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. Flux Gourmet
    Flux Gourmet makes us laugh because, on some bizarre level, we do actually believe in and care about these utterly preposterous characters and situations.
  2. Science Fair
    A crowd-pleasing, if slightly formulaic, documentary in the vein of Spellbound.
  3. El Mar La Mar
    Immersive, disorienting, frightening: this experimental documentary takes its form from the landscape it explores.
  4. Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
    Ultimately, it’s the film’s sheer strangeness – that peculiarly magical, lapsed-Catholic sensibility that runs throughout all of Del Toro’s most personal works – that makes this sing and fly.
  5. Dune: Part Two
    There are moments when Dune: Part Two feels uncomfortably timely.
  6. Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood
    Unfortunately, it becomes clear that the film is all backdrop, a boomer nostalgia trip with little in the way of actual story.
  7. Sequin in a Blue Room
    This feature debut from the Sydney-based writer and director Samuel Van Grinsven may tackle familiar material – gay coming-of-age stories are hardly uncommon – but it does so with a lustre and style that marks Van Grinsven out as a name to watch. Perhaps even more notable is Leach, a silky, feline presence who owns every moment that he’s on screen.
  8. Petrov's Flu
    It’s possibly the most Russian thing ever created, and it’s most certainly not a soothing viewing experience. But there’s something grimly fascinating about it nonetheless.
  9. Girls Will Be Girls
    This impressive first feature from Indian director Shuchi Talati burrows into the skin of its high-achieving, ambitious central character.
  10. Monster
    Ultimately, the question of what actually happened is just another red herring. The real point of the film is its heartfelt, if slightly trite, message: that it’s the wider world that needs to adapt and accept the differences of children like Minato and Yori, rather than the other way around.
  11. The First Slam Dunk
    While it leans a little heavily on baffling basketball strategy and court-based machinations, it’s a dynamic and unexpectedly affecting animation.
  12. How to Have Sex
    Here’s a cause for celebration for fans of British cinema: a feature debut that launches not one but two of the most promising talents to arrive in movie theatres for a long while.
  13. Chained for Life
    [A] wonky, charming satire.
  14. The Three Musketeers - Part I: D'Artagnan
    The picture’s seductive power lies elsewhere, with a glorious, typically extravagant performance from Eva Green as the treacherous Milady. She’s great fun in a role that might have been tailor-made for her skill set: Milady is vampy, venomous and dripping with goth jewellery.
  15. Selma
    The film may not be flawless (it’s a touch textbooky at times) but Oyelowo is note-perfect.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Pat and Mike
    This undervalued comic masterpiece, scripted by the husband-and-wife team of Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, would be a fine film even if it didn't try to be funny, which it so successfully does. [06 May 2007, p.64]
    • The Observer (UK)
  17. Thunder Road
    What we have instead is a succession of variously successful vignettes, only some of which hit that sweet spot between horror and humour, as we watch Arnaud’s life collapse around him.
  18. The Assistant
    It’s a credit to Garner that, as a character who effectively has no voice, she manages to say so much about Jane’s predicament through posture, pose and gesture.
  19. A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon
    It’s an absolute joy.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hold Back the Dawn
    Smoothly orchestrated entertainment. [30 Apr 2000, p.10]
    • The Observer (UK)
  21. Hustlers
    Perhaps too reliant on the structure of the original article, which tells the events in flashback, the film wraps up a little hastily. Brilliantly, though, the editing is teasing rather than explicit; Scafaria offers just enough of the girls and their bodies to get pulses racing without exploiting them or their story.
  22. Return to Dust
    It’s a gorgeous, quietly affecting film that finds an unassuming beauty in this simple life in rural China, but which doesn’t shy away from the extreme hardships faced by the very poorest.
  23. Conclave
    The fierce intelligence of Fiennes’s work is magnified by Berger’s elegant direction.
  24. Official Competition
    It dismantles the lofty ambitions of cinema as great, important and significant, a monument on the cultural landscape. Instead, it shows us art for ego’s sake, and it has a lot of wickedly spiteful fun doing so.
  25. Being Frank: The Chris Sievey Story
    [An] affectionate, frequently amusing documentary portrait.
  26. Bread & Roses
    Powerful and enraging.
  27. Priscilla
    Coppola evokes the aching loneliness and isolation experienced by women who simultaneously have everything and nothing.
  28. The Innocents
    The child’s perspective on the story means that the film is unquestioning when it comes to the sources of the psychic powers, neatly sidestepping the need for exposition. In a child’s mind, magic is real, black magic painfully so.
  29. One to One: John & Yoko
    Ultimately, One to One might not reveal a huge amount that’s new about Lennon, but it makes him feel bracingly alive in a way few other documentaries have managed.
  30. The Painter and the Thief
    Fascinating, confounding and continually surprising.
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