The Guardian's Scores

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For 6,585 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: 2,496 out of 6585
  2. Mixed: 3,770 out of 6585
  3. Negative: 319 out of 6585
6585 movie reviews
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  1. My Spy: The Eternal City
    There are some nice enough performances, particularly from Ken Jeong as JJ’s CIA boss and Anna Faris playing the high school deputy principal leading the choir trip. But tonally the movie is all over the place.
  2. The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat
    This is erratic storytelling, like a bunch of detached sketches and monologues, that leaves The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat making gestures towards the movie that it never really becomes. Let’s just hope we can see that movie some day.
  3. Nutcrackers
    The more accomplished the film-making becomes, the more we then expect the script to level up too.
  4. The Conjuring: Last Rites
    Wilson and Farmiga remain solidity incarnate, capable of enlivening even speculative spiritual dialogue. The film-making pulls no surprises out of the hat, though, and gives no indication that it would if it could.
  5. Eden
    It’s all too silly and the writing too hokey for us to keep up and by the end, truly care about who survives or not.
  6. The Platform 2
    The grindhouse thought experiments can be engaging, and a sign that the movie is more interested in speculative fiction than in preaching toward a single specific theme. But the movie rampages too quickly and carelessly to really dig into any of its characters.
  7. Matt and Mara
    Here is a toothless, aimless dramedy from Canada, a lo-fi excursion into nothing very interesting; it’s what would happen if Harry met Sally and maybe they weren’t meant to be lovers or even friends and were both a bit bland.
  8. Babygirl
    The film drifts along to a strangely implausible non-denouement with impermanent effects; she has all the backstory with work and family and he is weirdly blank in ways that don’t feel entirely intended.
  9. Hellboy: The Crooked Man
    No amount of budget could make up for the sputtering mess of a script, or the dead-on-the-inside expressions of the cast – apart from Rudolph who is consistently watchable.
  10. Duchess
    Marshall goes big on the use of freeze-frames, onscreen graphics deployed when introducing characters, and wink-wink meta jokes, all of which feel pretty tired and early noughties British crime drama by this point.
  11. Close to You
    As a movie, Close to You feels too unfocused, a major win and a welcome return for Page yet an opportunity squandered.
  12. Frankie Freako
    At least Sweeney has good enough comic timing to make the thinly written dialogue sound vaguely amusing; he’s also adept at making his many reaction shots exaggerated just enough to tickle without descending into outright mugging.
  13. Subservience
    If only the film were a little bit smarter and less predictable, it might have had a chance of becoming a cult classic.
  14. Things Will Be Different
    Despite an intriguing high-concept lo-fi premise, its oddities and uninteresting superfluities mean that it never really emerges from its self-imposed inertia and gloom.
  15. The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
    War of the Rohirrim is short on fiery floating eyeballs, wizards harnessing the power of the sun and ghost armies rising from caves – the kind of stuff you’d expect anime to go ham with, but perhaps not in director Kenji Kamiyama’s case.
  16. Pavements
    Intriguingly, but finally a bit frustratingly, Perry is running four ideas at once, a kind of cine-quadriptych with the plurality signalled by the title.
  17. Elton John: Never Too Late
    The film is bursting at the seams with archival photos, footage and interviews; not to mention outrageous polka dot and bedazzled costumes. The incredible access is expected since Never Too Late is produced by John’s husband and manager David Furnish, who co-directs alongside RJ Cutler. But perhaps that’s why it also feels so precious and tempered.
  18. The Penguin Lessons
    Weirdly, I felt that this odd film might have worked better if it was just about the lonely man and the penguin without the Argentinian tyranny – or just about the lonely man and the Argentinian tyranny without the penguin. The real non-CGI bird itself is very sweet.
  19. Bring Them Down
    In plot terms there is something unsubtle, unconvincing and even absurd in where it’s all heading.
  20. Apartment 7A
    James had impressed with her debut, the dementia horror Relic, but any of that film’s texture or creepiness has dissolved on a larger scale.
  21. The Cut
    The more British director Sean Ellis prods and provokes, the hokier it all gets, a film about cutting weight that could have benefited from a leaner edit.
  22. Cloud
    The final half-hour seems to be a neo-western style melee which seems to go on for ever. Odd … and unrewarding.
  23. Blink
    The film-makers never probe psyches very deeply, not even the parents’. It’s just one contemporary travelogue cliche after another, admittedly beautifully shot in super high definition.
  24. The Last of the Sea Women
    There is an important subject at the centre of this documentary from Korean-American film-maker Sue Kim, co-produced by Malala Yousafzai, but the film is finally let down by a bland and supercilious way of celebrating the women involved as a picturesque eco-feminist folk tradition, without actually tackling the hard questions their work is raising.
  25. The Life of Chuck
    Try as writer-director Mike Flanagan might, there’s something coldly unmoving about it all, a disjointed and dry-eyed tearjerker that never rises above Instagram caption philosophy.
  26. The Return
    Stripping the narrative of its gods and monsters, and almost two-thirds of the chapters, is great but the vacuum isn’t filled with much more than his two magnetic leads and consistently sumptuous cinematography. The Return is gorgeous to behold, but there just isn’t enough there.
  27. Shell
    Minghella doesn’t seem confident in what he’s really trying to make, his film as plainly, ploddingly shot as a daytime soap with an equally rubbishy score. If he’s trying to do a knowing carbon copy of a bottom shelf VHS horror, then he hasn’t gone far enough into studied pastiche to sell it as such.
  28. Without Blood
    Jolie also lays it on thick stylistically, as if compensating for a hollowness at her lavish, sepia-toned film’s core.
  29. Went Up the Hill
    Things eventually escalate, the pressure valve of pent-up emotions building and releasing. But it’s a long and demanding ride to get there, full of solemn looks and thousand-yard stares.
  30. Wolf Man
    The transformation scenes are passable – including time-honoured fingernail- detachment moments – but far inferior to comparable scenes devised long ago by John Landis or David Cronenberg. Those estimable performers Garner and Abbott look exposed by a film project that simply feels rushed and undeveloped.
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