The Guardian's Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 2,521 out of 6656
  2. Mixed: 3,814 out of 6656
  3. Negative: 321 out of 6656
6656 movie reviews
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  1. Weekend of a Champion
    The movie has some real archival value and the simple juxtaposition of Polanski and Stewart – the oddest couple in Cannes, surely – has a surreal impact. But I wonder if there isn't something a little bit placid and self-satisfied about the film, which is paced remarkably slowly, given the subject matter.
  2. Everyday
    A valuable, meticulously observed and wonderfully acted social-realist feature about a family under pressure.
  3. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
    What lets the movie down is its heart, or lack thereof. The reprise of the Games introduces new adversaries (and some allies) but has exactly the same dynamic as in the first movie.
  4. How to Survive a Plague
    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.
  5. Love Tomorrow
    Frankly, the performances and line-readings are uneven. The couple's journey through night-time London is interesting: both have a painful past that they are at first reluctant to discuss, especially Maya, but these disclosures are not dramatically developed in any really satisfying way.
  6. Pandora's Promise
    This film certainly chops up a few sacred cows. Could it be that the anti-wind brigade will have to make common cause with climate change scientists?
  7. Paradise: Hope
    The love story – and it can be called that – between the doctor and Melanie is presented with candour and tenderness. There is a new humanity to Seidl's work; it could be his best film so far.
  8. Milius
    Fantasy invigorates reality in this fond retrospective of the director who embodied the renegade heart of 70s Hollywood.
  9. A Touch of Sin
    This is a bitter, jagged, disaffected drama, pessimistic about China, pessimistic about the whole world. One characters asks another if he ever feels like travelling abroad. "Why would I?" he replies. "Everywhere is broke. Foreigners come here now." Jia Zhang-ke's movie gives us a brutal unwelcome.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Last Vegas
    Last Vegas is a good-natured bimbo of a movie, it'll do just about anything to please you, though luckily that includes delivering the 20 big laughs you feel you're owed (unlike The Hangovers), and gently jerking a tear or two. You enjoy it in spite of yourself.
  11. Cutie and the Boxer
    Alternately rueful and whimsical documentary.
  12. Drinking Buddies
    It's an intriguing and distinctive story, soberly told.
  13. Gloria
    Gloria is a sad, painful romantic story.
  14. Child's Pose
    Calin Peter Netzer's Child's Pose is a gripping new drama from Romania and another demonstration of how that country's new wave is developing a distinctive kind of real-time slice-of-life cinema with characterisation in extreme, pitiless closeup.
  15. Short Term 12
    There's a too-cute-to-be-true ending to this US indie movie by the much-acclaimed young director Destin Cretton; I couldn't buy it, and found myself wondering if I had kept the receipt for the rest of the film too.
  16. Faust
    This Faust is part bad dream, part music-less opera: sometimes muted and numb, though with hallucinatory flashes of fear.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Running from Crazy
    The only new titbit of information for Hemingway-philes is that none of his grandchildren read his books.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Counselor
    Working as a screenwriter for the first time after years of seeing his novels successfully adapted to the screen, McCarthy is stretching his powers of language and mood – and, all too quickly, stretching his slim story and cast of characters way too far.
  19. The Taste of Money
    It is a strange slo-mo farce, well directed, highly sexualised – shallow, but sleek.
  20. Ender's Game
    The movie's apocalyptic finale indicates that it's bitten off considerably more than it can chew in terms of ideas, but it looks good, and the story rattles along.
  21. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2
    Fortunately, the animators get stuck in: the foodscape Flint's party passes through is again wittily realised, each frame sprinkled with colourful hybrid creations, from "flamangos" to "shrimpanzees".
  22. Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa
    Sacha Baron Cohen's "Borat" set the bar very high for this type of narrative-driven prankery, and in comparison, Bad Grandpa comes across as disjointed and aimless.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wolf Children
    Telling the story through the eyes of the harried, bereaved but indomitable mother gives this calm, funny, only occasionally schmaltzy family film a maturity Twilight never reached.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Muscle Shoals
    A stubborn charmer whose life was a magnet for tragedy, Hall is the emotional centre not only of the Muscle Shoals sound but of this film.
  25. Closed Circuit
    It plays as cut-price Le Carré; a recording of a recording of superior films. The picture is fuzzy, and the plot becomes garbled.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Thor: The Dark World
    No amount of tool-wielding heroism can save The Dark World from being a startlingly unbalanced movie.
  27. Saving Mr. Banks
    Saving Mr Banks is an indulgent, overlong picture which is always on the verge of becoming a mess. Thankfully, reliable old Tom Hanks snaps his fingers and – spit, spot – everything more or less gets cleared away.
  28. Seduced and Abandoned
    It's a guilty-pleasure romp of a documentary, filmed at last year's Cannes film festival, all about the gorgeous, deadly and heartbreaking business of cinema itself.
  29. One Chance
    The movie is strongest is when it strips away the facts and focuses on the emotional notes.
  30. Belle
    Amma Asante's second feature tells Dido's extraordinary story in handsome, if formulaic, style.
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