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. Mission to Mars
    This isn't "2001," by a long shot, but for 2000, it'll do nicely.
  2. What Planet Are You From?
    At once smug and lazy, qualities fatal to comedy.
  3. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
    Niftily quirky.
    • Time
  4. Drowning Mona
    There's a definite limit to the number of moron jokes we can absorb in 100 minutes, and their movie exceeds it.
    • Time
  5. Wonder Boys
    The pulse of Curtis Hanson's direction is lethargic; the comic bits are so slack and deadpan you could mistake the film for an earnest drama--an Afterschool Special for troubled kids and their pooped parents.
  6. Judy Berlin
    The film is one-note; misery is the only game in town.
  7. Beautiful People
    The best movie of this very young millennium.
    • Time
  8. The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg
    Sharing its subject's virtues, it is a lovely addition to the annals of the Greatest Generation.
  9. The Whole Nine Yards
    You're entitled to ask for more than that in a comedy, but these days you're often obliged to settle for a lot less.
  10. Not One Less
    To Western eyes, this meandering parable registers as a perplexity and a disappointment.
  11. Boiler Room
    Curiously intense, alertly principled, refreshingly uncynical movie.
    • Time
  12. Scream 3
    Not so good is the absence of hip cross-references to the classic horror tropes.
  13. Isn't She Great
    One of the worst messes in years.
  14. Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her
    If the stories sometimes use Creative Writing 101 devices (like a quasi-prophetic homeless woman), the total effect is as spare and haunting as the film's arid, beautifully shot setting.
  15. The Hurricane
    In Washington's finely shaded performance he's a low-pressure system, illuminated by distant flashes of lightning.
    • Time
  16. Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.
    The fascinating film equivalent of a humane execution.
  17. Play It to the Bone
    Never achieves more than feckless amiability.
  18. Titus
    Vivid, relevant and of elevating scariness.
  19. Galaxy Quest
    In this space epic, no one will hear you laugh.
  20. Any Given Sunday
    Ends up less than the sum of its many, often interesting parts.
    • Time
  21. Man on the Moon
    Just gives us Andy, the pop postmodernist, and permits us to make what we will of him, which is a fascinating activity.
  22. Snow Falling on Cedars
    Essentially a liberal soap opera.
  23. Anna and the King
    Cutting through the epic gesturings of Andy Tennant's direction, he (Yun-Fat Chow) provides reason enough to return one last time to this otherwise weary romance
    • Time
  24. Onegin
    Handsome, well-acted, richly textured adaptation of Alexander Pushkin's novel.
  25. Stuart Little
    The blend of digital animation and live action is first rate.
  26. Simpatico
    Curiously, if fitfully, intriguing.
  27. Bicentennial Man
    The tone is cloying, the running time bloated.
    • Time
  28. Magnolia
    A hard-striving, convoluted movie, which never quite becomes the smoothly reciprocating engine Anderson ...would like it to be.
  29. The Cider House Rules
    A small epic with subtle strengths.
  30. The Green Mile
    At the core, though, one finds a slacky, sappy film. The human mystery that breathed so easily in "Shawshank" is often forced here.
    • Time
  31. Agnes Browne
    There are a reserve and a realism in Huston's work that make her very modest film more affecting than you might expect.
  32. Sweet and Lowdown
    Samantha Morton, as Emmet's "mute orphan half-wit" of a girlfriend, is the sweet revelation. Rarely has a performer mined such complex and potent emotion from such simple materials: a smile, a shrug, an attentive winsomeness.
  33. Tumbleweeds
    We have this movie--full of acceptant, sidelong glances at human quirkiness--to delight us.
  34. Ride with the Devil
    For all the carnage, Lee's tone is contemplative.
  35. Toy Story 2
    Pixar's improved computer animation is up to all the demands of this excellent adventure.
  36. Sleepy Hollow
    Sleepy Hollow may be late for Halloween, but this trick is a real treat.
  37. All About My Mother
    The most mature and satisfying work in a glittering, consistently surprising career.
    • Time
  38. Mansfield Park
    Well acted, and it achieves a strong, smart, engaging life of its own.
  39. Liberty Heights
    Seems to encompass all the humor, sadness and weirdness of ordinary life in an utterly winning, morally acute way.
  40. 42: Forty Two Up
    Apted...has the storytelling skills to weave a powerful and poignant snapshot of some decent folks who have become, collectively, Britain's first family.
  41. Dogma
    A tortured testament from a true believer.
    • Time
  42. Felicia's Journey
    A movie this implausible shouldn't be this dull.
  43. Anywhere But Here
    What it doesn't have is a central figure you can give a hoot about.
    • Time
  44. The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc
    A lively, nutty film, one full of clumsy, clanging battles filmed by the gifted, eccentric Besson with bloody brio.
  45. Rosetta
    The purity of Dequenne's performance inspires awe.
  46. The Bone Collector
    It's kind of fun--if you have the stomach for its more grisly passages.
  47. The Insider
    The viewer almost has to be a journalist--or a good editor--to sniff out the meat under all the fat.
  48. Mein liebster Feind - Klaus Kinski
    This documentary, a gallivanting time trip through a bolder film era, is Herzog's final collaboration with Kinski: an act of love and exorcism.
  49. Music of the Heart
    What saves this movie from hopeless sentimentality is Meryl Streep's subtle performance.
    • Time
  50. Being John Malkovich
    Weird, beguiling premise.
  51. The Best Man
    This agitated comedy could be called "The Big Chillin'" if it had a smidge of the 1983 film's wit and charm.
  52. Bringing Out the Dead
    Like its title -- blunt, thruthful, uncompromising. It is hard on an audience, even harrowing. But that's exactly what Martin Scorsese was put on earth to do.
    • Time
  53. The Story of Us
    Mostly the movie is like the marriage: good casting, golden promise, yet somehow a grating ordeal.
    • Time
  54. The Straight Story
    Alvin's tragic memories give perspective to the triumph of his trek, even as Farnsworth's weathered brilliance makes this movie a G as in gem.
  55. Fight Club
    Both actors are excellent--but there's something conventionally gimmicky about the way it plays its reality/unreality game.
    • Time
    • 14 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Omega Code
    Given its budget, the quality of its writing, acting and production is remarkably high--about miniseries level.
  57. Random Hearts
    A grim and draggy romance in which even the clothes and sets are dismal.
  58. The Limey
    Soderbergh slices, dices and Cuisinarts the script into flashbacks, scene shifts, stop motion and other distracting foolery.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Boys Don't Cry
    The movie lets down the material. It's to cool: all attitude, no sizzle.
  60. Happy, Texas
    An easy charm, a cleverly unforced sense of humor and a benignity toward all its genially oddball characters. If moviegoers skip this one, they'll be missing a real treat.
    • Time
  61. Three Kings
    A brilliant exercise in popular but palpable surrealism.
  62. Romance
    It's mostly an ordeal--for actress and audience.
  63. For Love of the Game
    You will simply want to shoot yourself by the third inning.
    • Time
  64. Blue Streak
    Not a bad concept, and Martin Lawrence is appealing. Unfortunately, the writers have no gift for comic writing.
  65. Get Bruce
    Fond, zippy new documentary about the Bruce who, on the Hollywood circuit, is the real Boss.
    • Time
  66. American Beauty
    Kevin Spacey (gives) a truly great performance.
    • Time
  67. Teaching Mrs. Tingle
    It's too empty to applaud, too insignificant to deplore.
  68. Mickey Blue Eyes
    Director Kelly Makin has a gift for casually tossed-off farce.
  69. Bowfinger
    Perhaps the funniest movie for grownups so far this year.
    • Time
  70. The Iron Giant
    A smart live-and-let-live parable.
  71. The Sixth Sense
    Unfolds with a patient intelligence. The Sixth Sense might not scare you out of your wits, but it could reward them.
  72. Dick
    Sells out real satirical possibilities to its marketing potential as teen fluff. Everyone loses -- except Hedaya, who keeps faith with his character's nutsiness.
  73. Muppets from Space
    Bringing Gonzo to his senses gives the Muppets briskly economical opportunities to satirize government, media excesses and cult sci-fi's more tiresome tropes.
  74. South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut
    Here's another warning: you may laugh yourself sick--as sick as this ruthlessly funny movie is.
  75. Run Lola Run
    Invigorating and annoying, Lola could use a dose of Ritalin. Best to take this 76-minute riff on alternate destinies as an antidote to Europe's minimalist art-house cinema and to enjoy Potente's sweaty radiance.
  76. An Ideal Husband
    An ideal play is degraded into an indolent film
  77. The Red Violin
    These stories, alas, are utterly predictable. Still, Samuel L. Jackson breaks through the crust of cliches as an expert called in to verify the instrument's provenance, and violinist Joshua Bell plays and Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts John Corigliano's score ravishingly.
  78. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
    AP2 starts out bright and clever--shagnificent, we might almost say--before sinking into a swamp of shagnation.
    • Time
  79. Tea with Mussolini
    Maggie Smith and Judi Dench are glorious comic actresses, while Joan Plowright provides a firm, touching moral center to the film. They almost make you forget Cher's totally out-of-it work as a disapproved-of American and carry the film to its destiny, which is one of inoffensive inconsequence, prettily staged. [24 May 1999, p.88]
    • Time
  80. The Mummy
    Hopelessly overwrought and deeply dopey movie.
  81. eXistenZ
    Like the virtual game he plays on us, the film is weird, it's addictive, and Lord, it's alive!
  82. Pushing Tin
    Tin tailspins into silliness and never regains its flight pattern.
  83. Shuang long hui
    The real fun is in seeing Hong Kong pop cinema at its innocent, crowd-pleasing best. And for Jackie, that goes double.
  84. Go
    Here is a picture that has wit, a hairpin-turn narrative, high pizazz and ensemble star quality. Ready, set, Go.
    • Time
  85. Metroland
    Metroland finally makes a good, subtle case for the bearable weightiness of middle-class being, for the higher morality of muddling through.
  86. Cookie's Fortune
    The film mostly simmers.
  87. The Matrix
    Given a budget that encourages their kinesthetic skills, the filmmakers tend to go on a bit, but it's mostly a kind of quick, glancing hipness that's being indulged here.
  88. Forces of Nature
    All its desperate plot maneuvers (Ben and Sandra making like Tarzan on a train roof) can't give the film wit; all the slo-mo sleet, rain and confetti can't give it style. [March 22, 1999]
    • Time
  89. The Deep End of the Ocean
    Pfeiffer restores honor to the family drama.
  90. The Corruptor
    Chow Yun-fat, the epitome of swaggering suavity in John Woo's Hong Kong crime films, wears his role as a good-bad cop dapperly in this good-middling drama set in Manhattan's Chinatown.
  91. 200 Cigarettes
    The first few minutes have promise (with an all-star list of Gen-X actors), and the last few minutes provide fun (with snapshots of lovers and losers). In between there is a void--feeble jokes, a lot of falling down and foolish declarations.
  92. Office Space
    At its shambling best, Office Space is like a bracing break at the coffee machine. Some horrible Monday, why not cut work to see it?
  93. The Thin Red Line
    The film is a gorgeous garland on an unknown soldier's grave.
  94. Affliction
    But the actor (Nolte) finds truth in Wade's emotional clumsiness, in the despair of a man who hasn't the tools or the cool to survive. There are too many of these men in life, and not enough films that tell their sad tales.
  95. A Civil Action
    A smart, tough, yet curiously moving film.
  96. Stepmom
    A pretty but utterly misleading picture in which cheap sentiment is used to supply easy, false resolutions to agonizing issues.
  97. You've Got Mail
    Ephron refreshingly stands out as the nation's foremost advocate of mind-meld. [21 Dec 1998, p. 74]
    • Time
  98. A Simple Plan
    There's neither intricacy nor surprise in the narrative, and these dopes are tedious, witless company. Mostly you find yourself thinking, "How long until dinner?"
  99. Shakespeare in Love
    The true, rare glamour of the piece is its revival of two precious movie tropes: the flourishing of words for their majesty and fun, and--in the love play between Fiennes and his enchantress--the kindling of a playfully adult eroticism.
  100. Rushmore
    An often deft, frequently droll little movie.
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