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. The Instigators
    It should be pulpy fun powered by car chases and zippy repartee, but The Instigators is a dispiriting and predictable drag of a movie.
    • 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. Mothers' Instinct
    A film about two immaculately groomed women gaslighting and goading each other to the point of madness should be a lot more fun than this.
  4. Luck
    While Pixar movies tell their stories visually, Luck finds itself wielding densely detailed exposition about the process of deploying luck to the human world. Still, there’s much to enjoy.
  5. Dashcam
    Best seen in a cinema with the rowdiest audience you can find.
  6. Joyride
    This odd-couple comedy road movie paints its characters in brushstrokes so broad you could land a jumbo jet on them, while the intrusively affable score lurches into every scene like a drunk with no concept of personal space. And yet Colman saves the picture, her thorny performance gradually revealing a well of pain.
  7. Jeanne du Barry
    It’s a curiously inert affair: constrained, corseted, passionless and saddled with a lumpen, Depp-shaped deadweight where there should be a pulse-racing core of power and desire.
  8. Underwater
    The murky cinematography further hinders a picture that looks as though it was shot through raw sewage.
  9. The Independent
    Some of the picture’s taut focus and pacing are lost to an unnecessary cancer subplot involving Eli’s family; like the journalists it follows, the film works best when it is tenaciously single-minded.
  10. Escape Room
    This picture is impressively designed but low on scares.
  11. Child's Play
    There are some gory moments (a man’s leg is sliced, the flesh falling off like meat from a rotisserie, and a sleazy character has a grisly encounter with a lawnmower), but the film extracts more laughs than genuine scares.
  12. Gran Turismo
    Amid the screenplay platitudes (“The crash is not going to define who you are; how you respond to it will”) and shameless advertising riffs (unabashed spiels about PlayStation democratising motor sports), there’s an intriguing story of alien worlds colliding that somehow seems tailor-made for Blomkamp’s preoccupations.
  13. Tolkien
    There are moments that catch – a cafe date between Tolkien and his future wife (Lily Collins) is one, and a knockout scene with the mother of his closest friend is another – but for the most part this is stolid film-making that lacks the imagination and creativity of its subject.
  14. Liam Gallagher: As It Was
    The Liam Gallagher of old, with his shrapnel wit and swaggering crusade against being “suckered in by the dickheads”, would have tossed a grenade into the editing suite rather than sanction a doc that is more extended corporate rebranding exercise than it is rock’n’roll.
  15. 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.
  16. King of Thieves
    There are a few rascally moments, such as Jim Broadbent settingoff roman candles in his back garden, but mostly it’s a staid affair, laden with dragged-outscenes of the gang doing thejob.
  17. The Call of the Wild
    It should please family audiences; it’s a handsomely mounted, stirring adventure. It’s just a little bit declawed.
  18. Don't Worry Darling
    The problem is that Wilde leans too heavily on surface and style, as a distraction from the fact that the story itself is riddled with inconsistencies and barely holds together.
  19. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
    The ugly visual effects are outdone only by the sound design, which is relentlessly loud and thunderingly tedious. Verbal exchanges between the humans are devoid of wit and barely functional in communicating the story.
  20. Haunted Mansion
    This is a grimly efficient IP cash-in that defuses any potential scares with a hot-pink colour palette and a bunch of oddly specific and distracting product placements.
  21. Sonic the Hedgehog
    Marsden is charming enough, summoning surprising chemistry with Schwartz, and so it’s not total torture spending an hour and a half with the pair. Yet for better or worse, it doesn’t linger.
  22. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
    In this third outing, there’s a crucial crackle of chemistry between Mikkelsen and Jude Law’s younger Dumbledore.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Mirror Crack'd
    Third and least good of the quartet of period Agatha Christie movies produced by John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin. [04 Feb 2007, p.2]
    • The Observer (UK)
  24. Halloween Ends
    The scares are sad, puny little things. Even Jamie Lee Curtis seems to have lost the will to fight. It’s time that Myers and his mouldy old mask were laid to rest. Let’s hope nobody decides to disinter him yet again.
  25. Wish
    Mostly, the soundtrack is an unhummable mess of warbled exposition.
  26. 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.
  27. 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.
  28. Midway
    Every tired war movie cliche is unearthed in a film that brings nothing new but will no doubt please fans of men in uniform yelling at explosions.
  29. Bird Box Barcelona
    With Bird Box: Barcelona, as with any film of this outlandish ilk, suspension of disbelief and an appreciation of propulsively destructive action sequences is key. Just don’t expect too many fresh ideas.
  30. Irresistible
    Whether Irresistible is the movie we “need” in such testing times is open to debate, with some already accusing Stewart of having gone soft. But as a non-partisan response to the craziness of “this system, the way we elect people” (which is indeed “terrifying and exhausting”), it gets my vote.
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