The Guardian's Scores

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For 6,561 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 40% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 55% 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: 2,484 out of 6561
  2. Mixed: 3,758 out of 6561
  3. Negative: 319 out of 6561
6561 movie reviews
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  1. Skincare
    Skincare is a worthy contribution to the growing microgenre of female-led beauty-themed horror, and some of us out here are ready for more.
  2. No Other Land
    No Other Land, for its many images of despair, still offers a stirring vision for what could be – Israelis and Palestinians working together in the name of justice, collaborating toward a world where both are free.
  3. Piece By Piece
    Pharrell’s rags-to-riches story is a familiar tale re-energised not just with his unique sound but the basic decision to animate his life so that it can thrive with his imagination and hit so many visual grace notes.
  4. Pedro Páramo
    Strangely, given Prieto’s visual acumen, the film is also a bit bland visually, bar a flashy prologue kicked off by the camera sinking into the bowels of the earth. But the story has enough residual power to deliver a dark night of the Mexican soul nonetheless.
  5. Meet Me Next Christmas
    It exists in Netflix festive movie world, an ever-expanding place of ever-diminishing returns, and while this won’t be a film someone would consider returning to next Christmas, it’ll just about do for now.
  6. Red One
    There’s nothing wrong with a big-hearted film for Christmas, but this commercial and formulaic slice of content is a toy destined to be forgotten.
  7. Bookworm
    This is a shameless heartstring plucker. But it’s charming and sometimes very funny.
  8. Dying
    This is a bleak, bold, extravagantly crazy story which is emotionally incorrect at all times.
  9. Paddington In Peru
    There are fewer jokes, moment by moment, but just as much sprightliness, spectacle and fun.
  10. Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story
    Though the interviews with the Reeve children are poignant and insightful, directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui show no signs of trusting their material.
  11. Heretic
    Heretic might not be good clean fun but Grant makes it worth us getting dirty.
  12. Slingshot
    It labours for an hour to find its own thematic core, but as the psychological pieces accumulate, the film starts to exert an inexorable pull in its exploration of cognitive dissonance and mental illness.
  13. Music by John Williams
    Such is the narrative offered here, with no examination of how and why he so brilliantly understands the relationship between pictures and sound; nor are there insights into his composing methods, or indeed his own musical influences and icons.
  14. Martha
    Martha is, after all, the star – a fascinating narrator of her own life, sometimes direct, sometimes curiously opaque or self-contradictory, always evincing a glowing, undaunted ambition. As the OG influencer, she lived the rule: whatever happens, just keep pushing forward. The people will keep watching.
  15. Time Cut
    The lack of tension, innovative kills or atmosphere is far more of an issue, the film looking every bit as tinny and flat as the very worst that streaming has to offer.
  16. Juror #2
    Suspense is kept on a low flame but the film offers cosy pleasures, not least in the jury-room wrangles.
  17. Canary Black
    As visual wallpaper it’s serviceable enough, providing a constant backbeat of blam-blam gunshots and explosions, mostly at night.
  18. Don't Move
    The film is at its best when words are secondary to action.
  19. 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
    Zimny’s film-making style is certainly less adventurous, but his weaving of archive footage is deftly done – it’s fun to see the terrible sleeping arrangements on early E Street Band outings – and you’re left with the sense that this is a unit of people for whom rocking out and blowing minds is an irresistible lifetime pursuit.
  21. The Room Next Door
    It’s a lovely, mordant, tender affair; a lush September song in duet, performed with aplomb by Swinton and Moore as they stroll the secondhand bookstores or lounge by the pool they can’t be bothered to swim in.
  22. Classified
    The fight sequences are lethargic and feature a lot of extras waiting patiently for their cue to fall over dead. The Maltese architecture remains as lovely as ever; the dialogue is, however, shockingly bad.
  23. Family Pack
    This is a perfectly accurate board-game adaptation insofar as it’s well-packaged, undemanding fun.
  24. Black Box Diaries
    Itō is an amazing personality: an intelligent, courageous journalist who may have changed the course of Japanese history.
  25. Matt and Mara
    Here is a toothless, aimless dramedy from Canada, a lo-fi excursion into nothing very interesting; it’s what would happen if Harry met Sally and maybe they weren’t meant to be lovers or even friends and were both a bit bland.
  26. Brothers
    The quirkiest thing about it is how much of that time it spends accidentally calling attention to its own overwritten, under-thought weaknesses.
  27. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
    By the end it’s nearly impossible not to shed a tear after the touching finesse and shape of this story.
  28. The Teacher
    Nabulsi hits the dramatic beats with confidence and Bakri has genuine distinction; his sensitivity and intelligence command every scene.
  29. Things Will Be Different
    Despite an intriguing high-concept lo-fi premise, its oddities and uninteresting superfluities mean that it never really emerges from its self-imposed inertia and gloom.
  30. Timestalker
    The throwaway gags and throwaway ideas reminded me pleasantly of the Peter Cook/Dudley Moore comedy Bedazzled from 1967. Lowe’s comedy has bite.
  31. Endurance
    Here is a frustrating film that tries to tell two stories at once, and succeeds with neither.
  32. Smile 2
    As stylishly made as these films might be, there’s still not enough of a distinctive identity away from its inspirations and not enough away from the (very loud) sound and fury to give us hope that this is a story worth retelling time and time again.
  33. Studio One Forever
    [An] affectionate, nostalgic documentary.
  34. Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare
    The story is, frankly, so crazy, the scheme so intricate and complex – I don’t want to spoil it for those who, like me, hadn’t heard the hit podcast it was based on, but suffice to say I remain astounded – that hearing Kirat tell it plain would be riveting enough.
  35. Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party
    Of course, the music is the main attraction and that’s served well, with long chunks of performance footage that aren’t sliced and diced as much as they would be in a contemporary rock doc.
  36. Joy
    It’s a somewhat stagey reconstruction but an approachable and humane account of a great moment in scientific history.
  37. Superboys of Malegaon
    There is terrific fun, charm and storytelling energy in Superboys of Malegaon, and it settles on an interesting theme: very rarely indeed does a new film-maker find success with a completely original work.
  38. My Hero Academia: You're Next
    There’s nothing revolutionary here, but the hybrid of old-style battle manga with a more modern oneiric sensibility feels a little different from standard superhero loudhailing.
  39. MadS
    The film has so much energy that its overall tone is fundamentally invigorating; this is the cinema of euphoric nihilism, and it’s a welcome return to form for Moreau.
  40. Stuntman
    The stunts are duly impressive and filmed with vim, but the party apparatchiks would probably be happy with how thuddingly sentimental the film is, and how conservative it is about family values.
  41. Lonely Planet
    It’s better, more grounded and self-aware than expected, enough to overcome the cliches and occasionally clunky dialogue. It’s a mostly enjoyable addition to the welcome sub-genre about 40-plus, desiring women as considered, desirable subjects.
  42. A Traveler's Needs
    Hong makes all of this look as easy and fluent as breathing.
  43. In Her Place
    A documentary might have served this material better, or a fiction feature that doesn’t have a made-up character as the lead.
  44. Daddy's Head
    Barfoot taps into liminal terrors more effectively through the visuals, from the gracefully shot fugue states experienced by stepmother and surrogate son, to a sinewy barrelling nightmare-beast that has apparently escaped from a Chris Cunningham video.
  45. The Last of the Sea Women
    There is an important subject at the centre of this documentary from Korean-American film-maker Sue Kim, co-produced by Malala Yousafzai, but the film is finally let down by a bland and supercilious way of celebrating the women involved as a picturesque eco-feminist folk tradition, without actually tackling the hard questions their work is raising.
  46. Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person
    It’s stylishly shot by first-timer Louis-Seize, a bit reminiscent of an early Jim Jarmusch movie with its deadpan sense of humour, never trying too hard, just a little bit too cool for school.
  47. Terrifier 3
    It’s not for everyone, but for gorehounds this film delivers and then some.
  48. Blitz
    Steve McQueen finds the key of C major for this well made and unashamedly old-fashioned wartime adventure, heartfelt and rousing and – yes – a bit trad overall, sometimes even channelling the spirit of Lionel Jeffries’s The Railway Children, although for me that’s no put-down.
  49. Maya and the Wave
    Yes, it certainly is about her, but it’s almost as if everyone involved – Gabeira, people who were supposedly her closest associates, and even the director Stephanie Johnes – aren’t quite conscious of the fact that they’re also making a documentary about endemic sexism in sport.
  50. V/H/S/Beyond
    Usually anything this many generations into its evolution is pretty exhausted – but this is pretty good, or at least in parts.
  51. The Friend
    It can be borderline maudlin and easily teary, though The Friend is grounded enough, and Watts sufficiently understated, to not become outright eye-rolling.
  52. Hold Your Breath
    Paulson’s commitment is unwavering, and it’s refreshing to see her in genre material a little more grounded than what the various American Horror Stories have given her, but she’s an actor in search of better material and, sadly, Hold Your Breath means that search is ongoing.
  53. The Platform 2
    The grindhouse thought experiments can be engaging, and a sign that the movie is more interested in speculative fiction than in preaching toward a single specific theme. But the movie rampages too quickly and carelessly to really dig into any of its characters.
  54. House of Spoils
    There are tasty moments here, but genre fans looking for a full meal might leave a little hungry.
  55. Salem's Lot
    While Dauberman manages a handful of effective moments (a morgue scramble with a homemade cross and a drive-in movie light trick are particularly good), he’s never able to capture the slow, escalating dread that a story such as this demands.
  56. Nickel Boys
    This is a survivor’s coming of age: tough, disillusioned, brilliant.
  57. Hellboy: The Crooked Man
    No amount of budget could make up for the sputtering mess of a script, or the dead-on-the-inside expressions of the cast – apart from Rudolph who is consistently watchable.
  58. The Outrun
    In every shot and every scene, mostly in closeup, Ronan carries the film with her unselfconsciously fierce and focused presence.
  59. Killer Heat
    A dull and predictable sunshine noir that wastes the time of those involved as well as ours.
  60. The Wild Robot
    Clever, heartfelt and frequently stunning, The Wild Robot offers the type of all-ages-welcome animated entertainment that will delight kids and leave a lump in one’s throat.
  61. My Old Ass
    Plaza’s natural toughness gives this film some texture, but the truth is she isn’t in it much. You can spend very, very long stretches of the running time longing for her to re-emerge. So, when she doesn’t, it feels bland.
  62. Apartment 7A
    James had impressed with her debut, the dementia horror Relic, but any of that film’s texture or creepiness has dissolved on a larger scale.
  63. One Hand Clapping
    There’s plenty for nostalgists and completists to swoon over. . . . Such a pleasure.
  64. Azrael
    Gorehounds will appreciate the film’s many beheadings and bloody murders.
  65. On Falling
    This is a very impressive debut.
  66. Never Let Go
    [Aja's] never quite sure if he wants to trick us with a jump scare or make us ponder weightier issues and, unable to do both efficiently, the film becomes lost in the murk in-between. Berry is, as ever, a strong anchor but by the time the credits roll, we’re ready to let go.
  67. Strange Darling
    It’s in uncompromising bad taste but made with lethal precision and discipline.
  68. Girls Will Be Girls
    It’s a quiet film, and Panigrahi plays Mira with such poise and intelligence, conveying her innermost thoughts with a slight lift of the chin here or lingering look there.
  69. The Goldman Case
    Kahn orchestrates the angry energy with an expert hand.
  70. Greedy People
    Some good moments and a great cast, but this doesn’t come together.
  71. Sugarcane
    [A] deeply disquieting and indeed enraging documentary.
  72. My Favourite Cake
    There is something quietly magnificent in it. Moments like these in life are poignantly brief – but many never have them at all. It’s a lovely film.
  73. Transformers One
    Breezy, comically self-referential and totally likable. But its charms nevertheless feel like they came off an assembly line – one that has been engineered to deliver Marvel-like results, in animated form of course.
  74. Separated
    The material is sobering and the mountain of evidence needs unpicking. The film-maker handles his brief with the cold, hard precision of an expert state prosecutor.
  75. Astrakan 79
    In addition to confronting the past, Mourão’s film also makes possible an intergenerational dialogue between Martim and his son, the young musician seen in the beginning; he also harbours his own secrets. Emerging from their conversation are sparks of understanding and compassion, which constitute the emotional beating heart of the film.
  76. Last Straw
    It’s encouraging to see low-budget early-career film-making with ambition.
  77. Haunted Heart
    Matters would have been improved from the audience’s point of view, however, if said digging had happened a little sooner; the film takes its sweet time to get to where we sense it’s going, and then quickly runs out of steam when it does.
  78. Harvest
    The ploddingly unvaried pace and undirected, underpowered performances make this an exasperating experience: a directionless, shallow movie which seems bafflingly unconvincing and inauthentic at every turn.
  79. Vermiglio
    It is wonderfully acted with unaffected naturalism by its cast of professionals and newcomers and plays an extravagant, almost shameless pizzicato on the audience’s heartstrings.
  80. The Penguin Lessons
    It’s understandable that a film this gentle wouldn’t venture into the gory details of what happens to Tom during a bruising night in the cells but to gloss over any of the terror a civilian might have felt under the cosh is baffling.
  81. The Return
    Stripping the narrative of its gods and monsters, and almost two-thirds of the chapters, is great but the vacuum isn’t filled with much more than his two magnetic leads and consistently sumptuous cinematography. The Return is gorgeous to behold, but there just isn’t enough there.
  82. Relay
    The subdued carefulness of the buildup gives way to rote, poorly staged action and a twist that might fill in a few plot-holes but leaves us otherwise dissatisfied.
  83. Speak No Evil
    McAvoy is the most compelling reason to see this one. The original may be darker, but it didn’t have McAvoy.
  84. Uglies
    Though it supposedly argues against human beings turned into synthetic quasi-droids, Uglies feels like just another throwaway product.
  85. The End
    At two and a half hours, Oppenheimer’s strange and ambitious deconstruction of human behaviour – with its bleak but adorning visuals and its novel spin on ideas we’ve seen in The Hunger Games and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth – can also be draining. Maybe that’s intentional.
  86. The Cut
    The more British director Sean Ellis prods and provokes, the hokier it all gets, a film about cutting weight that could have benefited from a leaner edit.
  87. The Assessment
    Opinions may divide about the extended coda that Fortuné gives her story but it is evidence that she is ambitious for something that eludes so many film-makers: an ending. It’s a stylish debut.
  88. Unstoppable
    Robles isn’t hard to root for but Unstoppable, a rousing yet overdone biopic, tries too hard to get us there anyway.
  89. Without Blood
    Jolie also lays it on thick stylistically, as if compensating for a hollowness at her lavish, sepia-toned film’s core.
  90. The Fire Inside
    Her story is obviously astounding in itself, but what makes The Fire Inside, once called Flint Strong, such an upper-tier sports movie is that Morrison and the Oscar-winning screenwriter Barry Jenkins don’t rely solely on the facts of her life to compel.
  91. The Critic
    The film has an odd teatime glow of cosy-crime sentimentality which deadens the effect, and this period drama can’t quite bring itself to show that, in the 1930s, murder was punishable by death. But McKellen overrides these concerns; his glorious star quality and dash make him the only possible casting.
  92. The Queen of My Dreams
    It slips just a little too easily into the generic pigeonholing of first generation south Asian narratives, but rattles along with fun and energy.
  93. Subservience
    If only the film were a little bit smarter and less predictable, it might have had a chance of becoming a cult classic.
  94. The 4:30 Movie
    By far the best thing in the film is Ken Jeong as the theatre manager, preening and ridiculous, dispensing putdowns with surgically precise comic timing.
  95. Reawakening
    Though a little mannered, the film has intelligence and force.
  96. In Camera
    In Camera is the kind of ambitious intelligent cinema that invites your most mulled-over theories. It will exasperate some; others will be engrossed by an intriguing movie.
  97. Betrayal
    The suspense-building and denouement are adequate enough, but what makes this more interesting is how director Rodger Griffiths weaves in a subtle dissection of how abuse can damage families in different ways.
  98. The Last Showgirl
    The commentary on gender and age feels easy and unspecific and the world of the Vegas showgirl created from too great of a distance to really ring true.
  99. Eden
    It’s all too silly and the writing too hokey for us to keep up and by the end, truly care about who survives or not.
  100. The Vourdalak
    A delirious and oddly agreeable stopover.
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