The New York Times' Scores

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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
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  1. Been Here Stay Here
    Time is slipping away for Tangier Island, just like its shoreline. Been Here Stay Here beautifully captures what it is right now, then asks us to consider what will probably be lost soon.
  2. In the Grey
    These days, Ritchie’s films are all about fabulous looking people causing a ruckus and blowing a lot of stuff up and taking out less good-looking bad guys in the bargain. “In the Grey” not only delivers these goods but goes into copious detail about just how Sid and Bronco get their ruckus up to speed.
  3. Is God Is
    Is God Is asks us to pay heed — in ways subtle and bold — to its comedy and anguish. It demands, without seeming to, that we watch to see, really see.
  4. The Wizard of the Kremlin
    It’s a useful framework for understanding leaders around the world, and Baranov is the ideal cipher, someone who intimately understands how easily people’s minds are swayed and molded.
  5. Agatha's Almanac
    While not everything that Bock does is equally fascinating — a director’s personal connection to a subject can be both an advantage and a hindrance — a fair amount of it is endearing, even inspiring.
  6. LifeHack
    By putting us inside the internet, Corrigan makes their insular world feel uncomfortably close to ours.
  7. The A List: 15 Stories from Asian and Pacific Diasporas
    Shorn of any larger narratives or showy touches, the film spotlights each subject telling, in brief, the individual histories and struggles of their lives.
  8. Blue Film
    I left this movie with an exhilarated kind of heaviness. Here is a work of art that wants to know what makes us us. There’s no caution. I don’t sense any compromise, either. Nor do I detect judgment. We’re being trusted with these souls, entrusted with them.
  9. Mortal Kombat II
    The spectacle — its eardrum-shattering, eye-popping pyrotechnics, with the violence framed against all manner of phantasmagoric computer-generated backdrops — is its own reward.
  10. Silent Friend
    Plenty of things happen, but Silent Friend isn’t traditionally plot-driven. It’s a film of sprawling ideas that float around like pollen, with some particles creating marvelous blooms. Others drift off aimlessly.
  11. The Sheep Detectives
    Not only is The Sheep Detectives delightful, but it’s funny and emotionally complex and, dare I say, unusually deferential toward the noble sheep, frequently cast as brain-dead losers in cinema’s barnyards (Shaun notwithstanding).
  12. Billie Eilish - Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D)
    In some ways, the movie is a bizarre Venn diagram of aesthetic and emotional interests: a totally immersive experience into the power of Eilish’s music, and a test film for Cameron to play with his latest gadgets.
  13. Our Land (Nuestra Tierra)
    Drawing attention to the filming technology, Martel implicitly reminds us that Chocobar’s case only came to trial because it was filmed and uploaded to the internet in the first place.
  14. Departures
    Departures is still tender and winsome, with graphic-novel-style animation lightening the load, but is ultimately punishing in tone. It lives by a truth that might ring familiar for gay men particularly: Humor that cuts deep is a form of survival.
  15. Two Pianos
    Looking for rational behavior, especially in a crucial flashback, is pointless. To the extent that Two Pianos coheres, it is in a way that might be described as musical.
  16. That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime the Movie: Tears of the Azure Sea
    It’s honestly easier to feel more invested in these characters (or to have a reference point for the understatement of Rimuru’s role) if you’ve been hanging out with the show for one or more seasons. But it’s a diverting dip in the anime sea.
  17. Hokum
    Reveling in misdirection and a teasing duality . . . Hokum profits from Colm Hogan’s insinuating camera as it noses through gloomy corridors and a terrifying dumbwaiter shaft, hinting at what lurks on the other side of the frame.
  18. The Devil Wears Prada 2
    Like the first movie, the second is a sleek diversion with brittle and sharp laughs, truckloads of couture threads and lashings of light drama.
  19. Bernstein's Wall
    While his celebrity has largely faded, Bernstein’s Wall makes the case that his charge to artists to lead the way in culture is timeless, and more vital than ever.
  20. Desert Warrior
    Rather than extend the epic sweep of this picture into the cosmic ineffable, he just wants the viewer bouncing along and rooting for its female hero. And the film succeeds admirably in this respect.
  21. Two Seasons, Two Strangers
    Li, carrying a camera she has inherited, appears to search for inspiration in her surroundings, too. Whatever elusive quality she is seeking, Miyake has found something like it. His film gently balances tidiness and looseness, connection and alienation and artifice and the natural world.
  22. Two Women
    Ultimately, Two Women is less a message movie than a featherweight comedy, gesturing at big ideas about sexual politics before settling in as an amusingly mischievous diversion.
  23. Everyone Is Lying to You for Money
    Even if you’re confused or mystified by the whole concept of cryptocurrency, the movie is a pretty solid introduction to how it works. More important, it explains why people got into it in the first place.
  24. Amrum
    To Akin’s credit, the film isn’t tastelessly sentimental (see “Jojo Rabbit”), and it depicts Nanning’s awakening with the kind of subtlety and restraint that suggests his moral education will continue evolving after the end of the movie.
  25. Blue Heron
    An exquisite debut feature.
  26. Eagles of the Republic
    Saleh’s tangled plotting has more verve than his pacing or visual sense. But the movie’s portrait of collaboration can’t help but induce a shudder.
  27. Erupcja
    Although Charli and Góra can’t quite translate enough layers between them to make this film really bruise, this is a pleasantly slight work that doesn’t overstay its welcome.
  28. Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo)
    In his first feature, the writer and director Joel Alfonso Vargas takes a rather unremarkable premise and unspools it with sedulous care.
  29. Steal This Story, Please!
    Goodman’s career is fascinating on its own merits, and the film is full of footage of her doggedly chasing down politicians and sources who clearly would prefer to control their own story. But more important, the movie gradually explores the fundamentals of journalism that she believes in and passes on to colleagues.
  30. Exit 8
    Exit 8 is a pip and as fun to watch as it is to mull over.
  31. Fiume o morte!
    The re-enactment approach may not be as novel as it once was, but it’s still a heady, creative way to excavate layers of buried history in a location that has more than its share.
  32. The Christophers
    I have rarely enjoyed watching two actors’ rapport the way I loved watching McKellen and Coel; it could have gone on forever and not been long enough.
  33. Faces of Death
    Blood-soaked and intense, it is occasionally uneven in tone, with varying degrees of skill from the cast. But story-wise, it mostly holds together, a thinker of a thriller that, even when it heads into pure slasher territory, still has its brain turned on.
  34. Hamlet
    A trade-off for this fleet-of-foot adaptation is the full range of the play’s philosophical soundings and emotional palette. But their “Hamlet” surges with its own energies — palpably a matter of life and death.
  35. Jimmy & The Demons
    "The Cathedral” embodies everything that’s lovely about [Grashow's] work — its impishness, its openheartedness and its darkness, too — and Jimmy & the Demons captures all of that with a spirit that matches its subject.
  36. Pizza Movie
    It’s fast, witty, and packed with clever punchlines, though it still finds time for several scatological gags.
  37. Living the Land
    The film tracks about a year in Chuang’s life in a sober, sociological style of long takes and smooth pans. The story feels loose, intentionally directionless, at first, but as it winds toward the cooler months, its collection of small details builds up to big-picture revelations about the imminent rise of China as a global superpower.
  38. The Stranger
    Existential ennui is not exactly fun to watch (or, one assumes, easy to perform), yet a meaningless life has rarely looked this beautiful.
  39. DJ Ahmet
    In this strikingly assured debut, the writer-director Georgi M. Unkovski demonstrates gentle realism, paired with luminous cinematography and a superb young cast.
  40. Yes
    Yes is an unsparing movie and can be hard to watch partly because Lapid’s raw fury and maximalist approach can border on off-putting excess. There are times in “Yes” when he seems to be veering out of control. At other times, he almost seems to bait you to look away, to turn off and tune out just like his revelers, even as he inexorably pulls you in, forcing you to bear witness alongside him.
  41. She Dances
    While the picture, directed by Rick Gomez, has an often jaunty tone, it’s really at its best when it leans into the sadness that shadows the father-daughter relationship. Those scenes are where the two Zahns do their best, most affecting acting work.
  42. Alpha
    Softer and gentler than either of its forbears, "Alpha" hums with a dreamlike unease, a movie less concerned with sensation than with genuine feeling.
  43. Fantasy Life
    For a movie about two people going through a wobbly patch, Fantasy Life glides with a sneaky storytelling ease.
  44. Lumiere, Le Cinema!
    It’s funny and beautiful and lively.
  45. Kontinental '25
    It’s a sneak attack of a movie, one that invites your laughter, even as it jabs you in the ribs.
  46. Palestine 36
    The dynamics are rarely simply drawn, and if the film’s default mode is miniseries-expository, there are a few striking stylistic flourishes.
  47. Spacewoman
    If there were lingering doubts about the nation’s first female space shuttle pilot and commander’s rock-steady demeanor, the writer-director Hanna Berryman’s documentary jettisons them.
  48. Tow
    The movie steers into a “beat the system” narrative that packs some stirring “Erin Brockovich” energy.
  49. Two Prosecutors
    Mordantly comedic, Two Prosecutors is deliberately paced but makes a tightly conceived addition to Loznitsa’s work, which rides deep into the long, dark nights of Russian history with fiction, observational documentary and immersions in the Soviet archives.
  50. Miroirs No. 3
    These cinematic allusions are catnip to film lovers, and while they’re pleasurable to consider they’re so delicately woven into the story that they never distract from the characters or the emotion, or edge into directorial cleverness.
  51. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come
    Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is a worthy sequel, repeating some of the same beats as its predecessor, but cleverly reinvented so that it’s still unpredictable and hilariously bizarre.
  52. Bushido
    Written by Masato Kato, Bushido holds you with its performances and a story that circles around questions of honor, loyalty, masculinity and the ties that bind and sometimes throttle.
  53. Group: The Schopenhauer Effect
    It’s invigorating to watch these interactions, even if similar filmmaking methods have been used before.
  54. undertone
    It’s a properly scary movie, the kind that merits watching in a theater with a good sound system (or headphones in a dark room, at home). And “Undertone” provides terrific evidence of what a filmmaker can do even under constraint. The most powerful tool in an artist’s toolbox just might be the audience’s imagination.
  55. Reminders of Him
    Reminders of Him deserves credit for serving it all up unabashedly and without a single wink. This is largely thanks to the stupendous Monroe, and also Withers.
  56. Space Cowboy
    It’s an unexpected illustration of how psychiatric challenges can turn one’s life into a “shrinking world,” as Jennings puts it, and how to keep going.
  57. Fukushima: A Nuclear Nightmare
    Although chiefly a straightforward — and at points repetitive — synopsis of the events, Fukushima: A Nuclear Nightmare distinguishes itself in its devotion to elevating these men as heroes.
  58. Dolly
    As an exploitation pastiche, Rod Blackhurst’s new sicko fairy tale is a knockout. Made entirely on Super 16-millimeter film, it oozes grindhouse sleaze that almost reeks through the screen. Ashley K. Thomas’s special makeup effects are distinctively stomach-churning. There’s not much to it beyond that, and for lots of horror fans, that will be enough.
  59. André Is an Idiot
    He can’t be irreverent about his impending death forever, but it’s oddly uplifting to see him so committed to trying — while encouraging every viewer to get a colonoscopy.
  60. Heel
    Infused with the D.N.A. of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), Heel is an uneasy study of subjugation and transformation. Rock-solid performances from Boon and Graham maintain its precarious balance between anxiety and absurdity.
  61. Hoppers
    It’s a fable, really, with a science-nerd edge and some charming animal friends. You could do a whole lot worse at the movies.
  62. The Napa Boys
    The humor is over-the-top and often exaggeratedly juvenile, but like many nominally “dumb” comedies, it’s the product of a keen and deliberate intelligence.
  63. Idiotka
    The American dream gets a quirky wardrobe upgrade in Idiotka, a lightweight but winning comedy that feels like a Netflix movie’s indie cousin.
  64. Ghost Elephants
    Ghost Elephants resides in the intersection of science and lyrical reverie — Herzog’s treasured terrain.
  65. The Inquisitor
    Tucker wisely front loads clips of Jordan (with some texts spoken by Alfre Woodard in voice-over). Jordan seems to be speaking to us today as a voice of conscience and reason in a nation in crisis struggling to fulfill its promise.
  66. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert
    It’s a fan’s dream, to be sure. But in getting so close to a man who has so often been turned into a caricature, “EPiC” goes beyond just the concert: We enjoy both the performance and the man who loved nothing more than to perform.
  67. Billy Preston: That's the Way God Planned It
    As tough a life as Preston had, the music that buoys this chronicle is a constant source of joy.
  68. My Father's Shadow
    It’s that sharp contrast of beauty with an undercurrent of pain that makes “My Father’s Shadow” so bittersweet, and it’s why it cuts to the quick.
  69. Cold Storage
    A B-movie throwback with plentiful winks, it has few thrills, but it has a touch of science, a plausible-enough threat, suitably disgusting splatter, appealing actors and a fleet running time.
  70. Queen of Chess
    Kennedy sticks largely to conventional documentary techniques for Queen of Chess, which is not a bad thing: It’s a good story, well told, and Polgar makes for an interesting subject.
  71. Sirât
    It’s a sincere, mesmerizing and admirably unorthodox film that, by turns, invites your love and tests your patience. It demands attention and generosity from you, including toward characters who can be tough to tolerate, much less care about. They and the movie can be maddening, even when it’s impossible to look away.
  72. Calle Málaga
    The viewer might think, Ah, it’s going to be one of those films where the hero’s resistance softens as she meets a quirky collection of fellow residents. It is not. The Moroccan director Maryam Touzani and her husband, Nabil Ayouch (“The Blue Caftan”), who wrote the script with her, have something more delicate in mind.
  73. Kokuho
    Even as it periodically languishes, the film comes back around, with some moving flourishes, to stamp its idea: To witness these vicissitudes over a lifetime, is to see the beauty, bloodshed and loneliness of true artistic greatness.
  74. Pillion
    With immense sensitivity, the screenwriter and director Harry Lighton, making his feature debut, stages sequences that deepen the characters and expand our understanding of their lives.
  75. The President's Cake
    It’s a striking, mature debut.
  76. Natchez
    Maybe telling the whole story doesn’t mean living happily ever after, but at least it can mean being a little wiser.
  77. Islands
    There’s a refreshing willfulness here to leave some quandaries lingering, and like the rough beauty of the volcanic island the movie is set on, Islands beckons and rebukes and beckons some more.
  78. The Love That Remains
    The landscape in which this family makes its domestic life is wild and lovely, and Palmason signals the changing of the seasons by showing us all of its beauty: the snow and ice, the sunshine and greenery, beautiful skies, placid water. The weather can be both delightful and harsh, warm and chilly, and that’s mirrored in the characters.
  79. Paying for It
    Paying for It keeps its narrative tight, perhaps overly simple. There’s space to savor the retro intimacy, amplified by the film’s striking primary colors and lo-fi rock soundtrack. Lee — while only gesturing toward the complexities of open arrangements — captures Chester and Sonny in a fleeting time that feels soft, but not shy.
  80. A Poet
    The writer and director Simón Mesa Soto skewers with knowing precision a kind of devotion to the creative life — without much of the creating — that renders one useless in the real world. The allure of the image of the tortured artist can be so enticing that it obscures the actual art.
  81. Send Help
    Send Help may not be peak Raimi (that, to my mind, would be A Simple Plan), but it’s Raimi at peak pulp. I’ll happily take it.
  82. The Wrecking Crew
    The action in The Wrecking Crew is so good, its fights so brisk and its car chases so lively, that it makes you wish its muscular leads, Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista, had starred in more decent action movies.
  83. Mr. Nobody Against Putin
    The documentary tries to heighten the stakes of Talankin’s story by casting his efforts under a pall of danger, dread or distress. But these bids for drama are far less persuasive than the horrifying raw footage Talankin captures, such as one scene in which young students are coached to march down a hallway, as if preparing for battle.
  84. Disneyland Handcrafted
    Delving into company archives, the director (whose grandfather, the animator Ub Iwerks, was a crucial contributor to early Disney films) has composed an official story, but one that wisely avoids “why this matters” talking-head commentary. Disneyland Handcrafted is instead an immersive bit of time travel.
  85. H Is for Hawk
    What does work about H Is for Hawk (aside from Mabel, whose presence is enough to recommend the film) is its refusal to make grief facile or tidy, or to proclaim that healing must look the same for everyone.
  86. Seeds
    Though Seeds is a lyrical portrait of a way of life, it also harbors an urgency that’s very much of our moment.
  87. Deepfaking Sam Altman
    Give Bhala Lough credit: His film simultaneously illustrates the deficiencies of generative A.I. and the dangers of investing in it emotionally, while remaining annoying and self-amused in a distinctly human way.
  88. A Private Life
    The intrigue is far-fetched and surprising — this is one movie you can’t write in your head — and delivered with increasing winks and charm.
  89. Shuffle
    While some institutions are legitimate, Shuffle, a shocking and confounding new documentary directed by Benjamin Flaherty, lays out in painstaking detail the collusion between moneymaking rehab treatment centers, double-dealing insurance entities and predatory social-media “scouts” who make sure cash flows into corporate pockets while the sick and suffering never get well.
  90. Sound of Falling
    Here is a movie whose atavistic excursion through time transfixes, even as its psychology remains as fuzzy as a photograph smeared by motion.
  91. A Useful Ghost
    This dazzling first feature from the Thai filmmaker Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke uses the frame of a sad-sweet sex comedy to weave together political allegory, supernatural mystery and more than one tender love story. And he does this with such skill and bravado that you never see the seams.
  92. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
    DaCosta’s talents as a director are a terrific, confident match for this material.
  93. All That's Left of You
    In depicting scenes of dispossession and fraught encounters with soldiers, the filmmaker offers a saga of trauma that has antecedents in dramas set during previous mass conflicts like Apartheid as well as in the Jim Crow South. If that strikes you as pointed, it is.
  94. Holding Liat
    Kramer quietly but forcefully recognizes that the conflict cannot continue as it has.
  95. OBEX
    There’s something smarter between the lines about the way technology warps our (self-) perception, but maybe that’s giving too much credit to a film so giddy about its warping. That’s not totally bad: Some films are like dreams whose meanings never materialize.
  96. Young Mothers
    Because of the ensemble structure, each tale is interrupted by another, so “Young Mothers” lacks some of the suspense that powers many of the Dardennes’ other films. Yet that slower pace allows a tenderness to develop, and the tension between the girls’ youth and newfound maternal instincts to emerge.
  97. Magellan
    The most arresting way that Diaz telegraphs, though, is through the sheer beauty of his images. The movie is often visually intoxicating, at moments gasp-out-loud ravishing, especially in its presentation of the natural world, which can have a soft visual quality that deepens the sense of otherworldliness.
  98. Greenland 2: Migration
    Ric Roman Waugh’s movie is a notable step up from the first film. The Garritys’ traversal across the treacherous North Atlantic Ocean and dashes past marauding bandits in Europe make for real human stakes.
  99. We Bury the Dead
    We Bury the Dead is most haunting when it gestures at a world dazed with trauma and explores a path to personal closure through collective efforts.
  100. The Dutchman
    As with the play (and its 1967 film adaptation), the sexual politics here are messy. What isn’t is the filmmakers’ bold dive into the archives of the nascent Black Arts Movement for a throughline.
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