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. Palmer
    The showy singer turned actor struggles to modulate his natural charisma, a flirtatious, extroverted energy repeatedly leaking out where it should be muffled.
  2. The Amazing Maurice
    This perky computer-animated adventure leans a little heavily on its meta self-aware storytelling devices (expect numerous fourth-wall-smashing to camera asides), but it’s a fun, if slightly macabre option for family audiences.
  3. Renfield
    Your standard vampire film would have put Cage centre stage. Renfield, God help it, elects to bury the lede and drive a stake through his heart.
  4. The Tender Bar
    It’s fair to say that this amiable but almost farcically uneventful adaptation of the 2005 memoir by JR Moehringer is also postcard-thin in its plotting and insight.
  5. 69: The Saga of Danny Hernandez
    Was the persona 6ix9ine an act or a kind of addiction? Was he a professional troll – the Katie Hopkins of hardcore hip-hop – or a genius marketeer? This intriguing documentary fails to fully answer these questions, but it does shine a light on a particularly uneasy aspect of internet celebrity.
  6. Pokémon Detective Pikachu
    The CGI critters are seamlessly integrated with the 35mm cinematography, the film stock’s grain smoothing the visual tackiness.
  7. I.S.S.
    While DeBose is impressive, the contrived plot of Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s movie hinges, somewhat preposterously, on rational, highly trained scientific minds devolving overnight into paranoid, murderous maniacs.
  8. Fly Me to the Moon
    Part of the problem is that while Johansson is deliciously minxy and manipulative as Kelly, the usually likable Tatum has all the charisma of a carpet tile in this clenched-jawed, buttoned-up role.
  9. Werewolf
    Choppy editing adds to the sense that this picture is struggling to achieve a tonal balance and work out exactly what it is trying to say.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Brannigan
    Amiable thriller merging Fabian of the Yard with Dirty Harry. [21 Mar 2004, p.91]
    • The Observer (UK)
  11. Copilot
    The director treats the film as an empathy exercise, hoping to complicate and humanise a terrorist. Yet this is undermined by the obvious red flags that she plants in each section. Saeed’s flight path becomes a foregone conclusion.
  12. Bruised
    It’s not badly made, necessarily, just entirely unsurprising. The saving grace is British theatre actor Sheila Atim, arresting and intriguing in a key supporting role.
  13. The Penguin Lessons
    Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty) directs, just about striking a balance between the fluffy sentimentality of the story and its hard-edged political backdrop.
  14. Iceman
    The tone flits between revenge thriller and against-the-elements survival movie, but commits to neither.
  15. 2073
    It’s a tricky balance, and one that the film doesn’t always quite pull off, between sounding a warning and screaming with existential terror; between galvanising the audience into action and plunging them into despair.
  16. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
    But while the period details are slavishly recreated, there’s an absence when it comes to character details for the two women, particularly Bundy’s wife, Carole Ann Boone (Scodelario).
  17. Yardie
    An over-explanatory voiceover seems to indicate a lack of confidence in the script’s jumbled plotting and laggy pacing. The performances aren’t bad (Ameen’s charisma eclipses the expositional dialogue), but the stakes feel low and the characters gangster-movie generic.
  18. Coming 2 America
    The comedy doesn’t work quite as well this way around, though Fowler is extremely likable as a sweet-natured slacker, channelling the endearing guilelessness of Murphy’s original Prince Akeem. Still, there are enough in-jokes and returning characters to keep fans happy.
  19. Death on the Nile
    The camera whirls giddily, dizzy from the sparkle and spectacle, but not quite able to conceal the fact that this is an empty bauble of a movie.
  20. Eternals
    For all the effort that has gone into ensuring representation in the casting, the storytelling, with its forced flashbacks and synthetic sentiment, lets the whole thing down.
  21. The United States vs. Billie Holiday
    This is Day’s show all the way, and her performance remains the film’s strongest suit.
  22. G20
    As anyone who saw The Woman King will know, Davis has a formidable screen presence and serious action chops; for all its silliness, there’s plenty of fun to be had watching her slaughter the bad guys amid a diplomatic hail of bullets and canapés.
  23. Charlie's Angels
    The picture comes armed to the teeth with slick action sequences . . . and genuinely funny lines. It’s just a pity that both the action and the dialogue are occasionally obscured by the frenzied editing.
  24. The Amateur
    James Hawes, who directed the entire first season of Slow Horses, clearly knows his way around the spy genre. Which is why this disjointed thriller about a brilliant CIA code cracker turned elite operative (Rami Malek) delivers at least some pacy thrills and globe-hopping intrigue, despite numerous issues with the screenplay, structure and casting.
  25. Greed
    As rambunctiously entertaining as it is crude.
  26. Magic Mike's Last Dance
    It’s a diverting enough way to pass a couple of hours, I suppose, although you’ll need a high tolerance for montage sequences and for the alarmingly priapic personal-space-invading exertions of Mike and his boys.
  27. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
    While the action set pieces and effects are dizzyingly immersive, the storytelling is fussy and somehow uncompelling.
  28. The Spy Who Dumped Me
    Director Susanna Fogel handles the action set pieces with gusto but fails to make the chick-chat bonding moments seem like anything more than padding.
  29. Eiffel
    Eiffel is not unentertaining – it would pass the time pleasantly enough on a long-haul flight. Together, Duris and Mackey have a corset-twanging chemistry. But the foregrounding of a fictional romance over a feat of engineering does feel like a missed opportunity.
  30. Despicable Me 4
    There’s little that’s new in this enjoyable but familiar brush with villainy.
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