Time Out's Scores

  • Movies
For 6,375 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 3.6 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:
6375 movie reviews
  1. More often than not, September 5 feels like a great 1970s thriller that could only have been made in the 21st century.
  2. An incomplete exercise that lacks crucial emotional brushstrokes despite a rich palette and a piano-heavy score, At Eternity’s Gate still offers the thrill of being inside an artistic process, adoringly interpreted.
  3. A full-bodied and mischievous autobiography in the spirit of Federico Fellini’s "Amarcord," Alejandro Jodorowsky’s return to filmmaking after 28 years of financial frustration explodes with great ideas.
  4. This is a brisk, well-oiled thriller with blistering performances and a crackling, memorable script.
  5. Leavened by an attractive soundtrack that includes the Carter Family’s well-placed “Single Girl, Married Girl” (and the Paul Simon song that gives the film its title), Obvious Child has a loud agenda that will be off-putting to some. Still, it’s a welcome counterpoint to the likes of "Knocked Up" and even "Juno," where the abortion route is an apparent no-go.
  6. The film ultimately plays less like an experiment than a demonstration of a tinkerer’s ingenuity. Tim’s finished Vermeer may resemble the real thing, but Tim’s Vermeer never tackles the true mystery of why the latter is actually incomparable.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Marvellous, toughly eccentric thriller which confirmed that Siegel had more responses to '70s paranoia than a mere Magnum blast, and decisively removed Matthau from the wasteland of Neil Simon wit.
  7. This vision of contemporary Italy as a warped fairyland filled with corpulent slobs and seedy C-grade celebrities recalls the tough-love spectacle of Fellini’s "La Dolce Vita," but Reality frustratingly devolves into a far more tedious mass-media morality tale.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The stars here are not the moms, but the kids-and they are truly amazing.
  8. Adjust to the deliberate rhythms of this hiking movie-set on the lush slopes of Georgia's Caucasus Mountains - and the psychological payoff stings like a blister.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The chemistry between Clift and Taylor is unmistakeable – this is one of the great cinematic portraits of untamed desire – and there’s a compelling sense of unavoidable destiny, of a societal trap slowly, inexorably snapping shut.
  9. Inna de Yard becomes more like a concert movie, with a spine of cultural history, than a narrative documentary.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Despite its wealth of detail and sharp observations about morality, the film remains curiously insubstantial with its refined dabbling in the elements of satire, sentiment and melodrama exploited with such panache in Chaplin's starring comedies.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    It's a spectacular return to the shimmering, mesmerising deep-focus animation associated with Disney's classic period: a marvellous use of lighting to create atmosphere, dew-drops glisten from every tree, and the villains are as primally terrifying as cartoon villains should be. The choice of material (Robert O'Brien's novel Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH) is less fortunate, since it lacks the wonder of early Disney, and the mouse heroine is far too insipid and twee. It's still a pretty effective family film, though.
  10. This may not quite be the biopic of two women whose achievements decidedly merit one, but it’s an extraordinary story about a man who endured danger, ridicule and desperation to create the circumstances for them to thrive.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A likeable shaggy dog of a movie, assuming the music's to your taste.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The first-person recollections of Nanking’s survivors are as uncommonly wrenching as their captors were brutally thorough.
  11. This one’s a crucible of sweaty pre-natal panic, weird knocks at the door, mind games and ultimately, a roaring, miniature apocalypse set inside a single claustrophobic living room. If that already sounds like your home, it's time to go and give it a try.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    French director Léonor Serraille’s debut film could easily have been unbearably twee. The fact that it isn’t, at all, is a tribute both to her unsentimental storytelling, and to the prickly strength of Laetitia Dosch’s central performance.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Buscemi's semi- autobiographical first feature as writer/director is a beautifully low-key, disarmingly perceptive blue-collar character-study, reminiscent of vintage Cassavetes in its sociological and emotional authenticity.
  12. A dryly amusing mockumentary from the Kiwis behind the similarly deadpan Eagle vs Shark and Flight of the Conchords, What We Do in the Shadows unfolds like the darkest movie that Christopher Guest never made.
  13. Basically, it’s an electrifying three-person play, as the determined Winstead, the complexly furious Goodman and Tony-winner John Gallagher Jr. (playing a lucky neighbor who made his way down) have it out in scenes that impart the nauseating futility of George Romero’s mall-ensconced "Dawn of the Dead."
  14. If this profile is marred slightly by thematic tidiness and a willingness to overglorify the champion's rise (Fischer didn't even write his best-seller, Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess), it still supplies a cracked, conflicted genius trapped in his ceaseless endgame.
  15. If the movie falls just shy of our highest mark, this is because Cronenberg is tamping down on his usually naturalistic performances - everything feels vaguely mad-scientist-ish.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    There aren't many films which tackle the generation gap between middle-aged kids and their old folks with such unsentimental comic acuity - and Reynolds essays her best role in three decades with delectable good grace and charm.
  16. Easily the most gracefully performed grief-porn you'll see this season.
  17. Mud
    Despite the best efforts of a cast that mixes unstudied newbies such as The Tree of Life’s Sheridan with Hollywood prima donnas like Reese Witherspoon (a starlet-slumming-it distraction as Mud's dim-bulb inamorata), there’s an overall clunkiness that Nichols is unable to overcome.
  18. Gilroy, vastly supported by cinematographer and Los Angeles specialist Robert Elswit (Boogie Nights, Magnolia), directs with the verve of a seasoned pro, even though Nightcrawler is his debut.
  19. The Woman King is a story of sisterhood and racial identity that deserves to pack in the crowds. About time, indeed.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    There is an affection – for the people, for the animals, and for the land – that suffuses Lunana with a warm glow.

Top Trailers