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. Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody
    It should be stressed that the problem doesn’t lie with Ackie necessarily, but rather with a leaden, by-numbers screenplay from Anthony McCarten, who brings to this film the same box-ticking approach he employed with Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Tokyo Decadence
    This is not, by any standard, entertainment. It is, from time to time, almost too agonising to watch: but at least, in its unrelenting, occasionally powerful way, it shows how sex and violence can sometimes, in their capacity for degradation, be brothers under the crawly skin.
  3. Gwen
    As a genre exercise, the film starts promisingly enough, contrasting claustrophobic, dimly lit interiors with atmospheric wides of the landscape composed like moody paintings. Worthington-Cox is compelling, by turns twitchy, tentative, stoic and bold. Still, something isn’t clicking.
  4. Dumbo
    Something slightly disingenuous, perhaps, about the glib anti-corporate message of the film jars. The appeal of the original came from its purity and simplicity. This overcomplicated onslaught of manufactured magic could never really compete.
  5. Operation Mincemeat
    A quality cast tackle the script’s various twists and turns with aplomb. But the tale itself feels cumbersome and over-furnished, listing under the weight of its bolt-on subplots and endless reams of dialogue.
  6. Those Who Wish Me Dead
    Unfortunately, the second half is over-reliant on flashy disaster set pieces, blazing towards a predictable, melodramatic conclusion.
  7. The Deer King
    The clear lines of the elegant 2D animation are not matched by the mythic muddle of the storytelling, an exposition-heavy slog of warring factions, convoluted webs of enchantment and a deadly, wolf-borne pandemic for good measure.
  8. Vita & Virginia
    Debicki (The Tale, Widows) is wonderful as Woolf, a wry and solemn observer, but the rest of the film is all too literal.
  9. Midsommar
    The film works better as a comedy than a horror, skewering its ignorant US tourists, and better still as a spiteful relationship drama.
  10. The Mercy
    Unlike the steely resilience in the face of disaster of Robert Redford’s character in All Is Lost, watching Crowhurst slowly crack is the cinema equivalent of filling your pockets with pebbles and chucking yourself into the Solent.
  11. The Turning
    This contemporary adaptation of The Turn of the Screw takes the ornate enigma of Henry James’s gothic novella and whittles it down into something rather more flat and conventional.
  12. A Rainy Day in New York
    Characters and storylines appear to have been chosen at random by a Woody Allen meme generator.
  13. The Dead Don't Die
    The performances are so deadpan (or undeadpan perhaps) that most of the cast seem to be flatlining even before the zombies start chewing chunks out of their faces.
  14. The Six Triple Eight
    Unfortunately, Perry drenches the tale with his trademark syrupy ineptitude, creating a gloopy, turgid plodder.
  15. Men in Black: International
    Unfortunately the smarts, the sass and the wit of the original MIB is MIA.
  16. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
    The film’s main asset is Jonathan Majors as Kang the Conqueror: his performance, with its velvet-soft line deliveries and unfathomable, boundless rage, is the magnetic core of this incoherent effects-dump of a movie.
  17. a-ha: the Movie
    Fans will no doubt find the film fascinating, if a little dispiriting: it may be like eavesdropping on your parents, only to discover that they’re on the brink of divorce.
  18. Close to You
    It’s clearly a passion project for Page, so why then does his performance feel so lifeless and inert?
  19. Wish
    Mostly, the soundtrack is an unhummable mess of warbled exposition.
  20. Lightyear
    The aspect that’s traditionally elevated Pixar animations, the dizzy wit and inventiveness of the screenplay, is missing from this dispiriting trudge through outer space, via some box-ticking messaging along the way.
  21. Dark Phoenix
    For all the energetic hurling around of heavy machinery, the movie feels inert and lazy.
  22. 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.
  23. Misbehaviour
    The film is called Misbehaviour, but a timid script belies mischief of any sort.
  24. Red Joan
    This is film-making that feels rather dated and, unlike its resourceful protagonist, curiously risk averse.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.
    Harris has a good ear for teenage dialogue. But her heroine, who addresses us directly through the camera, is a pain in the neck. She is to assertiveness-training what Schwarzenegger is to body-building. [01 Aug 1993, p.48]
    • The Observer (UK)
  26. A Dark Place
    Unfortunately, Scott is the most persuasive element in a film that is atmospherically photographed by Marcel Zyskind but let down by a clueless screenplay which borders, at times, on the risible.
  27. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3
    Another sloppy helping of migrant family cliches, served up with the same loving forcefulness as grandma’s moussaka
  28. Hillbilly Elegy
    The performances create anthropological distance, not human empathy.
  29. Dragged Across Concrete
    Unfortunately, kind of a drag.
  30. Ticket to Paradise
    Clooney and Roberts try their best but they’re finally not much more than decoration themselves, the filmic equivalent of plastic figurines on a cake.
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