The Guardian's Scores

For 6,594 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:
6594 movie reviews
  1. Here’s that Hollywood rarity – a sequel that’s better than the original. It’s wittier, less frenetic and introduces fresh characters and a nice scene of strategic furball vomming.
  2. It never quite catches fire, but it has a curious atmosphere of its own: menacing, pregnant with unease.
  3. Castillo’s talent for spiritually attuned atmospherics could be her USP among Chile’s current crop of directors with idiosyncratic slants on their country’s recent past.
  4. There’s a rare unpredictability that initially proves alluring, at least until that confusion starts to feel less intentional.
  5. Mélanie Thierry does her best in the lead as Duras, but her character is maddeningly flat and dull.
  6. Once the wounds have healed, Anvari may wish to make a film with the strength and distinctiveness of his debut.
  7. It’s a film that’s good enough that you want it to be better, a rare genre example of less not proving to be more.
  8. This is very much a sympathetic fly-on-the-wall with Team Chelsea, but, considering the high drama of Manning’s life, the resultant film is muted and disjointed, and given to impressionistic images – such as landscapes out of car windows – when really the time could have been spent telling us more.
  9. It is lively, colourful and genuinely funny, and doesn’t break what didn’t need fixing about the original.
  10. Quite simply, I just defy anyone with red blood in their veins not to respond to the crazy bravura of Tarantino’s film-making, not to be bounced around the auditorium at the moment-by-moment enjoyment that this movie delivers.
  11. Porumboiu gives us a knotty, twisty, nifty plot that’s quite involved but hangs together well, and there’s an amusing juxtaposition of gloomy, rainy Bucharest and the sunny terrain of La Gomera. We also get a neat and unexpected coda.
  12. It is an involving story, with a strong lead performance.
  13. I felt that we were not permitted much access to the character’s innermost thoughts, and so some of the film’s romance, and its fatalism, did not have the piercing impact as the visual masterstrokes. But there’s no doubting Diao’s style.
  14. Kapadia’s film is a gripping account of Maradona’s playing career until the mid-90s, though it is flawed by a lack of new material of the sort he had for his previous film about Amy Winehouse.
  15. A superbly elegant, enigmatic drama ... I was on the edge of my seat.
  16. The director may want to confront these issues head on – the racism and violence just below the surface. Indeed, raising it above the surface is the point. But much of the drama and humanity get blitzed by the molotov cocktails.
  17. A strange, faintly frustrating but diverting film.
  18. Very few films can make you scared and excited at the same time. Just like the lighthouse beam, this is dazzling and dangerous.
  19. Malick does succeed, to some degree, on his own terms; he attempts to give some (stylised) sense of this man’s inner life: his emotional and spiritual architecture. It is admirably serious but static.
  20. Port Authority is vehement, urgent and sensual – not perfect, and I would have liked to have seen more extended dance sequences. But it is made with storytelling gusto and heart.
  21. Opaque and unrewarding.
  22. The finale is more of a schmaltzy salute to the guide-dog ethos than intimate documentation of the new owners’ stories. The street training sequences, though – shot in swooping knee-high Steadicam – are thrilling; mini kerbside action movies.
  23. The film is fun, but, for all its inventiveness, it’s a bit tame, with its nice-but-dim hero. But Diamantino is never dull.
  24. It’s an immersive and exotic experience. Howard is a revelation.
  25. As ever, Almodóvar has made a film about pleasure, which is itself a pleasure: witty, intelligent and sensuous.
  26. It’s fierce, open and angry, unironised and unadorned, about a vital contemporary issue whose implications you somehow don’t hear on the news.
  27. Compared with Mia Hansen-Løve’s resonant French house drama Eden, or Michael Winterbottom’s kaleidoscopic 24 Hour Party People, these beats sound tinny.
  28. None of this is represented in any compelling dramatic style, and the actors – all very talented and assured – have perhaps not had clear enough direction. It is a mood piece. Whose mood leads nowhere.
  29. It is a really strange film, beginning in a kind of ethno-anthropology and documentary style, becoming a poisoned-herd parable or fever dream and then a Jacobean-style bloodbath. It is an utterly distinctive film-making, executed with ruthless clarity and force.
  30. Technically this is competent if not remarkable film-making.

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