The Guardian's Scores

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:
6554 movie reviews
  1. By any standards, this would be an outstanding film, but for a debut it is remarkable.
  2. The pure work-in-progress energy of all this is exhilarating, and if the resulting movie is flawed in its final act, then this is a flaw born of Jia’s heroic refusal to be content making the same sort of movie, and his insistence on trying to do something new with cinema and with storytelling.
  3. There is a lot of sound and fury in this Macbeth, but not without meaning. It’s not perhaps a very subtle version, and I felt that Kurzel should have perhaps worked more closely with Fassbender with the contours of his speeches, and shown the painful mind-changing and nerve-losing in the early stages. There is an operatic verve.
  4. This buttock-clenchingly embarrassing movie from director Valérie Donzelli is a pre-Revolutionary period drama from the quality end of the sugary French market – theatrically tricked out with one or two annoying and clumsy Brechtian touches of stylised self-aware modernity.
  5. Mon Roi, directed and co-written by Maïwenn (that is, film-maker and actor Maïwenn Le Besco) is an unendurable confection of complacent and self-admiring nonsense: shallow, narcissistic, histrionic and fake.
  6. Mia Madre is a tremendously smart and enjoyable movie.
  7. The film is quiet, understated and gentle, allowing the audience to take pleasure in teasing out its narrative subtleties, and presented with wonderful freshness and clarity.
  8. For all its apparent sombreness and thoughtfulness, The Sea Of Trees is an exasperatingly shallow film on an important and agonisingly painful subject - depression and suicide. This it slathers in palliative sentimentality.
  9. Blunt’s performance has an edge of steel. She brings off a mix of confidence, bewilderment and vulnerability, which functions very well against the alpha male characters higher up the chain of command.
  10. Youth has a wan eloquence and elegance, though freighted with sentimentality and a strangely unearned and uninteresting macho-geriatric regret for lost time, lost film projects, lost love and all those beautiful women that you never got to sleep with.
  11. This may not be the director’s most immediately electrifying film, but in its understated way, it’s an immensely powerful work.
  12. This is detached, flat film-making at its most bare. You figure out which lines of dialogue deserve to be underlined.
  13. This is a very good-looking film that represents a brave attempt to do justice to a very popular book; it manages it, just.
  14. Inconsistency is A Perfect Day’s biggest problem. The script is scalpel sharp in some places, flabby as the well-blocker in others.
  15. Portman has made a film with something serious and interesting to say about Israel, a nuanced portrait of the place that demonstrates a commitment to, and connection with, her home country. This is an assured, heartfelt debut.
  16. It’s a shame Kenan can’t muster his own bit of gothic shorthand for post-credit crunch America, but the film still has a fluid, 3D-orientated immediacy.
  17. It’s hardcore, yet much softer-core than Noé’s earlier movies, without the terrifying shock factor of Irréversible and Seul Contre Tous, and without the visual brilliance of Enter the Void, and Love is preposterous and badly acted and talky in a way that porn films haven’t been since they were designed to be shown in cinemas.
  18. Star power aside, it’s a modest, reined-in entertainment, rejecting musical numbers for a simple whistled refrain, and clocking in at just two hours.
  19. Winocour’s ability to build suspense is solid but she’s less confident when it comes to following through. She toys with perversity but sticks to formula.
  20. A rather silly, pointless and directionless film.
  21. Garrel struggles to unearth anything new. The mechanics of the relationships on show fail to lead anywhere unexpected while the dialogue is often flat and on-the-nose.
  22. Saulnier’s ability to take a well-trodden road and fill it with grisly surprises is quite something.
  23. It is such a strange film in its way, stranger still if you are not accustomed to Weerasethakul’s work, and it needs a real investment of attention. But there is something sublime in it.
  24. It is a masterpiece of black-comic bad taste and a positive carnival of transgression. The secret is the deadpan seriousness with which everything is treated.
  25. It is a creamily sensuous, richly observed piece of work, handsomely detailed and furnished: the clothes, the hair, the automobiles, the train carriages, the record players, the lipstick and the cigarettes are all superbly presented. The combination of all this is intoxicating in itself.
  26. Irrational Man is a good idea, a sketch for a movie, but the movie itself is unrealised.
  27. Funny, oddly affecting and cherishably personal.
  28. It hasn’t anything as genuinely emotionally devastating as Up, or the subtlety and inspired subversion of Monsters Inc. and the Toy Stories which it certainly resembles at various stages. But it is certainly a terrifically likeable, ebullient and seductive piece of entertainment, taken at full-throttle.
  29. Director Brad Bird deserves praise for packing such big ideas into such an accessible, rip-roaring, retro-futurist adventure.
  30. Amy
    It is an overwhelming story, and despite everyone knowing the ending, it is as gripping as a thriller: Kapadia has fashioned and shaped it with masterly flair.

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