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. Radical
    Derbez is very likable, if a little too prone to moments of moist-eyed pathos, but the young actors are phenomenal – in particular Jennifer Trejo as Paloma, the litter-picker with a genius IQ, and Danilo Guardiola as Nico, the class clown in the clutches of the cartel.
  2. Babes
    It’s caustically funny, albeit wincingly uncomfortable at times. Where the film really excels is not so much in the snappy, trash-talking vag banter, but in the perceptive depiction of the gear changes in a female friendship as the besties start to realise that their paths might be diverging.
  3. It Ends with Us
    For a film that dips its Manolo-clad toe into the murky waters of domestic abuse, it’s unexpectedly aspirational, almost frothy in tone. But perhaps that’s the point the film is labouring: spousal violence in a relationship is rarely broadcast to the wider world.
  4. The Instigators
    It should be pulpy fun powered by car chases and zippy repartee, but The Instigators is a dispiriting and predictable drag of a movie.
  5. Borderlands
    The effects are so shoddy, you wonder if the entire post-production budget was blown on fine-tuning Cate Blanchett’s cheekbones. It’s so incoherent, you half expect to see the notorious director Uwe Boll’s name on the credits.
  6. Tuesday
    There’s a real elegance and economy to Pusić’s direction, in the first half at least. She has a knack for packing layers of story into seemingly insignificant details.
  7. Daughters
    The dance is the picture’s climax, a glimpse of joy and optimism. But the film’s coda, shot three years later, shows the cost of prolonged separation. Hope is a spark that can be easily extinguished.
  8. Hollywoodgate
    [A] fascinating, chilling film.
  9. Only the River Flows
    Offbeat flashes of humour punctuate this stylishly enigmatic, Jean-Pierre Melville-inspired crime picture, but the momentum flags a little in a convoluted final act.
  10. Jackpot!
    Enthusiastic mugging and gurning from the cast can’t hide a feeble, flailing screenplay that clings to its single idea like a lifebelt.
  11. Alien: Romulus
    While Alien: Romulus leans into the grislier elements of its horror heritage – at the expense of much in the way of deeper story development – it fails to assert itself as a particularly distinctive addition to the series, formally, tonally or thematically.
  12. Dìdi
    This film understands that, irrespective of where your parents were born, or what part of the world they raised you in, if you grew up in the late 00s, you grew up primarily online.
  13. Harold and the Purple Crayon
    Since Levi is the single-use plastic of screen performers – flat, shiny, desperately unfashionable – it’s left to Jemaine Clement to provide the story’s charismatic core as Gary, the villainous failed fantasy novelist with a thing for Mel’s mum.
  14. Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In
    Set in the murkily atmospheric underworld of 1980s Hong Kong, wildly entertaining, eye-poppingly violent triad martial arts flick is an old-school throwback to the action cinema heyday of the territory.
  15. About Dry Grasses
    About Dry Grasses tiptoes around the edge of being suffocatingly verbose, and there are scenes that could stand a tighter edit. Still, the meaty, novelistic writing and exceptional quality of the performances make for a rich and engrossing viewing experience.
  16. I Saw the TV Glow
    To call it horror seems reductive. With its shapeshifting disquiet, I Saw the TV Glow is too languidly weird, too unmoored from genre conventions to be neatly categorised. But there’s not a frame in Jane Schoenbrun’s suffocating second feature that isn’t drenched in dread and unease.
  17. Deadpool & Wolverine
    A film can be obnoxious and simultaneously very funny, and Deadpool & Wolverine is frequently hilarious. But it’s also slapdash, repetitive and shoddy looking, with an overreliance on meme-derived gags and achingly meta comic fan in-jokes.
  18. Red Island
    It captures beautifully and atmospherically a sense of mounting tension as the military men grapple with their impotency in a newly independent country.
  19. Eno
    What is particularly striking, however, uniting most critics so far, is how elegantly the film flows; there is a curious, intuitive logic weaving together these randomly chosen scenes and clips. It’s an outstanding achievement.
  20. Longlegs
    There’s an unexpected elegance to this window into unimaginable evil.
  21. Fly Me to the Moon
    Part of the problem is that while Johansson is deliciously minxy and manipulative as Kelly, the usually likable Tatum has all the charisma of a carpet tile in this clenched-jawed, buttoned-up role.
  22. Despicable Me 4
    There’s little that’s new in this enjoyable but familiar brush with villainy.
  23. Sleep
    It’s an enjoyably grisly good time – a film that puts both power tools and Pomeranians to gleefully suspenseful use.
  24. The Nature of Love
    It’s a comedy, certainly, but one that leans into the discomfort of the polar differences between the couple.
  25. Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F
    Now in his 60s – not quite old enough to be a US presidential candidate but not far off – the actor lacks some of the hunger and aggression that ignited his career in the 80s, but he remains a uniquely magnetic performer. And somehow he manages to bring a degree of freshness to material that was stale several decades ago.
  26. Orlando, My Political Biography
    Weighty themes are handled with a refreshing lightness of touch.
  27. Unicorns
    Hardy is terrific, his face crowded with conflicting emotions that Luke doesn’t have the words to express.
  28. Problemista
    Swinton is massively overblown and Torres too wispy and diffident to balance things out.
  29. MaXXXine
    Gore addicts will be sated – the prosthetics and makeup are robustly grisly – but the story feels rather too glib and predictable to be fully satisfying.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Hounds
    All creatures great and small are fighting for their lives in this blasted landscape and, though the tension often flags, the actors, many of them non-professional, give consistently good face, especially Masstouri, who resembles a leathery, bushy-haired John Garfield.
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