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. La Piscine
    Erotic languour turns gradually into fear and then horror in this gripping and superbly controlled psychological thriller from 1969.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Landlord
    A still wonderfully penetrating, wise and exact meditation on race relations at the end of the 1960s.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Let It Be
    Neither an overlooked masterpiece nor the disaster the Beatles and the critics thought, it’s finally getting a fair shake. [2024 Restored Version]
  4. Mandabi
    Mandabi features an excellent performance from Guèye, who is innocent and culpable all at once. This is gentle, walking-pace cinema that leads us by the hand from vignette to vignette, from scene to scene, presented to us with ingenuous simplicity and calm.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Patton
    It bends a few facts, and occasionally slips towards satire. But, for the most part, this is a remarkably enjoyable - and commendably fair - biopic of an unforgettable character. They don't make many films, or indeed generals, like this any more.
  6. The Sterile Cuckoo
    An interesting feature, almost a B-side to The Graduate in its way, without the predatory older characters.
  7. The Italian Job
    The brio and ambition of The Italian Job can’t be doubted and Caine has enormous charisma.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Medium Cool
    Medium Cool encapsulates the divisive issues of race and poverty that remain as urgent today as they did in 1968. It also makes us think about the way the media shape our lives and are used to deflect public attention from sustained political action.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    True Grit
    Hathaway moseys rather than gallops along with a charming blend of comedy, action and sentiment; and in Robert Duvall there is a bad guy eminently worth shooting. [24 Dec 2005, p.48]
    • The Guardian
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Midnight Cowboy
    This is really Schlesinger's achievement. He has caught on film a slice of America as well, if not better, than one had any right to expect.
  11. Salesman
    If you want a genuinely Millerian cinematic experience, the best way to go is to get hold of Salesman, a 1968 documentary made by Albert and David Maysles, along with Charlotte Zwerin. 
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Support Your Local Sheriff!
    Lawman James Garner with only drunken Jack Elam by his side takes on town heavies Walter Brennan, Bruce Dern and their gunmen: it has a Hawksian, sub-Rio Bravo ring, but this is an affectionate and funny parody of such westerns. [25 Mar 2006, p.53]
    • The Guardian
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Assassination Bureau
    Done in a hip, glossy, none-too-witty style, though the support acts - Curt Jurgens, Philippe Noiret, Warren Mitchell, Telly Savalas - help it along.
  14. Where Eagles Dare
    The development of Bond films in the early 1960s brought a new dimension to espionage-oriented cinema. Where Eagles Dare brings these strands together - fusing the spy story with war action - and helped create a wave of patriotic cold war thrillers that arguably climaxed with The Spy Who Loved Me.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Oliver!
    Some of the set pieces are overdone but the final scenes take on an almost operatic quality.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Bullitt
    Blessed with the fresh eyes of newly landed Englishman Yates (and genius cameraman William Fraker), the movie makes San Francisco fresh and alive, but also completely remakes and modernises the bleak, sleazy gangster demimonde in which Bullitt does his hunting.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Boston Strangler
    Harrowing, low-key dramatisation of the serial killer's reign of terror in Boston in the early 1960s. [07 Aug 2004, p.53]
    • The Guardian
  18. Romeo and Juliet
    This has elegance, vigour and charm.
  19. Night of the Living Dead
    It remains a nightmare experience that’s not easily brushed off. And despite its ramshackle scrappiness in production terms, and some dated gender politics, the storytelling is first class, pitching us straight into the action, but only revealing its full hand gradually.
  20. Funny Girl
    While the 1960s swung, this spirited, good-natured but creakily old-fashioned picture lived in a different zeitgeist.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Rosemary's Baby
    This is horror rooted not in misty Carpathian castles, but in recognisable modern life, with the satanists depicted not as outlandish fiends but the sort of everyday folk you might encounter on any urban street.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Planet of the Apes
    A promising idea, and yet ultimately too cute: it is a one-to-one allegory, and this much of the film is spent exploring this not very rewarding vein.
  23. 2001: A Space Odyssey
    Something in its mandarin blankness and balletic vastness, and refusal to trade in the emollient dramatic forms of human interest and human sympathy. Kubrick leaves usual considerations behind with his readiness to imagine a post-human future.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told
    Director Jack Hill went on to make plenty of classic exploitation movies, such as the more marketable Foxy Brown and Switchblade Sisters, but Spider Baby is him at his trashy, most eccentric best. [15 Jun 2013, p.23]
    • The Guardian
  25. The Graduate
    The excellence of Katherine Ross as Mrs Robinson’s daughter, Elaine, is often overlooked. A hugely pleasurable film.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cool Hand Luke
    Paul Newman is at his charismatic best as convict Luke Jackson, fighting to maintain inner freedom despite the brutalities of a deep south chain gang. Much in the style of the old Warner Bros melodramas, the hardnut action here is lightened by a funny streak, as in the celebrated hard-boiled egg-eating contest. [31 Aug 2013, p.46]
    • The Guardian
  27. Point Blank
    An intriguing, disorientating 60s artefact.
  28. In the Heat of the Night
    The sheer tactlessness of its racial confrontation has a forthright quality and a not entirely intentional documentary realism, especially in the scenes shot on location in Sparta, Illinois (standing in for a fictional Mississippi town).
    • 61 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    You Only Live Twice
    What I can say for sure is You Only Live Twice is the Bond film I have seen most often and I have enjoyed the hell out it every single time.
  30. Chimes at Midnight
    Playing Falstaff might have been Welles’s creative and physical destiny: in the character he found a dignity and sensuality in his, by then, overweight form. The confidence and panache of his staging is a treat.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Frankenstein Created Woman
    Terence Fisher conjures up his customary dark fairytale atmosphere in one of Hammer’s best Frankenstein sequels. 
  32. Persona
    Persona is a film to make you shiver with fascination, or incomprehension, or desire.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    One Million Years B.C.
    Harryhausen's dinosaurs are well worth a look, but the rest of One Million Years BC will bore the furry pants off anyone more advanced than a Neanderthal.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Blow-Up
    Blow-up is still an absolute must, such is the degree of visual and intellectual excitement of the film.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Man for All Seasons
    This 1966 drama ticks most of the right boxes when it comes to entertaining as well as educating.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    What's Up, Tiger Lily?
    Woody Allen acquired the rights to a terrible Japanese Bond-style extravaganza, re-edited it and provided an incongruous soundtrack full of New York Jewish gags. The joke wears thin, but there are good laughs along the way. Allen's then-wife Louise Lasser and friend Mickey Knox help out.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Band of Outsiders
    No matter how ironic and artificial the script, there's a lovely sadness in the corners of Karina's eyes, which makes many of the films they did together more hers than his.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Doctor Zhivago
    Even granting the enormous difficulty of adapting such a long and complex book, I do not see how a worse job could have been done. Jack–rabbiting along in fits and starts, it gives one the feeling that the book has been arbitrarily chopped up into an irrelevant series of scenes, attempting an unsuccessful compromise between intimacy and the epic.
  39. King & Country
    This film is a gruelling experience and Dirk Bogarde’s coup de grâce is the most horrible effect of all.
  40. Darling
    John Schlesinger’s winsome adventure from 1965 still has verve and ambition, a romantic satire of swinging London.
  41. The Ipcress File
    Caine's star-quality and absolute ease in front of the camera are fully formed.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Train
    This long, exciting second world war thriller (based on a true-life incident involving art conservationist Rose Valland, who appears briefly in its opening sequence) has particular present-day relevance in view of the mindless destruction of art works and ancient ruins by Islamic State and our responses to these iconoclastic barbarities.
  43. The Sound of Music
    Robert Wise's adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical still has a little soul in its bones, with its reactionary nature tempered by Ernest Lehman's supple screenplay, and its elephantine running-time eased by a set of songs that lodge in your system like hookworms.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    None But the Brave
    The anti-war sentiment is overplayed, but it's a good gritty war drama for all that. [08 Oct 2005, p.53]
    • The Guardian
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    36 Hours
    George Seaton's 1964 36 Hours is complete tosh but clever and zestful tosh, and there's not a lot of that about. [13 Apr 1999, p.20]
    • The Guardian
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Goldfinger
    Not just my favourite Bond movie, but the standard by which all other Bond movies must be judged. It has Sean Connery, of course, and the best theme song, incorporating Shirley Bassey and lashings of John Barry brass...And it has the best villain.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Mary Poppins
    Tomlinson is the great heart of the movie, the warmth to Andrews’ splinter of ice, who, while sustaining the film’s line in jokey verbosity, still manages to be moving.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Zulu
    Zulu is a brilliantly made dramatisation of Rorke's Drift, and it does a fine job of capturing the spirit for which the battle is remembered.
  49. From Russia with Love
    It may seem grainy and fusty compared to the all-action tongue-in-cheek spectaculars that came later, but it's the Bond closest to my heart.
  50. An Autumn Afternoon
    Ozu shows how fragile and yet burdensome the institution of the family is.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Evil of Frankenstein
    The Evil Of Frankenstein, directed by camera ace Freddie Francis, looks stunning, although much of its budget was clearly spent on the cracking laboratory set. [20 Oct 2007, p.23]
    • The Guardian
  52. The Servant
    It is a brilliant, subversive account of class relations and the changing times.
  53. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
    I can never watch it without a bowel-liquefaction of fear.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Charade
    For all of its 113 minutes, Charade presents us with a temporary entry into that brighter place, into the possibility of adventure, the vicarious possession of beauty. Acted by two Europeans in a mythic, dangerous, beguiling Paris, it remains a quintessential Hollywood film.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    McLintock!
    One of John Wayne's jobbing westerns, a would-be comic transplanting of The Taming Of The Shrew. [08 Aug 2009, p.53]
    • The Guardian
  56. Knife in the Water
    Roman Polanski's sensational 1962 debut...is an example of how a superlative director makes a film from the simplest materials.
  57. The Haunting
    From a potentially creaky, cliche-filled premise (a gaggle of stereotypes are invited to a spooky old house where all is not as it seems), director Robert Wise leads us on a brilliantly unsettling journey.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    8½
    8 1/2 is probably the most potent movie about film-making, within which fantasy and reality are mixed without obfuscation, and there's a tough argument that belies Fellini's usual felicitous flaccidity.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Mouse on the Moon
    Jolly sequel to the superior The Mouse That Roared, which flaunted a Peter Sellers tour de force. This returns to the little Duchy of Fenwick, where the inhabitants - by virtue of their wine, which makes rocket fuel of a rare vintage - beat the superpowers to the moon. [04 Mar 2006, p.53]
    • The Guardian
  60. Cleopatra
    Joseph L Mankiewicz's four-hour Cleopatra is a stately but sometimes mindboggling spectacle. The central moment is the queen's jawdropping entry into Rome, for which Mankiewicz creates a sensational Busby Berkeley fantasy, like the world's biggest Olympic opening ceremony.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Dr. No
    The other is a scene, improvised on the set, when Bond does a double take on seeing Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington (recently stolen from London's National Gallery) in Dr No's palatial living room. It's the funniest moment in any Bond picture and one of cinema's great art jokes.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sanjuro
    Mifune's slob is deceptive, and the film builds slowly to a shattering ending.
  63. The Birds
    The essential Hitchcock movie, the purest and most confident, a brilliant distillation of the themes that had fueled him ever since he sent the lodger creeping to his upstairs room.
  64. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
    I can't help thinking that the most interesting things happen in the precredit sequence - the fraught childhood, Blanche's sinister "accident" - but it's still vivid, barnstorming stuff.
  65. Cléo from 5 to 7
    A pioneering glory of the new wave.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Music Man
    DaCosta's musical is one of the most exuberant and purely enjoyable of the lot. Much of this is down to the infectious energy of Robert Preston, reprising his stage role as smooth-talking conman. [12 Nov 2005, p.53]
    • The Guardian
  67. Lolita
    Although it is often seen as a precursor to the multiple parts played in Dr Strangelove, Sellers' turn here is a reminder of his true potential, soon to be swallowed up by a stream of ever more awful Pink Panther films.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ride the High Country
    Peckinpah's marvellous elegiac western incorporates the themes of The Wild Bunch - the end of the old west, friendship and betrayal - but is more moving than his blood-soaked epic. That's mainly down to the two stars, leathery veterans Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott. [12 Aug 2006, p.53]
    • The Guardian
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Through a Glass Darkly
    This is a noble attempt to shed light on a woman's inner struggle for existence. [02 Jul 2011, p.43]
    • The Guardian
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Lover Come Back
    Another glossy, witty battle-of-the-sexes comedy featuring the squeaky-clean Pillow Talk pairing of Rock Hudson and Doris Day. [28 Jan 2006, p.53]
    • The Guardian
  71. Victim
    This gripping thriller, part of the BFI's Bogarde retrospective, daringly smashed through 1961's homosexual taboos, but has weathered best as a study of blackmail and paranoia.
  72. The Innocents
    Filmed with a luminous brilliance by cinematographer Freddie Francis, The Innocents is the apotheosis of old-school Brit spookiness.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    El Cid
    It leaves the facts wounded and strewn haphazardly across the battlefield, but El Cid remains a flat-out terrific movie.
  74. West Side Story
    There is one especially lovely moment. At their first meeting, lovestruck Tony asks Maria if her kindness to him is just a joke. She replies: "I have not yet learned to joke that way. Now I never will." This is a real big-screen event.
  75. Breakfast at Tiffany's
    The movie still looks very good, and you'd need a heart of stone not to love the cat. [Review of re-release]
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Hustler
    The film is marred slightly by an over-abrupt ending and the irritating device of speeded-up clocks, but these are minor flaws in a film that has grown in stature over the years.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pit and the Pendulum
    Corman enhances the narrative with assorted shocks and tinted flashbacks reminiscent of the silent cinema.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Scream of Fear
    The plot is nicked from Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diaboliques, full of guttering candles, bumps in the night, and the kind of little shocks you hate yourself for jumping at. [08 Nov 2008, p.53]
    • The Guardian
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
    Global warming? Walter Pidgeon's Admiral Nelson has the answer in this lively, colourful sci-fi adventure. [11 Mar 2006, p.53]
    • The Guardian
  80. Elevator to the Gallows
    It is not free of plot-holes...but what a supremely stylish and watchable picture it is.
  81. La Dolce Vita
    It is a brilliant film, but there is nothing sweet about it.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Absent Minded Professor
    Wacky, bouncy Disney comedy.
  83. Breathless
    There is simply no other film which demonstrates so perfectly what it feels like to be young and in love.
  84. The Misfits
    For me, the film is itself a bit of misfit, full of big stagey speeches, contrived moments and some overemphatic performances, but opened out with muscular style by Huston. The faces of Gable, Clift and Monroe together in closeup have a Mount Rushmore look to them.
    • 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
  86. Spartacus
    A stirring classic.
  87. The Hidden Fortress
    The comedy co-exists with a dark view of life's brevity, and Kurosawa devises exhilarating setpieces and captivating images. Arthouse classics aren't usually as welcoming and entertaining as this.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Psycho
    It was Anthony Perkins's maternally obsessed misfit in Psycho who most perfectly distilled the modern fear of the monster who looks just like you.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ocean's 11
    Ocean's Eleven is devoid of morality other than a dedication to honour among thieves; it's consistently funny in a way that invites appreciative smiles rather than loud laughter; it's exciting without bringing disagreeable sweat to the palms; it's engaging, but never does anything as vulgar as taking us out of ourselves.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    House of Usher
    The movie, shot in CinemaScope and colour, is punctuated by shocking moments, but is more notable for its claustrophobic, doom-laden, necrophilic atmosphere and elegant camerawork than the kind of fashionable, in-your-face horror that was launched in the same year by Psycho.
  91. The Apartment
    Absolutely brilliant.
  92. Private Property
    Private Property’s vicious form of prurience may make some queasy, and is hardly the type of movie that could get made today without great backlash, but there’s definitely more going on here than mere time-capsule curiosity.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Mummy
    Alternately corny and magical, scary and comic, naive and perverse, elegant and clumsy, The Mummy is always stylish and atmospheric, and Cushing and Lee became enduring world stars.
  94. Shadows
    It's a cool customer – the hip lingo and fast-talking characters all of a piece with its bebop score – but there's a scrupulous honesty to the story, too.
  95. Look Back in Anger
    Sixty years on, the big-screen adaptation of the landmark play looks more conservative than revolutionary but Burton’s firepower is undimmed.
  96. North by Northwest
    [A] sublime classic.
  97. Anatomy of a Murder
    Otto Preminger's fiercely austere courtroom drama was strong stuff in 1959.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Wild Strawberries
    Wild Strawberries, which, while scarcely a bag of laughs, has a compassionate view of life that best illustrates the more optimistic side of Bergman's puzzled humanity.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Rio Bravo
    Over the course of Rio Bravo we are treated to an entertainment masterclass, a high watermark of Hollywood cinema in its heyday.
  100. Some Like It Hot
    Reinvented by Wilder and co-screenwriter co-writer IAL Diamond, Some Like It Hot is effortlessly fluent, joyous and buoyant: a high-concept comedy that stays as high as a kite, while other comedies flag. "Nobody's perfect" is the last line. Wilder, Lemmon, Curtis and Monroe come pretty close.
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