The Guardian's Scores

Select another publication »
For 6,554 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 6554
  2. Mixed: 3,754 out of 6554
  3. Negative: 319 out of 6554
6554 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. What They Had
    The script, inspired by Chomko’s grandparents’ marriage, throws up plenty of authentic-looking observations of life with Alzheimer’s.
  2. The Hole in the Ground
    It always finds new, invariably cinematic ways to nudge us towards its final leap into the abyss. Cronin feels like a real find for our especially insecure moment.
  3. Foxtrot
    Foxtrot is a movie from Israeli writer-director Samuel Maoz that is structurally fascinating yet also structurally flawed: its accumulations of ambiguity and mystery are jettisoned by a whimsical final reveal.
  4. Fighting with My Family
    Comedy and irony are not allowed to encroach on the film’s upbeat message, and the drama doesn’t reach out beyond a wrestling fanbase.
  5. Apollo 11
    The result is a stunning project of historical preservation – no narration, no cutaway interviews, no recreations, just original material synced with some music and the occasional diagram.
  6. The Competition
    It’s clear that they want to run it as meritocratically as possible, but what’s interesting is how the criteria for what talent is and who gets to judge it come up for debate.
  7. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
    It’s a conventional film in many ways but one that slowly and effectively builds to a remarkably rousing climax, displaying an act of overwhelming ingenuity that’s hard to deny.
  8. Cold Pursuit
    Even without Liam Neeson’s bizarre promotional “rape revenge” anecdote, this violent movie would leave a weird taste in the mouth, lumbered as it is with odd sub-Coen, sub-Tarantino stylings.
  9. Skid Row Marathon
    Undeniably uplifting, even if the string-laden score strains too hard to tweak the tear ducts, this US-made documentary tracks a running group of recovering addicts and paroled convicts who train for marathons together.
  10. Capernaum
    There is passion and compassion here, and Labaki’s film brings home what poverty and desperation mean, and conversely what love and humanity mean.
  11. On the Basis of Sex
    On the Basis of Sex is a solid, often impassioned film, but too often its worst instincts take over, and cliches stack up faster than legal documents.
  12. Paddleton
    Duplass and his co-writer, director Alex Lehmann, deliver this strange concoction – an improv bromance mixed with a tragic love story – with delicacy.
  13. An Elephant Sitting Still
    Hu provides no easy resolutions, and evidently found none himself. This epic of futility will have to stand as an epitaph for an extremely promising career cut short.
  14. The Aftermath
    It is more of a holiday romance and the well-intentioned performances lead nowhere.
  15. Varda by Agnès
    Two hours in this director’s company is a pleasure.
  16. Piranhas
    Giovannesi’s movie is watchable enough, but often looks like a smoothed-out, planed-down version of Garrone’s Gomorrah: Gomorrah without the rough edges, like a classy television version.
  17. Instant Family
    Instant Family retains the obvious appeal of watching basically nice people attempt a fundamentally decent thing for a few hours. The shamelessly optimistic finale may even leave you with something in your eye, dammit.
  18. Piercing
    It all works pretty well until the abrupt ending lets all the air out of the balloon. The dream-team pairing of Abbott and Wasikowska, two of the most interesting, subtle and risk-loving performers of their generation, is a huge compensation.
  19. The Operative
    Audiences may come to this film expecting the conventional pleasures of a spy thriller – excitement, tension, suspense – along with the additional values associated with the very best of the genre: character nuance, emotional complexity, plausible human dilemma. The Operative utterly defeats all of these hopes, chiefly in being at all times extremely boring.
  20. Mr. Jones
    Mr Jones is a bold and heartfelt movie with a real Lean-ian sweep.
  21. The Kindness of Strangers
    The Kindness of Strangers is one of those terrible ideas for a film: ensemble dramas that are superficially attractive because of all the big names shoehorned into the cast-list.
  22. I Was at Home, But
    The movie is not without interest, but I found it mannered, derivative and opaque.
  23. Gully Boy
    In the end, Gully Boy runs on very traditional lines, and maybe comes too close to cliche, but is always engagingly dead set on entertainment.
  24. The Golden Glove
    Apart from its grisliness, its hopelessness, and its pointlessness, what strikes you most about this true-crime movie is its brownness.
  25. God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunija
    What begins as a sprightly, shrewd, visually striking satire from Macedonian director Teona Strugar Mitevska deflates in its second act into something unconvincing, sophomoric and dramatically redundant.
  26. Elisa & Marcela
    Writer-director Isabel Coixet has taken a real-life love story from 20th-century LGBT Spanish history and turned it into something bafflingly passionless, joyless and excessively tasteful, an anti-alchemy assisted by stately monochrome photography that makes every frame look like a postcard from an art shop.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    TT3D: Closer to the Edge
    The speeds on such narrow, winding public roads are hair-raising and superbly photographed, the crashes spectacular and the riders far more likable than anyone involved in Formula One. Particularly engaging is the zanily amusing, leathered lunatic Guy Martin, a Lincolnshire lorry repair mechanic by day.
  28. Patrick
    It’s a film jam-packed with very good actors and big names, and suffused with a puppyish willingness to please. But where is the bite?
  29. The Kid Who Would Be King
    None of the young stars shine as John Boyega did in ATB, but this movie is sentimental in all the right places, and impossible to dislike.
  30. Watergate
    In the course of a mammoth, horribly absorbing four-hour film from Charles Ferguson we are immersed in a world of milky TV news footage, big lapels, bulbous combovers, dirty tricks, sweat, jowls and guilt.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »