The Observer (UK)'s Scores

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For 1,641 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 3.1 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: 894 out of 1641
  2. Mixed: 714 out of 1641
  3. Negative: 33 out of 1641
1641 movie reviews
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  1. Heart of Stone
    The screenplay is a rudimentary thing – scaffolding to support the set pieces – that starts to creak whenever it attempts any depth of character. But the action is terrific, with a screaming, tyre-shredding extended car chase around Lisbon’s tight, cobbled alleys a breathless and exhilarating highlight.
  2. 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.
  3. Brightburn
    In its attempts to provide an antidote to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s catalogue of liberal fantasies, the film swings too far in the other direction.
  4. Pain Hustlers
    It’s predictable but glossily watchable. The main redeeming feature is the crackling charisma of Emily Blunt, in the central role of a down-on-her-luck single mum turned pharma marketing genius.
  5. Swimming with Men
    Based on the true story of a group of Swedish men who competed in the synchronised swimming world championship, Swimming With Men is reminiscent of The Full Monty, its feelgood climax landing with a welcome, if gentle, splash.
  6. The King's Man
    The film can’t resist revelling in a conservative conclusion outside Buckingham Palace, with a victory banner fluttering against a smattering of St George’s flags.
  7. Foe
    Mescal and Ronan are captivating: her watchful, raw-nerved longing; his stinging sense of betrayal. It almost eases us past an overwrought final twist. Almost, but not quite.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Breakout
    Engagingly wry thriller starring Charles Bronson as a Texas adventurer hired by Jill Ireland to spring her innocent husband (Robert Duvall) from a Mexican jail. [08 Oct 2000, p.10]
    • The Observer (UK)
  9. Ricky Stanicky
    Despite the best efforts of a game John Cena in the title role, the laughs are a little thin on the ground.
  10. Next Goal Wins
    Even when he’s not mugging on screen, Waititi’s personality is evident in every frame, which suggests that he is rather overestimating the level of audience goodwill towards him, which has been depleted by the divisive Jojo Rabbit and the mediocre Thor: Love and Thunder.
  11. Mortal Engines
    The film’s critiques are unimaginative, tutting at how territories attack first in order to consolidate power, as well as the spectacle of war itself, bystanders crowding the balconies of the ship-like city, shrieking as guns and lasers fire at the wastelands below.
  12. The Almond and the Seahorse
    A film so grating that you long for the sweet release of amnesia.
  13. Bob Marley: One Love
    What becomes painfully clear is the fact that Bob Marley deserves a better biopic. Still, Lynch’s magnetic presence, and a heartstopping rendition of Redemption Song, almost justify the price of admission.
  14. The Girl in the Spider's Web
    This glum crime franchise, unfolding against a backdrop of blighted concrete chill and semi-derelict industrial spaces, is evolving into Scandinavia’s anti-hygge.
  15. Night School
    The film is a vehicle for Haddish, whose timing and delivery make the jokes jump off the page.
  16. Vita & Virginia
    Debicki (The Tale, Widows) is wonderful as Woolf, a wry and solemn observer, but the rest of the film is all too literal.
  17. Where the Crawdads Sing
    Like the backdrop – marsh or swamp – it’s all a bit soggy.
  18. Back to Black
    There are moments when Abela disappears and Winehouse bursts on to the screen, like a magic eye picture blinked fleetingly into focus. But the film is wildly uneven and prone to catastrophic misjudgments – in that at least it’s true to Winehouse’s spirit.
  19. Dark Phoenix
    For all the energetic hurling around of heavy machinery, the movie feels inert and lazy.
  20. Glass
    The metaphors are messy (trauma makes people extraordinary?) and the pacing’s off, but it’s fun to see the individual films’ universes crossing over.
  21. The Art of Racing in the Rain
    It’s laughably contrived and shamelessly calculating. Dog’s bollocks, but not in a good way.
  22. Four Kids and It
    This should amuse the younger members of the family, but it's unlikely to offer much more to parents than a couple of hours' respite.
  23. 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.
  24. Locked Down
    The film busts a gut attempting to free itself from the confines of the couple’s home. In this, it’s at least true to the spirit of lockdown, but it feels like a missed opportunity.
  25. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
    Plus points include a punchy soundtrack of 90s hip-hop, and Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback, heroically holding their own as the hapless humans roped into the Transformers’ thunderous mess.
  26. Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom
    The lazily generic plot devices (yet again, an ancient evil artefact offers unlimited powers to its holder); performances so thuddingly clunky that much of the dialogue sinks like a boulder in the sea; the lack of any humour whatsoever: these are all minor irritations compared with the picture’s glib trivialisation of the climate crisis.
  27. Mrs. Lowry & Son
    What starts out as a flinty portrait of the influence of a domineering mother over her unworldly son soon loses momentum.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Lady Vanishes
    A rather charmless remake of Hitchcock's classic 1938 comedy thriller, adding nothing of value and subtracting everything of significance. [04 Dec 2005, p.119]
    • The Observer (UK)
  29. In from the Side
    This one almost makes it, but a boggy script slows it down.
  30. Captain America: Brave New World
    It’s a humourless drag of a picture, overreliant on clunky exposition and naive geopolitical posturing. Plus it’s ugly, with a greasy murkiness that looks as though the lens was smeared with lard.
  31. Wild Mountain Thyme
    Shanley has an Oscar and a Pulitzer (he wrote the sublime Moonstruck, and the stage and screen versions of Doubt). Here, that’s easy to forget, given the cartoon accents and overblown metaphors about horses destined to jump the fence.
  32. A Journal for Jordan
    Adams is a vivacious screen presence with a twinkle in her eye, and Jordan can’t quite match her, unable to draw out any real inner turmoil in a character who is respectable to a fault.
  33. Two Tickets to Greece
    The character of Magalie is so enraging that you would chuck yourself into the Aegean Sea rather than spend two weeks in her company.
  34. Something in the Water
    Something in the Water is competently filmed, with lots of propulsive underwater shark’s eye shots of the flailing legs of the bridesmaids. But there’s rather too much time spent watching the girls bobbing and bickering in the middle of the ocean as they wait for the next assault from the circling fish.
  35. 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.
  36. The House That Jack Built
    This sporadically arresting slice of grand guignol takes pointed swipes at misogyny while occasionally seeming to wallow in it. Perhaps its greatest sin is one of bad timing. As always with Von Trier, we can only guess whether that sin is intentional or ironic.
  37. The Roads Not Taken
    The Roads Not Taken is frequently moving, and a fascinating creative idea, but without sufficient information about Leo’s character to anchor the narrative, it feels too abstract.
  38. Jackpot!
    Enthusiastic mugging and gurning from the cast can’t hide a feeble, flailing screenplay that clings to its single idea like a lifebelt.
  39. A Dog Called Money
    What was intended as an examination of the creative process backfires and becomes instead an inadvertent chronicle of oblivious privilege. Harvey wafts through scenes of poverty and devastation, then returns to her cocoon of a studio.
  40. A Dark Place
    Unfortunately, Scott is the most persuasive element in a film that is atmospherically photographed by Marcel Zyskind but let down by a clueless screenplay which borders, at times, on the risible.
  41. Songwriter
    While we learn little of interest about Sheeran himself, the film is arguably a thoroughgoing demystification of the industrial process behind the modern pop song.
  42. Venom: The Last Dance
    Hardy is a highlight, playing Eddie as a man who has had more than enough of the party that’s raging in his head, but Kelly Marcel’s film is a sloppy, incoherent let-down.
  43. That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime the Movie: Scarlet Bond
    It’s visually striking, and at times somewhat overwhelming. Expect numerous sword-based battles, ogres, dragons, ancient curses, distractingly voluptuous supporting characters and, of course, slime.
  44. Edie
    With its drab, overpowering score, this tedious drama is nearly as gruelling as the trek up Scotland’s Suilven.
  45. Stage Mother
    The feelgood tone feels a little flaccid.
  46. The Grudge
    The cluttered parallel story structure – the fates of several different individuals over a period of two years are woven together – results in a series of mini-scares rather than a gradual build to a big one. And since we already know the fate of most of them, all the diseased yellow lighting and oppressive sound design in the world can’t engineer much tension.
  47. Here Today
    It’s a film that sets out to tackle the impact of degenerative disease, but, barring a few moments of confusion and a forgotten name or two, is infuriatingly evasive when it comes to showing the realities of the condition.
  48. Bleeding Love
    Decent performances from both McGregors can’t breathe much spirit (alcoholic or otherwise) into the film’s listless and generic screenplay.
  49. Unhinged
    This zippy car chase thriller shares some DNA with Joel Schumacher’s 1993 black comedy Falling Down . . . . Both are darkly funny studies and send-ups of emasculated men, with Crowe’s character claiming to have been “dismissed as the unworthiest fuck to ever walk the planet”.
  50. The Goldfinch
    Probably, the intention was to make explicit the connections between Theo’s past and present, but there’s not enough detail or characterisation for this structural intervention to work. Without those connecting narrative bones, the result is all flab and no flavour.
  51. Father Stu
    Playing out to the histrionic squalling of a country-infused score, this is film-making that aims to smite its audience into submission.
  52. Welcome To Marwen
    The film fetishises female strength, but only in its ability to prop up men; its women remain prettified empty shells.
  53. Lift
    Perhaps aware of the limitations of the screenplay, director F Gary Gray deploys an irritating arsenal of flashy camera moves and sleight-of-hand edits, but these only serve to emphasise the emptiness of the spectacle.
  54. The 355
    Simon Kinberg’s film feels aggressively focus-grouped for the girl-boss crowd.
  55. White Men Can't Jump
    It’s slick, unchallenging and perfectly enjoyable, but it’s hard to see the point of a remake of Ron Shelton’s 1992 mismatched buddy movie about a pair of basketball hustlers who reluctantly team up.
  56. The Nutcracker and the Four Realms
    There is a slightly panicky desperation to the cacophonous production design, and a sense of trying to distract from a plot as thin as spun sugar.
  57. The Boss Baby: Family Business
    The pro-family, anti-tech messaging is designed to play to the parents, but while not entirely unwatchable, the film’s demented levels of energy will recommend it to younger audiences and may trigger stress headaches in anyone over 12.
  58. The Greatest Beer Run Ever
    [A] crass and manipulative warsploitation picture.
  59. Here
    It’s an alienatingly ugly technique and a mawkish tear-jerker choked up with synthetic sentimentality. You start to envy the dinosaurs their extinction event.
  60. 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.
  61. The Darkest Minds
    The film shares far too many tropes with other YA sci-fi properties – The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Divergent – to make a mark in the unforgiving post-apocalyptic wasteland of the adolescent market. That said, the casting is strong.
  62. Marching Powder
    If you’re a paunchy, middle-aged geezer with a wholesale cocaine habit, an aversion to “woke”, and hobbies that include beer and punching people, well, have I got a movie for you!
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    To the Devil a Daughter
    Far from the Rosemary's Baby it wished to be, but nonetheless unsettling at least up to the point that we see the devil's glove-puppet itself. [27 Jun 1999, p.10]
    • The Observer (UK)
  64. Dear Evan Hansen
    It’s the cinema equivalent of rubbing cut onions in the eyes of the audience: film-making that is cynically and artificially engineered to make the audience weep.
  65. Mother's Pride
    This is an underdog tale straining so hard to be endearing that it’s more likely to pull a muscle than tug a heartstring.
  66. Men in Black: International
    Unfortunately the smarts, the sass and the wit of the original MIB is MIA.
  67. The Enforcer
    It’s thuddingly predictable stuff that limps through a plot involving nefarious sex traffickers, treachery and a liberal smearing of Miami sleaze.
  68. Flight Risk
    Very silly, but pulpy fun.
  69. A Rainy Day in New York
    Characters and storylines appear to have been chosen at random by a Woody Allen meme generator.
  70. Jurassic World Dominion
    It doesn’t help that Dominion spends a good deal of time trying to figure out what story to tell and which genre (or country) to tell it in.
  71. Hillbilly Elegy
    The performances create anthropological distance, not human empathy.
  72. 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.
  73. The Last Bus
    The journey is a nice excuse to paint Tom into a cheerily cosmopolitan portrait of the UK.
  74. Red Notice
    Reportedly the most expensive Netflix original production to date, Red Notice would have benefited if some of its $200m budget had been spent on untangling the screenplay.
  75. Space Jam: A New Legacy
    James’s natural charisma should allow the film to soar but he’s bogged down by an avalanche of distracting cameos, from Gremlins to Game of Thrones.
  76. Lucy in the Sky
    Lucy in the Sky is low on real insight and feels like a psychology column in a supermarket tabloid.
  77. Sound of Freedom
    The picture, by Mexican director Alejandro Monteverde, is an earnest and well-intentioned attempt to engage with a very real and harrowing issue. It’s also a thunderously crass and manipulative movie that is hampered by erratic pacing, pantomime bad guys and an overfondness for shots of Caviezel weeping God-fearing, manly tears.
  78. Action Point
    You could make the argument that this film is effective enough as a series of stunt gags in 70s costume, and an alcoholic bear certainly made me crack a smile. But the subplot involving DC’s attempts to bring up his 14-year-old daughter is a saccharine afterthought, and feels oddly out of step with the vacuous nature of the rest of the film’s throwaway laughs.
  79. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3
    Another sloppy helping of migrant family cliches, served up with the same loving forcefulness as grandma’s moussaka
  80. Venom
    At least the CGI is clever, the consistency of Venom’s viscous, hostless form moving between molten metal and melted chewing gum.
  81. Argylle
    The special effects seem shoddy and unfinished and the screenplay struggles to keep up with its own twists and turns.
  82. The Hustle
    Clearly, it’s intended as a vehicle for Wilson, who is credited as co-producer, but it’s Hathaway who steals the show.
  83. 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.
  84. Stardust
    The whole thing feels strangely pedestrian, unable to capture or channel Bowie’s maverick spirit.
  85. 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.
  86. Morbius
    [An] incoherent, vampire-themed Marvel offcut.
  87. The Turning
    This contemporary adaptation of The Turn of the Screw takes the ornate enigma of Henry James’s gothic novella and whittles it down into something rather more flat and conventional.
  88. 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.
  89. Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver
    While Sofia Boutella, playing outlaw warrior Kora, brings a balletic elegance to her fight sequences, ultimately this is disappointingly generic stuff.
  90. Harold and the Purple Crayon
    Since Levi is the single-use plastic of screen performers – flat, shiny, desperately unfashionable – it’s left to Jemaine Clement to provide the story’s charismatic core as Gary, the villainous failed fantasy novelist with a thing for Mel’s mum.
  91. Vanguard
    It’s an unforgivable waste of Jackie Chan, action-movie legend, reduced here to pratfalls and gurning double takes.
  92. Red One
    A charmless, CGI-heavy spectacle, Red One falls into an ill-considered audience no man’s land: it’s too intense for little kids (we get to visit Krampus in what appears to be a yuletide S&M dungeon) and too bland to attract teens and genre fans.
  93. 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.
  94. Like a Boss
    Director Miguel Arteta, who brought a bracingly transgressive tartness to indie comedies Chuck & Buck and The Good Girl, delivers sloppily paced hack work here, while Tiffany Haddish and Rose Byrne, two fine comic actresses, are shackled to a screenplay so crassly tone-deaf, it makes you want to chisel off your own ears.
  95. 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.
  96. Robin Hood
    It’s a world that is so incoherent and inconsistent you almost have to admire the chutzpah, in which buxom lady horse-thieves dress themselves for a night of crime displaying several inches of showy cleavage, contained only by a glorified shoelace.
  97. 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.
  98. Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire
    Sofia Boutella shows action-star potential as Kora, a mysterious outsider who has found peace living with the farming commune, but she deserves a better vehicle than this chop-shopped jalopy.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blind Fury
    Slick tongue-in-cheek thriller giving Rutger Hauer an unusually sympathetic role as a blinded Vietnam veteran who's spent 20 years in the jungle honing his other senses as well as his swordsmanship. [27 Oct 2002, p.9]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 30 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Cassandra Crossing
    Coarse international thriller with a standard group-jeopardy dramatis personae set abroad a trans-European express train boarded by a plague-carrying terrorist. Saved from total mediocrity by an all-star cast that includes Sophia Loren, Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Ingrid Thulin, Martin Sheen, OJ Simpson, Richard Harris, and Alida Valli. [28 Oct 2007, p.14]
    • The Observer (UK)
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