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. Zappa
    Key to the success of the film is the editing, a pinballing assault of free association, claymation and gleeful profanity, which goes some way towards recreating what it must have been like to spend time inside Zappa’s head.
  2. Pink Wall
    Maslany is magnetic, her coiled fury and sexual energy threatening to erupt as her placid partner plods along beside her.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Kung Fu Panda 2
    The central notion of discovering one's unique personal identity ("the only thing that matters is what you choose to be now") takes us back to an earlier China and it's free of jokey references to other movies.
  4. Slalom
    Favier is smart on the mechanics of abuse, and the sobering inevitability of her heroine’s downhill skid.
  5. Music
    These self-consciously upbeat moments clash horribly with the wider redemption narrative.
  6. News of the World
    I found this a rewarding and entertaining drama, heavy with the weight of the past, yet buoyed up by the possibilities of the future.
  7. Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar
    The sci-fi stuff is tedious, but Wiig and Mumolo are bawdy and brilliant as ever, their effortless chemistry bolstered by years of collaboration.
  8. Rams
    It works on the assumption that a story about grumpy old gits united against a common foe has a universal appeal. True, to an extent, but what the makers of this film fail to realise is that it was the specificity of the Icelandic original that made it such a glumly hilarious delight.
  9. Greenland
    A first-rate B-picture, and a timely reminder of the delights of well-crafted popcorn thrills.
  10. A Glitch in the Matrix
    It’s a messy, mind-blowing collision of philosophy, technology, religion and fruit-loop paranoia which, while it doesn’t exactly make a watertight case, does provide a fascinating, and in one case deeply disturbing, insight into the thought processes of those who believe it.
  11. Assassins
    Perhaps wisely, Ryan White’s slick documentary chooses not to mine the bizarre scene for comic potential. Instead, he spins the arrest of Siti Aisyah and Doan Thi Huong – economic migrants from Indonesia and Vietnam respectively – into a parable about political corruption.
  12. Palmer
    The showy singer turned actor struggles to modulate his natural charisma, a flirtatious, extroverted energy repeatedly leaking out where it should be muffled.
  13. The Dig
    In a film defined by understatement, it’s the little details that matter.
  14. Beginning
    Sukhitashvili’s subtle performance brings interiority to a character who might otherwise be defined entirely by her suffering.
  15. The Road to Mandalay
    A combination of tender details – the way Guo carefully picks the fibres from his girlfriend’s skin after a gruelling shift at the factory – and a strikingly surreal approach to a scene in which Lianqing prostitutes herself for the first time makes this unflinching picture a notable addition to the ever-swelling list of films that deal with migration.
  16. Vanguard
    It’s an unforgivable waste of Jackie Chan, action-movie legend, reduced here to pratfalls and gurning double takes.
  17. One Night in Miami
    The ensemble cast electrifies Powers’s dialogue, jockeying between black power and integration, activism and commerce, spiritual clarity, pork chops and sex.
  18. Mayor
    Deft editing and unexpectedly affecting music choices make for an engaging portrait of the kind of impassioned and dedicated politician who seems in short supply right now.
  19. Robin's Wish
    It’s certainly informative and affecting, but the limited use of early archive footage and the emphasis on Williams’s decline and suffering make for bleak viewing.
  20. Baby Done
    Tinder-dry delivery bolsters the film’s gentle humour, and while the momentum sags a little in the second half, the natural chemistry between Matafeo and Lewis keeps the audience invested and the story relatable.
  21. Quo Vadis, Aida?
    Like the unblinking closeup that concludes the deeply moving (and ultimately redemptive?) epilogue to Quo Vadis, Aida?, Žbanić’s powerful and personal film keeps its eyes wide open.
  22. 76 Days
    It is, at times, harrowing. The film doesn’t shy away from grief at its rawest, fear at its most paralysing.
  23. The White Tiger
    Powered by a surging, impatient energy and a bracing undercurrent of spite, Ramin Bahrani’s version of Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Booker prize-winning novel is one of the more successful literary adaptations of recent years.
  24. Dear Comrades!
    Throughout, Konchalovsky juxtaposes wide-ranging events with seemingly insignificant details to dramatic effect.
  25. Stardust
    The whole thing feels strangely pedestrian, unable to capture or channel Bowie’s maverick spirit.
  26. Blithe Spirit
    The impish Leslie Mann is well cast as his dead wife, Elvira, who provides a jolt of creative inspiration. Judi Dench’s screechy caricature of psychic Madame Arcati is less winning.
  27. MLK/FBI
    Pollard’s decision to eschew traditional talking heads in favour of voiceover interviews allows the archive to take centre stage.
  28. My Rembrandt
    My Rembrandt is at its most interesting when struggling to reconcile the slow, careful work of art restoration with the crass, instant gratification on acquiring such rarefied objects.
  29. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
    The sense of the watering hole as a haven for lost souls – not to mention the threat of gentrification to civic space – couldn’t be more vérité.
  30. Sylvie's Love
    Like Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk and Todd Haynes’s Carol, Ashe takes the form of the 50s melodrama and recentres it on characters the genre has tended to ignore. This isn’t as politically restless as those films – it’s less interested in subverting the “woman’s picture” than establishing itself as one.
  31. Pieces of a Woman
    The film is acutely perceptive on the effect of a bereavement on other people.
  32. Soul
    It’s a visually sumptuous riot of ideas, pitched somewhere between a playful musical, a divine comedy and a metaphysical drama.
  33. David Byrne’s American Utopia
    There aren’t any isolated moments as cinematic as Byrne’s tender lamp dance in Jonathan Demme’s 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense, but the director’s playfulness is felt.
  34. Farewell Amor
    There are three sides to every story in Ekwa Msangi’s vivid and carefully observed feature debut, and so she cleverly splits the film into thirds, replaying the action but changing the vantage point with each chapter.
  35. Wonder Woman 1984
    While some sections of the globe-trotting plot strike a baggy, backward-looking note, it’s the smaller moments that make this fly, particularly when the film uses fantasy to turn horribly real everyday harassments into moments of air-punching triumph.
  36. Il Mio Corpo
    This intimate observational documentary explores poverty in Sicily from two different vantage points, drawing poetic connections between lives that don’t appear to touch.
  37. Werewolf
    Choppy editing adds to the sense that this picture is struggling to achieve a tonal balance and work out exactly what it is trying to say.
  38. The Midnight Sky
    Set pieces . . . are thrilling and judiciously spaced. The performances Clooney draws out are even better.
  39. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
    The theatrical origins of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom weigh heavy on this film, directed with a stagey air by Tony award winner George C Wolfe.
  40. I'm Your Woman
    Reorienting a typically white male genre around themes of feminist awakening and racial tension is an intriguing proposition, so it’s frustrating that Brosnahan remains blank and the film’s pace plodding.
  41. The Painter and the Thief
    Fascinating, confounding and continually surprising.
  42. Falling
    The directorial debut of Viggo Mortensen, which he also wrote and stars in, is an empathetic but gruelling account of a father-son relationship.
  43. Mank
    This is film-making as role-playing, which has immersed itself, method-style, in a past era and aesthetic, which wears its luminous black-and-white cinematography like a costume.
  44. Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan
    Temple has always used archive material playfully; here, it’s particularly riotous, like a chaotic patchwork quilt tacked together by one of Shane’s drunk aunties.
  45. Possessor Uncut
    Scenes of faces melting and bodies merging have a satisfyingly tactile feel, harking back to the experimental cinematic trickery of Georges Méliès, albeit with added 21st-century oomph. There’s a real physical depth to Possessor that helps keep the story grounded even during its most outlandish flights of fantasy.
  46. Hillbilly Elegy
    The performances create anthropological distance, not human empathy.
  47. Jungleland
    Brits Hunnam, O’Connell and Barden are strangely well cast as its all-American grifters. (Hunnam in particular gives a finely tuned performance as a washed-up smooth talker who still knows how to flirt.)
  48. Happiest Season
    Stewart is low key and likable, creating real emotional stakes and strategically using her signature shoulders-down shuffle. A pity, then, that she and Davis don’t quite have the romcom chemistry needed to secure the film’s place in the Christmas movie canon.
  49. The Kid Detective
    Writer-director Evan Morgan’s deft screenplay balances a taut crime story against a textured character study.
  50. Collective
    At a time when the press is routinely denigrated, an account of investigative journalism as a force for good makes for inspiring viewing.
  51. The Life Ahead
    The main selling point is Loren, who combines world-weary abrasiveness with a sense of something softer, turning Rosa into a believably divided character who puts a brave face on the future while seeking refuge from the past in the sanctuary of her lonely basement.
  52. Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey
    The film works its showy magic. Or perhaps enforces its magic would be more accurate.
  53. Dating Amber
    As Amber becomes more comfortable with her queerness, the taciturn Eddie retreats inwards. Their parallel journeys dispense with a one-size-fits-all coming-out narrative and are handled with a lightness of touch by Irish writer and director David Freyne.
  54. Dirty God
    This is full-blooded (and arrestingly tactile) fare, which gets right under the skin of its central character, in appropriately unruly and unflinching fashion.
  55. Being a Human Person
    This terrific, unexpectedly moving documentary portrait captures the man at work.
  56. About Endlessness
    As is customary, absurdist humour, global history and abject horror sit side by side, all equally weighted and witnessed.
  57. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project
    Stokes is a fascinating, elusive protagonist – she was a recluse who enjoyed daily martinis and felt a kinship with Steve Jobs. Yet Wolf treats her archive with reverence, rather than writing her off as an eccentric.
  58. The Climb
    The film is shrewd on male friendship, suggesting that a lot of men are vulnerable and crave intimacy, but are often too poor at communicating to truly reach for it.
  59. Summer of 85
    Ozon first read Chambers’s novel as a teenager and his adaptation blends the prickly joy of that first encounter with the stylistic confidence of a film-maker revisiting an old flame.
  60. His House
    Genuine jump scares are bolstered by the film’s spooky sound design, as well as terrific performances from Dirisu and Mosaku, whose terror is palpable.
  61. Honest Thief
    With Neeson well within the confines of his comfort zone, tailed by corrupt cops and diving out of hotel windows, the film should be better. Yet it drags.
  62. SHOT! The Psycho-Spiritual Mantra of Rock
    Rock’s wildest years – both the man and the music – swirl together into a psychedelic maelstrom of pills, pictures and brilliantly creative swearing.
  63. Time
    In Time it’s an almost superhuman sense of togetherness that rings through, a refusal to bow down, to be broken or defeated.
  64. Rebecca
    Personally, I would have preferred a little more Wheatley edge, a little less Country Living.
  65. White Riot
    Rubika Shah’s smart, spirited feature debut is a whistle-stop tour of a DIY uprising.
  66. Under the Shadow
    With this terrific feature debut, Anvari lifts the veil on his heroines’ hidden lives and leaves us all dreaming with our eyes wide open.
  67. Kajillionaire
    On relationships, July remains as perceptive as ever.
  68. The Forty-Year-Old Version
    [A] warm, funny and enjoyably rude debut.
  69. Saint Maud
    Charting a razor-sharp course between the borders of horror, satire, psychodrama and lonely character study (Taxi Driver has been cited as an influence), Saint Maud is a taut, sinewy treat, blessed with an impressively fluid visual sensibility and boosted by two quite brilliant central performances.
  70. On the Rocks
    A film that knowingly lifts riffs from screwball capers and melancholy romcoms alike, writing love letters to the city of New York as it swirls from one upmarket fairytale locale to the next.
  71. Eternal Beauty
    Roberts relies heavily on imagery suggesting a confused reality ( characters are constantly fractured into multiple reflections) but the use of colour is an effective shorthand that clues us into Jane’s state of mind.
  72. The Trial of the Chicago 7
    This is a film that examines both the past and the present day; that plots a path on the common ground between them.
  73. Rocks
    What a wonderful, heart-breaking, life-affirming gem of a movie this is.
  74. Miss Juneteenth
    Miss Juneteenth is a beautifully observed and quietly powerful drama that applies its coming-of-age tropes to children, parents and politics alike.
  75. Capital in the Twenty-First Century
    Documentaries should be more than a vehicle for information. Here, the message is hard to argue with, but the medium – an excess of music video-style cutting, contemporary pop culture montages and literal music cues – does the material no favours.
  76. Misbehaviour
    The film is called Misbehaviour, but a timid script belies mischief of any sort.
  77. Bill & Ted Face the Music
    This slapdash movie, with its big-hearted, puppyish positivity, might not save the world but it will surely lift the spirits.
  78. 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.
  79. The Devil All the Time
    However dark the narrative may seem, there’s a strong streak of black humour that accompanies the horror, often facilitated by a pointedly chosen tune.
  80. The Broken Hearts Gallery
    The premise of writer Natalie Krinsky’s directorial debut sounds cheesy, and it is, but watching the brooding Nick softening to putty in our goofball heroine’s presence while she remains sparkily oblivious is an earnest pleasure.
  81. Matthias & Maxime
    Ultimately, the revelation here is not so much Dolan’s more contemplative approach to film-making, but the subtlety and sensitivity of his performance.
  82. She Dies Tomorrow
    Alternately hilarious and spine-tingling, it recalls David Lynch’s Twin Peaks in its serious, penetrating sense of doom.
  83. Get Duked!
    Hyperactive editing, the jittery rap score and an obligatory acid trip scene grate, but Doff’s social commentary is sharp.
  84. Les Misérables
    It’s that sense of beauty – of the possibility of redemption – that prevents Les Misérables from being crushed by the grim weight of the world it depicts. It’s a world in which Ly grew up, and his love of these neighbourhoods, in all their hardscrabble glory, is tangible.
  85. i'm thinking of ending things
    This is not cinema that leaves you feeling good about things. Nor does it tread a familiar path. But I’m Thinking of Ending Things is one of the most daringly unexpected films of the year, a sinewy, unsettling psychological horror, saturated with a squirming dream logic that tips over into the domain of nightmares.
  86. Mulan
    It’s a film that cries out to be seen in the cinema. Disney’s decision to bypass a theatrical release in favour of streaming does a disservice to both the film and its audience.
  87. Chemical Hearts
    Heavy-handed symbolism aside, this is a decent little drama which digs into the bewildering limbo state between childhood and the adult world – a time in which everything hurts, heads are full of hormones and time stretches out interminably.
  88. Tenet
    Nolan’s desire to stimulate both the blood and the brain feels earnest. What’s frustrating is that he doesn’t trust his audience to follow along.
  89. Pinocchio
    The source material is a neat fit for the Italian film-maker, who traversed similarly episodic fairytale terrain with 2015’s Tale of Tales. It’s also a critique of society that feels timeless or, rather, timely – and not just for Garrone.
  90. Babyteeth
    There’s a fearlessness to Murphy’s film-making, a slightly wayward, maverick spirit. I can’t wait to see what she does next.
  91. Martin Margiela: In His Own Words
    The use of the notoriously media-shy Margiela’s warm, serious spoken voice helps to create intimacy, even though we never see his face.
  92. Perfect 10
    The film’s main asset is impressive newcomer Box: veering between bratty backchat and bruised reticence, she’s tossed on unpredictable tides of teenage emotions.
  93. An American Pickle
    Millennial self-interest and performative liberal politics are contrasted with “authentic”, let-it-all-hang-out conservatism. It’s a simplistic critique. Still, the frequently charming Rogen brings enough of his affable, nice guy credibility to each character to ground both loose cannon Herschel and his straight man foil.
  94. Summerland
    What a lovely, hopeful and rather magical movie this is.
  95. Make Up
    Eerie images of a bloodied fingernail and long grass lit by amber floodlights signal Oakley’s sly sense of humour and eye for visual poetry.
  96. 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”.
  97. Calm with Horses (The Shadow of Violence)
    Buoyed by Joe Murtagh’s screenplay, which keeps the warring elements of the narrative elegantly balanced throughout, the excellent ensemble cast create a complex emotional ecosystem through which our troubled antihero stumbles in search of his identity.
  98. Stage Mother
    The feelgood tone feels a little flaccid.
  99. How to Build a Girl
    It’s a credit to Feldstein that the wobbliness of her Wolverhampton accent never comes between us and her character. Instead, we simply get on board with her adventures, accepting her for what she is – however odd that may sometimes sound.
  100. Alice
    High-class sex work is presented as a financial quick fix and a route to female empowerment, but the film’s sex-positive politics gloss over any of the job’s potential pitfalls.
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