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 3.2 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. The Nightingale
    It’s a punishing watch; a harrowing film which boots home its message by gouging at the vulnerable soft spots of the audience. Like the world she depicts, Kent’s storytelling shows no mercy.
  2. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
    This Shrek spin-off is a breezily entertaining DreamWorks animation that harnesses the familiar appeal of the self-aggrandising feline (Antonio Banderas), while also adopting a distinctive and original graphic visual style.
  3. Babes
    It’s caustically funny, albeit wincingly uncomfortable at times. Where the film really excels is not so much in the snappy, trash-talking vag banter, but in the perceptive depiction of the gear changes in a female friendship as the besties start to realise that their paths might be diverging.
  4. Capernaum
    Rafeea, a non-professional actor and Syrian refugee, is the film’s secret weapon. At times, the tragedy unfolding on screen feels borderline unwatchable, but his strange, fascinating, eerily adult face offers a litany of minute expressions. There is a wisdom, a soulfulness, and an icy, angry candour that feels lived rather than performed.
  5. Wildfire
    Savagely powerful, directed with an unshowy but acute eye (the use of the colour red is a simple but searingly effective device), this is a terrific feature debut from the writer and director Cathy Brady.
  6. His House
    Genuine jump scares are bolstered by the film’s spooky sound design, as well as terrific performances from Dirisu and Mosaku, whose terror is palpable.
  7. Radical
    Derbez is very likable, if a little too prone to moments of moist-eyed pathos, but the young actors are phenomenal – in particular Jennifer Trejo as Paloma, the litter-picker with a genius IQ, and Danilo Guardiola as Nico, the class clown in the clutches of the cartel.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ride the High Country
    The leads' subtle, honest performances bring pathos and poignancy to what is probably Peckinpah's most well realised film. [04 Jul 2010, p.52]
    • The Observer (UK)
  9. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
    The latest instalment of John Wick makes an art of pain in a way that is curiously life-affirming.
  10. Knock at the Cabin
    As the film’s bleak momentum builds, so does a tsunami swell of existential dread. It’s Shyamalan’s most contained and efficient picture in a while.
  11. Barbarian
    It’s one of the most bracingly effective chillers of the year.
  12. The Promised Land
    This very enjoyable Nordic western from Nikolaj Arcel (A Royal Affair), based on a true story, is at first driven by grit and macho hubris. But thanks to the women in his life . . . the captain belatedly comes to realise that there is more to life than potatoes and royal-sanctioned prestige.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Red River
    It's a landmark film that brought a new psychological complexity to the genre and gave John Wayne the first truly challenging role of his career.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Forbidden Planet
    A minor classic. [02 Apr 2000, p.10]
    • The Observer (UK)
  15. Disco Boy
    While the plot itself is a little nebulous, the atmosphere that Abbruzzese creates, through a hypnotic, pulsing electronic score and Rogowski’s febrile presence, is unnerving and intense.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Incredible Shrinking Man
    Low-budget, sci-fi classic, one of the key Hollywood nuclear-angst pictures. [23 Jul 2000, p.10]
    • The Observer (UK)
  17. The Gospel According to André
    Fashion is fleeting, style remains, said Vreeland, and indeed the film attempts to apply her mantra, more interested in consecrating Talley as a man of taste and influence than it is probing for gossip or weakness.
  18. MLK/FBI
    Pollard’s decision to eschew traditional talking heads in favour of voiceover interviews allows the archive to take centre stage.
  19. BlackBerry
    The comic potential of the collision of personalities is thoroughly mined: Lazaridis the diffident visionary; Fregin the extrovert oddball; Balsillie the driven, hyperaggressive alpha male.
  20. Blue Story
    It shouldn’t work yet it does, underscoring the tragedy of corrupted innocence, constricting codes of masculinity and the aftermath of trauma.
  21. Wendell & Wild
    The story is a touch convoluted, but it’s a gleefully grim good time.
  22. The Taste of Things
    The Taste of Things defies expectations. There is something refreshingly unconventional about its depiction of the tender, well-worn love between Eugénie and Dodin.
  23. The Origin of Evil
    With the exception of Stéphane, who becomes more intriguing and less likable with each secret unpeeled, the main characters are a little schematic and two-dimensional. It’s fortunate, then, that the always impressive Calamy is on top form.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Masque of the Red Death
    Marvellous, macabre horror story from Corman's Edgar Allan Poe series. Vincent Price is a diabolical delight, his 12th-century Italian tyrant Prince Prospero a worthy model for Machiavelli. [21 Feb 2004, p.53]
    • The Observer (UK)
  25. I Saw the TV Glow
    To call it horror seems reductive. With its shapeshifting disquiet, I Saw the TV Glow is too languidly weird, too unmoored from genre conventions to be neatly categorised. But there’s not a frame in Jane Schoenbrun’s suffocating second feature that isn’t drenched in dread and unease.
  26. The Wife
    Watching the film for a second time, with prior knowledge of the revelations of its final act, Close’s performance seemed even more nuanced, as if each look now meant something different.
  27. The Workshop
    A third act that stumbles into genre territory loses focus temporarily, but is redeemed by a scene that celebrates the power of words above all else.
  28. The Competition
    Simon’s fly-on-the-wall mode is a distancing tool, but shouldn’t be confused with ambivalence. Exposing the mechanics of decision-making is an implicit reproof of increasing conservatism, both of La Fémis itself and the film-makers they are producing.
  29. The Mustang
    What’s particularly striking is an inventive sound design that tunes us in and out of the blood-pounding fury in Roman’s head – a place, we soon realise, which is not somewhere that’s comfortable to linger.
  30. Sleep
    It’s an enjoyably grisly good time – a film that puts both power tools and Pomeranians to gleefully suspenseful use.
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