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. Wild Mountain Thyme
    Shanley has an Oscar and a Pulitzer (he wrote the sublime Moonstruck, and the stage and screen versions of Doubt). Here, that’s easy to forget, given the cartoon accents and overblown metaphors about horses destined to jump the fence.
  2. A Journal for Jordan
    Adams is a vivacious screen presence with a twinkle in her eye, and Jordan can’t quite match her, unable to draw out any real inner turmoil in a character who is respectable to a fault.
  3. 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.
  4. Something in the Water
    Something in the Water is competently filmed, with lots of propulsive underwater shark’s eye shots of the flailing legs of the bridesmaids. But there’s rather too much time spent watching the girls bobbing and bickering in the middle of the ocean as they wait for the next assault from the circling fish.
  5. Persuasion
    This adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, by the theatre director Carrie Cracknell, from a screenplay by Ron Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow, is a travesty.
  6. The House That Jack Built
    This sporadically arresting slice of grand guignol takes pointed swipes at misogyny while occasionally seeming to wallow in it. Perhaps its greatest sin is one of bad timing. As always with Von Trier, we can only guess whether that sin is intentional or ironic.
  7. The Roads Not Taken
    The Roads Not Taken is frequently moving, and a fascinating creative idea, but without sufficient information about Leo’s character to anchor the narrative, it feels too abstract.
  8. Jackpot!
    Enthusiastic mugging and gurning from the cast can’t hide a feeble, flailing screenplay that clings to its single idea like a lifebelt.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. Songwriter
    While we learn little of interest about Sheeran himself, the film is arguably a thoroughgoing demystification of the industrial process behind the modern pop song.
  12. Venom: The Last Dance
    Hardy is a highlight, playing Eddie as a man who has had more than enough of the party that’s raging in his head, but Kelly Marcel’s film is a sloppy, incoherent let-down.
  13. That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime the Movie: Scarlet Bond
    It’s visually striking, and at times somewhat overwhelming. Expect numerous sword-based battles, ogres, dragons, ancient curses, distractingly voluptuous supporting characters and, of course, slime.
  14. Edie
    With its drab, overpowering score, this tedious drama is nearly as gruelling as the trek up Scotland’s Suilven.
  15. Stage Mother
    The feelgood tone feels a little flaccid.
  16. The Grudge
    The cluttered parallel story structure – the fates of several different individuals over a period of two years are woven together – results in a series of mini-scares rather than a gradual build to a big one. And since we already know the fate of most of them, all the diseased yellow lighting and oppressive sound design in the world can’t engineer much tension.
  17. 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.
  18. Bleeding Love
    Decent performances from both McGregors can’t breathe much spirit (alcoholic or otherwise) into the film’s listless and generic screenplay.
  19. Unhinged
    This zippy car chase thriller shares some DNA with Joel Schumacher’s 1993 black comedy Falling Down . . . . Both are darkly funny studies and send-ups of emasculated men, with Crowe’s character claiming to have been “dismissed as the unworthiest fuck to ever walk the planet”.
  20. 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.
  21. Father Stu
    Playing out to the histrionic squalling of a country-infused score, this is film-making that aims to smite its audience into submission.
  22. Welcome To Marwen
    The film fetishises female strength, but only in its ability to prop up men; its women remain prettified empty shells.
  23. Lift
    Perhaps aware of the limitations of the screenplay, director F Gary Gray deploys an irritating arsenal of flashy camera moves and sleight-of-hand edits, but these only serve to emphasise the emptiness of the spectacle.
  24. The 355
    Simon Kinberg’s film feels aggressively focus-grouped for the girl-boss crowd.
  25. White Men Can't Jump
    It’s slick, unchallenging and perfectly enjoyable, but it’s hard to see the point of a remake of Ron Shelton’s 1992 mismatched buddy movie about a pair of basketball hustlers who reluctantly team up.
  26. The Nutcracker and the Four Realms
    There is a slightly panicky desperation to the cacophonous production design, and a sense of trying to distract from a plot as thin as spun sugar.
  27. The Boss Baby: Family Business
    The pro-family, anti-tech messaging is designed to play to the parents, but while not entirely unwatchable, the film’s demented levels of energy will recommend it to younger audiences and may trigger stress headaches in anyone over 12.
  28. The Greatest Beer Run Ever
    [A] crass and manipulative warsploitation picture.
  29. Here
    It’s an alienatingly ugly technique and a mawkish tear-jerker choked up with synthetic sentimentality. You start to envy the dinosaurs their extinction event.
  30. The Exorcist: Believer
    It requires a rare ineptitude to take what is famously one of the most terrifying movies ever made, recycle pretty much everything (including Tubular Bells on the score) but neglect to include the scares.
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