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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    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Mudbound
    It’s a work of historical imagination that lands in the present with disquieting, illuminating force.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    My Life as a Zucchini
    Mr. Barras’s film, with its bigheaded, asymmetrical modeling-clay figures and off-kilter picture-book backdrops, explores a harsh situation with gentle whimsy.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 A.O. Scott
    Honeyland
    The opening minutes of Honeyland are as astonishing — as sublime and strange and full of human and natural beauty — as anything I’ve ever seen in a movie.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Everybody Wants Some!!
    Everybody Wants Some!! is more than just nostalgic. It’s downright utopian, a hormonal pastoral endowed with the innocent charm of a children’s book. There are plenty of movies about lust-addled youth, but it’s unusual to find one that feels truly wholesome.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 A.O. Scott
    O'Horten
    O'Horten is about frustration, patience, kindness and the wildness that lurks in even the calmest hearts. What's odd about that?
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 A.O. Scott
    24 Hour Party People
    "Print the legend," Mr. Wilson says at one point, both quoting John Ford and laying the foundation for his own often fact-free fabulous fabulism. And this movie is just that -- fabulous.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 A.O. Scott
    Atonement
    Atonement fails to be anything more than a decorous, heavily decorated and ultimately superficial reading of the book on which it is based.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 A.O. Scott
    The Tree of Life
    With disarming sincerity and daunting formal sophistication The Tree of Life ponders some of the hardest and most persistent questions, the kind that leave adults speechless when children ask them.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Restrepo
    As the war in Afghanistan returns to the front pages and the national debate, we owe the men in Restrepo, at the very least, 90 minutes or so of our attention. If nothing else, this film, in showing how much they care about one another, demands the same of us.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Won't You Be My Neighbor?
    It is that emphasis — the earnest, critical attention to the public Mister Rogers and his legacy — that makes Won’t You Be My Neighbor? feel like such a gift.
    • 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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 A.O. Scott
    Meek's Cutoff
    Meek's Cutoff is as unsentimental and determined as Ms. Williams's character, its absolutely believable heroine. It is also a bracingly original foray into territory that remains, in every sense, unsettled.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 20 A.O. Scott
    Babylon A.D.
    Our judgments, in any case, may be superfluous, since the director, Mathieu Kassovitz, has already publicly described it as "pure violence and stupidity."
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    Fruitvale Station
    Mr. Coogler, with a ground-level, hand-held shooting style that sometimes evokes the spiritually alert naturalism of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, has enough faith in his actors and in the intrinsic interest of the characters’ lives to keep overt sentimentality and messagemongering to a minimum.
    • 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    The Lure
    We are not exactly in the present and not precisely in the past, but in a dreamy cinematic space where distinctions of genre and tone are pleasantly (and sometimes shockingly) blurred.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 A.O. Scott
    A Christmas Tale
    A movie that is almost indecently satisfying and at the same time elusive, at once intellectually lofty -- marked by allusions to Emerson, Shakespeare and Seamus Heaney as well as Nietzsche -- and as earthy as the passionate provincial family that is its heart and cosmos and reason for being.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    In the Intense Now
    Those dreading 50th-anniversary greatest-hits medleys will find solace, enlightenment and surprise in João Moreira Salles’s In the Intense Now, a bittersweet, ruminative documentary essay composed of footage from the era accompanied by thoughtful, disarmingly personal voice-over narration.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 A.O. Scott
    The Last Waltz
    There are few concert movies that were filmed were such abiding feeling and respect. It's of a potent vintage that goes down deceptively smoother with age.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 A.O. Scott
    Secret Sunshine
    It is a great movie, by a major figure in world cinema.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    The Truffle Hunters
    A charming and slyly poignant documentary.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Judas and the Black Messiah
    Judas and the Black Messiah represents a disciplined, impassioned effort to bring clarity to a volatile moment, to dispense with the sentimentality and revisionism that too often cloud movies about the ’60s and about the politics of race. It’s fascinating in its own right, and even more so when looked at alongside other recent movies.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 70 A.O. Scott
    Revanche
    The characters and situations are interesting enough, and the filmmaking is sufficiently skilled to provide a measure of reasonably thoughtful entertainment.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood
    It’s a western, for Pete’s sake. Politics are wound into its DNA, and Tarantino knows the genome better than anyone else. Which is just to say that like other classics of the genre, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” is not going anywhere. It will stand as a source of debate — and delight — for as long as we care about movies. And it wants us to care.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Calle 54
    Even better on a second viewing because the film is such a pure expression of the director's love for the music, a love so infectious it should leave you elated.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Booksmart
    The rapid-fire, note-perfect dialogue is punctuated with moments of brilliant conceptual whimsy: animated and underwater sequences; horror-movie jump scares; immersive theater.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    Séraphine
    The mystery of Séraphine de Senlis -- who died in a mental hospital in 1942 and whose work survives in some of the world’s leading museums -- is left intact at the end of Séraphine. Rather than trying to explain Séraphine, the film accepts her.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 A.O. Scott
    Marx Can Wait
    It’s a complicated and painful story, humanely and sensitively told.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 A.O. Scott
    49 Up
    Suzy's marriage, Nick's divorce, Paul's work history: none of it is my or anyone else's business. But these things -- these people -- have become, through Mr. Apted's films, a vital part of modern life, which seems to grow richer every seven years, when the new "Up" movie comes out.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 A.O. Scott
    BPM (Beats Per Minute)
    in spite of its historical specificity, BPM never feels like a bulletin from the past. Its immediacy comes in part from the brisk naturalism of the performances and the nimbleness and fluidity of the editing. The characters are so vivid, so real, so familiar that it’s impossible to think of their struggles — and in some cases their deaths — as unfolding in anything but the present tense.
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