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. Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget
    Disappointingly but perhaps not surprisingly, this sequel fails to match the original on any level whatsoever. It’s not bad exactly, although there’s a synthetic look to the colour palette that feels very try-hard and gaudy next to the lovely, atmospheric earth tones of the first film.
  2. The Peasants
    The film is a match for Lars von Trier’s Dogville in its grimly relentless approach to misogyny and sexual violence. A disconcertingly beautiful picture about the ugliness of humanity.
  3. The Three Musketeers - Part I: D'Artagnan
    The picture’s seductive power lies elsewhere, with a glorious, typically extravagant performance from Eva Green as the treacherous Milady. She’s great fun in a role that might have been tailor-made for her skill set: Milady is vampy, venomous and dripping with goth jewellery.
  4. The Eternal Daughter
    For all its decorous restraint, this is emotionally potent storytelling.
  5. Leave the World Behind
    A provocative, superbly acted action drama that combines big-hitting ambition and spectacle with just enough humour to temper the whole end-of-civilisation meltdown scenario.
  6. Another Body
    The film focuses on Taylor’s quest to uncover the perpetrator and learn their motives. And while finally she has a good idea of the former, the answer to the latter remains elusive.
  7. Maestro
    With its nonlinear structure, Maestro feels a little like a scrapbook of life moments – glittering career achievements; crackling explosions of domestic tension – and Cooper keeps up a zesty, kinetic energy throughout.
  8. Wish
    Mostly, the soundtrack is an unhummable mess of warbled exposition.
  9. Napoleon
    A man, even a man as combative as Napoleon, amounts to more than the battles he has fought. And it is in this respect that the film is less successful.
  10. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
    Davis’s deranged games designer Dr Volumnia Gaul and Jason Schwartzman’s showboating compere Lucky Flickerman justify the price of admission.
  11. Saltburn
    There is little satisfaction to be found in the picture’s messily uninhibited climax.
  12. Rustin
    This is more of a dutiful plod through the facts than the kind of film that makes history come alive.
  13. May December
    May December also comes coloured by the lurid downlight of tabloid culture. It could be a pastiche of a psychological thriller, or a playfully misdirected daytime afternoon soap.
  14. The Great Escaper
    There’s a real emotional heft to the storytelling and Caine, at 90, is a knockout.
  15. Dream Scenario
    It’s a savagely funny showcase for Cage at his very best. But the picture sours somewhat in a third act that departs from crisp character study to target cancel culture, losing some of its biting humour in the process.
  16. Anatomy of a Fall
    Ultimately, one of the key pleasures of the picture is its uncertainty – the niggling doubts that remain, and the sense that a crucial piece of the puzzle is tantalisingly out of reach.
  17. The Eternal Memory
    The Eternal Memory is a restrained, respectful piece of film-making that takes its lead from its two subjects. It’s wrenchingly sad, but also a testament to the love that endures, even as Augusto increasingly struggles to recognise his wife.
  18. The Marvels
    Of the cast, it’s only Iman Vellani, as Marvel fangirl turned superhero Kamala Khan, who seems genuinely excited to be in the film.
  19. Give Me Pity!
    Kramer’s vision is distinctive: playful and jarringly lurid. Give Me Pity! is a one-off – and that’s probably a good thing.
  20. The Royal Hotel
    A psychological thriller, it’s all the more tense for Green’s smart understatement of the genre elements.
  21. How to Have Sex
    Here’s a cause for celebration for fans of British cinema: a feature debut that launches not one but two of the most promising talents to arrive in movie theatres for a long while.
  22. Fingernails
    Buckley, as always, is terrific, bringing the picture more emotional potency than it perhaps warrants.
  23. Bottoms
    Even if the scattershot plotting doesn’t quite hold together, there’s a wayward energy to the picture and a barbed sense of mischief.
  24. On the Adamant
    The film’s observational approach means that little context is provided for the techniques used here, or for the lives and circumstances of the daily visitors. But the warm, non-judgmental embrace of Philibert’s approach is profoundly affecting.
  25. In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50
    Rarely does a music documentary so vividly evoke both the artistic approach and the tricky personality of its subject.
  26. Subject
    It’s thought-provoking stuff, which also explores our own role, as audience members, in the voracious demand for other people’s stories.
  27. 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.
  28. Nyad
    It’s this – the wry humour provided by the long-suffering Bonnie; the lovely lived-in quality of the friendship – rather than the lengthy swimming sequences and a few slightly unwieldy flashbacks that gives the film its crowd-pleasing appeal.
  29. Trolls Band Together
    It’s a peppy sugar rush that should please younger audiences, but the appeal of the series is wearing pretty thin.
  30. 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.
  31. Killers of the Flower Moon
    Killers of the Flower Moon is monumentally long (206 minutes) and moves at an unhurried pace, but it knows where it’s going and barely a second is wasted. It’s sinuous and old-school, an instant American classic; almost Steinbeckian in its attention to detail and its banked, righteous rage.
  32. Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
    It’s an intense watch; at times infectiously hilarious, at others wrenchingly sad. For the film’s brief running time, there’s an emotional osmosis at play, in both sauna and cinema alike.
  33. Dalíland
    The great missed opportunity of this film, with its glossy, handsome design and cinematography, and its genteel orchestral score, is how polite and unadventurous it is – something that could never be said of Dalí himself.
  34. The Miracle Club
    It’s trite and predictable stuff: the laughs are forced; the pathos is over-stewed.
  35. Silver Dollar Road
    Peck’s film – which, with its themes of race and failures of American justice, has a kinship with Ava DuVernay’s 13th and Garrett Bradley’s Time – is both infuriating and also unexpectedly uplifting in its celebration of family unity.
  36. PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie
    It’s a chipper, self-consciously adorable romp that will no doubt delight existing fans of the television series. It is, however, laser-targeted at the youngest audience members.
  37. Sumotherhood
    It’s a wildly uneven mess.
  38. The Road Dance
    Although a little too performatively Scottish at times, this is a competently made weepie that should please fans of the book.
  39. 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.
  40. BlackBerry
    The comic potential of the collision of personalities is thoroughly mined: Lazaridis the diffident visionary; Fregin the extrovert oddball; Balsillie the driven, hyperaggressive alpha male.
  41. The Old Oak
    The final message of hope is resolutely upbeat and desperately needed.
  42. Saw X
    Grisliness occurs, accompanied by a score that sounds like knives being sharpened on violins. It’s thoroughly unpleasant, but that’s rather the point.
  43. The Creator
    Minor quibbles aside, this is a remarkable achievement, and a persuasive argument in favour of carte blanche creative freedom for Edwards in whatever he chooses to do next.
  44. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
    This is an archetypal Anderson film: mannered, fussy, obsessively designed – normally irksome traits, but in this alchemic instance it’s an utterly delightful combination.
  45. Fair Play
    It’s maliciously effective, up to a point: an enjoyably lurid piece of classy-trashy psychological warfare. Unfortunately, both the plot and the performances boil over in the third act, and the film loses much of its icily calculated cool.
  46. R.M.N.
    The space that Mungiu leaves, both physically, with his immaculately composed wide shots, and temporally, in the unhurried plotting, allows for a satisfying complexity, and an eventual swerve into dreamlike symbolism.
  47. Dumb Money
    Ultimately, Dumb Money may not be as revealing about the financial markets as it is about the rallying power of the internet.
  48. Expend4bles
    Watching the cast of Expend4bles, the latest instalment of the thunderously dumb veteran mercenary franchise, sweating and straining their way through the “casual banter” section of the screenplay is like watching contestants on The World’s Strongest Man attempting to climb a ladder while carrying a tractor tyre. It’s painful.
  49. The Lesson
    Unfortunately, it all rather stumbles with an overwrought final act that disintegrates under scrutiny and hinges on a key character’s unlikely ability to remember, verbatim, every word he has ever read.
  50. Flora and Son
    The volcanically sweary dialogue doesn’t quite disguise the naivety of the feelgood trajectory, and the ending feels clunky, but this is a boisterous and disorderly charmer of a picture nonetheless.
  51. A Haunting in Venice
    It’s enjoyable, if familiar.
  52. Brother
    Despite the background noise of police brutality, gang violence and financial peril, it is the altogether more intimate elements of Brother that drive the drama.
  53. Fremont
    It’s admirably understated film-making, shot in restrained black and white, with a tight aspect ratio that evokes the walls closing in around Donya during the long insomniac nights.
  54. Cassandro
    This is a giddily entertaining and celebratory drama that hints at the emotional bruises under the sparkly lurex leotard and false lashes.
  55. Love Life
    It’s a solid, sensitively handled study of the aftermath of a trauma, elevated by tricky, unexpected revelations about Park.
  56. The Nettle Dress
    Allan Brown, a textile artist, speaks eloquently of the rich symbolism of taking something that is a source of pain, stripping it of its sting and, over the years, gradually reshaping and repurposing it into a thing of beauty.
  57. Past Lives
    There’s something quite breathtaking about the deceptive ease with which Song’s first cinematic foray juggles the metaphysical and the matter-of-fact, conjuring a world in which every decision has transformative power, and concepts of love and friendship are at once mysteriously malleable yet oddly inevitable.
  58. The Nun II
    Aside from one marvellous set piece at a magazine stand, The Nun II’s mid-century design is tasteful to the point of tedium, and a disgrace to the good name of 70s-era nunsploitation. That really is the gravest sin.
  59. A Life on the Farm
    Harding’s film proves movingly open-minded on the subject of the strange things isolation can do, but as a neighbour he might have been nosier. English reserve seems to have prevented further prying into the circumstances that created this English eccentric.
  60. El Conde
    Larraín’s film demonstrates a palate for mordant humour as refined as the count’s taste for blood.
  61. Man on the Run
    This documentary shares Scorsese’s theme of obscene greed, while Kuala Lumpur’s neon nightscape gives the feel of a Batman villain’s origin story. The Penguin, probably.
  62. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3
    Another sloppy helping of migrant family cliches, served up with the same loving forcefulness as grandma’s moussaka
  63. Bobi Wine: The People's President
    It’s a gripping piece of film-making: a propulsive, kinetic account of a grassroots campaign captured at what would seem to be considerable personal risk to both the subject and directors. And as a snapshot of a curdled, corrupted political system, it is eye-opening and at times genuinely terrifying.
  64. The Equalizer 3
    While there are no surprises here, there are visceral kicks to be found in the businesslike efficiency of McCall’s retribution, and the devilish glint in Washington’s eye as he delivers it.
  65. 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.
  66. Maigret
    It’s dour, certainly, but the sense of bone-tired exhaustion and crushed hope that linger like pipe smoke works rather effectively for this particular case.
  67. Passages
    Most modern American film-makers rarely get the chance to conjure frank sex scenes that serve an explicit narrative purpose, so it’s significant that Sachs has cited the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Belgian film-maker Chantal Akerman (along with fellow Europeans Maurice Pialat and Luchino Visconti) as inspirations for this French-German co-production.
  68. The First Slam Dunk
    While it leans a little heavily on baffling basketball strategy and court-based machinations, it’s a dynamic and unexpectedly affecting animation.
  69. Scrapper
    Mostly Regan’s unfiltered approach brings a fizzing unpredictability and vitality to this abrasively empathic exploration of a father-daughter bond.
  70. Strays
    Strays is a film that leans heavily on gross-out gags and a pre-adolescent fascination with pee and poop.
  71. Blue Beetle
    Blue Beetle may be frontloaded with visual fireworks that neatly meld the practical and the virtual, but it is the likable interplay between its down-to-earth characters that gives the film oomph, making it more than just a Shazam-style romp.
  72. L'Immensità
    Of the two main characters, Clara provides the tonal touchstone for the film. Like her, the picture spins off into moments of unpredictable fantasy – musical numbers inspired by television variety shows. Music – peppy Italian pop, schmaltzy ballads – is inventively employed throughout, but the use of colour and costume is particularly evocative.
  73. Gran Turismo
    Amid the screenplay platitudes (“The crash is not going to define who you are; how you respond to it will”) and shameless advertising riffs (unabashed spiels about PlayStation democratising motor sports), there’s an intriguing story of alien worlds colliding that somehow seems tailor-made for Blomkamp’s preoccupations.
  74. 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.
  75. Haunted Mansion
    This is a grimly efficient IP cash-in that defuses any potential scares with a hot-pink colour palette and a bunch of oddly specific and distracting product placements.
  76. Red White & Royal Blue
    Fortunately, the twin charisma assault of the two leads adds considerably to the film’s appeal. It turns out that watching two impossibly beautiful boys making cow eyes at each other might be just the escapist pulp we need right now.
  77. LOLA
    Shot on film, using vintage equipment, the picture has a scrappy, tactile quality, its ghostly black-and-white images scratched and scorched. Meanwhile, Neil Hannon’s smartly used score envisages a chilling authoritarian future for pop music.
  78. The Beanie Bubble
    It is blithely unquestioning of what the frenzy over glorified Hacky Sacks actually tells us about society.
  79. Talk to Me
    For all the genre nods, this remains very much its own movie – a film that isn’t afraid to talk to its core audience, even while giving them the heebie-jeebies.
  80. Medusa Deluxe
    Mainly, though, the problem lies with a screenplay that fails to create suspense, or even to persuade us to care who killed a brilliant but unpopular hair stylist. Still, credit to the hair and costume design team for a collection of extravagantly silly creations.
  81. Pretty Red Dress
    Pretty Red Dress is both playful and defiant, swept along on a tide of toe-tapping tunes that tug at the heartstrings, yet unafraid to face up to complex personal issues while still maintaining its solidly mainstream appeal.
  82. Greatest Days
    It’s a film that obediently hits the predictable story beats, is regularly punctuated by peppy, disposable musical numbers, but shows no inclination to be much more than a nostalgic marketing vehicle for a collection of anodyne pop songs.
  83. Barbie
    It’s a riotously entertaining candy-coloured feminist fable that manages simultaneously to celebrate, satirise and deconstruct its happy-plastic subject. Audiences will be delighted. Mattel should be ecstatic.
  84. Oppenheimer
    For the most part, the film is a towering achievement. Not surprisingly, given Nolan’s preference for shooting on Imax 70mm film, the picture has a depth of detail you could drown in.
  85. Return to Dust
    It’s a gorgeous, quietly affecting film that finds an unassuming beauty in this simple life in rural China, but which doesn’t shy away from the extreme hardships faced by the very poorest.
  86. While We Watched
    This is tense, essential film-making that argues for the importance of serious, balanced journalism in today’s world of factional infotainment, while also showing the cost to those who stand against the tide.
  87. Medusa
    For all its multitudinous reference points, this remains very much Da Silveira’s movie – as distinct and pointed as Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night or Julia Ducournau’s Raw­ – a genre film with something to say, and a unique voice with which to say it.
  88. Bird Box Barcelona
    With Bird Box: Barcelona, as with any film of this outlandish ilk, suspension of disbelief and an appreciation of propulsively destructive action sequences is key. Just don’t expect too many fresh ideas.
  89. Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)
    Control director Anton Corbijn’s first documentary, Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis), is a fascinating and suitably maverick snapshot of a richly creative moment in music history, told through a couple of disreputable hippies who designed some of the most iconic album covers of all time.
  90. Wham!
    The beauty of Wham!, a key part of the appeal of the band, came from the perception that they were a self-contained unit, a guaranteed good time seemingly impervious to negativity. And for a while, that was true.
  91. La Syndicaliste
    It’s not unusual, unfortunately, for the victims of sexual attacks to find themselves distrusted and even accused. What rankles in the film’s approach is that the audience is also encouraged to question her story.
  92. Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken
    The latest picture from DreamWorks Animation is a likable if slight story of teen crises.
  93. Hello, Bookstore
    The community support for the embattled shop surprises nobody, except, perhaps Tannenbaum, the ageing hippy whose love of literature is evident on every groaning shelf.
  94. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
    He may be 80, but Ford carries the weight of the film, which, for all its gargantuan expense, feels a bit like those throwaway serials that first inspired Lucas – fun while it lasts, but wholly forgettable on exit.
  95. Nimona
    It’s a rambunctious adventure, certainly. But it’s also a film that argues for tolerance and LGBTQ+ acceptance.
  96. Asteroid City
    Fans will doubtless be dazzled by its meticulous imitation-of-life-in-miniature visual aesthetic, yet I swithered between whimsical amusement, mild curiosity and outright irritation.
  97. No Hard Feelings
    The unstoppable force of Lawrence’s charisma notwithstanding, this is not so much tasteless, just a bit bland.
  98. The Last Rider
    Spectacular archive footage from the event captures an inescapable sense of excitement – infectious, even to cycling agnostics in the audience – and interviews with LeMond and his wife, Kathy, are unexpectedly affecting.
  99. The Super 8 Years
    The slow-motion breakdown of a family is tracked by a lens that initially sought out intimacy and celebration, but finds itself, as the years pass, increasingly distanced from figures caught in its time capsule of a frame.
  100. 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.
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