The Times' Scores

For 262 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 41% higher than the average critic
  • 1% same as the average critic
  • 58% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 Pride & Prejudice
Lowest review score: 0 The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
Score distribution:
  1. Negative: 21 out of 262
262 movie reviews
  1. Skarsgard and Reinsve are excellent as two damaged people who are only able to open up when they’re working, but you yearn for the film itself to open up. It’s an intriguing premise, stylishly executed but sometimes lacking a bit of heart.
  2. There’s lots of fun here, some of the one-liners are exquisite and the helter-skelter finale is delightfully overstuffed. Frustratingly, it’s still second-grade Pixar.
  3. A sensual reframing of a story that must still be raw for Simón, 38, the film doesn’t quite match the subtlety and originality of Summer 1993. It’s a satisfying enough addition to the saga, though, and a fillip for the Galician tourist board.
  4. Like the original movie, this isn’t super funny, unless burping, farting and people being hit in the groin with golf balls is your thing.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    If you want to soak in what amounts to a concert film with an origin story, Becoming Led Zeppelin is sonically impressive and visually arresting.
  5. Thatcher’s performance is mostly a marvel. She’s instantly sympathetic, the most deliberately “human” being in the film, and yet the genius of her characterisation as a robot is in the way she slightly over-enunciates her dialogue and walks with the odd shuffle of a Thunderbirds marionette.
  6. It’s more funny peculiar than funny ha ha and, alas, doesn’t always work.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    It could be seen as a cynical capitalist move by the best businesswoman in the game. And it definitely is — at least partly.
  7. It’s all too obvious that The Smashing Machine has been conceived, among other things, as another Safdie-branded career boost for a pair of charming, charismatic actors who could do with a dash of Oscar magic. It’s just a shame that their film is a fugazi.
  8. It’s always compelling, and a powerful first feature.
  9. Fans are calling this the Brothers Grimm meets The Substance but it’s better than that sounds. And certainly harder to watch.
  10. Returning to the screen after a long absence, Lawrence manages such profound levels of eye-rolling pissed-offness that it’s difficult not to take it as a sign of the actress pushing back on the suffocating levels of adoration she has been subjected to.
  11. It’s not going to rock everyone’s world and neither is it a patch on Carol. But it’s competent, sometimes clever, film-making with ideas and lots of heart.
  12. Coen has gone back to his happy place but this time he’s not taken the audience with him.
  13. It’s not quite vintage Jarmusch (for that see Night on Earth and Broken Flowers), but it is light and compassionate.
  14. It’s a decent film about an underexplored subject and adequately acted by a cast of inexperienced unknowns, but nothing we haven’t seen before from the determinedly low-key Dardennes.
  15. No matter how many witty lines (there are a few) are placed into the mouths of postproduction beasties, they never seem real, nor do they interact credibly with their human co-stars (think Jar Jar Binks from Star Wars, but on all fours).
  16. You can’t lie in a close-up, which is lucky for Stewart. Because her lead actress, on camera throughout, expresses the kind of deeply moving primal agony and preternatural resilience that never once feels false, and ultimately compensates for the ostentatious nonsense around her.
  17. It is not the greatest Frankenstein ever. It’s not even an especially good one. It’s just, in the end, serviceable.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Solid on research, weaker on analysis, this is an affectionate celebration that keeps the northern soul campfires burning nicely.
  18. The film plays like a well-leafed anthology of Irish folklore, handsomely enough shot but lacking the unifying conceit that has driven, say, the great Australian horror movies of recent years: The Bababook, Talk to Me, Bring Her Back. Hangings, hauntings, howling winds? For McCarthy, it’s all just good craic.
  19. The writer-director Runar Runarsson makes a virtue out of this narrative simplicity, however, and delivers the equivalent of sweetly moving “slow” cinema, where we get to luxuriate in the characters for long, long, sometimes wordless takes, and to find in the exemplary performance of the relatively new and untested Hall a heartbreaking expression of hidden grief.
  20. It’s when they return to Earth-828 that the film reverts to type: enervating action, platitudinous script, predictable ending.
  21. Layton’s direction is powerful but patient and Berry brings real bite to her insurance agent, who at 53 is prey to the bitter realisation that the system is not built in her favour.
  22. The last act has a disappointing inevitability, with little of the transcendent emotion of the first hour.
  23. With Bader and Blyth on quietly charismatic form throughout, [Haley's] made a film that is eminently slick, consistently palatable and instantly forgettable. The perfect Netflix product.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Parallel Tales (Histoires parallèles) begins as an ambitious, metatextual, multicharacter ensemble drama, with various key cast members playing dual roles. But it rambles on too long, losing much of its early charm and focus in a ponderous, undercooked second half.
  24. Personally, I gorged myself silly on the esoteric references, and appreciated profoundly the way that this ersatz Belmondo, just like the real thing, rubs his lower lip. But I’m not convinced that everyone else will.
  25. Flawed to its core but never less than riveting
  26. It’s unashamedly derivative but also entertaining. Butler and Kravitz are charming together and dripping with chemistry.

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