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 Killing of Two Lovers
    Crawford is brilliant and bitter as a soon-to-be divorced dad unable to accept his fate.
  2. Unicorns
    Hardy is terrific, his face crowded with conflicting emotions that Luke doesn’t have the words to express.
  3. One Night in Miami
    The ensemble cast electrifies Powers’s dialogue, jockeying between black power and integration, activism and commerce, spiritual clarity, pork chops and sex.
  4. Climax
    What it all adds up to, other than a moment-by-moment experiential overload, is uncertain.
  5. Great Freedom
    The power of Sebastian Meise’s subdued prison drama comes not from big, brash moments but from subtle details. Sound design that hints at the aching emptiness outside the frame and beyond the walls.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Odd Man Out
    One of the best acted, most technically accomplished movies ever made in Britain with a great cast of British and Irish actors, though at times a trifle self-conscious in achieving its effects. [29 Aug 2010, p.50]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Big Country
    Strong allegorical undertones reflecting the Cold War, then at its height, and an unforgettable score by Jerome Moross. [31 Dec 2006, p.12]
    • The Observer (UK)
  8. After Love
    After Love constantly foregrounds duality, narratively and stylistically.
  9. Sometimes I Think About Dying
    It plays out at the tipping point at which living with loneliness starts to feel easier than tackling the daunting prospect of conversation with a stranger.
  10. Pain and Glory
    As the title suggests, the result is a tragicomic swirl of heartbreak and joy, slipping dexterously between riotous laughter and piercing sadness. At its heart is Banderas giving the performance of a lifetime in a role that, following his Cannes triumph, surely demands Oscar recognition.
  11. The Nature of Love
    It’s a comedy, certainly, but one that leans into the discomfort of the polar differences between the couple.
  12. Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan
    Temple has always used archive material playfully; here, it’s particularly riotous, like a chaotic patchwork quilt tacked together by one of Shane’s drunk aunties.
  13. Endurance
    While the 2022 expedition doesn’t match the nail-biting life-or-death stakes of the original venture, it’s compellingly captured through the eyes of a likable cast of eccentric world experts.
  14. Transformers One
    One of the aspects that makes this an unexpectedly satisfying piece of storytelling (aside from the obvious improvements in the joke quality) is the way that the film digs into the structure of Autobot society.
  15. Richard Jewell
    There is an elegant, even-handed character study buried within Clint Eastwood’s crisp procedural.
  16. Mank
    This is film-making as role-playing, which has immersed itself, method-style, in a past era and aesthetic, which wears its luminous black-and-white cinematography like a costume.
  17. Mandibles
    As a portrait of friendship, viewed through the compound eye of a mutant insect, it is multidimensional and rather moving.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Hidden Fortress
    There are two epic set pieces (a slave revolt and a peasant fire festival), numerous battles (including an extended fight with lances between two samurai) and endless felicitously staged scenes. In his first widescreen picture, Kurosawa revelled in a shape disparaged at the time, and stuck with it thereafter. [24 Mar 2002, p.9]
    • The Observer (UK)
  19. Les Misérables
    It’s that sense of beauty – of the possibility of redemption – that prevents Les Misérables from being crushed by the grim weight of the world it depicts. It’s a world in which Ly grew up, and his love of these neighbourhoods, in all their hardscrabble glory, is tangible.
  20. No Other Land
    The friendship that grows between the two is a splinter of hope in an otherwise increasingly bleak situation.
  21. Queen & Slim
    It’s a terrifically tactile film, full of the kind of deliciously observed detail that lingers in the mind long after the movie has finished.
  22. Judas and the Black Messiah
    It’s a credit to Stanfield that he manages to keep these complex contradictions alive throughout his performance, capturing perfectly the uneasy manner that O’Neal exhibited on camera, his eyes darting anxiously as he attempts to read his surroundings, his manner a mix of fearful, furtive and oddly forceful.
  23. Bird
    Bird finds beauty and wonder in every frame (one that Arnold has slyly shaped to evoke the format and curved corners of a smartphone screen, echoing the way Bailey captures private moments of visual poetry). The film celebrates rather than judges its erratic and occasionally challenging characters It’s the closest Andrea Arnold has come to a feelgood flick.
  24. 1985
    Malaysian-born writer-director Yen Tan shoots stylishly in black and white 16mm, each frame a tasteful photograph. What’s most skilful, though, is the way he succeeds in complicating archetypes.
  25. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
    The latest feature from the Bristol-based animation studio is an absolute delight.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Point Blank
    A landmark in the history of the crime movie, Point Blank's expressive feeling for landscape and architecture anticipates Michael Mann's Heat.
  27. Who You Think I Am
    It all adds up to a very modern drama about age-old anxieties: the fear of ageing and death; the desire for intimacy and reassurance; the allure of artifice and deceit.
  28. No Bears
    Filtering his immense contribution to cinema through a deceptively incidental lens, he once again reminds us that movie-making can be a profoundly humane endeavour; at once comedic, tragic and truthful.
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