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. Avatar: The Way of Water
    A lumbering, humourless, tech-driven damp squib of a movie, this long-awaited (or dreaded?) sequel to one of the highest grossing films of all time builds upon the mighty flaws of its predecessor, delivering a patience-testing fantasy dirge that is longer, uglier and (amazingly) even more clumsily scripted than its predecessor, blending trite characterisation with sub-Roger Dean 70s album-cover designs and thunderously underwhelming action sequences. In water.
  2. The Quiet Girl
    It’s one of the most exquisitely realised films of the year.
  3. Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
    Ultimately, it’s the film’s sheer strangeness – that peculiarly magical, lapsed-Catholic sensibility that runs throughout all of Del Toro’s most personal works – that makes this sing and fly.
  4. She Said
    Schrader’s sensitive, unshowy approach to the directing choices is a smart decision; this is a film that is respectful of and in service to the stories of the women.
  5. Roald Dahl's Matilda The Musical
    This is immensely enjoyable stuff.
  6. What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?
    There’s a languid kind of magic to Koberidze’s approach, which, with its enchanting score, digressive montages and sparse dialogue, has roots in silent cinema but also feels refreshingly and genuinely original.
  7. Lady Chatterley's Lover
    There’s a feverish wildness to Corrin’s performance, while O’Connell unleashes the full force of his considerable charisma.
  8. Bones and All
    In the elegant balance of these seemingly incongruous elements, Guadagnino has outdone himself.
  9. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
    The real star? Johnson’s crisply mischievous screenplay, which crams in so many laughs you almost don’t notice the occasional plot holes.
  10. Armageddon Time
    The family scenes, all jostling banter and suffocating love, are terrific.
  11. Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
    It is, very occasionally, brilliant: a deft reveal in the final 20 minutes ties together the disparate, seemingly unrelated scenes that came before. But with its overuse of fish-eye lenses and the quacking, whimsical brass-heavy score, it’s extremely hard work.
  12. The Menu
    Subtle it’s not, but it’s maliciously entertaining. It turns out that revenge on the ultra-wealthy is a dish best seared over a naked flame.
  13. Clara Sola
    This atmospheric debut from Costa Rican-Swedish director Nathalie Álvarez Mesén combines mud, moss and mysticism to arresting effect.
  14. Aftersun
    A brilliantly assured and stylistically adventurous work, this beautifully understated yet emotionally riveting coming-of-age drama picks apart themes of love and loss in a manner so dextrous as to seem almost accidental. Don’t be fooled; Wells knows exactly what she’s doing, and her storytelling is as precise as it is piercing.
  15. Causeway
    Lawrence is phenomenal, giving the kind of wary, reined-in performance that made such a compelling impression in her breakthrough film, Winter’s Bone. And the always excellent Henry gradually strips back a character who at first seems wholly at ease with life to reveal layers of suppressed guilt and pain.
  16. Living
    This deceptively gentle 50s-set film addresses weighty matters of life and death with a winning simplicity that is hard to resist.
  17. Call Jane
    The very watchable combination of Elizabeth Banks, as a suburban Chicago housewife turned illegal abortion technician, and Sigourney Weaver, as the founder of Call Jane, brings a force of charisma that overrides the picture’s occasional frothiness.
  18. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
    It’s mildly amusing, and Evan Rachel Wood is great fun as an evil Madonna. But one joke – even a joke as bizarre as this – is not enough to sustain a whole movie.
  19. Watcher
    There are few genuine surprises, perhaps, but there are distinctive elements here which set the film apart, not least the way lack of fluency in a language (Julia’s Romanian is sparse to non-existent) creates a sense of siege.
  20. The Wonder
    Few will remain unmoved by this intriguingly adventurous and thought-provoking drama.
  21. Triangle of Sadness
    There’s the flabby third act in which Östlund slightly fumbles the hand-tooled Louis Vuitton ball.
  22. Wendell & Wild
    The story is a touch convoluted, but it’s a gleefully grim good time.
  23. Bros
    Eichner is on fine form with the scabrous spikiness of the first half of the picture, but neither he nor the film itself seems fully comfortable with the final descent into sentimentality.
  24. Barbarian
    It’s one of the most bracingly effective chillers of the year.
  25. Memories of My Father
    Memories of My Father is a touch overlong and soapy and awkwardly structured. But it’s still an engrossingly watchable drama.
  26. The Banshees of Inisherin
    It’s an end-of-friendship breakup movie that swings between the hilarious, the horrifying and the heartbreaking in magnificent fashion.
  27. Lancaster
    Part oral history, part archive, this is a thoroughly researched account of the role of the Lancaster bomber in the second world war. It’s solid, no frills film-making, but that’s entirely appropriate given the sobering stories recounted by surviving members of Bomber Command, now in their 90s.
  28. All Quiet on the Western Front
    While not as showy as Sam Mendes’s sweeping, single-shot takes in 1917, this is remarkable, if harrowing, film-making. Moments of striking beauty – sunlight carved into exultant rays by skeletal winter trees – are almost as shocking and disquieting as the scenes of suffering.
  29. Emily
    O’Connor clearly isn’t afraid of rattling cages when approaching sacred texts. There’s something refreshingly untethered about the gusto with which she reimagines Emily, tossing aside the image of a shy, sickly recluse, replacing it with an antiheroine whose inability to fit in with the ordered world is a source of strength rather than weakness.
  30. The Good Nurse
    The film’s elegant framing and unobtrusive directorial choices give space for Chastain and Redmayne to fully inhabit their characters in a picture that combines compassion and empathy with a sickening swell of almost unbearable tension.
  31. All That Breathes
    Despite the poisons in the air, the brothers continue their work, mending broken creatures, one by one.
  32. Halloween Ends
    The scares are sad, puny little things. Even Jamie Lee Curtis seems to have lost the will to fight. It’s time that Myers and his mouldy old mask were laid to rest. Let’s hope nobody decides to disinter him yet again.
  33. Amsterdam
    Russell’s showy directorial pizzazz is very much in evidence, but there’s an edge of desperation to the chunks of exposition that dam the flow of this already meandering tale.
  34. Vengeance
    It’s mildly amusing stuff that delivers no surprises, but may muster a few laughs.
  35. The Cordillera of Dreams
    It’s a highly personal documentary: in addition to focusing on the mountains, Guzmán revisits his childhood home, now derelict, and explores his own archive footage of the 1973 coup d’état that prompted his relocation to France.
  36. After Blue (Dirty Paradise)
    It’s an overlong, indulgent slog.
  37. Nothing Compares
    It’s small wonder that she effectively torpedoed the stardom she never much wanted anyway.
  38. Flux Gourmet
    Flux Gourmet makes us laugh because, on some bizarre level, we do actually believe in and care about these utterly preposterous characters and situations.
  39. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris
    It’s unabashed froth, as substantial as a tulle skirt. And perhaps that’s exactly what we need right now.
  40. Girl Picture
    There are moments – Mimmi biting back her emotions as Emma dances for her alone at night – that tingle with discovery and promise.
  41. Smile
    The combination of a committed central performance from the increasingly gaunt and haunted Bacon, and a jarring, tortured score, makes for an enjoyably nasty brush with the smiling face of evil.
  42. The Greatest Beer Run Ever
    [A] crass and manipulative warsploitation picture.
  43. The Woman King
    It’s about overcoming trauma; it confronts and interrogates the role of some African peoples – the Dahomey included – in the enslavement of others. It’s also a thunderously cinematic good time: see it on the biggest screen you can find.
  44. The Girl with a Bracelet
    Demoustier dangles doubts, but also raises questions about the difference between judgment and justice. The score acts as our guide through the story: neat, self-possessed string arrangements occasionally fray into something jagged, raw-edged and nervy.
  45. Don't Worry Darling
    The problem is that Wilde leans too heavily on surface and style, as a distraction from the fact that the story itself is riddled with inconsistencies and barely holds together.
  46. Catherine Called Birdy
    Whis is a teen comedy with a refreshingly forthright approach to everything from puberty to the status of 13th-century women as chattels to be bartered.
  47. After Yang
    I’m not convinced that the picture carries quite the philosophical weight that it thinks it does. Still, it’s an undeniably gorgeous place to lose yourself for a while.
  48. Blonde
    At its heart this is a gothic melodrama, a fever dream of childhood trauma haunting adult life, replete with skin-crawlingly cruel visions of inquisitorial torture, brutal ordeals and hellish infernos – more Nightmare on Elm Street than My Week With Marilyn.
  49. In Front of Your Face
    In Front of Your Face is a gentle pleasure and, as such, may not be a picture that will win new fans to the films of director Hong Sang-soo. But admirers of his distinctive style – long takes, zooms, social awkwardness, vast quantities of strong alcohol – will be beguiled by this bittersweet series of encounters.
  50. Moonage Daydream
    What Moonage Daydream does manage to do is to share some of the adventurous spirit of its subject – a chameleon who wasn’t afraid of falling flat on his face while reaching for the stars. If Bowie’s career teaches us anything, it’s that no one can laugh at you if you’ve already laughed at yourself. Certainly his capacity for balancing seriousness with self-deprecation (“No shit, Sherlock!”) remained one of Bowie’s most endearing traits.
  51. Funny Pages
    Funny Pages spins a hilarious tale from the fringes of the underground comics scene, powered by a wonderfully sour performance by Daniel Zolghadri as Robert, a teenage cartoonist who strikes out on his own.
  52. Hatching
    Bergholm gives us precision-tooled jump scares and creeping, clammy atmospherics; a malevolent mother and an insurrectionist child.
  53. Ticket to Paradise
    Clooney and Roberts try their best but they’re finally not much more than decoration themselves, the filmic equivalent of plastic figurines on a cake.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    See How They Run
    It’s a fine, if mild, escapist hoot.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bodies Bodies Bodies
    By the end, I was fond of every single brat, dead or alive.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Score
    Electro-folk song interludes (written by Flynn) offer images about rivers and such that might better suit another film – one that doesn’t feel as if it’s waiting for darkness so that it can finally become a noir.
  57. Crimes of the Future
    Mortensen and Seydoux play it deliciously straight, jumping through the well-rehearsed philosophical and physical hoops with elegant ease, conjuring a sense of yearning humanity that saves the production from descending into silliness… just about.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Both Sides of the Blade
    Denis’s usual panache with mood and imagery doesn’t mitigate that awkwardness, nor does it alter the feeling that, although both leads individually portray impassioned suffering brilliantly, there’s little chemistry between them.
  59. Blind Ambition
    It’s heartwarming, inspirational stuff.
  60. The Forgiven
    Lorne Balfe’s sparsely used music leaves plenty of open spaces for the drama to breathe, as if inviting the audience to fill in the blanks with an internal accompaniment (tragic? Comedic? Ironic?) of their own choosing.
  61. Fall
    While the pace falters a little – there are only so many ways you can almost fall off a tower, after all – the tension is unrelenting.
  62. The Territory
    A must watch.
  63. It Snows in Benidorm
    The always impressive Spall elevates this low-key mood piece a little, but even his skill as an actor can’t save the stultifying pacing.
  64. Wildhood
    It’s striking, certainly, but teasingly elusive when it comes to story resolution.
  65. Three Thousand Years of Longing
    There’s something rather sterile and bloodless in the film’s approach, with its synthetic and soul-sappingly clean-looking CGI. Plus there’s the palpable lack of chemistry between the leads: a kind of brisk civility rather than the ache of eternal longing the title promises.
  66. Ava
    The 0-60 acceleration of disaster and melodrama is a little disconcerting, as is the tendency to self-sabotage demonstrated by Ava and her mother. But there’s a jagged emotional authenticity scored into the film like initials carved into a desk.
  67. Explorer
    The approach of director Matthew Dyas, who gives the archive material the appearance of found footage, adds to the mythic romance of Fiennes’s life story.
  68. Her Way
    [An] impressive drama.
  69. Beast
    Mostly, it’s the fact that Kormákur makes some genuinely interesting choices. Rather than relying on staccato editing to build tension, he opts for long, fluid single shots.
  70. Mr. Malcolm's List
    It’s pleasant, frothy, unapologetically by-numbers stuff.
  71. Official Competition
    It dismantles the lofty ambitions of cinema as great, important and significant, a monument on the cultural landscape. Instead, it shows us art for ego’s sake, and it has a lot of wickedly spiteful fun doing so.
  72. The Feast
    The Feast requires a degree of commitment; it avoids jump scares in favour of a long, slow build of tension – so slow that at times the characters appear to be in the grip of a kind of paralysis – that pays off with an explosively grisly final act.
  73. 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.
  74. Anaïs in Love
    Demoustier so supercharges her performance with charisma, she almost seems to sparkle.
  75. My Old School
    It’s a fascinating story that starts as an affable, strange-but-true tall tale but ends in a decidedly minor key.
  76. Orphan: First Kill
    The force of Fuhrman’s performance – as she demonstrated in last year’s The Novice, she can be a remarkable and unsettling presence in front of a camera – goes a considerable way towards reclaiming the role of the malevolent mini psychopath Esther. Even more impressive is Julia Stiles, a supremely talented yet underused actor who dominates this film from a gloriously unexpected midpoint twist onwards.
  77. Free Chol Soo Lee
    [An] impressive and wrenchingly sad documentary.
  78. Eiffel
    Eiffel is not unentertaining – it would pass the time pleasantly enough on a long-haul flight. Together, Duris and Mackey have a corset-twanging chemistry. But the foregrounding of a fictional romance over a feat of engineering does feel like a missed opportunity.
  79. Where Is Anne Frank
    This handsome but uneven animation weaves together excerpts from the diary with the quest of Kitty – the imaginary friend to whom Anne addressed much of it – to locate the young writer in present-day Amsterdam.
  80. Nope
    The film too often seems to be heading somewhere extraordinary, only to disappear into an ambitious conceptual hole that, while occasionally startling, is ultimately less than the sum of its parts.
  81. Luck
    While Pixar movies tell their stories visually, Luck finds itself wielding densely detailed exposition about the process of deploying luck to the human world. Still, there’s much to enjoy.
  82. Prey
    It’s a prequel to the Predator series that stays true to the essence of the original – stylishly violent, stickily graphic, impossibly tense – while also working satisfyingly as a self-contained entity.
  83. Bullet Train
    There are films that are so thunderously stupid they bypass guilty-pleasure status and end up as a danger to themselves and all around them. Bullet Train falls into the latter camp. It’s so imbecilic, you wouldn’t trust it to cross the road unsupervised, let alone negotiate Japan’s Shinkansen high-speed rail network.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Magician
    It's amusing and weirdly convincing.
  85. Thirteen Lives
    Despite the fact that we all know the outcome, and that it’s the third film in as many years to tell the story, Ron Howard’s account of the drama is compulsively watchable and breathlessly tense.
  86. Fire of Love
    The film’s approach skirts around the actual science of the Kraffts’ work, but it does explore the psychology of a shared passion, of a couple who melted their boots together on smoking lava flows and danced by the craters in a confetti of volcanic bombs.
  87. Hit the Road
    It’s that blend of heartbreak and joy, profundity and absurdity that is the key to this enchanting movie’s magical spell.
  88. 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.
  89. Joyride
    This odd-couple comedy road movie paints its characters in brushstrokes so broad you could land a jumbo jet on them, while the intrusively affable score lurches into every scene like a drunk with no concept of personal space. And yet Colman saves the picture, her thorny performance gradually revealing a well of pain.
  90. The Deer King
    The clear lines of the elegant 2D animation are not matched by the mythic muddle of the storytelling, an exposition-heavy slog of warring factions, convoluted webs of enchantment and a deadly, wolf-borne pandemic for good measure.
  91. George Michael Freedom Uncut
    Michael talks about himself with candour, and the archive footage is extensive. But the choice of interviewees, including a tittering Ricky Gervais honking out off-key witticisms, James Corden and Liam Gallagher, seems a bit random.
  92. Notre-Dame on Fire
    What the film does best is capture the daunting rage of the fire: Annaud combines muscular action sequences with actual footage of the event to eyebrow-scorching effect.
  93. She Will
    A thrillingly intense central performance by Alice Krige (who earned her genre spurs in the underrated 1981 screen adaptation of Peter Straub’s Ghost Story) is the lightning rod at the core of the film, grounding its hallucinogenic visuals in the terra firma of past tragedies and modern traumas, provoking “dark thoughts; really dark thoughts”.
  94. Where the Crawdads Sing
    Like the backdrop – marsh or swamp – it’s all a bit soggy.
  95. Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time
    It’s this aspect – the real warmth, the way the camera becomes almost incidental in the encounters between documentarian and subject – which gives this film its satisfying emotional depth.
  96. All Light, Everywhere
    It springs restlessly between ideas and, while it doesn’t quite cohere into a neat central thesis, the film did leave me with both the means and the inclination to do some further thinking on the subject.
  97. Railway Children
    It’s all perfectly inoffensive kids’ entertainment, but aside from the well-meaning but slightly jarring BLM messaging, it’s ploddingly predictable stuff.
  98. The Good Boss
    An impressively slick and slimy performance from Javier Bardem is the standout selling point for this serviceable if (perhaps appropriately?) workaday satire on corporate corruption and alienated capitalism.
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