The Guardian's Scores

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For 6,608 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: 2,502 out of 6608
  2. Mixed: 3,786 out of 6608
  3. Negative: 320 out of 6608
6608 movie reviews
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  1. Power
    The film makes cogent, sweeping sense of the record for perhaps the most illuminative, swift and damning case against the institution of policing – the real fourth estate, as one subject puts it – of the many investigations conducted in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. But there’s a dryness to its procedure.
  2. ParaNorman
    It's a likable scary story – with hints of Tim Burton and Steven Spielberg.
  3. Luce
    A tense, knotty puzzle ... It’s a drama that moves like a thriller.
  4. Christmas Eve in Miller's Point
    It might resemble other family dramas, but there’s a hum of something strange underneath, a sense that life is about surrendering to the infinite flow of events.
  5. The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
    Essential viewing for anyone interested in what freedom of information means in the digital age, this passionate, fascinating, unapologetically partial but fair documentary celebrates Aaron Swartz.
  6. Only the Brave
    There is a sincere effort to get beneath the facade of what an extremely fit twentysomething firefighter’s life is like. There’s even a possibility that the film’s first act is intentionally distancing so that the later scenes will have a bigger payoff.
  7. Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds
    Herzog and Oppenheimer are back (and Oppenheimer gets a co-directing credit) with another nimbly curious and fascinating film on a similar topic: meteorites. This is a rare example of modern documentary film-making that uses voiceover – that inimitable Herzog growl.
  8. Breaking a Monster
    It’s a charming and engaging mix – the antithesis of Metallica’s ego overload, and just as watchable.
  9. The Outwaters
    While its craft is certainly interesting, there’s something decadent and empty at its heart.
  10. Hail, Caesar!
    Hail, Caesar! is a lot of fun, and beautifully crafted, too. One to savour.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Candy Mountain
    It's the sort of film you either go along with or fall into a stupor watching. [28 Dec 1989]
    • The Guardian
  12. The Painted Bird
    The Painted Bird is a brutal kind of ordeal, but eerie, unearthly and even beautiful sometimes: a bad dream that leaks into waking reality.
  13. The Mad Women's Ball
    Contrived and possibly overheated though the film might be at times, there is real storytelling gusto to it, and Laurent punches it across with relish.
  14. 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.
  15. The Color Purple
    This heartfelt movie-musical of The Color Purple sugars the pill and softens the blow, planing down the original’s barbed and knotty surfaces, taking away some of the shock of violence and tragedy and tilting the experience more towards female solidarity and triumph over adversity.
  16. The Lure
    The Lure’s premise alone will turn heads but once the novelty wears off the question will remain: where’s the story?
  17. Mistaken for Strangers
    The result is an amusing, and occasionally touching meditation on fame, sibling rivalry and ambition, with a sweet payoff.
  18. Mystery Road
    The whole thing might have been improved by slightly nippier pacing, but the slow-burn action pays off with a spectacular climactic gun-fight, where the distances are so vast it takes half a second for bullets to find their marks.
  19. Christine
    In Hall, [Campos] has the perfect actor to convey Chubbuck’s internal struggle in a manner that’s devastating.
  20. Die Hard
    Only the hardest of hearts could fail to enjoy the great 80s action classic, rereleased for its 30th anniversary: with uproarious explosions, deafening shootouts and smart-alec tag lines following the bad guys getting shot.
  21. Star Trek Into Darkness
    People are unlikely to charge out of the cinema with quite the same level of glee as they did in 2009; but this is certainly an astute, exhilarating concoction.
  22. Queer
    Craig is so dominant that sometimes it seems that Gene is almost not worthy of him. Craig is strangely magnificent.
  23. Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer
    This documentary by Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin argues that Pussy Riot suffered an old-fashioned Soviet show trial, and what emerges is the effrontery and hypocrisy of Putin's attempt to associate these three young women with the Bolsheviks' suppression of religion.
  24. Under the Gun
    It’s a tight, slick polemic which doesn’t shy from the complexity surrounding the debate or the fact it wants you the viewer to get up and do something about it.
  25. Bugonia
    Yorgos Lanthimos’s macabre and amusing new film has a predictably strong performance from Emma Stone, an intestine-shreddingly clamorous orchestral score from Jerskin Fendrix and, most importantly, a wonderful montage finale – but frankly it’s a very, very long run-up to that big jump.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Slow
    Elena and Dovydas’s relationship unfolds at a gentle, unhurried pace, their growing attraction indicated by small details – coy glances, long, loaded pauses between conversation – that reward attentive viewing.
  27. Orion and the Dark
    It is a sweet-natured little tale, indebted to Monsters Inc and the whole Pixar canon but saved from being predictable with other borrowings (Back to the Future, Inception), as well as its various metafictional levels of storytelling.
  28. Sweet Thing
    This small, delicate, late-blooming film is quite lovely, and a throwback to the 1990s/2000s craze for semi-improvised, rough and ready indie film-making.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Under Fire
    On the surface, it is just another action adventure set in a well-known theatre of revolution, with a romance to set beside its thrills. But it contains within it the seeds of a political and personal drama that questions both American policy in Latin America and the exigencies of contemporary reporting. [19 Feb 1984, p.19]
    • The Guardian
  30. Author: The JT LeRoy Story
    Author is less a run-through of one of the biggest controversies to plague the literary world in the past century, than an illuminating study of the enigmatic and driven woman behind the phenomenon.
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