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 3.2 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. The Girl in the Spider's Web
    This glum crime franchise, unfolding against a backdrop of blighted concrete chill and semi-derelict industrial spaces, is evolving into Scandinavia’s anti-hygge.
  2. Two Tickets to Greece
    The character of Magalie is so enraging that you would chuck yourself into the Aegean Sea rather than spend two weeks in her company.
  3. 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.
  4. Herself
    The film’s abrupt tonal shifts are jarring.
  5. Sorry Angel
    The camerawork is unnecessarily showy, full of swirls and flourishes, which further distracts from the central story.
  6. Waves
    Trey Edward Shults’s bombastic third feature crashes and recedes, leaving few revelations in its wake.
  7. Robin Hood
    It’s a world that is so incoherent and inconsistent you almost have to admire the chutzpah, in which buxom lady horse-thieves dress themselves for a night of crime displaying several inches of showy cleavage, contained only by a glorified shoelace.
  8. Expend4bles
    Watching the cast of Expend4bles, the latest instalment of the thunderously dumb veteran mercenary franchise, sweating and straining their way through the “casual banter” section of the screenplay is like watching contestants on The World’s Strongest Man attempting to climb a ladder while carrying a tractor tyre. It’s painful.
  9. Thor: Love and Thunder
    For the most part, however, this romp, which pits Thor against Christian Bale’s cadaverous God-slayer, is superficial stuff – a film that brings a greeting-card triteness to its themes of love and sacrifice; that harvests internet memes (screaming goats) in the service of easy laughs.
  10. Bob Marley: One Love
    What becomes painfully clear is the fact that Bob Marley deserves a better biopic. Still, Lynch’s magnetic presence, and a heartstopping rendition of Redemption Song, almost justify the price of admission.
  11. Bleeding Love
    Decent performances from both McGregors can’t breathe much spirit (alcoholic or otherwise) into the film’s listless and generic screenplay.
  12. After Blue (Dirty Paradise)
    It’s an overlong, indulgent slog.
  13. Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver
    While Sofia Boutella, playing outlaw warrior Kora, brings a balletic elegance to her fight sequences, ultimately this is disappointingly generic stuff.
  14. 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.
  15. Project Wolf Hunting
    Approach with a strong stomach, and don’t bother trying to keep a tally of the body count.
  16. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
    Sometimes there is pleasure to be found in brainless action, but the extended video game-style finale left me furious and fatigued.
  17. 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.
  18. Three Thousand Years of Longing
    There’s something rather sterile and bloodless in the film’s approach, with its synthetic and soul-sappingly clean-looking CGI. Plus there’s the palpable lack of chemistry between the leads: a kind of brisk civility rather than the ache of eternal longing the title promises.
  19. Old
    If we can’t believe the characters, how are we meant to accept the film’s central premise?
  20. Amsterdam
    Russell’s showy directorial pizzazz is very much in evidence, but there’s an edge of desperation to the chunks of exposition that dam the flow of this already meandering tale.
  21. Photograph
    This bland, sombre love story from the director of The Lunchbox (2013) lacks that film’s flavour.
  22. Honest Thief
    With Neeson well within the confines of his comfort zone, tailed by corrupt cops and diving out of hotel windows, the film should be better. Yet it drags.
  23. 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.
  24. Epic Tails
    The decent quality of the animation of this English-language French production is rather let down by some shockingly poor voice performances and a couple of ear-bleeding musical numbers.
  25. A Dog Called Money
    What was intended as an examination of the creative process backfires and becomes instead an inadvertent chronicle of oblivious privilege. Harvey wafts through scenes of poverty and devastation, then returns to her cocoon of a studio.
  26. Cold Pursuit
    The whole tone of this glib black comedy, with its cartoon bad guys and conspiratorial wink with each addition to the body count, seems rather dated.
  27. Earwig and the Witch
    For a film about magic, there’s little sparkle to spare.
  28. Here Today
    It’s a film that sets out to tackle the impact of degenerative disease, but, barring a few moments of confusion and a forgotten name or two, is infuriatingly evasive when it comes to showing the realities of the condition.
  29. 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.
  30. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
    Dumbed-down and stripped of the symbolic subtext of the earlier movies, the picture is not without seat-shuddering thrills, but it’s like a tag-team wrestling bout for monsters rather than a picture with meaning and even a modicum of thought.
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