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. Vanguard
    It’s an unforgivable waste of Jackie Chan, action-movie legend, reduced here to pratfalls and gurning double takes.
  2. 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.
  3. Love Hurts
    Incoherent, inelegantly choreographed and shot with a colour palette reminiscent of one of those noxious American Candy Stores that have popped up all over London like an outbreak of herpes, this Valentine-themed martial arts action picture is one of the worst of the year so far.
  4. Like a Boss
    Director Miguel Arteta, who brought a bracingly transgressive tartness to indie comedies Chuck & Buck and The Good Girl, delivers sloppily paced hack work here, while Tiffany Haddish and Rose Byrne, two fine comic actresses, are shackled to a screenplay so crassly tone-deaf, it makes you want to chisel off your own ears.
  5. Cats
    The camera’s canted angles and shaky closeups convulse with feeling that the actors can’t seem to summon. Ensemble dance sequences convey neither emotion nor information (except that the felines each have 10 fully articulated human toes). The film is rated U, but many of its uncanny images are sure to haunt viewers for generations.
  6. 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.
  7. The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard
    The dismal dialogue wouldn’t matter quite so much if at least the action sequences delivered a few thrills, but the whole thing is so shoddily put together it looks as though it was edited with a strimmer.
  8. Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire
    Sofia Boutella shows action-star potential as Kora, a mysterious outsider who has found peace living with the farming commune, but she deserves a better vehicle than this chop-shopped jalopy.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Blind Fury
    Slick tongue-in-cheek thriller giving Rutger Hauer an unusually sympathetic role as a blinded Vietnam veteran who's spent 20 years in the jungle honing his other senses as well as his swordsmanship. [27 Oct 2002, p.9]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 30 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Cassandra Crossing
    Coarse international thriller with a standard group-jeopardy dramatis personae set abroad a trans-European express train boarded by a plague-carrying terrorist. Saved from total mediocrity by an all-star cast that includes Sophia Loren, Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner, Ingrid Thulin, Martin Sheen, OJ Simpson, Richard Harris, and Alida Valli. [28 Oct 2007, p.14]
    • The Observer (UK)
  11. 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.
  12. Fisherman's Friends: One and All
    It all feels rather cursory, subplots as glue to tack together the Cornish tourist board-approved shots of cornflower-blue waters and cloudless skies.
  13. Assassin Club
    By the end, his getaway car is almost as riddled with holes as the plot itself.
  14. Borderlands
    The effects are so shoddy, you wonder if the entire post-production budget was blown on fine-tuning Cate Blanchett’s cheekbones. It’s so incoherent, you half expect to see the notorious director Uwe Boll’s name on the credits.
  15. Blithe Spirit
    The impish Leslie Mann is well cast as his dead wife, Elvira, who provides a jolt of creative inspiration. Judi Dench’s screechy caricature of psychic Madame Arcati is less winning.
  16. Rambo: Last Blood
    It’s cheap and lazy stuff.
  17. Playmobil: The Movie
    While The Lego Movie is all about creativity and invention, Playmobil shamelessly steals ideas.
  18. Playing with Fire
    This is beyond inept.
  19. Off the Rails
    Bickering middle-aged women obsessing over travel arrangements is not entertainment, it’s a living hell.
  20. Holmes & Watson
    Puerile, imbecilic and imbued with the kind of casual 1970s sitcom homophobia that reads all male friendships as somehow suspect, this slack-jawed grossout comedy represents the nadir of Conan Doyle adaptations.
  21. Music
    These self-consciously upbeat moments clash horribly with the wider redemption narrative.
  22. Life Itself
    This stupid person’s idea of a clever movie is keen that we get the point, right down to providing an overbearing, hand-holding voiceover, which guides us through its multiple levels of plot contrivance as if the audience is a not particularly bright toddler.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Choirboys
    Aldrich is at his most crudely anarchic and macho celebrating the saintly community service and childish off-duty antics of Los Angeles's hard-nosed uniformed cops, starring Charles Durning, Perry King et al. [25 Feb 2007, p.6]
    • The Observer (UK)
  24. Apostasy
    Frequently, the film is enraging. Not because it shows the way in which dogma has the power to rewire the moral instincts of its devotees, but for the sombreness with which it acknowledges that the devotees allow this to happen.
  25. Article 15
    Ayushmann Khurrana, playing the good cop who can’t bring himself to look away to preserve “society’s balance”, combines soulful Bollywood heartthrob charisma with an arrestingly intense performance.
  26. Perfect 10
    The film’s main asset is impressive newcomer Box: veering between bratty backchat and bruised reticence, she’s tossed on unpredictable tides of teenage emotions.
  27. Parallel
    Montages, seesawing Dutch tilts and profligate overuse of lighting gels fail to conceal the fact that the film’s writing doesn’t match the lure of the central idea.
  28. Ellie & Abbie (& Ellie's Dead Aunt)
    As Ellie and Abbie respectively, Sophie Hawkshaw and Zoe Terakes make light work of a somewhat heavy-handed screenplay.
  29. Here We Are
    Beautifully observed and saturated with warmth, this tender family drama gradually reveals the fact that it is Aharon, as much as Uri, who depends on their relationship.
  30. Bye Bye Morons
    It’s amiable enough, but this broad French comedy is not distinctive enough for the arthouse crowd, and too Gallic for the mainstream.
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