Observer's Scores

  • Movies
For 1,801 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 49% higher than the average critic
  • 1% same as the average critic
  • 50% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 60
Highest review score: 100 Denial
Lowest review score: 0 From Paris with Love
Score distribution:
1801 movie reviews
  1. There are good things in it, but Ms. Hunt is smart, observant and bright enough to make films that resonate with more freshness than this. Maybe next time.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    There are heart-tugging moments in The Glass Castle, but Walls’s bestselling memoir needed to be roughed up and aired out. For it to match up to the book, the movie needed the glass to be smashed, not every shard treasured.
  2. We end up spending way too much time running over the same old ground. What have we found? The same old fear.
  3. Like just about everything else these days that passes itself off as a movie, Bleeding Love moves too slow for its own good and hobbles its way to an inconclusive and unsatisfactory ending.
  4. Rambling, well-shot but inconsequential curio.
  5. Scorsese’s movie did something crucial that this one doesn’t: it told the truth as it knew it. Honesty, or at least some version of it, would have been a very good place for War Dogs to start.
  6. Words are generally a problem for Dolittle—a fatal flaw when your picture is about talking animals. While the words are abundant, most are either perfunctory exposition or anachronistic jokes that fall flatter than the state of Nebraska.
  7. Katherine is searching for inspiration during her time in Morocco and, meanwhile, Dern should search for a better project.
  8. A far too anemic and restrained take on a story that demands at least some kind of dour sensuousness if not straight-up bodice ripping.
  9. No one was expecting Midnight Run level repartee from Hobbs and Shaw, but is it too much to ask for a bit more than the who-has-a-bigger-penis stuff we get here?
  10. A dismal hack job pretending to be a take on modern relationships.
  11. The insurmountable problem is that Imogene is not a very original, dynamic or charismatic character, and Kristen Wiig is not a very original, dynamic or charismatic actress. Nobody in this movie is really appealing enough to be much fun. The state of New Jersey should sue.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    It just goes to show, no matter how burnished your backdrop or splendiferous your setting, if your script is crap, you're stuck with a total dud.
  12. Shaving too fast with an old razor blade, I’ve had more scares than anything in Heretic from my bathroom mirror.
  13. Zack Snyder’s Justice League may feature altered scenes from its chopped-up counterpart, but it’s unlikely to play any differently to general audiences — apart from feeling like more of a slog. Its mere existence guarantees that someone, somewhere will be satisfied, but the film’s improvements are hardly enough to fix what was, now quite apparently, a flawed endeavor from the start.
  14. Despite its title, Onward is a regressive film, sometimes painfully so.
  15. The Mark Wahlberg–starrer reveals just how stuck Hollywood sci-fi is in 1999, when The Matrix cemented ideas of digital consciousness in the Western mainstream (with a bent of pan-Asian spirituality).
  16. It’s occasionally diverting, sure, but so is killing time while you wait for your flight to board.
  17. The movie exists between prestige and genre (or two genres, really, as it morphs in its final third from an escaped fugitive picture to a war movie), yet it can’t quite grasp either the elevated emotion of prestige or the snap of the genre.
  18. The often-stilted dialogue of the teenage protagonists doesn’t fare much better. As a result, many of the performances from the seemingly talented cast come off as stiff and stagey.
  19. Leave the World Behind is a dumb movie disguised as a smart movie, a middling thriller whose decorated cast and tricky camerawork can’t compensate for its undercooked, overwritten script.
  20. Like many third iterations, this one shows signs of the creative team growing bored with what made the story worth telling in the first place.
  21. There are individual scenes, individual moments of action and even characters that actually work, but as a whole, Black Adam is a tangled, cluttered mess.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    I'm not sure what went wrong with this picture. It could just be bad judgment on the part of screenwriter Steve Adams, who for all we know finds stalking adorable.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    In my own very humble opinion, In Praise of Love lacks even the most fragmented charms I have found in almost all of his previous works. [9 Sep 2002, p.25]
    • Observer
  22. It is the Oscar winner’s most affected performance to date, which is truly saying something when you consider that she has already played both Katherine Hepburn and Bob Dylan.
  23. The challenge here is that Kidman and Efron have no spark, which makes it awkward and uncomfortable to witness their coupling.
  24. Not particularly good or bad, it is “another Marvel movie” — certainly not the cure to what’s been ailing the Marvel Cinematic Universe since Endgame.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Speaking of afterthoughts, Olivia Wilde has a bit part as a single mom who unwittingly aids and abets the Brennans in their escape, and Brian Dennehy lurches silently through a number of scenes as John's working-class father. It's jarring to see such big-name actors in such thankless roles.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    What I don’t need is more undercooked leftovers: elevator pitches that satisfy the suits (It’s The Hangover with chicks!) because risk-averse studios don’t want to take any chances with that chick stuff and therefore create a self-fulfilling prophecy of estrogen dreck.

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