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. The Crime of Padre Amaro
    Carrera's handsome film offers a richly detailed portrait of a church not so much corrupt as morally lazy after centuries in command of an overwhelmingly Catholic country.
  2. 8 Mile
    There's something old-fashioned and dauntless about the way the film pushes past our initial resistance to its setting and subject matter, past pain, past defeat, to make this point. Because it rejects easy victories, this may be one of the few inspirational movies that could actually inspire someone, somewhere, sometime.
  3. Far From Heaven
    Ironizes without parodying an antique screen manner, then reaches out from beneath this smooth cover to grab us.
  4. Treasure Planet
    Take a while to get their vehicle to sail and soar. But when it does, this Planet is a treasure.
  5. The Truth About Charlie
    Donen got it gloriously right the first time. Why do it again? And why do it like this?
  6. Frida
    Julie Taymor's inventiveness has diminished to a kind of strained cuteness. Everything that makes an artist an artist -- the obsessions, the egotism -- is ignored in favor of upbeat movie conventions.
  7. The Ring
    An edgy, watchable film, but one that makes you feel more squeamish than screamish.
  8. Auto Focus
    Schrader's objectification of sad and stupid material is neither tragic nor transgressive. It is just undramatic and uninvolving.
  9. The Rules of Attraction
    Sex, drugs and rack 'n' ruin; pretty people doing nasty things to one another...honestly, what more could you want in a movie?
  10. Bowling for Columbine
    Rambunctious, disturbing, often hilarious new documentary.
  11. Safe Conduct
    Comic, suspenseful, romantic.
  12. White Oleander
    Lohman's pensive loveliness carries the film.
  13. Punch-Drunk Love
    There is something arresting about it too. The damned thing keeps gnawing at your mind -- if only for its almost perfect lack of conventional sentiment. Or movieness.
  14. Red Dragon
    This darkly seductive, flawlessly acted piece is worlds removed from most horror films. Here monsters have their grandeur, heroes their gravity. And when they collide, a dance of death ensues between two souls doomed to understand each other.
  15. Sweet Home Alabama
    The film (directed by Andy Tennant) has more problems than Melanie, and they're insoluble. Its lazy calculation telegraphs each plot turn and underlines emotions with corn-pone music.
  16. Moonlight Mile
    The film is full of sharp acting and home truths, but its ambition to be different finally surrenders to its need to be loved.
  17. The Banger Sisters
    Dolman's comedy isn't exactly a barrel of emotional surprises, but its great cast underachieves admirably. There are worse ways to pass 94 minutes.
  18. Secretary
    Writer-director Shainberg seems to be aiming for a dark comedy, but mostly his movie is coy without being funny, ugly without being truly transgressive, stupid when it needs to be smart.
  19. 8 Women
    Seduction is more important than deduction in this chic display of star quality to the eighth power.
  20. Spirited Away
    Artful but not arty, Spirited Away is a handcrafted cartoon, as personal as an Utamaro painting, yet its breadth and heart give it an appeal that should touch American viewers of all ages.
  21. S1m0ne
    Simone is a funny, smart, improbably successful satire on contemporary celebrity obsessions, the waning summer's most delirious comedy.
  22. Possession
    When Possession finds its true home, lodging in the convulsive certitude of Victorian romance, it does indeed catch fire -- and warms any viewer in the mood for love.
  23. Mostly Martha
    Nettelbeck is a sharp observer of life's surprises, and Gedeck has an appraising, intelligent beauty. Her Martha is like the film: tart on the outside, sweet on the inside, with a delectable aftertaste.
  24. Secret Ballot
    The film's spare wit is as applicable to Broward County as to the Persian Gulf. Secret Ballot offers further evidence that an Islamic regime can foster humanist satires with a critical, political edge.
  25. The Good Girl
    What makes The Good Girl worthwhile is its performances. All the actors play their entrapment with a weirdly convicted blankness. That's especially true of Aniston.
  26. Full Frontal
    The result is Soderberghs liveliest experiment since the strenuously weird "Schizopolis" six years ago -- except that this one works.
  27. Merci Pour Le Chocolat
    Occasionally succumbs to Mika's legato rhythms, but it is more often a sly, subtle comedy about the oh-so-gentle art of murder.
  28. Tadpole
    This is, alas, one weary ride--77 minutes that sometimes feel like that many hours.
  29. Sex and Lucia
    These people are fools for heedless love and, perhaps, needless complication, and you can't help responding to the heat of their passion.
  30. Read My Lips
    The comedic first part of Jacques Audiard's film doesn't achieve a seamless connection with its melodramatic second half, but you can't deny the originality of his conceit or the tart cynicism of its development.
  31. Lovely & Amazing
    This feels the way a lot of us are living now -- on desperation's dull yet still cutting edge.
  32. Minority Report
    Spielberg's sharpest, brawniest, most bustling entertainment since "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and the finest of the season's action epics.
    • Time
  33. Lilo & Stitch
    It's a bright, engaging bauble with half a dozen Elvis Presley songs for Mom and Dad, and just enough sass -- Stitch sticks his tongue into his nose and eats his snot -- to keep the tweeners giggling.
  34. The Bourne Identity
    The result is an escapist fantasy that is -- Damon's and Potente's persuasive performances aside -- as weightless and inconsequential as a musical. And at the moment every bit as welcome.
  35. Scooby-Doo
    The cast does great impressions of the original cartoon characters, and the computer-generated Scooby is convincing, but it turns out that what we liked about Scooby-Doo in the first place was that nobody was trying.
  36. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
    This is potentially near tragic material, and playing it as an all-forgiving comedy is a waste of everyone's time.
  37. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
    It is a ripping yarn and a spectacularly new and odd vision.
  38. Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
    It's a pretty, high-strung story, handsomely done in traditional animation (mostly by hand) that you can take the kids to without wincing.
  39. Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones
    An exhilarating two hours of serious fun.
    • Time
  40. Hollywood Ending
    Is comedy a young man's game, like skateboarding or sex? Writing jokes, creating droll characters -- these take ambition, ingenuity and energy, and after decades of devotion to this voracious muse, a fellow can get pooped.
    • Time
  41. Spider-Man
    Raimi directs the film at Maguire's pensive pace. Some scenes are just inert.
    • Time
  42. The Salton Sea
    Yet how can one possibly recommend The Salton Sea? If it could, this nasty film would make you smell the disgusting food on the table. And that says nothing about its casual sadism.
    • Time
  43. Enigma
    Enigma is not for everyone, but the thoughtful (and the historically minded) will find it an absorbing and extremely well-textured experience.
    • Time
  44. The Cat's Meow
    The result is tiresome and tone-deaf and a disappointing comeback for Bogdanovich.
  45. The Sweetest Thing
    Randy and giggly, this is a femme version of "The Man Show."
  46. Crush
    The film bubbles with acid wit, in the tradition of Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges, while simmering with the ache of lust pursued and love lost.
  47. Panic Room
    A fairly standard exercise in claustrophobic menace. It is also an exercise in style.
  48. Son of the Bride
    Wry, richly layered, wonderfully observed Argentine film.
  49. Y Tu Mamá También
    If this sounds like an old-fashioned sex comedy, it is -- sexy, for sure, and funny, in wild spurts.
  50. Ice Age
    It yearns for Pixar-style wit without quite earning it.
  51. Monsoon Wedding
    They bring their characters to good, slightly surprising, quite satisfying places. And leave us beaming happily.
    • Time
  52. Storytelling
    Does Solondz feel remorse for libeling his own kind? He might need to if his portraits didn't have the gift of dark wit, the ring of social truth. One makes allowances for a master storyteller.
    • Time
  53. The Mothman Prophecies
    Director Pellington's touch is light and flickering, and his actors are solid and persuasive. If you let yourself go with The Mothman Prophecies, it is -- in its lumpen, serious way -- sort of fun.
    • Time
  54. Italian for Beginners
    The sober wit of this comedy arises not from conventional artifice -- snappy dialogue, wacky situations -- but from a realistically drawn ensemble interacting truthfully with one another.
    • Time
  55. Black Hawk Down
    It takes its place on the very short list of the unforgettable movies about war and its ineradicable and immeasurable costs.
    • Time
  56. I Am Sam
    As the director of this noble weepie, Nelson so overuses visual tricks -- zooms, zip pans and multiple perspectives on a simple scene -- that she turns the viewer into an exasperated parent; this is a directorial style in need of a spanking.
    • Time
  57. Dark Blue World
    One thinks of the great opening line of that great novel The Good Soldier: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." Like many such tales, this one is worth taking to your aching heart.
    • Time
  58. Monster's Ball
    The cast is uniformly superb, and Marc Forster's attentive direction gives proper weight to each perplexing emotion. Strip away the strident melodrama, and you have this season's moodiest, most adult love story.
    • Time
  59. Gosford Park
    Tedium overwhelms caring well before this endless film finally concludes.
    • Time
  60. Ali
    A thoughtful epic is both a rarity and an oxymoron. But that's what Ali is, and you can't help being drawn sympathetically into its hero's struggle for mastery of himself and his era.
    • Time
  61. Kate & Leopold
    Given that this holiday film season has come up more than a little short on love and laughter, one can easily forgive Kate & Leopold the slightly excessive lengths and complications to which it goes in search of those rare commodities.
    • Time
  62. A Beautiful Mind
    The result is mainstream moviemaking at its highest, most satisfying level.
    • Time
  63. The Majestic
    The story has to carry way too much weight, as war remorse battles McCarthyism. The Majestic's makers don't get what made Capra movies invigorating.
    • Time
  64. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
    Though faithful in every detail to Tolkien, it has a vigorous life of its own -- grandeur, moral heft and emotional depth.
    • Time
  65. Lantana
    Lawrence's style, naturally lit and roughly realistic, matches the writing. Lantana sometimes has the air of a routine police procedural, sometimes the quality of a dour film noir. But this movie, so alert to mischance and dreams that don't quite work out as they should, has a good soul, a heart yearning for decency.
    • Time
  66. The Royal Tenenbaums
    For Hackman embodies the energy and outrage the rest of this rather twee family lacks. Royal stirs them all to life, and this great, bumptious performance by an actor gleefully rediscovering his funny bone stirs us to appreciative life too.
    • Time
  67. Vanilla Sky
    Every ambitious picturemaker should be allowed one wild misfire at no lasting cost to his reputation. Crowe (Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous) can now put this aside and go back to making good films.
    • Time
  68. Behind the Sun
    This movie is more emotionally remote than Salles' fine "Central Station." But it is starkly beautiful and says something potent to a world in which nations, like these families, engage in mindless blood feuds.
  69. Last Orders
    Wry humor and even a certain sexiness break through the reserve of a rueful, realistic, but finally emotionally rewarding film.
    • Time
  70. No Man's Land
    All the actors in No Man's Land are wonderfully alive, fractious and unpredictable. Their performances also help break down the schematics and turn this into an emotionally potent, powerfully thoughtful and finally tragic experience.
    • Time
  71. Ocean's Eleven
    Doesn't offer much.
  72. The Affair of the Necklace
    You may not be able to follow the overall arc of their scheming, but scene by scene they are a delightful crew, hissing away behind their cloaks and fans.
    • Time
  73. Behind Enemy Lines
    The journey is never boring, and it's morally satisfying too. O.K., the movie is what Hollywood likes to call "a ride." But it's one worth taking.
    • Time
  74. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
    The film lacks moviemaking buoyancy -- the feeling of soaring in space that Rowling's magic-carpet prose gives the reader. The picture isn't inept, just inert.
    • Time
  75. Shallow Hal
    We [Farrellys'] mock, they say, because we care. But that doesn't make the film elevating or amusing.
  76. Heist
    The result is a well-tooled machine chugging coldly along a twisting road to nowhere.
  77. Monsters, Inc.
    "Shrek," this film's prime competition for the first Animated Feature Oscar, is a synoptic parody of fairy tales. In Monsters, Inc. the gags aren't as spot-on but the technique is miles ahead. The vision is grander and warmer.
    • Time
  78. Amélie
    You could get drunk, or ill, on the high dose of whimsy in Amelie.
    • Time
  79. The Man Who Wasn't There
    If this were not such great American-vernacular moviemaking -- hilarious yet hypnotic -- one would be tempted to see something Greek in the tragedy that Ed never comprehends.
  80. Life as a House
    Will the movie end in an orgy of sentiment? Why do we bother to ask?
  81. The Last Castle
    Redford underacts, Gandolfini overacts, and this movie is directed with the same air of unreality, the same grim passion for cliches, both cinematic and emotional, that Lurie brought to his first film, "The Contender."
  82. Riding in Cars with Boys
    It is somewhat repetitive, but it is also wonderfully acted, especially by Barrymore.
  83. Bandits
    Works as a sweetly loony ensemble piece, a sort of cracked romance that's typical of director Barry Levinson at his shrewd but unpretentious best.
    • Time
  84. Mulholland Dr.
    Viewers will feel as though they've just finished a great meal but aren't sure what they've been served. Behind them, the chef smiles wickedly.
  85. Training Day
    As long as Training Day stays tightly focused on the struggle between the two cops, the movie is first rate.
    • Time
  86. Serendipity
    Your affection for Serendipity may depend on how fascinated you are by a movie that is apparently going after the all-time record for delayed consummation.
    • Time
  87. Liam
    Unsparing but never unsympathetic, emerges as one of the year's best, most brutally honest movies.
  88. Our Lady of the Assassins
    Full of sacrilegious rant, absurdist affectlessness and pop social criticism, this film plays like an old B movie: narratively improvisational, delusionally pretentious, weirdly watchable.
  89. Rock Star
    This is a good-natured retro romp that is truer to Golden Age movies than to golden oldies songs.
  90. O
    On your already groaning Shakespeare for Teens video shelf, stack this one above "10 Things I Hate About You" (a.k.a. "The Taming of the Shrew") and quite a bit below "Romeo + Juliet."
  91. Together
    We are free to adore a sad, funny, always good-natured film that eccentrically, tolerantly explores that moment when revolutionary ardor commingled with bourgeois stolidity to form our present weirdly ambiguous culture.
  92. Captain Corelli's Mandolin
    Corelli is a coffee-table movie: one leafs through the gorgeous vistas and nods through the narrative.
    • Time
  93. Rat Race
    It's a fine madness, full of jaunty desperation, survivable disasters and the kind of ferocious concentration on a really stupid idea that once propelled Wile E. Coyote.
    • Time
  94. The Deep End
    Elegantly made, romantically doomy, curiously affecting movie.
  95. Rush Hour 2
    Until a vigorous climax, the action scenes have little punch.
  96. Apocalypse Now Redux
    Apocalypse Now is about an American, perhaps a human madness. It searingly depicts, and finally embodies, the spiritual wounds men inflict on themselves and one another in the name of war. To gain the hearts and minds of a distant people, we lose our own souls.
  97. Planet of the Apes
    Mostly, the new film reminds us that swell production design is no substitute for a fresh, simple and startling idea.
    • Time
  98. Ghost World
    In this arid landscape, the edifice of Ghost World, with all its acute insolence, stands out like the Taj Mahal.
    • Time
  99. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
    A.I. will beguile some viewers, perplex others. Its vision is too capacious, its narrative route too extended, the shift in tone (from suburban domestic to rural nightmare to urban archaeology) too ornery to make the film a flat-out wowser of the E.T. stripe.
  100. Divided We Fall
    The result is a lovely movie, one that allows its characters unexpected spurts of growth and regression, darkness and grace.
    • Time
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