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. The Big Chill
    Indeed, the entire film is a kind of sock-hop benefit for Approaching Middle Age. This maturing generation never played Taps with such glamour or good humor. Play the music and let the big chill—the knowledge that "we're all alone out there, and we're going out there tomorrow"—melt away in the warmth of the feel-good movie of '83.
  2. Twilight Zone: The Movie
    "Wanna see something really scary?" asks Guest Star Dan Aykroyd at film's end. The Miller and Dante episodes are. So is the epic waste that informs much of this movie. [20 June 1983, p.73]
    • Time
  3. Octopussy
    When he had started playing this game of Save the Planet—when he was roguish Sean Connery and the world was so much younger—Bond had been a kind of role model for people of a certain class and ambition. Savoir-faire meant the aristocracy of style: which wine to decant, which brand of cigarette to smoke, which automatic weapon to carry under the armpit. Now that he was Roger Moore, 20 years later, Bond had degenerated into a male model, and something of a genial anachronism.
  4. Trading Places
    [Murphy] makes Trading Places something more than a good-hearted comedy. He turns it into an event.
  5. The Man with Two Brains
    This is the most assured and hilarious of the three Martin-Carl Reiner collaborations.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi
    It is not as exciting as Star Wars itself, which had the advantage of novelty. But it is better and more satisfying than The Empire Strikes Back, which suffered from a hectic, muddled pace, together with the classic problems of being the second act in a three-act play.
  7. Flashdance
    Like Saturday Night Fever and, for that matter, the Rocky films, Flashdance has made it big by taking experiences of black youths and playing them in whiteface. But unlike its grittily romantic predecessors, Flashdance is pure glitz.
  8. The Outsiders
    Alas, The Outsiders is not quite a good one. Because it falls in with the undulating rhythm of the life of its heroes, for whom a fatal fight and a quiet night have almost equal importance, the picture never manages to reach the peaks of satisfying Hollywood melodrama.
  9. Gandhi
    The director's stylistic self-denial serves to keep one's attention fastened where it belongs: on a persuasive, if perhaps debatable vision of Gandhi's spirit, and on the remarkable actor who has caught its light in all its seasons.
  10. The Year of Living Dangerously
    The plot becomes landlocked in true-life implausibilities; the characters rarely get a hold on the moviegoer's heart or lapels. What saves this meditation on the vestiges of colonialism is, ironically, its celebration of American star power.
  11. Tootsie
    This year's miracle is called Tootsie. It is not just the best comedy of the year; it is popular art on the way to becoming cultural artifact.
  12. The Dark Crystal
    The invention is impressive, but there is little indication of the Henson-Oz trademark: a sense of giddy fun.
  13. Honkytonk Man
    It is a guileless tribute not only to plain values of plain people in Depression America, but also to the sweet spirit of country-and-western music before it got all duded up for the urban cowboys.
  14. 48 Hrs.
    Neither jokes nor fast, flashy action can completely distract audiences from the failure to establish an authentic, rather than a purely conventional connection between Nolte and Murphy.
  15. Lookin' to Get Out
    A sloppy mess that stumbles toward oblivion like a drunk on a losing streak
  16. An Officer and a Gentleman
    The result is a Big Mac of a movie, junk food that somehow reaches the chortling soul.
  17. The World According to Garp
    What is missing from the movie is any attempt to discover a cinematic language that compares with the language of the novel. Where the book jumped, the movie plods; where the novelist came upon his themes in the course of rich exploration, the movie marches up and confronts them with all the subtlety of a morning-talk-show host. It is hard to recall any recent movie, of whatever literary lineage, that is as dully literal and unadventurous as this one.
  18. The Secret of NIMH
    There are a few longueurs, and moments when the plot trips, like Jeremy, over its own complications. But The Secret of NIMH is more important as Bon Bluth's declaration of dependence on a form of popular art that can infuse every corner of the imagination with its rainbow light.
  19. Annie
    Director John Huston offers production numbers full of empty extravagance, a host of familiar characters (like Punjab and the Asp) with little to do - and a chorus of baby Mormans knowingly strutting their stuff, breaking the sound and charm barriers.
  20. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
    One leaves the film neither hugely thrilled nor greatly awed, but with a pleasant sense of having caught up with old friends and found them to be just fine, pretty much the way one hoped they would turn out in later life.
  21. Poltergeist
    At first and final glance, Poltergeist is simply a riveting demonstration of the movies' power to scare the sophistication out of any viewer. It creates honest thrills within the confines of a P.G. rating and reaches for standard shock effects and the forced suspension of disbelief only at the climax, when we realize that the characters are behaving with such obtuseness precisely because they are trapped inside a horror movie.
  22. The Road Warrior
    Miller suggests violence; he does not exploit it. He throws the viewer off-balance by mixing the ricochet rhythms of his chase scenes with tableaux of Walpurgisnacht grandeur.
  23. Conan the Barbarian
    Conan is a sort of psychopathic Star Wars, stupid and stupefying.
  24. Chariots of Fire
    Hudson painstakingly makes an obscure corner of history reverberate in a nearly mythic way. It is lovely work. And like old snapshots of forgotten people from another time, strangely evocative and moving.
  25. Cat People
    Anyone grownup enough to gain legal admission to the movie (it is rated R) will probably find himself either reduced to guffaws or wishing he had stayed home looking at his poster of Nastassia Kinski wearing a snake.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Porky's
    It has some of ["American] Graffiti's" sweetness of spirit, but none of its style or depth of feeling; it has some of "Animal [House"]'s raunchiness, but none of its loony anarchy.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Deathtrap
    One can still appreciate the professionalism with which Levin crafted them and the larky spirits with which the performers force the suspension of incredulity.
  28. Diner
    The film is wonderfully cast and played, right down to the bit player (Ralph Tabakin) who shops suspiciously for a TV set: "I saw Bananzo and it was not for me."
  29. Personal Best
    Neither slick nor glib, they all suit a film that may finally disarm everyone with its full-frontal naturalness, its unsmirking bawdiness, its obvious liking for athletes as people, and its refusal (most of the time) to poeticize sport. Personal Best is likable precisely because it is so unembarrassed.
  30. Absence of Malice
    It is also extremely well acted at every level (one especially wants to single out Bob Balaban as the Government's chief aggressor and Wilford Brimley as its belated voice of conscience), and directed by Sidney Pollack with a sort of crisp but unassuming professionalism that is rarer than it ought to be. Perhaps best of all, the script, by sometime Journalist Kurt Luedtke, who was once part of a Pulitzer-winning investigative team on the Detroit Free Press, has a marvelously entertaining intricacy, briskly and believably building, half-inch by half-inch, Michael's outrage over and Megan's entrapment in the plot to get him.
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