Time's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. A Bug's Life
    At the end, the movie tops itself with comic outtakes, undoubtedly the funniest finale of any cartoon feature. “Antz” may have amused viewers with its sidewise wit, but as a comprehensive vision of computerized moviemaking, Pixar's dream works. And when A Bug's Life hits its stride, it's antastic.
  2. Very Bad Things
    Cameron Diaz is sublimely screwy as the single-minded bride determined not to let anything--including the deadly mishaps that keep shrinking the wedding party--spoil her nuptials. [30 November 1998, p. 111]
    • Time
  3. Central Station
    [Salles]'s imagery, like his storytelling, is clear, often unaffectedly lovely, and quietly, powerfully haunting.
  4. Elizabeth
    This darkly sumptuous, hypnotically complex movie ought to have many constituencies.
  5. American History X
    It's hard to know whom to blame for the film's choppiness, its mixture of rage and sentimentality, the stridency of some of the acting.
  6. Life Is Beautiful
    In this climate, turning even a small corner of this century's central horror into feel-good popular entertainment is abhorrent.
  7. Pleasantville
    An epic-size, largely entertaining parable of repression and awakening.
  8. Antz
    Kids may be puzzled by rebellious worker ants chanting Marxist slogans, but their parental guides may welcome the relief from the prevailing blandness of family films. [Oct 12, 1998 v152 n15 p116]
    • Time
  9. A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries
    The Merchant-Ivory attention to period detail often seems like the movie equivalent of good penmanship. But here it accrues a kind of ethical eloquence.
  10. 54
    All glitz, no glory. [7 September 1998]
    • Time
  11. Your Friends & Neighbors
    Jason Patric is the chief sleaze; Ben Stiller adds to his gallery of wormy guys; and Aaron Eckhart is the doleful husband who, when asked who his best lay was, unabashedly answers, "Me." [24 August 1998, p. 85]
    • Time
  12. Saving Private Ryan
    A war film that, entirely aware of its genre's conventions, transcends them as it transcends the simplistic moralities that inform its predecessors, to take the high, morally haunting ground.
  13. There's Something About Mary
    For those who park their sense and sensibility at the 'plex door, there's plenty to enjoy in the performances, the rowdy innocence of the whole thing, the closing sing-along of Build Me Up Buttercup--and the vision of Cameron Diaz in giggly, gangly bloom.
  14. Buffalo '66
    This says nothing about Gallo's own demonic charm as Billy or his directorial boldness in juxtaposing the emotional surreality of his story with the bleak reality of his hometown in winter, creating a sort of casual but strangely haunting weirdness.
  15. Smoke Signals
    A shrewd portrait, sly, casual yet palpably authentic, of the principal ways members of any minority try to respond to an uncomprehending world. [29 Jun 1998, p. 69]
    • Time
  16. Out of Sight
    What makes this movie work is the kind of cool that made Get Shorty go so nicely: an understanding that life's little adventures rarely come in neat three-act packages, the way most movies now do, and the unruffled presentation of outrageously twisted dialogue, characters and situations as if they were the most natural things in the world.
  17. Henry Fool
    It is pristinely acted; and its range and heart dwarf other summer films, so cogent is it about our common aches and dreams.
  18. Six Days Seven Nights
    It's all so predictable. And you begin to wonder, as you so often do at the movies these days, why did they bother? And more to the point, why should we bother? [15 June 1998, p.72]
    • Time
  19. The Truman Show
    Hollywood's smartest media satire in years--and a breakthrough for Jim Carrey.
  20. The Opposite of Sex
    This is a declaration of love: The Opposite of Sex is the smartest, edgiest, most human and handsomely acted romantic comedy in elephant years.
  21. City of Angels
    One of this movie's implications--and it's a common enough one these days--is that sensitivity is a quality impossible to find in straight guys. [20 April 1998]
    • Time
  22. Primary Colors
    Nichols and his once and current partner, screenwriter Elaine May, can make a funny, knowing, ultimately judicious film from the deliciously satyric satire.
  23. The Big Lebowski
    So even when they don’t achieve the glorious farce of a Fargo, there is always something fascinating about following the Coens’ rapt gaze as they peer into the American nut bowl.
  24. Dark City
    It is as cool and distant as the planet the Strangers come from. But, Lord, is Dark City a wonder to see. [2 March 1998]
    • Time
  25. Live Flesh
    Obsession has seldom looked as gaudy or thrilling as here.
  26. Oscar and Lucinda
    Its business is to turn sure-thing expectations into a game of chance, and provide us with that rarity--a genuinely eccentric yet deeply insinuating film.
  27. Afterglow
    Christie has already won prizes for the knowing weariness of her performance, and Flynn Boyle probably deserves some for her ferociously stated frustrations. But their clarity can't quite cut through the thickness of the film's air or compensate for the wooziness it induces.
  28. Jackie Brown
    At 2 1/2 hours, it all plays like the rough assembly of a 90-min. caper film--an anecdote told at epic length. Grier, foxy lady of '70s blaxploitation, is given little chance to radiate. [22 Dec 1997, p.80]
    • Time
  29. Kundun
    This is rapture in pictures. [22 December 1997, p. 81]
    • Time
  30. Titanic
    Ultimately, Titanic will sail or sink not on its budget but on its merits as drama and spectacle. The regretful verdict here: Dead in the water.
  31. Amistad
    Alive to the--yes--sometimes humorous, and therefore humanizing, struggles of the slaves and their would-be rescuers to surmount the language and cultural barriers that separate them. [15 Dec 1997, p. 108]
    • Time
  32. Good Will Hunting
    Hearts sinking, we are obliged to endure much pseudo-serious gabble as we head toward another painfully predictable triumph of the human spirit. There must be some better way of hunting our--and Oscar's--goodwill. [Dec. 1,1997]
    • Time
  33. Alien: Resurrection
    On the whole, the eek-for-yuks trade-off is more than fair--hip without being campy or condescending to one of the better movie franchises. [1 Dec 1997, p. 84]
    • Time
  34. Welcome to Sarajevo
    This could have turned out to be an exercise in easy sentiment, easy to shrug off. But Frank Cottrell Boyce's script is carefully understated, and director Michael Winterbottom has achieved a remarkably seamless blend of fictional and factual footage.
  35. The Sweet Hereafter
    A solemn, subtly structured, beautifully acted and ultimately hypnotic movie.
  36. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
    It is likely to disappoint the book's acolytes and tax the patience of newcomers. [1 December 1997, p.84]
    • Time
  37. Starship Troopers
    Maybe the filmmakers are so lost in their slambang visual effects that they don't give a hoot about the movie's scariest implications. [10 Nov 1997, p.102]
    • Time
  38. Eve's Bayou
    The poise and passion in Eve's Bayou leave one grateful, exhausted and nourished. For the restless spirit, here is true soul food.
  39. Happy Together
    [A] sexy, spiky love story.
  40. A Life Less Ordinary
    But that's the thing about this movie. It never leaves well enough, or good enough, alone. It keeps looking--sometimes a little too hard--for ways to transform the ordinary into the discomfiting.
  41. Boogie Nights
    So here's a tip for those attending this handsomely acted, epic-length little film. Ease into the sleaze, stare at the party animals, look but don't touch, and, oh, boogie all night. [October 6, 1997]
    • Time
  42. The House of Yes
    But the film is keyed to Posey's performance: perfectly brittle, faultlessly false. As the most toxic of this family of vipers, she creeps and stings, and no one dares look away.
  43. Soul Food
    It could be a distillation of some unaired black soap opera, so predictable are the plot contrivances--adultery, pregnancy, illness, missing money--and so cartoonishly are the characters drawn.
  44. L.A. Confidential
    A movie of shadows and half lights, the best approximation of the old black-and-white noir look anyone has yet managed on color stock.
  45. G.I. Jane
    What he (Scott) does superbly is establish a raw, compelling reality that transcends his movie's banal premises and predictable conclusion. That permits Moore to play, and us to feel, authentic pain, isola- tion and courage--shocking stuff to find in an action movie these days. [25 August 1997, p. 72]
    • Time
  46. The Full Monty
    To make an unembarrassing movie about embarrassment is definitely an eye-opening achievement.
  47. In the Company of Men
    Cool, shiny, handsomely made and, in its compelling-repelling way, mordantly funny.
  48. Air Force One
    Good--sometimes witty—suspense. [28 Jul 1997, p. 69]
    • Time
  49. Her Majesty, Mrs. Brown
    This British film has the regal, clubby aura of Masterpiece Theatre. [21 July 1997, p. 70]
    • Time
  50. Face/Off
    This isn't just a thrill ride; it's a rocket into the thrilling past, when directors could scare you with how much emotion they packed into a movie.
  51. Hercules
    Sixty years after Snow White, Hercules proves that Walt's art form is still sassy and snazzy.
  52. My Best Friend's Wedding
    When our sympathies shift to [Cameron Diaz's Kimmy], the movie sours. It is no help either that Ronald Bass neglected to write (or Mulroney was unable to find) a character in Michael. Why all this fuss over this lox, we keep wondering.
  53. Speed 2: Cruise Control
    The screenwriters, Randall McCormick and Jeff Nathanson, and the director, Jan de Bont, have no interest in providing their actors with stuff to act.
  54. Ulee's Gold
    Nunez's film neither floats like a butterfly nor stings like a bee. It just drones on.
  55. The Pillow Book
    Wu is a fine, supple tabula rasa; McGregor (Trainspotting) shows again that he is one of the boldest, most charming young actors.
  56. Addicted to Love
    A fine--but not entirely uninteresting—mess. [2 Jun 1997, p. 74]
    • Time
  57. Grosse Pointe Blank
    In its soft-spoken way, it is fierce, shaggy and deeply weirded out.
  58. Shall We Dance?
    The film has such a weakness for the easy incongruity (short men dancing with tall women--isn't that hilarious?) that it could almost be Australian. But Shall We Dance? also has an emotional gravity; it is grounded in a middle-aged man's nagging belief that he has one last chance to grab at life. [16 June 1997, p.76]
    • Time
  59. Paradise Road
    But in shaping their tale for the screen, shouldn't he have honored their courage--and, yes, inventiveness--with something other than cliches?
  60. Chasing Amy
    A true movie rarity: a brutally honest romance. If you loved "Sleepless in Seattle," you'll just hate it.
  61. Inventing the Abbotts
    The goofy hysteria of something like "A Summer Place" was infinitely more entertaining and emotionally authentic than the distant smugness of this failed clone. [7 April 1997, p. 76]
    • Time
  62. The Devil's Own
    More important, we should take into account the fact that this is really quite a good movie--a character-driven (as opposed to whammy-driven) suspense drama--dark, fatalistic and, within its melodramatically stretched terms, emotionally plausible.
  63. Crash
    An intellectual and a sensualist, Cronenberg graces Crash with philosophical musings, acres of pretty flesh and even more penis talk than on some 8 o'clock sitcoms. For all that, Crash doesn't work.
  64. The Substance of Fire
    In an era when films reduce the aged to comic cranks, Rifkin is heroic--the Lear of grumpy old men.
  65. Rosewood
    Ordinarily such trespasses against truth would be enough to condemn such a movie, but Rhames' gravity and grace, Voight's pinched anguish as he wills himself to do right, the moving work of actors like Don Cheadle and Esther Rolle do much to redeem this film for human if not historical reality.
  66. Absolute Power
    The warming, nicely played relationship of the burglar and his lawyer daughter (Laura Linney) is the source of the film's absolute power. [24 Feb 1997, p. 67]
    • Time
  67. Dante's Peak
    Writer Leslie Bohem and director Roger Donaldson brush briskly through the standard scientific and romantic blather. They know that in movies like this, complexity is the province of the special-effects people.
  68. Fierce Creatures
    This good-natured movie is very much in the spirit of those ancient comedies from Ealing Film Studios in which nice, silly people defend some enclave of old-fashioned sanity against the forces of brute modernism. [27 January 1997, p. 68]
    • Time
  69. The People vs. Larry Flynt
    Jogs from one incident to the next, amassing information and dispensing attitude but rarely creating real characters. That's supposed to be director Milos Forman's forte; here, though, nearly everyone is an enemy or a stooge.
  70. Evita
    But this Evita is not just a long, complex music video; it works and breathes like a real movie, with characters worthy of our affection and deepest suspicions.
  71. Scream
    An idiot-savant movie, knowing but not smart.
  72. Marvin's Room
    Marvin's Room, the 1991 Scott McPherson play, filmed by Jerry Zaks, is an old-fashioned weepie of noble mien with many bright moments and a superb cast.
  73. Jerry Maguire
    Altogether wondrous.
  74. Mars Attacks!
    Perhaps they don't create quite enough deeply funny earthlings to go around, but a thoroughly meanspirited big-budget movie is always a treasurable rarity. And those little guys from far away are a hoot. [30 Dec 1996]
    • Time
  75. Citizen Ruth
    Payne cannot shape or propel his own good material. He lets things dawdle when briskness would be a boon, and defeats the gung-ho efforts of Dern and other worthy actors. [9 December 1996, p.82]
    • Time
  76. 101 Dalmatians
    For us dog saps, it is especially nice to see cuddlesomely real pooches instead of drawn ones doing smart-pet tricks.
  77. Star Trek: First Contact
    Under the suave direction of Jonathan Frakes, who also plays the Enterprise's second-in-command, the movie glides along with purpose and style.
  78. Shine
    Ceases to be a cogent study of the disease of genius and devolves into two lesser creatures: an ordinary weepie and an Oscar contender.
  79. The English Patient
    To transport picturegoers to a unique place in the glare of the earth, in the darkness of the heart--this, you realize with a gasp of joy, is what movies can do.
  80. Space Jam
    The movie could have been a gleaming showcase for cartoon wit. Instead it's an 87-minute commercial peddling sainthood for Michael Jordan.
  81. Breaking the Waves
    In its pagan fervor, this is an almost religious experience.
  82. Ransom
    Its major sin--a certain ineluctable improbability--is pretty much offset by the moments of winsome humanity Gibson finds for his freebooter; by the rich, nicely tuned portrayals of the other actors; and by director Ron Howard's smoothly professional mastery of yet another genre that is new to him.
  83. Romeo + Juliet
    Luhrmann, an Australian who pretty much let his camera go nuts in the egregiously overrated "Strictly Ballroom", here makes reasonable, imaginative decisions that are, arguably, true to Shakespeare.
  84. Swingers
    Despite some rough edges and language, this is at heart a beguiling fantasy of comradeship.
  85. Sleepers
    At some low, what's-next level, Sleepers works like, well, gangbusters. [28 October 1996, p. 113]
    • Time
  86. Jude
    A careful, finally powerful film.
  87. Michael Collins
    There are pain and honor in this performance, and they constantly rise up to redeem a film that is less probing, less thoughtful than its director's claims and aspirations for it.
  88. The Long Kiss Goodnight
    Writer Shane Black mines his thriller premise while musing on issues of identity and redemption; he also shaped the itchy camaraderie of Davis and Jackson.
  89. Bound
    The Wachowskis have the predilection for loopy camera setups common to first-time directors, but their hearts are in the right transgressive place, and their film will tide some of us over until Quentin gets...well...unbound.
  90. That Thing You Do!
    There's evocative atmosphere in the period detail and perky faux-'60s tunes. A pity these are wasted in a movie that, like many a pop tune, has a cute idea but a simpleminded lyric.
  91. Secrets & Lies
    Rich in humor, pained or frolicking.
  92. Big Night
    A movie that is both as real as food on the table and as hauntingly evanescent as its taste on one's tongue.
  93. Tin Cup
    Rene Russo is both knowing and vulnerable, proving beyond a doubt that she is modern Hollywood's one true heiress to the screwball tradition. [19 August 1996, p.68]
    • Time
  94. The Fan
    De Niro's performance begins to seem more a matter of well-practiced gestures than real conviction, and the long, silly finale more an exercise in empty panache by director Tony Scott than a truly gripping suspense piece involving people we care about. [26 August 1996, p.61]
    • Time
  95. Jack
    One is left wondering why Williams has granted early retirement to his inner anarchist, what dark need compels a great clown to become a sad, fuzzy one in movies only Bob Dole - faking it -could love.
  96. Emma
    It is impressive enough that Paltrow holds your eye as a parade of lovelies and virtuoso actresses (Greta Scacchi, Polly Walker, Juliet Stevenson) march past. But her finest trick is to provide a comic subtext to Emma.
  97. A Time to Kill
    Director Joel Schumacher's breathlessly paced and incident-crammed movie will induce a certain sense of deja vu among veteran viewers.
  98. Trainspotting
    The film is about joy--in conniving and surviving, in connecting with audiences, in its own fizzy, jizzy style.
  99. The Nutty Professor
    Murphy, abetted by director Tom Shadyac and a whole raft of writers, cannot entirely escape the curious blend of aspiration and sloppiness that marked the earlier film.
  100. Striptease
    Yes, Burt Reynolds has some dirty, lively moments as a crooked, sex-starved Congressman. But the crazy, nothing-to-lose anarchy of people living below the margin and beyond the fringe is not within Bergman's fastidious reach.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »