Charlotte Observer's Scores

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For 1,652 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 56% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 41% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 65
Highest review score: 100 Frost/Nixon
Lowest review score: 0 Waist Deep
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,085 out of 1652
  2. Mixed: 279 out of 1652
  3. Negative: 288 out of 1652
1652 movie reviews
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  1. The Amazing Spider-Man
    Did we need another Spider-Man this quickly? Debatable. But if you wanted a new interpretation – especially one where story and action stay in the right balance – this is it.
  2. Standing in the Shadows of Motown
    Impassioned concert sequences with Ben Harper, Chaka Khan, Gerald Levert and especially Joan Osborne prove the Brothers' balanced approach still works on Motown chestnuts.
  3. Winged Migration
    The results require immense patience but also reward it immensely.
  4. Holes
    A richly satisfying adaptation of Louis Sachar's novel.
  5. House of Sand and Fog
    Perelman and Otto make auspicious, nearly flawless debuts.
  6. La La Land
    If “Whiplash” was Damien Chazelle’s bullet train through dark regions of the New York jazz world, La La Land is his leisurely bus tour through sunlit fantasies of life in Los Angeles.
  7. Startup.com
    The coolest film in town offers industrial espionage, power struggles, thwarted romance, betrayal and suspense - and best of all, it's true.
  8. Best in Show
    If this new film doesn't quite go to 11, it's a healthy 8½.
  9. Albert Nobbs
    Most movies about people passing themselves off as the opposite sex can't sustain the illusion, but "Nobbs" does.
  10. American Splendor
    A feature film as odd, personal and sometimes mundane as his (Pekar) comics.
  11. High Fidelity
    (Cusack) has never been more effective onscreen.
  12. The Station Agent
    His height didn't stop independent writer-director Thomas McCarthy from casting his friend in The Station Agent, scoring a triumph for both.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Iron Lady
    Lloyd finesses a deft script of brisk, quick strokes by Abi Morgan ("Brick Lane," "Shame") into a terrific entertainment.
  14. Bright Leaves
    Another of Charlotte native Ross McElwee's musings about his family, history (this time the tobacco industry) and life. It may be his best.
  15. The Matador
    A wicked comedy with just the mildest amount of pathos to season the blend.
  16. Into the Wild
    Penn, one of Hollywood's most famous iconoclasts, must have felt instinctive sympathy with someone who told the whole world in general to leave him alone.
  17. W.
    You'll be disappointed if you expect famed leftist Oliver Stone to apply a coup de grace to this man.
  18. Amazing Grace
    The movie is the usual kind of film biography of a respected figure from the distant past - honorable, oversimplified, handsome.
  19. District 9
    South African director Neill Blomkamp set and shot the film around his native Johannesburg, so parallels to apartheid leap to mind. Yet the script he wrote with Terri Tatchell applies to any culture that bluntly excludes another.
  20. WALL-E
    A potent environmental message wrapped up in an irresistibly cute romance between robots.
  21. East Is East
    Examines Muslim family's religious warfare.
  22. Hairspray
    The film's an irresistible time capsule of that Camelot summer, blending girrrrrl power, social consciousness and faux-'60s pop with the fizz of a soda jerk whipping up a root beer float.
  23. Dark Horse
    Veteran documentary-maker Louise Osmond directs with flair. She gives us just enough of the history of Blackwood to show what Dream Alliance means to the place, and she gets us inside the horse’s head.
  24. The First Grader
    I have never seen elementary schoolers more passionate about education than the ones I met at a school in rural Kenya, not far from the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro.
  25. Mansfield Park
    A love story more involved than I can easily explain.
  26. Chi-Raq
    Chi-Raq is indeed interesting, challenging, provocative and consistently entertaining in its outrageous depiction of life in modern Chicago. And nobody in mainstream filmmaking today except Spike Lee could or would have done it.
  27. Nine Queens
    Has more twists than the Pacific Coast Highway and more layers than a stack of silver-dollar pancakes. If you can wrap your mind around one unlikely condition, the picture provides unalloyed pleasure for connoisseurs of cinematic con artists.
  28. Hard Candy
    The film was reputedly inspired by Japanese teens who trolled chat rooms to find predators, made assignments, then ganged up to beat offending adults.
  29. A Hard Day's Night
    The songs are pure joy, for them and for us.
    • Charlotte Observer
  30. Mustang
    Deniz Gamze Ergüven, who makes her feature debut as writer-director after a couple of short films, tells the story exclusively from the girls’ point of view – both emotionally, as they have all our sympathy, and physically, as almost nothing happens that one of them could not be seeing.
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