The Observer (UK)'s Scores

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For 1,641 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 3.1 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: 894 out of 1641
  2. Mixed: 714 out of 1641
  3. Negative: 33 out of 1641
1641 movie reviews
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  1. 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.
  2. 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”.
  3. Ready or Not
    There is an elegance to the premise – an otherwise straightforward cat-and-mouse chase around a gothic mansion – and a satisfying clip to the rewardingly gory action.
  4. 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.
  5. The 8th
    There are charismatic figures fronting the movement, but the real power comes from each of the many shared, sad stories from women whose lives were affected by the law.
  6. Hide and Seek
    Using a combination of verité and poetic reconstructions, Fiore paints a sobering portrait of a bright, personable kid whose destiny is preordained.
  7. Being a Human Person
    This terrific, unexpectedly moving documentary portrait captures the man at work.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Long Riders
    Politically, the film reflects post-Vietnam, post-countercultural blues.
  9. A Bunch of Amateurs
    As this terrific and very moving documentary shows, the society, fuelled by bickering, biscuits and cinephilia, is a lifeline for its members, who weather bereavements, loneliness and fiercely argued creative differences within its peeling walls. Lovely stuff.
  10. Scala!!!
    Borrowing a punky, handmade aesthetic from the famous monthly programme posters, the film collates wildly entertaining interviews with former staff and punters.
  11. While We Watched
    This is tense, essential film-making that argues for the importance of serious, balanced journalism in today’s world of factional infotainment, while also showing the cost to those who stand against the tide.
  12. Good Grief
    Levy, who also wrote the screenplay and stars in the picture, has made a satisfyingly adult, bittersweet drama which argues that even a seemingly gilded life can be painfully messy.
  13. Never Look Away
    While the direction may be deceptively unfussy, Deschanel does brilliant work bringing Kurt’s worldview to life, enabling us to understand his progress towards an artistic breakthrough, represented here by paintings conjured by (among others) Richter’s former assistant Andreas Schön.
  14. 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.
  15. Joyland
    Richly detailed and superbly acted across the board, the film cast a scathing eye over the rigid social constraints that ensnare anyone who fails to conform.
  16. 3 Faces
    And Shahrzad, a huge star from the 1960s and 70s who was banished after the revolution, is present as a voice rather than a face in the film, but is no less significant for the fact that she is not seen by the camera.
  17. Knife + Heart
    Variously gorgeous, ethereal, artful and tacky, both Anne’s film and Gonzalez’s are sustained by a throbbing sexual energy, aided by French electronic act M83’s twinkling, club‑inspired score.
  18. Only the Animals
    This is film-making that really tests the elasticity of its story strands, but it largely manages to keep the audience from teetering into disbelief. For the most part, that’s thanks to persuasively solid characters and casting.
  19. Under The Wire
    It gives heart-in-the-mouth insights into the realities of war reporting, and is a testament to the value – and the price – of great journalism.
  20. Some Kind of Heaven
    It’d be easy to mistake the director’s deadpan observation for mocking, but the space he holds for the darker aspects of his characters’ individual stories helps to puncture any cultivated cutesyness.
  21. Being Frank: The Chris Sievey Story
    [An] affectionate, frequently amusing documentary portrait.
  22. Society of the Snow
    While there are moments in which the film’s generous running time starts to take its toll, Bayona’s smart decision to make this a tale of both the survivors and victims brings a nervy uncertainty to the story, even if we all know broadly how it ends.
  23. Living
    This deceptively gentle 50s-set film addresses weighty matters of life and death with a winning simplicity that is hard to resist.
  24. The Wedding Guest
    Patel excels as a smouldering, enigmatic antihero who gradually begins to drop his defences; Apte might be even better as the duplicitous femme fatale.
  25. Mogul Mowgli
    This is abrasive, confrontational film-making, with a machine-gun assault of ideas and influences.
  26. 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.
  27. Apollo 11
    A celebration of human endeavour, and of a rare moment of global unity.
  28. Support the Girls
    Under the party whoops and confetti cannons there’s a deceptively complex and layered portrait of female solidarity in the face of ingrained sexism, racism and general male shittiness.
  29. American Animals
    A heart-pounding heist movie and a bantering conversation between real life and fiction, the debut drama by documentary director Bart Layton (The Imposter) is a great deal sharper – and more slickly executed – than the lunkheaded criminal debacle on which it is based.
  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.
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