The Guardian's Scores

For 6,556 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:
6556 movie reviews
  1. A sombre, steadfast argument for art’s life-giving properties.
  2. If you’re in the right headspace, the whole thing is quite entrancing. Still, it’s also an extremely rarefied sort of entertainment.
  3. The drama sputters and fails to catch fire; it’s as if Gilford is far less interested in kindling things and prefers to just look at his pretty cast in a variety of lighting schemes from stark noontime sunglare to the golden hues of magic hour. That said, the toothsome cast is well worth watching, especially Plummer with his nervous smile and the incandescent Lindley.
  4. It is an interesting new Nosferatu for our age of pandemic fear, with some beautiful images and striking moments, particularly in the eerie moonlit hallucination sequence at the beginning, which makes the rest of the story feel slightly literal and self-conscious.
  5. The nature of the twist, together with the high volume score, some crowd-pleasing gotchas and some sinister vaping remind us that Conclave is a glossily transferred airport novel first and a deeper drama about the world of religion second.
  6. This documentary about [Moth's] life, directed by the actor Lucy Lawless, is a fascinating portrait of a woman who had two mottoes: “no regrets” and “don’t be boring”.
  7. It’s all more or less sufferable, and it may well keep young children quiet at Christmas … but we surely needed a higher joke content.
  8. As fun as the boys are, this is Barrera’s show. She is tremendous, and seemingly having a tremendous amount of fun.
  9. Dear Santa is like watching Bad Santa slowly turn into Elf, an unsatisfying attempt to be both naughty and nice, ending up as nothing instead.
  10. The moral maths seem calculated in advance to ensure a by-numbers outcome, but it’s an absorbing puzzle while it lasts.
  11. It is genuinely mind-boggling, and yet this unsatisfying, naive and fundamentally uncritical documentary, despite careful modern-day interviews with the participants, doesn’t get to grips either with the story’s implications or with the story itself.
  12. It is all inoffensive enough, but weirdly lacking in anything genuinely passionate or heartfelt, all managed with frictionless smoothness and algorithmic efficiency.
  13. Sweethearts thankfully avoids full predictability – a welcome relief, particularly in a film that embraces the rampant horniness of 18-year-olds. Even if you’ve suffered through the turkey dump, this one is a treat.
  14. What is still amazing is how brief an instant it was; in just a few years, the Beatles and their music would evolve into something completely different. A few years after that, they would break up, while still only in their 20s. An amazing split-second of cultural history.
  15. The film ends with a terrifying question about the fate of one of the women. It spreads an existential chill.
  16. All in all, this is a powerful example of a bricolage-like editing technique that relies heavily on exploiting the copyright laws around fair use to create a prismatic, provocative style of cinema that’s very 21st century.
  17. It never really feels like we’re on a journey anywhere we haven’t been before, with Spellbound far too bewitched with the past to create any of its own magic.
  18. It’s carried by a winning performance from Hasna.
  19. 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.
  20. There are some decent PG-rated thrills and scares for the preteen audience, but adults are unlikely to find it especially convincing, with clunky dialogue and a generic score letting down a solidly traditional spooky mystery.
  21. The stakes here are too low and so is the entertainment value.
  22. What an enjoyable spectacle it is.
  23. Strangely, this film keeps to the speed limit; it’s like Formula One with enhanced health and safety, slow-paced and a little low on adrenaline.
  24. C’est Pas Moi amuses – and discomfits.
  25. It’s a sincerely stupid idea executed sincerely, with seemingly complete buy-in from all involved that yes, this is a movie about a snowman with abs. I’ll take that type of brain freeze, for now.
  26. The film, with its clanging score, felt to me slightly tactless in its approach, like a Hollywood-ised version of a human interest story.
  27. Directors Stephen Maing and Brett Story give a shrewd, fly-on-the-wall picture of the divisions within the union itself, with the working-class members and people of colour uneasy with the white college-grad contingent who are very gung-ho about protesting and getting arrested, not quite realising that for black people this is to risk death.
  28. I last encountered the work of the Belgian artist and film-maker Johan Grimonprez in the documentary-reverie Double Take from 2009, which imagined an encounter between two Alfred Hitchcocks. Now in this fascinating and valuably informative film, he amplifies what he sees as the mood music that lay behind the assassination of the leftist Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961.
  29. The end result is so comically tawdry and silly you can’t but wonder if its all a bit of a tongue-in-cheek goof, a gag that Elizabeth Hurley at least seems to be in on, judging by her ripe, almost-winking performance.
  30. There are a couple of not-quite holes exactly, but slightly threadbare patches. More importantly, the narrative isn’t really the point; this is first and foremost a tense portrait of a toxic relationship, and a brutally compelling one at that.

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