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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    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Here Comes Mr. Jordan
    It is a delightful film, both comic and touching, with a wonderfully camp performance from Edward Everett Horton as one of God's bureaucrats. [06 Sep 2009, p.30]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    They Live by Night
    Inspired by the story of Bonnie and Clyde, superbly performed by Granger, O'Donnell and (as the evil gang leader) Howard De Silva. The opening scene shot from a helicopter was revolutionary in its day. [01 Jun 2014]
    • The Observer (UK)
  3. Cocote
    Dominican Republic film-maker Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias’s gorgeous, restlessly creative hybrid fiction combines ethnographic documentary with improvised drama to explore a clash of two religious identities.
  4. The Hermit of Treig
    This lovely, compassionate documentary, which recently won the audience award at the Glasgow film festival, is more than a character study. It’s a portrait of a friendship between Smith and film-maker Lizzie MacKenzie.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    It Came from Outer Space
    An exciting, frightening movie, and a landmark of the genre, it stands up surprisingly well. [16 Jul 2006, p.20]
    • The Observer (UK)
  6. Il Buco
    The wordless earth magic of the storytelling won’t be for everyone, but the film casts a beguiling spell.
  7. Drop
    It’s enjoyable stuff: a taut and crisply edited balance between humour and horror.
  8. Nine Days
    Nine Days is, in its subdued way, a profound and powerful commentary on life.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    F for Fake
    At times T for tedious and P for pretentious, the film remains essential viewing for admirers of the great cineaste and showman.
  10. The Lost Daughter
    As always, Colman manages to express deep wellsprings of emotion with few words and fewer gestures – her face telegraphing great swathes of anguish beneath polite smiles and annoyed glances.
  11. 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.
  12. The Farewell
    Ultimately, it’s all about balance, a yin and yang of roots and identities, humour and pathos that comes together into a satisfying, bittersweet wedding banquet of a movie.
  13. My Old Ass
    It’s a fun, silly premise, but while there’s no shortage of stoner humour, the film is deeper and considerably more satisfying than the drug-baked adolescent wisecracking might initially suggest.
  14. The Mitchells vs. The Machines
    The film retains a warm sense of humour about technology’s grip on society.
  15. The King of Staten Island
    All loose limbs and exposed emotional scar tissue, Davidson is persuasively raw in a performance that becomes increasingly textured and interesting as Scott finds a father figure in his mother’s ex-boyfriend. It’s his bruised charisma that compensates for a certain spaced-out lethargy in the storytelling and an overlong running time.
  16. My Name Is Pauli Murray
    This thorough and informative documentary, from the team behind RBG, shines a light on a brilliant and uncompromising firebrand who paved the way for generations to come.
  17. Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara
    With stately restraint, Bellocchio manages to put the audience in an ever-tightening chokehold of tension and outrage.
  18. Hive
    Basholli understands that healing is possible, even if closure isn’t.
  19. True Things
    With great physical poise and precision, Wilson (who optioned and developed the source book) engages the audience on a visceral level, her deceptively low-key performance taking us deep inside her character’s dreams, desires and insecurities.
  20. Silver Dollar Road
    Peck’s film – which, with its themes of race and failures of American justice, has a kinship with Ava DuVernay’s 13th and Garrett Bradley’s Time – is both infuriating and also unexpectedly uplifting in its celebration of family unity.
  21. Challengers
    The sex is like tennis: fierce, combative bouts in which there will always be a winner and a loser. And the tennis, ultimately, is like sex: an ecstatic consummation between two perfectly matched people at their glistening physical peak.
  22. On the Rocks
    A film that knowingly lifts riffs from screwball capers and melancholy romcoms alike, writing love letters to the city of New York as it swirls from one upmarket fairytale locale to the next.
  23. For Sama
    With footage as raw and dramatic as this, it’s a credit to composer Nainita Desai that her score remains restrained and understated throughout, emphasising subtler themes of endurance and empathy, while gesturing gently toward the possibility of hope – of love – even in the midst of tragedy.
  24. Joker
    Subtlety is not Phillips’s strong point. What he does have is an eye for a well-chosen location, an ear for a provocative line of dialogue and a finger on the pulse of very marketable, confrontational (if also “cynical”) entertainment. Add to this an incendiary central performance by Phoenix and Joker looks set to have the last laugh.
  25. The Outrun
    The intelligence and craft of the film-making, the way Fingscheidt guides us along the emotional journey of the central character, is absorbing.
  26. In the Heights
    Perhaps a more potent political statement is the way that Christopher Scott’s choreography claims and owns every square inch of the block. Reclaim the streets (with fabulous shoes and glorious Latin dance routines)!
  27. The Ground Beneath My Feet
    This oppressive, atmospheric Austrian drama takes the kind of alpha female high achiever familiar from Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, but undermines her with splinters of Hitchcockian paranoia.
  28. Honeyland
    No-nonsense beekeper Hatidze Muratova’s face is as weathered and craggy as the cliff face we see her scaling at the start of this gripping, Sundance-winning documentary.
  29. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
    This picture is more or less equal parts an indulgent, endurance-testing slog and a brilliantly audacious, fiercely political poke in the eye to conventional cinema. I loved every enraging minute of it.
  30. Rose Plays Julie
    There’s a strong element of Greek tragedy underpinning Rose Plays Julie.
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