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. Walkabout
    Roeg revels in the hallucinatory, creating a wilderness that exists as much in the mind as it does the land.
  2. Atlantics
    Atlantique may not be perfect, but I admired the way that Diop did not simply submit to the realist mode expected from this kind of material, and yet neither did she go into a cliched magic-realist mode, nor make the romantic story the film’s obvious centre. Her film has a seductive mystery.
  3. Wake in Fright (1971)
    It comes from the age of Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange, but none of those movies can match the sheer hardcore shock of the Australian New Wave nightmare Wake in Fright from 1971.
  4. The Green Knight
    David Lowery’s complex, visually sumptuous and uncommercial tale of Arthurian legend revels in upending expectations.
  5. The First Wave
    This remarkable film feels like it could become a time capsule, showing future generations what it felt like in 2020 for those on the frontline.
  6. Five Easy Pieces
    This superbly composed film comes as close to perfection as it gets.
  7. From Here to Eternity
    I have to say that Clift's plot is far less compelling than Lancaster's and something of the zip goes when Frank Sinatra disappears from the action, sent to the stockade. But what a punch this movie still packs.
  8. Tea with the Dames
    I would have loved to hear a discussion on a wider range of issues, particularly #TimesUp, but with a film this much fun, it seems churlish to ask for anything else.
  9. The Salesman
    The Salesman is a well-crafted, valuable drama.
  10. Afternoons of Solitude
    Deeply caught up in decoding this tradition, perhaps Serra is too beholden to it. If only this admittedly riveting examination of dark human compulsions had found a way to also articulate the perspectives of the animals for whom the arena is a lethal experience.
  11. Dahomey
    It is an invigorating and enlivening film.
  12. Get Out
    Get Out is very creepy, very funny and as pitiless as a surgeon’s scalpel.
  13. 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.
  14. Song of the Sea
    Folky music and Studio Ghibli-level flights of eerie fancy are obvious pleasures, but even more subtle and entrancing is the way Moore and his team use echoed shapes to suggest hidden patterns in nature and parallels between the real and the mythical.
  15. Amy
    It is an overwhelming story, and despite everyone knowing the ending, it is as gripping as a thriller: Kapadia has fashioned and shaped it with masterly flair.
  16. Fiume o morte!
    This intriguing documentary from Croatian film-maker Igor Bezinović is partly a comic opera and partly a chilling message from the past.
  17. Birds of Passage
    In the most reductive way, it is another mafia story. But as with their previous film, it is the specificity that counts, and while certain genre tendencies prevent the narrative from truly unmooring, hardly a scene goes by without something fundamentally familiar being rendered in a unique fashion.
  18. Ash Is Purest White
    What does the ending of Ash Is Purest White mean — and what does its middle or beginning mean? I’m not sure. It feels like a gripping parable for the vanity of human wishes, and another impassioned portrait of national malaise.
  19. The Treasure
    Laughs emerge from the recognisable micro-horrors found in modern living, which, if the world was run in the way we all agree it should be run, wouldn’t exist.
  20. Night Will Fall
    This is an extraordinary record. But be warned. Once seen, these images cannot be unseen.
  21. The Rider
    This is a movie using non-professionals playing versions of themselves, and under Zhao’s patient, unintrusive directorial eye they appear to be inhabiting a kind of heightened documentary.
  22. Varda by Agnès
    Two hours in this director’s company is a pleasure.
  23. The Delinquents
    This is a deadpan comedy which strides off down its own confident, eccentric path, and actually the whole heist trope is subverted from the outset by the purely un-tense way the robbery is shown.
  24. Close Your Eyes
    It is a mysterious, digressive, long and baggily constructed film possessed of a distinctive richness and humanity, all about the balance between memory and forgetting which we all negotiate as we come to the end of our lives.
  25. A Canterbury Tale
    A Canterbury Tale may be the most loving and tender film about England ever made. It’s a picture that’s steeped in nature, in thrall to myth and history; a re-affirmation of the English character, customs and countryside from a time when many viewers may have wondered whether this underpinning had been kicked clean away.
  26. Eighth Grade
    Elsie Fisher is magnificent as a vulnerable teenager facing trouble at school and at home in Bo Burnham’s gripping drama.
  27. The Novice
    It’s hard to deny Fuhrman’s pinch-faced vehemence and the film’s hallucinatory verve.
  28. Let's Get Lost
    It's not exactly a documentary, more a lovingly-filmed homage, but some candid interview material allows scraps of Baker's story to emerge.
  29. Kiki's Delivery Service
    This sunny 1989 fantasy by master animator Hayao Miyazaki broaches the issue of female sexuality more boldly than any Western children’s movie would dare.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mona Lisa
    Ultimately, there is something trite at the centre of the movie, most especially in the overuse of Nat King Cole’s haunting Mona Lisa to suggest Tyson’s ambiguity and Hoskins’s puzzlement. But this is almost concealed by Tyson’s sense of desperation and Hoskins’s painful sincerity.
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