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.
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