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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  1. She Will
    A thrillingly intense central performance by Alice Krige (who earned her genre spurs in the underrated 1981 screen adaptation of Peter Straub’s Ghost Story) is the lightning rod at the core of the film, grounding its hallucinogenic visuals in the terra firma of past tragedies and modern traumas, provoking “dark thoughts; really dark thoughts”.
  2. Luca
    While Luca might lack some of the dizzying inventiveness that marks out top-tier Pixar, it’s packed to the gills with charm.
  3. Minari
    What makes this more than just another formulaic feelgood film is the grit with which Chung evokes the hardscrabble lives of his characters, balancing the dreamier elements of the drama with a naturalism that keeps it rooted in reality.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sansho the Bailiff
    It is a heartbreaking story, tragic, unsentimental, but suffused with a belief in the ability of decency and dignity to survive under the most terrible circumstances. [02 Dec 2007, p.18]
    • The Observer (UK)
      • Posted Jan 11, 2022
  5. Anselm
    The meditative experience is heightened by Wenders’s innovative use of sound: indistinct whispers flutter like bats through the cavernous spaces.
  6. Benjamin
    The jokes are brutal and very funny, with Benjamin the butt of most of them.
  7. Martin Margiela: In His Own Words
    The use of the notoriously media-shy Margiela’s warm, serious spoken voice helps to create intimacy, even though we never see his face.
  8. A Hero
    Refreshingly, Farhadi is ambivalent towards his “hero”, and his control over the film’s tone is masterful; what begins as funny and almost farcical, soon shifts into something much sadder and more sobering.
  9. Wham!
    The beauty of Wham!, a key part of the appeal of the band, came from the perception that they were a self-contained unit, a guaranteed good time seemingly impervious to negativity. And for a while, that was true.
  10. The Territory
    A must watch.
  11. Bread & Roses
    Powerful and enraging.
  12. Blue Beetle
    Blue Beetle may be frontloaded with visual fireworks that neatly meld the practical and the virtual, but it is the likable interplay between its down-to-earth characters that gives the film oomph, making it more than just a Shazam-style romp.
  13. Minyan
    The film’s bluesy woodwind score has a teasing, goading quality that feels tinged with melancholy; the spectre of Aids hovers around the film’s edges.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Snake Pit
    Historically important Hollywood expose of the grim conditions in America's mental institutions and an influential plea for more sympathetic treatment of the mentally sick. Olivia de Havilland is harrowingly good as a deranged, incarcerated middle-class housewife; British actor Leo Genn is convincing if a trifle glib as a pipe-smoking shrink. [18 Jul 1999, p.10]
    • The Observer (UK)
  15. Make Up
    Eerie images of a bloodied fingernail and long grass lit by amber floodlights signal Oakley’s sly sense of humour and eye for visual poetry.
  16. BlacKkKlansman
    BlacKkKlansman slips seamlessly from borderline-absurdist humour to all-too-real horror, conjuring an urgent blend of sociopolitical period satire and contemporary wake-up call.
  17. Boiling Point
    The result is a spicy nerve-jangler served with a chargrilled side order of jet-black gallows humour – a divine comedy barrelling towards inevitable tragedy, played out in hell’s kitchen where someone is bound to get burned.
  18. Wicked
    With its all too timely themes of bullying, corrupt leaders and the demonisation of difference, this is a movie that promises a froth of pink and green escapism but delivers considerably more in the way of depth and darkness.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Kirikou and the Sorceress
    The sweet-natured Kirikou and the Sorceress, is a French animated movie drawing on a West African tale that has an authenticity The Lion King lacks.
  20. Wonka
    Wonka is an effervescent pleasure – an endlessly, intricately charming treasure trove of a movie. And overall, Timothée Chalamet’s fresh-faced take on the central character – bringing a puckish innocence and spry, light-footed energy to one of the most famously jaded misanthropes in children’s literature – works rather well.
  21. Summerland
    What a lovely, hopeful and rather magical movie this is.
  22. 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.
  23. Mary Queen of Scots
    While Ronan is terrific, Robbie has arguably the more difficult role, conjuring an engaging portrait of someone whose position has made her “more man than woman”.
  24. Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy
    Crisply British and deliciously no-nonsense, Kennedy is a wonderfully bracing character for Elizabeth Carroll’s deft documentary.
  25. Deerskin
    Dujardin plays it ingeniously straight, embarking on a violent rampage set to French lounge music.
  26. The Woman King
    It’s about overcoming trauma; it confronts and interrogates the role of some African peoples – the Dahomey included – in the enslavement of others. It’s also a thunderously cinematic good time: see it on the biggest screen you can find.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Geronimo: An American Legend
    Walter Hill is the living director closest to the great film-makers of Hollywood's Golden Age such as Raoul Walsh, John Ford and Howard Hawks, and Geronimo is his finest movie to date. Certainly it is his most humane. [16 Oct 1994, p.9]
    • The Observer (UK)
  28. Dear Comrades!
    Throughout, Konchalovsky juxtaposes wide-ranging events with seemingly insignificant details to dramatic effect.
  29. Alpha
    This Albert Hughes-directed adventure is visually stunning.
  30. Ava
    The 0-60 acceleration of disaster and melodrama is a little disconcerting, as is the tendency to self-sabotage demonstrated by Ava and her mother. But there’s a jagged emotional authenticity scored into the film like initials carved into a desk.
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