The Guardian's Scores

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For 6,581 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: 2,495 out of 6581
  2. Mixed: 3,767 out of 6581
  3. Negative: 319 out of 6581
6581 movie reviews
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  1. The Stranger
    François Ozon’s lustrously beautiful and superbly realised monochrome version of Albert Camus’s novella L’Etranger has an almost supernaturally detailed sense of period and place. It amounts to a passionate act of ancestor worship in honour of a renowned French artwork, though by making changes that bring a contemporary perspective on the book’s themes of empire and race – changes that include a critique of the original text – this adaptation perhaps loses some of its source material’s brutal, heartless power and arguably some of the title’s meaning.
  2. Pompei: Below the Clouds
    It is an intensely disquieting, utterly distinctive film and a superb final panel to his triptych.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    His Girl Friday
    With great verbal athleticism, the film earns its reputation as one of the fastest-talking comedies ever made.
  4. Little Trouble Girls
    This is an utterly absorbing and outstandingly acted film.
  5. Midwinter Break
    The film creates space for Hinds and Manville to give substantial, intimate, complex performances of the kind that most movies (of whatever sort) do not allow their leads, and Manville in particular is very moving.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Hard Boiled
    The seamless gun choreography is hypnotic in its fluidity, more akin to dance sequences than deadly shoot-outs – never was the phrase "bullet ballet" more accurately applied.
  7. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
    Jane Schoenbrun unveils a very enjoyable display of transformative ecstasy and submissive rapture, treating us to a bizarre pop-cultural black mass of fiercely believed-in trash and kink.
  8. Days and Nights in the Forest
    Ray's language of cinema is a kind of miraculous vernacular, all his own. It has mystery, eroticism and delight.
  9. Fatherland
    Here is an impossibly elegant, poised historical vignette whose brevity and control can hardly contain its characters’ personal and historical pain.
  10. The French Connection
    The final moments of The French Connection are a powerful, even magnificent repudiation of the modern piety of redemption and sympathy. It is a stunningly nihilist ending, one to set alongside Polanski's Chinatown.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Conversation
    The Conversation is an immaculate thriller, a study in paranoia and loneliness, long in gestation, partly inspired by Antonioni's Blow-Up, and released as the Watergate scandal was unfolding.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Wages of Fear (1953)
    The inspired calculation of action and agonised human reaction is irresistible and inescapable. It is a film that leaves the audience shattered and exhausted.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Annie Hall
    In Annie Hall, Allen again writes, directs and stars with Diane Keaton in a remarkable recreation of a spent love affair, which is both sad and hysterically funny. A film which sticks close to the cutting edge of love, and darts about daringly trying to make philosophical sense of it, is bound to be flawed. This one is, because Allen tried to do in 93 minutes what Proust needed 11 volumes for: to resolve life, love and the passing of both.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Mary Poppins
    Tomlinson is the great heart of the movie, the warmth to Andrews’ splinter of ice, who, while sustaining the film’s line in jokey verbosity, still manages to be moving.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Killing Fields
    Roland Joffé's 1984 masterwork is a solid piece of historical film-making, capturing factual detail without sacrificing fine storytelling.
  16. The Hidden Fortress
    The comedy co-exists with a dark view of life's brevity, and Kurosawa devises exhilarating setpieces and captivating images. Arthouse classics aren't usually as welcoming and entertaining as this.
  17. Mad Max
    Mad Max has always radiated an otherworldly vibe, a slightly sickly sensation that something at its core is fundamentally wrong.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Three Colors: White
    The film specialises as much in a kind of ironic gallows humour as in laughter pure and simple, but bitterness is also avoided - which is a small miracle in itself considering the subject matter and the setting.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Midnight Cowboy
    This is really Schlesinger's achievement. He has caught on film a slice of America as well, if not better, than one had any right to expect.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Dr. No
    The other is a scene, improvised on the set, when Bond does a double take on seeing Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington (recently stolen from London's National Gallery) in Dr No's palatial living room. It's the funniest moment in any Bond picture and one of cinema's great art jokes.
  21. From Russia with Love
    It may seem grainy and fusty compared to the all-action tongue-in-cheek spectaculars that came later, but it's the Bond closest to my heart.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Reds
    An engrossing, beautifully filmed and remarkably balanced portrait of a fascinating moment in history, cleverly enhanced by the intercutting of real-life documentary interviews. Reds is everything a historian could want in a movie.
  23. Breaking Away
    The film is fun and stirring; a robust portrait of youth at the crossroads and a bittersweet salute to the town at its centre.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    You Only Live Twice
    What I can say for sure is You Only Live Twice is the Bond film I have seen most often and I have enjoyed the hell out it every single time.
  25. Escape from Alcatraz
    Dirty Harry director Don Siegel reunited with Clint Eastwood for this taut 1979 thriller about real-life bank robber Frank Morris, who led the one possibly successful (bodies were never found) escape attempt from the notorious maximum-security prison on San Francisco's Alcatraz Island.
  26. The Haunting
    From a potentially creaky, cliche-filled premise (a gaggle of stereotypes are invited to a spooky old house where all is not as it seems), director Robert Wise leads us on a brilliantly unsettling journey.
  27. Down by Law
    Down By Law is effortlessly laidback, superbly elegant. Jarmusch made it look easy.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    All the President's Men
    Despite the twists, turns and exceptionally complex detail of the Watergate scandal, All the President’s Men manages to make it both comprehensible and watchable – with a few flashy fictional touches to gussy up the facts.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Right Stuff
    There are moments of dramatic licence, but overall The Right Stuff is a terrific historical film about the space race: accurately reflective of a complex reality, beautifully filmed, and done with wit, energy and an impressive sense of balance. Top marks.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Gandhi
    With the help of his cinematographers, Billy Williams and Ronnie Taylor, Attenborough has produced a very beautiful-looking movie that is maybe a little too seductive for its own good. But Attenborough shows once again his skill in managing the big set-piece.
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