The Observer (UK)'s Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Prey
    It’s a prequel to the Predator series that stays true to the essence of the original – stylishly violent, stickily graphic, impossibly tense – while also working satisfyingly as a self-contained entity.
  2. Searching
    The film doesn’t understand what mode it wants to operate in; serious thriller with emotional stakes or contrived, cynical satire (a set piece around a Twitter hashtag seems to suggest the latter).
  3. The Menu
    Subtle it’s not, but it’s maliciously entertaining. It turns out that revenge on the ultra-wealthy is a dish best seared over a naked flame.
  4. Heretic
    It’s a tense, tight fairground ride of a film.
  5. Ema
    The film is all about the chase: it’s an aggressive seduction that teases with bold visual statements, with flesh and flame throwers. But does it satisfy? Not on any deep emotional level, certainly.
  6. Spider-Man: No Way Home
    It’s all very meta and self-referential; screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers hoover up memorable lines from past movies and serve them with a flourish and an exaggerated wink to the audience. It’s also a good deal of fun.
  7. Utoya: July 22
    This harrowing retelling of Norwegian rightwing extremist Anders Behring Breivik’s 2011 terrorist attack on the island of Utøya is less exploitative than Paul Greengrass’s brutal, Netflix-bound, English-language version, but the question remains: does a tragedy have to be turned into cinema for people to engage with it?
  8. Memory
    Gradually and delicately, Sylvia and Saul’s tessellating traumas are revealed by a beautifully balanced pair of lead performances.
  9. Red Island
    It captures beautifully and atmospherically a sense of mounting tension as the military men grapple with their impotency in a newly independent country.
  10. 1985
    Malaysian-born writer-director Yen Tan shoots stylishly in black and white 16mm, each frame a tasteful photograph. What’s most skilful, though, is the way he succeeds in complicating archetypes.
  11. Escape from Mogadishu
    The picture, a big-budget spectacle guided by the sure hand of action director Seung-wan Ryu (Crying Fist), is at its most effective when the hurtling camera is strafed by bullets. It’s less successful when the headlong pace falters to allow the screenplay to hammer home its message of collaboration and tolerance.
  12. Pretty Red Dress
    Pretty Red Dress is both playful and defiant, swept along on a tide of toe-tapping tunes that tug at the heartstrings, yet unafraid to face up to complex personal issues while still maintaining its solidly mainstream appeal.
  13. A Quiet Place Part II
    To suggest Krasinski is only interested in surface thrills feels at odds with the seriousness of his craft. Judicious pacing, clever cross-cutting and visceral sound design build tension, but there’s an absence of soul, and no satisfying sense of what the monsters might be a metaphor for.
  14. The Sheep Detectives
    While it is not quite in the same league as any of the films that clearly influenced it, The Sheep Detectives is an appealingly offbeat children’s film, showcasing Balda’s knack for visual humour while also sheep-dipping into unexpectedly weighty themes.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Rita, Sue and Bob Too
    Raunchy, honest, non-judgmental comedy about two Yorkshire schoolgirls reacting against the inertia of their sink estate and sharing the favours of a randy estate agent. Adapted by Andrea Dunbar from her Royal Court play, directed by one of this country's great realists, and acted with gusto by Siobhan Finneran, Michelle Holmes and George Costigan. [01 Jan 2006, p.63]
    • The Observer (UK)
  16. How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
    There’s a new maturity both in the character and in the storytelling that makes this final film in the trilogy take wing.
  17. The Wonder
    Few will remain unmoved by this intriguingly adventurous and thought-provoking drama.
  18. Emma.
    In the lead role, Anya Taylor-Joy creates an admirably spiky character who is less likable than some of her screen predecessors, and all the better for it.
  19. 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.
  20. The Perfect Candidate
    Like Maryam’s approach to local politics, the film is well-meaning but occasionally naive.
  21. All My Friends Hate Me
    Andrew Gaynord’s debut feature doesn’t quite hold together, but the atmosphere of twitchy paranoia is horribly effective.
  22. RBG
    It’s not a showy piece of film-making, but then this indomitable 85-year-old is not an ostentatious person.
  23. Wild Men
    What makes this amiably amusing Danish comedy work is the fact that it takes its hapless protagonist almost as seriously as he takes himself.
  24. Eternal Beauty
    Roberts relies heavily on imagery suggesting a confused reality ( characters are constantly fractured into multiple reflections) but the use of colour is an effective shorthand that clues us into Jane’s state of mind.
  25. Makala
    This immersive, slow-burning documentary about a Congolese charcoal maker finds poetry in the punishing, monotonous graft of one man’s trade.
  26. Blinded by the Light
    It is gleefully dorky, hopelessly earnest, sincere, quite possibly to a fault. It unfolds as a series of Springsteen-soundtracked set pieces, each shamelessly engineered to maximise catharsis, cheering and possibly weeping from the audience.
  27. Pasolini
    “Narrative art is dead – we are in a period of mourning”; “To scandalise is a right, to be scandalised a pleasure”; “Refusal must be great, absolute, absurd…” Abel Ferrara’s infatuated tribute to Pier Paolo Pasolini is littered with such gnomic bon mots, which could apply equally to either director.
  28. The Great Escaper
    There’s a real emotional heft to the storytelling and Caine, at 90, is a knockout.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    REC
    Guaranteed to scare the pantalones off you.
  30. Dogman
    Fonte, who deservedly won the best actor prize at Cannes this year, is remarkable.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »