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. Long Day's Journey Into Night
    It’s dazzling, baffling and staggeringly ambitious.
  2. Spies in Disguise
    What keeps it from top-tier animation status is that, while the relentless killer drone army usually hits its targets, the jokes don’t always connect.
  3. Little Women
    By encouraging a merry chaos of overlapping personalities and performances – restructuring the timeline into a multilayered playground where the child and adult stories interact – and subtly foregrounding existing themes of female fulfilment and the economics of creativity, Gerwig creates something that is true to its roots and bracingly current.
  4. Citizen K
    Gibney struggles to psychologically penetrate his cold antihero.
  5. Jumanji: The Next Level
    Jumanji: The Next Level keeps things upbeat and lively, thanks in no small part to the introduction of two counterintuitively revivifying characters – curmudgeonly old codgers whose gripes and aches provide a jolly counterpoint to the teen angst that fired Kasdan’s previous instalment.
  6. Cats
    The camera’s canted angles and shaky closeups convulse with feeling that the actors can’t seem to summon. Ensemble dance sequences convey neither emotion nor information (except that the felines each have 10 fully articulated human toes). The film is rated U, but many of its uncanny images are sure to haunt viewers for generations.
  7. Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker
    The result is a handsome if creaky and oddly inconsequential final film that lurches around the galaxy at light speed without actually getting anywhere, as it steers a course between the inventive and the inevitable.
  8. Motherless Brooklyn
    Motherless Brooklyn is a curious near miss that can be both applauded and criticised for its boundless ambition.
  9. Ordinary Love
    Directed with wit, subtlety and great emotional honesty by Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn (the co-directors of 2012’s brilliantly life-affirming Good Vibrations), it’s a singular story with universal appeal – striking a very personal chord with some viewers while finding common ground with the widest possible audience.
  10. Lucy in the Sky
    Lucy in the Sky is low on real insight and feels like a psychology column in a supermarket tabloid.
  11. So Long, My Son
    So measured is the pacing, so sinuous the timeline, so understated the subtle ache of the performances that you don’t immediately realise that Wang Xiaoshuai’s exquisite three-hour drama has been performing the emotional equivalent of open-heart surgery on the audience since pretty much the first scene.
  12. Honey Boy
    This open-sore autobiography feels like the missing piece in the puzzle of this frequently brilliant, invariably self-jeopardising actor.
  13. The Nightingale
    It’s a punishing watch; a harrowing film which boots home its message by gouging at the vulnerable soft spots of the audience. Like the world she depicts, Kent’s storytelling shows no mercy.
  14. The Two Popes
    It doesn’t all work; the flashbacks are unwieldy and the pacing falters in the second half. It’s also rather coy in addressing some of the more damning elements in recent Catholic history. But there’s something disarming about a scene of papal bonding over beer and footy.
  15. Charlie's Angels
    The picture comes armed to the teeth with slick action sequences . . . and genuinely funny lines. It’s just a pity that both the action and the dialogue are occasionally obscured by the frenzied editing.
  16. Atlantics
    It’s silkily enigmatic and unpredictable, and certainly unlike anything else you will see this year.
  17. 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.
  18. 21 Bridges
    There’s a pulpy, comic-book noir to this highly enjoyable thriller, whose rules and parameters are clear.
  19. I Lost My Body
    The primary tone is gentle and melancholic – an almost existential evocation of memory, and the longing to be made whole.
  20. Harriet
    So often, historical films are stale and mired in misery, but Harriet has a rare buoyancy.
  21. Frozen II
    The more times I listen to Frozen II’s rousing anthem Into the Unknown, the more I’m convinced of its earworm quality. It’s as good (and maybe better) than the indelible Let It Go.
  22. Marriage Story
    This often hilarious heartbreaker is simply Baumbach’s best film to date – insightful, sympathetic and rather beautifully bewildered.
  23. Ford v Ferrari
    Slick, thrilling and saturated with vivid hues and 60s can-do optimism, Le Mans ’66, James Mangold’s follow-up to Logan, is a precision-tooled machine of a movie.
  24. Luce
    Part cautionary tale about the pitfalls of judging a book by its cover, part wily, gaslighting mind game, Luce is a tricky thing to pin down. And it’s entirely appropriate that a film that so bluntly challenges the preconceptions that determine society’s evaluation of a person should itself be a slippery enigma that defies neat categorisation.
  25. A Dog Called Money
    What was intended as an examination of the creative process backfires and becomes instead an inadvertent chronicle of oblivious privilege. Harvey wafts through scenes of poverty and devastation, then returns to her cocoon of a studio.
  26. Midway
    Every tired war movie cliche is unearthed in a film that brings nothing new but will no doubt please fans of men in uniform yelling at explosions.
  27. The Good Liar
    Flashes of violence are effectively jarring when juxtaposed with the chintzy cosiness of much of the film. Less successful are two thudding, lead-weight flashbacks, which disgorge chunks of exposition and quash some of the fun in McKellen and Mirren’s deft double act.
  28. The Irishman
    For all its flash-back/flash-forward tricksiness, The Irishman rarely seems disjointed or thematically fractured. It conjures a kaleidoscopic illusion of depth that only starts to shatter as the pace flags in the final act.
  29. 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.
  30. Chained for Life
    [A] wonky, charming satire.
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