The Guardian's Scores

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:
6556 movie reviews
  1. In its unexpected way, this film speaks to the new agony of banishment now being felt by millions of Ukrainians, and to the profound unease and concern and impotence spreading westward across Europe.
  2. Braff and Union have passable chemistry, but Union’s charisma and confidence is magnetic in any context including this one. It’s all breezy – there are no bad actors or malicious intent (other than that one Calabasas woman), so the drama is light and the messes are quickly cleaned up.
  3. There’s never really enough for the underserved trio of actors to sink their teeth into, although they all manage to coast comfortably enough.
  4. A pacifist parable taking a brave stand against nothing, totally removed from the sociocultural landscape of today’s Sweden, it sounds out like one of Caroline’s screams into the howling Scandinavian wind – impassioned, futile, heard by no one.
  5. This is a richly intelligent drama, in which every word and every shot counts.
  6. X
    With its unabashed focus on bodies, luring us in with their nudity before hacking them into tiny pieces, the back-to-basics slasher X arrives as a bold rebuke to all things staid and dignified.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Hall, always a joy to watch, shows yet another, more subdued, side of her prodigious craft. But the film fails to build real suspense, and the scary scenes feel rote and often inelegant, like ticking off a college-horror-movie shot list.
  7. It’s a delicate, thoughtful film, moving and real.
  8. Bloody, action-packed and tragicomic all at once, this dazzling coming-of-age tale masterfully contemplates the knotty process of coming to terms with past traumas through a horror-fantasy lens.
  9. Just occasionally, Lyne brings the right kind of flash, brash and trash to this fantastically silly and unbelievable story. But the film plods along in such a disconcerting way: there is no ratcheting up of tension, or plausible psychology.
  10. Dinklage always holds the screen with his natural charisma.
  11. There is a fair bit of sentimentality here, but an awful lot of affection and energy as well.
  12. Streamline’s narrative doesn’t go in the expected direction, with structural and emotional surprises making good on its promise to deliver a different kind of sports story, even if its final stretch is a tad neat.
  13. It’s spectacle coasting on the evergreen draw of time travel paced with beats of occasionally effective human emotion – grief, regret, self-loathing and acceptance in sometimes moving, very manageable amounts.
  14. Paxton’s movie sketches out the sinister dread just under the happy-family surface; she is in expert control of her film, achieving her effects with economy and force. It is really unnerving.
  15. Great Freedom is a formidably intelligent and well-acted prison movie and also a love story – or perhaps a paradoxically platonic bromance, stretching from the end of the second world war to the moon landing.
  16. Gold is a minimalistic production, story and setting wise, with an interesting kind of contextual ambiguity: we know there is a wider world beyond the frame, though we don’t know what it looks like. Sparseness is intriguing, but this film is so damn sparse.
  17. The journey is slick and diverting, and at times incisive, but Turning Red is yet another Pixar film that coasts rather than glides. Hopefully its next offering can turn into something more.
  18. Letts is a brilliant entrepreneur, an inter-disciplinary artist and eloquent speaker about what life was like in the punk era, and despite his (correct) refusal to see things in these tiresomely nostalgist or sentimental terms, there is a pang in recognising the spark of that time.
  19. It’s a thriller by name but less edge-of-your-seat than lounging on the couch, absorbing beats of plot like the ocean tide. A little provocation with slight commitment – that’s not a bad night in by any means.
  20. There’s a propulsive, driving force to the way the film is directed, but there are some things that don’t entirely track.
  21. To me this feels like a silly smirking film with zero insights into abuse or conspiracy theories.
  22. Lemercier’s weirdly grinning, gurning face superimposed on the child’s head creates an unnatural chill that the film fails to shrug off, even after Aline as an adult is supposed to be glammed up with her teeth fixed.
  23. Against the Ice is a Danish story flattened for a global audience.
  24. This film may stretch your patience to the limit and beyond. It’s minor work – but there is always something there, some restless wounded intelligence, a pugnacious worrying-away at something.
  25. For all the amazement at Ball’s tireless hustle and explosive originality, there’s a terminal lack of both in this monument to her memory.
  26. Narrating the film with occasional gonzo outbursts (“We were so fucking stupid”), Krichevskaya is perhaps over-infatuated with her subject, but then Sindeeva seems like quite a character.
  27. This is an engaging ensemble piece, acted with vehemence and sincerity, though it concludes a little melodramatically.
  28. The ending is tiresome and shark-jumping in the extreme.
  29. Pure evil permeates this brief, 80-minute film, whose cold visual brilliance reminds me of the recent movies of Paweł Pawlikowski. It wasn’t until some time after it had finished that I grasped one of the reasons it was so oppressive: there are no women in it at all. There is a chill of political fear.

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