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 Wicker Man
    There is genuine fear in its nightmarish tableaux: the breast-feeding woman holding an egg in the ruined churchyard is like a detail from Hieronymus Bosch. And that final sequence, with the eponymous Wicker Man, is inspired.
  2. Peterloo
    Mike Leigh brings an overwhelming simplicity and severity to this historical epic, which begins with rhetoric and ends in violence. There is force, grit and, above all, a sense of purpose; a sense that the story he has to tell is important and real, and that it needs to be heard right now.
  3. Joker
    What a gloriously daring and explosive film Joker is. It’s a tale that’s almost as twisted as the man at its centre, bulging with ideas and pitching towards anarchy.
  4. Little Women
    This is such a beguiling, generous film from Gerwig. There is a lot of love in it.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    22 July
    Refusing to make Breivik spectacular, the film pays tribute to process, how Norway gave him precisely what he was entitled to so as not to give him what he wanted – scale, martyrdom, glamour.
  6. Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
    This animated Japanese masterpiece is a war story as wrenching as any live-action movie.
  7. The Ladykillers
    It's a film with jazz in its bones and rhythm to its beats.
  8. Touch of Evil
    Brilliant.
  9. The Philadelphia Story
    Utterly beguiling, funny and romantic.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Third Man
    A noir classic.
  11. Acute Misfortune
    This is an enthralling drama: the best and most interesting Australian biopic since Chopper in 2000.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Southern Comfort
    It's an allegory about the Vietnam war, a study of American character and a national propensity for violence. Southern Comfort is a masterpiece.
  13. Hale County This Morning, This Evening
    There is something visionary in this film.
  14. Notorious
    Notorious has fascinating echoes of other Hitchcock movies such as Rebecca and Psycho. A must-see or must-see-again.
  15. Tea with the Dames
    I would have loved to hear a discussion on a wider range of issues, particularly #TimesUp, but with a film this much fun, it seems churlish to ask for anything else.
  16. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
    The film features an acting cameo from Siegel’s assistant and protege Sam Peckinpah, who also worked on the script, and is known for its high-octane pulp thrills. It should also be praised for elegant satire.
  17. They Shall Not Grow Old
    Peter Jackson has created a visually staggering thought experiment; an immersive deep-dive into what it was like for ordinary British soldiers on the western front.
  18. Amazing Grace
    I felt wrung out at the end of this film. How incredible must it have been for those who were there in person.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Pink Floyd: The Wall
    Extraordinary.
  20. Paris, Texas
    It is an eerie, sad story whose meaning disappears over the vast horizon as if on a highway heading away through the desert.
  21. Midsommar
    It’s a thoroughly enjoyable film, a crescendo of paranoid trippiness building to an uproarious grossout in its final moments.
  22. Apollo 11
    Somehow, it doesn’t look like something that happened 50 years ago – but rather an extraordinarily detailed futurist fantasy of what might happen in the years to come, if we could only evolve to some higher degree of verve and hope.
  23. Monos
    An arrestingly bizarre experience.
  24. The Souvenir
    The Souvenir is an artefact in the highest auteur register. Its absence of tonal readability is a challenge. But there is also a cerebrally fierce, slow-burn passion in its austere, unemphasised plainness.
  25. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
    In the past I have been agnostic and a nay-sayer about M:I, but the pure fun involved in this film, its silly-serious alchemy, and the way the franchise seems to strain at something crazily bigger with every film, as opposed to just winding down, is something to wonder at.
  26. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
    It is a wildly silly, wildly entertaining adventure which periodically gives us a greatest-hits flashback montage of the other seven films in the M:I canon - but we still get a brand new, box-fresh Tom-sprinting-along-the-street scene, without which it wouldn’t be M:I.
  27. Road Games
    One terrific moment in which Pat sees what he believes are the killer's shoes underneath a toilet stall door and berates him while Pamela climbs into the green van outside is reminiscent of another scene that arrived years later and was also labelled "Hitchcockian" – the footsteps down the hallway confrontation in the Coen brothers' No Country For Old Men.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Two-Lane Blacktop
    Two-Lane Blacktop should have established Hellman as one of the great directors of his generation. Instead, its box-office failure made him an enduring cult figure.
  29. Nomadland
    Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland is an utterly inspired docu-fictional hybrid, like her previous feature The Rider. It is a gentle, compassionate, questioning film about the American soul.
  30. Dune: Part One
    Villeneuve is superb at juxtaposing the colossal spectacle with the intimate encroachment of danger and a mysterious dramatic language that exalts the alienness of every texture and surface.
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