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. The Imaginary
    A beguiling, if slightly convoluted, fantasy.
  2. Kinds of Kindness
    It’s impossible to endure all this – the film is sporadically funny but it’s also emotionally arid, mannered, and overlong – without making a link between the power plays on screen and Lanthimos’s approach as a film-maker.
  3. Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1
    It’s not uninvolving. The picture takes its own sweet time getting going, but a satisfying momentum builds through the multiple, interlinked storylines.
  4. A Quiet Place: Day One
    This is a stylish and satisfying prequel that elegantly integrates Sam’s poet’s sensibility into the storytelling.
  5. Fancy Dance
    While Fancy Dance has a tendency to labour its points a little too emphatically, Gladstone and Deroy-Olson are both phenomenal; their connection, played out in shared glances and urgent wordless messages, is palpable, persuasive and vital.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ama Gloria
    One of the year’s most hypnotic performances nestles inside this seemingly modest French-language coming-of-age drama.
  7. The Bikeriders
    While the actual plot is a little thin, this is a thrillingly evocative piece of film-making: it’s shot in colour rather than the black and white of Lyon’s photographs but there’s a weary, beer-stained grit to it all, like leathers that have wiped out across asphalt a few too many times.
  8. Green Border
    It’s a supremely accomplished work.
  9. Federer: Twelve Final Days
    Like its subject, the film is not particularly revolutionary or groundbreaking in its approach. But again, like its subject, it is a work of unmistakable quality and class.
  10. Something in the Water
    Something in the Water is competently filmed, with lots of propulsive underwater shark’s eye shots of the flailing legs of the bridesmaids. But there’s rather too much time spent watching the girls bobbing and bickering in the middle of the ocean as they wait for the next assault from the circling fish.
  11. The Exorcism
    Despite Crowe’s commitment to going balls-out nutso in the role, the film unravels, a casualty of slap-dash plotting, lazy directing and a reliance on tired Catholic horror tropes.
  12. Sasquatch Sunset
    What the film shares with the Zellners’ previous pictures is a deft handling of tonal shifts, particularly the delicate tipping point at which flippant absurdity gives way to the darker minor key of melancholy.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Inside Out 2
    Is Inside Out 2 as memorable as the original? To borrow a word popular with Ennui, “Non!” Is it a must-see? Oui oui.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Treasure
    The truth about Treasure: it’s too conventional to satisfy devotees of Lena Dunham and too much of a vehicle for Dunham to please anyone else.
  15. Queendom
    Ultimately, as Agniia Galdanova’s remarkable observational documentary shows, Gena is her own extraordinary creation.
  16. Hit Man
    Hit Man takes Powell’s amiable, supporting actor appeal (Top Gun: Maverick) and hones it to a star quality of such laser-beam intensity, you start to fear for your eyesight. It breathes fresh life into the played-out hitman genre – and contains what may be one of the top five winks in movie history.
  17. Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg
    Catching Fire is more concerned with the mercurial essence of its subject than it is with the nuts and bolts of her life. We learn little, for example, about her family background.
  18. IF
    F is an engaging kid-pleaser that celebrates the power of imagination and suggests that the key to overcoming the tough times might have been lurking in our minds all along.
  19. Two Tickets to Greece
    The character of Magalie is so enraging that you would chuck yourself into the Aegean Sea rather than spend two weeks in her company.
  20. Tiger Stripes
    The message is not always clear, but it’s an entertaining ride.
  21. The Surfer
    Crisply scripted by Thomas Martin and directed by Finnegan with a pleasing, no-frills intensity, The Surfer feels resolutely old-school. It’s a low-budget, hard-hitting comic bruiser of a picture: a midlife-crisis movie dressed up as a 1970s exploitation flick.
  22. Hoard
    Carmoon’s depiction of trauma, grief and mental health in crisis as a kind of putrid, repellent stench that clings to the skin, stings the eyeballs and turns the stomach makes for a queasily insalubrious viewing experience. Hoard is a film I admire, but struggle to like.
  23. La Chimera
    There’s something about the folkloric quality of Rohrwacher’s films, their embrace of a kind of earth magic, that prompts people to describe them as fairytales. But this is perhaps misleading. La Chimera is no twinkly escapist fantasy, it’s a film full of grit, thorns and greed.
  24. Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger
    While the film lacks the bravura flourishes that characterised Powell and Pressburger at their peak, it’s an engrossing celebration of two of British cinema’s most distinctive voices, and their creative harmony.
  25. The Almond and the Seahorse
    A film so grating that you long for the sweet release of amnesia.
  26. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
    This is a top-quality summer blockbuster, bringing fresh blood and new ideas into the series while staying recognisably within the worlds so meticulously created in the previous three movies.
  27. Challengers
    The sex is like tennis: fierce, combative bouts in which there will always be a winner and a loser. And the tennis, ultimately, is like sex: an ecstatic consummation between two perfectly matched people at their glistening physical peak.
  28. Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara
    With stately restraint, Bellocchio manages to put the audience in an ever-tightening chokehold of tension and outrage.
  29. The American Society of Magical Negroes
    Kobi Libii’s film is far too diffident and polite in its approach to leave much of a mark in the conversation about race and representation in US culture.
  30. I.S.S.
    While DeBose is impressive, the contrived plot of Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s movie hinges, somewhat preposterously, on rational, highly trained scientific minds devolving overnight into paranoid, murderous maniacs.
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