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. Marriage Story
    This often hilarious heartbreaker is simply Baumbach’s best film to date – insightful, sympathetic and rather beautifully bewildered.
  2. La La Land
    Like the musical itself, the film has timeless charm and a brave sense of adventure. Bravo!
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  10. 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)
  12. 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)
  17. 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)
  20. 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.
  21. The Zone of Interest
    The impact all but knocks the breath from your body.
  22. 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.
  23. Burning
    It’s chilling and brilliant.
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
  26. 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)
  28. 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.
  29. 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.
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