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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per page
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Tokyo Story
    This 1953 classic is one of the cinema's most profound and moving studies of married love, ageing and the relations between parents and children. It is flawless and rewards numerous viewings.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Lady Vanishes
    It's the greatest-ever comedy-thriller, the greatest film set on a train, a faultlessly cast mirror held up to the nation in the year of Munich.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Passion of Joan of Arc
    This was Falconetti’s only major film, and over a period of a year under Dreyer’s direction (a combination of cruelty and patience) her extraordinarily expressive face made for one of the greatest, most harrowing screen performances.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Jules and Jim
    The film introduced a crucial theme that was to run right through Truffaut's work: how we cope with death and how we preserve our memories of those who have died. I don't think Jeanne Moreau gave a better performance than as Catherine.
  5. The Night of the Hunter
    Unforgettably haunting images (a car submerged in a watery grave; a spider's web view of the children fleeing in a riverboat to the strains of Pretty Fly; a silhouetted angel of death) make this a perennially unsettling masterpiece from which modern chillers could learn much.
  6. 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.
  7. Parasite
    Thrillingly played by a flawless ensemble cast who hit every note and harmonic resonance of Bong and co-writer Han Jin-won’s multitonal script, it’s a tragicomic masterclass that will get under your skin and eat away at your cinematic soul.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Battleship Potemkin
    Potemkin is a vital viewing experience that transcends its landmark/milestone status. Its virtuoso technique remains dazzling and is at the service of a revolutionary fervour we can still experience.
  9. Man with a Movie Camera
    This is an exuberant manifesto that celebrates the infinite possibilities of what cinema can be.
  10. Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
    Director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s feature debut intertwines music and politics in one of the best concert movies of all time.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Shop Around the Corner
    It's funny, touching and beautifully paced with numerous examples of the celebrated "Lubitsch touch".
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Breathless
    It baffled popular audiences outside Europe, but its insouciant style, amoral attitudes and cultural sophistication made it an influential milestone of post-war cinema. [28 Apr 1996, p.14]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Red River
    It's a landmark film that brought a new psychological complexity to the genre and gave John Wayne the first truly challenging role of his career.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sansho the Bailiff
    It is a heartbreaking story, tragic, unsentimental, but suffused with a belief in the ability of decency and dignity to survive under the most terrible circumstances. [02 Dec 2007, p.18]
    • The Observer (UK)
      • Posted Jan 11, 2022
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Children of Paradise (1945)
    The movie's final parting sequence, where Arletty rides away in a coach and Barrault is inexorably swept in the opposite direction by a swirling crowd, is among the peaks of romantic cinema.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Bride of Frankenstein
    Whale's greatest work and the best ever gothic horror movie. [10 Oct 2010, p.46]
    • The Observer (UK)
  17. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
    Portrait of a Lady on Fire (the French title uses the less Jamesian “jeune fille”) seamlessly intertwines themes of love and politics, representation and reality. At times it plays like a breathless romance, trembling with passionate anticipation. Elsewhere, it seems closer to a sociopolitical treatise, what Sciamma has called “a manifesto about the female gaze”.
  18. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
    This picture is more or less equal parts an indulgent, endurance-testing slog and a brilliantly audacious, fiercely political poke in the eye to conventional cinema. I loved every enraging minute of it.
  19. 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.
  20. Rocks
    What a wonderful, heart-breaking, life-affirming gem of a movie this is.
  21. Collective
    At a time when the press is routinely denigrated, an account of investigative journalism as a force for good makes for inspiring viewing.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sunrise
    Murnau's first Hollywood film and one of the last great silent movies.
  23. Amazing Grace
    When a parishioner leaps to her feet, her spirit clearly moved, you’ll want to do the same. Wholy Holy indeed.
  24. The Irishman
    For all its flash-back/flash-forward tricksiness, The Irishman rarely seems disjointed or thematically fractured. It conjures a kaleidoscopic illusion of depth that only starts to shatter as the pace flags in the final act.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
    It's an accomplished, affecting, relentless work.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Meet Me in St. Louis
    It's a film whose four parts cover the seasons from summer to spring but is truly a film for all seasons and all time.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Sunset Boulevard
    Still the best, most penetrating picture about Hollywood, its surface charm, its underlying cruelty, its lack of interest in its own history, its ruthless disregard for failure. The casting is perfect. [16 Mar 2003, p.7]
    • The Observer (UK)
  28. 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.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Chimes at Midnight
    Overall this elegiac, monochrome movie, shot in the snow and mud in wintry landscapes, is a rich masterpiece. [28 Jun 2015]
    • The Observer (UK)
  30. Call Me by Your Name
    Chalamet, with his restless, impatient physicality and a face as sensual and sculpted as a fallen angel from a Caravaggio painting, is quite simply astonishing.
  31. Marriage Story
    This often hilarious heartbreaker is simply Baumbach’s best film to date – insightful, sympathetic and rather beautifully bewildered.
  32. La La Land
    Like the musical itself, the film has timeless charm and a brave sense of adventure. Bravo!
  33. Petite Maman
    Petite Maman is short and sweet, yet fearlessly profound. A mix of fairytale, ghost story and rites-of-passage journey, this is at heart a cinematic parable about healing intergenerational wounds, about breaching the barriers that inevitably grow between parents and children.
  34. All We Imagine as Light
    It’s a marvel of a movie, with something of the humanist poetry of Satyajit Ray or Edward Yang. And it’s all the more remarkable given that this is Kapadia’s first fiction feature (her 2021 debut film, the documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, also picked up a prize in Cannes). What a talent.
  35. 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.
  36. Shoplifters
    It’s an eerily moving piece, masterfully blurring the divide between the unforgivable and understandable, finding tenderness in the bleakest and most traumatic of circumstances.
  37. No Other Land
    The friendship that grows between the two is a splinter of hope in an otherwise increasingly bleak situation.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    McCabe & Mrs. Miller
    A truly great western.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1945)
    Arguably the finest British film made during the second world war.
  40. TÁR
    The genius of Todd Field’s superb Tár comes from the way the film-making echoes the treacherously seductive and mercurial nature of its central character.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Top Hat
    In one of the best-looking, wittiest, most melodious and stylishly romantic musicals ever made, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance and feud from London to a dazzling art deco Venice. [09 Oct 2011, p.51]
    • The Observer (UK)
  42. No Bears
    Filtering his immense contribution to cinema through a deceptively incidental lens, he once again reminds us that movie-making can be a profoundly humane endeavour; at once comedic, tragic and truthful.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Yojimbo
    Toshiro Mifune is electrifying as an unemployed samurai exploiting two embattled factions in an early nineteenth-century Japanese country town. [05 Nov 2000, p.11]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ikiru
    The narrative is carefully paced, the central performance magnificent, the final effect overwhelming in a manner that recalls the great Russian writers Kurosawa admired.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Wizard of Oz
    Somehow, for all the dollar-book Freud brought to bear on it, the picture comes up fresh, innocent and enchanting whenever you see it.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ride the High Country
    The leads' subtle, honest performances bring pathos and poignancy to what is probably Peckinpah's most well realised film. [04 Jul 2010, p.52]
    • The Observer (UK)
  47. Memoria
    The film takes a fantastical leap that viewers will find either breathtaking or ridiculous – probably a bit of both.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Chinatown
    This film is flawless.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Cool Hand Luke
    Brilliant study of hero-worship and bloody-minded individualism centering on doomed outsider Paul Newman, jailed on a minor charge, bullied by guards, and winning the respect of fellow convicts on a southern chain gang. Superb cast, unforgettable moments. [29 Nov 2009, p.29]
    • The Observer (UK)
  50. Never Rarely Sometimes Always
    Perfectly pitched and sensitively played, this is truthful, powerful and profoundly moving fare from a film-maker at the very top of her game.
  51. The Zone of Interest
    The impact all but knocks the breath from your body.
  52. The Souvenir
    It’s powerful stuff: wryly tender, frequently funny, but insidiously suffocating. More than once I found myself stifling a scream – and I mean that as a compliment.
  53. Burning
    It’s chilling and brilliant.
  54. Drive My Car
    With its eddying, fluid score and judicious use of silence, its satisfying layers of storytelling, this is a supremely confident piece of film-making from Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, albeit one that, at three hours long and with a rather Chekhov-heavy second half, will certainly require the right mindset.
  55. Saint Omer
    Inspired by Diop’s own experience of attending the trial of a woman accused of murdering her baby, it’s a meditative exploration of a complicated connection between the woman in the dock and the one who bears witness.
  56. Time
    In Time it’s an almost superhuman sense of togetherness that rings through, a refusal to bow down, to be broken or defeated.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Swing Time
    Marvellous Astaire-Rogers musical with the usual high-gloss production. [06 Jan 2013, p.38]
    • The Observer (UK)
  58. Son of Saul
    I struggle to remember the last time a non-documentary film proved so profoundly, soul-shakingly distressing. This is as it should be – anything less would be immoral and irresponsible.
  59. Little Women
    By encouraging a merry chaos of overlapping personalities and performances – restructuring the timeline into a multilayered playground where the child and adult stories interact – and subtly foregrounding existing themes of female fulfilment and the economics of creativity, Gerwig creates something that is true to its roots and bracingly current.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Am Cuba
    The result is a technically astonishing mixture of optimistic Stalinist kitsch, agitprop and the epic Soviet style of the Twenties.
  61. Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat
    Informative, exhaustively researched, but never dry or didactic, this is a phenomenal achievement by Grimonprez, who holds his own country to account for its shameful role in this sorry tale.
  62. 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”.
  63. Nickel Boys
    A masterpiece.
  64. The Boy and the Heron
    The lush orchestral score, by regular Miyazaki collaborator Joe Hisaishi, is shimmering and exultant. All the elements are in place. So it seems almost churlish to note that this is middling Miyazaki at best.
  65. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
    What becomes clear from the film, which vividly details the cultural backdrop as well as Goldin’s work, is that fear has never been part of Goldin’s vocabulary, either creatively or personally.
  66. 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.
  67. They Shall Not Grow Old
    I’ve often argued that cinema is a time machine, but rarely has that seemed so true.
  68. Anora
    Anora deepens and darkens with each twist and turn and provides a violent corrective to so many Hollywood fairytales.
  69. The Favourite
    Amid such strangeness, the central performances keep us grounded.
  70. The Brutalist
    The screenplay dwells obsessively on certain aspects and rushes blithely past others. The craft of the film-making, though, is exemplary.
  71. La Chimera
    There’s something about the folkloric quality of Rohrwacher’s films, their embrace of a kind of earth magic, that prompts people to describe them as fairytales. But this is perhaps misleading. La Chimera is no twinkly escapist fantasy, it’s a film full of grit, thorns and greed.
  72. 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.
  73. Licorice Pizza
    Like all the best evocations of times past, Licorice Pizza has no answers – only an enraptured sense of awe that makes Anderson’s joyous film feel like a very personal memory.
  74. All of Us Strangers
    It’s a remarkable achievement – a raw and potent piece of storytelling that grabs you by the heart and doesn’t let go.
  75. Procession
    What could have been a disaster in the hands of a less sensitive film-maker ends up an extraordinary feat of care, collaboration and creativity.
  76. Blue Is the Warmest Color
    Certainly the performances by Léa Seydoux (already an important screen presence) and newcomer Adèle Exarchopoulos are extraordinary. Their portrayal of a blossoming, fragmenting relationship is shot through with genuine grace and conviction even when the film itself descends into indulgence.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    To Have and Have Not
    Casablanca is its model, and though a minor classic, it isn't in the same league. [30 Jul 2000, p.10]
    • The Observer (UK)
  78. Sugarcane
    The sickening facts of the case are presented with a respectful restraint but it’s impossible to watch this and not feel a cold, hard rage on behalf of the victims.
  79. Green Border
    It’s a supremely accomplished work.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Days and Nights in the Forest
    It brings to mind Chekhov, Jean Renoir and Love's Labour's Lost and is quite exquisite. [28 Jul 2002, p.9]
    • The Observer (UK)
  81. 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.
  82. Cold War
    There’s a sustained tension between the concisely epic sweep of the narrative and boxy confinement of the 4x3 frame that perfectly matches the film’s twin themes of freedom and incarceration.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Scarface
    Some of the humour is dated, but mostly it's astonishingly modern, full of unforgettable images. Muni is stunning and George Raft, who, like Sinatra, enjoyed the company of mobsters, gives an iconic performance: his cool, coin-tossing habit is referred to both in Singin' in the Rain and Some Like it Hot. [09 Apr 2006, p.18]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    High and Low
    As well as being a skilfully developed thriller and a study in moral dilemma, High and Low is a precise and devastating anatomy of postwar Japanese society. [31 Jan 1999, p.11]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Gold Rush (1925)
    This technically simple, endlessly inventive film balanced laughter and pathos; its cabin fever sequence is unsurpassed. [28 Feb 2010, p.24]
    • The Observer (UK)
      • Posted Jun 25, 2025
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Lavender Hill Mob
    Inventive, economic, masterly.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Deer Hunter
    The Deer Hunter is a rich and powerful picture that without a trace of patronisation or the slightest touch of cultural superiority, speaks eloquently for the inarticulate.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Treasure Island
    Attractively staged, it is one of numerous versions of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic adventure and is most notable for an unforgettable, over-the-top performance by Robert Newton as an eye-rolling Long John Silver. [7 May 2006, p.2]
    • The Observer (UK)
  89. Killers of the Flower Moon
    It is, it has to be said, something of a stretch to believe that this regal woman would be drawn to a dullard such as Ernest, but Gladstone and DiCaprio manage to convince us that this is more than a partnership of expediency – it’s a marriage of real love.
  90. For Sama
    With footage as raw and dramatic as this, it’s a credit to composer Nainita Desai that her score remains restrained and understated throughout, emphasising subtler themes of endurance and empathy, while gesturing gently toward the possibility of hope – of love – even in the midst of tragedy.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Hidden Fortress
    There are two epic set pieces (a slave revolt and a peasant fire festival), numerous battles (including an extended fight with lances between two samurai) and endless felicitously staged scenes. In his first widescreen picture, Kurosawa revelled in a shape disparaged at the time, and stuck with it thereafter. [24 Mar 2002, p.9]
    • The Observer (UK)
  92. Minari
    What makes this more than just another formulaic feelgood film is the grit with which Chung evokes the hardscrabble lives of his characters, balancing the dreamier elements of the drama with a naturalism that keeps it rooted in reality.
  93. Barry Lyndon
    One of the most beautiful of all Stanley Kubrick’s films, originally released in 1975, this slyly savage tale of social climbing in the 18th century is also arguably his funniest.
  94. The Farewell
    Ultimately, it’s all about balance, a yin and yang of roots and identities, humour and pathos that comes together into a satisfying, bittersweet wedding banquet of a movie.
  95. 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.
  96. System Crasher
    Most essential is the central performance: Zengel’s oscillating wild joys and storming furies are painful to watch. A moment when she howls for her mother (always tantalisingly out of reach) brought me to tears.
  97. Gunda
    To call the film meditative would be to undersell Kosakovskiy’s instinct for drama and tension.
  98. The Power of the Dog
    The weathered earth tones of Campion’s subdued colour scheme conceal a vivid and full-blooded emotional palette.
  99. Mr. Bachmann and His Class
    It’s an investment in time, certainly, but this profound and hopeful picture justifies every second of its three hours and 38 minute running time.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Alien
    The film is superbly paced, imaginatively designed, consistently suspenseful and never attracts an unintentional laugh. [2003 re-release]
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