Tim Robey

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The Telegraph
For 943 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 41% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 57% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 4.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Tim Robey's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 Roofman
Lowest review score: 0 Cats
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 340 out of 943
  2. Mixed: 541 out of 943
  3. Negative: 62 out of 943
943 movie reviews
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    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Tim Robey
    When Boys Leave Home
    Novello again, in an underrated road-to-ruin melodrama, plays a public-school rugby champ disgraced when he takes the fall for getting a waitress pregnant. Visual experiments abound and there's a justly famous scene with the curtains of a Paris nightspot being pulled back, exposing its superannuated regulars to the unsparing sunlight. [14 Jul 2012, p.4]
    • The Telegraph
      • Posted Apr 30, 2025
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Tim Robey
    The Rule of Jenny Pen
    It wants to become a cat-and-mouse game between the leads, but the leaky script dampens any real hope of suspense.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Tim Robey
    Wiener-Dog
    This prodding, acidic, bumpy-but-worthwhile movie is about even the world’s consenting creatures winding up with nothing they really wanted, while a dog submits to human will just to make us feel like we’re the ones in charge.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Tim Robey
    Fast Five
    Director Justin Lin has become the man to give this franchise legs: the start and finish here, defying every imaginable law of physics, are series highs.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Tim Robey
    Sasquatch Sunset
    Sasquatch Sunset barely gets started – though it does have remarkable prosthetics and some lovely sunsets.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Tim Robey
    Love & Friendship
    It’s flat-out hilarious – find me a funnier screen stab at Austen, and I’m tempted to offer your money back personally. Gliding through its compact 92 minutes with alert photography and not a single scene wasted, it’s also Stillman on the form of his life.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 100 Tim Robey
    Holy Spider
    It’s profoundly compelling, expertly made, and quite intentionally horrifying.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Tim Robey
    Causeway
    Causeway is an excellent, moving, determinedly low-key slice of US indie cinema.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Tim Robey
    The Midwife
    It’s Deneuve who musses up the formula and makes the film worth seeing, by generously bringing out her inner vulgarian.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Tim Robey
    Cyrano
    That the film winds up cramped, underwhelming and strangely thwarted is hard to square with all the effort up on screen – or perhaps it just feels too much like effort.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Tim Robey
    The Two Faces of January
    It’s an elegantly pleasurable period thriller, a film of tidy precision and class.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Tim Robey
    Audrey
    This film leaves you itching to read a meaty biography, even as it solidly maps out Hepburn’s emotional life, and explains the relationship with trauma which cut her out so well to be a UNICEF ambassador, raising millions for Bosnian war orphans and Somalian famine relief.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Tim Robey
    Judy
    Sketchy it may be, but the film finds dreamy consolation in the final curtain.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Tim Robey
    Truth
    Blanchett makes us feel the creeping horror of professional disgrace, the fear and stigma, however unfair Mapes argues her treatment may have been. We watch a polished professional come apart at the seams, caught up in self-incrimination and spiralling neurosis.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Tim Robey
    In Fear
    Writer-director Jeremy Lovering, in his feature debut, keeps a skilful handle on technique — his film is a calling card that could give you paper cuts.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Tim Robey
    Slack Bay
    Slack Bay is half as long as Quinquin, but still feels too long. Major ensemble scenes (a family banquet, a service on the beach) dawdle indulgently, as if waiting for the joke to start.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 100 Tim Robey
    Roofman
    Roofman has heart, energy and personality fit to burst. If the cinema gods decided that it was finally time for Channing Tatum to have a chance at an Oscar nomination, they could hardly have equipped him better than with this role.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Tim Robey
    Swan Song
    The film frustrates because it’s frictionless, almost completely devoid of credible conflict, and generally keen to sail through as a testament to everlasting love at its most altruistic.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Tim Robey
    Dumb Money
    In trying to pretend a blip was a seismic revolution, the film winds up distinctly strained, and more depressing than it quite knows.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Tim Robey
    Breaking
    The film fares best when the chief negotiator, a fellow Marine vet played by the late, great Michael Kenneth Williams, steps into the fray. It’s one of his final performances, and a wary, angry one that elevates the material.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Tim Robey
    Catfight
    Sheer novelty powers this confrontational curio, up to a point. But the nastiness cuts both ways.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Tim Robey
    Mothering Sunday
    There’s so much distinction here, and maybe just a slight vagueness about theme as Husson nears the finish line: it’s a tough ask to end a film well which is so given over to memory, and this becomes a bit of a waft in the general direction of closure.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Tim Robey
    The Return
    The headline draw remains the headline draw – and sometimes it’s enough for two lead actors to animate, complicate and enrich a project by lending it all the mysterious gravity you could ask for.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Tim Robey
    Blood Father
    In the grizzled spectacle Gibson willingly makes of himself, it has a B-movie equivalent of that A-plus Mickey Rourke comeback, delivered with just enough clout to count as a step in the right direction.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Tim Robey
    Steve
    As a feat of adaptation by Max Porter, from his 2023 novella Shy, it’s quite fascinating.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 40 Tim Robey
    Puzzle
    So what’s to dislike here? Hardly anything – it’s finding things actively to like that poses more of a problem.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Tim Robey
    Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale
    It’s not a peak for the doughty franchise so much as a reverential goodbye. Jollity is also served, when it’s not straining for misplaced importance.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Tim Robey
    Paddington In Peru
    It’s all impeccably pleasant, just a tiny bit bland.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Tim Robey
    Staying Vertical
    Staying Vertical is a script by a hot talent never quite getting round to being fully written, and instead disappearing down a series of suggestive dead ends.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Tim Robey
    The End We Start From
    With her actors, Belo captures moments of staggering grief that are moving in their restraint: we deal, usually, with the stricken aftermath.
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