The Guardian's Scores

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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
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  1. Romeo and Juliet
    This has elegance, vigour and charm.
  2. Night of the Living Dead
    It remains a nightmare experience that’s not easily brushed off. And despite its ramshackle scrappiness in production terms, and some dated gender politics, the storytelling is first class, pitching us straight into the action, but only revealing its full hand gradually.
  3. Funny Girl
    While the 1960s swung, this spirited, good-natured but creakily old-fashioned picture lived in a different zeitgeist.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Rosemary's Baby
    This is horror rooted not in misty Carpathian castles, but in recognisable modern life, with the satanists depicted not as outlandish fiends but the sort of everyday folk you might encounter on any urban street.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Planet of the Apes
    A promising idea, and yet ultimately too cute: it is a one-to-one allegory, and this much of the film is spent exploring this not very rewarding vein.
  6. 2001: A Space Odyssey
    Something in its mandarin blankness and balletic vastness, and refusal to trade in the emollient dramatic forms of human interest and human sympathy. Kubrick leaves usual considerations behind with his readiness to imagine a post-human future.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told
    Director Jack Hill went on to make plenty of classic exploitation movies, such as the more marketable Foxy Brown and Switchblade Sisters, but Spider Baby is him at his trashy, most eccentric best. [15 Jun 2013, p.23]
    • The Guardian
  8. The Graduate
    The excellence of Katherine Ross as Mrs Robinson’s daughter, Elaine, is often overlooked. A hugely pleasurable film.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cool Hand Luke
    Paul Newman is at his charismatic best as convict Luke Jackson, fighting to maintain inner freedom despite the brutalities of a deep south chain gang. Much in the style of the old Warner Bros melodramas, the hardnut action here is lightened by a funny streak, as in the celebrated hard-boiled egg-eating contest. [31 Aug 2013, p.46]
    • The Guardian
  10. Point Blank
    An intriguing, disorientating 60s artefact.
  11. In the Heat of the Night
    The sheer tactlessness of its racial confrontation has a forthright quality and a not entirely intentional documentary realism, especially in the scenes shot on location in Sparta, Illinois (standing in for a fictional Mississippi town).
    • 61 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    You Only Live Twice
    What I can say for sure is You Only Live Twice is the Bond film I have seen most often and I have enjoyed the hell out it every single time.
  13. Chimes at Midnight
    Playing Falstaff might have been Welles’s creative and physical destiny: in the character he found a dignity and sensuality in his, by then, overweight form. The confidence and panache of his staging is a treat.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Frankenstein Created Woman
    Terence Fisher conjures up his customary dark fairytale atmosphere in one of Hammer’s best Frankenstein sequels. 
  15. Persona
    Persona is a film to make you shiver with fascination, or incomprehension, or desire.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    One Million Years B.C.
    Harryhausen's dinosaurs are well worth a look, but the rest of One Million Years BC will bore the furry pants off anyone more advanced than a Neanderthal.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Blow-Up
    Blow-up is still an absolute must, such is the degree of visual and intellectual excitement of the film.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Man for All Seasons
    This 1966 drama ticks most of the right boxes when it comes to entertaining as well as educating.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    What's Up, Tiger Lily?
    Woody Allen acquired the rights to a terrible Japanese Bond-style extravaganza, re-edited it and provided an incongruous soundtrack full of New York Jewish gags. The joke wears thin, but there are good laughs along the way. Allen's then-wife Louise Lasser and friend Mickey Knox help out.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Band of Outsiders
    No matter how ironic and artificial the script, there's a lovely sadness in the corners of Karina's eyes, which makes many of the films they did together more hers than his.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Doctor Zhivago
    Even granting the enormous difficulty of adapting such a long and complex book, I do not see how a worse job could have been done. Jack–rabbiting along in fits and starts, it gives one the feeling that the book has been arbitrarily chopped up into an irrelevant series of scenes, attempting an unsuccessful compromise between intimacy and the epic.
  22. King & Country
    This film is a gruelling experience and Dirk Bogarde’s coup de grâce is the most horrible effect of all.
  23. Darling
    John Schlesinger’s winsome adventure from 1965 still has verve and ambition, a romantic satire of swinging London.
  24. The Ipcress File
    Caine's star-quality and absolute ease in front of the camera are fully formed.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Train
    This long, exciting second world war thriller (based on a true-life incident involving art conservationist Rose Valland, who appears briefly in its opening sequence) has particular present-day relevance in view of the mindless destruction of art works and ancient ruins by Islamic State and our responses to these iconoclastic barbarities.
  26. The Sound of Music
    Robert Wise's adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical still has a little soul in its bones, with its reactionary nature tempered by Ernest Lehman's supple screenplay, and its elephantine running-time eased by a set of songs that lodge in your system like hookworms.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    None But the Brave
    The anti-war sentiment is overplayed, but it's a good gritty war drama for all that. [08 Oct 2005, p.53]
    • The Guardian
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    36 Hours
    George Seaton's 1964 36 Hours is complete tosh but clever and zestful tosh, and there's not a lot of that about. [13 Apr 1999, p.20]
    • The Guardian
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Goldfinger
    Not just my favourite Bond movie, but the standard by which all other Bond movies must be judged. It has Sean Connery, of course, and the best theme song, incorporating Shirley Bassey and lashings of John Barry brass...And it has the best villain.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Mary Poppins
    Tomlinson is the great heart of the movie, the warmth to Andrews’ splinter of ice, who, while sustaining the film’s line in jokey verbosity, still manages to be moving.
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