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. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
    This female-led triptych of stories, with its deft, empathetic camerawork and intimate, intricately crafted character sketches, is a minor masterpiece in its own right.
  2. Death on the Nile
    The camera whirls giddily, dizzy from the sparkle and spectacle, but not quite able to conceal the fact that this is an empty bauble of a movie.
  3. Belle
    The film’s message is a beautiful one: to integrate our real-life vulnerabilities with the persona we project is to become all the more powerful.
  4. Parallel Mothers
    It’s Cruz who sets the tone, with a performance that radiates warmth and is refreshingly forgiving of her character’s flaws. She has never been better.
  5. Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road
    When Fine encourages him to elaborate, Wilson isn’t especially articulate, but his emotional responses to the individual songs are often lucid and revealing.
  6. Memory Box
    Hadjithomas and Joreige thoughtfully explore trauma while remaining joyful, animating Maia’s photos, which fizz, crackle and dance to life on screen.
  7. A Journal for Jordan
    Adams is a vivacious screen presence with a twinkle in her eye, and Jordan can’t quite match her, unable to draw out any real inner turmoil in a character who is respectable to a fault.
  8. Nightmare Alley
    Years ago, I compared Del Toro to Orson Welles, a film-maker who instinctively understood the hypnotic power of cinema to dazzle, delight and deceive. On the basis of Nightmare Alley, which is blessed with more than a touch of evil, that’s a comparison by which I still stand.
  9. Belfast
    Kenneth Branagh’s unabashedly feelgood memoir of growing up in Belfast as the Troubles erupted in the late 1960s suffers from a problem of perspective.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ascension
    Accompanied by a lithe, organic score by Dan Deacon, which weaves the rhythms of industry and technology into the music, the film is a mosaic portrait of the realities and repercussions of “the Chinese dream”.
  11. Cow
    It’s not an easy watch, certainly – I cried more or less solidly through the last 30 minutes – but it’s an important one.
  12. Save the Cinema
    Save the Cinema is the kind of plucky underdog feelgood slop that the British film industry churns out on a regular basis, largely to the indifference of audiences.
  13. Memoria
    The film takes a fantastical leap that viewers will find either breathtaking or ridiculous – probably a bit of both.
  14. Scream
    While this is the smartest, funniest and stabbiest film since the 1996 original, it does feel as though Scream has come full circle, an ouroboros serpent of a franchise that is destined to endlessly devour itself until those testy toxic fans finally lose patience.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sansho the Bailiff
    It is a heartbreaking story, tragic, unsentimental, but suffused with a belief in the ability of decency and dignity to survive under the most terrible circumstances. [02 Dec 2007, p.18]
    • The Observer (UK)
      • Posted Jan 11, 2022
  16. Lola
    Mya Bollaers is a magnetic presence in this Belgian-French film that approaches the story of an adolescent trans girl and her estranged father with good intentions but a thuddingly unsubtle directorial approach.
  17. Being the Ricardos
    The film is obsessed with deconstructing good screenwriting, the way a line lands, and ensuring clear character motivation.
  18. Don't Look Up
    The smug asides plastered on screen, and the hyperactive inserts of nature documentary footage do nothing to raise the film’s real-life stakes.
  19. Lamb
    Jóhannsson teases the possibility of a monster, but waits to reveal his hand. When he does, there’s more than a touch of gallows humour. I laughed out loud at his audacity, and had nightmares later.
  20. Clifford the Big Red Dog
    The film is best when it sticks to children’s caper mode, jostled along by gentle toilet humour, bad-tempered barnyard animals and a scene of two kids driving a van across Manhattan.
  21. Citizen Ashe
    This thoughtful documentary about Arthur Ashe, the first African American man to win Wimbledon in 1975, understands that representation is only one step towards equality.
  22. The Matrix Resurrections
    The film is a utopian riff on the apocalyptic source material, a Technicolor reimagining flooded with light and optimism.
  23. Titane
    Some will be repelled, many will be bamboozled. But for those with an appetite for cinema that gets you in the gut, Ducournau delivers the goods.
  24. The Tragedy of Macbeth
    The film has a cold, abstract beauty.
  25. The King's Man
    The film can’t resist revelling in a conservative conclusion outside Buckingham Palace, with a victory banner fluttering against a smattering of St George’s flags.
  26. Boiling Point
    The result is a spicy nerve-jangler served with a chargrilled side order of jet-black gallows humour – a divine comedy barrelling towards inevitable tragedy, played out in hell’s kitchen where someone is bound to get burned.
  27. Minyan
    The film’s bluesy woodwind score has a teasing, goading quality that feels tinged with melancholy; the spectre of Aids hovers around the film’s edges.
  28. Ailey
    Film-maker Jamila Wignot pays particular attention to the specificity of Ailey’s black influences: the church, blues music and his southern upbringing, all of which informed his best-known work, Revelations (1960).
  29. 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.
  30. Munich: The Edge of War
    MacKay is muted; his character is teased for his reserve, a quality he shares with the film. Niewöhner gives the sparkier performance, as a passionate German nationalist whose loyalty has flipped.
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