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. Terminator: Dark Fate
    As a genre exercise, it mostly works; set pieces are tense, explosive and pleasingly gory, littered with flying scraps of metal and meat. Davis in particular is an authoritative presence. As a sequel, it’s baldly opportunistic, grab-bagging contemporary political issues (reproductive justice; undocumented migrants) in a transparent attempt to justify its cultural relevance.
  2. By the Grace of God
    There’s perhaps an over-reliance on voiceover by way of letters and emails, though the film’s unvarnished formal directness is a good thing, given the sensitive material.
  3. The Beach Bum
    It’s not unfunny watching McConaughey smoke a joint from between Isla Fisher’s toes, but some viewers may find themselves less enamoured of Moondog than the film is.
  4. Monos
    Tonally, the film is mercurial, capturing the multiple realities of its young subjects who are both children and soldiers – the distressing, disorienting dichotomy at the centre of its eerie spell. With skill and sensitivity, Landes manages to capture both sides of their fractured world, evoking empathy without resort to pity.
  5. The Aeronauts
    Inspired by real events, the film is at its best when it leans into the action-adventure genre; director Tom Harper smartly uses camera-shake and closeups to immerse the audience in the weather’s volatility.
  6. Sorry We Missed You
    Time and again, scenes of back-breaking struggle end with the screen fading to black, as if the film itself is simply too tired to go on or hanging its head in empathetic shame.
  7. Brittany Runs A Marathon
    There’s a note of truth in Bell’s finely tuned performance as a character whose insecurities have calcified over the years, hardening her to genuine goodwill, which she frequently misreads as pity.
  8. After the Wedding
    This story of motherhood and moral conundrums, of privilege and philanthropy and “worthy causes” is one whose dramatic twists and soapy reveals feel at odds with the cultivated tone of serious, muted elegance.
  9. Doctor Sleep
    The new material is fresher and considerably more fun.
  10. Farming
    Enitan’s trauma is revelled in but for what? Few new truths are learned here. A rushed, redemptive montage towards the film’s end is presented as ickily aspirational.
  11. The Last Tree
    Akinola (best known to some for his work on Doctor Who) is clearly completely in tune with the director, getting under the skin of his story and striking just the right note of internalised anguish and ecstasy that defines this tender, heartfelt and clearly very personal movie.
  12. Good Posture
    Wells’s bracingly spiky writing vividly draws both the characters and the connections between them.
  13. VS.
    For all the impressive qualities of the picture, it does feel as though there is a rigid upper-age limit for its audience.
  14. Joker
    Subtlety is not Phillips’s strong point. What he does have is an eye for a well-chosen location, an ear for a provocative line of dialogue and a finger on the pulse of very marketable, confrontational (if also “cynical”) entertainment. Add to this an incendiary central performance by Phoenix and Joker looks set to have the last laugh.
  15. Judy
    Zellweger and Garland coexist symbiotically on the screen, in a kind of magic-eye illusion of a performance that flips back and forwards between the two. Zellweger is phenomenally good nonetheless.
  16. Sometimes Always Never
    The precision in the shot composition is mirrored in the storytelling – there’s an unassuming elegance that balances the eccentricity of a film that makes something as mundane as Scrabble into a taut dramatic device.
  17. The Goldfinch
    Probably, the intention was to make explicit the connections between Theo’s past and present, but there’s not enough detail or characterisation for this structural intervention to work. Without those connecting narrative bones, the result is all flab and no flavour.
  18. Ready or Not
    There is an elegance to the premise – an otherwise straightforward cat-and-mouse chase around a gothic mansion – and a satisfying clip to the rewardingly gory action.
  19. Skin
    The film works hard to complicate the character of Widner, but flattens the pernicious culture that formed him.
  20. Hotel Mumbai
    There is something queasy about mining such fresh real-life trauma for popcorn entertainment.
  21. Honeyland
    No-nonsense beekeper Hatidze Muratova’s face is as weathered and craggy as the cliff face we see her scaling at the start of this gripping, Sundance-winning documentary.
  22. Downton Abbey
    It’s lighthearted stuff and mostly benign too, save its unashamedly effusive stance on the monarchy.
  23. For Sama
    With footage as raw and dramatic as this, it’s a credit to composer Nainita Desai that her score remains restrained and understated throughout, emphasising subtler themes of endurance and empathy, while gesturing gently toward the possibility of hope – of love – even in the midst of tragedy.
  24. The Kitchen
    It’s quite an achievement to combine career low points for all three of the female leads, but a film that spends so much time capturing shots of characters walking sassily through the streets of 70s Hell’s Kitchen at the expense of characterisation clearly has its priorities fried.
  25. The Farewell
    Ultimately, it’s all about balance, a yin and yang of roots and identities, humour and pathos that comes together into a satisfying, bittersweet wedding banquet of a movie.
  26. Rambo: Last Blood
    It’s cheap and lazy stuff.
  27. Ad Astra
    The result is an A-list B-movie that juggles moments of breath-taking visual splendour with much on-the-nose speechifying about sins of the fathers and eternal isolation, spiced up with some action-packed silliness that entirely undercuts its more po-faced pretensions.
  28. Call Me by Your Name
    Chalamet, with his restless, impatient physicality and a face as sensual and sculpted as a fallen angel from a Caravaggio painting, is quite simply astonishing.
  29. Hustlers
    Perhaps too reliant on the structure of the original article, which tells the events in flashback, the film wraps up a little hastily. Brilliantly, though, the editing is teasing rather than explicit; Scafaria offers just enough of the girls and their bodies to get pulses racing without exploiting them or their story.
  30. Liam Gallagher: As It Was
    The Liam Gallagher of old, with his shrapnel wit and swaggering crusade against being “suckered in by the dickheads”, would have tossed a grenade into the editing suite rather than sanction a doc that is more extended corporate rebranding exercise than it is rock’n’roll.
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