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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per page
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Sunset Boulevard
    Still the best, most penetrating picture about Hollywood, its surface charm, its underlying cruelty, its lack of interest in its own history, its ruthless disregard for failure. The casting is perfect. [16 Mar 2003, p.7]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
    It's a classic with special effects that could scarcely be improved on. [18 Apr 2004, p.13]
    • The Observer (UK)
  3. The Novice
    It’s not surprising to learn that its writer and director, Lauren Hadaway, who based this film on her own experiences on a college rowing team, has a background in sound editing.
  4. All Quiet on the Western Front
    While not as showy as Sam Mendes’s sweeping, single-shot takes in 1917, this is remarkable, if harrowing, film-making. Moments of striking beauty – sunlight carved into exultant rays by skeletal winter trees – are almost as shocking and disquieting as the scenes of suffering.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ikiru
    The narrative is carefully paced, the central performance magnificent, the final effect overwhelming in a manner that recalls the great Russian writers Kurosawa admired.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Shane
    Shane is a beautiful, deceptively simple movie that takes on different meanings for each generation. [08 Oct 2000, p.10]
    • The Observer (UK)
  7. Past Lives
    There’s something quite breathtaking about the deceptive ease with which Song’s first cinematic foray juggles the metaphysical and the matter-of-fact, conjuring a world in which every decision has transformative power, and concepts of love and friendship are at once mysteriously malleable yet oddly inevitable.
  8. Elvis
    It’s a riotously audacious work.
  9. I'm Still Here
    The realisation that her husband is gone for good is a gradual process that plays out, largely without words, on Torres’s face, in a performance of extraordinary intelligence and emotional complexity.
  10. Green Border
    It’s a supremely accomplished work.
  11. Nightmare Alley
    Years ago, I compared Del Toro to Orson Welles, a film-maker who instinctively understood the hypnotic power of cinema to dazzle, delight and deceive. On the basis of Nightmare Alley, which is blessed with more than a touch of evil, that’s a comparison by which I still stand.
  12. Killers of the Flower Moon
    It is, it has to be said, something of a stretch to believe that this regal woman would be drawn to a dullard such as Ernest, but Gladstone and DiCaprio manage to convince us that this is more than a partnership of expediency – it’s a marriage of real love.
  13. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
    There’s not a frame of this rich, kaleidoscopically detailed animation that isn’t dazzling.
  14. The Personal History of David Copperfield
    Astutely amplifying the absurdist – and remarkably modernist – elements of his source, Iannucci and co-writer Simon Blackwell conjure a surreal cinematic odyssey that is as accessible as it is intelligent and unexpected.
  15. Anora
    Anora deepens and darkens with each twist and turn and provides a violent corrective to so many Hollywood fairytales.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    I Know Where I'm Going!
    An enduring minor masterpiece with an amazing climax featuring a boat caught in a treacherous whirlpool. [05 Feb 2012, p.45]
    • The Observer (UK)
  17. The Reason I Jump
    Rothwell uses the language of cinema – macro lens closeups, distortion, off-kilter framing and an evocative blend of sound design and score – to convey the autistic experience of the world.
  18. Rocketman
    Fletcher is the real star of this show, a director whose enthusiasm for musical storytelling shines through every frame, hitting all the emotional high notes.
  19. Under the Shadow
    With this terrific feature debut, Anvari lifts the veil on his heroines’ hidden lives and leaves us all dreaming with our eyes wide open.
  20. Cold War
    There’s a sustained tension between the concisely epic sweep of the narrative and boxy confinement of the 4x3 frame that perfectly matches the film’s twin themes of freedom and incarceration.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Bride of Frankenstein
    Whale's greatest work and the best ever gothic horror movie. [10 Oct 2010, p.46]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Alien
    The film is superbly paced, imaginatively designed, consistently suspenseful and never attracts an unintentional laugh. [2003 re-release]
  23. TÁR
    The genius of Todd Field’s superb Tár comes from the way the film-making echoes the treacherously seductive and mercurial nature of its central character.
  24. Conclave
    The fierce intelligence of Fiennes’s work is magnified by Berger’s elegant direction.
  25. All We Imagine as Light
    It’s a marvel of a movie, with something of the humanist poetry of Satyajit Ray or Edward Yang. And it’s all the more remarkable given that this is Kapadia’s first fiction feature (her 2021 debut film, the documentary A Night of Knowing Nothing, also picked up a prize in Cannes). What a talent.
  26. An Elephant Sitting Still
    At times, it feels as though we’re watching something we’re not supposed to be seeing, such is the detail of the emotional degradation on show; in this sense, it’s impossible not to read it as something of a nihilistic suicide note.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Chimes at Midnight
    Overall this elegiac, monochrome movie, shot in the snow and mud in wintry landscapes, is a rich masterpiece. [28 Jun 2015]
    • The Observer (UK)
  28. The Sparks Brothers
    From bucket-of-water tomfoolery to visually inventive biography and witty musicology, this really does have something for the girl with everything.
  29. Aftersun
    A brilliantly assured and stylistically adventurous work, this beautifully understated yet emotionally riveting coming-of-age drama picks apart themes of love and loss in a manner so dextrous as to seem almost accidental. Don’t be fooled; Wells knows exactly what she’s doing, and her storytelling is as precise as it is piercing.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Tokyo Story
    This 1953 classic is one of the cinema's most profound and moving studies of married love, ageing and the relations between parents and children. It is flawless and rewards numerous viewings.
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