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. Gunpowder Milkshake
    Tiresome stuff.
  2. Prisoners of the Ghostland
    It’s almost worth watching just for the way that Cage delivers the word “testicle”: it sounds as though all the syllables got caught in a combine harvester and then had to be reassembled, with the accents and emphases in the wrong places. It is, like much of the film, utterly barmy.
  3. My Name Is Pauli Murray
    This thorough and informative documentary, from the team behind RBG, shines a light on a brilliant and uncompromising firebrand who paved the way for generations to come.
  4. Mandibles
    As a portrait of friendship, viewed through the compound eye of a mutant insect, it is multidimensional and rather moving.
  5. Only You
    Vividly rendered, and filled with tangible yearning, it strikes a balance between romantic passion and mundane domesticity, as the skin-prickling attraction of new love is tested by the day-to-day tribulations of real life.
  6. Little Girl
    [A] tender observational documentary.
  7. Bad Tales
    Parental indifference is not attuned to the looming tragedy in this horribly compelling fable.
  8. Respect
    Despite top-notch period production design and a couple of convincing studio workout sequences (I was reminded of the brilliant Love & Mercy as Aretha tells her bassist to ditch Alabama for Harlem), the drama rarely has the fiery spark its subject demands.
  9. Copshop
    Alexis Louder holds her own as the heroine of (and sole woman in) Joe Carnahan’s lean, mean, 70s-inspired action thriller.
  10. Copilot
    The director treats the film as an empathy exercise, hoping to complicate and humanise a terrorist. Yet this is undermined by the obvious red flags that she plants in each section. Saeed’s flight path becomes a foregone conclusion.
  11. Herself
    The film’s abrupt tonal shifts are jarring.
  12. Misha and the Wolves
    A puzzle box of a structure reveals fresh angles to the story with each new contributor, but the woman at its core – the discredited author Misha Defonseca – remains silent and unaccountable, to the film’s detriment.
  13. Here Today
    It’s a film that sets out to tackle the impact of degenerative disease, but, barring a few moments of confusion and a forgotten name or two, is infuriatingly evasive when it comes to showing the realities of the condition.
  14. Enforcement
    While Shorta is certainly a propulsive piece of action cinema, which makes effective use of its acid yellow, cement grey and burnt umber palette and warren-of-concrete location, there’s a crudely schematic quality to the writing.
  15. Wildfire
    Savagely powerful, directed with an unshowy but acute eye (the use of the colour red is a simple but searingly effective device), this is a terrific feature debut from the writer and director Cathy Brady.
  16. Annette
    By comparison with 1999’s Pola X and 2012’s Holy Motors, Annette (which Carax tenderly dedicates to his daughter Nastya) is surprisingly accessible fare: adventurous, anarchic and unexpectedly heartfelt.
  17. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
    Cretton negotiates potential cliches such as flashback sequences and that hoariest of old chestnuts, the training montage, with a gravity-defying lightness of touch.
  18. The Last Bus
    The journey is a nice excuse to paint Tom into a cheerily cosmopolitan portrait of the UK.
  19. Worth
    Though this stolid drama, based on a true case, begins as a procedural, about systems, processes and deadlines, it is most absorbing when it zeroes in on one man’s moral arc.
  20. Candyman
    The overall tone is one of wry knowingness, which is DaCosta’s achilles heel.
  21. The Nest
    Law manages to be both utterly authentic and glossily untrustworthy.
  22. Mogul Mowgli
    This is abrasive, confrontational film-making, with a machine-gun assault of ideas and influences.
  23. 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.
  24. Surge
    Whishaw’s intensity is gripping to watch but the character remains opaque; whether we’re meant to read Joseph as experiencing psychosis or simply suffering the unforgiving conditions of city life under capitalism is ambiguous.
  25. Pig
    Though the film is teed up as a kind of John Wick-style revenge bender, Cage’s star persona is soon smartly subverted.
  26. Censor
    This thrilling, dizzying debut from Welsh writer-director Prano Bailey-Bond is a nostalgic treat for anyone old enough to remember the infamous “video nasties” scare of the early 80s. Yet beneath the retro surface lies a more universal tale about the power of horror to confront our deepest fears – a timeless celebration of the liberating nature of the dark side.
  27. The Night House
    The fuzzy plotting is balanced by Hall’s brilliantly controlled performance as the caustic, sceptical Beth, whose grief has pushed her to the knife edge of sanity.
  28. Reminiscence
    From his cheesy narration (“Nothing is more addictive than the past,” Nick solemnly opines) to the movie’s double-crossing femme fatale and nocturnal, neon-lit setting, the director has great fun playing with genre tropes, but it’s unclear whether she’s going for heightened camp.
  29. Sabaya
    [A] sensitive, frequently harrowing observational documentary.
  30. People Just Do Nothing: Big in Japan
    Rarely does a half-hour TV show successfully stretch itself into a 90-minute film. It’s a nice surprise, then, that the popular BBC mockumentary works as a feature.
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