The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,271 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 20271
  2. Mixed: 8,430 out of 20271
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20271
20271 movie reviews
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  1. The English Patient
    A stunning feat of literary adaptation as well as a purely cinematic triumph.
  2. Lone Star
    Gratifyingly complex and beautifully told, this tale explores a huge array of cultural, racial, economic and familial tensions. In the process, it also sustains strong characters, deep emotions and clear dramatic force.
  3. Sunshine State
    Creates a cinematic mosaic of American lives unprecedented in its range, balance, subtlety and even-handedness.
  4. Blissfully Yours
    Marks the emergence of one of the more original and promising new voices to hit the international cinema scene in recent years.
  5. Halloween
    From the first shot to the last, this movie is confidently guided by a specific and committed vision.
  6. Gosford Park
    A virtuoso ensemble piece to rival the director's "Nashville" and "Short Cuts" in its masterly interweaving of multiple characters and subplots.
  7. Saving Private Ryan
    Steven Spielberg's soberly magnificent new war film, the second such pinnacle in a career of magical versatility, has been made in the same spirit of urgent communication. It is the ultimate devastating letter home.
  8. About Schmidt
    What makes this exquisitely observed slice of American screen realism transcend itself is finally its moral sensibility.
  9. Braveheart
    One of the most spectacular entertainments in years.
  10. The Hours
    Ms. Kidman, in a performance of astounding bravery, evokes the savage inner war waged by a brilliant mind against a system of faulty wiring that transmits a searing, crazy static into her brain.
  11. In the Bedroom
    When a film as profoundly quiet as In the Bedroom comes along, it feels almost miraculous, as if a shimmering piece of art had slipped below the radar and through the minefield of commerce.
  12. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
    The most voluptuous comic-book movie ever made.
  13. Road to Perdition
    A truly majestic visual tone poem.
  14. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
    Not merely an interesting document from a far-off place; it is a masterpiece.
  15. Hannah and Her Sisters
    Virtually nonstop exhilaration--a dramatic comedy not quite like any other, and one that sets new standards for Mr. Allen as well as for all American moviemakers. [7 February 1986]
    • The New York Times
  16. The Last Seduction
    A devilishly entertaining crime story with a heroine who must be seen to be believed, is as satisfying an ensemble piece as Red Rock West.
  17. My Own Private Idaho
    The film itself is invigorating - written, directed, and acted with enormous insight and comic elan. [27 Sept 1991]
    • The New York Times
  18. Who Framed Roger Rabbit
    A film whose best moments are so novel, so deliriously funny, and so crazily unexpected that they truly must be seen to be believed.
  19. Toy Story
    Thanks to exultant wit and so many distinctive voices, Toy Story is both an aural and visual delight.
  20. Moolaadé
    To skip Moolaade would be to miss an opportunity to experience the embracing, affirming, world-changing potential of humanist cinema at its finest.
  21. Thelma & Louise
    It reimagines the buddy film with such freshness and vigor that the genre seems positively new.
  22. 21 Grams
    You won't come out unaffected, because the depths of intimacy that the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu plumbs here are so rarely touched by filmmakers that 21 Grams is tantamount to the discovery of a new country.
  23. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
    Stupendously entertaining.
  24. Full Metal Jacket
    Kubrick's harrowing, beautiful and characteristically eccentric new film about Vietnam, is going to puzzle, anger and (I hope) fascinate audiences as much as any film he has made to date... A film of immense and very rare imagination.
  25. My Flesh and Blood
    In what has been called the Year of the Documentary, "My Flesh and Blood" stands beside "Capturing the Friedmans" and "The Fog of War" as an unforgettable experience.
  26. Talk to Her
    When it's over, the realization of how much the movie means to you really sinks in; you can't get it out of your heart.
  27. In the Mood for Love
    Probably the most breathtakingly gorgeous film of the year, dizzy with a nose-against-the-glass romantic spirit that has been missing from the cinema forever.
  28. Adaptation.
    I realize that the fear of contracting writer's block from a fictional character is crazy, but in the brilliantly scrambled, self-consuming world of Adaptation it has a certain plausibility.
  29. Eyes Wide Shut
    Kubrick left one more brilliantly provocative tour de force as his epitaph.
  30. Malcolm X
    Mr. Lee means for Malcolm X to be an epic, and it is in its concerns and its physical scope. In Denzel Washington it also has a fine actor who does for Malcolm X what Ben Kingsley did for “Gandhi.” [18 November 1992]
    • The New York Times
  31. Pulp Fiction
    A triumphant, cleverly disorienting journey through a demimonde that springs entirely from Mr. Tarantino's ripe imagination, a landscape of danger, shock, hilarity, and vibrant local color. Nothing is predictable or familiar within this irresistably bizarre world. You don't merely enter a theater to see Pulp Fiction; you go down a rabbit hole.
  32. Titanic
    A huge, thrilling three-and-a-quarter-hour experience that unerringly lures viewers into the beauty and heartbreak of its lost world.
  33. Schindler's List
    But the film Schindler's List, directed with fury and immediacy by a profoundly surprising Steven Spielberg, presents the subject as if discovering it anew.
  34. Almost Famous
    What Mr. Crowe has done is nonetheless remarkable. He has made a movie about sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll that you would be happy to take your mother to see.
  35. Beau Travail
    A film that has the sweep and esthetic power of a full-length ballet.
  36. Brazil
    Brazil may not be the best film of the year, but it's a remarkable accomplishment for Mr. Gilliam, whose satirical and cautionary impulses work beautifully together. His film's ambitious visual style bears this out, combining grim, overpowering architecture with clever throwaway touches.
  37. Blue Velvet
    As fascinating as it is freakish. It confirms Mr. Lynch's stature as an innovator, a superb technician, and someone best not encountered in a dark alley.
  38. Days of Being Wild (re-release)
    As he (Wong Kar-wai) floods the screen with beauty and fills the soundtrack with hypnotic rhythms, he forges a filmmaking style of incomparable eroticism.
  39. Lost in Translation
    Here he (Murray) supplies the kind of performance that seems so fully realized and effortless that it can easily be mistaken for not acting at all.
  40. Do the Right Thing
    A remarkable piece of work. [30 June 1989]
    • The New York Times
  41. Spirited Away
    The towering, lost dreaminess at the heart of the film is an unmistakable obsession of this director.
  42. Mystic River
    Mystic River is the rare American movie that aspires to -- and achieves -- the full weight and darkness of tragedy.
  43. Yi Yi
    In exchange for three hours of your time, Yi Yi will give you more life.
  44. My Voyage to Italy
    Extraordinary labor of love.
  45. Raging Bull
    The entire film is played at such high pitch it may well exhaust audiences that don't come prepared. And, at the heart of the film, there is the mystery of Jake himself, but that is what separates Raging Bull from all other fight movies, in fact, from most movies about anything. Raging Bull is an achievement.
  46. Being John Malkovich
    Irresistable, nimble and very funny.
  47. Barton Fink
    An unqualified winner. Here is a fine dark comedy of flamboyant style and immense though seemingly effortless techniqe...It's an exhilarating original. [21 Aug 1991]
    • The New York Times
  48. The Door in the Floor
    Surely the best movie yet made from Mr. Irving's fiction. It may even belong in the rarefied company of movies that are better than the books on which they are based.
  49. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
    Clever, funny, wildly innovative film.
  50. Ghost World
    It's surely the best depiction of teenage eccentricity since "Rushmore," and its incisive satire of the boredom and conformity that rule our thrill-seeking, individualistic land, and also its question-mark ending, reminded me of "The Graduate."
  51. 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.
  52. Mulholland Dr.
    By surrendering any semblance of rationality to create a post-Freudian, pulp-fiction fever dream of a movie, Mr. Lynch ends up shooting the moon with Mulholland Drive.
  53. Maria Full of Grace
    Sustains a documentary authenticity that is as astonishing as it is offhand. Even when you're on the edge of your seat, it never sacrifices a calm, clear-sighted humanity for the sake of melodrama or cheap moralizing.
  54. The Piano
    Prepare yourself for something very special...Here's a severely beautiful, mysterious movie that, as if by magic, liberates the romantic imagination. [16 Oct 1993]
    • The New York Times
  55. Bad Education
    Bad Education is a voluptuous experience that invites you to gorge on its beauty and vitality, although it has perhaps the darkest ending of any of the films by the Spanish writer and director.
  56. The Godfather
    One of the most brutal and moving chronicles of American life ever designed within the limits of popular entertainment. [16 Mar 1972]
    • The New York Times
  57. Short Cuts
    It raises the spirits not by phony sentimentality but by the amplitude of its art. From time to time, it is also roaringly funny... A terrific movie. [1 Oct 1993, p.C1]
    • The New York Times
  58. Ransom
    Mr. Howard has made Ransom in the same clean, swift, logical style that sent his "Apollo 13" into orbit, resulting in a spellbinding crime tale that delivers surprises right down to the wire.
  59. In the Line of Fire
    It's movie making of the high, smooth, commercial order that Hollywood prides itself on but achieves with singular infrequency.
  60. Sleepless in Seattle
    Not since "Love Story" has there been a movie that so shrewdly and predictably manipulated the emotions for such entertaining effect.
  61. Tootsie
    Tootsie is the best thing that's yet happened at this year end. It's a toot, a lark, a month in the country.
  62. Sabrina
    In our wistful estimation, the most delightful comedy-romance in years.
  63. Born on the Fourth of July
    It is a film of enormous visceral power with, in the central role, a performance by Tom Cruise that defines everything that is best about the movie.
  64. The Purple Rose of Cairo
    I'll go out on a limb: I can't believe the year will bring forth anything to equal The Purple Rose of Cairo. At 84 minutes, it's short but nearly every one of those minutes is blissful.
  65. The Kids Are All Right
    It is outrageously funny without ever exaggerating for comic effect, and heartbreaking with only minimal melodramatic embellishment.
  66. The Pinochet Case
    Eloquent, meticulously structured documentary -- Sober political and legal analysis alternates with grim first-hand accounts of torture and murder in a film that has the structure of a choral symphony that swells to a bittersweet finale.
  67. Heading South
    A beautifully written, seamlessly directed film with award-worthy performances by Ms. Rampling and Ms. Young.
  68. Our Daily Bread
    Nikolaus Geyrhalter's superb documentary is an unblinking, often disturbing look at industrial food production from field to factory.
  69. The Duchess of Langeais
    Duchess of Langeais seems to me a nearly impeccable work of art -- beautiful, true, profound.
  70. The Secret of the Grain
    An entire family chronicle, along with four decades of French social and economic history, is recapitulated as a lavish, hectic dinner, complete with music and belly dancing. It will leave you stunned and sated, having savored an intimate and sumptuous epic of elation and defeat, jealousy and tenderness, life and death, grain and fish.
  71. 35 Shots of Rum
    In its modest scope and mellow tone, 35 Shots of Rum resembles Olivier Assayas’s "Summer Hours," another recent film by a French director who has sometimes trafficked in provocation and extremity. Both movies embed extraordinary thematic richness within a simple, almost anecdotal narrative framework, and both achieve a rare eloquence about the state of the world by means of tact and reticence.
  72. Toy Story 3
    As sweet, as touching, as humane a movie as you are likely to see this summer.
  73. Children of Tokyo
    That it is more -- a small masterpiece, perfect in design and execution -- almost goes without saying, but the film’s profundity and its charm go hand in hand.
  74. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
    Its speedy, funny, happy-sad spirit is so infectious that the movie makes you feel at home in its world even if the landscape is, at first glance, unfamiliar.
  75. Lebanon
    Lebanon is meticulous, nearly clinical in its attention to what happens in war -- specifically what happened in the first days of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 -- but it is also a palpably and intensely personal film.
    • The New York Times
  76. The Army of Crime
    Was it all for naught? Only weeks after the 23 partisans were arrested (and all but two promptly executed), Paris was liberated. Army of Crime is a passionate act of remembrance.
  77. Last Train Home
    Mr. Fan's documentary is informed by a melancholy humanism, and finds unexpected beauty in almost unbearably harsh circumstances. It tells the story of a family caught, and possibly crushed, between the past and the future - a story that, on its own, is moving, even heartbreaking. Multiplied by 130 million, it becomes a terrifying and sobering panorama of the present.
  78. Somewhere
    The opening shot of Somewhere, Sofia Coppola's exquisite, melancholy and formally audacious fourth feature, prepares you for what is to follow in a characteristically oblique and subtle manner.
  79. Inside Job
    Inside Job, a sleek, briskly paced film whose title suggests a heist movie, is the story of a crime without punishment, of an outrage that has so far largely escaped legal sanction and societal stigma.
  80. 127 Hours
    Mr. Boyle has a knack for tackling painful, violent or unpleasant subjects with unremitting verve and unstoppable joie de vivre.
  81. Black Swan
    Black Swan is visceral and real even while it's one delirious, phantasmagoric freakout.
  82. White Material
    Ms. Denis has an extraordinary gift for finding the perfect image that expresses her ideas, the cinematic equivalent of what Flaubert called le mot juste.
    • The New York Times
      • Posted Dec 14, 2010
  83. True Grit
    In some ways, much like Charles Laughton's "Night of the Hunter," which the Coens quote both musically and visually, True Grit is a parable about good and evil. Only here, the lines between the two are so blurred as to be indistinguishable, making this a true picture of how the West was won, or - depending on your view - lost.
  84. Rango
    Rango, which may take place entirely within its hero's head - that kind of ambiguity worked in "Inception" and "Black Swan," so why not here? - is about the appetite for myths and stories, whether or not they make sense. It is about the worlds we dream inside our fishbowls, helped by the weird reflections on the walls.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Tokyo Story
    Even on the basis of a limited exposure to his work, the story seems archetypal Ozu.
  86. Secret Sunshine
    It is a great movie, by a major figure in world cinema.
  87. 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.
  88. Poetry
    The importance of seeing, seeing the world deeply, is at the heart of this quietly devastating, humanistic work from the South Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong.
  89. Of Gods and Men
    Of Gods and Men is supple and suspenseful, appropriately austere without being overly harsh, and without forgoing the customary pleasures of cinema. The performances are strong, the narrative gathers momentum as it progresses, and the camera is alive to the beauty of the Algerian countryside.
  90. Moneyball
    It's hard to imagine anyone but Mr. Pitt in the role. He's relaxed yet edgy and sometimes unsettling.
  91. The Descendants
    To call The Descendants perfect would be a kind of insult, a betrayal of its commitment to, and celebration of, human imperfection. Its flaws are impossible to distinguish from its pleasures.
  92. The Grandmaster
    The Grandmaster is, at its most persuasive, about the triumph of style. When Ip Man slyly asks “What’s your style?” it’s clear that Mr. Wong is asking the same question because here, as in his other films, style isn’t reducible to ravishing surfaces; it’s an expression of meaning.
  93. Project X
    The Oscars are swell, but once in a while a film comes along that is so courageous it deserves consideration for the Nobel Prize. An entire generation has been born and gone to college since the Beastie Boys defined that most basic of civil liberties: You've got to fight for your right to party.
  94. The Deep Blue Sea
    To put the matter perhaps more abstractly than such a sensual film deserves, it is about the fate of untameable, irrational desire in a world that does not seem to have a place for it.
  95. Jane Eyre
    A splendid example of how to tackle the daunting duty of turning a beloved work of classic literature into a movie. Neither a radical updating nor a stiff exercise in middlebrow cultural respectability, Mr. Fukunaga's film tells its venerable tale with lively vigor and an astute sense of emotional detail.
  96. 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.
  97. The Double Hour
    The best movie of its kind since the French director Guillaume Canet's hit from 2006, "Tell No One."
  98. City of Life and Death
    City of Life and Death isn't cathartic: it offers no uplifting moments, just the immodest balm of art. The horrors it represents can be almost too difficult to watch, yet you keep watching because Mr. Lu makes the case that you must.
  99. My Perestroika
    My Perestroika gives you a privileged sense of learning the history of a place not from a book but from the people who lived it. Watching it is a little like attending a party in an unfamiliar city and discovering the place's secrets from the guests.
  100. Cave of Forgotten Dreams
    The 3-D is sometimes less than transporting, and the chanting voices in the composer Ernst Reijseger's new-agey score tended to remind me of my last spa massage. Yet what a small price to pay for such time traveling!
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