Time's Scores

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For 2,984 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: 1,815 out of 2984
  2. Mixed: 939 out of 2984
  3. Negative: 230 out of 2984
2984 movie reviews
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  1. Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle
    Jennifer Jason Leigh's draggy performance as Parker is all studied accent (something vaguely mid- Atlantic but never before heard on Earth) and equally studied self-pity and it cannot sustain our sympathy, or our interest in this inept film.
  2. The Professional
    This is a Cuisinart of a movie, mixing familiar yet disparate ingredients, making something odd, possibly distasteful, undeniably arresting out of them. [5 Dec 1994, p. 93]
    • Time
  3. Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles
    A vampire story needs vampires, sure, but it also needs a human victim to lead the audience into the vortex and help them escape it. Otherwise, the fear factor evaporates, and you get this mishmash: an interview in a void, a vampire movie with underbite.
  4. The Santa Clause
    The Santa Clause presents us with an Anti-Claus, Tim Allen of Home Improvement, hard-edged, discomfitingly frenetic and spritzing cheerless one-liners.
  5. Pulp Fiction
    It towers over the year's other movies as majestically and menacingly as a gang lord at a preschool. [10 Oct 1994]
    • Time
  6. Ed Wood
    This Ed Wood is dead wood.
    • Time
  7. Fresh
    Fresh alchemizes the terrifying cliches of urban melodrama into annihilating poetry.
  8. The Shawshank Redemption
    [Darabont] makes you feel the maddening pace of prison time without letting his picture succumb to it.
  9. Natural Born Killers
    Most films today are afraid to try anything new. Natural Born Killers is an explosive device for the sleepy movie audience, a wake-up call in the form of a frag bomb. [29 August 1994, p.66]
    • Time
  10. Clear and Present Danger
    The movie has two other qualities you don't always find in films of this kind: a sense of humor and a sense of character. [15 August 1994, p. 61]
    • Time
  11. True Lies
    For a viewer sympathetic to Schwarzenegger's and Cameron's best selves -- the ironist with muscles and the mordant fabulist -- True Lies is a loud misfire. It rarely brings its potent themes to life.
  12. Spanking the Monkey
    The movie is finally predictable, but it has connected with a generation that believes it has been saddled with the thankless job of raising its own parents.
  13. Forrest Gump
    It's a long drink of water at the fountain of pop-social memory.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Little Big League
    Little Big League was a movie for kids that never talked down to its target audience. It gave equal weight to issues that could easily be expected under these unusual circumstances.
  15. Wyatt Earp
    Wyatt Earp drones past its logical conclusion, which is, of course, the great shoot-out. Since Earp's life uninstructively limped along after that event, so must the movie, further abusing our overtaxed patience and undertaxed intelligence.
  16. Speed
    The movie has two virtues essential to good pop thrillers. First, it plugs uncomplicatedly into lurking anxieties -- in this case the ones we brush aside when we daily surrender ourselves to mass transit in a world where the loonies are everywhere. Second, it is executed with panache and utter conviction.
  17. Renaissance Man
    Warm-hearted humanism is glopped all over Renaissance Man in the hopes that we won't notice that the story makes no sense.
  18. The Flintstones
    And while more than 30 writers worked on the screenplay and untold numbers labored to re-create the ambiance and effects that the animators once tossed off with a few squiggles of their pencils, The Flintstones doesn't feel overcalculated, over-produced or overthought.
  19. Beverly Hills Cop III
    Beverly Hills Cop III is just going through the motions, without comic conviction, surprises or suspense. [6 June 1994, p.66]
    • Time
  20. Maverick
    The film offers us Mel Gibson as a new Bret Maverick, the Western gambler, as well as the old TV Maverick, James Garner, now playing a wry frontier sheriff. These two guys can make you smile contentedly even when the script is wandering and they're just sort of standing around waiting for its next good part to develop.
  21. Crooklyn
    Our natural sympathy for the Carmichaels is sabotaged by crude and careless moviemaking.
  22. Red Rock West
    It has the kind of tension and energy -- maybe even a touch of delirium -- that is only a memory in most of today's big studio movies.
  23. The Hudsucker Proxy
    The Coens have deliberately cut themselves off from their best subject. Try as they will to create a vision of corporate (and urban) hellishness through sheer stylishness, theirs is a truly abstract expressionism, at once heavy, lifeless and dry.
  24. Four Weddings and a Funeral
    A British romantic comedy with not much inside its pretty head but the spinning out of an ancient Hollywood riddle.
  25. What's Eating Gilbert Grape
    The script, by Peter Hedges from his novel, spins out a few too many eccentricities, and the direction, by Lasse Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog), meanders. But DiCaprio and Cates bring loopy authenticity to their roles, and Depp is, as always, a most effacing star.
  26. In the Name of the Father
    By the end of the movie, whether or not you're a member of Sinn Fein, the Brits' brutality toward the Conlons will get your Irish up.
  27. The Pelican Brief
    But we don't go to movies like this in search of stylish apercus. We go to see innocents like ourselves getting swept up by irresistible tides of terror. And to have the pants scared off us. That doesn't happen in The Pelican Brief.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Schindler's List
    Epic cinema, tragic drama, it is also an act of remembrance and conscience that ultimately transcends the ordinary critical categories.
    • Time
  29. Mrs. Doubtfire
    Most of the fun comes from seeing people fooled by what seems to us, who are in on the joke, a completely penetrable ruse. Curiously enough, what's really unpersuasive about Mrs. Doubtfire -- not to say draggy -- is its nondrag sequences.
  30. Addams Family Values
    Like the first of the Addams chronicles, this is an essentially lazy movie, too often settling for easy gags and special effects that don't come to any really funny point.
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