Time's Scores

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For 2,974 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 53% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 45% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.2 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 Paterson
Lowest review score: 0 Life Itself
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,807 out of 2974
  2. Mixed: 937 out of 2974
  3. Negative: 230 out of 2974
2974 movie reviews
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  1. Animal Kingdom
    A contemplative crime drama with a high startlement quotient.
  2. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
    The perfect summation of Hollywood at this moment - an apotheosis of American male infantilism - and, on its own, a most likable mess.
  3. The Other Guys
    Like some silly summer song that can't be shaken from the mind, this is a catchy enterprise, no better than it tries to be and no less funny.
  4. Dinner for Schmucks
    On the way to this predictable conclusion, the movie offers plenty of smart entertainment. You'd be a schmuck to miss it.
  5. Get Low
    Without Duvall's rich, supremely skilled performance, this slim period piece wouldn't amount to much.
  6. Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel
    Watching the film is like reading Playboy for the articles.
  7. Salt
    She's (Jolie) got what no other Hollywood woman even tries for, and which is embodied among recent international stars perhaps only by Hong Kong action star Michelle Yeoh: feminismo.
  8. Ramona and Beezus
    A gentle, charming movie and really a parent's dream: a kid's movie that doesn't involve action sequences or explosions. Yet you wish the filmmakers had adhered to Mr. Quimby's no-nonsense point of view and found a way to make this family slightly less squeaky-clean.
  9. Life During Wartime
    His films will never be mainstream fare; audiences who wander into the theater may well find them derisive, needlessly shocking, perhaps unforgivable. But I'd call them, and especially Life During Wartime, unforgettable.
  10. Inception
    Inception is precisely the kind of brainy, ambitious, grand-scale adventure Hollywood should be making more of.
  11. The Sorcerer's Apprentice
    Somewhere in recreational value between an afternoon on a San Diego beach and one at a Detroit public swimming pool. Either way, before you know it, it's evening.
  12. The Girl Who Played with Fire
    In Rapace, it has an actress who brings a memorable literary character to indelible movie life, as Vivien Leigh did for Scarlett O'Hara.
  13. The Last Airbender
    Surely the worst botch of a fantasy epic.
  14. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
    Certainly it's the lightest and brightest -- everyone is still chaste, but the movie is actually sexy in parts. It appears to have embraced its own sense of camp and is consistently funny in an intentional way. For the first time, I found myself curious to see what comes next.
  15. South of the Border
    The 70-minute movie -- which was co-written by the British-Pakistani commentator Tariq Ali, author of the 2006 study "Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope," and photographed in part by docu-doyen Albert Maysles -- is amateur night as cinema, as lopsided and cheerleadery as its worldview.
  16. Knight and Day
    Yet he just kept going and going, and the slick, proficient Knight and Day is proof that you should never count Cruise out.
  17. Toy Story 3
    An instant classic.
  18. Cyrus
    The scariest romantic comedy of the year.
  19. The Karate Kid
    Jaden may have to carry the burden of family celebrity, even as he carries his new film. Expertly.
  20. The A-Team
    You could also say the picture lacks a coherent plot and complex characterization, but those are irrelevant to the genre. The movie is like a superior athlete who gets tongue-tied in a post-game interview but on the field is poetry in motion.
  21. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
    Remarkably, thanks to this documentary, we hope for the sake of this smart, vibrant, apparently good-hearted woman, that the invitations keep coming.
  22. Ondine
    Farrell's work as Syracuse is understated to the point that some may find it unremarkable -- but it's a beautifully confident performance, an irony given that he constructs his portrayal of Syracuse around the concept of humility.
  23. Splice
    The movie is ridiculously over the top, inelegant and so defiantly ?crazy?that it works, reminding you how fun gore and creatures that go bump ?(and? grind) in the night can be. It's a sci-fi horror film, but no actual ?comedy?has made me laugh as much this year as Splice.?
  24. Get Him to the Greek
    Shaggily amusing but familiar and way-too-long.
  25. Killers
    Take what pleasure you can from the two stars. They look great; it's just the state of romantic comedy that looks terminal.
  26. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
    No masterpiece, Persia is fun for exactly as long as it takes to sit through it.
  27. Sex and the City 2
    A movie gaudy enough to make Dancing with the Stars seem dignified.
  28. Shrek Forever After
    The resulting adventure is once again lively and clever, although its creative underpinnings -- a sort of flea-market pastiche of antique fairy tales, vintage vaudeville and contemporary pop culture -- seem rather more shabby than chic.
  29. Letters to Juliet
    I'd take any woman in my life, ages 10 to 100, to Letters to Juliet and my guess is we'd both leave with a little Italian glow.
  30. Iron Man 2
    He (Tony) could be a self-destructive hero out of a Dostoyevsky or Mailer novel. That portrait gives Iron Man 2 its fascination. The rest is a cluttered, clattering toy story.
  31. Mother and Child
    The movie unfolds with novelistic pacing for a leisurely but engaging two hours.
  32. A Nightmare on Elm Street
    A fine copy.
  33. Harry Brown
    Tawdry but compelling.
  34. The Back-up Plan
    My pregnancy lasted 41 weeks and five days, involved morning, afternoon and night sickness and culminated in 25 hours of labor capped off by an emergency C-section. Yet all that seems like a walk in the park compared with the 100 minutes I spent watching Jennifer Lopez mug her way through The Back-Up Plan.
  35. Kick-Ass
    Kick-Ass moves with such bloody assurance that you'd be forgiven for not seeing how smart it is. But smart it is. Smart, important and deadly.
  36. Date Night
    It's a lively, often astute piece of marital sociology wrapped up in an action frolic involving an extremely average New Jersey couple.
  37. The Greatest
    The Greatest often feels like a mash-up of Sarandon's greatest grief hits.
  38. Clash of the Titans
    As to the chief complaint about Clash of the Titans -- that the movie stinks -- what can I say? I liked it. This is a full-throttle action-adventure, played unapologetically straight.
  39. Hot Tub Time Machine
    The movie made me laugh as much as anything since "The Hangover" or the love scenes in "Avatar."
  40. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    I finished Larsson's novel with the uncomfortable sense it used a good mystery as an excuse to dwell on sadism and perversity -- an aspect only exacerbated on screen.
  41. Greenberg
    That Greenberg has merits is undeniable. Gerwig, a funny mix of Kate Winslet and the joyfully ditzy young Diane Keaton, should end up a star. Stiller dials back his own schtick and deserves to be taken seriously.
  42. Remember Me
    If I had a daughter of impressionable age, I'd rather have her weeping over this mildly tasteless romance than the nonsense of "Twilight."
  43. Cop Out
    Sluggish, formulaic.
  44. The Crazies
    It's an efficient thriller, with scare weapons ranging from the primitive (a pitchfork) to the apocalyptic (an A bomb). The acting is only horror-film-functional, and you might wish that our trio of renegades knew a few basic laws of the genre.
  45. The Yellow Handkerchief
    As for the yellow handkerchief of the title, I'd have dismissed it as a cheesy device if it weren't for the fact that I'm still cherishing the eloquence of Hurt's silent marvel when he finally sees it, fluttering across the gray Southern sky.
  46. The Ghost Writer
    We should hail a movie that recalls creepy political thrillers of the mid-'70s, back when some films were made for grownups and the comfortable catharsis of a happy ending was not required -- think of the panoramically cryptic worldview of "The Parallax View" and "Three Days of the Condor," and of course, "Chinatown."
  47. Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
    This is a big, often quite scary action movie, with tons of creepy computer-generated imagery that's right up there with Voldemort in terms of physical nastiness, although less powerful emotionally.
  48. Valentine's Day
    The film skips along pleasantly, supremely confident in its own cuteness and utterly unapologetic about how shallow or contrived it might be.
  49. Dear John
    This isn't a love story, it's a misery story that drags on, not to a dramatic conclusion but a tepid moment.
  50. From Paris with Love
    This pickpocket of a movie flashes open its coat to proudly display all its swiped goodies.
  51. When in Rome
    A picture that registers between Abysmally Awful and Mildly Mediocre. Such a one would be When in Rome, which is possible to sit through without wanting to stick darts in your eyes or frag the screen. Call it medi-awful.
  52. Saint John of Las Vegas
    One of those shaggy-dog stories that you keep hoping will get sharper, smarter, cooler, more worthy of its star. Buscemi may not be exactly celestial, but he still deserves better.
  53. Creation
    Bettany's Darwin always has a chill or a case of the sweats, tummy ache or trembling hands. He has our sympathy initially, but the movie bathes us in such general despair that the natural instinct soon becomes a desire to tell him to buck up. We do believe in survival of the fittest, after all.
  54. The Spy Next Door
    That imperishable affability, that eagerness to please his Hollywood bosses, allows Chan to elude many of the indignities thrown his way in The Spy Next Door. It may also be the reason he says yes to a junky movie like this.
  55. Daybreakers
    In standard-narrative terms, Daybreakers suffers from tired blood. No question the Spierigs are prime film imagineers. What they needed here was a director.
  56. Leap Year
    Mostly awful.
  57. Youth in Revolt
    Uneven but occasionally quite funny.
  58. The White Ribbon
    A kind of mashup of "Our Town" and "Village of the Damned," the film is both draining and enthralling.
  59. Did You Hear About the Morgans?
    The movie is like a car wreck in which no one is injured but the onlookers.
  60. Avatar
    Embrace the movie -- surely the most vivid and persuasive creation of a fantasy world ever seen in the history of moving pictures -- as a total sensory, sensuous, sensual experience.
  61. Nine
    After a while, Nine plays like some Hollywood charity revue.
  62. The Lovely Bones
    When else has the obscenity of child murder been the cause of such gravity and grace?
  63. Invictus
    Damon, beefed up for the occasion, makes Pienaar a stalwart yet courtly figure. Freeman infuses Mandela's speeches with the same gentleness and gravity he's brought to his numerous God roles and the Visa Olympics commercials. But the real deity here is Eastwood, still chugging away handsomely in his 80th year.
  64. A Single Man
    Tom Ford -- the Texas-born fashion designer who for a decade was the creative director at Gucci -- financed this first feature himself. The producer couldn't have hired a smarter director.
  65. Brothers
    Brothers isn't up there in the empyrean of classic movies, but it is a solid drama -- about a family at war with itself.
  66. Up in the Air
    Reitman's blend of comedy and drama, romance and social observation make Up in the Air the ideal movie --- and maybe even a cure -- for the Great Recession blues.
  67. The Princess and the Frog
    In an amazing year for animation, The Princess and the Frog is up at the top. Go on, give it a big kiss.
  68. 2012
    Any sentient viewer will be able to predict every lumpy twist of this ludicrous, fitfully enjoyable movie.
  69. The Fourth Kind
    Osunsanmi wants you to believe that everything he shows you that's not reenacted by professionals really happened, and is documented by the omnipresent video cameras. It's a device used far more successfully in "Paranormal Activity," which had the added benefit of being a good movie.
  70. A Christmas Carol
    A ghost story, a bustling action-adventure and an example of the comedy tour-de-farce, in which the star validates his virtuosity by appearing in a plethora of funny disguises.
  71. This Is It
    It proves that, at the end, he was still a thriller. Fans and doubters alike can look at the gentle, driven singer-dancer at the center of this up-close document and say admiringly, This was him.
  72. Law Abiding Citizen
    Butler has the showier part, but his impersonation of the tragic hero is undercut by his weird resemblance to Soupy Sales. You start hoping that Shelton will kill somebody with a custard (or puffer-fish) pie to the face.
  73. Zombieland
    An exhilarating ride, start to finish. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg set a high bar for this subgenre with "Shaun of the Dead," but Reese, Werner and Fleischer may have trumped them. This isn't just a good zombie comedy. It's a damn fine movie, period. And that's high praise, coming from a vampire guy.
  74. A Serious Man
    To absorb God's body blows, this disquieting, haunting movie says, is to be fully alive. To do otherwise could kill you.
  75. Surrogates
    An ambitious but sub-ordinary SF epic in which, as so often, Willis is better than his material.
  76. Paranormal Activity
    Beyond the viral ingenuity of the marketing, what's cool about PA is that it's not just a fun thrill ride; it's an instructive artistic experience. A horror-movie revisionist, Peli follows a less-is-more strategy.
  77. The Informant!
    The Informant! may end up closer to the non-starters. Its lunacy is too deadpan, and its denouement too drawn out, to appeal to those who liked the Bourne movies, or, for that matter, the Gore. But it's worth seeing, and a salutary achievement.
  78. Inglourious Basterds
    It's just possible that Tarantino, having played a trick on history, is also fooling his fans. They think they're in for a Hollywood-style war movie starring Brad Pitt. What they're really getting is the cagiest, craziest, grandest European film of the year.
  79. District 9
    District 9 proves that genre films, besides being a hell of a lot of fun, can say things you hadn't considered and show stuff you haven't seen.
  80. The Time Traveler's Wife
    It's soppy enough to suit the requirements of the weepie genre...But the movie also has an aching solidity that allows you to surrender to its cuddly-creepy feelings without hating yourself in the morning.
  81. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
    The only collateral damage is in the audience, where, as you sit through the movie, you can feel your IQ drop minute by minute.
  82. Funny People
    That heart comes bursting out of Funny People, Apatow's intermittently engaging, 2 hr. 26 min. essay in schizo-cinemaphrenia.
  83. Thirst
    Blending plot elements of "Double Indemnity" and "Natural Born Killers" with the ripe sensuality of Francis Coppola's take on "Dracula," the film should make audiences sit up in startled pleasure, as if they'd just received the most luscious neck-bite.
  84. The Ugly Truth
    In its wan attempt to be raunchy, the picture fails where Judd Apatow has usually succeeded; written by three women, this is a girl's mistaken idea of an R-rated comedy.
  85. (500) Days of Summer
    Because the emotional drama is so one-sided, I just can't love you.
  86. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
    With Half-Blood Prince, again we have a stalwart, satisfying visualization of the Rowling cosmos.
  87. Bruno
    The problem with shock comedy is that it works in its purest form only the first time. Where do you go after you've gone too far? No artist can get heads to swivel and stomachs to turn indefinitely.
  88. Public Enemies
    It lacks overall focus, and at the end you may have a question for Michael Mann: Why'dyou bother? [July 6, 2009, p.59]
    • Time
  89. The Hurt Locker
    A near-perfect movie about men in war, men at work. Through sturdy imagery and violent action, it says that even Hell needs heroes.
  90. Whatever Works
    No kidding: this is the feel-good movie of the year and a cinematic soul massage.
  91. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
    If Hollywood is going to remake a '70s movie, it might as well be Pelham, and it ought to work as competently as this one. But wouldn't it be nice, once in a while, for Hollywood to turn contemporary traumas into vigorous movies instead of hijacking the anxieties of the past?
  92. Tetro
    Alas, in Tetro he (Coppola) has made a movie in which plenty happens but nothing rings true.
  93. The Hangover
    Even Galifianakis's pervy charm, and a deeply weird cameo by Mike Tyson, can't save The Hangover. Whatever the other critics say, this is a bromance so primitive it's practically Bro-Magnon.
  94. Away We Go
    A bloated, criminally judgmental borderline-comedy.
  95. Land of the Lost
    Ferrell's latest excursion into delusions of manhood is director Brad Silberling's Land of the Lost, an action comedy with the sloppy construction and saving grace notes of the star's other movies.
  96. Up
    Extending the patented Pixar mix of humor and heart, Up is the studio's most deeply emotional and affecting work.
  97. Terminator Salvation
    What's lacking is the sense of emotional balance and urgency that the original Terminator, though just a B movie, was blessed with--the quality that earned it fans in the first place.
  98. Angels & Demons
    As transparent as this device is, Angels has elemental satisfactions in its blend of movie genre that could appeal to wide segments of the audience.
  99. Star Trek
    It's a real family film, relatively light on the violence and funny without being overly crude; it even has some touching moments.
  100. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
    X-Men Origins: Wolverine is an O.K., not great, Marvel movie...Wolverine doesn't rise above the level of familiar competence.
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