The Guardian's Scores

For 6,656 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:
6656 movie reviews
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A self-assured gem constructed like the bowl of classic ramen the characters strive to cook: a collection of individual parts perfectly arranged.
  1. The happiness and innocence in this film are beyond compare.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    This is one of the finest films about the process of movie-making, a bleak, complex work that gives Travolta his most challenging role.
  2. An intriguing, disorientating 60s artefact.
  3. At just 72 minutes, this is a brief, intense feature: it’s possible that Wandel envisaged it as even shorter than it actually is, and perhaps its narrative tendons slacken a little after the initial spasm of horror. But what an incredible performance from Vanderbeque: an intuition of fear and pain and moral outrage that goes beyond acting.
  4. There’s real energy.
  5. There are some plausibility issues in Room, but this is a disturbing and absorbing film, shrewdly acted, particularly by Larson. It lets the audience in; it does not just let the nightmare stun them into submission. You make a real emotional engagement.
  6. 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.
  7. Admittedly some of these moments get a little gushy. Beyoncé has much to be thankful for and she spends a little too long doing the thanking, from her parents to her dancers to guests like Diana Ross. But there’s always another slab of concert action round the corner to jolt the whole show back to life.
  8. The film does not signpost the traditional twists and turns and dramatic reversals, but keeps a cool distance, letting us wonder if Sandra is guilty or not, and we are kept guessing until the end. It’s a lowkey, almost downbeat drama, but with something invigoratingly cerebral.
  9. Fallen Leaves is another of Kaurismäki’s beguiling and delightful cinephile comedies, featuring foot-tapping rock’n’roll. It’s romantic and sweet-natured, in a deadpan style that in no way undermines or ironises the emotions involved and with some sharp things to say about contemporary politics.
  10. Nebraska may not be startlingly new, and sometimes we can see the epiphanies looming up over the distant horizon; the tone is, moreover, lighter and more lenient than in earlier pictures like Sideways. But it is always funny and smart.
  11. It’s dynamic and intriguing, though the detail and the emotion can get lost in the splurge.
  12. It’s grim, unfussy and deeply moving.
  13. The “fascist” staging could have been hackneyed, but Loncraine carries it off superbly as the showcase for action-thriller noir.
  14. 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.
  15. The stunts are wildly impressive, especially the motorbike riders who sail through the air in a ball of flame, and the gunplay is unique, although I have never found the term “balletic” quite right for something so brutal and quick. It is all so bizarre that you have to enjoy it.
  16. It is a bravura debut from a young film-maker, proving that one can still make a movie for no money at a family member’s house and come away with a work of art, not just a calling card.
  17. It's a cool customer – the hip lingo and fast-talking characters all of a piece with its bebop score – but there's a scrupulous honesty to the story, too.
  18. Tatum manages to ground the viewer in his abject bewilderment and pain. It’s a instantly memorable performance in a haunting movie, one that I have carried with me in the hours since I’ve seen it. Perhaps that is the best thing I can say about this remarkable feature – for its viewers, as it is for its meticulously rendered subject, the disquiet lingers.
  19. Sachs’ approach is so humane, and his characters so fully rendered, that an agenda never announces itself; instead, Sachs’ worldview seeps into you. He’s that skilled a film-maker.
  20. Watched again now, I can respond more strongly to the heartfelt directness and empathy.
  21. The movie's disturbing labyrinthine story of murder and betrayal now looks like a fable by David Lynch: and the witty, charged dialogue between the leads shows that no screen couple, before or since, had as much chemistry as Bogart and Bacall.
  22. As activist Larry Kramer remarked, the movement had "its good cops and its bad cops", and there is a remarkable, angry, passionate funeral speech from campaigner Bob Rafsky that helped mobilise Act Up and awaken America's conscience.
  23. Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Loveless is a stark, mysterious and terrifying story of spiritual catastrophe: a drama with the ostensible form of a procedural crime thriller. It has a hypnotic intensity and unbearable ambiguity which is maintained until the very end.
  24. Everything in Showing Up is certainly valid, but I confess I thought it lacked some perspective on Lizzie’s life, and it is sometimes a bit studied and passionless, especially compared with Reichardt’s previous film, First Cow. But there is sympathy and charm and food for thought.
  25. Elvis is of course a tailor-made subject for Luhrmann, the Moulin Rouge director’s trademark bombast and razzle-dazzle so in tune with the singer’s rattle and roll, which comes through in both his biopic and now EPiC.
  26. The weird oppression and seediness of the times is elegantly captured, and Hoss coolly conveys Barbara's highly strung desperation.
  27. It’s a movie that rescues the tired zombie trope – without insisting on metaphor or satire.
  28. Museum is an oddly genial, garrulous film in many ways – rather like Güeros – and it doesn’t behave quite like a heist thriller, nor exactly like a coming-of-age comedy.

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