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. Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
    It is, very occasionally, brilliant: a deft reveal in the final 20 minutes ties together the disparate, seemingly unrelated scenes that came before. But with its overuse of fish-eye lenses and the quacking, whimsical brass-heavy score, it’s extremely hard work.
  2. The Menu
    Subtle it’s not, but it’s maliciously entertaining. It turns out that revenge on the ultra-wealthy is a dish best seared over a naked flame.
  3. Clara Sola
    This atmospheric debut from Costa Rican-Swedish director Nathalie Álvarez Mesén combines mud, moss and mysticism to arresting effect.
  4. Aftersun
    A brilliantly assured and stylistically adventurous work, this beautifully understated yet emotionally riveting coming-of-age drama picks apart themes of love and loss in a manner so dextrous as to seem almost accidental. Don’t be fooled; Wells knows exactly what she’s doing, and her storytelling is as precise as it is piercing.
  5. Causeway
    Lawrence is phenomenal, giving the kind of wary, reined-in performance that made such a compelling impression in her breakthrough film, Winter’s Bone. And the always excellent Henry gradually strips back a character who at first seems wholly at ease with life to reveal layers of suppressed guilt and pain.
  6. Living
    This deceptively gentle 50s-set film addresses weighty matters of life and death with a winning simplicity that is hard to resist.
  7. Call Jane
    The very watchable combination of Elizabeth Banks, as a suburban Chicago housewife turned illegal abortion technician, and Sigourney Weaver, as the founder of Call Jane, brings a force of charisma that overrides the picture’s occasional frothiness.
  8. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
    It’s mildly amusing, and Evan Rachel Wood is great fun as an evil Madonna. But one joke – even a joke as bizarre as this – is not enough to sustain a whole movie.
  9. Watcher
    There are few genuine surprises, perhaps, but there are distinctive elements here which set the film apart, not least the way lack of fluency in a language (Julia’s Romanian is sparse to non-existent) creates a sense of siege.
  10. The Wonder
    Few will remain unmoved by this intriguingly adventurous and thought-provoking drama.
  11. Triangle of Sadness
    There’s the flabby third act in which Östlund slightly fumbles the hand-tooled Louis Vuitton ball.
  12. Wendell & Wild
    The story is a touch convoluted, but it’s a gleefully grim good time.
  13. Bros
    Eichner is on fine form with the scabrous spikiness of the first half of the picture, but neither he nor the film itself seems fully comfortable with the final descent into sentimentality.
  14. Barbarian
    It’s one of the most bracingly effective chillers of the year.
  15. Memories of My Father
    Memories of My Father is a touch overlong and soapy and awkwardly structured. But it’s still an engrossingly watchable drama.
  16. The Banshees of Inisherin
    It’s an end-of-friendship breakup movie that swings between the hilarious, the horrifying and the heartbreaking in magnificent fashion.
  17. Lancaster
    Part oral history, part archive, this is a thoroughly researched account of the role of the Lancaster bomber in the second world war. It’s solid, no frills film-making, but that’s entirely appropriate given the sobering stories recounted by surviving members of Bomber Command, now in their 90s.
  18. All Quiet on the Western Front
    While not as showy as Sam Mendes’s sweeping, single-shot takes in 1917, this is remarkable, if harrowing, film-making. Moments of striking beauty – sunlight carved into exultant rays by skeletal winter trees – are almost as shocking and disquieting as the scenes of suffering.
  19. Emily
    O’Connor clearly isn’t afraid of rattling cages when approaching sacred texts. There’s something refreshingly untethered about the gusto with which she reimagines Emily, tossing aside the image of a shy, sickly recluse, replacing it with an antiheroine whose inability to fit in with the ordered world is a source of strength rather than weakness.
  20. The Good Nurse
    The film’s elegant framing and unobtrusive directorial choices give space for Chastain and Redmayne to fully inhabit their characters in a picture that combines compassion and empathy with a sickening swell of almost unbearable tension.
  21. All That Breathes
    Despite the poisons in the air, the brothers continue their work, mending broken creatures, one by one.
  22. Halloween Ends
    The scares are sad, puny little things. Even Jamie Lee Curtis seems to have lost the will to fight. It’s time that Myers and his mouldy old mask were laid to rest. Let’s hope nobody decides to disinter him yet again.
  23. Amsterdam
    Russell’s showy directorial pizzazz is very much in evidence, but there’s an edge of desperation to the chunks of exposition that dam the flow of this already meandering tale.
  24. Vengeance
    It’s mildly amusing stuff that delivers no surprises, but may muster a few laughs.
  25. The Cordillera of Dreams
    It’s a highly personal documentary: in addition to focusing on the mountains, Guzmán revisits his childhood home, now derelict, and explores his own archive footage of the 1973 coup d’état that prompted his relocation to France.
  26. After Blue (Dirty Paradise)
    It’s an overlong, indulgent slog.
  27. Nothing Compares
    It’s small wonder that she effectively torpedoed the stardom she never much wanted anyway.
  28. Flux Gourmet
    Flux Gourmet makes us laugh because, on some bizarre level, we do actually believe in and care about these utterly preposterous characters and situations.
  29. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris
    It’s unabashed froth, as substantial as a tulle skirt. And perhaps that’s exactly what we need right now.
  30. Girl Picture
    There are moments – Mimmi biting back her emotions as Emma dances for her alone at night – that tingle with discovery and promise.
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