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. Futura
    Some talk eloquently, some glare at the camera with cagey mistrust. But the point of this worthwhile and frequently fascinating project is that all have the opportunity to be heard.
  2. McEnroe
    Barney Douglas’s doc about tennis maverick John McEnroe belongs to that rare handful of portraits that should find an audience far beyond just fans of the game itself. In this, it has a kinship with Asif Kapadia’s films Senna and Diego Maradona.
  3. The Gray Man
    For all the sensory overload – it’s a bit like being trapped inside a first-person shooter challenge being played by a 12-year-old gaming prodigy – The Gray Man is undeniably entertaining.
  4. A Chiara
    There’s a sparky authenticity to the performances , bolstered by the fact that Carpignano cast a real-life family in the central roles.
  5. Brian and Charles
    The result has homemade charm to spare, proving delightfully ridiculous but also poignant.
  6. 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.
  7. Thor: Love and Thunder
    For the most part, however, this romp, which pits Thor against Christian Bale’s cadaverous God-slayer, is superficial stuff – a film that brings a greeting-card triteness to its themes of love and sacrifice; that harvests internet memes (screaming goats) in the service of easy laughs.
  8. Ennio
    As a tribute to the man and his legacy it’s fascinating stuff.
  9. The Princess
    Combining news footage, interviews, blustering commentators and vox pops, the film serves as an accusatory finger pointed at public appetites and the press that fed them, and a cautionary tale.
  10. Elvis
    It’s a riotously audacious work.
  11. Moon, 66 Questions
    As the enigmatic, tarot-inspired title suggests, questions remain, but Lentzou leaves us with the sense that this long-stalled relationship can finally move forward.
  12. The Sea Beast
    The film features dazzling action and a fantasy world that is realised with an almost tactile level of detail. Seek it out on a monster-size screen if at all possible.
  13. The Black Phone
    A solid, spooky period chiller.
  14. Cha Cha Real Smooth
    Raiff knows exactly what he’s doing – Cha Cha is funny, honest and shamelessly manipulative.
  15. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
    None of which is to say that Good Luck to You, Leo Grande isn’t admirably subversive and enjoyably whimsical fare.
  16. Everything Went Fine
    The latest picture from the chameleonic film-maker François Ozon is one of his less formally adventurous. Ozon adopts a light-footed, naturalistic approach in this study of domestic dynamics. It’s not a film that is interested in taking a moral stance on assisted dying, nor is it a picture that wallows in tragedy.
  17. Lightyear
    The aspect that’s traditionally elevated Pixar animations, the dizzy wit and inventiveness of the screenplay, is missing from this dispiriting trudge through outer space, via some box-ticking messaging along the way.
  18. Wild Men
    What makes this amiably amusing Danish comedy work is the fact that it takes its hapless protagonist almost as seriously as he takes himself.
  19. Leave No Traces
    With the help of a couple of outstanding performances from Ziętek and Agnieszka Grochowska, as Jurek’s mother, and its obsessive attention to period detail, the film finally unravels the serpentine coils of corruption.
  20. 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.
  21. All My Friends Hate Me
    Andrew Gaynord’s debut feature doesn’t quite hold together, but the atmosphere of twitchy paranoia is horribly effective.
  22. Swan Song
    Todd Stephens’s film is an amiable little story, and Kier is clearly enjoying himself immensely, but this is as wafting and insubstantial as Patrick’s chiffon scarf.
  23. Il Buco
    The wordless earth magic of the storytelling won’t be for everyone, but the film casts a beguiling spell.
  24. Earwig
    Earwig, the director’s first English-language film, lacks the macabre logic of Evolution, or the precision of Innocence; the audience is left fumbling for meaning in the gloom.
  25. Mary and The Witch's Flower
    It may lack the originality of the best Miyazaki films, but with its heart-swelling score and exquisitely realised worlds, this is a must for Ghibli fans.
  26. Men
    It’s a playfully twisted affair – not quite as profound as it seems to think, perhaps, but boasting enough squishy metaphorical slime to ensure that its musings upon textbook male characteristics are rarely dull, and sometimes deliciously disgusting.
  27. Dashcam
    Best seen in a cinema with the rowdiest audience you can find.
  28. Olga
    Shot with a documentary-style naturalism and propulsive restlessness that mirrors Olga’s ferocious drive, this is a terrific, timely feature debut.
  29. Hustle
    This is quality film-making, with enough that’s distinctive – Dan Deacon’s score is a pulsing, panicky jolt of energy – to appeal beyond basketball fans.
  30. Bergman Island
    Bergman Island has a languid, meandering pace and a plot that is governed by chance encounters and discoveries.
  31. Luzzu
    The magnetic Scicluna is a Maltese fisherman in real life, and part of a cast predominantly made up of non-professional actors. His performance is impressively complex.
  32. Elizabeth: A Portrait in Part(s)
    Although it may not bring revelations, there’s an informality and intimacy to this portrait that is unexpectedly pleasing.
  33. The Bob's Burgers Movie
    Fans will eat it up (with relish and fries); older kids will adore the oddball humour. And even cinemagoers who have never seen an episode of the TV series (me, for example) are likely to find much to amuse them, provided they have a tolerance for extreme silliness.
  34. Top Gun: Maverick
    Top Gun: Maverick offers exactly the kind of air-punching spectacle that reminds people why a trip to the cinema beats staying at home and watching Netflix.
  35. a-ha: the Movie
    Fans will no doubt find the film fascinating, if a little dispiriting: it may be like eavesdropping on your parents, only to discover that they’re on the brink of divorce.
  36. Benediction
    Behind it all is an endlessly saddening search for that transformative sacrament evoked by the film’s title – alluring yet elusive.
  37. Emergency
    Carey Williams’s smart satire of the daily realities of racial profiling is a switchback ride that lurches between comedy and nerve-shredding tension, but loses focus in an extraneous coda.
  38. The Innocents
    The child’s perspective on the story means that the film is unquestioning when it comes to the sources of the psychic powers, neatly sidestepping the need for exposition. In a child’s mind, magic is real, black magic painfully so.
  39. Cordelia
    Tension is frequently punctured by clunky dialogue.
  40. Vortex
    There’s a despairing inevitability to the film’s incremental pacing – we feel every aching minute of the nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time. It’s not exactly fun, but it’s a relentlessly powerful piece of film-making.
  41. The Legend of Molly Johnson
    The film tackles issues of race, sexual violence and the low-level simmering cruelty that is a fact of life for those hardy individuals who make a life in the bush in the late 19th century.
  42. 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.
  43. Everything Everywhere All at Once
    The result may be a tad overlong and convolutedly overstuffed, but it made me laugh, cry and think – which is more than can be said for many a Marvel flick.
  44. This Much I Know to Be True
    The atmosphere is stripped down and austere, allowing the songs to speak for themselves as they transport us from this world to the next.
  45. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
    Unlike movies such as Black Panther and Shang-Chi, which functioned as self-contained entities, this film requires an encyclopedic knowledge of Marvel minutiae and world-class cross-referencing skills to fully work. And who, outside the diehard fanbase, has the bandwidth for that level of commitment?
  46. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
    The screenplay is so meta that at times it is practically consuming itself, an ouroboros of in-jokes. But there’s an affable appeal to the picture that disarms the more self-satisfied tendencies of the writing, and which stems from the chemistry between Cage and Pascal. Come for the industry satire, stay for the endearingly goofy buddy movie.
  47. Happening
    Happening is a visceral, confronting experience.
  48. Playground
    It is piercingly insightful without ever labouring the point.
  49. Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle
    Along the way, the director, Arthur Harari, takes the exhausted true tale of the lone Japanese soldier and sculpts it into a captivating tragicomedy, a sharp-eyed study of zealotry and self-delusion, ridiculous and heartbreaking in about equal measure.
  50. Operation Mincemeat
    A quality cast tackle the script’s various twists and turns with aplomb. But the tale itself feels cumbersome and over-furnished, listing under the weight of its bolt-on subplots and endless reams of dialogue.
  51. The Lost City
    The respective charms of Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum receive a rigorous workout during the course of this caffeinated, overeager adventure romp – to the point where significant signs of wear and tear begin to appear.
  52. The Northman
    While the Norns-of-fate narrative may contrive several reversals of fortune and sympathy, there’s little of the genuinely uncanny weirdness that made Eggers’s first two features such a treat. What madness lies herein is not of the north-northwest variety but more in keeping with the bonkers blockbuster spectacle of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah.
  53. Prayers for the Stolen
    It captures the wary, precarious nature of a community that relies financially on the same forces – the rampaging drug cartels – that also terrorise it. Huezo taps into the intense vibration between young female friends who treasure each other above all else.
  54. Compartment No. 6
    Beautifully believable performances from Haarla and Borisov add emotional weight, rivalling the nuanced naturalistic charm of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy.
  55. Navalny
    It’s a genuinely exciting piece of storytelling, a propulsive real-life quest for truth driven by ingenious tech-geeks and the disarming force of Navalny’s personality.
  56. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
    In this third outing, there’s a crucial crackle of chemistry between Mikkelsen and Jude Law’s younger Dumbledore.
  57. Murina
    The atmosphere, of sun and celebration, rings as hollow as the Europop that Ante blasts to drown out arguments; sonar-stabs of cello on the score sound a warning
  58. Small Body
    With its colour palette of mossy greens, terracotta and earth tones, and its matter-of-fact approach to themes of folklore and mysticism, this gorgeous first feature from Italian director Laura Samani is as enchanting as it is unusual.
  59. Against the Ice
    There is about as much jeopardy as you’d expect from an action thriller about an obscure land dispute; a tense encounter with an angry polar bear and a phantom hot air balloon are highlights during the endless plodding across the frozen wilderness.
  60. Rebel Dread
    Letts gives thoughtful context to the way he was able to straddle the racially delineated worlds of dub reggae and punk rock, drawing parallels between the merging of subcultures in 1970s London, and the intersection of hip-hop and rock’n’roll in 1980s New York.
  61. Ali & Ava
    Ali & Ava is a vibrant work that uses the transcendent power of song to turn a streetwise tale into a diegetic musical, with genuinely surprising results.
  62. Lucy and Desi
    Poehler, herself a gifted comedian, doesn’t include her own voice in the film, though we still get a sense of her feminist perspective.
  63. Escape from Mogadishu
    The picture, a big-budget spectacle guided by the sure hand of action director Seung-wan Ryu (Crying Fist), is at its most effective when the hurtling camera is strafed by bullets. It’s less successful when the headlong pace falters to allow the screenplay to hammer home its message of collaboration and tolerance.
  64. The Worst Person in the World
    Blending melancholy wistfulness with unruly energy and piercing humour, it’s a down-to-earth tale of love and death, boosted by a brilliantly believable central performance and elevated by fantastical moments of hallucinogenic horror and ecstatic joy.
  65. Ambulance
    At the core of the film, partially concealed by Bay’s posturing and swagger, is a bracing, slickly executed B-movie.
  66. The Audition
    The slow creep of the camera mirrors the incremental build in pressure; this is the kind of tension that feels like a tightening chokehold on the audience.
  67. The Novice
    It’s not surprising to learn that its writer and director, Lauren Hadaway, who based this film on her own experiences on a college rowing team, has a background in sound editing.
  68. True Things
    With great physical poise and precision, Wilson (who optioned and developed the source book) engages the audience on a visceral level, her deceptively low-key performance taking us deep inside her character’s dreams, desires and insecurities.
  69. The Bad Guys
    It’s sharp, silly and frequently very funny.
  70. Morbius
    [An] incoherent, vampire-themed Marvel offcut.
  71. Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood
    Unfortunately, it becomes clear that the film is all backdrop, a boomer nostalgia trip with little in the way of actual story.
  72. Sing 2
    While there are no surprises whatsoever here, the perky charm remains.
  73. Hive
    Basholli understands that healing is possible, even if closure isn’t.
  74. Paris, 13th District
    This is a playfully sensuous affair that wonders what happens to slow-burn intimacy when mediated by the urgency of the online world.
  75. The Phantom of the Open
    Despite the inherent silliness, the actors play it straight. There’s an earnestness to Rylance’s performance, which encourages us to find inspiration in the underdog.
  76. Master
    Diallo utilises the visual language of horror – red lighting, empty shower stalls, a gnarled hand that emerges from under the bed – to express the terror of racism and the rot of its legacy.
  77. X
    The latest film from horror director Ti West (The House of the Devil), about a porn movie shoot gone wrong, is ripe with playful winks and nudges.
  78. Red Rocket
    As for Baker and regular co-writer Chris Bergoch, they refrain from judging their characters, observing the world from Mikey’s maniacally self-serving point of view even as comedy turns to queasiness and worse.
  79. Turning Red
    Turning Red is a fizzing, squealing adolescent explosion of a movie that nails a fundamental truth about growing up.
  80. The Adam Project
    The high-concept plot is held together more by force of will (and some decent special effects) than by logic, but the core of this engaging, kid-friendly Netflix production is a big-hearted tale of broken families made good.
  81. Great Freedom
    The power of Sebastian Meise’s subdued prison drama comes not from big, brash moments but from subtle details. Sound design that hints at the aching emptiness outside the frame and beyond the walls.
  82. The Batman
    Zoë Kravitz is a highlight as cocktail waitress turned cat burglar Selina Kyle.
  83. The Duke
    While The Duke is never quite as surprising as the case that inspired it, it nonetheless retains a much-needed astringent streak.
  84. Studio 666
    The running time is an issue – a punchy seven-inch single approach would have been preferable, rather than this jam session of a screenplay, which doesn’t know how to end. But the tonal blend of goofy and gory is oddly endearing.
  85. La Mif
    Mini-chapters focus on characters in turn, each offering a new perspective on the unfolding drama; choral and chamber music is an unexpected but effective punctuation in the storytelling, but most powerful is sound design that understands the gravity of moments of weighted silence.
  86. Cyrano
    It’s as though an essential part of the character’s appeal is missing; the knock-on effect is that the film’s glorious scenery and Sicilian backdrop end up doing rather a lot of heavy lifting.
  87. Servants
    Ostrochovský’s camera emphasises the constricting architecture of both church and state, with its black and white morality and a claustrophobic central courtyard, frequently portrayed via stiff, judgmental God’s-eye shots.
  88. Flee
    This is a triumph-of-the-human-spirit story as dramatic as the most finely wrought melodrama, with flashes of vintage newsreels reminding us that it is all “real”.
  89. Petrov's Flu
    It’s possibly the most Russian thing ever created, and it’s most certainly not a soothing viewing experience. But there’s something grimly fascinating about it nonetheless.
  90. Marry Me
    [A] silly, shallow romcom, which is as thin and predictable as Kat’s tinny pop songs.
  91. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
    This female-led triptych of stories, with its deft, empathetic camerawork and intimate, intricately crafted character sketches, is a minor masterpiece in its own right.
  92. Death on the Nile
    The camera whirls giddily, dizzy from the sparkle and spectacle, but not quite able to conceal the fact that this is an empty bauble of a movie.
  93. Belle
    The film’s message is a beautiful one: to integrate our real-life vulnerabilities with the persona we project is to become all the more powerful.
  94. Parallel Mothers
    It’s Cruz who sets the tone, with a performance that radiates warmth and is refreshingly forgiving of her character’s flaws. She has never been better.
  95. Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road
    When Fine encourages him to elaborate, Wilson isn’t especially articulate, but his emotional responses to the individual songs are often lucid and revealing.
  96. Memory Box
    Hadjithomas and Joreige thoughtfully explore trauma while remaining joyful, animating Maia’s photos, which fizz, crackle and dance to life on screen.
  97. 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.
  98. Nightmare Alley
    Years ago, I compared Del Toro to Orson Welles, a film-maker who instinctively understood the hypnotic power of cinema to dazzle, delight and deceive. On the basis of Nightmare Alley, which is blessed with more than a touch of evil, that’s a comparison by which I still stand.
  99. Belfast
    Kenneth Branagh’s unabashedly feelgood memoir of growing up in Belfast as the Troubles erupted in the late 1960s suffers from a problem of perspective.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ascension
    Accompanied by a lithe, organic score by Dan Deacon, which weaves the rhythms of industry and technology into the music, the film is a mosaic portrait of the realities and repercussions of “the Chinese dream”.
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