The Guardian's Scores

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For 6,577 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 2.2 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: 2,494 out of 6577
  2. Mixed: 3,764 out of 6577
  3. Negative: 319 out of 6577
6577 movie reviews
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  1. Black Mail
    The lowish-budget production values, gestural performances and blunt moralism of the scriptwriting puts this very much in the heightened dramatic tradition of mainstream Nigerian cinema, but Emelonye has an accessible style and has picked the topical subject of cybercrime, an approach which might broaden the film’s appeal.
  2. It Snows in Benidorm
    Pushing its luck at two hours, this eventually collapses in a heap of its own symbolism, barely unpacking the missing-persons intrigue it started out with. Nice views en route, but it’s a tale scribbled in haste on the back of a postcard.
  3. The Whale
    Fraser does an honest job in the role of Charlie, and Hong Chau brings a welcome fierceness and sinew to the drama, but this sucrose film is very underpowered.
  4. The African Desperate
    Stingily is relaxed and amiable, but in acting terms there may be nothing else there and the film doesn’t develop in any interesting direction.
  5. Master Gardener
    Perhaps Schrader will indeed defiantly return to his accustomed theme for his next film – and this brilliant, restless director might well make it work. Sadly, this one doesn’t.
  6. Jeepers Creepers: Reborn
    Neither slicing under the genre’s surface, nor dicing the heritage well, this reboot is more an unseemly act of IP cannibalism.
  7. Bullet Proof
    In short, this is not very good but there are worse things you could be watching as you fall asleep on the sofa after a heavy night’s drinking, which is exactly what it feels like this was designed for.
  8. The Little Mermaid
    Bailey is the best thing about this film but, despite a team crammed with talent, this live action reworking can’t match the magic of the 1989 classic.
  9. The Retaliators
    Without revealing which one wins out, I can assure you that a huge amount of murderous mayhem is unleashed, including death by woodchipper.
  10. The Lost King
    It’s a fascinating story but the resulting film insists on a kooky relatability that isn’t really there. A misfire.
  11. Butcher's Crossing
    Grisly sights are paraded before the camera (including a castrated hunter and untold bison gore) but Polsky lacks the visual flair to make the shocks visceral or the suffering anything more than superficial.
  12. Dreamin' Wild
    However earnest and heartfelt, the film doesn’t tell us nearly enough, or really anything, about Joe.
  13. Kraven the Hunter
    Only the robust presence of Russell Crowe – and what might conceivably be a sly visual joke about exiled Russian plutocrat Mikhail Khodorkovsky – make this generic slice of superhero action worth watching.
  14. Magic Mike's Last Dance
    Channing Tatum’s hunky stripper enjoys some sizzling scenes with Salma Hayek but this eccentric threequel feels cobbled together.
  15. Please Baby Please
    The film feels over-determined and self-satisfied.
  16. Knock at the Cabin
    The Sixth Sense director’s apocalyptic mystery horror is short on both mystery and horror and the ambiguous finale is deeply ridiculous.
  17. Spirited
    The decision to make the film a musical is a genuine head-scratcher, one that’s never justified or even mildly explained given that the two leads are not natural singers and so throughout the lunges into song feel awkward at best.
  18. Your Place or Mine
    Even as glossy run-of-the-mill formula, it’s never even close to being as funny or romantic as it needs to be, devoid of fizzy one-liners and hampered by the pair struggling to muster up chemistry during phone conversations that never feel as lived-in as they would for friends with such extensive history.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. A Haunting in Venice
    No amount of spooky jump-scares can save Kenneth Branagh’s latest Christie adaptation, which wastes its atmospheric setting and stellar cast.
  22. Plan A
    The will-they-won’t-they succeed in carrying out the poisoning plot makes for pretty flat drama, and for a film about people who have suffered so much, this really fails to make us care about the characters.
  23. All Is Vanity
    Sadly, this fatally self-conscious and self-aware movie fizzles out– a process that seems to start with the opening credits.
  24. A Man Called Otto
    Hanks carries the film with his personality and his easy address to the camera, but this oddity of a film never quite comes to life.
  25. Bar Fight!
    Bar Fight! wants to be the best night out of your life, but – mistaking dodgy drunken acting for ambience – it feels pretty ersatz throughout, like one of those pseudo-Irish bars that has bought in all its decor.
  26. Hunted
    Hounded’s take is caricatural enough to neuter much sense of actual threat and stop it from being the Brit multicultural answer to Deliverance it sometimes feels like it’s stretching for.
  27. Renegades
    Unfortunately, the dialogue sounds as if it was written by one of those newfangled AI chatbots, or maybe an actual human being who aspires to write as well as an AI chatbot but is not there yet.
  28. Christmas Bloody Christmas
    So if current hit Violent Night sounds a little too classy and mainstream, then here is this shoddily made but tinsel-bright gift for you, the cinematic equivalent of a cheap soap and body lotion set bought at the last minute. It’s serviceable, but not a lot of thought went into it.
  29. You People
    Mercifully, Murphy adds a dose of sharpness to the project, wrapping his lines in a delivery so sleek and spirited you’d almost think they were funny. And as for the central couple? The one that just wants to get married, culture clash be damned? They’re nice. So nice. Too nice.
  30. Plane
    It’s just about diverting enough for the most part but there’s something a little off about its pacing, French director Jean-François Richet (who peaked a while back with his propulsive Mesrine movies) struggling to corral his moving parts, suspense never really arriving as it should.
  31. The Old Way
    A lot of True Grit-style grizzled-guy-smart-kid bonding that’s hackily written but reasonably watchable thanks to Cage and Armstrong’s screen chemistry.
  32. Boston Strangler
    A director like Jonathan Demme or David Fincher would have gone for the jugular on this kind of material, but writer-director Matt Ruskin seems a little squeamish and keeps everything on the right side of contemporary taste. The chill of fear is missing.
  33. Beau Is Afraid
    Joaquin Phoenix is on really uninteresting form, playing to his weaknesses as an actor as he gives a narcissistic performance of pain, sporting a permanently zonked expression of anxiety and torpid self-pity at the misery that surrounds him.
  34. Somebody I Used to Know
    This is an odd combination of broad semi-satirical humour and deeply serious hugging and learning.
  35. Luther: The Fallen Sun
    It’s all socked over with great and gruesome conviction, but there isn’t the same character-related interest as the TV series could generate.
  36. Ambush
    It’s both by the book and dispiritingly vague.
  37. Cat Person
    The chillingly unanswered questions of the story are all given the most obvious answers imaginable and relatability is carelessly tossed aside, along with logic and investment.
  38. The Wandering Earth II
    At nearly three hours long, The Wandering Earth II is packed with expository science talk, which gets more convoluted and tiring as the clock ticks on.
  39. Shadow Master
    Shadowy it is indeed, but mastery is more questionable.
  40. Sometimes I Think About Dying
    Ridley though is consistent and sort of revelatory, an actor who has struggled to find her footing post-franchise as is often the case, delivering a surprisingly nuanced and deeply felt performance.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Run Rabbit Run
    Snook, of course, is typically excellent, fresh from her turn as Succession’s petulant, scheming Shiv Roy in another spiky role here – but even her performance, as it heightens towards a crazed delirium, recalls Toni Collette’s in Hereditary.
  42. Eileen
    The performances from Hathaway and McKenzie are vehement and watchable, but the film itself is an unsatisfying and anticlimactic oddity.
  43. We Have a Ghost
    It’s not that its heart isn’t in the right place, it’s just that its heart has been transplanted from somewhere else.
  44. Theater Camp
    For all the grand gestures of musical theater, there’s an odd flatness to Theater Camp, a half-hearted and lackluster comedy from a group of Hollywood friends set at a summer performing arts community.
  45. Sword Art Online the Movie -Progressive- Scherzo of Deep Night
    Perhaps this works for gamers, or within the context of the larger Sword Art Online mythos, but it seems a painfully rote instalment – a bit like being stuck watching a particularly garrulous and boring YouTube gamer.
  46. Landscape with Invisible Hand
    A bafflingly botched misfire ... Quite what the film is and who it’s for remains a head-scratcher, a stilted jumble of somethings boiling down to nothing.
  47. White Men Can't Jump
    White Men Can’t Jump didn’t miss the first time, and it continues to resonate like a Shaquille O’Neal alley-oop. The reboot, a basic nostalgia play, shouldn’t scam anyone.
  48. Seriously Red
    This is a film that is trying very hard to be liked, while at the same time complacently assuming its likeability is beyond question.
  49. Inside Man
    In the end this feels a bit too much like a knockoff of a superior product, like something one of these guys would sell out of the boot of their car.
  50. Raging Grace
    It generally feels secondhand, though the final musical scene has an authenticity and heart that the rest lacks.
  51. Air
    This film winds up looking like the most expensive in-house corporate promo in history: shallow, parochial and obtuse. By the time the credits roll, we’re apparently supposed to be euphoric – not so much at individual sporting achievement, but at all the billions of dollars that Nike has been making.
  52. One True Loves
    There is little payoff, with Fickman running shy of the full-blooded commitment to make his film a proper weepie and instead constantly reverting to sassy, annoyingly self-aware comedy that makes light of everything.
  53. Epic Tails
    Nearly everything about Epic Tails feels a bit underwhelming, and limited imagination-wise.
  54. Love Again
    Love Again, by ceding some space to the Queen of Feelings, has moments that play. I can’t say it was good, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it.
  55. The Magician's Elephant
    It’s heartfelt and sweetly earnest, but humdrum and disappointingly unmagical. The animation doesn’t help: characters speak with blank paralysed faces as if they’ve had botched Botox.
  56. She Is Love
    A waste of great talent, sadly.
  57. Three Day Millionaire
    What’s missing is a sense of what’s at stake – we never quite get a feeling for how desperate these men are, and for the most part they feel a bit too familiar from the Britcom playbook. That said, Burrows brings cheeky-chappie warmth to the character of Curly.
  58. Ocean Boy
    Atkins uses these settings as pretty scaffolding for otherwise ordinary scenes.
  59. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3
    Its brief, brushed-off moments of anti-levity stand out, maybe because as a director, Vardalos does not have the comic touch required to provide the escapist distraction the movie is going for.
  60. The Strays
    British actor/writer Nathaniel Martello-White’s directorial debut nudges at some uncomfortable fault lines of race and class, but tends to over-index unearned suspense for character development or insight.
  61. A Family Affair
    The initial setup is great, the Ephronesque excitable phone conversation montage is tolerable, but the cliched breakup and makeup plot transition clanks.
  62. Pain Hustlers
    Blunt remains committed to the end but even she can’t add a shine to the drab last act, the pleasure of seeing her on screen replaced with the pain of another undeserving project.
  63. Golda
    As a war movie, it’s bafflingly dull; as a political-intrigue drama, it’s lifeless; as a personal portrait of Meir, it’s inert and superficial.
  64. The Machine
    The Machine is as surprisingly stylish as it is surprisingly unfunny.
  65. Superpower
    Penn’s aim might be true, but his appetite for adrenaline appears to trump his ability to justify why he occupies a position in the red-hot center of a global crisis.
  66. Afire
    In the end I felt that the film fully achieves neither the ostensible comedy of the opening, nor the supposed sadness of its denouement.
  67. Mafia Mamma
    Not even the fierce wattage of Toni Collette’s talent can light up this hokey crime comedy.
  68. Jackpot!
    Despite the action-comedy bona fides of director Paul Feig, helmer of the far more entertaining Bridesmaids and Spy, and the comedic chops of Awkwafina and John Cena, Jackpot! is an unsteady balance of dark and light, a tinny and discordant mishmash of stunts, ridiculous characters, ludicrous stakes and attempts at zeitgeist.
  69. Haunted Mansion
    Lakeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Owen Wilson and Jamie Lee Curtis cannot save this laborious story of a creepy old dwelling and the awful Hatbox Ghost.
  70. The Resurrection of Charles Manson
    A few more passes through the editing suite have improved things, but the film is still a raggedy-assed mess, with apparently significant characters’ stories pruned back to stubs and loose endings like blasted shards.
  71. To Catch a Killer
    The plot proceeds like a mid-season episode of CSI: Anywhere, just with better cinematography and a mournful cello score.
  72. Flamin' Hot
    It’s cheerily done and competently made but broadly sentimental to a fault, the strings being pulled too visible for the film’s many coerced moments of emotion to really work. For a film all about the importance of heat, it’s frankly lukewarm.
  73. Problemista
    An explosion of pass-agg hipster quirkiness is what’s offered here, an everything-everywhere-all-at-onceuniverse of cutesy vulnerability and pseudo-childlike ersatz charm.
  74. Stalker
    That sweaty, close-to-a-nervous breakdown tense feeling of being trapped is nowhere in the film. And where the script goes in its pulpy nasty final twist felt to me like a disturbingly misogynist move.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Cassandra Crossing
    Script and acting are equally shaky. [27 Sep 2008, p.55]
    • The Guardian
  76. Money Shot: The Pornhub Story
    For me it never gets to grips with the real issue for Pornhub, OnlyFans or indeed Facebook: are these sites publishers or platforms? If they derive profit from the content they host, then should they be responsible for it, or not?
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Land of the Pharaohs
    Joan Collins is the only person in this film who seems to be enjoying the fact it's a big camp mess.
  78. Ip Man: The Awakening
    This is lightweight, forgettable stuff.
  79. Living with Chucky
    The close-knit ethos might well explain the franchise’s gleefully perverse sense of fun, but the truth is this love-in features too much filler.
  80. Five Nights at Freddy's
    A competently made yet maddeningly dull attempt to bring the hit video game to the big screen makes for an instantly forgettable night at the movies.
  81. The Pope's Exorcist
    Racing towards its splattery finale, it just about qualifies as lively schlock, and is likely your one chance to see Crowe in flowing robes piloting a Vespa to the strains of Faith No More.
  82. Hilma
    What a shortchanging of Af Klint’s extraordinary life and work this is.
  83. Assassin Club
    Appreciation for the artistry of the John Wick series redoubles frame by crummy frame.
  84. Red White & Royal Blue
    Red, White and Royal Blue just isn’t the fun, brain-disengaged romp it could have been, any praise going toward intention rather then execution.
  85. The End of Sex
    A smarter, sharper film might have explored what happens next in an otherwise happy marriage when the spark goes out. Instead, the comedy here is as broad as it gets, with some wildly unconvincing and unhilarious set-pieces.
  86. Rally Road Racers
    This is very bizarre stuff, even within the traditionally weird parameters of cultural representation in cartoons, but kids won’t mind as it’s one non-stop riot of colour and vroom-vroom movement.
  87. Born to Fly
    Liu almost manages to throttle up how Lei and the instructors push themselves and their planes into something dramatically interesting, but it never ignites. In the meantime, this is less a movie, more a flying foreign policy document.
  88. Happiness for Beginners
    Throughout it all, Kemper visibly strains to temper her comedic impulses. Sometimes she delivers her lines with a quickness that feels refreshingly out of place, but it’s mostly call-and-response songs along the trails and heart to hearts under the stars.
  89. The Beanie Bubble
    Some deeply muddled non-storytelling and tonal blandness pretty much sink this movie from the outset, despite its decent cast and origins in a potentially fascinating true story.
  90. Asphalt City
    There are some strident cliches alongside redundant self-harming machismo in this sub-Schraderesque movie about New York paramedics.
  91. Homecoming
    The performances are very strong, and there’s a great sisterly relationship between Bemba and Gohourou; they deserved a more substantial story.
  92. Club Zero
    Club Zero is a strenuous, pointless non-satire which fails to say anything of value about its ostensible subjects: body image, eating disorders and western overconsumption.
  93. Last Summer
    Breillat’s movie rolls along capably enough while the affair is in progress, but it’s tested to destruction when things go wrong. She is not good at delivering the iciness crucial to the story’s third act, happier as she is with the sunny, languorous sexiness of the amour fou.
  94. Bobcat Moretti
    It’s as if the film doesn’t quite trust its original moments to stand alone, and instead feels the need to signpost everything.
  95. The Amateur
    As for Malek’s performance, his line readings and screen presence are very distinctive, but I have to say the moments when he has to present anguished emotion to the camera do not quite work, and feel eccentric.
  96. Cobweb
    Cobwebbed would be more accurate, perhaps: every detail is secondhand, if not downright hoary.
  97. Retribution
    Some guilty pleasure thrills are what’s on offer but they are frankly annulled by Liam Neeson’s autopilot dullness, a driverless car of a performance from an actor we know to be capable of much more.
  98. Quicksand
    It doesn’t help that the film takes itself with Deliverance-like seriousness, and fails to really acknowledge its absurdity.
  99. Quiz Lady
    The 99-minute film is long on yelling and guffaws, short on punchlines.
  100. Pet Sematary: Bloodlines
    It’s competently acted and made – her direction easily trumps her writing – and while there’s nothing close to suspense, there are some effectively visceral moments of gore.
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