Tim Robey

Tim Robey is a British film critic, writer and author who has spent more than two decades chronicling the highs, lows and occasional spectacular disasters of cinema.

Since 2000, Tim has reviewed films, written features and interviewed leading figures from the film world for The Daily Telegraph. His work has also taken him beyond the page: he appears regularly on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row and Monocle Radio, contributed to Radio 4’s former Film Programme, and appeared on the BBC’s Film programme between 2015 and 2017.

Born in Hertfordshire in 1978, Tim studied Classics at Oxford University before establishing his career in film criticism. Over the years, his writing has ranged from major Hollywood releases and international cinema to retrospectives, interviews and essays exploring the strange, surprising history of the movies. His own favourite film is Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.

In 2024, Tim published Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops, an exploration of some of cinema’s most notorious commercial failures. Rather than simply cataloguing bad movies, the book examines what Hollywood’s misfires reveal about ambition, risk, excess and the unpredictable business of making films. It ranges across a century of cinema and 26 notable flops, from the silent era to Cats.