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 4.2 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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    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Tim Robey
    Widows
    Dramatic fragments, blasted our way, dance before us for the next two hours, rotating and glinting, colliding and connecting, like a puzzle in zero gravity. As a transition into flinty, supercharged genre filmmaking, it gets by on no more than electric confidence, high-fiving technical virtuosity, and a cast to die for. It’s very satisfying.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Tim Robey
    The Seagull
    Your hope, gradually dashed, is for The Seagull to convey more of a sense of human loss than this faintly so-whattish drama about a dead bird.
    • 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.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Tim Robey
    The Miseducation of Cameron Post
    What a step up for Moretz this is. Her wobbly credentials as a leading lady – oddly, and maybe ill-advisedly, there’s a Carrie reference in the script – suddenly feel like a thing of the past. There’s eye-rolling resignation in her performance, then bottomless despair, then tentative hope.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Tim Robey
    American Animals
    It’s really the style and performances, more than the pseudo-experimental structure Layton has chosen, that keep the film grabby.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Tim Robey
    The Nun
    It’s sludgy, and kind of random, and if you already know you’ll enjoy it anyway, you undoubtedly will.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Tim Robey
    The Equalizer 2
    At base, these are meat-and-potatoes genre thrills, but the meat’s decently seasoned, and, even if there’s too much token foliage crowding the plate, it’s cute that they mind about presentation.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Tim Robey
    The Bookshop
    Nighy and Mortimer have just a couple of scenes together, but they’re easily the film’s best: both actors sink gratifyingly into the nuances of this incipient friendship, bond over books you actually believe they’ve read, and give the film its best hope of doing Fitzgerald justice.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Tim Robey
    Ant-Man and the Wasp
    Though Rudd and Lilly spark off each other just as appealingly as before, the more urgent point is for Lilly to earn The Wasp her equal billing, which she very much does.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Tim Robey
    Hearts Beat Loud
    There’s very little marring this as a pleasant experience all round, even if little, outside the performances, ramps it up into the realm of the truly memorable.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Tim Robey
    The Escape
    For all The Escape’s weaknesses, it’s held together with real sinew by Arterton, who lives and breathes the stifling air of Tara’s habitat without needing to act up a storm at any point.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Tim Robey
    Unfriended: Dark Web
    It’s impressive how many layered twists Dark Web inflicts after its simple start, suggesting the tendrils of a conspiracy proliferating so quickly and steathily there’s no undoing them.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Tim Robey
    McQueen
    For all its baroque pomp, though, McQueen intuits the one unspoken terror – loneliness – which nudged this fascinating artist into the void.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Tim Robey
    Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    OK, McQuarrie may not have De Palma’s sweat-drop precision, John Woo’s craziness or the impish wit of Brad Bird, but his mastery of logistics here is easily sufficient to make it the blockbuster of the summer.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Tim Robey
    Burning
    This is Lee’s closest ever film to a thriller, but it defies expectations, offering multiple, murky solutions to a set of mysteries at once.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 80 Tim Robey
    Cold War
    Music has a vital role all the way through, inspiring the film’s rhythm and flow, its time jumps and nomadic shifts in location, its very destiny.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Tim Robey
    On Chesil Beach
    On Chesil Beach is a non-disaster, essentially, until it falls off a cliff.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Tim Robey
    Whitney
    The film is oddly unmoving as a memorial, but as with Amy Winehouse, it inspires a collective mea culpa for the feeding frenzy of public judgement that only turned to sympathy when it was far too late.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Tim Robey
    I, Tonya
    Compellingly stumped by its own heroine, the film simply can’t make its mind up about Tonya Harding. If it did, it wouldn’t get away with being such a blast.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Tim Robey
    Wonder Wheel
    It isn’t Allen escaping into the past so much as defensively dredging it up, script-wise. And though he’s hired another world-class cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, to give this the gaudy hypercoloured glow of a pastichey Douglas Sirk melodrama, the film’s look is pushy and unattractive, as if it’s wearing too much lipstick.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Tim Robey
    Annihilation
    Portman’s high-tension acting, her inability to relax, suits the material down to the ground. It’s one of her best performances, moving through credible grief and bewilderment, but facing up bullishly to her fears by the end, and finding some kind of exhausted resolve to interrogate them.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Tim Robey
    Blockers
    Leslie Mann’s warmth and air of charming confusion have helped many a film before. But she gets some definitive moments for the clipreel here.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 20 Tim Robey
    Death Wish
    A pound-store Tarantino with the sadism dialled up and the wit switched off, Roth has the very basics of a stomach-clenching suspense sequence down pat. It’s just that the film never provides any rationale for why you’d want to submit to it.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Tim Robey
    A Quiet Place
    Everything builds with implacable skill up to, but not quite including, the finale, which is played for a table-turning punchline that feels more crowd-pleasing than strictly satisfying.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Tim Robey
    Thoroughbreds
    It doesn’t have easy access to human emotion, instead deploying a series of techniques to fake it.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Tim Robey
    Love, Simon
    It’s a casual breakthrough, normalising what was once a taboo.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Tim Robey
    Western
    Grisebach has an observational grasp of the male psyche – especially its pathological obsession with pride – that fairly takes the breath away.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Tim Robey
    Custody
    As a demonstration of slighted masculinity being given an inch, taking a mile, and chewing it up with breakneck fury, the film could hardly be more timely or disconcerting. But it understands the ignition point of rage – not just its ugly momentum.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Tim Robey
    I Feel Pretty
    The only means it can find to be funny is sabotaging its own message, which isn’t a great starting point, let alone finishing point, for a body-positive comedy.
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