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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    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    La Ronde
    This elegant, imperishable romantic comedy is lighter in tone than the play and has a haunting score by Oscar Strauss (no kin to the waltz family).
  2. Titane
    Some will be repelled, many will be bamboozled. But for those with an appetite for cinema that gets you in the gut, Ducournau delivers the goods.
  3. The Matrix Resurrections
    The film is a utopian riff on the apocalyptic source material, a Technicolor reimagining flooded with light and optimism.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Sons of Katie Elder
    Superior western starring John Wayne (just out of hospital and boasting that he had beaten 'the Big C') as an honest gunslinger rallying his wayward brothers (Dean Martin, Earl Holliman, Michael Anderson) to regain the family ranch from a crooked land baron and avenge their mother's death. [30 Jul 2000, p.10]
    • The Observer (UK)
  5. On the Record
    The film’s empathetic approach allows Dixon to explore her decision, peeling back the layers of complexity that racism brings to the burden of sexual abuse. A must watch.
  6. Swan Song
    Ali is tremendous in a dual role that takes in everything from a beguiling meet-cute with his future wife (Naomie Harris) to a third act consumed by grief and doubt about whether he did the best thing for his family after all.
  7. Red Rooms
    Plante’s measured pacing and cool, dispassionate storytelling burrow into the skin of the character. It’s not a comfortable place in which to spend time.
  8. Explorer
    The approach of director Matthew Dyas, who gives the archive material the appearance of found footage, adds to the mythic romance of Fiennes’s life story.
  9. Citizen Ashe
    This thoughtful documentary about Arthur Ashe, the first African American man to win Wimbledon in 1975, understands that representation is only one step towards equality.
  10. Vortex
    There’s a despairing inevitability to the film’s incremental pacing – we feel every aching minute of the nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time. It’s not exactly fun, but it’s a relentlessly powerful piece of film-making.
  11. Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger
    While the film lacks the bravura flourishes that characterised Powell and Pressburger at their peak, it’s an engrossing celebration of two of British cinema’s most distinctive voices, and their creative harmony.
  12. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
    Cretton negotiates potential cliches such as flashback sequences and that hoariest of old chestnuts, the training montage, with a gravity-defying lightness of touch.
  13. Lamb
    Jóhannsson teases the possibility of a monster, but waits to reveal his hand. When he does, there’s more than a touch of gallows humour. I laughed out loud at his audacity, and had nightmares later.
  14. 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.
  15. Blind Ambition
    It’s heartwarming, inspirational stuff.
  16. All That Breathes
    Despite the poisons in the air, the brothers continue their work, mending broken creatures, one by one.
  17. Hollywoodgate
    [A] fascinating, chilling film.
  18. The Nettle Dress
    Allan Brown, a textile artist, speaks eloquently of the rich symbolism of taking something that is a source of pain, stripping it of its sting and, over the years, gradually reshaping and repurposing it into a thing of beauty.
  19. The Good Nurse
    The film’s elegant framing and unobtrusive directorial choices give space for Chastain and Redmayne to fully inhabit their characters in a picture that combines compassion and empathy with a sickening swell of almost unbearable tension.
  20. Daughters
    The dance is the picture’s climax, a glimpse of joy and optimism. But the film’s coda, shot three years later, shows the cost of prolonged separation. Hope is a spark that can be easily extinguished.
  21. Beast
    Mostly, it’s the fact that Kormákur makes some genuinely interesting choices. Rather than relying on staccato editing to build tension, he opts for long, fluid single shots.
  22. Apostasy
    Frequently, the film is enraging. Not because it shows the way in which dogma has the power to rewire the moral instincts of its devotees, but for the sombreness with which it acknowledges that the devotees allow this to happen.
  23. Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie
    The real revelations, however, lie in the depiction of Fox’s family life, most notably his marriage to actor Tracy Pollan, who first won his heart by calling him “a complete fucking asshole”, and whose unswerving love leaves him all but speechless when he’s asked what she means to him, save for one word: “Clarity”.
  24. Cassandro
    This is a giddily entertaining and celebratory drama that hints at the emotional bruises under the sparkly lurex leotard and false lashes.
  25. Emily
    O’Connor clearly isn’t afraid of rattling cages when approaching sacred texts. There’s something refreshingly untethered about the gusto with which she reimagines Emily, tossing aside the image of a shy, sickly recluse, replacing it with an antiheroine whose inability to fit in with the ordered world is a source of strength rather than weakness.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Scent of Green Papaya
    The boldness of this remarkable feature film debut resides in its reticence, and we experience the world through a special sensibility. [03 Apr 1994, p.5]
    • The Observer (UK)
  27. Fremont
    It’s admirably understated film-making, shot in restrained black and white, with a tight aspect ratio that evokes the walls closing in around Donya during the long insomniac nights.
  28. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    Genre convention means it’s a foregone conclusion that this mission is not, in fact, “impossible”, but director Christopher McQuarrie cleverly controls the ticking clock quality that makes these films so much fun.
  29. Brother
    Despite the background noise of police brutality, gang violence and financial peril, it is the altogether more intimate elements of Brother that drive the drama.
  30. The County
    The drama may be down to earth, but that doesn’t stop the film – or indeed its protagonist – from dreaming big, and daring to look beyond the horizon.
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