The Times' Scores

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For 250 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 1.6 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: 120 out of 250
  2. Mixed: 110 out of 250
  3. Negative: 20 out of 250
250 movie reviews
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  1. One Battle After Another
    Hefty yet cantering, deliriously funny in places, as audacious as a moonshot — One Battle After Another is probably Anderson’s best film.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    His Girl Friday
    They no longer make the fizzing, dangerous compound that is Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell’s chemistry in His Girl Friday.
  3. No Other Land
    The film is consistently gripping and harrowing, while including delicate moments of optimism, where Abraham and Adra enjoy quiet conversations (sometimes beautifully shot by Szor) over a hookah pipe at night. And then, inevitably, it is back to violence, conflict and hate.
  4. The Secret Agent
    The sidewinding rhythm of the film will probably throw some, but that’s all the more reason to see it in the theatre: a lot goes on beneath the surface, the lack of signposting has a cumulative power, and the ending is a beauty, mixing heartbreak, hope and the boy, Fernando, who has been patiently waiting for his father all along.
  5. 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.
  6. Nickel Boys
    Very occasionally a movie appears that understands the potential of cinema so deeply that it changes the medium for everyone.
  7. Anora
    Each change of tone is handled with sinuous ease by Baker, one of the best independent directors, who is finally getting the props he deserves.
  8. The Brutalist
    The performances are savagely good, with Pearce and Brody both on awards season form. And it’s shot on rarely seen 70mm film stock, which means that it looks like something beautiful, haunting and strange, but always from the long-forgotten past.
  9. Sound of Falling
    Schilinski is in such control of every frame, every cut, prop and camera move that it’s often breathtaking just to witness the emergence of this grandly interlaced tapestry of grief.
  10. Sorry, Baby
    Sorry, Baby is of a different order of achievement. Walking a tonal tightrope between comedy and tragedy with an exquisite balance that recalls Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain of last year, the film manages to address a difficult, dark subject with a blunt candour that is also slyly funny.
  11. 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.
  12. Hard Truths
    Mike Leigh and his leading actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste have created a bilious protagonist to rank alongside Jack Nicholson’s ornery grouch in As Good As It Gets and David Thewlis’s scabrous drifter in Leigh’s own Naked.
  13. Train Dreams
    Past western, part romance, part philosophical treatise, this Sundance Film Festival stunner also feels like the greatest Terrence Malick film that Malick never made.
  14. Withnail and I
    Robinson's curlicued dialogue and the excellent performances make for rich entertainment; the fusion of writing and acting is particularly fine in the case of the drunken, self-consciously eccentric Withnail, whose many great lines are perfectly delivered by Richard E Grant.
    • The Times
  15. Resurrection
    This kind of unhinged ambition is what cinema does better than anything else.
  16. Good One
    Towards the end, that mood changes devastatingly. Another film might have needed a murder to send these chills but Donaldson is in such control of the tone, and her cast are on such exquisite form, that a single sentence has massive reverberations.
  17. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert
    This is a celebration of the King doing what he did best, and loving every second.
  18. Cover-Up
    It’s a sobering riposte to the clickbait era.
  19. Sentimental Value
    Reinsve seems to give nothing away and yet there’s not a scene she’s in where we’re not clued into Nora’s emotions. The acting is almost invisible. Nora, it becomes clear, is the mirror image of her father: giving free rein to her emotions only under the cover of the art.
  20. No Other Choice
    There is, initially, some heavy slapstick here (the first murder is a calamitous mess) but the bite of the film resides in the richness of its characters and how it delves into the protagonist’s home life.
  21. A Real Pain
    This is a story that is perfectly weighted between bleak and warm, poignant and irreverent.
  22. Two Prosecutors
    His legal ambitions are thus stymied at every turn by missed appointments and disinterested power players, resulting in glacial narrative pacing and a miserably predictable outcome. It is, at best, vaguely Kafka-esque but also, for the viewer, quite the trial.
  23. Pillion
    It’s knotty stuff for a first film but Lighton finds a delicate balance between disturbing, funny, sweet and sad.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Bag
    Fassbender’s crispness is the perfect foil for Blanchett’s immaculately dressed voluptuary: the two entwine in bed like snakes but you never doubt their devotion to one another. Even their treachery feels like a warped kind of love.
  25. The President's Cake
    It’s a testament to Nayyef’s ingenuous performance and the mesmerising sense of place that the film is always compelling and sometimes bleakly funny, although there are no happy endings.
  26. Sinners
    The ending’s a bit iffy, the action so-so. And yet the genre-mashing audacity (part horror, part historical epic, part musical) is so assured, the characters so rich, and the flights of fancy so ambitious that it’s impossible not to be moved.
  27. Sirât
    This is original, explosive (literally — you’ll see!) and ovation-worthy, cinema.
  28. Hamnet
    The ending, set in the Globe during a production of Hamlet, is harrowing, meaningful and magnificently sad. You might want to yell out, “Make it stop!” This is, instantly, the essential Shakespeare movie.
  29. 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.
  30. Power To The People: John & Yoko Live in NYC
    It’s an exquisite portrait of a musical genius at work. And Yoko Ono.
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