Time Out's Scores

  • Movies
For 6,418 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: 62
Highest review score: 100 Pain and Glory
Lowest review score: 0 Surf Nazis Must Die
Score distribution:
6418 movie reviews
  1. It must be noted that Wrona, a director of uncommon promise, committed suicide at a festival where this film was playing. It’s impossible to know his private pain, but it seems like he got a lot of it up onscreen.
  2. Documentary filmmaker Jeff Feuerzeig turns a controversial literary hoax that fooled the world (and many a celebrity) into a tale of a private desperation but tidies it up too much.
  3. Raw, messy and unkempt (as a domestic cancer drama should be), Saturday Night Live writer Chris Kelly’s feature debut is also a woe-is-me gay rom-com, a showdown between siblings and—at its best—an out-and-proud minimusical. If that sounds like too much, it is.
  4. Sully is so square, it’s a wonder it even gets airborne. Hanks’s walking iceberg never thaws; the actor is never as vulnerable as he was in Captain Phillips.
  5. The saturation of Arvo Pärt instant-melancholia on the soundtrack feels a bit too pushy, but otherwise this is a confidently controlled, accessible yet piercing look at the insidiousness of grief. It's Moretti at his best.
  6. A boxing movie in desperate need of Martin Scorsese (aren’t they all?).
  7. This isn’t a straight documentary — part of what makes the film so suggestive is the idea that we’re seeing a double performance pitted against our own prurient interests. As for the movie’s final scene, you won't witness something as confrontational all year: a yowl from beyond the grave. It’s a small piece of revenge for a lost soul.
  8. For 
the most part, you’re in the hands of a capable lunatic who has a tale to tell.
  9. Taking the worst of it on the chin is star Jack Huston, whose Jewish prince turned galley slave, Judah Ben-Hur, suffers from a distinct lack of personality—he’s like a boulder that someone forgot to chisel into a statue.
  10. Herzog’s latest, ostensibly about the internet, is divided into 10 sections, each taking on a blend of awe and uneasiness at a radically changed world that’s increasingly lived online.
  11. The film doesn’t quite cut loose to hit emotional high notes, but Regina Spektor’s velvety cover of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” poignantly completes a sweet, generous film.
  12. A quiet, sneaky sense of dislocation vibrates through Chad Hartigan’s indie comedy, which contains so many ideas about race, child-rearing, fatherhood and accidental exoticism, that to call it a mere coming-of-age movie would be a shame.
  13. When Phillips’s regular ace Bradley Cooper shows up—as a scowling war profiteer—it just feels like stunt casting and a missed opportunity for levity.
  14. As with 1999’s deceptively deep South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut and, more recently, The Lego Movie, the script works hard to invest its scenario with an existential and political dimension, crudely but effectively expressed.
  15. With its engaging story, energetic soundtrack and slick production values, Nerve is an easy watch for restless young minds.
  16. After 2012’s similarly themed "Sleepwalk with Me," Birbiglia continues to mine a scene he knows well, and even though he doesn’t strike you as a natural-born filmmaker (some of these scenes are as flatly lensed as the Saturday Night Live sketches being spoofed), he’s evolving as a confrontational dramatist.
  17. Her whole life has been about beating the odds — it’s inspiring stuff.
  18. The central idea here is as durable and effective as a well-told fireside ghost story, but in the cold light of day, the film fades.
  19. Equals could be her least persuasive performance to date — and remember, Stewart has played a soldier at Guantanamo and a girl who dates a vampire.
  20. The soundtrack offers the expected jazz, while Allen himself, now sounding mumbly, offers intermittent, awkward narration. In the pantheon of his films, it’s a pretty but minor distraction.
  21. The Infiltrator works best when it owns its Miami Vice–esque sizzle: Composer Chris Hajian breaks out the percolating Jan Hammer synthesizers, and the ’80s decadence wafts offscreen like a stink.
  22. It turns out it’s okay to cross streams: Here’s a summer movie starring a girl squad proud of its big brains and tacky jumpsuits. You could call that a supernatural event in itself.
  23. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates follows a sturdy trajectory toward incipient maturity (and ceremonial catastrophe). If you don’t think about it too hard, you won’t hate it.
  24. The movie works best in the clan’s private world (even if rock climbing in the rain seems like poor parenting). But then it deflates: Frank Langella, normally a welcome presence, is clownishly directed as a mean grandfather, and the plot abandons its tensions too abruptly.
  25. 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.
  26. The action is largely routine and the dialogue rarely more than functional, but DeMonaco, marshalling the franchise’s best production values yet, shrewdly taps into the angry zeitgeist; his vision of an America where the citizens are encouraged to express their basest emotions is more relevant than ever.
  27. Writer-director Gary Ross (Pleasantville, Seabiscuit) knows how to please crowds, so there's fascination in his consistently wrongheaded impulse to add more historical details: lengthy scenes of exposition, even a leap decades into the future for a courtroom drama involving Knight's persecuted offspring. He's lost sight of the powerful drama at this story's heart, about the ennobling swirl of momentous events.
  28. His rock music gets a decent airing, but you wish more of the man’s perversity came through: his intimidating ego, the way he could exhaust his bandmates. And seriously, where is “Valley Girl” and his amazing kids? Not bitchin’ at all.
  29. The first half of Right Now, Wrong Then fits the usual mold, but the real joke begins when the movie abruptly starts over and our hero — seemingly aware of his Groundhog Day do-over — makes subtly different (and smarter) choices the second time around in a rich and playful revision.
  30. Add to the list of actors who, beautifully and boldly, go it alone in their own survival movies the name Blake Lively. Do it without laughing, because she’s the shark here: Even though The Shallows, a tremendously entertaining bit of fluff, pits her against a computer-generated great white, the poor creature never stands a chance.

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