
  22. Red Sonja
    The action sequences, which are what made the original Sonja so indelible (especially since Nielsen had Arnold Schwarzenegger as a co-star), are a bit more rote. But someone somewhere must have done a punch-up on the script, because every now and then a reasonably witty quip arrives out of nowhere before the dialogue reverts to faux medieval speak.
  23. The 9th Life of Louis Drax
    The result is a supernatural mystery thriller, slightly overcooked and tonally odd – and uncertain if its juvenile lead is supposed to be cute or sinister. But it is watchable and even intriguing in its weird way.
  24. Olympus Has Fallen
    Part of the weirdness of this film lies in the fact that the tense North Korean situation in the real world gives it no realism or satirical edge, or prophetic authority of any kind.
  25. Edie
    We get some lovely photography of the Highlands and the breathtaking landscapes all around Inverness, and Hancock is always a potent presence. But she could have done more, conveyed more, with a story that wasn’t so basically simplistic and familiar.
  26. The Lady of Heaven
    For a film that aims to promote religious diversity and freedom of thought, its metronomic alternation between time frames, narrative slavishness and laughable coda have a suffocating sense of orthodoxy.
  27. Stage Mother
    Nothing really comes to life and the dialogue is plodding and laborious.
  28. Finding You
    Although the main characters in this romantic tale are meant to be just over 18, this Sky Movies release is manifestly aimed at a much younger market with its sex-free storyline and nice-girls-finish-first morality.
  29. The Curse of La Llorona
    While it’s nice to see Cardellini nab a rare lead (in the middle of an unusually fruitful time with turns in Green Book, Avengers: Endgame and Netflix comedy Dead to Me), the script fails to provide her with enough meat, despite her predicament, ultimately stranding her with a rather standard shrieking mother role.
  30. Desperados
    It’s imperfect, sometimes frustratingly so, but also just about fun enough for yet another tipsy Friday night locked down indoors, its sun-drenched setting proving alluring and yet cruelly out of reach.
  31. The Woman in the Window
    Curiosity might bring you here but boredom will drive you away.
  32. Silk Road
    An unthrilling, bland drama.
  33. Dune
    This is a film that doesn’t dramatically harness the vast forces it’s gesturing at, but trundles determinedly along with very little variation of tone or pace.
  34. Passengers
    Stalking tactics bolstering romantic comedies are by no means new, and over the decades, film-makers have proved adept at somehow planing down real-world nastiness, but here it’s gruesomely inescapable.
  35. The Woman in Cabin 10
    It sounds fun on the face of it, and the sheer silliness of the situation almost keeps it afloat, but the cardboard quality of the drama gets soggy.
  36. Monster Trucks
    It has tentacles and hot wheels, yes, but not the legs or bright ideas to sustain itself.
  37. House Party
    It’s Kid Cudi who salvages the picture playing an even more deadpan version of himself. And he carries the second half of the story through a macabre twist that at least makes the 100-minute feature worth finishing.
  38. Leave One Day
    It is burdened by a trite and naive sentimentality that it doesn’t know how to make realistically plausible or transform into romanticism or idealism.
  39. Before I Go to Sleep
    It aims for sexy and/or dangerous, but the tone is dry and the pace lags.
  40. The Reef: Stalked
    Traucki manipulates the suspense competently enough, but this film mostly depends on tedious jump-scares for its effect, and has a few too many scenes where someone looks around in terror at the water with a worried expression.
  41. Summer Camp
    It all amounts to a passable second activity watch at best.
  42. The Grudge
    Forget about chilling to the bone, The Grudge barely drops below room temperature.
  43. Shelby Oaks
    Even in an oversaturated genre of increasingly diminished returns, Shelby Oaks is about as dispensable as it gets.
  44. O'Dessa
    Everyone’s stumbling along in a vaguely defined universe, which really only serves as a backdrop to catchy musical numbers that evolve from folk to pop rock.
  45. Easter Sunday
    The saving grace here should be the win for the Filipino community, commanding a big-screen moment with a cast of undervalued Asian stars. But they’re all short-changed by a hypocritical sense of heritage and pride.
  46. Chappie
    Chappie is a broad, brash picture, which does not allow itself to get bogged down in arguing about whether or not “artificial intelligence” is possible. It has subversive energy and fun.
  47. 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.
  48. 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.
  49. Britney Vs. Spears
    There’s a definite sense that the makers couldn’t keep up with an ever-shifting case but wanted to meet a deadline nonetheless.
  50. The Quiet Ones
    The arrestingly fierce Cooke, in particular, is surely a star in the making.
  51. The Week Of
    There are laughs, but they’re meek.
  52. Our Day Will Come
    It's a road movie that runs out of road – and out of ideas.
  53. 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.
  54. Bleeding Love
    This unbearably cute joint selfie of a movie is gruesomely indulgent and entitled from the first; it allows Ewan McGregor little or no opportunity to show his natural wit and flair and there is oddly no real chemistry between him and his co-star.
  55. Falling for Christmas
    A film like Falling for Christmas doesn’t try or need to break the mold, it doesn’t even need to be that good, it just needs to be low-level competent and as these films go, it’s just about passable enough for those who tend to start getting excited about the festive period at least two months early.
  56. Come Away
    This is a muddled, leaden fantasy adventure for Christmas which feels as if someone put all the Quality Streets in a saucepan and melted them together, with the wrappers still on.
  57. Gangster Squad
    For all the guns and gore, it's as breezy and uncritical as a tale from the True Detective magazine that the cops can't help reading.
  58. Anna
    Anna is not quite pedestrian but it never really feels like the work of someone with anything to say or prove. It’s competent and even complacent at times, a million miles from what one would expect from the director of The Fifth Element.
  59. 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."
  60. Table 19
    After the unnatural way it plops this gruesome group in their social Siberia, it goes from (alleged) comedy to serious drama with all the subtlety of a 10-year-old playing Mario Kart.
  61. Act of Valor
    The gimmick behind this excruciating propagandist movie about the US special forces' war on terror is that it features not actors but actual Navy Seals.
  62. The Boss
    Many of The Boss’s troubles stem from its constant, unpredictable shifts in tone.
  63. The Carpenter's Son
    It’s all so hard to define not because it’s too brave and original to fit into the system, but because it’s never all that clear that anyone involved knows what the hell they’re making. Whatever their answers might be, I’m positive that Nathan and Cage didn’t aim to deliver something quite so dull.
  64. Merv
    As it is, Merv is slight and sweet and entirely to expectations. Making a movie about co-parenting a dog is not a bad idea – though I wouldn’t say it’s a great one, either.
  65. Shaft
    Even outside of the script’s aggressively repetitive bigotry, the shambolic Scooby Doo plot struggles to grab even the slightest amount of attention.
  66. Suicide Squad
    It’s a clotted and delirious film, with flashes of preposterous, operatic silliness. But it doesn’t have much room to breathe; there are some dull bits, and Leto’s Joker suffers in comparison with the late Heath Ledger.
  67. 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.
  68. Rising High
    The film’s plausibility-level isn’t perhaps as high as all that (it really works best as a period piece from the pre-2008 crash) but Kross brings to it a jaded, corrupted glamour.
  69. Fireworks
    It’s confusing and disorientating but brings back dreamy teen angst like the strongest of madeleines.
  70. The Bromley Boys
    Weirdly for a film supposedly based on actual events – adapted from Dave Roberts’s football memoir about life as a fan of beleaguered Bromley FC during the 1969-70 season – a persistent whiff of fakeness hangs over it.
  71. 13 Minutes
    The production values are a bit too pedestrian to elevate this much above the ordinary.
  72. The Goldfinch
    The film always looks good under the eye of cinematographer Roger Deakins, and screenwriter Peter Straughan renders some elegant and amusing dialogue, but this Goldfinch stays earthbound.
  73. Twixt
    It's a film which fatally fails to hold your focus: events seem both predictable and mumbled; the monochrome looks grubby, the splashes of colour and blood joke shop cheap.
  74. Meg 2: The Trench
    The sequel alternately treads water and splashes around frantically in search of an identity. Never settling on whether he wants his film to be Alien, Jaws, Jurassic Park or Sharknado, Wheatley serves up a bouillabaisse of all four.
  75. Bliss
    Every syllable of action, as we grind towards the broadly guessable finish, is jeopardy-free and interest-free. Wilson looks as if he is thinking about something else: the halting sing-song rhythms of his voice sound vapid, and Hayek is trilling, whooping and smirking away in a world of her own.
  76. Father Stu
    There are also good bits in this based-on-a-true-story drama, including the aforementioned performances and a commitment to theology so sincere it’s not afraid to bore an audience with lots of pin-head-fine debates about Godhood. If Gibson weren’t part of the package it might be possible to like it more.
  77. Honeydew
    With a running time of 107 minutes, the film goes on just a little longer than it really needs to before it gets predictably violent, grotesque and reasonably scary at last. But Milburn and Kennedy certainly know how to build a unique atmosphere.
  78. IO
    Too measured and sedate for a post-apocalyptic thriller, yet too barren for a Christopher Nolan-style space and time travel epic, IO appears most akin to The Martian in that it focuses primarily on one person’s grit and resourcefulness to endure and grow plants in an unforgiving place.
  79. The Astronaut
    The Astronaut has a lot going for it, but, like the lead character in the opening scenes, it doesn’t quite stick the landing.
  80. Welcome To Marwen
    The remarkable career of artist and photographer Mark Hogancamp has been turned into an elaborate and misjudged movie of baffling pass-agg ickiness and pointlessness.
  81. Without Blood
    Jolie also lays it on thick stylistically, as if compensating for a hollowness at her lavish, sepia-toned film’s core.
  82. 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.
  83. The Comedian
    The storyline does get frayed towards the end...but that’s not really the point; as long as you’re here for the dick jokes.
  84. Lift
    There’s plenty to keep many viewers watching for its 1 hour, 44-minute runtime. But given the bare characterization for everyone and the total lack of chemistry between Hart and Mbatha-Raw (despite her best efforts), not enough to elevate Lift above its many forgotten peers.
  85. Blood and Money
    Cinematographer turned director John Barr serves up a generic thriller: the title lets you know that what you’ve got on the label is what you’ve got in the can.
  86. Extinction
    Extinction is a competent, if formulaic film. Its dilemma, like many of the films in Netflix’s growing sci-fi catalogue, is the way its best parts are subdued on the small screen while its worst (dialogue and clunky storytelling) are enhanced.
  87. Smurfs: The Lost Village
    Fans of smurfiness may well like it, and Gargamel gets some nice lines, but I have to say that both script and animation are entirely predictable, as if generated by some computer software.
  88. Domino
    Even die-hard De Palma completists would be better served by forgetting this one exists – a tedious, ugly thriller devoid of anything to say that will serve as a regrettable footnote for a distinguished film-maker who is capable of so much more.
  89. 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.
  90. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows
    It’s soon clear that OOTS follows the model of Bay’s Transformers sequels. Longer, louder and boasting even more hardware, it does everything to generate the illusion of bleeding-edge bang-per-buck, while cribbing shamelessly from 1991’s Secret of the Ooze.
  91. Pitch Perfect 3
    So many movies end with trite sentiments about “family” and “sisterhood” but it doesn’t feel forced here. It looks like these performers are genuinely enjoying themselves, and it’s infectious.
  92. From the Land of the Moon
    The film takes on Gabrielle’s listlessness, slumps into an opiated fug. The malady is mysterious and not easily treatable. It just exhausts you. It transforms from a story about release to just another jail. At times it felt like there was no escape.
  93. Ae Dil Hai Mushkil
    What’s odd is that the movie itself turns out not to be some incendiary provocation, but squarely Bollywood trad, a globetrotting weepie unlikely to offend anyone but the most entrenched.
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