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. The Green Wave
    Ahadu pulls the curtain back on a government that was willing to imprison and torture its electorate.
  2. Rush
    What Rush has to offer is a great human drama, two dangerously talented men pushing each other to risky victory and a superb script, delivered with some mastery by Hemsworth and Brühl.
  3. Avengers: Age of Ultron
    It’s all operatically mad, and the city-destroying final confrontation is becoming a bit familiar, but Whedon carries it off with such joy and even a kind of evangelism.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Samsara
    It may be just more of the same from Fricke, but with his unique process, another incredible-looking lap around the world is more than welcome.
  5. Rust and Bone
    What could have been simply bizarre, sentimental or contrived here becomes an utterly absorbing love story.
  6. West of Memphis
    A gripping documentary.
  7. Breathing
    The "breathing" of the title becomes a cleverly recurrent motif, and Markovics's script circles around the themes of death and life in thoughtful and elegant ways: it is a well-carpentered screenplay which bears every sign of having been a labour of love, worked on fruitfully over many years.
  8. Keep the Lights On
    Every frame pulses with hard-gained experience: it may be the most lived-in film of 2012, and certainly counts among the most moving.
  9. Las Acacias
    Exhilarating and moving. This is a very satisfying love story.
  10. The House I Live In
    Among Jarecki's interviewees is David Simon (author of The Wire) who is incandescent with contempt for the system.
  11. Two Years at Sea
    What a strange and intriguing film.
  12. Prisoners
    In his first English language film, Quebeçois director Denis Villeneuve has produced a masterful thriller that is also an engrossing study of a smalltown America battered by recession, fear and the unrelenting elements.
  13. Bad 25
    Lee wants to clear away the tabloid smoke and spite, and bring the focus back to Jackson's professionalism, his craftsmanship, his artistry and his pop genius; the movie defiantly insists that Jackson was and is superior to his detractors.
  14. Ginger & Rosa
    This is a teenage movie that could in other hands have been precious; instead it has delicacy and intelligence.
  15. Frances Ha
    Gerwig's performance is full of depth and nuance; self-conscious without being mawkish, clever behind the kook.
  16. Much Ado About Nothing
    But Whedon's key coup is in simply directing a very good version of the play. He's got a keen ear for comedy, a no-nonsense approach to ditching the gags that don't work, a deft hand for slapstick and an eagerness to use it.
  17. Upstream Color
    It is invigoratingly freaky and strange, with a Death-Valley-dry sense of humour somewhere underneath — though a little derivative sometimes. More than once, Carruth gives us a close-up on a hand ruminatively stroking a surface: very Malick. And the shots of creepy creatures swarming under the skin are very Cronenberg.
  18. To the Wonder
    At its best, Malick's cinematic rhapsody is glorious; during his uncertain moments, he appears to be repeating himself. But what delight there is in this film.
  19. Tabu
    It's a gem: gentle, eccentric, possessed of a distinctive sort of innocence – and also charming and funny.
  20. Barbara
    The weird oppression and seediness of the times is elegantly captured, and Hoss coolly conveys Barbara's highly strung desperation.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Storage 24
    The whole thing proves unexpectedly entertaining.
  22. Spring Breakers
    Full credit to Korine, who sustains this act of creative vandalism right through to the finish. Spring Breakers unfolds as a fever dream of teenage kicks, a high-concept heist movie with mescal in the fuel tank.
  23. Hors Satan (Outside Satan)
    Devotees of Dumont's earlier films – particularly his 1999 film "Humanity" – will instantly recognise the style, the locale, the narrative, the bizarre quasi-realism, in which events take place in a world infinitesimally different from the one we inhabit. As ever, the visionary, radioactive glow is compelling.
  24. Tomorrowland
    Director Brad Bird deserves praise for packing such big ideas into such an accessible, rip-roaring, retro-futurist adventure.
  25. Jurassic World
    A terrifically enjoyable and exciting summer spectacular: savvy, funny, ridiculous in just the right way, with some smart imaginative twists.
  26. Room 237
    [Room 237] raises very interesting ideas about how we view a film, about what happens if we take the act of viewing down to a deeper, molecular level, and about how a movie's significance and effect need not be those intentionally willed by the director.
  27. Lore
    Australian director Cate Shortland's drama is overflowing with such poetic visual touches, conjuring up a fairytale landscape of long shadows, wafting curtains and waving fronds.
  28. No
    A fascinating case study in basic-level democracy.
  29. Leviathan
    Not an easy watch, and something in which you must make an investment of attention – but a fascinating piece of work.
  30. Sweetgrass
    This beautiful and hypnotic documentary shows the agony and the ecstasy of herding sheep up into Montana's Beartooth mountains for the summer pasture.
  31. Greedy Lying Bastards
    We call our House of Commons proceedings Punch and Judy: but the climate-change deniers on Fox News are Punch on steroids. It's a chilling and depressing picture.
  32. Beyond the Hills
    Enthralling, mysterious and intimately upsetting – a terrible demonstration of how poverty creates a space which irrational fear must fill.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Spectacular Now
    Ponsoldt elicits remarkably strong performances from his two young leads, who display a depth of feeling that's breathtaking in its simplicity and honest. There's an inherent chemistry here that's both disarming and refreshing.
  34. 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.
  35. Fruitvale Station
    The robust acting and sharp sense of the Bay Area milieu glides us nicely over the film's few soft patches.
  36. The Angels' Share
    Ken Loach's latest collaboration with screenwriter Paul Laverty is warm, funny and good-natured. It's a freewheeling social-realist caper – unworldly and at times almost childlike.
  37. What Maisie Knew
    The adults' behaviour is almost as confusing for us as it is for her. It's a neat trick that reminds us these weighty adult issues are both life-changing and, in the moment, somewhat insignificant to someone Maisie's age.
  38. American Hustle
    It is an intriguing confection of a movie, announcing its influences candidly, but exerting its originality too.
  39. 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.
  40. A Hijacking
    Danish director Tobias Lindholm spins an exacting drama out of a crisis on this deft, verite-style account of Somali piracy in the Indian ocean. Full credit to A Hijacking for resisting the siren-call of Hollywood histrionics in favour of the nuts-and-bolts.
  41. My Brother the Devil
    It's an athletic, loose-limbed piece of movie-making, not perfect, but bursting with energy and adrenaline.
  42. The Wall
    Julian Roman Pölsler's bewitching debut manages to be at once a creepy sci-fi parable, a feminist Robinson Crusoe and a clear-eyed ode to the wonders of nature experienced in solitude. Walden pond with added wall.
  43. Star Trek: The Motion Picture
    It’s a bit overextended but very watchable with flourishes of exotic invention.
  44. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
    It’s still entertaining and charming in its innocent idealism.
  45. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
    You can even forgive the franchise for cheating the issue of Spock’s death, though another death seems forgotten relatively quickly. The original cast members bring a certain gravitas.
  46. The Hunt
    It is forthright, powerful, composed and directed with clarity and overwhelming force, yet capable of great subtlety and nuance.
  47. Cutie and the Boxer
    Alternately rueful and whimsical documentary.
  48. Computer Chess
    Bujalski really has pulled off something extraordinary here.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    In a World...
    A cameo from Geena Davis is particularly tart, and all the better for it.
  50. What Richard Did
    What Richard Did is an engrossing and intelligent drama that throbs in the mind for hours after the final credits.
  51. Nebraska
    Nebraska may not be startlingly new, and sometimes we can see the epiphanies looming up over the distant horizon; the tone is, moreover, lighter and more lenient than in earlier pictures like Sideways. But it is always funny and smart.
  52. 22 Jump Street
    It certainly provides that rarest of things: relaxing enjoyment. In all its uncompromising goofiness, 22 Jump Street brings onstream a sugar-rush of entertainment.
  53. Nymphomaniac: Volume I
    Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac bludgeons the body and tenderises the soul. It is perplexing, preposterous and utterly fascinating.
  54. In the Fog
    In the Fog is an intense, slow-burning and haunting drama.
  55. Heli
    The film functions as clammy thriller as well as poetic agitprop.
  56. 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.
  57. Metallica: Through the Never
    In between songs there's a movie within a movie as Dane DeHaan silently takes on the forces of anarchy on behalf of the band. Awesome.
  58. A Field in England
    Wheatley's new film is grisly and visceral, an occult, monochrome-psychedelic breakdown taking place somewhere in the West Country during the civil war.
  59. Only Lovers Left Alive
    If it is an exercise in style … well, what style. With its retro-chic connoisseurship and analogue era rock, this is a brilliant haute-hippy homage.
  60. The Past
    It is an intricate and often brilliant drama, with restrained and intelligent performances; there is an elegantly patterned mosaic of detail, unexpected plot turns, suspenseful twists and revelations.
  61. The Selfish Giant
    This is a fine film, which cements Barnard's growing reputation as one of Britain's best film-makers.
  62. 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.
  63. London - The Modern Babylon
    Temple's film is refreshingly free of cliché. A very heady experience.
  64. Call Me Kuchu
    The film-makers have turned what could have been a detached news report into a moving human tragedy.
  65. Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer
    This documentary by Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin argues that Pussy Riot suffered an old-fashioned Soviet show trial, and what emerges is the effrontery and hypocrisy of Putin's attempt to associate these three young women with the Bolsheviks' suppression of religion.
  66. Museum Hours
    Like José Luis Guerín's brilliant 2007 curio "In the City of Sylvia," this is one of those rare films that may change the way you view the world.
  67. Dallas Buyers Club
    [McConaughey] delivers a twitchy, hostile performance on par with anything he's done since he escaped the rom com cul-de-sac.
  68. Kill Your Darlings
    Though it begins as a murder-mystery, Kill Your Darlings may be best described as an intellectual moral maze, a story perfectly of its time and yet one that still resonates today.
  69. Alan Partridge
    The genius of Alpha Papa, then, is in remaining faithful to Partridge's small-screen soul while also managing the demands of a big-screen Alan.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Secret Disco Revolution
    Rather than simply charting the rise and fall of disco to a thumping soundtrack, the film presents an unexpected school of thought – that disco was actually a vehicle of liberation, a revolutionary tool used to end the oppression of women and black and gay people in 1970s America.
  71. Spider-Man: Homecoming
    Spider-Man: Homecoming is so joyously entertaining that it’s enough to temporarily cure any superhero fatigue. There’s wit, smarts and a nifty, inventive plot that serves as a reminder of what buoyant fun such films can bring.
  72. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
    We get the playfulness of seeing quirky magic powers mixed with the familiarity of how a time loop plays out. Add in Burton’s authorial visual stamp and what we’ve got is an extremely pleasing formula. It gels as Tim Burton’s best (non-musical) live-action movie for 20 years.
  73. Adore
    An incredibly provocative piece of work, featuring a brave and vulnerable performance by Naomi Watts (who seems perhaps a little too young) and a career-high acting masterclass from Robin Wright (who is cast perfectly).
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Breathe In
    The story of the ingenue who enters the fold and awakens deep feelings is nothing new, but Doremus makes it all utterly captivating. He mines just the right amount of drama and spontaneous comedy from each moment and the foreshadowing is perfectly weighted.
  75. The Crash Reel
    A crash reel – a greatest hits of a boarder's most dramatic falls – is meant to entertain. But Walker takes the cheap thrills of the format and flips it painfully on its head.
  76. Afternoon Delight
    Director Jill Soloway's comedy-drama isn't perfect – the leitmotif about open eyes feels over-workshopped, and the ending's a bit pat – but it nails with self-lacerating precision the manners and mores of a certain type of hipster parent, the bourgeoisie's muddled attitudes towards sex workers, and the precarious foundations of friendship.
  77. The Stone Roses: Made of Stone
    Meadows is clearly not interested in lifting the biographical lid on anyone, just getting alongside the band, and picking up on their energy, vulnerability and excitement. He has no agenda; he just loves the Stone Roses, and it's a great, heartfelt tribute.
  78. 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.
  79. Snowpiercer
    The way the allegory works out is not exactly subtle or unexpected, but is strangely moving, despite the gruesomeness that has gone before. All in all, a treat.
  80. Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers
    The casefile remains open, but this considered investigation matches the Panthers' bravura with an organisational flair of its own.
  81. Our Children
    Émilie Dequenne is the young actor who made a powerful debut in the Dardenne brothers' prize-winning film "Rosetta" in 1999, and what a superb performance she gives now in this inexpressibly painful drama.
  82. Neighbors
    In its current state, Neighbors is filthy, nasty and a bit too sloppy. But it’ll scrub up lovely.
    • 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.
  84. Wadjda
    You'd need a heart of stone not to be won over by Wadjda, a rebel yell with a spoonful of sugar and a pungent sense of a Riyadh society split between the home, the madrasa and the shopping mall.
  85. Escape from Tomorrow
    The acting isn't perfect (which is perhaps understandable under the circumstances), and the film's dream states sometimes try too hard, but Escape From Tomorrow has an otherworldly atmosphere that both hooks and engages.
  86. Night Moves
    This director, in the past, has shown herself to be an ace with the teasing, hanging ending and Night Moves saves the best for last.
  87. The Dirties
    It may wind up as the year's most significant horror film; it's certainly among the most original.
  88. The Railway Man
    From time to time, the script contextualises a little clumsily...but the playing and pacing are terrific.
  89. 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.
  90. Fading Gigolo
    Turturro has given Allen his biggest and best on-screen turn in years: the part was written for him and it's full of scope for amiable kvetching and nimble slapstick.
  91. The Invisible Woman
    The Invisible Woman shies from propaganda just as Nelly shies from impropriety. Fiennes has done the right and proper thing here. He has, at 50, made a mature movie, prudent in the best possible sense.
  92. Joe
    Joe also stands as a reminder of what a terrific actor Cage can be when he is able to harness and channel his wilder impulses.
  93. Life of Crime
    It gleams with a faintly-tacky, country club sheen, as if it'd been sheep-dipped in essence of 70s and come out feeling peachy.
  94. Philomena
    Its main focus is the sparky, shifting relationship between its two protagonists and its trump card the startling chemistry between its two main stars.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Armstrong Lie
    Succeeds as a probing look into the mechanics of an epic lie, and because of the emotion at its heart.
  96. Child of God
    Child of God is a shocking tale of backwoods lunacy and one man's descent into hell. Perhaps the most shocking thing about it is that it's really rather good.
  97. Le Week-End
    For all its flaws - in fact, perhaps because of them - Le Week-End is a work borne from, and provoking, real feeling.
    • 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.
  99. Sunshine on Leith
    A remorselessly rousing attempt to do for the Scottish pub rock twins what Mamma Mia! did for Abba or Tommy for The Who.
  100. Gloria
    Gloria is a sad, painful romantic story.
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