Time Out London's Scores

  • Movies
For 1,246 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 48% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 48% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 64
Highest review score: 100 Dark Days
Lowest review score: 20 The Secret Scripture
Score distribution:
1246 movie reviews
  1. Simon Pegg plays the world’s most unconvincing psychiatrist in this fluffy, irritating Brit comedy.
  2. Everything here feels inauthentic, from the cast speaking their lines in English to the unthrilling final escape attempt.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Howard T Duck, of Marvel Comics, might well have a beef against Lucasfilm for transforming his magnetic comic strip personality into a zipperless polyester duck-suit (filled interchangeably by eight different actors, each apparently under four feet in height) in this aimless movie.
  3. It’s all so overly macho that it plays like a camp pleasure-cruise.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Where Misery restored one's faith in Stephen King adaptations, this travesty buries his reputation alive. Neither Singleton nor scriptwriter John Esposito has grasped the anti-capitalist undercurrents of King's story, relying instead on cheap shocks and dodgy creature effects.
  4. Soul-crushingly unfunny...It’s a movie that assumes that if you repeat ad nauseam an unfunny joke about ass-licking, it’ll magically become hilarious. It’s so grotesquely misogynistic, it makes The Hangover look like Thelma & Louise.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Looks like something knocked off on rest days from Smokey and the Bandit II. The last five minutes, when they show out-takes of flubbed lines, etc, are hysterical. The rest is strictly for those willing to pay for a series of TV chat show performances.
  5. Putting the ‘retch’ into ‘wretched’, this wedding comedy makes the fatal assumption that the sight of acting icons of a certain age – Robert De Niro, Susan Sarandon and Diane Keaton – behaving badly will have us rolling in the aisles.
  6. Overall this is dull, derivative, murky stuff, full of running and shouting but never really going anywhere.
  7. Contrary to appearances, Mortdecai isn’t a total disaster: Depp may be suffering the most catastrophic career slump since Eddie Murphy said yes to Norbit, but he’s still perfectly watchable.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    A right royal turkey.
  8. It’s a struggle to glean many positives from this ugly, superficial offering, which gestures towards feminist empowerment while heaping mental and physical hurt on every one of its female characters.
  9. Precious Cargo isn’t actually as objectionable as your average petrol-station-bargain-bin thriller, thanks to one or two half-decent lines, a plot that vaguely makes sense and an unexpected dearth of outright misogyny. It’s still pretty rubbish, though.
  10. Clarke directs fights in weird slo-mo and is generous with scenes of himself in his undies.
  11. This reboot of the Marvel superhero franchise is a film of two halves: the first likeable and fun, the second tiresome and loud.
  12. From chases on boats to bust-ups on buses, the action and locations are fitfully engaging, but the story feels cobbled together and the dialogue is often painful.
  13. Taken 3 scores over its predecessor on almost every level: the stakes are higher, the LA locations are nicely photographed and, best of all, there’s an actual plot, with twists and everything.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    There is not nearly enough violence. No one is eviscerated. The villains, all mumblers to a man, are not punished by having their tongues cut out. The body count is only somewhere in the high eighties - and most of these are simply gunned down with a deplorable lack of invention. Very little is done by way of eye-gouging, limb-crushing or tooth-extraction.
  14. Imagine simultaneously eating wallpaper paste, listening to Coldplay and watching the entire ‘Da Vinci Code’ trilogy back to back and you’ll have some idea how grindingly tedious the experience of watching Rings becomes.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    A loud, obnoxious, single-idea schlocker...There's carnage galore, but minimal interest. King himself described it as a 'wonderful moron picture', and he was half-right.
  15. This enjoyable-despite-itself horror flick has precisely nothing new to offer - with the arguable exception of a monster in a miniskirt, which may be a first.
  16. Asking far more questions than it could ever answer, Exposed ends on a note so flat and predictable that it undermines all that went before. But there are strange and memorable moments here, and a mood of eerie foreboding that’s hard to shake.
  17. In short, the raw materials are there for a fun – if throwback – genre piece of the kind that kept ’90s cinema stocked with stiffs. Alas, the tension dissipates in a tangle of muddled subplots, sluggish pacing and some strange decisions from director Tomas Alfredson (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). The result isn’t a Bone Collector, never mind a Se7en.
  18. With its unusual central conceit and awkward, somnambulant pacing, The Cobbler feels like a quirky foreign comedy that’s been mis-translated into English, losing all the subtlety and humour in the process.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Sadly, the script is so patchy that most of the genuine laughs are squeezed into the first half; the rest is a rather tacky and confused extended joke about the nuclear arms race, which is tasteless only because it fails to be funny.
    • Time Out London
    • 22 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Aside from a good exchange rate of one-liners, the chief feeling left by the movie (a remake of Claude Berri's Un Moment d'Egarement) is of a thin, cynical calculation. Sole reason to catch it would be to monitor one more step of Caine's increasing excellence as middle age overtakes him.
  19. Grace of Monaco could have been a camp delight, but it feels too much like a stodgy, outdated television movie to work even as kitsch.
  20. There are laughs, but they’re tinged with the sadness of watching a beloved elderly relative making a bloody old fool of himself.
  21. Sean Penn's pompous, ethically bankrupt humanitarian aid drama The Last Face would surely have worked better as a charity single.... Instead, we get this vain mess, a vacuous romance with real human pain as background noise and where the only honest pleasure is waiting to see what misstep it will take next.
    • 15 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    A copy rather than a sequel, this has none of the intelligence, wit or tempo that graced the first swarm of hungry fish.

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