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. Killers of the Flower Moon
    Killers of the Flower Moon is monumentally long (206 minutes) and moves at an unhurried pace, but it knows where it’s going and barely a second is wasted. It’s sinuous and old-school, an instant American classic; almost Steinbeckian in its attention to detail and its banked, righteous rage.
  2. 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.
  3. Dalíland
    The great missed opportunity of this film, with its glossy, handsome design and cinematography, and its genteel orchestral score, is how polite and unadventurous it is – something that could never be said of Dalí himself.
  4. The Miracle Club
    It’s trite and predictable stuff: the laughs are forced; the pathos is over-stewed.
  5. Silver Dollar Road
    Peck’s film – which, with its themes of race and failures of American justice, has a kinship with Ava DuVernay’s 13th and Garrett Bradley’s Time – is both infuriating and also unexpectedly uplifting in its celebration of family unity.
  6. PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie
    It’s a chipper, self-consciously adorable romp that will no doubt delight existing fans of the television series. It is, however, laser-targeted at the youngest audience members.
  7. Sumotherhood
    It’s a wildly uneven mess.
  8. The Road Dance
    Although a little too performatively Scottish at times, this is a competently made weepie that should please fans of the book.
  9. 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.
  10. BlackBerry
    The comic potential of the collision of personalities is thoroughly mined: Lazaridis the diffident visionary; Fregin the extrovert oddball; Balsillie the driven, hyperaggressive alpha male.
  11. The Old Oak
    The final message of hope is resolutely upbeat and desperately needed.
  12. Saw X
    Grisliness occurs, accompanied by a score that sounds like knives being sharpened on violins. It’s thoroughly unpleasant, but that’s rather the point.
  13. The Creator
    Minor quibbles aside, this is a remarkable achievement, and a persuasive argument in favour of carte blanche creative freedom for Edwards in whatever he chooses to do next.
  14. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
    This is an archetypal Anderson film: mannered, fussy, obsessively designed – normally irksome traits, but in this alchemic instance it’s an utterly delightful combination.
  15. Fair Play
    It’s maliciously effective, up to a point: an enjoyably lurid piece of classy-trashy psychological warfare. Unfortunately, both the plot and the performances boil over in the third act, and the film loses much of its icily calculated cool.
  16. R.M.N.
    The space that Mungiu leaves, both physically, with his immaculately composed wide shots, and temporally, in the unhurried plotting, allows for a satisfying complexity, and an eventual swerve into dreamlike symbolism.
  17. Dumb Money
    Ultimately, Dumb Money may not be as revealing about the financial markets as it is about the rallying power of the internet.
  18. 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.
  19. The Lesson
    Unfortunately, it all rather stumbles with an overwrought final act that disintegrates under scrutiny and hinges on a key character’s unlikely ability to remember, verbatim, every word he has ever read.
  20. Flora and Son
    The volcanically sweary dialogue doesn’t quite disguise the naivety of the feelgood trajectory, and the ending feels clunky, but this is a boisterous and disorderly charmer of a picture nonetheless.
  21. A Haunting in Venice
    It’s enjoyable, if familiar.
  22. Brother
    Despite the background noise of police brutality, gang violence and financial peril, it is the altogether more intimate elements of Brother that drive the drama.
  23. Fremont
    It’s admirably understated film-making, shot in restrained black and white, with a tight aspect ratio that evokes the walls closing in around Donya during the long insomniac nights.
  24. Cassandro
    This is a giddily entertaining and celebratory drama that hints at the emotional bruises under the sparkly lurex leotard and false lashes.
  25. Love Life
    It’s a solid, sensitively handled study of the aftermath of a trauma, elevated by tricky, unexpected revelations about Park.
  26. The Nettle Dress
    Allan Brown, a textile artist, speaks eloquently of the rich symbolism of taking something that is a source of pain, stripping it of its sting and, over the years, gradually reshaping and repurposing it into a thing of beauty.
  27. Past Lives
    There’s something quite breathtaking about the deceptive ease with which Song’s first cinematic foray juggles the metaphysical and the matter-of-fact, conjuring a world in which every decision has transformative power, and concepts of love and friendship are at once mysteriously malleable yet oddly inevitable.
  28. The Nun II
    Aside from one marvellous set piece at a magazine stand, The Nun II’s mid-century design is tasteful to the point of tedium, and a disgrace to the good name of 70s-era nunsploitation. That really is the gravest sin.
  29. A Life on the Farm
    Harding’s film proves movingly open-minded on the subject of the strange things isolation can do, but as a neighbour he might have been nosier. English reserve seems to have prevented further prying into the circumstances that created this English eccentric.
  30. El Conde
    Larraín’s film demonstrates a palate for mordant humour as refined as the count’s taste for blood.
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