The Observer (UK)'s Scores

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For 1,640 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 51% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3.3 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 68
Highest review score: 100 Enys Men
Lowest review score: 20 Book Club: The Next Chapter
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 893 out of 1640
  2. Mixed: 714 out of 1640
  3. Negative: 33 out of 1640
1640 movie reviews
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  1. A Minecraft Movie
    Perhaps there’s an alternative out there, a sharper, smarter, funnier version of a Minecraft movie. One with actual jokes. Or, God forbid, there may even be a worse iteration, although that’s hard to imagine.
  2. Love Hurts
    Incoherent, inelegantly choreographed and shot with a colour palette reminiscent of one of those noxious American Candy Stores that have popped up all over London like an outbreak of herpes, this Valentine-themed martial arts action picture is one of the worst of the year so far.
  3. Emmanuelle
    Diwan relocates the action to Hong Kong and remakes Emmanuelle as a glossy but dispiriting treatise on the emptiness of the corporate world, punctuated by lots of panting, lip-chewing abandon.
  4. Borderlands
    The effects are so shoddy, you wonder if the entire post-production budget was blown on fine-tuning Cate Blanchett’s cheekbones. It’s so incoherent, you half expect to see the notorious director Uwe Boll’s name on the credits.
  5. Irish Wish
    There are no leprechauns in this abysmal romantic comedy. Otherwise, though, pretty much no theme-park Ireland cliche is left unturned.
  6. What Happens Later
    It’s a tonal mess, a film that aims to be an adorably quirky romcom but plays out as such a surreally purgatorial ordeal.
  7. The Exorcist: Believer
    It requires a rare ineptitude to take what is famously one of the most terrifying movies ever made, recycle pretty much everything (including Tubular Bells on the score) but neglect to include the scares.
  8. Book Club: The Next Chapter
    If anything, the writing in this chocolate-box travelogue of a sequel is even lazier than that of the first film, with much cackling innuendo and sparkly narcissism, a couple of clumsily engineered long-distance domestic crises and interminable heartfelt speeches that made me cringe so hard I nearly dislocated my spine.
  9. Assassin Club
    By the end, his getaway car is almost as riddled with holes as the plot itself.
  10. The Super Mario Bros. Movie
    The Super Mario Bros Movie is a frantic Easter egg hunt of a film that does the bare minimum to please its loyal existing fanbase. Those less enthralled by the antics of the moustachioed Italian plumber will wonder which of Donkey Kong’s weaponised barrels this joyless, noisy mess was scraped from.
  11. Murder Mystery 2
    This crime caper has a certain frenzied energy, but it’s sloppily plotted, crass and so dumb, you wouldn’t trust it to use cutlery unsupervised.
  12. Fisherman's Friends: One and All
    It all feels rather cursory, subplots as glue to tack together the Cornish tourist board-approved shots of cornflower-blue waters and cloudless skies.
  13. DC League of Super-Pets
    It’s formulaic, uninspired stuff, an artless, mirthless mess that leans heavily on the familiarity of the characters – Batman, Wonder Woman and others cameo – while also undermining the integrity of the DC universe.
  14. Persuasion
    This adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, by the theatre director Carrie Cracknell, from a screenplay by Ron Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow, is a travesty.
  15. Morbius
    [An] incoherent, vampire-themed Marvel offcut.
  16. The Addams Family 2
    A singularly unattractive animation style, jokes as flat as roadkill and a score that could be used as an instrument of torture are just some of the problems with the latest attempt to squeeze yet more blood from the Addams Family mausoleum.
  17. Off the Rails
    Bickering middle-aged women obsessing over travel arrangements is not entertainment, it’s a living hell.
  18. The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard
    The dismal dialogue wouldn’t matter quite so much if at least the action sequences delivered a few thrills, but the whole thing is so shoddily put together it looks as though it was edited with a strimmer.
  19. Music
    These self-consciously upbeat moments clash horribly with the wider redemption narrative.
  20. Stardust
    The whole thing feels strangely pedestrian, unable to capture or channel Bowie’s maverick spirit.
  21. Playing with Fire
    This is beyond inept.
  22. Cats
    The camera’s canted angles and shaky closeups convulse with feeling that the actors can’t seem to summon. Ensemble dance sequences convey neither emotion nor information (except that the felines each have 10 fully articulated human toes). The film is rated U, but many of its uncanny images are sure to haunt viewers for generations.
  23. The Kitchen
    It’s quite an achievement to combine career low points for all three of the female leads, but a film that spends so much time capturing shots of characters walking sassily through the streets of 70s Hell’s Kitchen at the expense of characterisation clearly has its priorities fried.
  24. Rambo: Last Blood
    It’s cheap and lazy stuff.
  25. The Art of Racing in the Rain
    It’s laughably contrived and shamelessly calculating. Dog’s bollocks, but not in a good way.
  26. Playmobil: The Movie
    While The Lego Movie is all about creativity and invention, Playmobil shamelessly steals ideas.
  27. Stuber
    In the absence of sharp writing, Bautista and Nanjiani adopt the blunt-weapon approach, shrieking their lines at each other as if they’re trying to hold a conversation from opposite sides of an eight-lane motorway. It’s painfully unfunny stuff.
  28. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
    The ugly visual effects are outdone only by the sound design, which is relentlessly loud and thunderingly tedious. Verbal exchanges between the humans are devoid of wit and barely functional in communicating the story.
  29. Bel Canto
    There’s a tepid, cross-cultural romantic comedy trapped inside this televisual hostage drama. The reliable Moore is trapped too. Even she can’t animate the material, leaving the graphic denouement feeling like a bum note.
  30. Patrick
    While the eponymous star of this film is a fairly robust example of the breed, with eyeballs that appear to be securely wedged into its skull, there’s a frisson of anxiety whenever he’s on screen that undermines any attempts at comedy.
  31. Life Itself
    This stupid person’s idea of a clever movie is keen that we get the point, right down to providing an overbearing, hand-holding voiceover, which guides us through its multiple levels of plot contrivance as if the audience is a not particularly bright toddler.
  32. Holmes & Watson
    Puerile, imbecilic and imbued with the kind of casual 1970s sitcom homophobia that reads all male friendships as somehow suspect, this slack-jawed grossout comedy represents the nadir of Conan Doyle adaptations.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Texasville
    It is a rancid, flaccid affair, both cynical and sentimental. The characters are caricatures and seem to have more to do with Bogdanovich's feelings about Beverly Hills in 1990 than Texas in 1984. [09 Dec 1990, p.52]
    • The Observer (UK)

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