The Observer (UK)'s Scores

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For 1,640 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 3.3 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: 893 out of 1640
  2. Mixed: 714 out of 1640
  3. Negative: 33 out of 1640
1640 movie reviews
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  1. Pain and Glory
    As the title suggests, the result is a tragicomic swirl of heartbreak and joy, slipping dexterously between riotous laughter and piercing sadness. At its heart is Banderas giving the performance of a lifetime in a role that, following his Cannes triumph, surely demands Oscar recognition.
  2. Return to Seoul
    Park’s portrayal of Freddie never misses a beat – an astonishing transformative feat for a first-time actor who seems to arrive on screen as a fully formed, multifaceted performer, inhabiting the film’s kaleidoscopic central character.
  3. The Velvet Underground
    A more conventional director might have chosen to focus on their most famous member, Reed, but Haynes smartly structures the film as a group show, giving space to the women in the ensemble.
  4. All That Breathes
    Despite the poisons in the air, the brothers continue their work, mending broken creatures, one by one.
  5. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    Genre convention means it’s a foregone conclusion that this mission is not, in fact, “impossible”, but director Christopher McQuarrie cleverly controls the ticking clock quality that makes these films so much fun.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    F for Fake
    At times T for tedious and P for pretentious, the film remains essential viewing for admirers of the great cineaste and showman.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cléo from 5 to 7
    It's a beguiling, slightly indulgent work, featuring a film-within-a-film starring Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina. [28 Nov 2010, p.34]
    • The Observer (UK)
  8. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
    The theatrical origins of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom weigh heavy on this film, directed with a stagey air by Tony award winner George C Wolfe.
  9. Robot Dreams
    There’s such tenderness to the storytelling, such empathy and emotional depth, that it broadens the film’s potential audience from kids, who will respond to the cute characters and gentle wit, to adolescents and adults, who will recognise the angst and awkwardness of trying to function alone once again.
  10. About Endlessness
    As is customary, absurdist humour, global history and abject horror sit side by side, all equally weighted and witnessed.
  11. Nomadland
    There’s a hardscrabble sense of ordinary ageing folk making the best of a bad deal in often desolate and unforgiving circumstances. Yet whatever hardships they face, it’s the air of community and self-determination that rings throughout Zhao’s empathic film.
  12. The Banshees of Inisherin
    It’s an end-of-friendship breakup movie that swings between the hilarious, the horrifying and the heartbreaking in magnificent fashion.
  13. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
    Nyoni’s Zambia-set film, using the Bemba language and English, deftly juggles humour with pathos, domestic drama with surreal fantasy flourishes. It’s dizzyingly creative and rather special.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Odd Man Out
    One of the best acted, most technically accomplished movies ever made in Britain with a great cast of British and Irish actors, though at times a trifle self-conscious in achieving its effects. [29 Aug 2010, p.50]
    • The Observer (UK)
  15. Happy as Lazzaro
    Inviolata is Italian for “unspoiled”, and the word could apply to its people as much as their straw-gold land.
  16. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
    There’s lots to love here, not least the animation itself, which uses split screens, Ben-Day dots and onomatopoeic text that mimic the tactile experience of reading physical comics – panels, hatching and primary colours intact and ready to leap off the page.
  17. Blue Jean
    A supremely accomplished debut feature from writer-director Georgia Oakley, Blue Jean captures a specific moment in British history with almost uncanny accuracy.
  18. The Tragedy of Macbeth
    The film has a cold, abstract beauty.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    I Know Where I'm Going!
    An enduring minor masterpiece with an amazing climax featuring a boat caught in a treacherous whirlpool. [05 Feb 2012, p.45]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Point Blank
    A landmark in the history of the crime movie, Point Blank's expressive feeling for landscape and architecture anticipates Michael Mann's Heat.
  21. Playground
    It is piercingly insightful without ever labouring the point.
  22. An Elephant Sitting Still
    At times, it feels as though we’re watching something we’re not supposed to be seeing, such is the detail of the emotional degradation on show; in this sense, it’s impossible not to read it as something of a nihilistic suicide note.
  23. Anatomy of a Fall
    Ultimately, one of the key pleasures of the picture is its uncertainty – the niggling doubts that remain, and the sense that a crucial piece of the puzzle is tantalisingly out of reach.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Written on the Wind
    Polished melodrama of considerable psychological and social subtlety. [03 Feb 2013, p.43]
    • The Observer (UK)
  25. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
    There’s not a frame of this rich, kaleidoscopically detailed animation that isn’t dazzling.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    They Were Expendable
    Beautifully photographed in black and white by Commander Joseph August, this moving picture has images and sequences that show Ford at his poetic and humanistic best. [13 Aug 2006, p.20]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Black Narcissus
    Kathleen Byron is unforgettable as a sister who goes dangerously off the rails. A beautifully designed movie with Oscar-winning colour photography by Jack Cardiff. [27 Apr 2014, p.48]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Great Escape
    It shows how a cast of veteran actors (Richard Attenborough, Steve McQueen, James Garner et al), most with some military experience, can breathe life into conventional characters, and how excitement can be generated without endless explosions and special effects. [19 May 2002, p.9]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 86 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Big Sleep
    Bogart and Bacall's exchanges are wittily playful, and the only femme fatale is a minor though crucial figure who destroys that perennial noir fall-guy, Elisha Cook Jr. But it's unmissable, irresistible.
  30. One Cut of the Dead
    For a movie about the undead, Japanese director Shin’ichirô Ueda’s horror comedy is certainly lively.
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