A.O. Scott

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The New York Times
For 2,141 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 50% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 48% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 0.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

A.O. Scott's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 65
Highest review score: 100 Crime + Punishment
Lowest review score: 0 Blended
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,187 out of 2141
  2. Mixed: 735 out of 2141
  3. Negative: 219 out of 2141
2141 movie reviews
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    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 A.O. Scott
    Steve Jobs
    Steve Jobs is a rich and potent document of the times, an expression of both the awe that attends sophisticated new consumer goods and the unease that trails in the wake of their arrival.... Mostly, though, it is a formally audacious, intellectually energized entertainment, a powerful challenge to the lazy conventions of Hollywood storytelling and a feast for connoisseurs of contemporary screen acting.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    Le Havre
    A stylized and sentimental fairy tale about the way the world might be, grounded in a frank recognition of the way it is.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Da 5 Bloods
    In its anger, its humor and its exuberance — in the emotional richness of the central performances and of Terence Blanchard’s score — this is unmistakably a Spike Lee Joint. It’s also an argument with and through the history of film.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 A.O. Scott
    Side by Side
    For a film geek this movie is absolute heaven, a dream symposium in which directors, cinematographers, editors and a few actors gather to opine on the details of their craft. It is worth a year of film school and at least 1,000 hours of DVD bonus commentary.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    Days of Glory
    It is a chronicle of courage and sacrifice, of danger and solidarity, of heroism and futility, told with power, grace and feeling and brought alive by first-rate acting. A damn good war movie.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Burma VJ: Reporter i et lukket land
    A rich, thought-provoking film.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 A.O. Scott
    Certain Women
    The subtlety of the film is both an accomplishment and a limitation. It’s hard not to want more for these women, and to wish you could see more of them.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 A.O. Scott
    Love Is Strange
    By the time the movie is over, you feel as if the people in it were friends you know well enough to tire of, and to miss terribly when they go away.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 A.O. Scott
    The Assassin
    The film is intriguing, but ultimately opaque, a lovely, inert object that offers, in the name of movie love, an escape from so much that is vital and interesting about movies.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    In Between Days
    Sensitive, modest, thrillingly self-assured first feature by So Yong Kim, was one of the standouts of the 2006 Sundance Film Festival -- exactly the kind of thoughtful, independent work one hopes to find there and too rarely does.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    The Twilight Samurai
    Mr. Yamada is confident that by taking his time and relishing the leathery arrogance that is the perquisite of a director in his 70's, his audience will follow his whims.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 A.O. Scott
    Madeline's Madeline
    if Madeline’s Madeline is sometimes unconvincing and frequently unnerving, it is never uninteresting. In its final moments it ascends into heady, almost visionary territory, like a balloon caught in a sudden updraft, and becomes a singular and strange experience.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 40 A.O. Scott
    The Climb
    Rather than ascending to new heights of bromance, The Climb coasts down into the barren flatlands of masculine self-pity.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    A Hero
    Nothing in this stressful, intricately plotted fable of modern life is as simple as we or the characters might wish.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    The Northman
    What’s perhaps most impressive about The Northman is that it hurtles through 136 minutes of musclebound, shaggy-maned mayhem without a whisper of camp or a wink of irony. Nobody is doing this for fun. Even if, in the end — thank goodness — that’s mostly what it amounts to.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    Neruda
    Mr. Larraín invites us to believe that history is on the side of the poets and the humanists, and that art will make fools of politicians and policemen. But he is also aware, as Pablo Neruda was, that history sometimes has other plans.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 A.O. Scott
    Blancanieves
    It communicates the delights of pastiche rather than the thrill of original creation, a secondhand movie love that is seductive but not entirely satisfying.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 A.O. Scott
    Stranger by the Lake
    Stranger by the Lake is seductive and fascinating, but it is also a bit trapped in its own conceit, and in its carefully maintained emotional detachment.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 A.O. Scott
    Animals
    Mr. Schiffli shoots in a fluid style, tweaking colors and focus to register changes in perception and feeling. Anxiety dissolves in sunshine and dreamy music, gathers up again in darker colors and more dissonant sounds and then winds up to a pitch of panic.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 A.O. Scott
    Sicario
    Mr. Villeneuve, aided by Taylor Sheridan’s lean script, Roger Deakins’s parched cinematography and Johann Johannsson’s slow-moving heart attack of a score, respects the imperatives of genre while trying to avoid the usual clichés. It’s not easy, and he doesn’t entirely succeed.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    George Washington
    This dream of a movie is set in such a place; with its delicate shifts of tone, it could be a fairy tale by Faulkner
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    Another Year
    Splendidly rich and wise.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 A.O. Scott
    Blade Runner 2049
    Mr. Villeneuve’s film, by contrast, is a carefully engineered narrative puzzle, and its power dissipates as the pieces snap into place. As sumptuous and surprising as it is from one scene to the next, it lacks the creative excess, the intriguing opacity and the haunting residue of its predecessor.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 A.O. Scott
    The Damned United
    The rare sports movie that deals with -- indeed positively relishes -- humiliation and disappointment.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    The Woman Who Ran
    The Woman Who Ran is a cinematic sketch, and also the work of a master.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Western
    Western is as precise as a dropped pin on a GPS map, which makes its sense of mystery all the more powerful.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    Wadjda
    With impressive agility, Wadjda finds room to maneuver between harsh realism and a more hopeful kind of storytelling.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 A.O. Scott
    Notfilm
    A charming, earnest, sometimes ungainly mixture of history, criticism and high-minded gossip, Notfilm testifies to an almost inexhaustible fascination with the pleasures and paradoxes of cinema.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Juno
    Juno respects the idiosyncrasies of its characters rather than exaggerating them or holding them up for ridicule.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 A.O. Scott
    Everything Everywhere All at Once
    The movie is a metaphysical multiverse galaxy-brain head trip, but deep down — and also right on the surface — it’s a bittersweet domestic drama, a marital comedy, a story of immigrant striving and a hurt-filled ballad of mother-daughter love.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 A.O. Scott
    Blue Valentine
    Cindy and Dean remain, for all their sustained agony and flickering joy, something less than completely realized human beings. Mr. Cianfrance's ingenious chronological gimmick, coupled with his anxious, clumsy plotting, leaves them without enough oxygen to burst into breathing, loving life.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 A.O. Scott
    Close
    The roteness of the film’s second half — reinforced by Valentin Hadjadj’s over-insistent score — can’t dispel the exquisite insight of its earlier scenes or the heart-rending precision of the performances.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    State Funeral
    Composed entirely of footage shot at the time in various parts of the Soviet Union, the film is a haunting amalgam of official pomp and everyday experience, the double image of a totalitarian government and the people in whose name it ruled.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 A.O. Scott
    Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One
    Mr. Gomes has a tendency to revel in his own cleverness and to indulge in self-conscious cinematic jokes. He also has a penchant for obscurantism, a habit of confusing ambiguity with depth.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 70 A.O. Scott
    The Banshees of Inisherin
    The Banshees of Inisherin might feel a little thin if you hold it to conventional standards of comedy or drama. It’s better thought of as a piece of village gossip, given a bit of literary polish and a handsome pastoral finish.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    The Secret of Kells
    It is only fitting that a movie concerned with the power and beauty of drawing -- the almost sacred magic of color and line -- should be so gorgeously and intricately drawn.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 A.O. Scott
    Pete Seeger: The Power of Song
    As the latest tribute -- Jim Brown’s loving documentary, Pete Seeger: The Power of Song -- makes clear, he’s still busy, still angry, still hopeful, still singing.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    Katyn
    The result is a film with a stately, deliberate quality that insulates it against sentimentality and makes it all the more devastating.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    Coming Home
    There is terrible pain here, and the main interest of the film is in how the characters respond to it and what their response says about China’s understanding of its recent history.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    Coco
    If Coco doesn’t quite reach the highest level of Pixar masterpieces, it plays a time-tested tune with captivating originality and flair, and with roving, playful pop-culture erudition.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 A.O. Scott
    Admission
    Mr. Weitz lines up a target placed at the explosive intersection of class, race, region and every other source of societal anguish, and then does not so much miss as aim in another direction — or several — letting fly a volley of darts that land as lightly as badminton birdies.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 A.O. Scott
    I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians
    Until its devastating final scenes, the way “I Do Not Care” makes its points is discursive rather than dramatic.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    The Station Agent
    The movie's writer and director, Tom McCarthy, has such an appreciation for quiet that it occupies the same space as a character in this film, a delicate, thoughtful and often hilarious take on loneliness.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Bamako
    Bamako is something different: a work of cool intelligence and profound anger, a long, dense, argument that is also a haunting visual poem.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 A.O. Scott
    Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One
    It is worth sticking with it until the end, since the third part is the most powerful.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Bright Star
    Ms. Campion, with her restless camera movements and off-center close-ups, films history in the present tense, and her wild vitality makes this movie romantic in every possible sense of the word.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    MLK/FBI
    The result is at once suspenseful, visually engrossing and intellectually bracing. It also raises urgent, sometimes uncomfortable questions about power, privacy and the ethical challenges of examining the past.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Weekend
    There is also a need for stories that address the complex entanglements of love and sex honestly, without sentiment or cynicism and with the appropriate mixture of humor, sympathy and erotic heat. Weekend, Andrew Haigh's astonishingly self-assured, unassumingly profound second feature, is just such a film.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
    If fun does not really fit into Roy Andersson’s frame of reference, there is ample pleasure to be gleaned from his formal discipline and his downbeat wit.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 A.O. Scott
    44 Inch Chest
    Think of 44 Inch Chest as a piece of chamber music and you can compensate for the thinness of its story and the lack of visual distinction.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    Revenge
    Revenge leaves a lurid, punchy afterimage, an impression somewhere between righteous delight and quivering revulsion. It’s both a challenge and a calling card, in which Ms. Fargeat at once exposes what’s wrong with her chosen genre and demonstrates her mastery of it.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    Leviathan
    Leviathan, a product of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, offers not information but immersion: 90 minutes of wind, water, grinding machinery and piscine agony.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Fish Tank
    The contradictions of adolescence have rarely been conveyed with such authenticity and force.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    Police, Adjective
    So much in this meticulous and moving film is between the lines, and almost nothing is by the book.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 A.O. Scott
    Django Unchained
    Like "Inglourious Basterds," Django Unchained is crazily entertaining, brazenly irresponsible and also ethically serious in a way that is entirely consistent with its playfulness.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 A.O. Scott
    Pacific Rim
    Pacific Rim, with its carefree blend of silliness and solemnity, is clearly the product of an ingenious and playful pop sensibility.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 60 A.O. Scott
    The Hustle
    Comedy is in a weird place right now, and The Hustle deserves some credit for fulfilling its own modest, escapist ambitions. Unlike a lot of what we see these days, in movies and elsewhere, it doesn’t feel like a rip-off or a scam. It’s downright innocent.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 A.O. Scott
    The Big Short
    A true crime story and a madcap comedy, a heist movie and a scalding polemic, The Big Short will affirm your deepest cynicism about Wall Street while simultaneously restoring your faith in Hollywood.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    Closed Curtain
    On one level, the film (or nonfilm; it was shot on digital video and partly with smartphone cameras) is a mischievous, Pirandellian entertainment. It is also an allegory, dark but not despairing, of the creative spirit under political pressure, and of the ways the imagination can be both a refuge and a place of confinement.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 A.O. Scott
    The Forger
    Preposterousness is not necessarily a vice, and plausibility is a weak virtue. Just ask Alfred Hitchcock. So to say that the conceits of The Forger (directed by Philip Martin) are ridiculous isn’t really saying much. It’s also dull, incoherent and drab to look at.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 A.O. Scott
    Moana
    There are some touching and amusing zigzags on the way to the film’s sweet and affirmative conclusion.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    The Edge of Democracy
    Though she is a scrupulous and dogged digger-up of hidden facts and a thoughtful interpreter of public events, Costa hasn’t produced a work of objective journalism or detached historical scholarship so much as a personal reckoning with her nation’s past and present.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    Gimme the Loot
    Gimme the Loot has a lot to say about the contradictions of a place that is defined by both abundant opportunity and ferocious inequality. But the film makes its points in a lighthearted, street-smart vernacular, treating its protagonists not as embodiments of a social condition but rather as self-aware individuals who are, like teenagers everywhere, both smart and dumb.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    Two Trains Runnin'
    This captivating movie, like the blues itself, is at once a recognition of those somber truths and a gesture of protest against them.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Tchoupitoulas
    Tchoupitoulas does explore the border between innocence and experience. It is alive with the risk and curiosity of youth, and unapologetic in insisting that the pursuit of fun can be a profound and transformative experience.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 60 A.O. Scott
    Cousin Jules
    Cousin Jules is in many ways a wonder to see and hear, but there is less to it than meets the eye.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Of Time and the City
    It is a deeply personal piece of art that never descends into the confessional or the therapeutic, and a work of social and literary criticism that never lectures or hectors, but rather, with melancholy, tenderness and wit, manages to sing.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 A.O. Scott
    Consuming Spirits
    It is a work of obsessive artisanal discipline and unfettered artistic vision. You have never seen anything like it.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 A.O. Scott
    A Fantastic Woman
    Psychologically astute and socially aware as the film is, it is also infused with mystery and melodrama, with bright colors and emotional shadows.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Melancholia
    Melancholia is emphatically not what anyone would call a feel-good movie, and yet it nonetheless leaves behind a glow of aesthetic satisfaction.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 A.O. Scott
    You, the Living
    The film is slow, rigorously morose and often painful in its blunt reckoning of disappointment and failure. It is also extremely funny.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    Hairspray
    The overall mood of Hairspray is so joyful, so full of unforced enthusiasm, that only the most ferocious cynic could resist it.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 A.O. Scott
    The Sea Is Watching
    Fortunately, Mr. Kumai, who himself has shown no aversion to baroque melodrama, leans here toward a plain and direct style that is tasteful and intelligent, a boon, given the predictability of the story. He understands the difference between pitiable and pitiful.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Chicago
    Who would have expected Ms. Zellweger --- and Miramax -- to come through in a musical? And it's one of the few Christmas entertainments to run under two hours. Who couldn't love that?
    • 37 Metascore
    • 20 A.O. Scott
    Charlie St. Cloud
    You are not, in a movie like this, supposed to think too much; you are supposed to be transported beyond skepticism on a wave of pure, tacky feeling. Instead, in this case, you drown in sentimental, ghoulish nonsense.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Battle Royale
    American fans of "The Hunger Games" may not embrace - or even be permitted to see - Battle Royale, which is too bad. It is in many ways a better movie and in any case a fascinating companion, drawn from a parallel cultural universe. It is a lot uglier and also, perversely, a lot more fun.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
    “Glass Onion” is completely silly, but it’s not only silly. Explicitly set during the worst months of the Covid pandemic — the spring of 2020 — “Glass Onion” leans into recent history without succumbing to gloom, bitterness or howling rage, which is no small accomplishment. One way to interpret the title is that a glass onion may be sharp, and may have a lot of layers, but it won’t make you cry.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Starred Up
    Though it is, finally, an affecting story of two damaged men bound by blood and something like love (and also a thrillerish catalog of double crosses and shifting allegiances), it is, above all, a study in the patterns of chaos that govern penitentiary life.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Midnight in Paris
    It is marvelously romantic, even though - or precisely because - it acknowledges the disappointment that shadows every genuine expression of romanticism.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    The Guardians
    The Guardians is a historical drama that doesn’t lose itself in decorative period detail, a beautifully photographed chronicle of rural existence that refrains from picturesque sentimentality and grinding misery, the usual modes for this kind of film.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 A.O. Scott
    Benediction
    The film never quite conjures a link between the life and the work.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 A.O. Scott
    The Story of the Weeping Camel
    Lovely, uncomplicated though limited movie.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    Faat Kiné
    Sembène is a far more adroit and elegant storyteller than many may be accustomed to seeing.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 A.O. Scott
    Tuesday, After Christmas
    The strength of Tuesday, After Christmas, Mr. Muntean's fourth feature, lies in its rigorous, artful and humane fidelity to quotidian circumstance.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    The World's End
    The buzz of The World’s End is more like an antic sugar high than a reeling, drunken stupor. There are no headaches, dry mouth or crushing shame at the end — no “Hangover,” in other words. I’ll drink to that.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 A.O. Scott
    Lost Illusions
    Giannoli illuminates the dank frenzy of the 19th-century attention economy with an eye on our own post-truth era. Lost Illusions is sensational. Nobody paid me to say that. Well, actually, The New York Times did, but you should believe me anyway.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    District 9
    In the best B-movie tradition, the filmmakers embed their ideas in an ingenious, propulsive and suspenseful genre entertainment, one that respects your intelligence even as it makes your eyes pop (and, once in a while, your stomach turn).
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    Right Now, Wrong Then
    Contemplating both tales in succession can induce a far from unpleasant sense of vertigo, a feeling of standing at the edge of an abyss of wide-open philosophical questions and deep psychological mysteries.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    Ford v Ferrari
    Ford v Ferrari is no masterpiece, but it is — to invoke a currently simmering debate — real cinema, the kind of solid, satisfying, nonpandering movie that can seem endangered nowadays.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 A.O. Scott
    The Chambermaid
    The film’s style is austere — there are few camera movements and no musical score — but its visual wit and emotional sensitivity lift it above the minimalist miserablism that drags down so many well-meaning films about modern workers. After you’ve seen it, the world looks different.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 A.O. Scott
    Norte, the End of History
    It is the work of a director as fascinated by decency as by ugliness, and able to present the chaos of life in a series of pictures that are at once luminously clear and endlessly mysterious.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 A.O. Scott
    The Turin Horse
    The movie is too beautiful to be described as an ordeal, but it is sufficiently intense and unyielding that when it is over, you may feel, along with awe, a measure of relief. Which may sound like a reason to stay away, but is exactly the opposite.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Wendy and Lucy
    What will happen to her? The strength of this short, simple, perfect story of a young woman and her dog is that this does not seem, by the end, to be an idle or trivial question. What happens to Wendy -- and to Lucy -- matters a lot, which is to say that Wendy and Lucy, for all its modesty, matters a lot too.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Pasolini
    The blend of pornography and humor, obnoxiousness and elegance, sweetness and cruelty reminds you that this is, above all, an Abel Ferrara movie. And the splendor of Pasolini lies in its essentially collaborative nature.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 A.O. Scott
    X
    X is a clever and exuberant throwback to a less innocent time, when movies could be naughty, disreputable and idiosyncratic.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    The Wrestler
    Like its hero, the movie has a blunt, exuberant honesty, pulling off even its false moves with conviction and flair.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 40 A.O. Scott
    The New Guy
    A bad-taste comedy with a heart.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 40 A.O. Scott
    Good Time
    Sometimes it flaunts its clichés...and other times it cloaks them in rough visual textures and jumpy, bumpy camera movements, so that a rickety genre thrill ride feels like something daring and new. It isn’t. It’s stale, empty and cold.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 A.O. Scott
    JCVD
    Some of this is affecting, some of it tedious, and the film's inconsistencies of tone are made more glaring by its peculiar look.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    Everlasting Moments
    The result is an experience that, even as it feels a bit familiar, is nonetheless engrossing and satisfying.
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