GAMES: GameSpot | GameFAQs MUSIC: Last.fm | MP3.com MOVIES: Metacritic | Movietome TV: TV.com
Home | About Metacritic | About Metascores | What's New | Wireless Versions | Discussion Forums | Advertising Inquiries | Contact Us | RSS
Metacritic.com: We Deal With Criticism
     Help
> Switch to Advanced Search  
Film Video/DVD Music Games TV

Film

Upcoming Release Calendar
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums

 

Wide Releases

sort by name sort by score

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

 

Limited Releases

sort by name sort by score

67 $9.99
75 24 City
66 Adoration
74 Afghan Star
48 Alien Trespass
56 American Violet
82 Anvil! The Story of Anvil
57 Away We Go
81 Beaches of Agnes, The
62 Big Man Japan
28 Big Shot-Caller, The
78 Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story, The
55 Brothers Bloom, The
82 Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country
xx Call of the Wild
63 Cheri
62 Cherry Blossoms
63 Dead Snow
65 Departures
18 Downloading Nancy
58 Easy Virtue
70 End of the Line, The
77 Every Little Step
64 Examined Life
80 Food, Inc.
38 Gigantic
56 Girl from Monaco, The
67 Girlfriend Experience, The
87 Gomorrah
89 Goodbye Solo
63 Great Buck Howard, The
79 Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
xx Home
82 Hunger
91 Hurt Locker, The
16 I Hate Valentine's Day
81 Il Divo
54 Is Anybody There?
71 Jerichow
58 Julia
74 Lemon Tree
36 Life is Hot in Cracktown
40 Limits of Control, The
42 Little Ashes
64 Lymelife
50 Management
57 Merry Gentleman, The
66 Moon
35 New York
62 Not Forgotten
xx Offshore
78 O'Horten
64 Outrage
40 Paris 36
54 Pontypool
71 Pressure Cooker
52 Quiet Chaos
83 Revanche
67 Rudo y Cursi
86 Seraphine
65 Sex Positive
70 Shall We Kiss?
77 Sin Nombre
59 Sleep Dealer
74 Song of Sparrows, The
54 Stoning of Soraya M., The
82 Sugar
84 Summer Hours
61 Sunshine Cleaning
28 Surveillance
42 Tennessee
63 Tetro
64 Throw Down Your Heart
80 Tokyo Sonata
63 Tokyo!
70 Tony Manero
74 Treeless Mountain
88 Tulpan
74 Two Lovers
83 Tyson
83 U2 3D
60 Under Our Skin
69 Unmistaken Child
69 Valentino: The Last Emperor
22 What Goes Up
45 Whatever Works
57 Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

 



Printer-Friendly Version Email This Page Discuss In Our Forums

Time Out
ThinkFilm Inc.

Time Out reviews
Critic Score
Metascore: 88 Metascore out of 100
User Score  
7.2 out of 10
based on 30 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
based on 15 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

MPAA RATING: PG-13 for sensuality

Starring Aurélien Recoing, Karin Viard, Serge Livrozet, Jean-Pierre Mangeot, Monique Mangeot, Nicolas Kalsch, Marie Cantet, and Félix Cantet

After losing his job, Vincent (Recoing) can't bring himself to tell his wife (Viard) and children, so he wanders around France during the day, while they think he's at work, and finds himself on a moral and ethical journey of conscience that challenges the notions he's formed about life. (ThinkFilm)


GENRE(S): Foreign  
WRITTEN BY: Robin Campillo
Laurent Cantet
 
DIRECTED BY: Laurent Cantet  
RELEASE DATE: DVD: January 14, 2003 
Video: January 14, 2003 
Theatrical: March 29, 2002 
RUNNING TIME: 132 minutes, Color 
ORIGIN: France 
LANGUAGE(S): French (with English subtitles) 

Original Frech title "L'Emploi du Temps," which translates as "Timetable"; Don Quixote Award, 2001 Venice Film Festival

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100
Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Recoing gives a performance that won't soon be forgotten. Neither will Time Out. It's a great movie.
Read Full Review
100
Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
Cantet has rich insights into this material, and brings them alive through sensitive acting and powerful filmmaking.
Read Full Review
100
The New Yorker David Denby
This movie makes one grateful that a serious European art cinema still exists. [15 April 2002, p. 88]
100
Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
There's piercing sadness, and fury, too, in this Everyman's isolation, and Cantet is singularly skilled at evoking the universal condition of such tragic ordinariness.
Read Full Review
100
Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
It's a chilly, lonely introduction to a man who has effectively stepped out of the social world of adult responsibility.
Read Full Review
100
New York Magazine Peter Rainer
A hushed, small-scale masterpiece that moves into the shadowlands of tragedy.
Read Full Review
100
The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
Cantet's masterful study of a white-collar businessman in decline.
Read Full Review
91
Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
Recoing's performance is chillingly low-key -- sometimes you can swear that he believes his own fictions -- and Livrozet, making his film debut, has a perfect long-in-the-tooth charm.
90
Newsweek David Ansen
It has the stately, well-crafted anxiety of a Hitchcock movie, except that the protagonist and antagonist are one and the same.
90
Slate David Edelstein
It's like an Ingmar Bergman film with the loss of religious faith replaced with a sort of socioeconomic nebulousness.
Read Full Review
90
Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Vincent is played masterfully by Aurelien Recoing, who gives him a sort of as-if anomie; this haunted hero is so detached that he may not realize he has no real life to be detached from.
90
Variety David Rooney
Theater veteran Recoing is utterly compelling. Both the script and the resourceful, subtle actor provide enormous insight into the troubled character.
Read Full Review
90
The New York Times Stephen Holden
Recoing's performance is a sensitive portrayal of a man in the throes of an excruciating spiritual crisis.
Read Full Review
90
Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Powerful.
Read Full Review
90
Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
Not just an especially subtle and thoughtful psychological drama, it's a provocative, even an unnerving one as well.
Read Full Review
88
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey
Skip work to see it at the first opportunity.
Read Full Review
88
Boston Globe Leighton Klein
Cantet's script and direction are flawless, and, matched step-for-step by Jocelyn Pook's mournful score, he builds the tension to near unbearable levels.
Read Full Review
88
San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
"Human Resources" was a good, straightforward tale, but Time Out is better. It's haunting. It's like a poem.
Read Full Review
88
Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
If the movie has a flaw, it's that the working out of Vincent's psychology is too perfect.
80
New Times (L.A.) David Ehrenstein
A subtle mood piece in which a man's collapse is examined so rigorously that one almost hopes for a murder to come along and break the tension.
80
Film Threat Rich Cline
This is brilliant filmmaking.
Read Full Review
80
TV Guide Ken Fox
Look carefully at that final scene; few happy endings have ever felt so downbeat.
Read Full Review
80
Village Voice Dennis Lim
Recoing's meta-performance is an unemphatic marvel, his placid countenance stretched tight over telltale flickers: a quickly suppressed smirk of incredulous delight, a nervous twitch of chagrin, an abrupt pang of guilt.
Read Full Review
78
Austin Chronicle Marrit Ingman
Faultlessly truthful in its observations.
Read Full Review
75
Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
I admire the closing scenes of the film, which seem to ask whether our civilization offers a cure for Vincent's complaint.
Read Full Review
75
New York Daily News Jack Mathews
A well-crafted indictment of the dark side of the modern work ethic.
75
ReelViews James Berardinelli
For those with the patience to sit through this kind of unhurried motion picture, Time Out offers a compelling character study of an individual under the kind of strain we can all relate to.
Read Full Review
75
Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
This is a documentarylike film about a man who creates a castle in the air and then moves right in, the "Harold and the Purple Crayon" of the workplace.
Read Full Review
75
Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
The movie isn't a thriller, but it has the tension of a thriller, and its cool, icy tone, deliberate pacing and clean, antiseptic lines are reminiscent of Kubrick and Antonioni.
Read Full Review
50
New York Post Lou Lumenick
Looks great but moves like molasses, is more interesting than truly involving.
Read Full Review

What Our Users Said

Vote Now!The average user rating for this movie is 7.2 (out of 10) based on 15 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

JF Harrumph gave it a 10:
Um let me make an immediate point that everyone, including the critics, seems to have missed: the movie isn't about existentential crisis and high falutin abstract concepts, it's about the mental illness of the Vincent character. It's about a condition of deep denial. It happens and it's real. The movie is highly effective, and the content of the movie demanded the slow creepy pacing, anything otherwise would have been ineffective. I was knocked out by it.

Buttered Popcorn gave it a 6:
I think Paula W.'s review about hit it on the head. I kept waiting to find a little something more in this movie, but it just didn't come. The character who plays the smuggling kingpin stole the show.

Ryan gave it a 10:
The ending makes me cry. Its heartbreaking irony, intense emotions, and beautiful music are just too much. No other film in 2002 came close to achieving the power of this film.

Paula W. gave it a 7:
The concept is promising, and the movie gets off to a good start: a laid-off executive drives around all day, calling his wife at intervals to tell her he's in meetings, covering the mouthpiece when the kids at the playground get too noisy. It can't last and he digs himself deeper and deeper in an attempt to keep up appearances at home. This is a painful story to watch, and the pitch-perfect, unflinching acting makes it even more so. But the pain is ratcheted up to unbearable and, I think, unnnecessary levels by the glacial pace at which the story moves. In many scenes we watch in real time as the protagonist pulls off the highway and into a parking lot, in silence. The visuals in the movie are stylish enough in an anti-stylish way: cramped, flat, indoors, in the car or under a cloudy sky, but nothing that justifies holding each shot this long. The 132 minutes of the movie seem as long as the entire seven months of the character's ordeal. This may be the point, to make you feel the character's pain and bewilderment as he feels it, but that's more pain than I care to volunteer for.

Jim L. gave it a 3:
Boring. Didn't find anything - characters, plot or actions- of interest here.

Klondike V. gave it a 1:
this movie was terrible! it felt like a long slow death... and i'm usually a fan of "art" movies! i can't believe what high marks and praise people have given it here.. the main character was a psychopath! there was nothing sympathetic about him!

Chad S. gave it a 10:
"Time Out" is an art film. "Amelie" is a commercial film that just happens to be from France. I'm not knocking the Jean-Pierre Jeunet charmer but this amazing movie by Laurent Cantet is the French import people should be going ga-ga over. Cantet nails scene after scene like when Vincent (Aurelian Recoing) parks his car for overnight lodging in the lot after a meeting with his friend/client, or when our vagabond walks through the United Nations headquarters. All those lies Vincent has to maintain, and yet so functional with loved ones. Recoing is superb. I also like how "Time Out" has the same storyline as an episode of "The Flintstones" in which Fred becomes The Gravelberry Pie King. Well, there goes my credibility.

Read more user comments...

Discuss this movie in our forums

Return to top of page
Home | FILM | DVD/VIDEO | MUSIC | GAMES | TV | Forums | About Metacritic metacritic.com

Popular on CBS sites: iPhone 3G | Fantasy Football | Moneywatch | Antivirus Software | Recipes | E3 2009

About CBS Interactive | Jobs | Advertise

© 2009 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use