The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,311 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: 9,399 out of 20311
  2. Mixed: 8,446 out of 20311
  3. Negative: 2,466 out of 20311
20311 movie reviews
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    • 96 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Man with a Movie Camera
    It is a disjointed array of scenes in which the producer, Dziga Vertoff, does not take into consideration the fact that the human eye fixes for a certain space of time that which holds the attention.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rosemary's Baby
    Miss Farrow is quite marvelous, pale, suffering, almost constantly on-screen in a difficult role that requires her to be learning for almost two hours what the audience has guessed from the start...Everyone else is fine, but the movie—although it is pleasant—doesn't quite work on any of its dark or powerful terms.
  3. Don't Look Now
    A fragile soap bubble of a horror film. It has a shiny surface that reflects all sorts of colors and moods, but after watching it for a while, you realize you're looking not into it, but through it and out the other side. The bubble doesn't burst, it slowly collapses, and you may feel, as I did, that you've been had.Not only do you probably have better things to do, but so, I'm sure, do most of the people connected with the film.
  4. Double Indemnity
    Such folks as delight in murder stories for their academic elegance alone should find this one steadily diverting, despite its monotonous pace and length...But the very toughness of the picture is also the weakness of its core, and the academic nature of its plotting limits its general appeal.
  5. The Manchurian Candidate
    The film is so artfully contrived, the plot so interestingly started, the dialogue so racy and sharp, and John Frankenheimer's direction so exciting in the style of Orson Welles when he was making Citizen Kane and other pictures that the fascination of it is strong. So many fine cinematic touches and action details pop up that one keeps wishing the subject would develop into something more than it does.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Days of Heaven
    It is full of elegant and striking photography; and it is an intolerably artsy, artificial film.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Rio Bravo
    Despite its slickness, virility, occasional humor and, if it may be repeated, authentic professional approach, it is well-made but awfully familiar fare.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Duck Soup
    A production in which the bludgeon is employed more often than the gimlet. The result is that this production is, for the most part, extremely noisy without being nearly as mirthful as their other films.
  9. McCabe & Mrs. Miller
    I don't automatically object to contemporary allusions, but I prefer to find them myself, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller is so busy pointing them out to us that the effect is to undercut its narrative drive and the dignity of its fiction.
  10. Yojimbo
    As in most Westerns, the dramatic penetration is not deep, and the plot complications are many and hard to follow in Japanese. Kurosawa is here showing more virtuosity than strength. Yojimbo is a long way (in the wrong direction) from his brilliant Rashomon.
  11. Almayer's Folly
    Almayer's Folly is not friendly terrain to traverse; like some sinister version of Proust, it is a prolonged fever dream that ultimately yields madness.
  12. The Zone of Interest
    All that is clear from what’s onscreen is Glazer has made a hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise set in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.
  13. Alphaville
    What it comes to is simply that the dazzle of Mr. Godard's cinematic style is not matched by the hackneyed idea of a robot society that is expounded in the script.
  14. Gavagai
    This is a high-minded and carefully composed film about, among other things, the inability of words in any language to satisfactorily communicate states of being. There are pleasures and intellectual provocations to be had here. But its attempted effects fall flat a little too often.
  15. The Godfather: Part II
    The only remarkable thing about Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II is the insistent manner in which it recalls how much better his original film was...Even if Part II were a lot more cohesive, revealing, and exciting than it is, it probably would have run the risk of appearing to be the self-parody it now seems.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Red Beard
    Red Beard is well meant and well made, no question about it. But it unfolds familiarly and, at 185 minutes, practically forever.
  17. Paths of Glory
    Mr. Kubrick has made it look terrific. The execution scene is one of the most craftily directed and emotionally lacerating that we have ever seen. But there are two troubling flaws in this picture, one in the realm of technique and the other in the realm of significance, which determine its larger, lasting worth.
  18. The Hidden Fortress
    This is not to say that the action is not vivid, exciting and tense, or that Kurosawa's camera is any less graphic than it usually is. This is simply to say that The Hidden Fortress is essentially a superficial film and that Kurosawa, for all his talent, is as prone to pot-boiling as anyone else.
  19. After Hours
    After Hours is not, ultimately, a satisfying film, but it's often vigorously unsettling.
  20. Night of the Living Dead
    Night of the Living Dead is a grainy little movie acted by what appear to be nonprofessional actors, who are besieged in a farm house by some other nonprofessional actors who stagger around, stiff-legged, pretending to be flesh-eating ghouls.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Mother and the Whore
    Watching The Mother and the Whore, you find that you're back in the movie-sludge of the nineteen-fifties, when a number of mediocre French films focused on sub-Sagan characters: numb, semi-paralyzed creatures who hardly had the calories to drag themselves through the day.
  22. The Seventh Continent (1989)
    The Seventh Continent is one of the most stylish films in this year's New Directors/New Films series. With its fragmented pattern of beautifully composed and repeated images from middle-class life, it rejuvenates a 1960's style that would seem to be exhausted by now. But the Austrian writer and director Michael Haneke pulls viewers through a good portion of the film on the sheer strength of his visual flair, avoiding the classic trap of how to create a film about boredom that is not boring.
  23. Wild Strawberries
    This one is so thoroughly mystifying that we wonder whether Mr. Bergman himself knew what he was trying to say.
  24. Strangers on a Train
    Mr. Hitchcock again is tossing a crazy murder story in the air and trying to con us into thinking that it will stand up without support.
  25. Winter Sleep
    Mr. Ceylan performs this particular operation with rigorous solemnity, technical virtuosity and precision tools — his lapidary visual style rises to the challenge of the natural environment — yet there’s something missing from the very start, namely the spark of breathed-in life.
  26. The Innocents
    Mr. Clayton and Miss Kerr have neglected to interpret the tale and character with sufficient incisiveness and candor to give us a first-rate horror or psychological film. But they've given us one that still has interest and sends some formidable chills down the spine.
  27. Poor Things
    It isn’t long into Poor Things that you start to feel as if you were being bullied into admiring a movie that’s so deeply self-satisfied there really isn’t room for the two of you.
  28. Wolfwalkers
    As much a joy as this movie . . . is to behold, its scenario is more than a little overbaked and overdrawn.
  29. My Neighbor Totoro
    When My Neighbor Totoro, which was written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, is dispensing enchantment, it can be very charming. Too much of the film, however, is taken up with stiff, mechanical chitchat.
  30. Imitation of Life
    This modernized remake of Miss Hurst's frankly lachrymose tale is much the same as its soggy predecessor. It is the most shameless tear-jerker in a couple of years.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Eraserhead
    A murkily pretentious shocker.
  32. Three Colors: Blue
    Blue doesn't seduce the viewer into its very complex, musically formal arrangements. The narrative is too precious and absurd. The interpretation it demands seems dilettantish.
  33. Cléo from 5 to 7
    Another French film that fairly glitters with photographic and cinematic "style," yet fails to do more than skim the surface of a cryptic dramatic theme.
  34. Goldfinger
    What they give us in Goldfinger is an excess of science-fiction fun, a mess of mechanical melodrama, and a minimum of bedroom farce...It is good fun, all right, fast and furious, racing hither and yon about the world as Double-Oh Seven pursues the intrigues of a mysterious financier named Goldfinger.
  35. Spartacus
    It is a spotty, uneven drama in which the entire opening phase representing the basic-training program in a gladiatorial school is lively, exciting and expressive, no matter how true to history it is, and the middle phase is pretentious and tedious, because it is concerned with the dull strife of politics.
  36. Room
    While it flickers with grace and imagination during its initial half, largely because of Jack, it devolves into a dreary, platitudinous therapy movie in its second, largely because of Ma.
  37. Written on the Wind
    The trouble with this romantic picture—among other minor things, including Mr. Stack's absurd performance and another even more so by Miss Malone—is that nothing really happens, the complications within the characters are never clear and the sloppy, self-pitying fellow at the center of the whole thing is a bore.
  38. The Great Escape
    There are a few moments when Richard Attenborough as the chief engineer of the whole project demonstrates some impressive strength and poise. But for much longer than is artful or essential, The Great Escape grinds out its tormenting story without a peek beneath the surface of any man, without a real sense of human involvement. It's a strictly mechanical adventure with make-believe men.
  39. The Big Sleep
    The Big Sleep is one of those pictures in which so many cryptic things occur amid so much involved and devious plotting that the mind becomes utterly confused. And, to make it more aggravating, the brilliant detective in the case is continuously making shrewd deductions which he stubbornly keeps to himself.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Carrie
    Mr. de Palma has ordered universal overacting. Piper Laurie does it with considerable grace—the wicked witch in a children's pantomime. The marvel, though, is Sissy Spacek. She makes us perfectly aware that she is overacting, and yet she is very effective. Her hysteria is far too hysterical. Her delight in being taken to the prom is far too radiant. But it moves us.
  41. Bonnie and Clyde
    It is a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cutups in "Thoroughly Modern Millie."
    • 86 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Distant Voices, Still Lives
    One of those dimly realized personal statements that ultimately says a lot less than the written program notes that accompany it.
  43. Los Angeles Plays Itself
    Los Angeles Plays Itself, in spite of its length, is rarely tedious, an achievement it owes mainly to the movies it prodigiously excerpts.
  44. Only Angels Have Wings
    When you add it all up, Only Angels Have Wings comes to an overly familiar total. It's a fairly good melodrama, nothing more.
  45. The Bad and the Beautiful
    It is a crowded and colorful picture, but it is choppy, episodic and vague.
  46. The Double Life of Veronique
    The Double Life of Veronique doesn't end. About three-quarters of the way through, it starts to dissolve, like mist, so that by the time it is actually over the screen seems to have been blank for some time.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Five Easy Pieces
    At first appears to be rich with a quantity of felt life, but on reflection seems both more carefully studied and more coldly casual than profoundly understood.
  48. I Am Another You
    Ms. Wang delves further into Dylan’s past. If by the end she probably still puts too much trust in Dylan’s aphorisms, give her credit for recognizing the shortcomings of her footage and correcting course.
  49. Out of the Past
    The style is still sharp and realistic, the dialogue still crackles with verbal sparks and the action is still crisp and muscular, not to mention slightly wanton in spots. But the pattern and purpose of it is beyond our pedestrian ken.
  50. The Delinquents
    The Delinquents wants to live modestly. It’s less concerned with satisfying the expectations of its genre than in finding waggish ways to deviate from them. To the film’s thinking, narrative is only a construct.
  51. Close Your Eyes
    Close Your Eyes has its virtues, certainly, including some pleasurably loose interludes at the beachfront compound where Miguel lives. These have a delicate, unforced quality that creates pinpricks of light in a movie that, as it struggles to engage meaningfully with the past, sinks into ponderousness.
  52. Sling Blade
    Thornton is sadly affecting in the film's central role.
  53. Harakiri
    You may not get much satisfaction from the tortured human drama in this film, but you should get an eyeful graphic exercise.
  54. Cat People
    The Cat People is a labored and obvious attempt to induce shock. And Miss Simone's cuddly little tabby would barely frighten a mouse under a chair.
  55. In Front of Your Face
    The secret is poised somewhere between triteness and disarming simplicity.
  56. Atonement
    Atonement fails to be anything more than a decorous, heavily decorated and ultimately superficial reading of the book on which it is based.
  57. Stalker
    Stalker offers the eye so little that it might well have made a better novel, or short story, than a nearly three-hour-long film.
  58. The Last Waltz
    There is a dazzling array of talent on display here, and the film surely has its memorable moments. But it articulates so little of the end-of-an-era feeling it hints at—and some of Mr. Scorsese's accomplishments have been so stunning—that it's impossible to view The Last Waltz as anything but an also-ran.
  59. The Black Stallion
    For all its pretty glimpses of the desert island, the film never offers a clear, overall sense of what the place looks like; neither the camera nor the boy really goes exploring.
  60. Ascension
    This aestheticization of Chinese society doesn’t exactly sit well with this viewer: one wonders if this counts as a kind of tourism.
  61. Blade Runner
    THE view of the future offered by Ridley Scott's muddled yet mesmerizing Blade Runner is as intricately detailed as anything a science-fiction film has yet envisioned.
  62. Frame by Frame
    The film’s four-person shuffle turns into a bit of a hash.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    2001: A Space Odyssey
    The movie is so completely absorbed in its own problems, its use of color and space, its fanatical devotion to science-fiction detail, that its is somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring.
  64. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
    Here is an American film, in Japanese with English subtitles, written, directed and photographed by Americans, made in Japan with a Japanese cast, which attempts to reveal the spiritual mysteries of a quintessentially Japanese phenomenon. That it doesn't succeed is almost a foregone conclusion. What is surprising, however, is that Mishima is as tolerable as it is, given all the strikes against it.
  65. Homicide
    Homicide, which refers to metaphorical as well as literal murder, may be Mr. Mamet's most personal and deeply felt work. It's also his most blunt and despairing. Both "House of Games" and "Things Change" deal with conspiracies of some sort. Yet the scam that is the center of this film is unconvincing.
  66. The Bad News Bears
    Has a number of other virtues that make it a surprisingly painless adventure. Among these are the screenplay by Bill Lancaster, Burt's son, who has the talent and discipline to tell the story of The Bad News Bears almost completely in terms of what happens on the baseball diamond or in the dugout.
  67. The Terminator
    A B-movie with flair.
  68. My Uncle
    Facing it squarely, "My Uncle" is perceptibly contrived when it lingers too long and gets too deeply into the dullness of things mechanical. After you've pushed one button and one modernistic face, you've pushed them all.
  69. Stray Dogs
    Until it goes haywire with the cabbage scene, Stray Dogs sustains a hypnotic intensity anchored in exquisite cinematography that portrays the modern industrial cityscape as a chilly wasteland.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Wrong Man
    Frighteningly authentic, the story generates only a modicum of drama.
  71. The Exorcist
    The care that Mr. Friedkin and Mr. Blatty have taken with the physical production, and with the rhythm of the narrative, which achieves a certain momentum through a lot of fancy, splintery crosscutting, is obviously intended to persuade us to suspend belief. But to what end? To marvel at the extent to which audiences will go to escape boredom by shock and insult.
  72. Baby Doll
    Mr. Kazan keeps the courtship bouncing between the emotional and the ludicrous. The nonchalance of the pursuer is its most entertaining grace.
  73. Miss Kiet's Children
    As in Nicolas Philibert’s similar French documentary “To Be and to Have” (2002), the relative absence of conflict in the interactions between a seasoned teacher and wonderful pupils grows tedious at feature length, and there is — presumably by design — relatively little meat on this documentary’s bones.
  74. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
    Seen with or without foreknowledge of its methods, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is only fitfully engaging — suspect as documentary, insubstantial as fiction.
  75. The Salt of the Earth
    The Salt of the Earth leaves no doubt about Mr. Salgado’s talent or decency, and the chance to spend time in his company is a reason for gratitude. And yet his pictures, precisely because they disclose harsh and unwelcome truths, deserve a harder, more robustly critical look.
  76. Turning Red
    It’s too bad that Turning Red fumbles its storytelling, because at the very least it has fun when it lets its fur fly.
  77. Rose Plays Julie
    Amid the lush greenery of the setting, the atmosphere is perpetually bone-chilling — complete with an ominously high-pitched score — making the film seem distant and difficult to fully embrace
  78. The LEGO Movie
    The visual environment created by the filmmakers (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller of “21 Jump Street” wrote and directed; the animation is by Animal Logic) hums with wit and imagination... The story is a busy, slapdash contraption designed above all to satisfy the imperatives of big-budget family entertainment.
  79. Come from Away
    This amiable production’s temperature never rises above lukewarm: good sentiments are, unfortunately, difficult to dramatize, an issue compounded by a score that can feel like aural wallpaper.
  80. The Reason I Jump
    The portraits are moving and informative. . . . As an aesthetic endeavor, though, The Reason I Jump is questionable, regardless of how much sensitivity the filmmakers took in their approach.
  81. The Day the Earth Stood Still
    It is comforting, of course, to have it made plain that our planetary neighbors are much wiser and more peaceful than are we, but this makes for a tepid entertainment in what is anamolously labeled the science-fiction field.
  82. Charade
    There's a lot to be said for it as a fast-moving, urbane entertainment in the comedy-mystery vein.
  83. Bad Axe
    This is a hermetic story, but one wishes that Siev had balanced its coziness with acuity.
  84. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour
    It’s a shame that the shots here are all over the place — the stage, the sky, too close, too far, too kinetic; only occasionally, in medium close-ups, just right. The director is Sam Wrench, and it’s unclear whether he’s making a movie or a salad. Under the circumstances, he’s done the best he probably could.
  85. The Second Mother
    The Second Mother goes soft toward the end, defusing its conflicts too easily and inconsequentially.
  86. Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back
    The Empire Strikes Back is not a truly terrible movie. It's a nice movie. It's not, by any means, as nice as "Star Wars." It's not as fresh and funny and surprising and witty, but it is nice and inoffensive and, in a way that no one associated with it need be ashamed of, it's also silly.
  87. Our Beloved Month of August
    The whole turns out to be less than the sum of its elegantly constructed and cleverly uncategorizable parts.
  88. They Live by Night
    They Live by Night has the failing of waxing sentimental over crime, but it manages to generate interest with its crisp dramatic movement and clear-cut types.
  89. C'mon C'mon
    C’mon C’mon is a nice movie about characters who are so nice that I almost feel bad for not being nicely disposed toward them or this movie, even with Joaquin Phoenix as the guy and Gaby Hoffmann as the sister.
  90. Knives Out
    Johnson’s own sleight of hand is estimable, even if his effort to add politics into the crowded mix rings hollow. The machine is what matters here, and he has clearly had such a good time engineering it that it’s hard not to feel bad when you don’t laugh along with him.
  91. Hold Me Tight
    For all the intensity of Krieps’s performance and the power of the piano repertoire, Hold Me Tight proceeds through the mourning process with a strange detachment, using Clarisse’s agony as scaffolding for ideas about memory and storytelling that seem more imposed on life than pulled from it.
  92. Night Moves
    An elegant conundrum, a private‐eye film that has its full share of duplicity, violence and bizarre revelation, but whose mind keeps straying from questions of pure narrative to those of the hero's psyche.
  93. Mirror (1975)
    Mr. Tarkovsky appears so absorbed in grappling with his own demons that universality suffers. [17 Aug 1983, p.C14]
    • The New York Times
  94. Once Upon a Time in the West (re-release)
    The biggest, longest, most expensive Leone Western to date, and, in many ways, the most absurd... Granting the fact that it is quite bad, Once Upon the Time in the West is almost always interesting, wobbling, as it does, between being an epic lampoon and a serious hommage to the men who created the dreams of Leone's childhood. (Review of Original Release)
  95. Touching the Void
    This is compelling stuff, but there is something deeply distracting in the use of recreated material.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
    This is an impressive study in anticlimax, more distinguished than the usually quoted classic example of "For God, for country and for Yale." The picture has a very, very excellent begining, a mediocre middle and a most deplorable ending.
  97. Heal the Living
    It’s all just empty calories; what this movie desperately needs is conflict.
  98. 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.
  99. Soft & Quiet
    The brutal possibilities of the white supremacist mind-set are nothing to shy away from. Still, the film’s admittedly jarring cruelty does little beyond press down on old bruises, turning the realities of racialized violence into an immersive spectacle with the kind of real-world sadistic allure one might find in a serial-killer movie.
  100. The Climb
    Rather than ascending to new heights of bromance, The Climb coasts down into the barren flatlands of masculine self-pity.
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