The Times' Scores

For 277 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. Negative: 23 out of 277
277 movie reviews
  1. It’s loud and diverting and very young children are sure to be entertained. But it’s also utterly dead, right down to its hollow, greedy, cash-grabbing core.
  2. 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.
  3. This being Reichardt, white-knuckle thrills were unlikely to be on the menu either, but you would have hoped for something to engage with beyond a vague hum of disappointment.
  4. Roustayi handles the change of gear impeccably, though, balancing extreme events with layered characterisation.
  5. 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.
  6. It has its moments, mostly in the initial set-up. And Armstrong still lands a few zingers.
  7. This kind of unhinged ambition is what cinema does better than anything else.
  8. The last act has a disappointing inevitability, with little of the transcendent emotion of the first hour.
  9. 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.
  10. The film instantly falls into the seemingly insuperable live-action remake trap — the deluded belief that simply putting the original on film, sometimes via a frame-by-frame copy, is enough in itself.
  11. This Indiana Jones knock-off is staggeringly slapdash.
  12. Johansson and her excellent cast nail the big moments and revel in the small ones.
  13. There’s little dramatic jeopardy here and certainly no danger. Instead, by the closing credits Cécile has barely changed, and the musical around her has barely registered. Sorry, the film with songs in it.
  14. Sometimes, a couple of scenes can make all the difference.
  15. It’s knotty stuff for a first film but Lighton finds a delicate balance between disturbing, funny, sweet and sad.
  16. 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.
  17. This is original, explosive (literally — you’ll see!) and ovation-worthy, cinema.
  18. On the positive side, Threapleton, the daughter of Kate Winslet, is sensational. Quietly commanding, but always glowing with charisma, she is the discovery here.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. It’s an ambitious contemporary western shot last year yet set in the summer of 2020, and ostensibly aims, in almost every scene, to analyse and ridicule the political obsessions and digital neuroses that dominated that moment. And, well, it’s quite the mess.
  22. 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.
  23. Jacobsen is an instinctive stylist and the film sometimes slips into cottagecore territory, complete with chunky knitwear and crepuscular lighting. Yet the truth of the family’s situation always surfaces, making the beauty hollow and the loss more keenly felt.
  24. It’s not often that films get better on a second viewing, but this dense, challenging and intellectually rigorous documentary about “Hitler’s favourite film-maker” Leni Riefenstahl is one of those exceptions.
  25. Rosamund Pike and Matthew Rhys deliver a concentrated burst of parental trauma in this propulsive psychological thriller that’s set almost entirely inside a Land Rover late at night. It’s like Tom Hardy’s Locke but more intense.
  26. 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.
  27. Building a whole movie around leaden, titter-inducing chunks of ersatz anti-drama is madness.
  28. And then, saving the best till last, literally (of the entire franchise), there’s a helter-skelter biplane chase along South Africa’s Blyde River Canyon that’s simply one of the most extraordinary and apparently death-defying stunt set-pieces that anyone, let alone an A-list megastar, has ever attempted to put on film. And for this, Tom Cruise, we salute you. Mission accomplished.
  29. It’s sloppily directed by David Ayer (Sabotage) with a depressing lack of urgency and a sense that everything here has been done better, more efficiently and with more emotional engagement before.
  30. Everything ultimately descends into an overblown and hyper-violent firefight south of the border, near Juárez. It is an action movie, after all. But it’s one of the good ones.

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