The Guardian's Scores

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For 6,601 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: 2,500 out of 6601
  2. Mixed: 3,782 out of 6601
  3. Negative: 319 out of 6601
6601 movie reviews
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  1. Girl
    The sheer sustained intensity of the drama and performances carry it through.
  2. The Highwaymen
    Hamer and Gault won the day in a hail of submachine fire, but even their hagiography can’t hide that they’re history’s losers.
  3. The Day Shall Come
    Morris handles a delicate balancing act with an expected ease, the work of a satirist with so much to say yet with an awareness that saying less leads to so much more.
  4. Us
    The fiercely charismatic, mesmeric gaze of Lupita Nyong’o holds the movie together, and I have to say that without her presence, the movie’s final spasm of anarchic weirdness might have lost its grip. She radiates a force-field of pure defiance.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Beach Bum
    Joyous, outrageous and slyly mournful.
  6. The Kindergarten Teacher
    Gyllenhaal is terrific as a teacher and wannabe poet who exploits a child prodigy in this gripping psychological drama.
  7. Maiden
    At all events, it pays due homage to Edwards as a courageous pioneer.
  8. Triple Frontier
    It’s an enjoyable enough way to spend two hours but without any commentary or real depth, it’s in need of a bit more suspense or conflict to really oil the wheels, the film too often ambling along when it should be racing.
  9. Captain Marvel
    I wanted a clearer, more central story for Captain Marvel’s emergence on to the stage, and in subsequent films – if she isn’t simply to get lost in the ensemble mix – there should more of Larson’s own wit and style and, indeed, plausible mastery of martial arts. In any case, Captain Marvel is an entertaining new part of the saga.
  10. Sauvage / Wild
    What is interesting about Sauvage is that it shows how savagely boring Leo’s life is, quite a lot of the time.
  11. Hannah
    It is a haunting portrait of emotional undeadness.
  12. What They Had
    The script, inspired by Chomko’s grandparents’ marriage, throws up plenty of authentic-looking observations of life with Alzheimer’s.
  13. The Hole in the Ground
    It always finds new, invariably cinematic ways to nudge us towards its final leap into the abyss. Cronin feels like a real find for our especially insecure moment.
  14. Foxtrot
    Foxtrot is a movie from Israeli writer-director Samuel Maoz that is structurally fascinating yet also structurally flawed: its accumulations of ambiguity and mystery are jettisoned by a whimsical final reveal.
  15. Fighting with My Family
    Comedy and irony are not allowed to encroach on the film’s upbeat message, and the drama doesn’t reach out beyond a wrestling fanbase.
  16. Apollo 11
    The result is a stunning project of historical preservation – no narration, no cutaway interviews, no recreations, just original material synced with some music and the occasional diagram.
  17. The Competition
    It’s clear that they want to run it as meritocratically as possible, but what’s interesting is how the criteria for what talent is and who gets to judge it come up for debate.
  18. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
    It’s a conventional film in many ways but one that slowly and effectively builds to a remarkably rousing climax, displaying an act of overwhelming ingenuity that’s hard to deny.
  19. Cold Pursuit
    Even without Liam Neeson’s bizarre promotional “rape revenge” anecdote, this violent movie would leave a weird taste in the mouth, lumbered as it is with odd sub-Coen, sub-Tarantino stylings.
  20. Skid Row Marathon
    Undeniably uplifting, even if the string-laden score strains too hard to tweak the tear ducts, this US-made documentary tracks a running group of recovering addicts and paroled convicts who train for marathons together.
  21. Capernaum
    There is passion and compassion here, and Labaki’s film brings home what poverty and desperation mean, and conversely what love and humanity mean.
  22. On the Basis of Sex
    On the Basis of Sex is a solid, often impassioned film, but too often its worst instincts take over, and cliches stack up faster than legal documents.
  23. Paddleton
    Duplass and his co-writer, director Alex Lehmann, deliver this strange concoction – an improv bromance mixed with a tragic love story – with delicacy.
  24. An Elephant Sitting Still
    Hu provides no easy resolutions, and evidently found none himself. This epic of futility will have to stand as an epitaph for an extremely promising career cut short.
  25. The Aftermath
    It is more of a holiday romance and the well-intentioned performances lead nowhere.
  26. Varda by Agnès
    Two hours in this director’s company is a pleasure.
  27. Piranhas
    Giovannesi’s movie is watchable enough, but often looks like a smoothed-out, planed-down version of Garrone’s Gomorrah: Gomorrah without the rough edges, like a classy television version.
  28. Instant Family
    Instant Family retains the obvious appeal of watching basically nice people attempt a fundamentally decent thing for a few hours. The shamelessly optimistic finale may even leave you with something in your eye, dammit.
  29. Piercing
    It all works pretty well until the abrupt ending lets all the air out of the balloon. The dream-team pairing of Abbott and Wasikowska, two of the most interesting, subtle and risk-loving performers of their generation, is a huge compensation.
  30. The Operative
    Audiences may come to this film expecting the conventional pleasures of a spy thriller – excitement, tension, suspense – along with the additional values associated with the very best of the genre: character nuance, emotional complexity, plausible human dilemma. The Operative utterly defeats all of these hopes, chiefly in being at all times extremely boring.
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