The Guardian's Scores

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For 6,556 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: 2,481 out of 6556
  2. Mixed: 3,756 out of 6556
  3. Negative: 319 out of 6556
6556 movie reviews
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  1. Hedda
    It’s an impressive feat of technical film-making, which has now become a hallmark of DaCosta’s work. But she caves to baser impulses in reinterpreting an old and, some might say, crusty play.
  2. From Ground Zero
    A heartbreaking collection.
  3. The Christophers
    The Christophers is a talky, at times incredibly funny, comedy drama with plot reversals that make it feel like it’s on the verge of a thriller. It doesn’t end up there, at least not strictly, but it’s unpredictable enough to never make us entirely sure just where it’s heading.
  4. Ballad of a Small Player
    Ballad of a Small Player ends up a little too slight, a sketchy look at a familiarly doomed character.
  5. Hamnet
    Zhao is a good fit for the material. She, too, is a close observer of nature and of the many aching, yearning people passing through it. But she has previously not made anything as traditionally tailored and refined as this.
  6. Rental Family
    Hikari and company mostly skim over the tension in a movie seemingly built out of highlight reels and lacking connective tissue.
  7. Bad Apples
    Etzler manages some nasty comedy, sourced from the bracing jolt of watching teacher and student cruelly manipulate one another. And he shows a sturdy technical command throughout.
  8. At Work
    The film, though eventful enough, does not quite succeed in its tacit claim to be a study of poverty; the author behaves like a student who is stoically accepting some temporary dodgy accommodation.
  9. Roofman
    Another, more textured film might have tried to paint him as more than just lovable rogue but Roofman is too focused on making us feel good rather than bad. I would have settled for conflicted.
  10. Good Fortune
    There are noble intentions to Good Fortune, in ways related to both the resurrection of the big-screen comedy and its of-the-moment through-line about the increasingly untenable class divide in America, but also not a lot of laughs, the idea of its existence more appealing than the experience of watching it.
  11. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
    It’s as twisty and stuffed with second and third guessing as one would want but its charmingly convoluted nature feels as elegantly composed as it felt in the original, building to a finale that leaves us with a satisfied smile.
  12. Pompei: Below the Clouds
    It is an intensely disquieting, utterly distinctive film and a superb final panel to his triptych.
  13. The Lost Bus
    The writing might be disappointingly inelegant but The Lost Bus is forthright and frightening regardless.
  14. Steve
    A drama suffused with gonzo energy and the death-metal chaos of emotional pain, cut with slashes of bizarre black humour.
  15. Christy
    Christy Martin’s life was filled with devastating blows but in her biopic, we barely feel the impact.
  16. Erupcja
    The initially alluring casualness of Ohs’s project fades quickly into a mildly irksome shallowness – lots of unearned and unconvincing staring, docile conversations, should-be evocative images that do not evoke.
  17. Dead Man's Wire
    The personae and performances of Pacino, Domingo and Myha’la complicate the psychopathic nastiness of the affair, and create something surreal and bizarre and often hilarious: a display of, not heartlessness, exactly, but a shrewd professional sense that pity and fear were emotions that could only benefit the kidnapper.
  18. The Voice of Hind Rajab
    There is a reckless, ruthless kind of provocative brilliance in what Ben Hania is doing.
  19. Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale
    The film is very silly and always watchable in its weird way.
  20. On Swift Horses
    Kass and Minahan combine old and new while rubbing suggestively against the grain: the familiar pleasures of watching charismatic young actors meet the novelty of seeing them plugged into situations our period dramas have historically overlooked.
  21. The Conjuring: Last Rites
    Wilson and Farmiga remain solidity incarnate, capable of enlivening even speculative spiritual dialogue. The film-making pulls no surprises out of the hat, though, and gives no indication that it would if it could.
  22. A House of Dynamite
    I watched this film with translucently white knuckles but also that strange climbing nausea that only this topic can create.
  23. Borderline
    The screenplay isn’t nuanced enough to switch between modes in a way that feels intentional and the result is the sense that there are a few different films jostling for attention.
  24. Somnium
    It may think it is tilting at the dream factory, but Somnium simply feels tired.
  25. Afternoons of Solitude
    Deeply caught up in decoding this tradition, perhaps Serra is too beholden to it. If only this admittedly riveting examination of dark human compulsions had found a way to also articulate the perspectives of the animals for whom the arena is a lethal experience.
  26. The Smashing Machine
    The film does not really permit the various emotional crises and issues to supersede the importance of fighting all that much, and the fighting itself is not transformed or transfigured in the drama.
  27. The Testament of Ann Lee
    This is a genuinely strange film, elusive in both tone and meaning, one which deploys the obvious effects and rhetorical forms of irony, while at the same time distancing itself from these effects and asking its audience to sympathise and even admire Lee, because she is not supposed to be the villain.
  28. Late Fame
    It’s a lovely slice of life, a heartfelt New York story – and judging from the brief burst of writing that we are permitted to hear, the postman can rest easy whether he is on stage or at work.
  29. The Wizard of the Kremlin
    The Wizard of the Kremlin just feels pointless in its knowing cynicism, right up to the silly, unearned flourish of violence at the very end.
  30. Father Mother Sister Brother
    Basically, there is a contentment and calm here, an acceptance and a Zen simplicity that is a cleansing of the moviegoing palate, or perhaps the fiction-consuming palate in general. It is a film to savour.
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