The Telegraph's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
For 2,495 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 0.8 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:
2495 movie reviews
  1. Midway will never be mistaken for a classic, and even box office success for the $100 independent production looks dicey. Stretches of the film work beautifully, though, and the sinking feeling for Japan’s forces is painted with sympathy, not schadenfreude.
  2. For all the film’s fumbled shortcuts, air of semi-intentional Nineties-ness, and the completely mad bit with a stray flight of doves, it jollies along with some amiability.
  3. Think of Destroyer as film noir with the brightness turned up. Karyn Kusama’s Los Angeles-set thriller has the bleary, beer-dank air of an overlong house party at which the host has just snapped on the lights: fun’s done folks, now check out the mess.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    It’s the women who steal the film, collectively recalling Grey Gardens (1975) in their distinctive, damaged mannerisms.
  4. Boy Erased could have been more sharply etched, all told – there’s something naggingly indistinct about it. But the lessons of Conley’s experience fight manfully, all the same, to punch through and be counted.
  5. It uses some hoary devices to twist your arm, but resistance, eventually, is futile.
  6. It has a whistle-stop quality, and you sometimes wish it would slow down to savour more personal details, rather than dishing out brisk bullet points from this amazing life.
  7. There’s only so much in this desperately involved historical saga that Chadha and her screenwriters are able to grapple with.
  8. The film is ultimately little more than a trifle, but Hudson is the cherry topping: as this messy, crafty, grasping nightmare, the actress is more fun than she’s been in years.
  9. Frears’ film is all nostalgia and inertia – a tale ablaze with historical import and contemporary resonance, reduced to commemorative biscuit tin proportions.
  10. Alpha Papa’s biggest laughs explode from moments of pure inconsequence.
  11. There’s an inevitable and perhaps unavoidable hitch. People in sitcoms generally don't change at all, while people in films can rarely afford not to – and a movie-sized plot, with its multiple emotional crests and dips, isn’t the kind of environment these characters were built to thrive in.
  12. For all its seeming modesty, this is a mature, contemplative and mostly rewarding experiment: no awards-season bruiser, but a worthwhile B-side for Ashby’s venerable American classic.
  13. It’s enjoyably acted and astutely put together, with plot details that bleed out at just the right speed. But it lacks the thrilling existential dizziness and lingering chill of Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, to which it owes a considerable and obvious debt: in fact, it’s essentially the Ex Machina you can follow while making cups of tea and checking your phone, which may be all that Netflix wanted from it.
  14. There’s enough in Mr Jones to make you want a good deal more.
  15. It has heft, it looks amazing, and it's businesslike to a fault.
  16. This apocalypse isn’t a nightmare so much as the ultimate bromantic fantasy, one in which – with the removal of any responsibility – the boys are free to bicker, banter, and bed down together.
  17. It is what these films always are – source material for its own advertising campaign – but in this instance, it’s little more, which might have been a problem if said campaign hadn’t already proven such a roaring success.
  18. While writers Lena Waithe and James Frey make Queen and Slim’s initial decision to flee convincing, and dramatically spiky – it’s striking that even a lawyer doesn’t fancy her chances on the legal route – their screenplay is rather less good at coming up with excuses for the string of colourful and picturesque pit-stops the two keep making afterwards.
  19. It’s unlikely to change anyone’s life, exactly, but it’s genial, funny, and invigorating.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    It’s utterly ridiculous – and impossible to resist.
  20. An artistic spin on tragedy that’s deft, witty, very well-acted, and more diverting than it is profound.
  21. 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.
  22. For a comedy about a tribe of manic homunculi with nylon faux-hawks, it’s really got to be counted a pleasant surprise.
  23. The brothers' mission is like a Spy vs. Spy strip crossed with a Friz Freleng Pink Panther cartoon.... It’s consistently funny, with the kind of well-orchestrated slapstick moments where you can actually feel the stick slap.
  24. So if Wonder Woman 1984 is playing near you, should you pounce? If it even remotely appeals, I’d say absolutely – even though the film itself, a direct sequel to 2017’s Wonder Woman, is a bit of a marshmallowy muddle.
  25. From top to bottom, it’s Brydon’s film, and his performance matches the modesty of the surroundings: rarely pushing too hard, he finds just the right groove as a browbeaten Everyman lacking spring in his step (or dash in his breaststroke).
  26. Many things in this film have an off-kilter absurdity, for good and bad.
  27. Come the final act, the best political thrillers don't play nice, after all – they twist the knife. This one’s so concerned with making the world a better place, it retracts the blade and wipes it clean
  28. The 22-year-old Van Patten is a more than capable solo lead: the breakout star of Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories, she has an invaluable knack for making her characters’ worst traits their most compelling features.

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