Time Out's Scores

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For 6,377 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 3.5 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: 2,478 out of 6377
  2. Mixed: 3,424 out of 6377
  3. Negative: 475 out of 6377
6377 movie reviews
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    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Lust for Life
    Throughout Lust for Life, Van Gogh, brilliantly portrayed by Kirk Douglas as a man forever on a knife-edge, struggles to explain himself to his family and to Anthony Quinn's Gauguin. However, Minnelli, with the colours he chooses - which follow those of the paintings - and with his dramatic counterpointing of events in Van Gogh's life with his canvases, undermines all explanations.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The One That Got Away
    Worth noting that the film was regarded as piquant rather than as offensive; it's still worth watching, despite too many scenes of Krüger lurching across muddy fields and frozen rivers.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Keeper of the Flame
    It works well if rather stiffly for a while, with excellent performances (Wycherly and da Silva are outstanding), but blows up into absurd histrionics and naive propaganda.
  4. Cool It
    To Cool It's credit and its detriment, the movie establishes that Lomborg quickly made enemies, without spelling out exactly why he's so loathed besides refusing to toe the Green Party line.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    After the Storm
    Shallow snapshots don’t diminish the raw emotional potency of this inspiring tale, in which art provides in-need kids with both an escape from daily hardship and a vehicle for restoring confidence in themselves and the future.
  6. All In: The Poker Movie
    The opinions assembled are impressive: everyone from "Rounders'" Matt Damon to former senator Al D'Amato, a poker defender. But where's the voice of reason? It's card playing, not a dependable income.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Streetcar Named Desire
    Kazan’s direction simmers when it needs to boil, placing all its chips on the battered decor and ethereal lighting, leaving you to wonder what fun Hitchcock or Preminger would have with the sexually pulsating, pressure-cooker backdrop gifted to them in the source material.
  8. Motherless Brooklyn
    Yet it’s rare that we get a movie this municipally minded and Chinatown-ish, and Norton invents new elements with a free hand, including a Harlem turf war, a skittering jazz undercurrent (the music is by Daniel Pemberton) and a love interest in Gugu Mbatha-Raw. Alec Baldwin, playing a powerful urban planner, makes for a ferocious Robert Moses stand-in.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    My Afternoons with Margueritte
    While the screenplay, adapted from a novel by Marie-Sabine Roger, grows more clumsily trite as the film proceeds, the two leads are always enjoyable together.
  10. Europa
    Haunting and narratively spare, Europa is a plea for humanity wrapped inside a gripping survival story.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Operation Crossbow
    Much ado about background authenticity is nullified by the cardboard characters, but the starry cast makes it all relatively painless.
  12. Love Lies Bleeding
    The batshit fever dream that Kristen Stewart’s fans have been waiting for, Love Lies Bleeding also happens to be the best B-movie of the year.
  13. United Red Army
    The film's commitment to representing the harsh truths of an unfortunate historical moment is admirable, but it tends to grate rather than illuminate.
  14. Student
    A sense of existential dread that would make the Russkie novelist beam is channeled beautifully, but for a filmmaker lauded for his minimalist aesthetic, Omirbayev sure loves broad-stroke symbolism and sloganeering.
  15. The Phantom of the Open
    It has a bit of the mood of The Full Monty or Brassed Off about it, and if it’s not as good as either of those it has a gentle upbeat cheeriness that’s hard to resist.
  16. Pariah
    Establishing character, conflict and environment with astounding economy in the film's first ten minutes, Rees demonstrates the sort of filmmaking chops and personal storytelling (the director claims she drew on her own coming-out experience) that suggests the low-key epiphanies of Amerindie cinema at its best.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Dark Skies
    The real mystery of Dark Skies isn’t who’s pulling the paranormal pranks — it’s lanky visitors from above, not vengeful spirits from beyond — but why Dimension is treating this reasonably effective potboiler like something that should be hidden away at Area 51.
  18. Youth in Revolt
    It’s a kick to see Cera cut loose from his patented befuddled-nerd routine, even if the film’s caricatured performances and fish-in-a-barrel scorn are sure to be monotonous for some.
  19. Illegal
    Illegal has caused a stir in Belgium, and the sincerity of the movie can't be denied. But there's little emotion to hold on to, apart from a mother's impotent concern about her wayward teenage son (Gontcharov), still on the outside.
  20. Restless
    Gus Van Sant directs his players just shy of mush; he's a filmmaker capable of brilliant dares (Milk, Paranoid Park) and shocking whiffs (Finding Forrester, the pointless remake of Psycho). This one's kind of in the middle.
  21. Spring Fever
    All that's left is to enjoy the ravishing visuals, which range from gorgeously dusky scenes of semidarkness to the sort of smeary neon palettes that Wong Kar-wai has virtually patented.
  22. Wolke Neun
    Cloud 9's plot is thin, the conflict lazy, and the resolution sudden and unsurprising. That's a shame, because stronger development in the story department might have made this film a minor sensation.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    To the Devil a Daughter
    The film's unlikely trump card is Richard Widmark as a credibly sceptical supernatural investigator, who romps through the proceedings with a disarming stoicism, but regrettably faces his devilish opponent Lee only in the closing sequence. It's a good deal more interesting than the rest of the possession cycle, but still a disappointment.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Let's Spend the Night Together
    Although one may mourn the lost opportunity to say something about the Stones other than that they are twenty years older than they were twenty years ago (cue 'Time Is on My Side'), a Stones concert is still worthwhile entertainment.
  25. Stillwater
    Stillwater’s leap is admirable – it’s just a shame about the landing.
  26. Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure
    For once, trying to expand into a bigger exploration of the zeitgeist actually proves to be a misstep; the movie works best when it simply shuts up and concentrates more on the anatomy of a prank gone pop phenomenal.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    God's Creatures
    Family traumas and terrible lies permeate co-directors Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer’s drama, which is given a bedrock of emotional authenticity by screenwriter Shane Crowley and is exceptionally acted.
  28. Please Give
    She has real sympathy--characters that might have been brittle, mockable creations in another writer-director’s hands gain resonance here. But the filmmaker also might have very little to say apart from the way guilt enters into life, and then suddenly recedes.
  29. Musical Chairs
    In many ways, this effervescent drama from Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan) upends conventions, even when it sticks to a familiar narrative path.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune
    It's a well-constructed and long-overdue tribute, yet Fortune refrains from delving into larger questions that surround Ochs's work. Did the singer's unwavering dedication to agitpop leave him stranded in the '60s? And does Ochs's diminished legacy among today's essentially apolitical neofolkies amount to a second tragedy?
  31. Hesher
    That T.J. and his family willingly allow this headbanging psycho(analyst) to move into their cluttered, dankly lit abode-the emotional damage is palpable, yo!-is just one of the film's many eyebrow-raising contrivances.
  32. Shaolin
    Fists fly furiously and much blood is spilled; there's a sacrifice via sword that's both cringe-inducing and cheerworthy. Even special guest star Jackie Chan gets in on the fun with a hilarious bit of food-jitsu. It's almost enough to make you forget that this entertainingly hollow film is populated entirely with toy soldiers.
  33. The Forgiven
    The Forgiven takes the harder road, and actually proves more engrossing and haunting in retrospect than when you’re actually watching it. In an era of instant gratification, that, for all the film’s evident flaws, is still worth chin-stroking respect.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Devils
    No matter how thickly Russell piles on the masturbating nuns, tortured priests and dissolute dauphins, there's no getting round the fact that it's all more redolent of a camp revue than a cathartic vision. Derek Jarman's sets, however, still look terrific.
  35. In the Fog
    Loznitsa would have done better to embrace the story’s enigmas as opposed to explicate them.
  36. Korkoro
    Even as it stands as a cinematic monument to mass suffering, Korkoro can't help but swing, strum and celebrate life for as long as it lasts.
  37. Elysium
    Hollywood loves these apocalypse-soon stories, however, because they function as blank canvases for ruin porn, and if nothing else, Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium gives us the realistically trashed tomorrow we suspect we deserve.
  38. The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part
    There are some hilarious new songs (look out for ‘Gotham City Guys’) and the jokes are more meta than ever, with Arnett’s Batman still invariably the funniest figure in the room. But the comedy feels like overcompensation for a story that gets more convoluted as it shifts back and forth between the human and Lego worlds.
  39. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
    We might have all felt like lost children for a while, but ten years later, the innocence is shameless.
  40. The Forgiveness of Blood
    No matter how sincere, Marston's effort also suffers from the lack of a burning lead as he had in Maria's Catalina Sandino Moreno. Fierce acting is a virtue you don't have to travel the world to find - or to lose sight of.
  41. Mia and the Migoo
    Lovingly designed, but dramatically inert.
  42. Magic Trip
    The directors rarely go beyond the experiential to provide larger, lasting insight into the journey's generational and historical importance. As such, the comedown from this Trip is a real bitch.
  43. Lifeforce
    Lifeforce is a near-impossible film to review, at once indescribably awful and hugely, brilliantly entertaining.
  44. Dumb and Dumber To
    Dumb and Dumber To may not be quite as funny as the first one, but it’s the funniest thing the Farrellys have made since.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Endgame
    Fans of "The Wire," take note: Clarke “Lester Freamon” Peters does an impressive turn as Nelson Mandela.
  46. If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle
    Despite the faux-realist aesthetic (gritty handheld camerawork; all-natural sound), we never feel like much is at stake, though Pistereanu and Condeescu have an easygoing rapport that makes the quieter moments between them affecting.
  47. Robin Hood
    Can they really be setting up a sequel at the end, with Robin as an outlaw? Let’s hope so--that’s the movie you actually wanted.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
    In a movie that deals almost exclusively in pals playing pop music and exposed penises, the boyish humor goes a long way. Call it a hit single, but don’t expect it to go platinum.
  49. Polisse
    Polisse builds to one of the most hilariously misguided climaxes ever conceived; let's just say that this soapy symphony of squalor literally doesn't stick the landing.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Polyester
    Likely to be criticised for being less than murky Waters, even with its 'Odorama' card to scratch for olfactory pleasures/displeasures; but then it's clear from an opening helicopter shot that bad taste has found the budget to go middle of the road.
    • 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.
  52. 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.
  53. Easy Virtue
    Though occasional acerbic touches remain, the sections that are drawn directly from the original remain hampered by the loss of Coward's dialogue. But the first half of the film, an addition detailing events only described in the play, is pure Hitchcock, its combination of conciseness and idiosyncrasy demonstrating his mastery of silent narration.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    L'ennemi intime
    Conventional as the film may be, the two leads are quite adept, and director Florent Emilio Siri proves to have an exquisite eye for battlefield tableaux.
  55. Home
    We certainly need all the ecological jeremiads we can get. But must they be so numbingly pedantic?
  56. Art Bastard
    Breezy and vivid, Art Bastard ultimately delivers the person: criminally underrated yet still principled and generous. It just leaves you wishing for more defiance, especially when a conventional tone takes over with too many interviewees and overpowers the film’s most lucrative asset: a pulsating New York backdrop.
  57. Men Go to Battle
    The elliptical story of sibling despondency doesn’t quite hang together, though the groundswell of missed potential doesn’t come into focus until the film’s undeniably powerful closing moments.
  58. Far Out Isn't Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story
    Hardly the trippy icon the doc’s title suggests, the artist is now more like everyone’s slightly seedy hedonistic granduncle, happiest sketching cartoon pigs and walking the moors of County Cork.
  59. Leap Year
    For those who can't handle graphic scenes of golden showers and cigarettes ground into bare breasts, Leap Year will feel more like a blind leap into the void of art-house cinema du extreme, South of the Border division, than a portrait of urban ennui.
  60. A Master Builder
    The film adheres closely to a well-reviewed theater production cocreated by and starring Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, both of whom get to riff on their prickly "My Dinner with Andre" rapport.
  61. Mysteries of Lisbon
    Comfortable with subtle Proustian detachment, the director has taken another stab at colossal scope, this time getting lost in the cerebral folds.
  62. Lee Daniels' The Butler
    Viewers familiar with Daniels’s idiosyncratically vulgar work might be disappointed that there’s little here that compares to Nicole Kidman loosing a yellow stream on Zac Efron’s jellyfish stings in "The Paperboy" (2012).
  63. Snitch
    Snitch is a movie that cries out for the wiry B stars of yore: Robert Forster, a younger Tommy Lee Jones. And it would have occurred to a craftier screenwriter to make his hero’s walk on the criminal wild side a touch more tempting.
  64. The Score
    The Score doesn’t always strike the right notes, but it has its high points thanks to a simple, rewarding romantic arc.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Fatal Promises
    The film fingers public ignorance and governmental inaction as causes, but its horrifying first-person testimonials of exploitative abuse are what make this call to arms resound loudly, angrily, urgently.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    More Than Honey
    Although the unexplained collapse of honeybee colonies is a global problem, the most startling moments in Markus Imhoof’s documentary take place on a microscopic level.
  67. Potiche
    The laughs are purely surface; the film's women's-lib pretensions seem grafted on as if to lend significance to a story that would benefit from a lighter, less cerebral touch. Still, it's hard to resist La Deneuve's charms.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Krull
    Strong on stunts and special effects but often rambling and ponderously lurching into comedy, it's not the greatest of Christmas treats, but does have enough cherishable moments between the wordy longueurs; and in Lysette Anthony's Princess Lyssa, a heroine for whom many a young Turk would walk through fire and ice.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Valley of the Dolls
    The film is regarded in some quarters as a marvellous piece of camp.
  70. Kids for Cash
    May’s biggest get, however, is Ciavarella himself—a man forever rationalizing his shady actions, who emerges as a more complexly tragic figure than you’d think possible.
  71. Bob Marley: One Love
    Bob Marley: One Love is a strange mixture of the authentic and the broad. Taking place in a perma-fug of ganja smoke, director Reinaldo Marcus Green’s (King Richard) intermittently engaging portrait of the reggae superstar is shot through with sincere intentions, but too often leans into the trite.
  72. Annabelle: Creation
    The demon doll from the Conjuring movies remains creepy, even if this prequel feels occasionally wooden.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Philadelphia Experiment
    A time-travel yarn of the past arrives in the present persuasion. The 'what the hell's happened?' passages are, as usual, more diverting than the 'what the hell can we do about it?' scenes, the latter involving merely flashing lights, showers of sparks and talk of imploding vortexes.
  74. Project Nim
    The good news is that the film's stylistic excesses don't negate the many fascinating aspects of Nim's story.
  75. Sleep Tight
    There's a Polanskian black comedy buried in here somewhere; a sassy neighbor girl who knows too much hints at the right direction, which is never fully explored.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    My Reincarnation
    It's fascinating to watch Yeshi grow from a skeptical teenager into a spiritual leader - a transformation that still doesn't bring him any closer to his father. The film could use one scene of the two men acknowledging their differences, but even without that, My Reincarnation won't test your patience.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ridicule
    Rather deliberately paced, and mired in archaic and abstruse puns, the film is perhaps more interesting than enjoyable. Still, Leconte's customary zest and mordant humour are there, lurking behind the claustrophobic production design and free-spirited camerawork.
  78. Soundtrack for a Revolution
    Even if you’ve seen this footage of the sit-ins at Southern diners, the Selma-to-Montgomery marches and Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral before, you can’t help but be moved to your core.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Black Coal, Thin Ice
    Black Coal, Thin Ice may well floor some viewers, as it did the Berlin jury. But others will find it too obtuse and remote, its characters too withdrawn to be relatable. See it, though, for those fleeting, unforgettable visual touches.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Book Club
    It all adds up to a pleasant diversion, but you might wish this cinematic bonbon offered something closer to a meal.
  81. How I Ended This Summer
    The movie's first hour happens to be its most absorbing. Director Alexei Popogrebsky sets up the quiet tensions between his two generationally divided characters like a chess match pocked with occasional power grabs.
  82. Racing Dreams
    Poised between childhood and adolescence, arrogance and insecurity, the kids still make for compelling subjects.
  83. Rapt
    Belvaux's tension-building setup is stellar; the follow-through, less so.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Whistleblower
    Our heroine plods doggedly through her frequently stymied investigation, and The Whistleblower follows suit, trudging forward one encumbered step at a time.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Mundo alas
    Inspiring if straightforward, the film boasts music that makes for a pleasantly innocuous soundtrack to buying Frappuccinos.
  86. The Armstrong Lie
    Given Armstrong’s squirminess on the couch, you’ll wish this profile had traded a portion of its deep background for a little in-the-moment boldness.
  87. Brother
    Although he retains the sweep of the novel, Virgo struggles to replicate its observational texture and the tension is undone by an atmospheric vagueness, full of pregnant pauses that only stretch out the run-time.
  88. We Bought a Zoo
    Too much of the movie feels predestined - down to the rainstorm on opening day - and subplots involving budding romance end up forcing what's implicit. Crowe, meanwhile, still can't stop abusing his vinyl collection; the aural wallpapering of Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens and others will surely please postboomer fans who haven't quite gotten the hang of silence.
  89. Shutter Island
    Shutter Island is slumming: minor but enjoyably nuts.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Death of a Gunfighter
    A fringe Siegel Western (he spent two weeks finishing it off). The theme of a law and order marshal who has tamed a frontier town, only to become an embarrassment to the 'civilised' community, is sufficiently interesting for one to wonder what it would have been like if Siegel had done the whole thing.
  91. Spider-Man: Far from Home
    Awkward teenage energy is the secret weapon in Marvel's post-Avengers palate cleanser, one that strains to keep things light and fun.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Reivers
    Period charm accounts for much of the mild enjoyment to be had from this sunnily nostalgic adaptation of William Faulkner's novel about an unholy trio - small boy (Vogel), dimwitted young buck (McQueen) and wily black (Crosse) - who 'borrow' a 1905 Winton Flyer and drive triumphantly off to Memphis for three days of illicit pleasure.
  93. The Informer
    The Informer is a film that favours brawn over brains, punching its way through any plot predicaments. A smart hairpin or two would have made it a juicier watch.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Septien
    As intriguing as the movie is, there's the sense that its free-associative story line has been dredged up from its maker's unconscious and recounted without filter or shape.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Bedazzled
    Good fun sometimes but a little too sketchy, with a plot that is almost as threadbare as the outfit worn by the voluptuous Raquel Welch in her cameo role as one of the Seven Deadly Sins.
  96. Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers And The Emergence Of A People
    The survey the film provides is bracing, and there are plenty of talking heads to guide us through the kaleidoscope of imagery. Unfortunately, there’s also a public-television vibe to the proceedings that mutes the overall power. It’s essential info presented with little imagination.
  97. Perfect Days
    Beautiful acted by Japanese veteran Yakusho, it’s a character study with real depth. Maybe not top tier Wenders, but still one to linger over.
  98. The Rum Diary
    You can't deny the fun of seeing Depp retro-construct a muted version of his Vegas mugging like De Niro riffing on Brando's Don Corleone. (His reaction to swigging homemade rum is worth the price of admission alone.)
    • 66 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Carlito's Way
    It runs long and is ultimately not much more than a showpiece, but Pacino looks every inch a movie star, and De Palma provides a timely reminder of just how impoverished the Hollywood lexicon has become since the glory days of the '70s.
  100. Freakonomics
    Despite a roster of off-kilter documentarians each directing an episode, Freakonomics only partly delivers the sense of traipsing into uncharted territory.
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