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
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Suspicion
    Hitchcock's fourth Hollywood movie is a subtle thriller set in a very Hollywoodian England populated by leading members of the Tinseltown cricket club. [19 Jan 2003, p.8]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Death of a Gunfighter
    Sharp small-scale western set in a nasty frontier community that finds its incorruptible old-style sheriff (Richard Widmark) a barrier to its joining the 20th century. Widmark is excellent, as is Lena Horne as the handsome saloon-keeper he marries. [17 Apr 2011, p.52]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Reivers
    Pleasing, affectionate adaptation of William Faulkner's last novel. [01 Aug 1999, p.10]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Tarnished Angels
    The Tarnished Angels is a polished psychological melodrama, meticulous in its subtle observation, but only the planes involved in the dangerous flying scenes are strictly of the 1930s.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ice Station Zebra
    Grand adventure yarn, based on an Alistair MacLean verbal comic strip about a Cold War race to grab some top secrets from an Arctic weather post. Like the nuclear submarine on which it's mostly set, the film cracks, leaks but finally stands the strain and has weathered well. [03 Feb 2008, p.2]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Young Frankenstein
    Mel Brooks's send-up of 1930s horror movies is a mixed, always amiable affair, beautifully shot in monochrome with loving attention to detail. [12 Nov 2000, p.11]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Ivanhoe
    Best of a series of lavishly mounted MGM historical yarns made in England in the early 1950s with American stars and British supporting casts. [03 Jun 2012, p.46]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Till the End of Time
    Overshadowed at the time and ever since by the similar but altogether bigger The Best Years of Our Lives (which the same studio, RKO, released a couple of months later), this is a very decent contribution to a cycle of movies about ex-servicemen adjusting to civilian life. [29 Aug 2004, p.71]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Swept Away
    It is, in effect, a reworking of The Admirable Crichton, JM Barrie's parable about a servant taking command when a hopeless aristocratic family is shipwrecked. Far superior to the disastrous 2002 Guy Ritchie-Madonna remake. [30 Jan 2005, p.13]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Monkey Business
    An often hilarious, if always creaky, affair, bubbling with visual and verbal wit and co-scripted by the great humorist SJ Perelman. [06 Jan 2008, p.10]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Niagara
    This gripping thriller, an early film noir in colour, features the Niagara Falls thundering grandly in the background and Marilyn Monroe wiggling sexily in the foreground as a treacherous wife whose scheme to murder her middle-aged husband (Joseph Cotten) goes fatally wrong. [27 Sep 2009, p.29]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    North Dallas Forty
    Authentic, if unsurprising, look at the brutal, exploitative, drug-ridden world of top-level American football through the honest, if bleary, eyes of an over-the-hill pro, superbly played by Nick Nolte who attended several colleges on football scholarships. [02 Nov 2003, p.8]
    • The Observer (UK)
  13. 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Objective, Burma!
    Although this is a wartime flagwaver and Flynn pulls out a grenade pin with his teeth, it is still a thoughtful and gritty depiction of platoon life and jungle warfare that uses actual combat footage shot by the US army signal corps. [07 Jul 2013, p.43]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Revenge of Frankenstein
    Though short on chills and thrills, Hammer Studio's third, handsomely mounted period horror movie confirmed that they'd discovered a formula for hitting the international jackpot. It's therefore a bloody landmark in British movie history. [02 Aug 1999, p.10]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Rain People
    A journey by car that becomes a journey into the inner self, Wild Strawberries played a crucial role in creating what is now thought of as an American genre, the Road Movie. [11 Jun 1995, p.12]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Quo Vadis
    Long, well-mounted early Christian epic based on the novel by 1905 Nobel prize-winning Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz about eager Christian martyrs and hungry lions in ancient Rome. [03 Aug 2014, p.45]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson
    It's a bicentennial companion piece to Nashville, with a fabulous cast that includes Burt Lancaster (superb as dime novelist Ned Buntline), Harvey Keitel and Joel Grey. [22 Jun 1997, p.11]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Road to Morocco
    A witty, light hearted movie in which Bing sings 'Moonlight Becomes You' to a suitably enchanted Dorothy Lamour. [25 May 2003, p.8]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Gambit
    Attractive comedy-thriller in the Topkapi vein starring Michael Caine, shortly after his international success in Alfie, as an over-ambitious cockney crook in Hong Kong. [30 Apr 2006, p.14]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    They Died with Their Boots On
    Vigorous traditional western starring Errol Flynn at his most dashing as a conventionally heroic, glory-seeking George Armstrong Custer, whose career the film traces (without too much concern for historical accuracy) from West Point through the Civil War to the catastrophe at the Little Big Horn. [14 May 2006, p.2]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    My Favorite Blonde
    The blonde in this funny, lively Bob Hope thriller is one of Hitchcock's favourite blondes, Madeleine Carroll. The picture evokes her most famous Hitchcock film, The 39 Steps, and uncannily anticipates North by Northwest. [12 Dec 2004, p.95]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Harder They Fall
    Inspired by the suspect career of a prewar Italian boxer, it's rather good, but inferior to the novel by Budd Schulberg, the expert on the fight game and Oscar-winner for On the Waterfront. [04 Jan 2009, p.06]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Good News
    Amusing first screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (who went on to script On the Town and Singin' in the Rain). The evergreen numbers include 'The Best Things in Life Are Free' which, in a romantic, slightly camp sequence, is sung first by a very young Mel Torme, then (in French) by Peter Lawford. [09 Jan 2000, p.10]
    • The Observer (UK)
  25. The Truth
    The parallels drawn between Fabienne’s life and the stories she’s drawn to are a little on the nose. “What matters most is personality! Presence!” she declares, determined not to fade into obscurity. Deneuve’s luminous performance ensures she won’t.
  26. Alice
    High-class sex work is presented as a financial quick fix and a route to female empowerment, but the film’s sex-positive politics gloss over any of the job’s potential pitfalls.
  27. The Card Counter
    In Oscar Isaac’s enigmatic blackjack player “William Tell”, with his wary hooded eyes and closed book countenance, the film has a broodingly commanding central performance. It’s a pity, then, that much of its promise is squandered by sloppiness, both in the writing and elsewhere.
  28. VS.
    For all the impressive qualities of the picture, it does feel as though there is a rigid upper-age limit for its audience.
  29. I'm Your Woman
    Reorienting a typically white male genre around themes of feminist awakening and racial tension is an intriguing proposition, so it’s frustrating that Brosnahan remains blank and the film’s pace plodding.
  30. Fingernails
    Buckley, as always, is terrific, bringing the picture more emotional potency than it perhaps warrants.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »