Time Out's Scores

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For 6,370 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: 2,473 out of 6370
  2. Mixed: 3,422 out of 6370
  3. Negative: 475 out of 6370
6370 movie reviews
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    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Secret of NIMH
    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.
  2. The Thing
    The Thing has emerged as one of our most potent modern terrors, combining the icy-cold chill of suspicion and uncertainty with those magnificently imaginative effects blowouts.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Série Noire
    The characterisations are turned on their heads.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Firefox
    The simple storyline is quickly grounded by flying chunks of exposition that director/actor Eastwood tries to ignore. Eastwood the director disregards many Cold War possibilities, preferring to dawdle over a first hour that mooches along while Eastwood the actor enjoyably dons various disguises, playing a man who can't act (or so everyone tells him) and is happiest left alone with his gippy nerves.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Author! Author!
    Pacino can do you a volatile, middle class intellectual with one hand behind his back, and along with his streetwise brood has all the best and funniest lines.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Grease 2
    Such niceties as a plausible plot and three-dimensional characters are trampled under Weejun-shod foot, but sheer energy, a handful of good tunes (including a great theme song from the Four Tops), and some very funny one-liners save the day.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
    Foregoing the special effects bonanza of its predecessor, it settles for low camp humanoid melodrama.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Poltergeist
    Although the sub-religious gobbledegook (including a tiresome midget medium) is hard to take, it is consistently redeemed by its creator's dazzling sense of craft.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Burden of Dreams
    Blank's special brand of ethnographic film documentary finds a curiously appropriate subject in that weirdest of all capsule cultures: the on-location film crew.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Road Warrior
    Miller's choreography of his innumerable vehicles is so extraordinary that it makes Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark look like a kid fooling with Dinky Toys.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid
    Some amusement is derived from watching a film that so obviously had to be worked out backwards. The bits in between feature likeable Martin as a keen but clumsy detective - with all the good lines, which is no bad thing because he's the best part of this fairly amusing, clever exercise in editing.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wrong Is Right
    Veering wildly between a quite well-written satire on the contemporary American political scene and a very ham-fisted nuclear blackmail thriller, its sheer eccentricity is quite engaging.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Forbidden World
    While the writer conjured up everything he could remember about Alien, the rest of the New World crew were working out how to reproduce Scott's film for about 50 bucks.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Sword and the Sorcerer
    Editor Marshall Harvey stitches the messy pieces together with considerable panache.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Chosen
    A worthy but irretrievably dull homily (based on the novel by Chaim Potok) about the conflict between adolescent friendship - two Jewish boys, one orthodox and Zionist, the other a Hasidic - and filial devotion within the demands of the faith.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Diva
    Marvellous amalgam of sadistic thriller and fairytale romance, drawing on a wild diversity of genres from film noir to Feuillade serial.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Silent Rage
    The idea of pitting karate champion Norris against a virtually indestructible psychopath is intriguing, but the resulting confusion of clichés proves disappointingly incompetent.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Basket Case
    Same old gore and poignancy, but some garish characters and the nightmare quality of the New York hotel give it more low budget charm than it deserves.
  19. The Long Good Friday
    In style, the film’s ambition sometimes oversteps its ability, but it’s a rare London gangster film that has something to say about the city and says it with wit and little resort to bloodletting
  20. Out of the Blue (1980)
    Hopper keeps things light and off-the-cuff, allowing his performers free rein - sometimes too much, as in the case of the screechy and shrill Farrell - to explore grim territory without falling into heavy-handedness.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Eating Raoul
    The most delicious blackly comic collision of sex, food and murder, Bartel's film arrives as a delightful surprise from the former court jester of Roger Corman's exploitation stable.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Victor Victoria
    There is so much to like and admire in Edwards' intricate comedy about sexual identity which is neither vulgar nor preachy, combining a Clouseau-esque bedroom farce - and the prospect of characters coming out of the closet in all possible ways - with a convincing love story and just enough show-stopping musical numbers...Don't miss this one. It sends sparks.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Missing
    Spacek and Lemmon are fine as the missing man's wife and father, but what makes the film so overwhelming in places is its unending night-time imagery of a society coming apart at the seams. Costa-Gavras underpins his campaigning content with all the electric atmosphere of a paranoid conspiracy thriller, and ensures that Missing will remain the cinematic evocation of a military coup for years to come.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Evil Under the Sun
    With Ustinov's energetic impersonation of Poirot and Anthony Shaffer's traditionally structured script, Death on the Nile offered a fair recreation of Agatha Christie's world, but this time Christie herself would rightly have disowned the film.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Diner
    Not a lot to it, but the sense of period is acute, the script witty without falling into the crude pitfalls that beset other adolescent comedies, and the performances are spot-on.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Loveless
    At times the perversely slow beat of each scene can irritate, but that's a reasonable price for the film's super-saturated atmosphere.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Swamp Thing
    Craven tries to do this 'veggie-man' horror in a suitable DC Comics style; and with Louis Jourdan as arch-villain 'Arcane', not to mention Adrienne Barbeau (Mrs John Carpenter) as the Thing's object of desire, he's definitely on the right track. At other times, the picture is right off its trolley.
    • 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Barbarosa
    Transplanted Australian director Schepisi confidently threads his own route through Peckinpah territory (a Mexican patriarch demanding honour; a graveyard resurrection), less concerned with Peckinpah's gothic haunting than with teasing dark, absurd ironies from the symbiosis of sworn enemies.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Quest for Fire
    If you have a weakness for exotic scenery (filmed in Canada, Scotland, Kenya), and some curiosity about the everyday life of prehistoric humankind, you will probably take some mild pleasure in this saga of the Ulam tribe's search for a way to light their fire.
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