The Telegraph's Scores

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For 2,493 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 50% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 48% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0.7 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 66
Highest review score: 100 Cantona
Lowest review score: 0 Cats
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,195 out of 2493
  2. Mixed: 1,123 out of 2493
  3. Negative: 175 out of 2493
2493 movie reviews
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  1. Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom
    The film never tries to do anything other than look good, and is hellishly ugly even so.
  2. Inferno
    While the plot’s endless lurches and jinks are designed to hold you in a constant state of pleasurable bafflement, the cumulative effect is desensitisation: no single thread holds long enough to give you anything to cheer for or believe in.
  3. Mrs. Lowry & Son
    As a two-hander it has some tension and promise.
  4. Captain America: Brave New World
    A thrill-free thriller.
  5. Wild Mountain Thyme
    A film so frivolous and twee I felt as if my brain were leaking out of my nostrils as I watched.
  6. Holland
    Director Cave stages some nicely gripping scenes of suspense, toggling between camp and grit as nimbly as the swoony soundtrack, which occasionally cuts out for comic effect.
  7. Daddy's Home
    Lame Ferrell, through some weird freak of his talent, tends to be the best Ferrell, and despite the film’s general mediocrity in most departments – let us swish briskly over everything about the way it looks – his floundering star turn delivers the goods.
  8. Austenland
    For a while, the film gets by on silliness alone. But in the end, it all amounts to no more than a sniggery guilty pleasure.
  9. xXx: Return of Xander Cage
    The movie wastes chance after chance to pull together a satisfying action sequence, or give us anything to look at that’s not lame, spatially confusing, and badly lit.
  10. The Great Wall
    From blundered opening to risible conclusion, it’s a wall-to-wall fiasco.
  11. Lost River
    The result is cinema you don’t watch so much as absent-mindedly scroll through, wondering when an idea or an image worth clicking on will finally show up.
  12. The House That Jack Built
    It is two and a half hours of self-reflexive torture porn with an entire McDonald’s warehouse of chips on its shoulder, and a handful of genuinely provocative ideas which, exasperatingly, go nowhere much.
  13. Tyler Perry's A Madea Homecoming
    It’s less a film than a compound disaster scenario for comedy: to say I didn’t laugh once is to understate the sheer volume and vehemence of not-laughing I was doing during each of its 106 agonising minutes.
  14. The Roads Not Taken
    The film is close to parody – not of anything Potter’s ever done, but of male artists and their obsessive end-of-life regrets. If you’d told me it was a shelved adaptation of late Philip Roth done by Alejandro González Iñárritu in Birdman (or Biutiful) mode, I’d have believed it in a shot.
  15. Parallel Tales
    Unfolds with little dramatic momentum and negligible intrigue.
  16. Halloween Kills
    What Halloween Kills lacks in ideas it partially makes up for in gruesomely authentic slasher texture. From cinematography to editing, casting to oozy prosthetic gore, Green and his crew have recreated the feel of the Carpenter original with an almost academic diligence, particularly in an extended 1970s-set opening flashback.
  17. Suburbicon
    It’s a hectic, sour and muddled film – a flailing counterfeit of satire that keeps slipping on its own banana skin supply, and never remotely gets to grips with what it thinks it’s sending up.
  18. The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death
    It’s murky and unsatisfying.
  19. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
    Ritchie’s film...is so misshapen and inert, your imagination and memory never come close to being sparked by it. Just sticking with the plot soaks up every ounce of concentration you have.
  20. Black Adam
    The film has whizz, and bang, and you’ll forget it by tomorrow.
  21. A Dark Place
    It’s a bungled business, making obvious errors of staging.
  22. Cinderella
    Despite the strenuous effort, this glass slipper just doesn’t fit.
  23. Machete Kills
    Perhaps because the joke’s already spent, this sequel has a pretty low bar to clear, and manages to be both utterly meritless and weirdly bearable.
  24. Venom: The Last Dance
    As last dances go, it’s the Macarena in film form.
  25. The Purge
    This movie starts from a premise so sociologically batty it’s hard to take any of its subsequent terrors seriously, which means tension doesn’t so much fly out the window as fail to even get up the driveway.
  26. Child 44
    When it finally gets going, it becomes gloweringly compelling, shored up by its strong supporting players (Paddy Considine, Vincent Cassel and Charles Dance also pop up), handsome photography and sheer, clanking momentum.
  27. Moonfall
    The film sounds actively embarrassed by what it’s trying to pitch, and reverse-engineers its sci-fi elements to fit the default disaster template Emmerich could apply in his sleep. We’re promised the Moon, but sold a lemon.
  28. Kick-Ass 2
    Your ass is constantly braced in readiness and hope, but it remains un-kicked.
  29. Edie
    The film is way too much like a never-give-up Saga commercial for its own good.
  30. The Curse of La Llorona
    Raymond Cruz’s solemn performance as a skilled Mexican exorcist does the job, but the film misses a trick in not casting a more heavyweight veteran – Edward James Olmos? – to lend a little of that Max von Sydow ballast.
  31. Pompeii
    Anderson’s Pompeii doesn’t sweat the human stuff. His camera is mostly trained on the big picture: billowing smoke, tidal-waves, fireballs streaking through the sky. What’s happening to the people on the ground doesn’t matter, so long as we’re aware that 95 percent of them are being squashed or torched.
  32. Padre Pio
    In cinematic confession, no number of Hail Marys could make amends for this.
  33. The Woman in the Window
    There’s bad fun to be had in the final stretch – if you go in fully aware that the production flew off the rails.
  34. Human Highway
    If it sounds insane on paper, the film is even more bizarre up on the screen. Demonstrating considerable skill as a director, Young gives the action an eerie, artificial sheen.
  35. Passengers
    As a directing assignment, it at least proves that The Imitation Game was no fluke: Morten Tyldum can make glossily sexless, space-cadet guff out of whatever half-baked script you throw at him. The attempts at humour are wince-inducing.
  36. Monster Trucks
    As much as you may find yourself rooting for the film, it’s too blandly directed by Chris Wedge (Ice Age) to repay the favour with anything out of the ordinary.
  37. Leave One Day
    Cannes has had its share of opening-night turkeys over the past decade or so (2014’s Grace of Monaco was a memorable one), but for sheer unabating feebleness this must take the biscuit.
  38. Before I Go to Sleep
    It’s just chilly and uninvolving.
  39. Chappie
    It’s a brawny, inventive action romp that’s as happy firing rockets at helicopters as it is contemplating the Cartesian model of mind-body dualism, which gives it a satisfying, sweet-and-sour tang of its own.
  40. The Unforgivable
    It’s never outright bad – not unforgivably so – but comes off muted, diffuse and generally half-baked.
  41. Romeo & Juliet
    Let’s blame Fellowes before Shakespeare – one of them built this house, the other has just walked right through it in his filthiest garden clogs.
  42. Britney Vs. Spears
    The conclusion the directors reach could have come from any of the other Spears films
  43. Bleeding Love
    While the leads get it together somewhat in the final stretch, it can’t be the hardest job to access these teary-bonding emotions opposite an actual loved one.
  44. Horrible Bosses 2
    This is the problem with being held hostage in the worst studio comedy of the year: for cast and audience alike, there’s little to do but wait for it to stop.
  45. Unhinged
    As a psychothriller, it gives itself one simple assignment – to set your heart rate pounding through the roof. And on this level, with a lurid voltage that might require health warnings, it nastily delivers.
  46. Suicide Squad
    When you compare Suicide Squad to what James Gunn and Marvel Studios achieved in Guardians of the Galaxy – low-profile property, oddball characters, make-it-fun brief – the film makes you cringe so hard your teeth come loose. But it’s a slog even on its own crushingly puerile terms.
  47. 65
    The version we get feels like it’s been eagerly pitched, passably storyboarded, then handed over with a defeated shrug to somebody’s second unit.
  48. Meg 2: The Trench
    Meg 2, by design, is a completely anonymous bag of lukewarm McDonalds – it’s hard to be mad at it, but only because nothing in it stands out enough to get mad at.
  49. Bliss
    Strip away the wiring, and Cahill’s film connects most tangibly as a fable about drug addiction – hardly a shock, with all the crystal-obsessed scurrying to make one grey reality bearable, or switch to another outright. He’s had more ingenious ideas, but the whole thing’s strangely charming.
  50. Father Stu
    The movie isn’t awful, just sapping and strained.
  51. Welcome To Marwen
    The film is such a crackpot tangle that it is even hard to fathom what a successful version might have looked like.
  52. Lift
    Kevin Hart just about gets by. but Netflix's heist thriller falls down thanks to its terrible CGI, nonsensical plot and mismatched casting.
  53. Smurfs: The Lost Village
    Under-eights may thrill to this, or they may, in years to come, confuse it with their first LSD trip. Just don’t say you weren’t warned.
  54. Insidious: Chapter 2
    The scares are mostly very scary indeed, and that means the film does its job.
  55. Pitch Perfect 3
    There’s nothing you could call an actual emotion in store, just an awful lot of face-pulling.
  56. Wild Card
    Wild Card, which keeps giving the Stath too much mannered hard-boiled dialogue for his own good, is a promising blend of components that don’t quite end up gelling.
  57. From the Land of the Moon
    From the Land of the Moon is a story about how good it feels to feel very, very bad – and how a life lived in rapturous misery is somehow more valuable than mild domestic contentment. That might ring truer if Garcia wasn’t working in such a starchy register.
  58. Jupiter Ascending
    Cinema-goers desperately need a fresh, unusual and franchise-free blockbuster to rally behind, but Jupiter Ascending isn’t it.
  59. Homefront
    This meat-and-potatoes B-thriller stays modest and grounded: compared with the noisy excesses of higher-budgeted action flicks, it has a kind of crude integrity.
  60. The 355
    Rather than doing anything novel or surprising with the basic spies-gone-rogue template, The 355 just repackages it in girl-power wrapping: it’s the film equivalent of a high-fructose, corn-syrup-based fizzy drink being passed off as chic in taller, slimmer cans.
  61. Spiral: From the Book of Saw
    If the original films owed a blatant debt to David Fincher’s Se7en, this one remortgages from the same lender.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    X-Men Origins: Wolverine
    A compromise, a ghastly hybrid, a film that appears to have pirated and wrecked its own potential.
  63. Brick Mansions
    Director Camille Delamarre and Luc Besson, who co-wrote the screenplay, relocate the story to Detroit and tone down some of its (admittedly broad) social satire — although the Parkour remains centre-stage, and is mostly hair-raising.
  64. Dracula Untold
    If they had to give Drac an “origin story” this literal-minded, at least they had the sense to keep it keen and lively, whittled to a point.
  65. Why Him?
    Hamburg’s always reaching for poo-based humour in his more desperate moments.
  66. Need For Speed
    The racing scenes are its one hope of reclaiming your attention, but there aren’t nearly enough of them to justify such a killing duration.
  67. The Nutcracker and the Four Realms
    It has the feel of a clockwork musical toy that’s been tinkered with and shaken to life over and over – it cranks out a tune, all right, but the feeling of labour behind it dampens the magic.
  68. Queen of the Desert
    ]Herzog's] film has the distinction, and also the disadvantage, of being probably the least severe Herzog has yet made: it’s pretty and watchable, with Kidman trying her heartfelt best, but it can’t make its Gertrude Bell, as lover, cultural pioneer and feminist icon, add up to more than a series of voguish poster-girl poses.
  69. The Greatest Beer Run Ever
    The idea is that Chickie’s experiences will challenge his simplistic view of the conflict, but Farrelly frames his jaunt as a glorified gap year, with various atrocities repackaged as opportunities for personal growth. Napalm
  70. Here
    Zemeckis can’t let go of his ghastly conviction that everything has to be heart-tugging schmaltz. Alan Silvestri’s ruinously sickly score is his main accomplice.
  71. The Deliverance
    The film succumbs to being undiluted tripe.
  72. The Exorcist: Believer
    Director David Gordon Green fails to whip up even a fraction of the original 1973 chiller's menace in this sloppy, CGI-heavy farrago.
  73. As Above, So Below
    These catacombs are just an echo chamber into which any rubbish can be pumped, and while this gives carte blanche to production designer Louise Marzaroli, the relentless flow of subterranean non-sequitur becomes at least as trying as the whirling, jerky non-cinematography.
  74. The Gunman
    A garbled mélange of arbitrary, unsatisfying action and token remorse.
  75. Slaughterhouse Rulez
    The school isn’t specific enough and the horror isn’t weird enough: on both fronts, it’s so broad it could practically be a Norfolk waterway.
  76. Marching Powder
    One swaggering brawl plays out to a certain synth version of Beethoven’s 9th, suggesting that Love’s fanboy devotion to A Clockwork Orange might override having fully understood it. But who knows?
  77. The Other Woman
    Nick Cassavetes (John Q, The Notebook) has never delivered a picture that entirely knows what its tone is, and a manic uncertainty duly sucks the fun away.
  78. Ella McCay
    Many good actors here are weirdly bad.
  79. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
    The gonzo-Wagnerian backstory the franchise subsequently built up hasn’t been sufficiently pruned – and with so many characters to juggle, the story feels less like a coherent chain of events than a bundle of obligatory subplots.
  80. Dear Evan Hansen
    On all fronts, you wish that Dear Evan Hansen had nothing to do with Evan Hansen.
  81. Michael
    The performances are great, the rise-to-fame story gripping, and the music and choreography are making my skin tingle. I can’t wait to see how they’re going to deal with the trickier stuff.” But then you do wait. And wait. And then the credits roll, and you’re left waiting still.
  82. Mother of the Bride
    The film’s more nothingy than noxious: Mark Waters (Freaky Friday, Mean Girls) directs with vanishingly little of the snap he had back in the day.
  83. Planes
    DisneyToon Studios have borrowed so much from Pixar here, and yet they seem to have learned almost nothing.
  84. Pinocchio
    Robert Zemeckis, who should be well above this, imprints a bit of personality on this nightmare exactly twice.
  85. Terminator Genisys
    In practice, the interplay between events old and new is equal parts tedious and indecipherable, with the characters talking about parallel timelines like studio executives thrashing out a franchise in a boardroom.
  86. Gemini Man
    Those wonky de-aging effects and distracting frame-rate serve as trip-wires too. But what ultimately hobbles Gemini Man, more than all of that, is its refusal to buy into its own ludicrousness. It’s a slab of silliness that commits a terrible error: it takes itself seriously.
  87. Men in Black: International
    It goes all-in on the foolproof chemistry, at the expense of everything else. We know from Thor: Ragnarok and the subsequent Avengers pow-wows how well Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson can spar, but their partnership only takes a film so far when the script’s in freefall and nothing else seems to have a stake.
  88. The Enforcer
    Banderas is good value, playing the role a few shades more seriously than it deserves, while first-time director Richard Hughes deploys much fizzing neon and halogen to strike a convincingly sleazy tone. But even at 90 minutes the plot feels padded, and it’s all so preeningly sordid.
  89. No Escape
    No Escape is a film you’d want to recoil from taking seriously, so it’s almost a relief that its bungled execution makes this actively impossible.
  90. Flight Risk
    “We should be home in about 90 minutes or so,” Wahlberg chirpily informs his passengers just before take-off. That’s the film’s pledge to its audience too: some ups, some downs, then safely into land.
  91. Chaos Walking
    It takes around three minutes for Chaos Walking to fully set out its premise, and around three seconds more for everyone watching to realise it’s not going to work.
  92. Bad Santa 2
    The level of not very funny things this entails, even by the standards of barely-awaited sequels to lowbrow Yuletide comedies, is kind of impressive.
  93. The Sound and the Fury
    Faulkner’s book, an oblique and complex tale of the American South’s festering decline, hasn’t so much been reworked for cinema as simply dumped on the screen in handfuls, and the result is a swirling mess.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    America: The Motion Picture
    I mean, it’s really dumb: steroidally dumb, dumb not in a charming, laughter-provoking way but just in a clunking, vulgar, relentless, random smutty jokes about handjobs way.
  95. Jurassic World Dominion
    This series' sixth film has a daft plot, groans with lousy action and makes the poor old dinosaurs humiliatingly surplus to requirements.
  96. Underdogs
    In a memorably bad summer for children’s films, this, surely, is as low as things can sink.
  97. Dad's Army
    Dad’s Army bleakly suggests that even the best source material in the world can only take you so far.
  98. Hillbilly Elegy
    Converting dyed-in-the-wool Appalachian pessimism into honest, bootstrappy uplift is not a task you envy Howard or his cast, as the running time slips away and no concrete point materialises. Elegy is four years late and doomed.
  99. The Last Bus
    As beautiful as some of the landscapes are, and as brilliant as Spall is in repose, there is only so much sitting on a bus looking wistful that one actor can do. Other than Spall’s steady gaze and some mood-book photography, The Last Bus has little to recommend it.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Striptease
    Gymnasium attendants may have worked long and hard on Demi's body, but $12.5 million does seem an unconscionable amount for her to show us nothing we haven't seen before. If only half that money had gone on the rest of the film, then we might have had a better rendering of Carl Hiaasen's hilarious novel, which is an excursion into the by-ways of Miami's crazy culture.
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