The Guardian's Scores

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For 6,581 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: 2,495 out of 6581
  2. Mixed: 3,767 out of 6581
  3. Negative: 319 out of 6581
6581 movie reviews
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  1. Saint Maud
    The film punches out its warped drama with amazing gusto and Clark is lethally assured: not Saint Maud really, but Saint Joan, a spectacular horror heroine.
  2. The Kingmaker
    Lauren Greenfield’s film about the Philippines’ former first lady Imelda Marcos reveals a grotesquely self-pitying, wholly unrepentant and very rich woman.
  3. 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.
  4. Nosferatu the Vampyre
    This is Herzog's journey to the heart of darkness, a film that specifically echoes his earlier offerings The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and his South American odyssey Aguirre, Wrath of God.
  5. The Cotton Club Encore
    This is a gift to cinephiles everywhere from deep in the cellar and we’re all lucky to get a sip.
  6. Until the End of the World
    The scenes of artistic, scientific and communal triumph were significant. The isolated, solipsistic anger of each character, lost in their own identity loop, seemed like a perfect analogy for the conflicts in eastern Europe in the mid-1990s.
  7. Promising Young Woman
    Writer-director Emerald Fennell (a showrunner for TV’s Killing Eve) lands a stiletto jab with her feature debut, and Carey Mulligan is demurely brilliant as the appropriately named Cassandra.
  8. Tenet
    For me, Tenet is preposterous in the tradition of Boorman’s Point Blank, or even Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, a deadpan jeu d’esprit, a cerebral cadenza, a deadpan flourish of crazy implausibility – but supercharged with steroidal energy and imagination.
  9. West Side Story
    West Side Story is contrived, certainly, a hothouse flower of musical theatre, and Spielberg quite rightly doesn’t try hiding any of those stage origins. His mastery of technique is thrilling; I gave my heart to this poignant American fairytale of doomed love.
  10. Mank
    What an addictive romantic drama it is, mixing sentimentality with pure rapture.
  11. Minari
    This is a wonderfully absorbing and moving family drama with a buttery, sunlit streak of sentimentality.
  12. Boys State
    It’s not clear if it’s funny or tragic, if it’s reality TV or reality itself. But Boys State is as exciting and moving as Steve James’s high school basketball epic Hoop Dreams was a generation ago, with its emotional rawness, its guileless patriotism and capacity for hurt and wonder.
  13. The Green Knight
    The visual brilliance of this film combines with shroomy toxicity and inexplicable moral grandeur: what a stunning experience.
  14. The Father
    Its effects are essentially theatrical – but they are powerfully achieved, and the performances from Hopkins and Colman are superb. It is a film about grief and what it means to grieve for someone who is still alive.
  15. Untouchable
    Untouchable: The Rise and Fall of Harvey Weinstein (BBC Two), directed by Ursula MacFarlane, is a film of halting testimonies, long pauses, lips pressed tightly together and eyes filling with tears.
  16. Da 5 Bloods
    It’s all so inventively bizarre that you could treat it simply as a black comedy, but in the final 15 minutes there is an amazing crescendo of emotion.
  17. Memoria
    In a calmly realist, non-mystic movie language, this director really can convince you that the living and the dead, the past and the present, the terrestrial and the other, do exist side by side.
  18. The Souvenir: Part II
    This rich and mysterious film is a real achievement.
  19. DAU. Natasha
    What DAU. Natasha shows is the bizarre way that, in totalitarian societies, the normal and the abnormal, the banal and the grotesque, and the human and the inhuman live together side by side.
  20. The Lady Eve
    Stanwyck supplies a bravura double performance, a showcase for her brilliant versatility.
  21. Collective
    The cynicism and indifference to suffering is truly horrible, and a kind of insidious evil rises from the screen like carbon monoxide, and also a terrible sadness.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Hamilton
    It keeps all the power of a live performance while simultaneously adding a filmic pizzazz including some breathtaking aerial shots. There is extraordinary direction – again under Kail – so that the cameras capture the mise en scène of theatre without losing any of the closeup intimacy of film.
  23. McCabe & Mrs. Miller
    If anything, Robert Altman's self-styled "anti-western" looks even richer, stranger and more daring than it did when it first appeared back in 1971.
  24. Wise Blood
    John Huston's hellfire burlesque is one of the great lost films of the 1970s and a movie to stand alongside his Maltese Falcon or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Dear Diary
    Often, the film-maker seems to be on a journey without a destination, perhaps without a script. Occasionally, brilliantly, he goes entirely off the rails.
  26. Wild Strawberries
    A wonderfully composed movie in which Ingmar Bergman is able to vary the tone from melancholy to gaiety in the most deeply satisfying way
  27. My Brilliant Career
    The film itself is a kind of free spirit, and one that has made an indelible print on Australian cinema.
  28. Mikey and Nicky
    A neglected 1976 gem from a neglected Hollywood genius. May was known for her comedy but here proves absolutely fluent in the language of mobster lowlife, with an edge of caustic, disillusioned humour, and strange yet shockingly real outbursts of violence in which cafe owners and bus drivers are suddenly roughed up.
  29. Brief Encounter
    The film is thrillingly, unapologetically about decency and honour, about, as Laura heartrendingly puts it, controlling oneself.
    • 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.
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