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. Mildred Pierce
    For its control of narrative, its photography of the vanished suburban California of the 1940s, and for its compelling central performance from Crawford, Michael Curtiz’s noir thriller is utterly gripping.
  2. Au Revoir les Enfants
    It remains breathtakingly good. There is a miraculous, unforced ease and naturalness in the acting and direction; it is classic movie storytelling in the service of important themes.
  3. Top Hat
    Top Hat reflects a transatlantic kind of universe, the Brit dimension absorbed into American waspy class, and sweetened with some mannered comedy; this was a Hollywood that loved PG Wodehouse.
  4. The Seventh Seal
    Ingmar Bergman's dark masterpiece effortlessly sees off the revisionists and the satirists; it is a radical work of art that reaches back to scripture, to Cervantes and to Shakespeare to create a new dramatic idiom of its own.
  5. Dear Comrades!
    It is a passionate drama of fear and rage.
  6. Residue
    Residue is a fleeting and haunting lament for what is lost to gentrification, and other tolls on black life in America. But at the same, it’s exhilarating and monumental, laced with the sensation that we’re discovering a bold and sensitive new voice.
  7. Children of Heaven
    This is a pellucid and gentle film, made with the simplicity and grace of a children's tale and yet its humour, emotional clarity and directness speak directly to adults and children alike - and the pre-teen principals shoulder an adult burden of performance.
  8. The Duke
    What a lovely, rousing, finally moving film this is.
  9. Limbo
    What a thoroughly wonderful sophomore feature from the British director Ben Sharrock – witty, poignant, marvellously composed and shot, moving and even weirdly gripping.
  10. Small Axe: Lovers Rock
    McQueen’s compositional sense is a marvel; the movie’s period and location is evoked with masterly skill, and the romance is wonderful. What a cure for lockdown depression.
  11. Small Axe: Mangrove
    As with McQueen’s previously premiered Small Axe film, Lovers Rock, there is real fervour and real meaning here: it is film-making with visceral commitment and muscular storytelling.
  12. Small Axe: Red, White and Blue
    Boyega carries the film with a compelling authority of his own.
  13. Chimes at Midnight
    Playing Falstaff might have been Welles’s creative and physical destiny: in the character he found a dignity and sensuality in his, by then, overweight form. The confidence and panache of his staging is a treat.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    8½
    8 1/2 is probably the most potent movie about film-making, within which fantasy and reality are mixed without obfuscation, and there's a tough argument that belies Fellini's usual felicitous flaccidity.
  15. Battleship Potemkin
    Eisenstein's film still has a hypnotic urgency.
  16. Black Narcissus
    The co-directors created from Rumer Godden's novel an extraordinary melodrama of repressed love and Forsterian Englishness - or rather Irishness - coming unglued in the vertiginous landscape of South Asia.
  17. Guys and Dolls
    The face-off between two of the biggest legends in American pop culture, Sinatra and Brando, is something to be relished, although the roles are perhaps a little too atypical for each for the pairing itself to be legendary as the individuals. But still, what a joy it always is.
  18. Meet Me in St. Louis
    An unmissable big-screen experience.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Get Carter
    Get Carter has as much value as a piece of social history as it does as a thriller.
  20. Quo Vadis, Aida?
    There’s a real tragic power in this almost unbearably brutal and shocking movie from writer-director Jasmila Žbanić.
  21. The Lady Vanishes
    A pleasure.
  22. Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
    The lack of awareness of this event is another tragic example of black history being ignored. Only this time the record survived, and now we all get to share in it.
  23. Flee
    This animated documentary from Danish film-maker Jonas Poher Rasmussen is an irresistibly moving and engrossing story, whose emotional implications we can see being absorbed into the minds of the director and his subject, almost in real time.
  24. Violation
    Building to a remorseless climax, Sims-Fewer and co-writer/director Dusty Mancinelli brilliantly, and times almost unwatchably, overhaul the rape-revenge movie as something far more realistic, traumatised and noxious.
  25. Petite Maman
    Céline Sciamma’s beautiful fairytale reverie is occasioned by the dual mysteries of memory and the future: simple, elegant and very moving.
  26. To Catch a Thief
    Hitchcock's superbly insouciant crime caper from 1955 must surely be one of the last movies in which the American super-rich are indulged so extravagantly and adoringly – the kind of people who stub their cigarettes out in fried eggs.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Husbands and Wives
    Allen's best film for some time. As an examination of middle-aged, middle-class Manhattan mores, in fact, it is well nigh unbeatable. [22 Oct 1992, p.6]
    • The Guardian
    • 68 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    I Confess
    In the work of someone so exhaustively appreciated as Hitchcock, you wouldn't expect to find forgotten masterpieces but I Confess is one. It might never catch fire, but it smoulders gloriously.
  29. Sisters with Transistors
    Lisa Rovner’s superb documentary pays a deeply deserved, seldom-expressed tribute to the female composers, musicians and inventors from the brief history of electronic music.
  30. Licorice Pizza
    It’s such a delectable film: I’ll be cutting myself another slice very soon.
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