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. Girls Will Be Girls
    This impressive first feature from Indian director Shuchi Talati burrows into the skin of its high-achieving, ambitious central character.
  2. The Apprentice
    Most intriguing is Strong’s slippery portrayal of Cohn – a man full of sharp edges and wide, swinging contradictions.
  3. 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.
  4. In Fabric
    Strickland’s work seems to exist in that strange space between the social-realist tragicomedy of Mike Leigh and the exotic kaleidoscopic imaginings of Nicolas Roeg or Ken Russell. It’s a mesmerising place to be, at once familiar yet otherworldly. Try it on for size.
  5. Fire of Love
    The film’s approach skirts around the actual science of the Kraffts’ work, but it does explore the psychology of a shared passion, of a couple who melted their boots together on smoking lava flows and danced by the craters in a confetti of volcanic bombs.
    • 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)
  7. Thirteen Lives
    Despite the fact that we all know the outcome, and that it’s the third film in as many years to tell the story, Ron Howard’s account of the drama is compulsively watchable and breathlessly tense.
  8. Good Posture
    Wells’s bracingly spiky writing vividly draws both the characters and the connections between them.
  9. 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.
  10. Dahomey
    It’s a wisp of a thing, clocking in at barely over an hour. But the agile poetry and formal playfulness of Mati Diop’s exquisite hybrid documentary belies the weight and wealth of ideas within.
  11. Asia
    This impressive Israeli feature debut from Ruthy Pribar stars a mesmerising Shira Haas.
  12. Diego Maradona
    I found myself gripped by a universally accessible tale of a divided soul – a figure whose dual personas are embodied in the two names of the film’s title; Diego and Maradona.
  13. The Brink
    It’s unsavoury viewing – flies on the wall are rarely attracted by the sweet smell of roses after all – but it’s queasily fascinating nonetheless.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    All That Heaven Allows
    A sharply observed indictment of 1950s country club conformity. [07 Jul 2013, p.45]
    • The Observer (UK)
  15. The Wild Robot
    It’s sentimental stuff, certainly, but the picture’s unexpectedly dark humour outweighs any maudlin tendencies.
  16. Werner Herzog - Radical Dreamer
    Interviewees tie themselves in knots of gushing superlatives, but the real insights come from the man himself.
  17. The Hummingbird Project
    Part thriller, part family drama, part satirical commentary on the way that the pursuit of wealth is a cultural cancer that taints everything it touches, The Hummingbird Project is no less compelling for its odd mishmash of components.
  18. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
    Földes’s matter-of-fact approach to storytelling balances the tendency towards quirkiness in the material. Dream logic coexists with the crushingly mundane, in a picture that also showcases the director’s musical talents with an intricate and involving score.
  19. Smile 2
    The special effects are bracingly revolting, the malevolent smiles as creepy as ever. And the film has the added bonus of some killer choreography, in every sense of the word.
  20. 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hold Back the Dawn
    Smoothly orchestrated entertainment. [30 Apr 2000, p.10]
    • The Observer (UK)
  22. Time
    In Time it’s an almost superhuman sense of togetherness that rings through, a refusal to bow down, to be broken or defeated.
  23. 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.
  24. Benediction
    Behind it all is an endlessly saddening search for that transformative sacrament evoked by the film’s title – alluring yet elusive.
  25. The Holdovers
    There’s a bracingly astringent bleakness under its surface layer of melancholy humour; a biting, sharp edge that counters the occasional lurch towards sentimentality.
  26. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
    While subjects as dark as separation and death may be faced head-on (a reading from Philip Larkin’s The Trees had me in tears), there’s a comedic quality that reminded me of Aardman’s sublime Creature Comforts animations – a joyous juxtaposition of quotidian, vérité-style dialogue and fancifully inventive visuals that hits a tragicomic sweet spot.
  27. 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.
  28. Woman of the Hour
    Kendrick’s knack for capturing period detail goes beyond the psychedelic synthetics and kipper ties. She taps into the treacherous sexism that was hardwired into the entertainment industry and wider culture of the time, both of which are shown to be minefields of fragile male egos and potential violence.
  29. We the Animals
    One of the discoveries of the year so far.
  30. The Inspection
    This well-acted outsider’s-eye view of the inner workings of the US armed forces is fiercely candid, in its condemnation of the brutality that is enmeshed in the training programme, and in its celebration of the bonds and brotherhood that grow between fellow cadets.
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