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. Lady Chatterley's Lover
    There’s a feverish wildness to Corrin’s performance, while O’Connell unleashes the full force of his considerable charisma.
  2. Long Shot
    Two of the most immediately likable actors in Hollywood, Theron and Rogen are a joy together.
  3. Upgrade
    It’s still a small, silly movie and there’s nothing particularly novel or even of the moment about its technosceptic stance on machines, but as a genre exercise, it’s a fun ride.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle
    Astaire and Rogers in their last pre-war monochrome musical, a touching cinebiography of the celebrated American dancers of the pre-First World War era whose partnership ended with his death as a pilot in the war. The dance routines are more numerous, though less spectacular, than in the previous movies. [04 Jan 2004, p.8]
    • The Observer (UK)
  5. LOLA
    Shot on film, using vintage equipment, the picture has a scrappy, tactile quality, its ghostly black-and-white images scratched and scorched. Meanwhile, Neil Hannon’s smartly used score envisages a chilling authoritarian future for pop music.
  6. The Surfer
    Crisply scripted by Thomas Martin and directed by Finnegan with a pleasing, no-frills intensity, The Surfer feels resolutely old-school. It’s a low-budget, hard-hitting comic bruiser of a picture: a midlife-crisis movie dressed up as a 1970s exploitation flick.
  7. Calm with Horses (The Shadow of Violence)
    Buoyed by Joe Murtagh’s screenplay, which keeps the warring elements of the narrative elegantly balanced throughout, the excellent ensemble cast create a complex emotional ecosystem through which our troubled antihero stumbles in search of his identity.
  8. 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.
  9. Chevalier
    Perhaps that is this frothy film’s strength: cherrypicking multiplex-friendly elements from a complex and still largely unknown life in a manner that leaves the audience wanting to know much more.
  10. Medusa
    For all its multitudinous reference points, this remains very much Da Silveira’s movie – as distinct and pointed as Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night or Julia Ducournau’s Raw­ – a genre film with something to say, and a unique voice with which to say it.
  11. McEnroe
    Barney Douglas’s doc about tennis maverick John McEnroe belongs to that rare handful of portraits that should find an audience far beyond just fans of the game itself. In this, it has a kinship with Asif Kapadia’s films Senna and Diego Maradona.
  12. Sometimes Always Never
    The precision in the shot composition is mirrored in the storytelling – there’s an unassuming elegance that balances the eccentricity of a film that makes something as mundane as Scrabble into a taut dramatic device.
  13. The Last Tree
    Akinola (best known to some for his work on Doctor Who) is clearly completely in tune with the director, getting under the skin of his story and striking just the right note of internalised anguish and ecstasy that defines this tender, heartfelt and clearly very personal movie.
  14. Another Body
    The film focuses on Taylor’s quest to uncover the perpetrator and learn their motives. And while finally she has a good idea of the former, the answer to the latter remains elusive.
  15. Love Life
    It’s a solid, sensitively handled study of the aftermath of a trauma, elevated by tricky, unexpected revelations about Park.
  16. SHOT! The Psycho-Spiritual Mantra of Rock
    Rock’s wildest years – both the man and the music – swirl together into a psychedelic maelstrom of pills, pictures and brilliantly creative swearing.
  17. Smile 2
    The special effects are bracingly revolting, the malevolent smiles as creepy as ever. And the film has the added bonus of some killer choreography, in every sense of the word.
  18. The Alpinist
    A portrait of a man who, as one of his contemporaries remarked, feels almost too comfortable on the side of a mountain.
  19. Worth
    Though this stolid drama, based on a true case, begins as a procedural, about systems, processes and deadlines, it is most absorbing when it zeroes in on one man’s moral arc.
  20. A Simple Favor
    The lip-smacking, acid drops of malice in the latest film from Paul Feig (Bridesmaids) makes this unexpectedly cruel comedy as intoxicating as the mid-afternoon martinis swilled by the two central characters.
  21. The Inventor
    Charming and informative as it is, the film may struggle to engage younger audiences accustomed to more overt comedy in their animated movies and less grave-robbing.
  22. Brian and Charles
    The result has homemade charm to spare, proving delightfully ridiculous but also poignant.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Boston Strangler
    This semi-documentary account of the terror in the Boston of the early Sixties sparked off by the serial killer Albert de Salvo has a creditable central per-formance from Tony Curtis and an admirable suppor-ting one by Henry Fonda as the chief investigator for the state attorney general. [12 Aug 2007, p.14]
    • The Observer (UK)
  24. The Kitchen
    Robinson and Bannerman are excellent, warily stepping around each other’s expectations and weighing up the cost of allowing themselves to care.
  25. The Imaginary
    A beguiling, if slightly convoluted, fantasy.
  26. The Life Ahead
    The main selling point is Loren, who combines world-weary abrasiveness with a sense of something softer, turning Rosa into a believably divided character who puts a brave face on the future while seeking refuge from the past in the sanctuary of her lonely basement.
  27. Peterloo
    Leigh’s egalitarian insistence on voices for all means that there are a few too many of them in play. Still, there is a fascinating wealth of detail, both in the vividly recreated period backdrop and, more remarkably, given the sheer volume of people on screen, in the characters, however fleetingly they appear.
  28. Cordelia
    Tension is frequently punctured by clunky dialogue.
  29. Ben Is Back
    The material feels more like a play than a film, its drama shrunk down into a single, digestible day, but it’s affecting in its muted seriousness.
  30. Mulan
    It’s a film that cries out to be seen in the cinema. Disney’s decision to bypass a theatrical release in favour of streaming does a disservice to both the film and its audience.
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