The Guardian's Scores

For 6,571 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:
6571 movie reviews
  1. There are some lovely playful moments: his favourite elf eats a magic shroom and grows to monstrous proportions. But there is a lot of padding and the decision to stick with the book’s rhyming scheme becomes annoying.
  2. Interestingly the story, despite the classic music-biopic tropes that Mangold did so much to popularise, does not conform to the classic rise-fall-learning-experience-comeback format. It’s all rise, but troubled and unclear. You might not buy Chalamet’s Dylan at first; I didn’t, until that Guthrie bedside scene. There is amazing bravado in this performance.
  3. Alas, you have to sit through a lot of turgid Bible studies dramatisations of bits of scripture to get to the good stuff.
  4. This documentary includes witty and insightful interviews with MI stalwarts like Thompson and Hugh Grant; it is a great pleasure to watch and will send people back to Merchant Ivory films themselves, particularly perhaps their Quartet (1981) and The Golden Bowl (2000).
  5. A brilliant idea, brilliantly executed; hilarious, surreal and, yes, in its weird way, genuinely exciting.
  6. This is a very entertaining account of an actor who appeared to ascend, singly, to a higher plane than all others of the Hollywood golden age.
  7. It’s all smug pointing and nodding rather than anything smarter or more savage, its targets just and understandable – motherhood is hellish, husbands are thoughtless, wider society is misogynistic – but its overly didactic methods repetitive and ineffectual.
  8. It’s the kind of movie that could be charitably described as “educational”, though probably not as much as the magazine article that serves as its source material. At least we know Perry is true to history in one major way: today, as was the case back then, these women deserve better.
  9. A lucid, emotionally honest account of trauma that lies beneath the smiles of family photos and wedding videos.
  10. A sombre, steadfast argument for art’s life-giving properties.
  11. If you’re in the right headspace, the whole thing is quite entrancing. Still, it’s also an extremely rarefied sort of entertainment.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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”.
  16. 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.
  17. As fun as the boys are, this is Barrera’s show. She is tremendous, and seemingly having a tremendous amount of fun.
  18. 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.
  19. The moral maths seem calculated in advance to ensure a by-numbers outcome, but it’s an absorbing puzzle while it lasts.
  20. 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.
  21. It is all inoffensive enough, but weirdly lacking in anything genuinely passionate or heartfelt, all managed with frictionless smoothness and algorithmic efficiency.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. The film ends with a terrifying question about the fate of one of the women. It spreads an existential chill.
  25. 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.
  26. 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.
  27. It’s carried by a winning performance from Hasna.
  28. 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.
  29. 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.
  30. The stakes here are too low and so is the entertainment value.

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