The Guardian's Scores

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For 6,573 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 2.3 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: 2,491 out of 6573
  2. Mixed: 3,763 out of 6573
  3. Negative: 319 out of 6573
6573 movie reviews
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    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Man Bites Dog
    The result would be hilarious if it weren't for its grisly and often deliberately pointed subject matter. There seems little to do but to laugh or retch. The fact that you may well do both at the same time is probably the film's intention. It has a serious point to make about the media's complicity in violence. But, in making it, it may well defeat its own ends with too many absurdist touches. [14 Jan 1993, p.8]
    • The Guardian
  2. The Muppet Christmas Carol
    Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy are joined by Caine as a hilarious Scrooge in this irresistibly sweet musical adaptation of Dickens’ festive tale.
  3. Bram Stoker's Dracula
    This Dracula isn’t from Coppola’s great 70s/80s period, but it has a melodramatic and operatic energy and draws on the look and feel of Hollywood’s pre-Code salaciousness and the silent movie madness of Nosferatu – though the expressionist shadows are blood-red, not black.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    1492: Conquest of Paradise
    The New World is a disaster, moans Queen Isabella. Yes, that's about right.
  5. Romper Stomper
    A young Russell Crowe is spellbinding in this ugly but unforgettable film that remains hard-hitting and shockingly violent more than two decades on.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Glengarry Glen Ross
    Few contemporary writers for the stage, TV and cinema have come close to David Mamet for the quality, quantity and variety of their work. Among its peaks, and characteristic of his highly individual ear for American demotic at its most creatively and colourfully obscene, is Glengarry Glen Ross.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Husbands and Wives
    Allen's best film for some time. As an examination of middle-aged, middle-class Manhattan mores, in fact, it is well nigh unbeatable. [22 Oct 1992, p.6]
    • The Guardian
    • 45 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
    Fire Walk With Me is not just an artistic triumph in its own right, it’s the key to the entire Twin Peaks universe...Lynch’s unsung masterwork.
  9. A League of Their Own
    It’s a great piece of Hollywood confectionery, and you might well find yourself choking up a little at the end.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Light Sleeper
    The cast is skillfully alert and Schrader's vision is unencumbered either by sentiment or cynicism.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Porco Rosso
    The plot is hardly the point here - the animation is delightful, colourful and detailed and the flying sequences in seaplanes as old-fashioned as this style of animation are exhilarating.
  12. Until the End of the World
    The scenes of artistic, scientific and communal triumph were significant. The isolated, solipsistic anger of each character, lost in their own identity loop, seemed like a perfect analogy for the conflicts in eastern Europe in the mid-1990s.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bugsy
    The man himself would have tried to hoodwink you into thinking he was a decent guy. Bugsy the movie follows suit.
  14. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse
    The greatest ever making-of documentary.
  15. The Double Life of Veronique
    The elusiveness of the film is precisely the point: it is as beautiful and mysterious as a poem and its formal elegance and conviction are unarguable. What makes it a must-see, however, is the generous, unselfconscious passion of Jacob's performance as a young woman - two young women - in love.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Indian Runner
    What actually happens is generally predictable, degenerating into violence as the brothers test each other to the full. But the way the story is expressed is more original, since Penn lingers long enough on his scenes of rural heartland life to get more out of them than would be vouchsafed by your average American family saga. [28 Nov 1991]
    • The Guardian
  17. Point Break
    Point Break is a freaky mix of Dog Day Afternoon and Big Wednesday; bank robbing meets surfing.
  18. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
    Dodgy history and dodgier accents, but Kevin Costner's medieval romp still has some magic – and shouldn't be judged on the weakness of its imitators.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bride of Re-Animator
    The first movie was a real tough act to follow but Yuzna - who produced the first instalment - has a real handle on the necessary sick OTT humour. [18 Oct 2003, p.83]
    • The Guardian
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Misery
    Reiner’s film, the perfect 90-minuter, is sometimes a little stretched at 107 minutes. Nevertheless it maintains its tension well, plays enough tricks on us so that we don’t ever treat anything quite seriously and Goldman’s script has enough good lines and situations to keep one interested in exactly what is coming next.
  21. My Twentieth Century
    An elegant midsummer, end-century night’s dream of a film, with an elusive, gossamer lightness.
  22. Goodfellas
    Goodfellas is a compelling, black-comic nightmare.
  23. The Killer
    The Killer is quite a spectacle and, incidentally, much more pessimistic than Sirk.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Blind Fury
    It was not clear to me why Phillip Noyce, the Australian director of the fine Backroads and Newsfront, should want to make this comedy thriller as his first American picture. But possibly his vision was impaired where the script was concerned. [12 Jul 1990]
    • The Guardian
  25. Cinema Paradiso
    If ever a movie came from the heart, it was Giuseppe Tornatore's nostalgic Cinema Paradiso (1988) now getting a rerelease to celebrate its silver jubilee.
    • 13 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Ski Patrol
    Ski Patrol is produced by Paul Maslansky, who was responsible for the Police Academy series. Substitute a ski lodge in Utah for the well-known Academy and you have the film in one the kind of baleful adolescent material that would knock the warts straight off Cromwell's face. [14 Jun 1990]
    • The Guardian
  27. Akira
    Akira’s strangeness is very startling and sometimes bewildering. But there is a thanatonic rapture to its vision of a whole world ending and being reborn as something else.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Steel Magnolias
    This film is a true story and a brilliant depiction of friendship that manages to be witty, warm, uplifting, and, just when you thought you were safe, utterly heartbreaking. It’s also frequently laugh-out-loud funny.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mystery Train
    The film is beautifully shot in saturated colour by Robby Muller, the cinematographer of Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas and many other remarkable looking films, but has one of those minimalist screenplays that drives one mad since nobody says anything which makes much sense at all. Its direction seems to ask us to look past the characters for significance, while enjoying their offbeat lifestyles. [07 Dec 1989]
    • The Guardian
  30. Friendship's Death
    There’s a fair bit of posturing and radical chic happening in this movie and it’s sometimes a little glib. But the droll double-act chemistry between Paterson and Swinton is unexpectedly great, especially considering the enigmatically childlike and lovably humourless demeanour that Swinton often projects.
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