The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
For 20,269 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 4.2 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 20269
  2. Mixed: 8,428 out of 20269
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20269
20269 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Decorado
    Vázquez’s deadpan directorial style, which occasionally swerves into grim spoofs of Looney Tunes-style antics, perfectly suits the animated dystopia.
  2. Obsession
    Barker shows real promise as a horror storyteller; his instincts about when to hold back and when to plunge the knife are scalpel sharp. If only the sexual politics at play in Obsession didn’t feel so callow.
  3. Remarkably Bright Creatures
    While being cynical about a wise-octopus movie is probably unfair, being bored by it isn’t great, either.
  4. Swapped
    Pelage and plumage noticeably lack the tactile quality of a Pixar extravaganza, but the animation gets a pass for the movie’s purposes — namely, to impart a message that communities should trust each other, whether they’re covered in rotely-rendered feathers or fur.
  5. Animal Farm
    There’s a reasonably OK movie somewhere inside Animal Farm, but it’s drowning in ideological confusion, which wouldn’t be such a big deal — one rarely asks children’s cartoons featuring talking pigs to be wellsprings of thoughtful political theorizing — except that this is “Animal Farm.”
  6. Deep Water
    This picture is not as ridiculous as a “Sharknado” movie — Harlin is out to make a genuine nail-biter, and he largely succeeds, maintaining interest even as the two-hour mark approaches. But it’s not enough to make you genuinely afraid to go into the ocean this summer.
  7. Apex
    This Netflix thriller is a fun-enough time that is elevated by the performances of predator and prey.
  8. Fuze
    Despite a plot (by Ben Hopkins) bursting with double- and triple- crosses, the movie feels programmatic, its characters bland cogs in a Rube Goldberg machine.
  9. Omaha
    I was left befuddled about the movie’s message and, indeed, what I was supposed to make of the whole thing. That’s frustrating, and it’s not the sort of feeling you want to have when leaving a movie like this; it overwhelms whatever impression the rest of the movie might have left.
  10. I Swear
    Jones has turned a life into a hackneyed survivor’s story with cartoon villains, cardboard saints, pretty scenery, mewling piano notes and expedient, drama-goosing epiphanies.
  11. Over Your Dead Body
    Intentionally juvenile humor can have a way of breaking down even the stoniest viewer with the right levels of sincerity and self-awareness, but the film (a remake of the Norwegian thriller “The Trip”) is too slick and giddy about its own crudity to nurture these elements.
  12. Balls Up
    There are slapstick foibles, sight gags about rubbers, and many, many vulgar jokes — some good for a laugh, though I doubt the film’s Oscar prospects.
  13. Normal
    Normal — which heralds, according to the press notes, the birth of yet another franchise — navigates its cartoonish excesses with expected competence. As for Odenkirk, he’s golden; as mythology nerds will recall, Ulysses was also known as the Master of Cunning.
  14. Mother Mary
    The downer here is that Lowery doesn’t seem to know what to do with his stars, performers who are never better than when they’re just doing what they do best — you know, acting.
  15. Lee Cronin's The Mummy
    Cronin thrills as ever to luscious gross-out scenes.
  16. You, Me & Tuscany
    To sell its brand of wish fulfillment, the film relies almost entirely on the charisma of its leads.
  17. Newborn
    Parker the writer has tended to overload his screenplays with messages. He does some of that here, as well. Parker the director, however, is gifted with crews and capable actors and that shows, too. The members of his ensemble — especially Oyelowo — find ways to keep us guessing, and caring, to the end.
  18. The Travel Companion
    There is charm in the film’s allusions to New York City indie filmmaking, like the crew member who fibs that he’s shooting a mayonnaise commercial. But that specificity does not extend to Simon and Bruce’s bond, which consists of parallel play or the odd story about getting too stoned.
  19. Bunnylovr
    Bunnylovr, the first feature from Katarina Zhu, touches on various themes, none of which feels fully realized. Yet there is such a sweet symbiosis between Zhu’s intimate, easy directing style and her unselfconscious performance in the lead role — beautifully illuminated by Daisy Zhou’s gentle cinematography — that the movie’s aimlessness rarely grates.
  20. The Blue Trail
    Alas, Tereza, whose interior life remains largely obscured from start to finish, isn’t a compelling vessel for whatever Mascaro is trying to do in this movie. And, as it drifts from one place to another, one encounter to another, one sketchy idea to another, so may your attention.
  21. A Great Awakening
    It’s an earnest account of a religious movement that still resonates — Whitefield’s practice was instrumental in the growth of the Methodist church, and his sermons and lectures are still in print today.
  22. The Drama
    Zendaya and Pattinson are both enjoyable to watch, but she’s given too little to do and he’s given too much.
  23. The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist
    The result is less clarifying than bewildering, though it’s often very interesting.
  24. BTS: The Return
    This is, in short, as polished as you would expect of a work about a pop behemoth, a companion piece to their new album that’s less a revelatory look at the meaning of their time away than a sentimental welcome back for the group and its fans. For the BTS Army, that’s likely more than enough.
  25. Our Hero, Balthazar
    So many details in this comedy-drama (a characterization worth quibbling with) are meant to provoke. And Our Hero, Balthazar teases with the promise of a darkly intelligent film. Not unlike its protagonist’s tears, the effect is dismayingly performative.
  26. A Magnificent Life
    There’s more to love in the details than in this overloaded sprint through history, which the film frames from the perspective of an aging Pagnol as he talks to a phantom version of his younger self and attempts to begin writing his memoirs.
  27. Forbidden Fruits
    Though Reinhart and Pedretti chew through the scenery with dedication, the film, directed and written by Meredith Alloway, is a vibes-only pastiche that has little to add to the satirical queen-bee subgenre besides some updated slang.
  28. They Will Kill You
    A case in which a production designer and prosthetics team showed up for work but the screenwriters might as well have crowdsourced their ideas from fanboys.
  29. Dhurandhar The Revenge
    The first installment’s critics might think this sequel further desensitizes viewers to violence along national or religious lines. It’s a movie of the current moment, which isn’t exactly a comfort.
  30. Dead Lover
    It’s too much yet not enough.
  31. Late Shift
    Benesch’s beautifully controlled performance — a balancing act of anxious, fidgety physicality and poker-faced concentration — shows us the difficulty of honoring each patient’s humanity when workplace conditions demand efficiency over empathy. Still, this message runs thin as the story progresses, a bit too evenly, through its various cases, giving the film a languid, repetitious quality.
  32. Marc by Sofia
    Two creative decision makers more at ease behind the scenes, they are, perhaps, not the most natural chroniclers of their own careers and social lives, and as the film goes on, it strains to arrive at even the most basic personal revelations.
  33. Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man
    In its quest to give us a little bit of everything, it finally delivers not nearly enough of anything.
  34. Project Hail Mary
    Lord and Miller, almost by default, accentuate the positive to the detriment of the very movie that they’ve painstakingly created. Like a lot of Earthlings, they seem more at home in a far-out fantasy than on our ordinary, terrifying planet, which is why this particular message of hope ends up being a bummer.
  35. Youngblood
    “Hockey will teach you what you need to know about life” is a cliché, and while Underwood’s delivery of the line almost redeems it, James’s work makes you believe it.
  36. Protector
    While the final twist adds some depth to its madcap revenge plot, it’s Jovovich who keeps the film’s moodiness from unintentionally playing for laughs.
  37. The Bride!
    It doesn’t always make sense tonally and intellectually, but the whole thing is energetic, handsome and stocked with enough expert, appealing performers to hold your interest through the rougher, less coherent passages.
  38. Dreams
    Dreams might feel distant and frosty, but it has a lot to say about inequality and the prerogatives of privilege.
  39. In the Blink of an Eye
    With In the Blink of an Eye, Stanton is juggling quite a bit, including many landscapes to create and a lot of imagination for exploration. While the visuals are not exactly eye-popping, the movie is plenty serviceable.
  40. K-Pops!
    It has its momentary charms, mostly when it’s just .Paak and Rasheed riffing off each other, with the buoyant chemistry of a real father and son, or, when we see .Paak be less BJ under K-pop’s bright lights and more himself, just the artist with a mic and a set of drums.
  41. Scream 7
    The results are, by turns, amusing and lightly scary, though never truly surprising.
  42. I Can Only Imagine 2
    Ventimiglia becomes the sequel’s saving grace.
  43. Midwinter Break
    The saving grace of Midwinter Break is the pair of stellar leads, who would be appealing to watch just fumbling for their reading glasses. That also happens to be the pinnacle of action, however, within this prosaic drama.
  44. How to Make a Killing
    The story and the actors make How to Make a Killing easy to drift along with, even if it never coheres tonally, logically or, really, any which way.
  45. Joe's College Road Trip
    There’s a reason that “Road Trip” is premiering in the middle of Black History Month. While expansively anarchic to a fault, the movie’s anger, and its pride, is convincing.
  46. By Design
    Kramer has constructed an ironically detached artifact that invites questions about ownership and image and then bats them away, making it a frustrating experience with an intriguing veneer.
  47. Crime 101
    Like lovingly warmed leftovers, it has its satisfactions: a charismatic cast, evocative Los Angeles location work, the sort of granular details on diamond couriering and insurance valuation that might give impressionable viewers ideas.
  48. GOAT
    It’s a story with few surprises and mostly rudimentary emotional concepts, but is enlivened by artwork with colorful texture and a dynamic animation style.
  49. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die
    It’s actually when the film returns to the main, quest-driven plot that the film lags, particularly around the middle; there’s just not enough interest among the team members and the action to sustain narrative tension, and the film feels like it loses its drive.
  50. Scarlet
    “Scarlet” is peppered with a few exceptional moments of inspiration, but ends up caught in an awkward push-pull between Shakespeare’s text and the fantastical spaces where Hosoda’s vision extends.
  51. Wuthering Heights
    Robbie and Elordi hold your attention well enough, though they’re more persuasive apart than when they’re together.
  52. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
    While much of this is muddled and repetitive, it is also now and then slyly amusing.
  53. Jimpa
    The men give Jimpa a warm, intergenerational quality, gesturing at the power of queer family over time. If only the film didn’t ask the audience to invest in so very many subplots; the clutter ends up sucking the air out of all of them.
  54. Dracula
    The movie’s intermittent flippancy is its lifeblood, with Christoph Waltz’s cheeky vampire hunter delighting even when he seems to be off doing his own thing.
  55. The Moment
    The Moment lights on substantive subjects throughout, yet partly because it’s about one individual’s ostensible struggles rather than the larger system, its bite is toothless.
  56. Moses the Black
    A high-strung, faith-based hood drama, Moses the Black has admirable intentions but lacks precision.
  57. Shelter
    The spy-versus-spy scenario set out by the screenwriter Ward Parry isn’t going to give the maestro Mick Harron (“Slow Horses”) any sleepless nights. But as a vehicle for Statham’s bone-breaking escapades, it’ll do. And the story avoids some of the expected clichés.
  58. In Cold Light
    A depressing, downbeat thriller that hustles from one violent act to the next with only the flimsiest of narrative throughlines, the latest from the French Canadian director Maxime Giroux is an unfortunate misfire.
  59. The Rip
    Damon is the only one keeping his head above water, mostly because he’s the only one given the space to make decisions and navigate different dynamics. Everyone else is trapped in a kiddie game of cops and robbers.
  60. Night Patrol
    The lumbersome conspiracy-building in the front half, paired with flashy visuals and some performances fitting for a crude stoner comedy, make this a bleary experience overall.
  61. All You Need Is Kill
    By narrowing the scope and condensing the logic of the action, this film undermines the excitement of the story, so even the day of an alien apocalypse starts to get tedious. That’s a great misfortune given the movie’s funky style.
  62. People We Meet on Vacation
    Occasionally cute and almost instantly forgettable, “People,” tidily directed by Brett Haley, offers less-than-witty dialogue.
  63. Dead Man's Wire
    When Dead Man’s Wire ends with footage of the real Kiritsis and Hall, it is hard not to conclude that a much crazier, livelier film could have been made.
  64. The Mother and the Bear
    Like any decent soap, The Mother and the Bear is powered by human dramas that are contrived, silly and ultimately a little weird. But what actually happens belie what is in execution a relatively sedate story about the spoken frictions and unspoken secrets between mother and daughter, father and son.
  65. Goodbye June
    The story, about a dying matriarch and her stricken adult children, paints by numbers with stock characters and cloying scenarios.
  66. Anaconda
    Rudd does his lovable simpleton shtick and manic Black carries on, as per usual, like a scruffy Don Quixote, but the film around them doesn’t quite keep pace with their go-for-broke absurdity.
  67. Breakdown: 1975
    If you’re an aficionado of ’70s cinema, there’s probably not much new here. The films covered are certainly a murderer’s row of masterpieces, but they’re familiar to cinephiles. Yet despite its lack of depth, there’s value to Breakdown: 1975 as an introduction to an era, particularly for younger people or newer movie lovers who might relish learning about the films of the time and the ways they weave into history.
  68. Avatar: Fire and Ash
    The fight sequences are models of spatial coherency and escalating tension, and they grab you wholly, turning a movie into a full-body workout. That feeling dissipates whenever the fighting stops, the story cranks back up and somebody calls someone else “bro,” which happens too often.
  69. David
    It can be a preachy and po-faced movie, to be sure, but a handsome one.
  70. Atropia
    The movie, written and directed by Hailey Benton Gates, wants to be a lot of things at once, including a satire and a dark rom-com. It bites off more than it can comfortably chew. However, the cast, also featuring Tim Heidecker, Chloë Sevigny and Channing Tatum, is charismatic and at times piercingly funny.
  71. Ella McCay
    Ella McCay is a bizarre movie that would have worked better if it went all-in as an homage to another era. Since we won’t get to see that version, you’ll just have to buckle up and enjoy the very strange ride.
  72. The King of Color
    We don’t need to hear about Herbert’s party years after his first marriage faltered. But he still had a cool idea, and his explanations of printing technology and color chemistry are almost enough to carry the film.
  73. Happy Holidays
    The movie favors an unflashy presentation that allows its themes to emerge organically. But the interlocking structure, which owes more to the early work of Alejandro González Iñárritu than “Rashomon,” undermines sustained tension, and the dramatic architecture is slightly wobbly.
  74. Little Trouble Girls
    Djukic has a fine eye and is a talent to look out for, even if here, like Ana-Maria, she chose the wrong girl.
  75. Five Nights at Freddy's 2
    With its jacked-up production budget, “Freddy’s 2,” at the very least, delivers more intricate set pieces that allow for a spatter of solid kill scenes — the rest is as tame and creaky as its signature animatronic teddies.
  76. Merrily We Roll Along
    Merrily We Roll Along is an OK movie of a good production of a great musical: on balance, another worthy addition to the Stephen Sondheim canon, which can always stand to be expanded.
  77. The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Photo
    Frankly, this hunt isn’t particularly thrilling, despite the premise’s potential to create intriguing parallels between Nghe’s erasure and the exploitation of the Vietnamese people by U.S. forces during the war.
  78. The Thing with Feathers
    Cumberbatch gives himself fully to the task of abjection, plunging us into the shadows and chaos of Dad’s life. But the movie neglects to make Mum’s presence palpable — and that is a loss.
  79. Good Fortune
    This is a movie that wants to have it both way.
  80. Eternity
    Sappy and silly, Eternity made me thank heaven for Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early as the quick-witted coordinators tasked with guiding our threesome to perpetual bliss. They’re a comic delight, and they aerate a movie that’s most touching when it’s least frantic.
  81. Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter
    Curtis shows up late in the picture, and her grounded presence helps Powter’s hard-luck story resonate more sympathetically. The documentary ends not with the promise of a comeback, but with a resolution to restore some, well, sanity to Powter’s life.
  82. A Very Jonas Christmas Movie
    While the vanilla songs lack magic, the dad jokes and brotherly roasting feel like their own kind of delightfully unserious gift.
  83. The Running Man
    There’s nothing wrong (or incorrect!) about either Wright’s desire to please or the righteousness, and at times you can sense a bit of anger wafting off the screen, even if Wright and Powell mostly seem to be having a very good time.
  84. King Ivory
    While this slick film wants to use their stories to put faces to the fentanyl epidemic, Swab’s genre instincts get the better of him.
  85. Modi - Three Days on the Wing of Madness
    The energetic and arguably strenuous performance by the lead actor, Riccardo Scamarcio, is something of a flex, to be sure.
  86. Nuremberg
    Evidently, as this muddled movie tells it, the climactic lesson of the Nuremberg trials was that America had a friend, too.
  87. Love+War
    Love + War chooses to go wide rather than deep, resulting in a movie that, while pleasingly dynamic, offers less psychological insight than the photographs she has gambled everything to take. And perhaps that’s as it should be.
  88. Dracula
    Jude is an interesting, admirably unorthodox filmmaker who likes to push his viewers. Here, he simply punishes us.
  89. Ballad of a Small Player
    Ballad of a Small Player contains a great story, but it’s bogged down by its trappings. Perhaps it just got a little too greedy.
  90. Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc
    As Denji and his adversaries converge on and above city streets, it’s possible to enjoy the combat on the level of pure sensation. Here, the rapturous ability of anime to isolate and prolong movement and emotion within a frame is on full display.
  91. Dream Eater
    Less, here, would have really frightened more.
  92. Queens of the Dead
    It’s all meant to be viewed through the lens of camp, that increasingly diluted and all-too-broad category that here feels more like an excuse for the film’s flat construction than an aesthetic approach. Though you’ll get a few laughs out of its cast.
  93. Regretting You
    It’s formulaic and predictable, with goofy writing and clumsy editing. The saving grace is the actors, who manage to perform even the most ridiculous lines with a straight face.
  94. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
    While De Mornay was chilling as a woman haunted by a miscarriage and her husband’s suicide, Monroe is merely chilly, lumbering like a mopey teenager stuck with reciting unintentionally funny lines that aim for sexy but kill the mood.
  95. Truth & Treason
    No matter its flaws, Truth & Treason is very well acted.
  96. The Woman in Cabin 10
    A body isn’t the only thing that goes overboard here.
  97. Soul on Fire
    In terms of dramatic oomph, the problem isn’t that everyone behaves with decency and compassion, but that everyone unfailingly says what they mean, robbing the movie of moment-to-moment friction, dimension and subtext, even as its lessons in gratitude and self-forgiveness hit the mark.
  98. Mr. K
    Naturally, the guests are weirdos, though none are very memorable. And since Glover himself is the ultimate weirdo, it all feels a bit much.
  99. Kiss of the Spider Woman
    For the most part, though, the X factor of elegance, sensuality and verve that made MGM musicals so memorable is missing here. You want to give an encouraging grade for effort, but effort is also the last thing you want to see in a musical.
  100. Roofman
    Here is a protagonist who clearly straddles the line between right and wrong; the trouble is that in Roofman, that line wobbles, leaving the movie somewhere between a fun-loving caper and a finger-wagging morality tale.
prev
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »