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. Rye Lane
    The result will leave you with a smile on your face, a spring in your step and (hopefully) a renewed confidence in next-wave British film-making.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    To Catch a Thief
    An engaging comedy thriller, one of the Master's rare straightforward whodunnits, producing real cinematic chemistry between Grace Kelly (her third and last Hitchcock film) and Cary Grant (his third and penultimate Hitchcock picture). [19 Oct 2014, p.48]
    • The Observer (UK)
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    They Live by Night
    Inspired by the story of Bonnie and Clyde, superbly performed by Granger, O'Donnell and (as the evil gang leader) Howard De Silva. The opening scene shot from a helicopter was revolutionary in its day. [01 Jun 2014]
    • The Observer (UK)
  4. The Teachers' Lounge
    It’s a masterclass in using a stripped-back, minimal approach to gripping effect, evident throughout Ilker Çatak’s terrific, taut, Oscar-nominated drama.
  5. Black Box Diaries
    It’s a tough watch – at the start, she suggests that we “close our eyes and take a deep breath if we need to” – but a brave and important one.
  6. Small Things Like These
    Small Things Like These casts a powerful spell.
  7. Being a Human Person
    This terrific, unexpectedly moving documentary portrait captures the man at work.
  8. Knives Out
    Built upon a wittily verbose script that delivers more laugh-out-loud lines than most of the year’s alleged comedies, Knives Out retains a beating human heart into which daggers are regularly plunged.
  9. The Super 8 Years
    The slow-motion breakdown of a family is tracked by a lens that initially sought out intimacy and celebration, but finds itself, as the years pass, increasingly distanced from figures caught in its time capsule of a frame.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mirror (1975)
    It's a beautiful, elaborately textured film, by some way Tarkovsky's most difficult, and not to be approached without first consulting some exegetical text. [15 Aug 2004, p.9]
    • The Observer (UK)
  11. Challengers
    The sex is like tennis: fierce, combative bouts in which there will always be a winner and a loser. And the tennis, ultimately, is like sex: an ecstatic consummation between two perfectly matched people at their glistening physical peak.
  12. Pig
    Though the film is teed up as a kind of John Wick-style revenge bender, Cage’s star persona is soon smartly subverted.
  13. Sorry We Missed You
    Time and again, scenes of back-breaking struggle end with the screen fading to black, as if the film itself is simply too tired to go on or hanging its head in empathetic shame.
  14. Sisters with Transistors
    What a joy is a documentary that neither talks down to its audience nor diminishes its subject.
  15. The Holdovers
    There’s a bracingly astringent bleakness under its surface layer of melancholy humour; a biting, sharp edge that counters the occasional lurch towards sentimentality.
  16. Da 5 Bloods
    While the changing moods of BlacKkKlansman seemed bold and audacious, the warring elements of Da 5 Bloods appear bolted together rather than alchemically mixed.
  17. The Last Black Man in San Francisco
    Talbot’s film is not perfect. A scene set to Joni Mitchell’s Blue makes its point awkwardly, and the narrative, like its characters, is prone to meandering. Yet as a film about place and personal mythology, it’s hugely moving.
  18. Pamfir
    It’s a bold, arresting debut from writer-director Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk, who balances muscular, crime-thriller tropes against moments of striking, unsettling beauty, tension and urgency against knottily complex character development. Highly recommended.
  19. Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
    It’s an intense watch; at times infectiously hilarious, at others wrenchingly sad. For the film’s brief running time, there’s an emotional osmosis at play, in both sauna and cinema alike.
  20. Navalny
    It’s a genuinely exciting piece of storytelling, a propulsive real-life quest for truth driven by ingenious tech-geeks and the disarming force of Navalny’s personality.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    La Ronde
    This elegant, imperishable romantic comedy is lighter in tone than the play and has a haunting score by Oscar Strauss (no kin to the waltz family).
  22. Madeline's Madeline
    The dilemma she presents is ethical: is it fair to ask someone to traumatise (or retraumatise) themselves for the sake of art? Rather boldly, it seems as though Decker is also asking the question of herself.
  23. The Climb
    The film is shrewd on male friendship, suggesting that a lot of men are vulnerable and crave intimacy, but are often too poor at communicating to truly reach for it.
  24. A Hero
    Refreshingly, Farhadi is ambivalent towards his “hero”, and his control over the film’s tone is masterful; what begins as funny and almost farcical, soon shifts into something much sadder and more sobering.
  25. The Northman
    While the Norns-of-fate narrative may contrive several reversals of fortune and sympathy, there’s little of the genuinely uncanny weirdness that made Eggers’s first two features such a treat. What madness lies herein is not of the north-northwest variety but more in keeping with the bonkers blockbuster spectacle of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah.
  26. Ernest Cole: Lost and Found
    The narration, by LaKeith Stanfield, speaks on behalf of the photographer, who died in 1990. It’s through his remarkable pictures of South Africa and Black America, however, that we really hear his voice.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    3 Godfathers
    This underrated picture opens with a superbly staged bank robbery, is strikingly shot in Death Valley, and is dedicated to the great Harry Carey, who starred in Ford's 1919 version of this story and died in 1947 after appearing in Red River. [22 Aug 2004, p.63]
    • The Observer (UK)
  28. Queendom
    Ultimately, as Agniia Galdanova’s remarkable observational documentary shows, Gena is her own extraordinary creation.
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