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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    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Monrovia, Indiana
    While there’s no reason to suppose that this is Wiseman’s last movie, it doesn’t seem impossible that, at 88, he is aware of lengthening shadows and autumnal tints, of the fragility of perception and the finite nature of consciousness. Monrovia, Indiana is not precisely about any of those things, but it carries intimations of them, elegiac strains amid the doggerel of daily life.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Y Tu Mamá También
    Director Alfonso Cuarón works with a quicksilver fluidity, and the movie is fast, funny, unafraid of sexuality and finally devastating.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Gangs of New York
    This is historical filmmaking without the balm of right-thinking ideology, either liberal or conservative. Gangs of New York is nearly a great movie. I suspect that, over time, it will make up the distance.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Blind Shaft
    Deftly swings to a spartan, engrossing climax, and the final twists spell out what the murderers are made of and the setting responsible for creating them. It is a true piece of film magic.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    I'm Not There.
    Among its many achievements, Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There hurls a Molotov cocktail through the facade of the Hollywood biopic factory.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    And Everything Is Going Fine
    This sense of intimacy makes And Everything Is Going Fine both vibrant - what amazing company this man was! - and terribly sad.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Results
    The triumph of Results is that it pretends to be loose, lazy and lived-in when it’s actually disciplined, hard-working and in almost perfect shape.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Dirty Pretty Things
    This film has a conquering spirit. The dankness is replaced by an optimistic blast of sunlight at the end, a contrast to the earlier lighting dimmed with human misery. Mr. Frears blasts away the blight, though he doesn't have to work to restore Okwe's dignity. It shines through from the start.
    • 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.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    The Fighter
    With solid bodywork, clever feints and tremendous heart, it scores at least a TKO, by which I mean both that it falls just short of overpowering greatness - I can't quite exclaim, "It's a knockout!" - and that the most impressive thing about it is technique.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Moving Midway
    May not advance any grand new thesis about the South and its history, but it turns an old house into a rich and strange repository of local knowledge.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Rachel Getting Married
    It’s a small movie, and in some ways a very sad one, but it has an undeniable and authentic vitality, an exuberance of spirit, that feels welcome and rare.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Acasă, My Home
    It’s both intimate and analytical, a sensitive portrait of real people undergoing enormous change and a meditation on what that change might mean. It taps into something primal in the human condition, a basic conflict between the desire for freedom and the tendency toward organization — an argument, finally, about the meaning of home.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    The Messenger
    No movie can convey the truth of war to those of us who have not lived through it, but The Messenger, precisely by acknowledging just how hard it is to live with that truth, manages to bring it at least partway home.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Broker
    Kore-Eda, remarkably, doesn’t counterfeit a happy ending, but he also refuses despair. He’s an honest broker of heartbreak.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Side Effects
    While the plot may be predictable (and more than a little preposterous) in retrospect, Mr. Soderbergh handles it brilliantly, serving notice once again that he is a crackerjack genre technician.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Flee
    Less a sociological case study than a psychological portrait, the film is both probing and tactful.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    The Kid Stays in the Picture
    One of the funniest, and most telling, films of the year. The filmmakers call "Kid" a documentary, but the movie is one of the unusual kind that is firmly lodged inside the subject's perspective.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Fair Game
    Things worked out between Joe and Valerie, and for their real-life models, who are now the subjects of a terrifically entertaining movie. But that does not mean that justice was done, or that truth prevailed.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    The Last of the Unjust
    “Shoah” remains a heroic reckoning with the limits of collective understanding, but The Last of the Unjust is something smaller, stranger and more paradoxical: the portrait of an individual whose actions still defy comprehension, and the self-portrait of an artist consumed by the past.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Una Vita Difficile
    It also stands by itself as an exuberant bad time, a pity party that has no business being so much fun.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Little Otik
    A handmade dream, cobbled together from dirt, wood and more imagination than most of us can muster in our most fevered states. Because this Czech master refuses to work in the scrubbed, antiseptic manner of most animators, this fable comes to life as hilarious and creepy.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Portrait of a Lady on Fire
    This is less a chronicle of forbidden desire than an examination of how desire works. Like a lost work of 18th-century literature, it is at once ardent and rigorous, passionate and philosophical.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Bronson
    Bronson invites you to admire its protagonist as a pure, muscular embodiment of anarchy. And perhaps you will, but you may also be glad that he’s still behind bars.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Queen of Katwe
    In Ms. Nair’s hands, Phiona’s story has a richness and unpredictability that separates it from other, superficially similar movies. It also has the buoyant, cleareyed feel for the particulars of culture and place that is among this director’s great gifts.
    • 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.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
    Shooting in the summer of 2020, Jude and his team were clearly constrained by the realities of Covid-19, but they also succeeded in turning a bad situation to creative advantage, facing the awfulness and absurdity of the present with wit, indignation and a saving touch of tenderness.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Passing Strange
    A show not simply preserved by Mr. Lee’s camera, but brought, somehow, to its fullest, strangest, most electrifying realization.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Pieces of April
    Hedges's intelligent and touching farce, Pieces of April, makes an important contribution to a small and insignificant subgenre: Thanksgiving Day failure. It does so by raising the bar.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Wild
    In its thrilling disregard for the conventions of commercial cinematic storytelling, Wild reveals what some of us have long suspected: that plot is the enemy of truth, and that images and emotions can carry meaning more effectively than neatly packaged scenes or carefully scripted character arcs.
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