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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    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Jaws 2
    Well, the big questions might as well be answered first. Is Jaws 2 as scary as the original Jaws? No. Is it as much fun? No. Will it make as much money? No. Is it a total catastrophe? Not quite. What, then, is Jaws 2? Quite simply, it is an almost scientific exercise in showbiz mediocrity. This smooth and passionless spectacle is too impersonal to win anyone's affection and too inoffensive to inspire hatred. It's so bland that it evaporates from memory as soon as the final credits appear onscreen.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Corvette Summer
    As long as one doesn't demand too much of it, Corvette Summer delivers a very pleasant two hours of escape.
  3. F.I.S.T.
    The movie F.I.S.T. stands for nearly 2½ hours of almost unmitigated boredom—a misfired would-be proletarian epic with Sylvester Stallone misplaying the Jimmy Hoffa part with a self-confidence that borders on the sublime.
  4. Semi-Tough
    Semi-Tough may or may not turn out to be the year's best comedy—there's Annie Hall to remember and Mel Brooks yet to be heard from—but it is without a doubt the year's most socially useful film.
  5. The Turning Point
    It is hard to imagine anyone, with the possible exception of preadolescent males, who will not, in the end turn on to Turning Point.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Close Encounters of the Third Kind
    What lifts this film into orbit—and what saves it from being a shaggy flying-saucer story—is the breathless wonder that the director brings to every frame. Whether he is showing us a pristine, starry Midwestern sky or displaying Special Effects Wizard Douglas Trumbull's formidable arsenal of spaceships and celestial storms, Spielberg seems to be looking at everything onscreen as if for the first time. The freshness of his vision is contagious—and exhilarating.
  7. Sorcerer
    Friedkin's pretensions do not entirely defeat the film, and his craftsmanship often rescues him from self-betrayal. But Sorcerer lacks the kind of low cunning — the sorcery — that is Friedkin's strong suit.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    New York, New York
    If this movie were a big-band arrangement, it would be a duet for a sax man and a girl singer, but with the soloists in a different key from the band.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope
    A grand and glorious film that may well be the smash hit of 1977, and certainly is the best movie of the year so far.
  10. Slap Shot
    There is nothing in the history of movies to compare with Slap Shot for consistent, low-level obscenity of expression...Its problem is an ending that abruptly transports the audience from heightened realism to broad satire. It is a defect that Slap Shot shares with the current hit Network—a desire to present an editorial so corrosive that aesthetics, questions of form and proportion simply dissolve.
  11. Pumping Iron
    A very good film, beautifully shot and edited, intelligently structured and — to risk what will surely seem at first a highly inappropriate term —charming.
  12. King Kong
    The special effects are marvelous, the good-humored script is comic-bookish without being excessively campy, and there are two excellent performances.
  13. Rocky
    The story is achingly familiar, and though Stallone has a certain power, he is certainly not the subtlest actor to crawl out from under Marlon's overcoat. But the picture goes most wrong in the conceit it employs to lift Rocky out of the clubs and into the big arena for his title challenge.
  14. Carrie
    Carrie's ultimate triumph is spectacular beyond anything one is used to in this antique genre. Brian De Palma's sure and powerfully individual style, blending romance, darkish satirical humor and suspenseful spookiness, transforms what could have been dreary stuff. From its first shot, Carrie catches the mind, energetically shakes it and refuses to let go even after the end credits have rolled.
  15. Network
    There is a lunatic energy about it. Every once in a while, Chayefsky abandons the struggle to dramatize his ideas and has somebody, usually Holden, just turn to the camera and spout off. In those moments, his concern — and sometimes his mother wit — comes blazing through and the picture takes on a life not found in safe, sane, well-calculated movies.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Two-Minute Warning
    Most of these matters cancel each other out, but there is just enough energy remaining to make Two-Minute Warning an amusing time waster.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Outlaw Josey Wales
    This directorial style seems to spring naturally from the man, assuming that Eastwood's screen character, in its mature, or post-spaghetti, formulation is a true reflection of his sensibility. The flat, quiet voice, the understated grace of his movements, the sweet almost boyish manner, contrasting so curiously with the violent deeds he performs, have a remarkable way of gaining sympathetic interest not so much through command as through insinuation.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Bad News Bears
    Surprisingly, improbably, The Bad News Bears is the year's funniest movie. It is very much like the team itself: no serious threat at first, but, finally, tough to beat.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Face to Face
    This is a strange, stormy period for Ingmar Bergman.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
    As always, the acting is superlative. Gazzara's Cosmo catches all the paradoxes and puzzles of the character, the wired ambition and the rapture over doom.
  21. Taxi Driver
    The movie has an air of recent discovery, of shocked innocence about the tawdry quality of city life that is gratingly naive. The film goes most disastrously wrong when it tries to turn slice-of-life realism into full-scale melodrama.
  22. Dog Day Afternoon
    Al Pacino gives an electric performance, charged with a lunatic energy that expertly captures the weird blend of confidence and self-deprecation (if not hatred) that marks the paranoid syndrome.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Man Who Would Be King
    A mellow, brassy, vigorous movie, rich in adventure and melancholy, The Man Who Would Be King represents the best work Huston has done in a decade.
  24. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
    One Flew over the Cuckoo 's Nest is an earnest attempt to make a serious film. But in the end the movie backs away from both the human reality and the cloudy but potent symbolism that Ken Kesey found in the asylum.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Three Days of the Condor
    A piece of dotty, slightly paranoid intrigue. Three Days of the Condor promises little and keeps its word. It is hard to get indignant about it, or enthusiastic either.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Farewell, My Lovely
    This is the sort of private-eye period piece that means to do honor to the traditions of Raymond Chandler and the hard-boiled melodrama. But through its own dim eagerness it ends up making a mockery of them.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Jaws
    What sets Jaws apart from most of the other ceiling busters and makes it a special case, like "The Godfather," is that it is quite a good movie. For one thing, it is mercifully free of the padding—cosmic, comic, cultural—that so often mars "big" pictures. In that sense, the movie is very like its subject. If the great white shark that terrorizes the beaches of an island summer colony is one of nature's most efficient killing machines, Jaws is an efficient entertainment machine.
  28. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
    Along with the high comedy, this determined insistence on the gory stupidity of ancient but still potent fancy is what holds the film together. Grail is as funny as a movie can get, but it is also a tough-minded picture — as outraged about the human propensity for violence as it is outrageous in its attack on that propensity.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tommy
    There has never been a movie musical quite like Tommy, a weird, crazy, wonderfully excessive version of The Who's rock opera.
  30. The Godfather: Part II
    This is a much colder film, with austere aspirations — not fully realized — to transcend its melodramatic origins and to become an authentic tragedy. … As Michael plots his careful, lethal moves, the recurring, unforgettable image is of his eyes growing colder, until they finally go dead to the horrors around him.
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