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. Benediction
    Benediction is not an easy experience and some of the caustic, brittle dialogue scenes with Sassoon’s celebrity acquaintances are grating – yet deliberately so. The sadness is overwhelming.
  2. Swan Song
    Mahershala Ali gives a heartfelt performance in this elegant and rather melancholy sci-fi mystery with which Irish film-maker Benjamin Cleary makes his impressive feature debut.
  3. The Humans
    Very real issues are suffused with an oppressive, unearthly, compelling unreality.
  4. Little Girl
    This extraordinary documentary by director Sebastien Lifshitz, who has made many films about the LGBTQ+ experience (Wild Side, Bambi, Open Bodies), achieves a remarkable degree of intimacy with its young subject and her family.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Oasis Knebworth 1996
    The joy of live music is in immediate, fleeting sensation, which doesn’t need to get caught on the hide of history. But that sensation is something Carruthers captured brilliantly in 1996.
  6. A Banquet
    Paxton’s movie sketches out the sinister dread just under the happy-family surface; she is in expert control of her film, achieving her effects with economy and force. It is really unnerving.
  7. Inu-oh
    Retrofitting medieval Noh as a world of guitar gods and cavorting dancers, Inu-oh has its two disabled lead characters make a psychedelic plea in favour of slipping loose from dominant narratives, told in a fecund patchwork of styles by Yuasa that asserts its own outsider credentials.
  8. Saloum
    Saloum does not stop at simply reinterpreting the tropes of the western but wholly retools its influences with local flavours.
  9. Only You
    It’s a poignant and compelling Venn diagram of passion and heartache.
  10. Madres
    Madres never loses a strong underpinning of social conscience that seeps into director Ryan Zaragoza’s considered shots.
  11. The Real Charlie Chaplin
    This film may not have all that much new material but it piercingly asks the right questions about Chaplin’s elusive reality.
  12. The Auschwitz Report
    Even for those who know about the Auschwitz Protocols – a report to which the pair contributed that has a weighty legacy in Holocaust history – the film is still intensely impactful. Inevitably, it is profoundly upsetting and disturbing.
  13. Four Hours at the Capitol
    The underlying collective testimony furnished by Four Hours at the Capitol is that the age of Trump has not yet ended – and the true day of reckoning in the United States is still to come.
  14. Balloon
    While armed with plenty of social critique, the beauty of Balloon goes beyond this tug-of-war between modernity and tradition.
  15. The Maid
    Thai writer-director Lee Thongkham’s horror feature is a giddy, gory little treat
  16. The First Wave
    This remarkable film feels like it could become a time capsule, showing future generations what it felt like in 2020 for those on the frontline.
  17. Pier Kids
    Stories involving shocking discrimination and violence are filmed with a conspiratorial understanding, as if the camera is lending a friendly ear.
  18. Great Freedom
    Great Freedom is a formidably intelligent and well-acted prison movie and also a love story – or perhaps a paradoxically platonic bromance, stretching from the end of the second world war to the moon landing.
  19. Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time
    A very touching and insightful film.
  20. Lightyear
    The film just bounces along, zipping through its running time.
  21. Only the Animals
    Moll has given us this audacious, witty and absorbing mystery thriller, a tale of adultery and amour fou with a gamey touch of the macabre.
  22. Dune: Part Two
    The second part of Denis Villeneuve’s monumental Dune adaptation lands with a sternum-juddering crash; it’s another shroom of a film, an epic sci-fi hallucination whose images speak of fascism and imperialism, of guerrilla resistance and romance.
  23. Keyboard Fantasies
    Often music documentaries feel padded out with filler but honestly I could have spent another hour in Copeland’s company.
  24. Playground
    At just 72 minutes, this is a brief, intense feature: it’s possible that Wandel envisaged it as even shorter than it actually is, and perhaps its narrative tendons slacken a little after the initial spasm of horror. But what an incredible performance from Vanderbeque: an intuition of fear and pain and moral outrage that goes beyond acting.
  25. 'Twas the Fight Before Christmas
    It is an extraordinary portrait of a man who is convinced he cannot be wrong, who will always position himself – at least in his own mind – as the persecuted victim struggling to do right.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nightmare Alley
    It's an authentically bilious look at the world and its morals as Tyrone Power, taking decisive strides from the standard romantic hero roles he had been typecast in, rises from a travelling carnival mind-reading act to a high society shown to be even more corrupt.
  27. President
    What President does well is show that linear narrative is not necessarily the point in the fight for democracy. Victory might not be immediate, but the people’s hope for change will never die.
  28. Rebel Dykes
    A judicious mix of new-minted interviews, home video footage and charming animation by Shanahan makes for a delightful, well-tempered package.
  29. '83
    It is an endearing sports film with just enough awareness of where it stands, now that Britain’s imperial legacy is being questioned more than ever, on a larger field.
  30. Stop-Zemlia
    This gentle, authentic-feeling coming-of-age drama from Ukrainian film-maker Kateryna Gornostai premiered at the Berlin festival in 2021. Released in the UK almost a year to the day since the Russian invasion, her film has become unbearably poignant.
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