The Guardian's Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 2,493 out of 6576
  2. Mixed: 3,764 out of 6576
  3. Negative: 319 out of 6576
6576 movie reviews
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  1. Origin
    The result is a film with urgency and heartfelt sympathy, but one which I couldn’t help thinking may have been better served as a documentary to focus more directly on the issues involved.
  2. A Life on the Farm
    The documentary’s director, Oscar Harding, explains that his grandfather was a neighbour of Carson’s in the wonderfully named village of Huish Champflower, and he was first shown A Life on the Farm age six. Stretching this curiosity of a man and his work into a full-length documentary is perhaps pushing it.
  3. Blood Flower
    As Blood Flower trudges towards its conclusion, the film turns out to be a lacklustre trauma-as-plot horror.
  4. Sympathy for the Devil
    If you were programming a season of the best of the worst from Nicolas Cage’s filmography – in other words, his most interesting/outlandish/crazed performances in low-budget films – this kooky thriller would certainly be a good candidate.
  5. Past Lives
    This heart-meltingly romantic and sad movie from Korean-Canadian dramatist and filmmaker Celine Song left me wrung out and empty and weirdly euphoric, as if I’d lived through an 18-month affair in the course of an hour and three-quarters.
  6. Hit Man
    Richard Linklater’s latest is a jaunty action comedy that spins its machine-tooled high concept like a bicycle wheel – sometimes with shrewd intent, sometimes for pure fun.
  7. The Beast
    The Beast may not add up to a cogent or thoroughgoing critique of all the ideas it invokes, but it’s such a luxurious cinematic experience; it’s created with such elan and attack, and the musical score amplifies its throb of fear.
  8. Man on the Run
    Interviews with various journalists, local law enforcers, politicians and FBI agents lay out the nitty-gritty of the story. Lashings of onscreen text spell out the statistics and figures, which is helpful. The caricatures of the various grifters are distractingly tacky, though, and somewhat lower the film’s tone.
  9. Kick Out!: The Newtown Neurotics Story
    Here’s a fascinating time-capsule of a documentary about an admittedly niche-interest band who achieved their most valuable cultural currency during the politically-charged 1980s, and who achieved a subsequent second act that achieves considerable emotional heft.
  10. Dalíland
    The cleverness of Kingsley’s performance is the twinkle in his eye that leaves you wondering whether Dalí has disappeared entirely up his own myth. How much of the eccentricity is a put-on, brazen self-publicity to maximise sales? Disappointingly, the script invents a fictional art school dropout to be our guide to Dalí’s universe.
  11. Once Upon a Time in Uganda
    It’s nice to see the old tension between selling out and staying pure never goes away in any corner of the film-making world.
  12. Swing and Sway
    Pessoa and Barbosa’s earnestness shines through. Swing and Sway may be a visually and politically derivative work, but it also serves as a beguiling pandemic time capsule.
  13. Outpost
    Initially performed with a slightly incongruous general chirpiness, the film then blazes over the top into a cartoonish frenzy. But otherwise it’s a well-conceived disintegration, with clear sight of the terrain, both outer and inner.
  14. No More Bets
    It is a shame that either Chinese authorities had a word, or producers decided to aim for brownie points by fitting No More Bets out as an anti-fraud public-messaging spot – because Ao Shen’s thriller is otherwise a snappily directed and intriguing entrée to the industry of online deception.
  15. Good Boy
    Both leads are good, but the ultra-controlled Løkke – with his poster-boy looks and too-timely smiles – is pivotal to stringing out the farce.
  16. Priscilla
    Coppola’s portrait is absorbing, especially in Priscilla’s child phase, and if it is less distinctive in its final section, as Priscilla becomes more briskly disillusioned and realistic about what to expect, then that is to be expected.
  17. The Killer
    It is all entertainingly absurd and yet the pure conviction and deadpan focus that Fassbender and Fincher bring to this ballet of anonymous professionalism makes it very enjoyable. And there are moments when the veneer of realism is disquieting.
  18. Maestro
    In the end, Cooper’s Maestro succeeds because it is candid about the sacrifices which art demands of its practitioners, and the sacrifices these practitioners demand of their families and partners
  19. Poor Things
    Everything in it – every frame, every image, every joke, every performance – gets a gasp of excitement.
  20. All of Us Strangers
    The film is an enormously satisfying and affecting experience.
  21. Choose Love
    It struggles to feel at all like a genuine story.
  22. Ferrari
    Cruz brings gall, spite and passion to the role of Laura, but there’s not much for Woodley to do in the thankless role of Lina. And Driver is a remote and unengaging paterfamilias. But no one could doubt the style with which Mann stages those race scenes, with their danger and horror.
  23. El Conde
    This is another powerful addition to Larraín’s movies about the ongoing agony of Chile, and the Chilean people’s struggle to confront the past, armed with the hammer and the sharpened stake.
  24. Comandante
    De Angelis offers some muscular film-making, with decent action sequences.
  25. Maigret
    Depardieu brings his natural charisma and watchful presence to the role, and he can bring off Maigret’s air of worldly, tolerant bemusement and distaste at the transparently guilty people he comes across.
  26. Passages
    In Passages the sex is the plot: the plot of all our lives.
  27. Sound of Freedom
    This is just a dull and badly acted movie.
  28. Cobweb
    Cobwebbed would be more accurate, perhaps: every detail is secondhand, if not downright hoary.
  29. Bobi Wine: The People's President
    It’s an intimate portrait combined with increasingly shocking footage as his opposition movement comes under attack.
  30. The Equalizer 3
    Like McCall, [Washington] knows his tools, an arsenal not of guns and blades but of withering stares and crumpled smiles. It’s almost enough to outshine everything else.
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