The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,268 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 5% same as the average critic
  • 49% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 4.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 61
Highest review score: 100 Short Cuts
Lowest review score: 0 Gummo
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9,377 out of 20268
  2. Mixed: 8,427 out of 20268
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20268
20268 movie reviews
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  1. Magic Hour
    A crafty reveal does not a clever film make, and even at a merciful 80 minutes, the device eventually feels more tired than the sullen Erin, who soldiers on through her suffering.
  2. One Spoon of Chocolate
    An empty muddle of social commentary with little intensity.
  3. Michael
    Here, what we are left with is a string of musical set pieces, like a greatest hits album, performed ably by the stars — in his debut role, Jaafar Jackson dances like he is possessed by his uncle’s talent — but strung together in repetitive false-note ways that are insulting both to audience and subject.
  4. Outcome
    A slapdash satire of modern celebrity culture that is awkward where it wants to be acerbic and clumsily maudlin where it wants to be meaningful.
  5. The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson
    The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson is the latest product off the crime documentary assembly line to raise the question of why it exists and what it ever hoped to achieve.
  6. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
    There’s a flat empty nothingness to The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, even more than its flat empty predecessor, and that’s a huge bummer.
  7. Slanted
    It is no fun for a viewer to scoff at a film that purports to speak to pain that is real for many. But “Slanted” doesn’t actually have any interest in contending with those experiences seriously, instead using its palely observed traumas as a launchpad for a pastiche of other punchier genre films.
  8. War Machine
    Such blunt messaging reduces the onscreen carnage, which relentlessly occurs via this mute machine’s searing lasers, barrage of bombs and kaiju breath, to little more than the human toll required for this particular military man to feel again. Worse yet, the film concludes with hawkish intensity, fashioning itself into a tasteless recruitment video.
  9. Psycho Killer
    When it comes to this Dumpster’s worth of horror nothingness, that’s the inescapable question, translated into English: What is it?
  10. The Dreadful
    The knight might represent the contagion of human evil, and Anne’s story a journey of proto-feminism, but for all its big themes, the most resonant is the film’s title.
  11. The Strangers: Chapter 3
    Now that the third and mercifully final film has flumped into theaters, this empty trilogy offers few worthwhile returns other than well-duh horror lessons that should (but won’t) sink in: Leave good horror alone, and relentless cat-and-mouse games do not a movie make.
  12. Melania
    Much like the dress that Mr. Pierre designed for her — a white number whose bold black zigzag obscures all of its seams — Mrs. Trump seems exceptionally good at keeping hidden how everything, her marriage and family included, fits together.
  13. Worldbreaker
    Directed by Brad Anderson, Worldbreaker is committed above all to shortchanging its themes, along with excitement and visual interest, a showy Steadicam shot notwithstanding.
  14. Return to Silent Hill
    “Return” cranks the chaos factor up several gears. Maybe that’s a logical shift for a franchise about a creepy New England town that jostles its visitors around multiple planes of reality. Though, here, it’s not as fun as that sounds.
  15. Mercy
    A witless, thrill-free hodgepodge of shinily packaged action-thriller clichés.
  16. My Neighbor Adolf
    While the lead actors are clearly committed, the movie gives them little to do besides exchange verbal invective.
  17. The SpongeBob Movie: Search for Squarepants
    All of its head-spinning action has a stultifying effect. At all times, the film seems afraid that it’ll lose its audience’s attention, barraging us with the mindlessly zany to hold our engagement.
  18. The Age of Disclosure
    Question the film and you’re a chump, it implies. But anyone who sits through its nearly two hours of unprovable claims is a chump of a different sort.
  19. The Carpenter's Son
    To graft the story of Jesus onto the template of a genre film is, if blasphemous to the faithful, and mainly just silly to everyone else.
  20. Sarah's Oil
    A David and Goliath story with big feelings, edifying speeches and a swelling score, Sarah’s Oil is a movie that will surprise nobody. Viewers might even make out a regressive strain reinforcing the feel-good mood.
  21. Shelby Oaks
    A derivative and dogged horror movie that reverts to rote with wearying regularity.
  22. Play Dirty
    Play Dirty is a misanthropic work. Which isn’t inherently a deal breaker, but a stiff Wahlberg lacks the moxie to make the brutal barrage of death amusing or worthwhile.
  23. The Strangers: Chapter 2
    With little furtherance of the plot beyond confusing flashbacks to a creepy childhood triad, “Chapter 2” is hackneyed and silly, relying heavily on Petsch’s sneakily resilient scream queen.
  24. Gabby's Dollhouse: The Movie
    What comes next is a case of sensory overload without substance, complete with nondescript pop songs and an array of outfits — each purchasable online! — for Gabby and the gang. Even Wiig, giving it her all as a modern clone of Cruella de Vil, appears somewhat shipwrecked amid the sugary material.
  25. French Lover
    It’s an open question as to whom the film insults the most: the principals (Marion gullibly believes that Abel does his own stunts; Abel is so spoiled he can’t perform basic household tasks); the public (depicted as clamoring for brainless celebrity gossip); or you, the viewer, from whom so little has been demanded.
  26. The Senior
    You can simply surrender yourself to the bland moral lessons of the movie, but even then, it’s hard not to feel like this was best left as a quirky human interest segment on a slow news day.
  27. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
    Instead of an auteur upgrading his sensibilities with a studio paycheck, “Beautiful Journey” mostly reads as a for-hire job doomed with jumbled writing.
  28. Ebony & Ivory
    Ebony & Ivory, in its unrelenting aggression, is particularly exhausting, though I suppose you have to admire the integrity of its vision. Irritating as Hosking’s humor is, you can’t deny his commitment to the bit.
  29. Stealing Pulp Fiction
    Turkiewicz apes Tarantino’s great film by giving chapter titles to its sections and setting multiple scenes in a diner. These sequences don’t resemble “Pulp Fiction” so much as they do television ads for Chili’s — a locale where you’ll have a better time than watching this utterly misbegotten movie.
  30. Bride Hard
    A smorgasbord of unconvincing danger and semi-schmaltzy lessons in friendship, Bride Hard is rarely as funny as it could be.
  31. The Ritual
    Topping it all off is a deliberately shaky and agitated shooting and cutting style that heightens nothing. Just watch “The Exorcist” again.
  32. Hurry Up Tomorrow
    Underneath the blinding lights, the Weeknd has always told us, is a hollow core. In that regard, the movie has mirrored the music.
  33. Lilly
    With a cringey inspirational tone, the movie weaves in Ledbetter’s advocacy work and court case with moments from her personal life.
  34. The Martial Artist
    Though Pakistan is filmed with a sense of grandeur, Ibby’s return to his cultural roots is rushed and superficial. Khan’s lack of screen presence, toothless mixed martial arts sequences and unintelligible editing further knock the film down.
  35. The Parenting
    The cast is game — especially Cox, who gets to do some over-the-top Linda Blair mugging — but the script, by a “Saturday Night Live” writer, Kent Sublette, is puerile and abrasive, lacking the wit of “Evil Dead” (an obvious influence) and the brio of “Scary Movie.”
  36. The Electric State
    Whereas the book is elliptical in narrative, muted in color palette and melancholy in mood, the movie is obvious, garish and just plain dumb.
  37. In the Lost Lands
    This lackluster script struggles to build a captivating story to match the allure of its expansive desert setting.
  38. Riff Raff
    Harris and Murray are such reliably engaging screen presences that they provide a few glimmers of entertainment, provided you’re able to set aside the movie’s practically all-encompassing repulsiveness.
  39. Last Breath
    Last Breath is disappointingly shallow and fatally lethargic.
  40. Old Guy
    Beyond the stale plot and groaners that make up the dialogue, “Old Guy” suffers from haphazard pacing, as if every third scene was cut out in postproduction. Watching, one wonders who this movie is for — even within the target demographic stated in the title.
  41. Captain America: Brave New World
    The writing is stiff and the ensemble is mostly charmless, while the visuals are slapdash.
  42. Love Hurts
    At 83 minutes, Love Hurts falls somewhere between making a virtue of brevity and wheezing its way to the finish line.
  43. Kinda Pregnant
    Most egregiously, the world of Kinda Pregnant is filled with dopey men and despairing women whose torments, parental or otherwise, make for a land mine of comedy duds.
  44. Heart Eyes
    It’s hard to discern who the film is for when it feels as if it’s been passed around genre writing classes in search of an identity.
  45. Flight Risk
    Where Flight Risk fails as a film is not really Gibson’s fault. He knows how to shoot action sequences. The screenplay is instead all over the place, in a way that feels tired and halfhearted.
  46. Inheritance
    It’s underbaked and baffling to watch, with little tension or interest to pull us through.
  47. Alarum
    Given that the finale of Michael Polish’s spies-on-the-lam thriller, Alarum, teases the unwelcome possibility of a sequel, please consider this review a mercy killing.
  48. Don't Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever
    This too-chummy documentary, promoted on Johnson’s website, offers the more familiar reverse sensation of having 90 minutes of your life taken from you. By the time it’s over, you will be older, a progression that if anything the movie feels like it hastens.
  49. Homestead
    Less a self-contained movie than a pilot for a show that already exists. The quality of the acting can only improve.
  50. The Man in the White Van
    While Wolfe is an engaging screen presence, the movie is too clumsy and clichéd to conjure tension.
  51. Red One
    It’s all a particularly egregious piece of commercial slop — just a little too expensive and passable to qualify for being so bad it’s sort of fun.
  52. Hippo
    Like a stubborn toddler zipping his mouth shut while stomping his feet, “Hippo” manages to be noisily aggravating while saying nothing at all.
  53. Meet Me Next Christmas
    In recent years Netflix has become a factory for B-rate Christmas movies, with the occasional cheap comfort to be found in its manufactured holiday romances. This bizarre concoction, not so much.
  54. Lonely Planet
    For this to work, the relationship needs a certain element of inevitability and comfort. Theirs is stilted.
  55. It's What's Inside
    Even the twists feel obvious and not all that interesting, more the fulfillment of plot points seeded early on rather than startling turns of fortune.
  56. White Bird
    One could argue that Forster and company calibrate their anodyne effects to make a Holocaust narrative that’s palatable for younger viewers. But what mostly resonates is a particularly lachrymose brand of show-business hedging.
  57. Joker: Folie à Deux
    Joker: Folie à Deux is such a dour, unpleasant slog that it is hard to know why it was made or for whom.
  58. Killer Heat
    The twists and pedestrian dramatics are a stiff slog to get to, and Gordon-Levitt’s once innate charisma has vanished altogether here.
  59. Uglies
    McG has concocted a fantastical, glossily repellent digital landscape that glows with neon and constant fireworks, causing the film to feel at once too sincere and too artificial.
  60. AfrAId
    This scenario’s predictability could be forgiven were the movie effective on any level, but it just isn’t, from Cho and Waterston’s wooden performances to jump scares that would not startle Scooby-Doo.
  61. 1992
    The look is drab, the action is barely coherent.
  62. Incoming
    Its story of high school freshmen navigating a libertine house party follows exactly the trajectory you would expect, with few laughs and even fewer surprises.
  63. The Crow
    Ultimately what this version, directed by Rupert Sanders, is spiritually derived from is neither the film nor the comic, but rather the flattened popular image that the film produced — a Hot Topic-style version of alternative consciousness.
  64. The Greatest Surf Movie in the Universe
    A spectacularly inane comedy.
  65. The Good Half
    Snow, as the daughter who always played second fiddle, brings real feeling to her role — suggesting that she may in fact be the good half of this insipid drama.
  66. The Union
    The gimmick is that The Union, in addition to being an action film, is also a sort of comedy of remarriage for Roxanne and Mike, except that the screenwriters, Joe Barton and David Guggenheim, haven’t brought much in the way of levity to the relationship. Nor have they applied much ingenuity to the big set pieces.
  67. Harold and the Purple Crayon
    The movie plods around awkwardly, trying to leech whatever charm it can from the remaining elements of the original.
  68. Rhinegold
    Mixing war movie, coming-of-age drama and gangster thriller, Akin and Hajabi’s screenplay is a dispiriting brew of repellent behavior and odious rap lyrics.
  69. Back to Black
    That a movie messes with the historical record a little doesn’t automatically make it bad. But in Back to Black the omissions feel downright weird, as if something is being ignored.
  70. Longing
    Plausibility complaints always feel cheap, but Longing strains credulity well past the breaking point.
  71. The Garfield Movie
    It’s a Garfield movie that strangely doesn’t feel as if Garfield as we know him is really there at all.
  72. The Strangers: Chapter 1
    The hapless script — written by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland and based on the original — offers nothing fresh in a tiring 91 minutes, and nothing daring to justify a new “Strangers” film, let alone a new series, especially when Bertino’s formidable film is streaming on Max.
  73. Mother of the Bride
    Mother of the Bride is directed by Mark Waters (“Mean Girls”) with an apparent allergy to verisimilitude.
  74. Jeanne du Barry
    Since Maïwenn created Jeanne for herself, it may seem paradoxical to state that she’s all wrong for it. Nevertheless, her broad performance is a consistently unfortunate case study in “whatever she thinks she’s doing, this isn’t it.”
  75. Unsung Hero
    Viewer beware: Between the uplift and the cringe, this movie may cause whiplash.
  76. Boy Kills World
    The only point of this ridiculousness is to watch Skarsgard flex his sculpted arms and take a great deal of brutal punishment so that he can dole out more. Rinse, repeat.
  77. Cabrini
    It’s inspiring stuff, rendered stodgy and repetitive.
  78. High & Low: John Galliano
    The director Kevin Macdonald asks Galliano questions in “High & Low,” but the answers are largely self-serving and unsatisfying in a movie that, for the most part, plays like yet another installment in a highly publicized redemption narrative.
  79. Code 8: Part II
    In the end, even genre fans with relaxed standards might try to similarly rebel against this insipid offering.
  80. Spaceman
    Spaceman is neither particularly astute about human nature nor discernibly interested in the politics embedded in it, and it is not even meme-ably bad, which is a shame. So much wasted potential.
  81. Becoming King
    Becoming King exhibits the kind of self-importance that ultimately diminishes the subject, be it Dr. King or Oyelowo.
  82. Madame Web
    The only real bummer about Madame Web, the latest installment in the Spider-Man chronicles, isn’t that it’s bad, but that it never achieves memorably terrible status. The story is absurd, the dialogue snort-out-loud risible, the fights uninspired. Even so, there are glimmers of wit and competency. And then there’s its star, Dakota Johnson, who has a fascinating, seemingly natural ability to appear wholly detached from the nonsense swirling around her.
  83. Marmalade
    In essence, Marmalade pretends to be more dunderheaded than it is, then acts as if it’s been smart all along, in a shift that takes it from insulting to incoherent.
  84. Argylle
    It is ostensibly a tribute to spy movies of an earlier age, not clever enough to be a spoof and certainly not satire. But a homage shows affection for, understanding of and respect toward the thing it is honoring. Argylle feels pasted together by a robot manipulating some kind of spy Magnetic Poetry.
  85. Miller's Girl
    A work of glaring artifice, Miller’s Girl, written and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett, is being touted as a psychological thriller, but it’s too vapid and silly to do much besides titillate.
  86. The Underdoggs
    The kids in the film are simply too young to make an impact, and Snoop, who is fine enough as an actor, ultimately doesn’t possess the charisma necessary to elevate a lazy script.
  87. Lift
    Hart possesses neither the charisma of Cruise nor the charm of Redford necessary to shoulder these action movie mechanics, a failure that demonstrates what happens when character actors are told they’re movie stars.
  88. He Went That Way
    Few things in this laboriously quirky picture mesh at all.
  89. Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire
    Boutella is a pleasingly game and lithesome heroine, but the movie around her feels curiously indifferent, a crammed, compressed delivery system for its maker’s dorm-room dreams.
  90. Family Switch
    The real nail in the coffin is the film’s messaging about the power of family, which is about as tacked-on and stilted as they come — hardly a shock in light of the rest of the Netflix holiday movie lineup.
  91. Genie
    The holiday themes feel arbitrary and tacked on; one guesses the script was rescued from Curtis’s bottom drawer and spruced up with some Christmas fairy dust. The story, finally, is only about a man who learns the true meaning of punctuality.
  92. Saltburn
    Saltburn is the sort of embarrassment you’ll put up with for 75 minutes. But not for 127. It’s too desperate, too confused, too pleased with its petty shocks to rile anything you’d recognize as genuine excitement.
  93. Next Goal Wins
    Bland photography and perfunctory writing are the very least of my issues with Next Goal Wins, a movie-shaped stain on the class of entertainment known as the sports-underdog comedy.
  94. Journey to Bethlehem
    The magic of movies does depend on a certain suspension of disbelief, but “Journey” tests the viewer beyond rational credulity, even as it persists in asserting the reality of its existence.
  95. The Devil on Trial
    Instead of challenging assumptions, exploring implications or discussing the difficult questions here, Holt merely mines the material for superficial shock value and lurid titillation.
  96. After Death
    Whether you believe these phenomena are spiritual journeys or visions created by the human mind (or both), the film loses its sense of epiphany in the lackluster jumble of its moviemaking.
  97. Divinity
    A misbegotten blend of the futuristic and the antiquated, “Divinity” is an unintentionally comical sci-fi diatribe obsessed with beautiful bodies, bickering brothers and biblical symbolism.
  98. Rebel
    At best, this drama picks apart the Islamic State’s nefarious recruitment tactics, taking on the fresh perspective of a Muslim family in Europe. These dynamics are rich, and the consequences agonizing — so it’s too bad the filmmakers seem to think that the bigger the spectacle, the more powerfully communicated this whirlwind of politics and emotions. The opposite is the case.
  99. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3
    The ancient Greeks wrote tragedy after tragedy warning against hubris. Yet, Vardalos’s flailing crowd-pleaser needs a shot of self-confidence and logic.
  100. Portrait of the Queen
    Elements that could have made for a somewhat intriguing documentary get lost in what amounts to a tedious piece of agitprop that ultimately regurgitates the dutifully respectful picture of Elizabeth we’ve seen time and time again.
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