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. MadS
    The film has so much energy that its overall tone is fundamentally invigorating; this is the cinema of euphoric nihilism, and it’s a welcome return to form for Moreau.
  2. 1917
    1917 is Mendes’s most purely ambitious and passionate picture since his misunderstood and under-appreciated Jarhead of 2005. It’s bold, thrilling film-making.
  3. A Simple Life
    A Simple Life is a tear-jerker, but thoughtful and intelligent, with an anti-sentimental dimension.
  4. Love Exposure
    Deeply strange and politically incorrect, ­baffling, and often funny.
  5. Goldstone
    It’s a gorgeous film to watch, but a better and bigger one to think about. The key to unlocking this hugely ambitious genre hybrid – a classic Australian film and a masterpiece of outback noir – is understanding that Goldstone is a country, not a town, and its name is Australia.
  6. Limbo
    The cast, in weather-beaten and woebegone mode, are uniformly excellent, directed by Sen in beautiful unison, their performances different notes in the same melody.
  7. The Substance
    In its trashiness – and, yes, its refusal of serious substance – The Substance should really be put out on VHS cassettes and watched at home in homage to the great era of home entertainment pulp and video-store masterpieces of weirdness and crassness.
  8. Paradise: Hope
    The love story – and it can be called that – between the doctor and Melanie is presented with candour and tenderness. There is a new humanity to Seidl's work; it could be his best film so far.
  9. Logan Lucky
    It’s always supremely watchable, but rarely, if ever, commits itself to genuine jeopardy or suspense. Instead of edge-of-the-seat moments, there are gags and clever touches and excellent performances.
  10. The Starling Girl
    The Starling Girl, anchored by a bristling performance from the always solid Scanlen, is at its best when it hews to the combustible suspense of a teenage girl glimpsing her own instincts – for honesty, for autonomy, and most threateningly for pleasure.
  11. High Life
    As with so many of Denis’ films, the point is to contrive an overwhelmingly powerful mood and moment, an almost physiological sensation, this one incubated in the vast, cold reaches of space. It throbbed and itched with me long after the film was over.
  12. Nosferatu
    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.
  13. The Blue Trail
    The Blue Trail is a generic mashup: it partly has the bittersweet tone of many films about defiant old people, and partly it has something far more subversive and disquieting. The mix of tones is interesting, like chewing cake and cheese at the same time.
  14. The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart
    An interesting, grown-up musical profile.
  15. A Quiet Passion
    It is Davies’ ability to invest even the most apparently-humdrum moments with some form of intense radiance that sustains his film.
  16. Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan
    In the end, the film operates best as an act of ancestor-worship to an extraordinary musician whose best days – we are forced to sadly conclude – appear to be behind him.
  17. The Personal History of David Copperfield
    Everything rattles and zings like a pinball machine, and it’s a bracing, entertaining, richly satisfying experience.
  18. Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It
    [A] televisual but still touching documentary tribute.
  19. Clemency
    There’s little room to breathe in writer-director Chinonye Chukwu’s constricting, devastating drama Clemency, an intentionally airless film processing a tough subject through an unusual viewpoint.
  20. Fancy Dance
    Gladstone’s performance is looser, more open, less reserved. Simply put: she does more acting, and gives strength and substance to a dense, knotty family drama which though maybe anticlimactic in the final act – and too reliant on a handgun plot-point – is fluent and heartfelt.
  21. Till
    It is as noble an execution of tragic historical record as one could hope for within the limits of a biopic – neither confirmation of doubters nor enough justification to relive it.
  22. Ratcatcher
    It is about grief and about the shock of grief and the stabbing fear which, in its terrifying way, gives you a clarified view of your own existence. A film to wonder at.
  23. Obsession
    Obsession is satisfyingly slick proof that [Barker] knows just what to do when levelling up to a different platform, and while his debut might have been a film designed around a very modern form of horror, this time he’s looking back, his set-up using elements of a classic fable and the kind of grabby schlock you’d see in a video store back in the 1980s.
  24. Christmas, Again
    Poekel’s style is far too authentic-indie and unaffected to get slushy or sentimental about Christmas; through his lens Christmas tree lights blink like police lights. But in its own low-key way, he pitches his film just right for a little squeeze of festive warmth.
  25. Asia
    This is a candid, sober, well-acted debut by the first-time director Ruthy Pribar.
  26. Poetic License
    Poetic License is far from mere pastiche. It has a distinct, youthful sensibility and sources its comedy more from recognisably human behaviour than from profane, one-liner riffing.
  27. Zero Days
    Zero Days is an intriguing, disturbing watch.
  28. Nope
    There is something clotted and heavy about this film, with sadly not enough of the humour for which Peele justly became celebrated in his double-act days with Keegan-Michael Key. It’s not the positive response I wanted to have.
  29. The Misfits
    For me, the film is itself a bit of misfit, full of big stagey speeches, contrived moments and some overemphatic performances, but opened out with muscular style by Huston. The faces of Gable, Clift and Monroe together in closeup have a Mount Rushmore look to them.
  30. They'll Love Me When I'm Dead
    This tricksy, exasperating and strangely unenlightening film, with its pointless fictional narrator played by Alan Cumming, purports to tell the story of Orson Welles’s mysterious “lost” masterpiece, The Other Side of the Wind. But in jokily trying to imitate the jabbering chaos of this film’s production history, it fails to give a clear, informative account.
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