Time Out's Scores

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For 6,373 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 41% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 56% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3.4 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 Pain and Glory
Lowest review score: 0 Surf Nazis Must Die
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2,476 out of 6373
  2. Mixed: 3,422 out of 6373
  3. Negative: 475 out of 6373
6373 movie reviews
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    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Still Mine
    Providing the film’s foundation, Cromwell is adept at revealing emotional layers lurking under the surface of his flannel-clad old-timer.
  2. A Screaming Man
    A collective sense of psychological turmoil seems to weigh heavily on the entire country as much as Champ, reaching critical mass once chaos creeps into the city-leading to a quiet, climactic walk into darkness that earns the right to be called haunting.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nanny
    It swings with aplomb from moments of tenderness and lightness to tragedy and cruelty.
  4. The Island President
    It's fascinating to be so close to a then-sitting head of state as he negotiates for his homeland's survival, and the news that Nasheed was recently deposed in a coup by Gayoom loyalists makes the hard-won victories he did secure all the more poignant.
  5. Our Nixon
    Having a backstage view of the momentous trip to China adds color, but the real takeaway here is a tone of dawning tragedy, sourness sneaking into even the most innocuous of visual records.
  6. The Cabin in the Woods
    Charmingly, like a throwback to the pre-Twitter age, here's a horror film that's been made with no reasonable way to discuss it beforehand.
  7. Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1
    Simply skip the first part entirely: "Killer Instinct" bulges with a disconnected jumble of nightclub attacks and fence-clipping escapes you've seen better elsewhere. Yet a tide change happens with the superior Public Enemy No. 1, which takes the subject's raging ego as its cue.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Miami Blues
    Ward is physically fine for Hoke, Baldwin a wired Junior, and best of all is Leigh's hooker, but it doesn't quite translate to the screen. Willeford didn't write genre, and the film washes about a bit finding a tone.
  9. Friendship
    Yes, Friendship does feel in many ways like an expanded I Think You Should Leave sketch built on bizarro absurdism and a waterfall of exacerbating circumstances. To his credit, though, DeYoung – a TV director making his feature debut – does take advantage of the opportunity in some satisfying ways.
  10. Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould
    Gould is as much of a mystery at the end as at the beginning. You get the feeling that's the way he'd have wanted it.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    It's Alive
    John Ryan's performance as the husband is particularly astute, and Bernard Herrmann's score milks the suspense for all it's worth.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Lady in Red
    Director Teague revels in the regular motifs of guns, money, fast cars and bizarre death, grafts on a layer of social comment lately absent in exploiters, and still slams through it all with an anarchic humour sometimes worthy of Sam Fuller.
  13. Headhunters
    Though the film wraps up its spinning-plates narrative a little too neatly, this is still a Scandi-noir to die for.
  14. Brittany Runs A Marathon
    Colaizzo successfully walks a fine line between inspiration and caution, never presenting Brittany as a patronizing role model for weight loss, nor a clichéd case of inner beauty. The film grasps the complex nature of Brittany’s self-image without ignoring its dark side.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Promising Young Woman
    After spending the whole movie subverting expectations, it feels like Promising Young Woman tries to have it both ways with a ‘satisfying’ twist, and leaves the audience adrift.
  16. Easier with Practice
    Geraghty’s performance is harrowing: Clinging to the phone and tortured by his ecstasy, he weaves empathy out of a flawed loner’s dysfunctional fetish.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shut Up and Play the Hits
    It's a tricky thing to pull off in a movie-equal parts talk and rock-but in a way, this mix of cerebral and kinetic is just what LCD strove for over the course of its ten-year life.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Love, Simon
    Love, Simon feels lived-in and self-assured, two traits its fans will want to adopt as well.
  19. Diplomacy
    Diplomacy’s origins as a play (written by Cyril Gely and starring the same actors) are always evident. Despite Schlöndorff’s attempts to give the movie some pop through widescreen lensing and noirish lighting, it’s a visually staid affair—very “filmed theater.” Fortunately, both Arestrup and Dussolier are captivating presences.
  20. Crime After Crime
    The tale itself is extraordinary, so why not let it do the talking? When Crime After Crime sifts through the facts, we feel the pull of justice; those moments might be enough.
  21. Dogtooth
    How perfectly perverse: In a summer crammed with sequels, remakes, '80s nostalgia and the frustrated sense of "What else y'got?" comes the most original nightmare in years.
  22. Prick Up Your Ears
    Oldman is brilliant; Molina’s Halliwell less subtle; and the film’s dissection of cottaging quaintly amusing.
  23. Journeyman
    Journeyman may be intimate but it never feels small.
  24. The King and I
    Poor songs (Hello Young Lovers, Getting to Know You), fair choreography, poor script, nice photography.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Smithereens
    This debut feature from Seidelman (ex-New York Film School) may be small and unambitious, but its old tale of the little girl lost in the city is told with energy and verve. Seidelman's sure feeling for the squalor and glamour of urban decay, and her speedy, stylish editing, combine with a pulsating soundtrack from The Feelies to create a febrile sense of Lower Manhattan street life: fast living on a permanent adrenalin high.
  26. In the House
    Characters seem less entrapped by their desires than by plot necessities — a fact that’s not redeemed by Ozon’s winking self-awareness.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Face in the Crowd
    In the opening scenes of Kazan and writer Budd Schulberg's satire on the dangers of television and advertising, Griffith's virtuoso, likeably irreverent performance makes for genuinely amusing viewing; but once he's mixing with the bigwigs, the film-makers' political messages start flying thick and fast, and the drama soon becomes overheated and unconvincing.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Exotica
    Fascinating, and without the pretensions that have marred some of Egoyan's earlier work.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    City of Gold
    What it lacks in cohesion, City of Gold makes up for in its subject’s wit and wisdom.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Rejoice and Shout
    No movie that includes Tharpe's blistering electric guitar and the soaring falsetto of the Swan Silvertones' Claude Jeter can be all bad, but it's astonishing how little this time capsule adds to its phenomenal source material. You might even call it a miracle.
  31. In Bloom
    A cute suitor shows up at Natia’s side with the gift of a pistol (for her protection, he insists), and you wait in vain for it to go off. Rather, the fireworks come in last-act shouting bouts, sincere if slightly disappointing.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Man for All Seasons
    An agonisingly respectable, sincere film of Robert Bolt's literate play, with Scofield as Sir Thomas More, endorsing the divine right of the Pope over and above his King.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    All That Jazz
    The jokes are relentlessly crass and objectionable; the song'n'dance routines have been created in the cutting-room and have lost any sense of fun; Fellini-esque moments add little but pretension; and scenes of a real open-heart operation, alternating with footage of a symbolic Angel of Death in veil and white gloves, fail even in terms of the surreal.
  34. M3GAN
    It always keeps you in on the joke – and it’s a killer joke.
  35. Always Shine
    What makes Always Shine transcend, though, is its long-telegraphed yet still unexplained switcheroo — not exactly new to fans of "Mulholland Drive" (or even "Freaky Friday") but near-experimental in its implications, given the context of two women struggling to make their professional marks.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mickey 17
    Mickey 17 may lack some of the political bite of his previous work – though there are Trumpian elements in Marshall – but it’s unquestionably tremendous fun: a big, strange spectacle that’s unlike most blockbuster cinema out there.
  37. Happy End
    Happy End is more meandering and less contained, though, and it doesn’t have a central, gripping mystery like The White Ribbon to make you lean in more than you recoil. Rather, it’s a more diffuse film, and a more despairing one, although there are flashes of gallows humor to lighten the pileup of downers. As for the happy end? Happy hunting.
  38. Burden
    An epic, often funny testament to creative fearlessness.
  39. Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine
    The film quickly abandons any sort of broader cultural interest in favor of a typical womb-to-tomb, warts-and-all examination of recent history’s most visionary CEO.
  40. Aliyah
    There’s no sense of what Wajeman is after here. A character piece should have some sense of a character’s who, what and why, right?
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Hospital
    It starts off with some marvellously cruel moments, and Scott's performance towers over the proceedings throughout. But Hiller's direction is pretty shoddy, while the script eventually loses its way and begins to look increasingly hysterical, at the same time shamelessly trivialising Scott's crisis.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Cairo Conspiracy
    Cairo Conspiracy doesn’t quite deliver the dazzling fireworks its promises, but it’s still a thought-provoking watch.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Zipper: Coney Island's Last Wild Ride
    Combining footage of embattled town meetings and raucous boardwalk scenes with evenhanded interviews and visualized statistics, Zipper is a compelling argument for a populist Coney Island whose days are, alas, numbered.
  44. Weathering with You
    This is an enchanting little story, to a point – it’s thin stuff, but while it never fully gets the emotions jangling, there’s charm to spare and the action is dynamic and occasionally thrilling.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Infinity Pool
    It’s one hell of a twisted ride with a troupe of truly awful characters as our guide. It’s damn-near unmissable and, from a safe distance, addictive as all hell.
  46. Good Hair
    A slipshod documentary about a fascinating subject: the loaded history and current complications of African-American hairstyling.
  47. The Mouth of the Wolf
    The couple's extended interview together is so oddly touching that you wished Marcello had focused solely on them, instead of incorporating vintage cityscape footage and free-form wanderings through the northern town's waterfront district into the mix.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    These Are the Damned
    The performances are universally weak, and Losey's clearly ambivalent attitude towards the demands of the genre ensures that the film is never exciting. But as an ambitious oddity, it exerts not a little fascination.
  49. The Outrun
    The Outrun is adapted by Scottish journalist Amy Liptrot from her own searingly honest memoir, with German director Nora Fingscheidt as co-writer. Fingscheidt handles her true-life traumas with great care, but without sparing us any of the harsh realities of recovery.
  50. Wreck-It Ralph
    The metaphor is clever, injecting real-life risk and reward into these beautifully artificial vistas, scored to composer Henry Jackman's Nintendo-worthy beeps and bloops.
  51. ParaNorman
    Sensitive parents shouldn't fret; this is the kind of grim fairy tale, equal parts midnight-movie macabre and family-round-the-hearth compassionate, that scars in all the right ways.
  52. Let It Rain
    While her focus has drifted away from the upper middle class, Jaoui’s sensibility remains rather middlebrow; there’s the distinct feeling that she’s preaching solely, albeit with impressive subtlety, to the same bourgie choir as before.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Rocket
    Kim Mordaunt’s when-life-gives-you-land-mines tale is light on well-drawn characters, but its performances, especially from the nonprofessional junior members, more than light the fuse for the finale.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sign 'o' the Times
    Musically, it's a matter of opinion, but from the sparse funk of the title tune to the bebop blow-out around Charlie Parker's Now's the Time, this guiltless grooving in Eden fizzes with brilliantly choreographed wit and invention.
  55. Paul Williams Still Alive
    The oft-hilarious push-and-pull between director and subject - Williams wryly notes that the film is turning into "the Steve and Paulie Show" - effectively hacks away at the celebrity-enthusiast divide. By the end of this perceptive dual portrait, both men are content to merely be human.
  56. The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
    This is a movie that preaches to its rafters-raising choir.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Only the Brave
    Despite the looming threats on display, Kosinski never imbues his movie with a real sense of danger until it’s too late to take the threat seriously. For all of the movie’s flare, Only the Brave lacks dynamism.
  58. Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia
    Nicholas Wrathall’s documentary—rough-edged in style, yet anchored by pointed and poignant interviews with the man himself — is mostly for those already fascinated by Vidal’s colorful life.
  59. The Sheep Detectives
    A woolly family caper with a nostalgic flavour, The Sheep Detectives conjures flattering comparisons with Babe.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Radio Unnameable
    It's as haunting and heroic as anything you'll see on the big screen this year, even if the film itself has a tendency to traffic in an abundance of dead air.
  61. Violette
    It’s a movie about coming to peace with solitude, leagues beyond most biopics.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    America America
    Certainly, it is one of the finest movies to deal with the plight of those thousands of immigrants who travelled in steerage to Ellis Island at the turn of the century.
  63. Hail, Caesar!
    It doesn’t seem new for them, yet as super polished, mannered, slightly surreal comedies go, the movie feels as rare as a unicorn.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Candy Mountain
    A witty anti-road-movie with a subplot on the nature of the artist.
  65. The Color Purple
    It’s far from a ham-fisted, tasteless Bialystocky nightmare. But neither does it avoid some jarring dissonance, as Celie, a young Black woman in 1900s Georgia, goes from a deep personal hell to some hard-won peace via slickly choreographed saloon-bar stompers, banjo-picking blues numbers, and an awkwardly-staged soul ballad framed within an RKO-style dream sequence.
  66. Mistaken for Strangers
    The brotherly-love epiphany to which the film builds does effectively pluck the heartstrings, but there’s a lingering sense that we’re being had.
  67. Babes
    Better Things creator Pamela Adlon’s directorial debut deftly juggles fast-paced anecdotal comedy with rich, moving character work, while upending pregnancy myths with the ferocity of a woman stamping on her oppressive breast pump. Scene-stealing work from the likes of Sandra Bernhard, John Carroll Lynch and Elena Ouspenskaia layer up the sense that, in the world of Babes, every life is a tiny miracle.
  68. Safety Not Guaranteed
    Safety Not Guaranteed doesn't quite know what kind of comedy it wants to be; the humor works best in its first hour, when the news-of-the-weird plot takes on a suggestive dimension of romantic desperation.
  69. Christine
    A superior and recent take on this material, Robert Greene’s experimental "Kate Plays Christine," is worth seeking out, both for its sympathy and deeper grasp of Chubbuck’s unknowable pain. Ironically, Christine’s director Antonio Campos (Afterschool) is capable of exactly that kind of riskiness, but the instinct abandons him here.
  70. Star Trek Into Darkness
    At least the Abrams-helmed Star Trek from 2009 had a pretzel-logic playfulness; the portentously subtitled Into Darkness is attempting like hell to be a Trek for our troubled times. The franchise has been thoroughly Christopher Nolan–ized.
  71. Dope
    Dope has thrilling moments and flies like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but its caustic intelligence glints fast and furious.
  72. Queer
    Queer may be flawed, but its naked approach to such a raw subject, coupled with a remarkable lead performance, makes it a trip worth taking.
  73. Bugonia
    Stone and Plemons’ verbal battles of wits are worth the price of admission, even if the script co-written by Will Tracy (The Menu) is overly reliant on culture war jargon.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Brewster McCloud
    Altman's unexpected follow-up to MASH is pitched fairly successfully between escapist fantasy and satirical comment on the same.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Harry and Tonto
    Mazursky has escaped Fellini's shadow; when everyone's back from going to 'look for America', he might have something interesting to say.
  76. Lovers of Hate
    It's a movie that doesn't inspire anything as passionate as love or hate.
  77. Pieta
    Stick with the film, though, and you might find yourself strangely moved by its oddball mix of ripe melodrama, overwrought violence and regional verisimilitude.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Under Fire
    A thrilling film, with a head, a heart, and muscle.
  79. Author: The JT LeRoy Story
    Documentary filmmaker Jeff Feuerzeig turns a controversial literary hoax that fooled the world (and many a celebrity) into a tale of a private desperation but tidies it up too much.
  80. Adela
    Adela’s troubles feel slight and underdeveloped in the face of the world around her; it’s all too appropriate, in the end, that nature swallows her whole.
  81. Bellflower
    In one grease-monkey swoop, Glodell proves that he's a subversive talent worth following. Let a thousand of his future projects bloom.
  82. Blade of the Immortal
    The story isn’t wildly original – think ‘Leon’ with throwing stars – and it’s overlong, but the action is unrelenting, thrillingly staged and occasionally even flat-out hilarious.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
    Too often dismissed as modish, it's in fact a mostly very funny, insightful, gently romantic account of well-meaning couples.
  84. No. 7 Cherry Lane
    It definitely demands patience ... but it rewards it with a similarly narcotic effect.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Road to Utopia
    A typical Road movie (Utopia being Alaska), this has Lamour oscillating between Bob and Bing for possession of both halves of the map to her goldmine. But kiss-kiss and moonlight serenading aside, it's always the quipping rivalry of the duo that rules.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Evil Dead II
    Using the same breathless pacing, rushing camera movements and nerve-jangling sound effects as before, Raimi drags us screaming into his cinematic funhouse. Delirious, demented and diabolically funny.
  87. 50/50
    The story is an autobiographical one from screenwriter Will Reiser's own ordeal; you smile with the thought that he had such women in his life, tough yet supportive, giving him the license to be funny again.
  88. Super 8
    Had the big boy himself, Steven Spielberg, made his directorial debut with this slam-bang sci-fi thriller set in suburban 1979 (and not merely produced what amounts to an homage), he would have been celebrated as a gifted bringer of mayhem: a Michael Bay before there was one.
  89. War Horse
    What's missing, then? There's no fiery central performance in the mix (the horse doesn't count), and once Emily Watson's hardscrabble mom is rotated out of the action, you yearn for an anchor.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Heaven Can Wait
    Beatty ambles nicely enough through the hero's part (remodeled as a quarterback), and Charles Grodin turns up trumps playing another of his chinless, spineless wonders. But Christie's comedy gifts are as minuscule as ever, and the film drags its feet uncertainly from beginning to end.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    East of Eden
    As long-winded and bloated with biblical allegory as the original. That said, it's a film of great performances, atmospheric photography, and a sure sense of period and place (the California farmlands at the time of World War I).
  92. Easy A
    The script, credited to one Bert V. Royal, seems to have been run through an out-of-control sass machine (seriously, it'll make you appreciate Diablo Cody's tact).
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Flying Down to Rio
    Fred and Ginger teamed for the first time as featured artists in the big production number, 'The Carioca': 'I'd like to try this thing just once' says Fred, launching the movies' greatest partnership. Otherwise notable mainly for the non-stop opticals which turn the film into a series of animated postcards.
  94. The Oath
    What emerges is an illuminating, though terribly dismaying, portrait of the War on Terror’s lasting effects. Whether one retreats or steps out defiantly, there is no sanctuary.
  95. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
    As ever, it’s Zellweger that provides the secret sauce.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Killers
    Like its predecessor, Siegel's version is at its best while setting up the chillingly ruthless detail of the opening execution (here unnervingly set in an asylum for the blind), less satisfying when it starts providing an answer to the mysterious passivity of the victim (Cassavetes).
  97. Armadillo
    It's a sickening but stunning portrait of combat that looks past notions of bravery or brutality, guilt or innocence, to bear witness to a thoroughly besieged humanity.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Down and Out in Beverly Hills
    It betokens some kind of desperation (or perhaps the fact that this was produced by Disney's adult offshoot) that the comedy rests increasingly on the cute antics of the family dog.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Beauty Is Embarrassing
    A breezily entertaining profile of painter, puppeteer and performer Wayne White, Beauty Is Embarrassing places the kindhearted, foulmouthed subject front and center.
  100. Candyman
    It helps that Candyman is exquisitely shot. Right from the first frame, DaCosta is always doing something interesting with the camera. There is smart visual storytelling almost everywhere you look, from the clever use of mirrors, to edgy scene transitions, to set design that starts to mirror Candyman’s look in interesting ways. The jump scares are rare but hardly needed: all this contributes to a growing feeling of dread as the film speeds towards its bold conclusion.
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