The Guardian's Scores

For 6,576 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:
6576 movie reviews
  1. Temple's film is refreshingly free of cliché. A very heady experience.
  2. It's made with gusto, but there's little dramatic interest for non-enthusiasts.
  3. This is a great-looking movie with a sure sense of time and place; it is obviously a personal, and in fact, autobiographical work about Assayas's own youth. But for all its flair, I came away dissatisfied at its colossal self-indulgence and creamy complacency, and the way historical perspective and meaning are permitted to dissolve in its sunlit nostalgia.
  4. What stands out is the animation. The microcosmic woodland world is luminous and detailed, and there's a nice disconnect of scale whereby humans appear as lumbering, slow-motion giants.
  5. This is less a caper than a trudge; a linear adventure that proceeds in fits and starts, with few surprises and fewer laughs. There's barely even a hangover.
  6. Blue Is the Warmest Colour really is an outstanding film and the performances from Exarchopoulos and Séydoux make other people's acting look very weak.
  7. Venus In Fur is a playful if occasionally heavy-handed jeu d'ésprit on the subject of sexual role-play, the games we all play, illusion and reality, and directing as a sexual act.
  8. This is a fine film, which cements Barnard's growing reputation as one of Britain's best film-makers.
  9. It is an intricate and often brilliant drama, with restrained and intelligent performances; there is an elegantly patterned mosaic of detail, unexpected plot turns, suspenseful twists and revelations.
  10. If it is an exercise in style … well, what style. With its retro-chic connoisseurship and analogue era rock, this is a brilliant haute-hippy homage.
  11. The Immigrant is certainly different: but Gray seems to run out of ideas and the film is shapeless and unsatisfying.
  12. It is a typically calm, lucid drama, presented in the director's unforced, cinematic vernacular and attractively and sympathetically acted.
  13. This movie looks and feels superb, it is pure couture cinema. But there is also a excess of richness and bombast and for all its sleekness I felt that the spark of emotion was being hidden, and there is a kind of frustration in the operatic sadness.
  14. Scenes have a habit of stopping at any second, with or without whopping soundtrack.
  15. A strained jeu d'ésprit which is smug, precious, carelessly constructed, emotionally negligible, and above all fantastically annoying. It's a terrible waste of real acting talent.
  16. There's the frustrating sense of ideas bubbling too low beneath the surface, of mordant jokes serving as an end rather than a means.
  17. This hoary, hackneyed old cop-opera...is served with such relish that the fun proves infectious.
  18. Denis's drama intrigues more than it actually delivers...Sleight of hand is all well and good. But sooner or later a film must pay up.
  19. Franco's As I Lay Dying is a worthwhile movie, approached in an intelligent and creative spirit. The ensemble work from the actors is generally very strong, with a star turn from Nelson as the prematurely aged patriarch, and the story is presented lucidly and confidently.
  20. Redford delivers a tour de force performance: holding the screen effortlessly with no acting support whatsoever.
  21. 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.
  22. It is put together with technical competence, but is entirely cliched and preposterous, and it implodes into its own fundamental narrative implausibility.
  23. This is a sweet-natured, but essentially undemanding film from Kore-eda.
  24. The film functions as clammy thriller as well as poetic agitprop.
  25. The Congress contains tricks aplenty and ideas in abundance. The problem comes in herding these scattered, floating elements towards a satisfying whole.
  26. Only God Forgives will, understandably, have people running for the exits, and running for the hills. It is very violent, but Winding Refn's bizarre infernal creation, an entire created world of fear, really is gripping. Every scene, every frame, is executed with pure formal brilliance.
  27. Director Hugh Hartford does not patronise his stars, although perhaps there is something too gently celebratory and obviously feelgood about the film. These dynamic table-tennis stars put the rest of us to shame.
  28. In the Fog is an intense, slow-burning and haunting drama.
  29. Brilliantly written, terrifically acted, superbly designed and shot; it's a sweet, sad, funny picture about the lost world of folk music which effortlessly immerses us in the period.
  30. It's a film which fatally fails to hold your focus: events seem both predictable and mumbled; the monochrome looks grubby, the splashes of colour and blood joke shop cheap.

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