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. Cowboys
    Comic actors Steve Zahn and Jillian Bell are uncharacteristically earnest in this achingly well-intentioned but thuddingly heavy-handed family drama.
  2. 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.
  3. Queer
    The yagé trip sequence is overlong, baggy and indulgent. The characters lose all sense of their bodies; the film simply loses its point.
  4. Trolls Band Together
    It’s a peppy sugar rush that should please younger audiences, but the appeal of the series is wearing pretty thin.
  5. Problemista
    Swinton is massively overblown and Torres too wispy and diffident to balance things out.
  6. Pick of the Litter
    In a tussle between the appeal of the subject and the plodding banality of the approach, the pups are ultimately the losers.
  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. Seize Them!
    The small-screen tone of the picture makes it feel like a duff episode of Horrible Histories, albeit with considerably more swearing.
  9. Angel Has Fallen
    Butler is convincingly sturdy as Banning, but the film’s politics are shaky.
  10. Vanguard
    It’s an unforgivable waste of Jackie Chan, action-movie legend, reduced here to pratfalls and gurning double takes.
  11. Land
    Wright is sympathetic and believable, but we never truly get a sense of Edee or her desires outside the bounds of her loss.
  12. Crawl
    The scenes of family bonding are tiresome but the action is mostly tense and cheerfully bloody.
  13. Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F
    Now in his 60s – not quite old enough to be a US presidential candidate but not far off – the actor lacks some of the hunger and aggression that ignited his career in the 80s, but he remains a uniquely magnetic performer. And somehow he manages to bring a degree of freshness to material that was stale several decades ago.
  14. Yesterday
    There’s a zesty spark between Patel and James, and for a while the film chugs along happily on the goodwill bought by the soundtrack. Then one honkingly misjudged scene knocks the whole movie off key, heralding a toe-curling, tone-deaf terrace chant of an ending.
  15. Papillon
    At a slow two hours plus, the film feels stretched.
  16. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
    It’d be easy to map Gilliam on to Grisoni, a film-maker dogged by his artistic misfires and the mess left in their wake. Really, though, he’s Quixote, stuck in a noble past and wilfully disconnected from a present that jostles uncomfortably close.
  17. Locked Down
    The film busts a gut attempting to free itself from the confines of the couple’s home. In this, it’s at least true to the spirit of lockdown, but it feels like a missed opportunity.
  18. Air
    For all its affable charm, there’s something slippery and disingenuous about this film.
  19. Salem's Lot
    The vampire genre is, like its toothy protagonists, notoriously difficult to kill outright, but this flat and uninspired film could be a nail in its coffin.
  20. Lizzie
    Most irritating is the murder scene itself, which sees both women stripping nude, seemingly in order for the camera to leer more effectively at their bodies rather than to spare them getting their petticoats bloodied.
  21. The Lighthouse
    Frat boy humour is dressed up in an expensive, arthouse jacket.
  22. Hotel Mumbai
    There is something queasy about mining such fresh real-life trauma for popcorn entertainment.
  23. Red One
    A charmless, CGI-heavy spectacle, Red One falls into an ill-considered audience no man’s land: it’s too intense for little kids (we get to visit Krampus in what appears to be a yuletide S&M dungeon) and too bland to attract teens and genre fans.
  24. Mary J Blige's My Life
    Footage of recent concerts and meet and greets is included to showcase both her imperious glamour and how far she’s come, yet we never really get a sense of where she’s been, let alone My Life’s musical and cultural context.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Let It Be
    The film is a bore. It's supposed to show how the Beatles work, but it doesn't. Shot without any design, clumsily edited, uninformative and naive, it would have destroyed a lesser group.
  26. The Kid Who Would Be King
    I’m a huge fan of Cornish’s 2011 debut Attack the Block, but this film isn’t nearly as energetic or enjoyably wacky as its predecessor. In fairness, it’s pitched at a considerably younger audience, but at two hours it drags; less patient children may struggle.
  27. Babylon
    For all its nudge-wink movie-history nods and self-conscious carnivals of bodily fluids and glamorous excess, Babylon is exhaustingly unexciting fare – hysterical rather than historical, derivative rather than inventive.
  28. The Goldfinch
    Probably, the intention was to make explicit the connections between Theo’s past and present, but there’s not enough detail or characterisation for this structural intervention to work. Without those connecting narrative bones, the result is all flab and no flavour.
  29. The Lost City
    The respective charms of Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum receive a rigorous workout during the course of this caffeinated, overeager adventure romp – to the point where significant signs of wear and tear begin to appear.
  30. The Goldfinger
    This has the brash swagger of The Wolf of Wall Street, but the labyrinthine intricacies of the case may present something of a challenge to anyone not well versed in stock market manipulation.
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