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. Tokyo Story
    [Hara's] sad dignity and emotional generosity are compelling.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Silent Running
    The screenplay by Deric Washburn and Michael Cimino (later to collaborate on The Deer Hunter) and Steven Bochco (of subsequent Hill Street Blues fame) delivers its ecological message with humour and imagination, and Joan Baez sings the appropriate songs.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Hot Rock
    Yates paces the fast-moving thrills with precision. [25 Apr 2009, p.53]
    • The Guardian
  4. A Clockwork Orange
    Flawed or not, it is a compelling thought experiment.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Harold and Maude
    It's to director Hal Ashby's credit that he succeeds in maintaining an unsettling tone of pre-Lynchian absurdism throughout, while also pulling the viewer into a touching love story between perhaps the most unlikely couple in cinema history.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Nicholas and Alexandra
    Nicholas and Alexandra boasts terrific performances and gorgeous production design, but it's bloated and unwieldy. There is more history here than the film-makers know what to do with.
  7. Duel
    It takes less than a minute of watching Duel, Steven Spielberg's feature-length debut, to realize you're in the hands of a master director.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    200 Motels
    Thankfully, Zappa was a far better composer than he was a movie director. Whereas the film, with its self-indulgent and incoherent celebrations of drink, drugs and groupies and its tiresomely scatological bent, was largely gale-force gibberish, its sprawling soundtrack, dissonant and atonal but rich in wit and humour, has aged surprisingly well.
  9. The Last Picture Show
    Peter Bogdanovich's 1971 ode to a Texan small town is still a masterpiece whichever way you look at it.
  10. The French Connection
    The final moments of The French Connection are a powerful, even magnificent repudiation of the modern piety of redemption and sympathy. It is a stunningly nihilist ending, one to set alongside Polanski's Chinatown.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Devils
    There is much to irritate in the film, but it's bold, individual and a landmark in British cinema, with outstanding performances.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Two-Lane Blacktop
    Two-Lane Blacktop should have established Hellman as one of the great directors of his generation. Instead, its box-office failure made him an enduring cult figure.
  13. Walkabout
    Roeg revels in the hallucinatory, creating a wilderness that exists as much in the mind as it does the land.
  14. McCabe & Mrs. Miller
    If anything, Robert Altman's self-styled "anti-western" looks even richer, stranger and more daring than it did when it first appeared back in 1971.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Anderson Tapes
    A clever caper movie. [08 Oct 2011, p.46]
    • The Guardian
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    They Might Be Giants
    Offbeat comedy-drama about a former New York judge convinced he is Sherlock Holmes. Amiable, if a little too clever for its own good. [04 Jan 2000, p.36]
    • The Guardian
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Plaza Suite
    Schizophrenic performance from the estimable Walter Matthau, playing the central characters of three Neil Simon stories set in New York's Plaza Hotel. His barely contained rage as the dad who finds his daughter refusing to come out of the bathroom on her wedding day is particularly good, but the jokes are thinly rationed. [19 Nov 2005, p.53]
    • The Guardian
  18. Get Carter
    There's no mistaking its chilling charisma and style. [11 Jun 1999, p.15]
    • The Guardian
  19. El Topo
    There is a tenous narrative logic - in which Jodorowsky himself, dressed in cowboy black, must gun down four desert-dwelling killers - which gives the film a measure of watchability. But it's hardly deep.
  20. Husbands
    A brilliantly textured film to be savoured.
  21. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
    Billy Wilder's distinctive, irreverent slant on the world's greatest "consulting detective" holds up reasonably well 32 years on; you wouldn't expect anything directed by Wilder and scripted by his long-time associate IAL Diamond to be anything less than funny and watchable, and this is both.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Original Cast Album: Company
    Pennebaker's film, running just under an hour, is revelatory in getting under the skin of the main players. And the director's opening revelation will exasperate musical-theatre nerds as we hear that this was the pilot for a whole series on original cast recordings that never got made. [15 Sep 2021]
    • The Guardian
  23. Five Easy Pieces
    This superbly composed film comes as close to perfection as it gets.
  24. La Piscine
    Erotic languour turns gradually into fear and then horror in this gripping and superbly controlled psychological thriller from 1969.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Landlord
    A still wonderfully penetrating, wise and exact meditation on race relations at the end of the 1960s.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Let It Be
    Neither an overlooked masterpiece nor the disaster the Beatles and the critics thought, it’s finally getting a fair shake. [2024 Restored Version]
  27. Mandabi
    Mandabi features an excellent performance from Guèye, who is innocent and culpable all at once. This is gentle, walking-pace cinema that leads us by the hand from vignette to vignette, from scene to scene, presented to us with ingenuous simplicity and calm.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Patton
    It bends a few facts, and occasionally slips towards satire. But, for the most part, this is a remarkably enjoyable - and commendably fair - biopic of an unforgettable character. They don't make many films, or indeed generals, like this any more.
  29. The Sterile Cuckoo
    An interesting feature, almost a B-side to The Graduate in its way, without the predatory older characters.
  30. The Italian Job
    The brio and ambition of The Italian Job can’t be doubted and Caine has enormous charisma.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »