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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  1. How Do You Know
    Listen to the rhythms of "Broadcast News" - from Holly Hunter's daily crying jags to William Hurt's cock-of-the walk patter - and you'll hear how romantic comedy can approach an art form, a roundelay that requires the ear of a conductor. How Do You Know, James L. Brooks's latest, has such tone-deaf passages that it feels made by a totally different man.
  2. 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.
  3. Unstoppable
    Tony Scott almost wins us over with this fun thrill ride.
  4. Saw 3D
    Like a stumpy limb requiring quick cauterization via steam pipe (our first cringe), the Saw series is begging for closure.
  5. White Material
    What starts as an intriguing reverie ends as a hollow allegory.
  6. Love and Other Drugs
    The film definitely gets it up, but has some commitment issues.
  7. Faster
    The Rock deserves better than this ho-hum revenge picture.
  8. Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench
    That the duo will work their way back to each other is never in doubt, although Chazelle doesn't succumb to easy sentiment. If anything, he moves too far in the other direction, aiming for a wizened ambiguity that doesn't entirely come off.
  9. Nothing Personal
    With both hostility and compassion, the damaged duo slowly come to understand themselves and their respective pain-a familiar path that's energized by subtle lead performances, a tactile sense of place and surprising insight into the way people connect as they help each other heal.
  10. Heartless
    We know how these bargains turn out, so all we're left to do is watch pretentious exchanges about grief pile up, laugh at the way the movie exploits its Indian-girl-as-innocence-personified notion and wish that Eddie Marsan's giddy cameo as Hell's personal weapons dealer were much, much longer.
  11. Tiny Furniture
    The funny thing? It all works reasonably well, especially if you have a yen for the urbane register of city kids and their amazingly cool parents.
  12. The King's Speech
    Firth is exceptional in letting us into his dissolving pride.
  13. Shoah (re-release)
    Shoah's ultimate legacy, however, is being the final word on the Final Solution-one that renders every well-intentioned dramatic re-creation of such horrors into repulsive Ausch-kitsch by comparison.
  14. Saint Misbehavin': The Wavy Gravy Movie
    This Age-of-Aquarius relic's dedication to utopian ideals is great; this superficial portrait, however, is merely grating.
  15. Rabbit à la Berlin
    The doc's straining for a larger, Varda-esque metaphor about the sad humans on the sidelines is ill-advised.
  16. And Everything Is Going Fine
    You still leave hoping he ultimately found peace and enlightenment, two things he graciously gave to those of us who hung on his every word.
  17. The Tourist
    The movie dies onscreen; it might be the best advertisement for avoiding the glories of Italy ever released by a Hollywood distributor.
  18. Tangled
    Disney knows how to bewitch a crowd, but the sense that Tangled was made more by corporate mandate than artistic spark remains constant throughout.
  19. Burlesque
    The divas rule in this glossy musical.
  20. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I
    The first part of Deathly Hallows has plenty of invigorating imagery alongside the pro forma narrative elements.
  21. The Warrior's Way
    Someone surely thought to call this knowingly ridiculous genre mash-up "Cowboys vs. Ninjas," though even that title wouldn't hint at all the you-gotta-be-kidding-me craziness on display.
  22. You Won't Miss Me
    The result is a work that radiates a boozy, Bukowski-esque downward spiral, all alcohol-fueled anger and aimless sadness.
  23. The Tempest
    A tiresome mess that's completely bereft of a quiet moment in speech or manner, The Tempest aches for the wisdom of discipline.
  24. Hemingway's Garden of Eden
    For an especially egregious bit of miscasting, look no further than Mena Suvari, star of this tony adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's posthumously published novel about a disintegrating marriage.
  25. The Company Men
    A quintet of actors carve out a beautiful, ill-fated geometry in John Wells's layoff drama, which might play like a retort to "Up in the Air" if it didn't have shortcomings of its own.
  26. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
    One's heart sinks the moment the trio is picked up by Prince Caspian (Barnes) and deposited on his ship, the Dawn Treader. Suddenly we're in green-screen land, where everything looks cheap, heavily digital and unfortunately postconverted to 3-D-hardly a fantastical otherworld.
  27. The Fighter
    You can't necessarily blame Wahlberg, as his modest performance is the one element that feels truly authentic and heartfelt.
  28. Come Undone
    From its title on, Come Undone is as dully generic as is imaginable.
  29. Queen of the Lot
    Jaglom can craft a scene and stage organic conversations, but if his saps and suckers never wander beyond a hermetic view of the real world, then so what?
  30. Night Catches Us
    Night Catches Us surges awkwardly in its latter third, suddenly aware that a promising setup isn't enough. Regardless, here is an honorable attempt to address a complex chapter of African-American pride, one that's usually hidden under hairdos and wah-wah pedals.
  31. Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
    Some moments are so deliciously shivery-our heroes' breath condensing in the air like in John Carpenter's "The Thing"-that you wish the film were naughtier and less nice.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bhutto
    Rather than treat its subject as the sort of martyr to democracy that makes good copy in the West, Bhutto digs deeper.
  33. All Good Things
    It's a juicy story, though that doesn't excuse Jarecki from fixating above all else on the tabloid-ready twists and pop-psychological turns of Durst's story.
  34. Barney's Version
    Even if you can forgive the crude JAP caricatures (et tu Minnie Driver?) and the blatantness of the film's attempts to make you sob, you're still left with lovely actors stuck in a lackluster cover version of the real thing.
  35. I Love You Phillip Morris
    People who like their comedies pitch black (we're talking midnight, no stars or moon) should get a kick out of the tale of Steven Russell (Carrey).
  36. Black Swan
    Both a baroque thriller set in New York's ballet demimonde and a portrait of artistry as schizoid perfectionism, Darren Aronofsky's new film percolates parallel lines of fine madness-but then, doubling down on duality is this movie's raison d'etre.
  37. The Legend of Pale Male
    Lilien certainly captures Pale Male's wild animal beauty in loving close-up. What his film needs, however, is distance.
  38. Kawasaki's Rose
    Such overall familiarity makes the over-the-top soap-operatic elements, such as a histrionic screamathon between mom and daughter, that much more grating-and Hrebejk's upending of cathartic clichés that much more gratifying.
  39. Undertow
    Undertow's three impassioned lead performances and Fuentes-León's honest engagement with thorny matters of identity, sexuality and community still make it an easy movie to get swept up by.
  40. The Nutcracker
    Russian-born schlockmeister Andrei Konchalovsky has flirted with the good kind of bad in the past (Tango & Cash), but here, he's finally made his disaster-piece. Unclean.
  41. Family Affair
    Far be it from us to deny the director his deserved catharsis or to dissuade someone from speaking out about abuse. Still, Family Affair feels less like a documentary than one man's filmed therapy marathon, to which you're voyeuristically privy in an oversharing-on-Oprah sort of way.
  42. Me, Too
    Clearly there's a lot of myth-dispelling to do; indeed, the film often seems like a public-service announcement wrapped around a sketchy narrative skeleton.
  43. William S. Burroughs: A Man Within
    Reducing an influential genius to a bohemian Zelig with a firearm fetish misses the forest for the flaming metal trees; in Leyser's biographical interzone, the superficial trumps the truly subversive.
  44. Today's Special
    An overall lack of adventurousness negates any genuine sense of surprise, but credit this Indian-themed indie for spicing up a familiar and routine dish with reasonably tasty flavor.
  45. The Next Three Days
    You keep waiting for the movie to grow a brain, for that random attractive neighbor (Wilde) to turn out to be a decoy, for Banks herself to become suspect. Nope. The Next Three Days morphs into "The Fugitive" on steroids.
  46. Made in Dagenham
    Sally Hawkins cruises into her new movie the same way she did her breakthrough, "Happy-Go-Lucky."
  47. Skyline
    So bland it's easy to forget the title only minutes after exiting, this Emmerich-by-numbers invasion movie exists only to offer you the cutting edge in unconvincing special effects.
  48. Helena from the Wedding
    Even by the stultifying standards of everything's-screwed ensemble movies, Joseph Infantolino's thirtysomething drama feels particularly threadbare.
  49. Disco and Atomic War
    The fancifulness wears out its welcome, though, and you often wish the film would treat its subject with a bit more seriousness.
  50. Shake Hands with the Devil
    For everything admirable, like the way female Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana (the wonderful Gakire) resigns herself to a violent death, there's a heavy-handed metaphor-a cute gaggle of orphaned goats-ready to smack away the intelligence.
  51. Eichmann
    The movie's twitchy, diabolical monster is neither persuasive nor historically tenable, and unlike Arendt's Eichmann, he's far too easy to dismiss.
  52. Morning Glory
    This charmless movie thinks it can soft-sell its date-night love story and its media meta-jabs without people feeling they've been bamboozled on either count.
  53. Change Nothing (Ne Change Rien)
    By the end, you feel curiously closer to the performer and her process without having any clue how you got there. It's exhilarating.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story
    Despite the film's odd assembly of talking heads (Koufax, sure, but Ron Howard?) and narrow scope that rarely addresses how a first-generation community sought a new-world identity via knuckleballs, Miller's survey is a breezy compendium of fun facts and colorful figures.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    A Marine Story
    The film stumbles through rounds of ham-fisted melodrama.
  56. Outside the Law
    Even the movie's trio of outstanding actors come off like mouthpieces from a creaky Group Theater play, spiced with an occasional Cagneyism or two.
  57. Red Hill
    When the movie keeps its focus on retribution and Rambo-esque ambushes, however, this slice of Ozploitation doles out grind-house pleasures by the dozens.
  58. Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer
    The more substantial material, including Spitzer's feuds with vindictive New York politician Joe Bruno and financier Ken Langone, gets short shrift.
  59. Four Lions
    While these ninnies' antics and banter are remarkably entertaining, the quality of the satire depends on when the movie is sending up ludicrous extremist logic and when it's just engaging in repetitive buffoonery.
  60. Fair Game
    Then Plame's cover gets blown, and so does the film's; suddenly, the clunky melodrama that had been lurking in the shadows starts hogging the spotlight.
  61. 127 Hours
    Paradoxically, this is not a tale about summoning inner strength, but about shedding pride. Sometimes, there's no choice.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    For Colored Girls
    But something compelling happens here that shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. Raging in Shange's still startlingly fluid verse like witches casting spells, this powerful cast (especially Jackson, Goldberg and Phylicia Rashad) reaches bravely, if sometimes clumsily, for emotional accountability.
  63. A Small Act
    It's an inspiring narrative-as are the interwoven stories of three students hoping to earn that educational gift-but the doc itself is more of a telethon-ready fund-raiser than a work of dramatic reportage.
  64. Inspector Bellamy
    Depardieu and Cornillac's sibling rivalry, which segues between mostly verbal smackdowns and liquored-up bursts of merriment, is beautifully observed, as is the relationship between the detective and his devoted wife (the wonderful Marie Bunel). The thriller stuff, by comparison, is just a lot of perfunctory deadweight.
  65. Amer
    Amer could exist only as a movie, not as a novel or a pop song. If you give it a whirl, you won't simply get drunk on its immediacy; you may throw out plot and character altogether.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Jolene
    There's no pleasure in watching the repeated sexual exploitation of the eponymous heroine in Dan Ireland's adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's short story; that there's little purpose to this abuse, however, is absolutely unforgivable.
  67. Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields
    Strange Powers works best when inadvertently capturing the toll of living in the shadow of a genius. When it comes to examining the genius himself, it's woefully out of tune.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Kids Grow Up
    The second in a proposed self-reflective doc trilogy, director Doug Block's embarrassingly honest follow-up to "51 Birch Street" (2005) is a neurotic, occasionally poignant rumination on his teenage daughter doing just what the title says.
  69. Monsters
    There's so much right with Gareth Edwards's low-budget alien invasion tale that you almost want to brush aside everything that's not up to snuff.
  70. Waste Land
    It probably would have helped if Walker (who credits two other codirectors) had chosen just one of those avenues for deeper study; her doc has a vertiginous way of feeling arty and ephemeral at one moment, humane and maybe too earthbound the next.
  71. Wild Target
    It's entertainment designed to resemble a good time without aspiring to provide one.
  72. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
    This can't be a faithful facsimile of the literary phenomenon currently turning soccer moms into Scandinoir crackheads. Nor can ethical journalist Mikael (Nyqvist), an uncoverer of conspiracies, actually be the dull, Windbreakered nonaction hero onscreen.
  73. Welcome to the Rileys
    Only Leo, always a dependable supporting actor, turns her character into something resembling a three-dimensional person. Watching her tentatively reconnect with her maternal instincts is a welcome surprise. Everything else here just feels like another descent into mediocre Amerindie miserablism.
  74. Vision: From the Life of Hildegard Von Bingen
    Writer-director Von Trotta, an icon of the New German Cinema, doesn't have the technical chops for the fireworks you desire, so she settles for wan earnestness.
  75. Paranormal Activity 2
    The impression is less of calculated ineptitude than of seasoned professionals (director Tod Williams made The Door in the Floor) playing dumb, as a checklist of household items-frying pans, endlessly shutting doors, a pool cleaner with a mind of its own-test viewers' reflexes.
  76. The Taqwacores
    Whether anyone over the age of 16 will find the film's proud amateurism and choir-preaching personally enlightening, much less profound, is anyone's guess.
  77. Boxing Gym
    Indeed, you leave the film feeling like Wiseman has given you a glimpse of one of those ephemeral ports in a storm to which all of us retreat at times.
  78. Inhale
    Even with the grungy aesthetics and earnest preaching, Inhale is really nothing but crass topical exploitation, milking this social issue for every salacious drop.
  79. Kalamity
    Inane dialogue, extraneous scenes and wooden performances make for an experience that's less edge-of-your-seat than one very long, amateur hour and a half.
  80. Conviction
    For those of us with a love of actorly indulgence, though, the film is a treasure trove, filled with enough molten-gold performances to gild a thousand Oscars.
  81. Hereafter
    What was Clint thinking? (Or Martin Scorsese, when he made "Shutter Island," for that matter.)
  82. Tamara Drewe
    Strikingly picturesque locations and a terrific ensemble cast help this tonally inconsistent adaptation of Posy Simmonds's comic series pass by with relative ease, though it leaves a very peculiar aftertaste.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Modus Operandi
    This stilted but oddly compelling Milwaukee-based throwback to Me Decade cheapies pays homage to the entire spectrum of '70s exploitation cinema, from the mucky Super-8 to the copious nudity.
  84. Stone
    All ye searching for Primal Fear redux, abandon hope. The character-driven drama he (Curran) offers viewers instead is something far more complex, cracked and unique for an American movie boasting big-name stars: an unblinking glare into the abyss.
  85. The Portuguese Nun
    Even those that have acquired a taste for Green's rigorous, super-ascetic aesthetic may find this French drama about a starlet (Baldaque) to be almost as bare as it is spare.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    BearCity
    Despite a schmaltzy original score and some clunky direction, the film's well-portrayed characters and spot-on depiction of the scene make this a pleasant enough romp.
  87. Knucklehead
    A distinctly shameless and shoddily made family comedy.
  88. Punching the Clown
    While never uproarious, Punching the Clown exudes the clever, warped sincerity of its star, eschewing uppercuts for a series of playful jabs.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Pillion
    Pillion starts as it means to go on; aligning its oddly innocent nature with extreme, hardcore imagery, and managing to give screwball humour an emotional gravitas.
  90. Evil Does Not Exist
    Japanese superstar-in-the-making Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s (Drive My Car) latest film is a touching ecological parable full of little feints and narrative red herrings. Just when you think it’s heading in one direction, it slips off elsewhere, like a fawn in the woods.
  91. The Lost King
    Langley has a tough time persuading people to care as much about Richard III as she does, and so does this film.
  92. The Worst Person in the World
    Any film that can combine questions of mortality with funny, fully alive scenes of sex, social awkwardness, professional screw-ups and throwaway fun is a rich one. Its brilliant, full-on performance from Reinsve deserves to be celebrated far and wide.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Arrebato (1979)
    A hallucinatory, claustrophobic examination of the secret potency of film itself, it enters the disorienting world of a young film-maker who discovers his camera has a feature he'd never imagined. Taking one right back to those great '70s mood-movies, it's a singular treat. [05 Nov 2003, p.97]
    • Time Out
  94. The Keeper
    It’s an old cliché about biopics that if the story wasn’t true, you probably wouldn’t believe it. The Keeper takes it a step further: you know it’s true and you still don’t believe it.
  95. Mr. Jones
    If a subplot showing Orwell writing ‘Animal Farm’ as he becomes persuaded by Jones’s evidence doesn’t entirely work, there’s plenty in this thoughtful journalism drama that does. And not a single scene in a car park.
  96. Private Life
    The riskiness of [Jenkins'] set-up, one that blooms with complications and rawness, is a thing of adventurous beauty. Her film is a gift to those people who discretely flinch at every dinner party and kid-celebratory anecdote.
  97. Eighth Grade
    Eighth Grade is lovely work, lifted up by a timeless piece of indie wisdom: Keep it real, as cringe-inducing as that can be.
  98. Hereditary
    A harrowing story of unthinkable family tragedy that veers into the realm of the supernatural, Hereditary takes its place as a new generation's The Exorcist—for some, it will spin heads even more savagely.
  99. The Tale
    It's a bold, significant piece of work: an investigative thriller with a grave finale that stuns you into silence, then, hopefully, something more.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Police Story (1985)
    The likeable and graceful Chan directs, sings and performs jaw-dropping stunts. Few of his American or Austrian rivals attempt a fraction of that.
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