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 4.8 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. What saves the movie from tedium is a cast that is easy to watch, from understated veterans such as Belushi.
  2. You watch the movie like you read a book, which leads to eventual tedium. You can’t put a bookmark in a movie, come back later, and pick up where you left off.
  3. I admire Carrey for taking on a grim and sobering project made in Krakow, Poland, that requires a range he would never be asked to show in any American sitcom, but Dark Crimes is so lurid, irrelevant and unwatchable it makes you wonder if he ever read the script.
  4. It’s such a pleasure to see four mature women, more beautiful, glamorous, desirable and pulled together than most of the ladies today who are half their age, share the screen in all their glory that it’s easy to forget how disappointing the movie is.
  5. As docs go, it’s not as informatively or entertainingly good as it should have been and not as shamefully self-serving as it could have been, but as wistful as it made me feel about the New York I once loved that will never come again, it put a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes.
  6. Only masochists try to make movies out of Chekhov. They keep trying, and they never get it right.
  7. I cannot count the number of reservations I had about Anything, an idea with every possibility of being a cheap publicity gimmick aimed at selling the sensational and luring the lurid. What a shock, then, to discover that Anything is anything but.
  8. A turgid, pretentious, and incomprehensible existential joke. What a star on the rise is doing in it is a question mark for the archives.
  9. A well-directed thriller with knuckle-chewing suspense. A cast of unknowns give some first-rate performances, doing everything right to milk the throb of panic and anxiety from “what would I do?” situations. Terror builds from start to finish.
  10. No matter how you regard its limited commercial possibility for success, there is nothing funny about Tully. Having forewarned you, I must add that suffering through her never-ending agony is less daunting than it has to be when it is Theron who is doing it for you.
  11. There are so many ideas rattling around in Backstabbing for Beginners that are never resolved, and so many duplicitous characters that are never satisfactorily explained, that the end result is a muddle of confusion and violence that could end the future of tourism in Baghdad forever.
  12. The film, poorly edited and weakly unfocused by Turkish writer-director Deniz Gamze Ergüven, is a real mess.
  13. It’s not much of a movie, but it feels good and leaves you with life-affirming optimism.
  14. It’s a good story, but too slow-moving for its own good. The cast works diligently, and Keener is scrappy but calm throughout, with a convincing naturalism as a woman with tremendous strength and a powerful belief in civil rights—at a time when most women were reluctant to speak out against political corruption.
  15. Well-considered and sincerely acted, Kodachrome is a character-driven drama that has been wrongly labeled a comedy by some so-called critics. There is nothing funny about it.
  16. A thriller with no thrills.
  17. Several aspects of this sad, grim story remain a mystery, but I am pleased to report that for the most part, Chappaquiddick catalogues the facts and eschews the sensationalism. The result is a film of integrity and disclosure, a controversial chapter in American history that substitutes clinical accuracy for Hollywood embellishment, with an impressive attention to detail and an admirable respect for suspenseful narrative.
  18. Unusual and invigorating.
  19. The result is an old-fashioned play turned into an old-fashioned movie that looks like an old-fashioned play. Nothing happens and everybody talks incessantly.
  20. A fresh and valiant attempt to breathe some fresh air into the #MeToo movement, Submission is stimulating and intelligently rendered until the final act, when predictability sets in.
  21. There’s nothing else to watch or care about in the entire film anyway. Once again, a great actress is on her own.
  22. Movies about coming of age and out of the closet are nothing new, but Love, Simon is so honest, funny and real it never fails to capture your imagination and lift your spirit.
  23. It’s an espionage cartoon sideshow that is inarguably pointless, with occasionally entertaining moments. Color it preposterous.
  24. The latest in this ossified cornball genre is The Cured, which at least tries for a soupçon of freshness.
  25. A well-meaning, expertly acted film, it unfortunately drowns in its own sorrow.
  26. Annihilation is a demented science-fiction comic book of a movie that makes less sense than a butterfly mating with a buffalo.
  27. All I know is it’s excruciatingly dull. It pains me to see industrious people wasting time, chasing their tails and turning into butter when they could be taking a nap — which is what I did at regular intervals during The Female Brain.
  28. Despite good intentions, the movie never lives up to the breathless excitement the real-life story promises.
  29. The cast is uniformly excellent, with Francisco Reyes a particularly likable beam of strength and light as the unfortunate Orlando, but the film’s great triumph is Daniela Vega, a transgender actress and singer, who makes an indelible impression in the leading role.
  30. This lumbering trilogy of trash based on the books by E. L. James has so run out of blood and oxygen that it has varicose veins.

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