Time Out's Scores

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For 6,384 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: 2,481 out of 6384
  2. Mixed: 3,428 out of 6384
  3. Negative: 475 out of 6384
6384 movie reviews
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    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Phantom
    Little expense has been spared in putting this adventure fantasy on screen, with vintage planes and automobiles by the yard, striking Art Deco production design and breathtaking Thai coastal locations. A pity that the performers are so uncharismatic, with leading man Billy Zane plastic and soulless in Lycra, and not much more winning when he switches to playboy mode to woo free-spirited politico's daughter Kristy Swanson (pertly anonymous).
    • 27 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Bonfire of the Vanities
    What De Palma delivers is merely a mediocre yuppy nightmare movie, stylistically flashy but with little pace, bite or pathos.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Papillon
    With Schaffner unable to find the necessary perspective to prevent the film from becoming unevenly episodic, it ends up looking as if it were tacked together by at least three different directors.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Tenant
    Everything except the dubbing of the French supporting cast is a model of craftsmanship, but as the plot escalates into increasingly arbitrary excesses of fantasy and heads for the predictable pay-off, the movie looks more and more like a potboiler.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Poltergeist II: The Other Side
    This sequel, sans Spielberg but obedient to his spirit, simply fails to regenerate the original's gut-grinding fears that make you dread ever scratching a spot again. And the contribution of Giger's design work has only added one near-unwatchable sequence.
  6. Sidewalk Stories
    An ambitious but sadly misguided attempt to make a contemporary silent comedy which opts for simplistic plotting, sentimentality and mime as it tells of a homeless, black New York street artist's attempts to trace the mother of a baby girl whose father's murder he has witnessed.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Nun's Story
    Not as awful as you might expect, since the nun's training is shown in fascinating detail and the later doubts are quite subtly expressed. Solid performances, too, but it's still a long haul (made no lighter by Franz Waxman's abominably insistent score) for anyone not committed to theological problems of faith, conscience and obedience.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Comes a Horseman
    Visually superb, though: a doomed attempt to make Fordian metaphors speak a language of corrupting, intimate anxiety.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Cherry 2000
    Plus marks for the presence of the old-timers, but overall it's a walk on the mild side.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Waxwork
    The portmanteau horror movie makes a hesitant comeback with this jokey teen splatter pic.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mermaids
    The film is burdened by curious details and observations, and its preoccupation with all things aquatic (little sister is an ace swimmer, Mom dresses up as a mermaid for New Year's Eve, etc) is overworked. Characterisation suffers, with Charlotte and her mother too self-absorbed to engage our sympathies. Crucially, they just aren't funny.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Noises Off...
    Another theatrical metaphor fails to transfer to the screen. This adaptation of Michael Frayn's stage hit undoubtedly has its moments, but will still disappoint those who laughed themselves silly at the original.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fortress
    While confined to the futuristic prison interiors, the film works reasonably well; but once Lambert springs his wife from the women's section and escapes, the limitations of budget and narrative imagination start to show. As it moves away from the ensemble feel of the early scenes, this quickly degenerates into a part explosive, part sentimental star vehicle.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Maniac Cop
    Despite abundant action and a start involving a fistful of murders, the overall effect is sluggish.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Exorcist II: The Heretic
    Substantially recut by Boorman after his original version was derided in America, but it's still easy to see why New Yorkers jeered. Boorman completely avoids gore and obscenity, treating the original as a kind of sacred good-versus-evil text, and weaving its sets and characters into a highly traditional confrontation of occult forces.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Around the World in 80 Days
    Mike Todd's inflation of Jules Verne, with Niven as Phileas Fogg and the Mexican comedian Cantinflas as Passepartout, becomes an interminable travelogue interspersed with sketches in which star-spotting affords some relief (there are cameos from hordes of luminaries ranging from Dietrich and Beatrice Lillie to Keaton and Sinatra).
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Henry & June
    Kaufman's account of the triangular affair between Henry Miller (Ward), his wife June (Thurman) and Anais Nin (Medeiros) in '30s Paris is certainly good to look at, edited like a dream, and about an hour too long. Intelligently scripted, particularly good on the pain in relationships, it doesn't shed much light on the literary commerce between the writers.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Yankee Doodle Dandy
    Now it seems raucous, vulgar, over long; but if you like slick jobs, this is certainly one of the slickest.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Arabesque
    Much flashier than Donen's earlier Charade (also scripted by Peter Stone, alias Pierre Marton) and very sub-Hitchcock.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kill Me Again
    Derived from assorted Hitchcocks and noir classics, the tortuous storyline of writer-director Dahl's determinedly sordid thriller has its moments, but the whole thing is fatally scuppered by the Kilmer pairing.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    They Live
    The black-and-white visuals disturb for only so long, and while themes of indoctrination and conspiracy prove initially intriguing, the film quickly descends into fistfights and gunfire. Still, there's little about the comic strip action to suggest that we should be taking this too seriously.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gorky Park
    Hurt and Dennehy are excellent, as ever, but Marvin is badly miscast as a ruthless smoothie; and the film as a whole, while never less than involving, seldom generates any real suspense as it moves towards a curiously muffled showdown.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gigi
    The combination of these two visual elitists is really too much - it's like a meal consisting of cheesecake, and one quickly longs for something solid and vulgar to weigh things down.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jesus Christ Superstar
    Despite the impressive desert locations and an array of tanks (to represent the ills of modern militarism), it's still staged like a student revue. Most notable moments are the garden of Gethsemane scene, where Jewison cuts in leering Pharisees and crucifixion details from Flemish masters to supremely kitschy effect, and the scene of Christ being flogged, shot in sadistic slow motion.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sisters
    In retrospect, it does indeed appear as a highly efficient gut-ripper, with far more suggestion than De Palma's later work of the loose-end flux of real life going on in the background. There is, however, much early evidence of his rampant misogyny, his increasingly blatant stealings from Hitchcock, and most unforgivable of all, his clear distaste for the people he creates.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Battlestar Galactica
    Some good special effects, but with strictly tele-standard acting, straightforward space opera plot, grandiose sentiment and slushy love interest, it's really only meat for genre fans.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    RoboCop 2
    Kershner's direction is never more than adequate, and the story seems full of unfulfilled promise and tangled threads. It's also deeply, disturbingly violent in a way which is more manipulative than gory; unlike the original, with its prophetic vision of the future, this sequel seems to spend too much time glorying in the very horrors it has outlined.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Shoot the Moon
    Even Parker's direction, with its unerring sense of pace, cannot disguise an awkwardly episodic narrative which just cannot find a sense of an ending.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I Confess
    Clift (as the priest) and Malden (as the cop) make this worth watching, but it's heavy going at times and the more literary aspects of the script, adapted from Paul Anthelme's play (written in 1902), are uncinematic to say the least.
  30. The End
    Mostly admirable for its ambition, which often feels nearly endless – as, alas, does the film itself.
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