The Times' Scores

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For 278 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 2.1 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. Positive: 130 out of 278
  2. Mixed: 125 out of 278
  3. Negative: 23 out of 278
278 movie reviews
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  1. Rental Family
    Yes, it’s just awful. Fake, puke-inducing emotional dishonesty of the most absurd kind. Nothing here makes sense.
  2. The Rip
    The film is a hoot, possibly the most gloriously macho cop movie since the writer-director Joe Carnahan’s previous cop movie Copshop (2021), or his breakout cop movie Narc (2002), or the cop movie he wrote for Edward Norton, Pride and Glory (2008).
  3. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
    Gosh, I hope that Ralph Fiennes’s back is OK. Because the 63-year-old certainly did a lot of heavy lifting in this latest instalment of the long-running zombie franchise. I mean that metaphorically, of course, because in this movie it’s up to Fiennes to provide the emotional, intellectual and comedic fireworks.
  4. People We Meet on Vacation
    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.
  5. Sentimental Value
    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.
  6. David Bowie: The Final Act
    Like the man, this film isn’t sentimental but gosh, it packs a punch.
  7. The Housemaid
    Sweeney proves here, after Christy, Echo Valley and Reality, that she’s a performer of versatility and, crucially, staying power.
  8. Song Sung Blue
    Jackman’s tendency towards camp is hidden by glitzy outfits and silly stylings of his stage persona, while Hudson is positively unleashed by the demands that Claire places upon her. She has been quite rightly nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance, and is a credible best actress Oscar contender.
  9. The Six Billion Dollar Man
    You really could not make any of this up.
  10. Avatar: Fire and Ash
    It’s difficult to convey just how little dramatic urgency there is in a film that’s effectively a computer-generated diorama, one that’s filled with fantastical flora and fauna and mystical beings who are all dressed up with nowhere to go.
  11. Goodbye June
    The narrative arrives in clumsy self-contained chunks that don’t always gel.
  12. Oh. What. Fun.
    You know that your comedy is in crisis when you’ve substituted actual jokes for the grating rhythms of an oompah band. Still, Pfeiffer remains charismatic till the end. She deserved better.
  13. It Was Just an Accident
    The screaming and shouting eventually detract from the drama, although perhaps Panahi is making a point about the hysteria of Iran’s rulers. He is certainly making a point about the traumatising effects of their cruelty, with which he is intimately familiar.
  14. Eternity
    Eternity might have worked if the three leads conveyed anything beyond jaded inertia in each other’s company. They are supposed to be consumed by a love so passionate it propels them into adventures beyond the grave. They look, instead, as if they could barely get out of their trailers.
  15. Cover-Up
    It’s a sobering riposte to the clickbait era.
  16. Magazine Dreams
    Majors plays the central character, Killian Maddox, with subtlety and sensitivity.
  17. Ella McCay
    Mackey is fine but wasted, and still clearly anticipating a role to top her astounding Emily from 2022. The political messaging, meanwhile, is grimly bromidic.
  18. Fackham Hall
    Despite the game involvement of actors as fine as Damian Lewis, Katherine Waterston, Thomasin McKenzie and Anna Maxwell Martin, this Downton Abbey spoof is often aggressively unfunny.
  19. The Tale of Silyan
    Arguments will rage about how much of this is staged and how much captured. The film-makers have labelled the film “a documentary fable” and that works for me. It’s that place where Ken Loach and David Attenborough meet. In the best possible sense.
  20. Marty Supreme
    There are gruesome gunfights, car chases, savage beatings and the sense by the closing frames that Safdie has delivered the narrative equivalent of an unstoppable plummet down an especially precipitous flight of stairs. You’ll emerge battered and bruised.
  21. Zootopia 2
    Perhaps most delightful, though, are the carefully drawn supporting characters, with welcome returns for Flash the sloth and Maurice LaMarche, the Vito Corleone-esque arctic shrew. Truly an offer you can’t refuse.
  22. Die My Love
    Nothing has dramatic impact. Nobody seems to believe anything they’re doing. Lawrence and Pattinson, two innately charismatic performers, are strangely self-conscious, and so many of their scenes seem like experimental improv or half-cooked rehearsals.
  23. Wicked: For Good
    Erivo is extraordinary as Elphaba. Although she is known and rightly celebrated for her vocal prowess, her best scenes are wordless. She carries whole set pieces, and the wounded essence of the entire project, in her haunted looks and her mood of quiet despair.
  24. Now You See Me: Now You Don't
    My two stars are for [Pike] alone. She’s an utter hoot in every scene, part Miranda Priestly, part Hannibal Lecter, and it’s an unsettling testament to her power as a performer that she tilts the sympathy axis of the entire movie towards her.
  25. Nuremberg
    Flawed to its core but never less than riveting
  26. A House of Dynamite
    The film rarely draws breath. It barrels bleakly, with effortless aplomb, to the end. You might need a stiff drink.
  27. The Running Man
    It all ends with a grossly emetic monologue about how evil mass media is trying to “make us hate each other so they can steal from us”. And The Running Man is not part of the mass media how? Still, who doesn’t love Shaun of the Dead?
  28. Frankenstein
    It is not the greatest Frankenstein ever. It’s not even an especially good one. It’s just, in the end, serviceable.
  29. Earwig and the Witch
    Ultimately, bar some tedious spell-making scenes, nothing happens. Harrowingly poor.
  30. Hedda
    There’s only one thing worse than being trapped in a theatre watching a badly staged play: being trapped in a cinema watching a badly adapted stage play. And so it is, frequently, with this Ibsen update that’s pulled in too many directions at once by its ambitious director, Nia DaCosta, and the producer-star Tessa Thompson.
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