The Guardian's Scores

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:
6601 movie reviews
  1. What this by-the-numbers approach lacks in artistry it makes up for in an avalanche of facts.
  2. It’s a slight film at times but one that builds to a crescendo of emotion.
  3. Alita: Battle Angel is a film with Imax spectacle and big effects. But for all its scale, it might end up being put on for 13-year-olds as a sleepover entertainment. It doesn’t have the grownup, challenging, complicated ideas of Ghost in the Shell. A vanilla dystopian romance.
  4. A very cinematic spatial impossibility is conjured up by Robitel as he allows the audience to ponder how exactly these rooms are supposed to fit together. The film has a vicious streak of throwaway black comedy.
  5. All the fire and lifeblood of this idea has been sucked out and we are left with something bland.
  6. Its wild nature won’t be to everyone’s taste, but that’s sort of the point. It’s not a film that cares if you find these women charming or likable – it just cares that you believe them.
  7. The combination of WTF casting and glaring technical limitation proves so distracting you can barely focus on the script’s new intel.
  8. There’s clearly a more nuanced drama to be made from this story but given the scale, there’s still a lot here to praise.
  9. Sometimes the shagginess of the film can make it feel a bit slight and at times it does work better as a concentrated character study, but it’s such a joy to spend this time with McCarthy, drunkenly scheming and grumbling, that it’s hard to complain.
  10. There’s something so constructed and suffocating about watching a tried and tested formula not working, the over-sentimental string-pulling on show for all to see.
  11. It would be difficult to invest in if not for its two main stars who work hard to elevate the overly engineered plot, filling in the emotional gaps left by the haphazard script.
  12. Gilroy avoids the ghoulish extremes of Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals and offers up a believably pretentious battleground. He’s as invested in crafting a fully fleshed art world as he is in creating a full-on horror film and while the two often blend well, at other times, his concoction is far less effective.
  13. The second Lego Movie is even better than the original: a sophisticated new adventure that gives us a new look at how the universality of the Lego universe was more gendered than we thought.
  14. It’s a movie that rescues the tired zombie trope – without insisting on metaphor or satire.
  15. If gym buff Henry Cavill really is quitting the role in the movies, as has been rumoured, the film-makers could do worse than to follow the direction here, opening a vacancy for a skinny, long-haired Superman with an earnest hipstery vibe that screams Adam Driver.
  16. The Breaker Upperers is Sami and Van Beek’s show through and through. The film coasts off the energy and rapport of this affable pair, whose smart-mouthed performances are full of pep and fizz. What they lack in wit they compensate for with sheer likability.
  17. A truly terrible Working Girl knock-off.
  18. As a drama, it’s frustratingly insubstantial, failing to provide enough of an emotional centre or a convincing payoff.
  19. Kidman fearlessly commits to the filth of it all, whether it’s drunkenly fighting off her daughter’s sleazy boyfriend or jerking off a bed-ridden informant, but her radical transformation and some timeframe trickery can’t mask a plot that feels rather empty.
  20. Nadia is shown always surrounded by crowds, almost crushed by them. But her utter loneliness is heartbreaking.
  21. The job itself is bafflingly dull.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Each assassination sequence is so ridiculously protracted and inefficiently constructed that it would make a good running gag if the violence wasn’t the one thing the film seemed to take seriously.
  22. The cinema calendar is chockablock with faulty efforts built around perfectly serviceable ideas, but realized without a modicum of distinction. Serenity offers the less-common inverse: a magnificently terrible idea, executed to perfection.
  23. IO
    Too measured and sedate for a post-apocalyptic thriller, yet too barren for a Christopher Nolan-style space and time travel epic, IO appears most akin to The Martian in that it focuses primarily on one person’s grit and resourcefulness to endure and grow plants in an unforgiving place.
  24. There is something visionary in this film.
  25. There is humanity and complexity in this welcome movie, as well as muscular power and unreconciled anger.
  26. Like so many of Shyamalan’s adventures, Glass starts strongly and fizzles, a dramatic droop which is initially camouflaged by the escalating grandiosity of visual rhetoric, something febrile and high-concept that is visionary in everything except having vision.
  27. There are moments of crushing emotional weight but as the film progresses, they start to carry less power.
  28. It is a finely constructed drama, avoiding stuffiness without slipping into camp territory and while diehard historians might disapprove, everyone else will be supremely entertained.
  29. This extraordinary story has unfortunately been turned into a handsomely produced but laborious, drawn-out and dramatically inert movie.

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