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. 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.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Sunrise
    Mr. Murnau shows himself to be an artist in camera studies, bringing forth marvelous results from lights, shadows and settings. He also proves himself to be a true story teller, and, incidentally, here is a narrative wherein the happy ending is welcome.
  3. La Dolce Vita
    A brilliantly graphic estimation of a whole swath of society in sad decay and, eventually, a withering commentary upon the tragedy of the overcivilized. (Review of Original Release)
  4. 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.
  5. WALL-E
    The first 40 minutes or so of Wall-E -- in which barely any dialogue is spoken, and almost no human figures appear on screen -- is a cinematic poem of such wit and beauty that its darker implications may take a while to sink in.
  6. His Girl Friday
    His Girl Friday is a bold-faced reprint of what was once—and still remains—the maddest newspaper comedy of our times.
  7. Carol
    At once ardent and analytical, cerebral and swooning, Carol is a study in human magnetism, in the physics and optics of eros. With sparse dialogue and restrained drama, the film is a symphony of angles and glances, of colors and shadows.
  8. Before Midnight
    Before Midnight is a wonderful paradox: a movie passionately committed to the ideal of imperfection that is itself very close to perfect.
  9. Amazing Grace
    You get both the most lovely gaze a professional camera’s ever laid upon Aretha Franklin and some of the mightiest singing she’s ever laid on you. The woman practically eulogizes herself. Don’t bother with tissues. Bring a towel.
  10. Dunkirk
    Dunkirk is a tour de force of cinematic craft and technique, but one that is unambiguously in the service of a sober, sincere, profoundly moral story that closes the distance between yesterday’s fights and today’s.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
    Mr. Ford, who has struck more gold in the West than any other film-maker, also has mined a rich vein here. He is again exposing the explosive forces involving the advent of law, in the shape of Mr. Stewart, on the raw denizens of a lawless frontier town. When legend becomes fact, a newspaper editor tells Mr. Stewart, print the legend. In Liberty Valance, there is too much of a good legend.
  12. The Searchers
    A rip-snorting Western, as brashly entertaining as they come.
  13. 45 Years
    [A] sensitive and devastating portrait of a long, happy marriage in sudden crisis.
  14. Taxi Driver
    Acting of this sort is rare in films. It is a display of talent, which one gets in the theater, as well as a demonstration of behavior, which is what movies usually offer. Were Mr. De Niro less an actor, the character would be a sideshow freak.
  15. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
    Pham manages to float existential and spiritual questions into Thien’s consciousness and ours without trying to offer solutions, at least in language.
  16. The Servant
    Its account of patrician degradation will cause you to blink your eyes. Although it is only fiction, it wafts a thick and acrid air of smoldering truth.
  17. Yi Yi
    In exchange for three hours of your time, Yi Yi will give you more life.
  18. 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.
  19. Mr. Turner
    Mr. Turner is a mighty work of critical imagination, a loving, unsentimental portrait of a rare creative soul. But even as it celebrates a glorious painter and illuminates the sources of his pictures with startling clarity and insight, the movie patiently and thoroughly demolishes more than a century’s worth of mythology about what art is and how artists work.
  20. The Irishman
    A monument is a complicated thing. This one is big and solid — and also surprisingly, surpassingly delicate.
  21. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
    Jeanne Dielman... has been described as minimalist, though I don't see how any film this long and so packed with information could be equated with minimalism as defined in painting. The manner of the film is spare, but the terrible, obsessive monotony of the life it observes is ultimately as melodramatic as, say, Roman Polanski's ''Repulsion.''
  22. Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
    The movie remains one of the most startling and moving animated films ever. It is also, with the likes of “The 400 Blows,” “Kes,” and “Vagabond,” one of the finest films about being young in an indifferent world.
  23. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
    The picture is more fun than it has a right to be.
  24. The Wild Child
    Unlike any other film Truffaut has ever made, yet only Truffaut could have made it. It is a lovely, pure film. And it may be a classic.
  25. Stop Making Sense
    Mr. Demme has captured both the look and the spirit of this live performance with a daring and precision that match the group's own.
  26. Shadow of a Doubt
    You've got to hand it to Alfred Hitchcock: when he sows the fearful seeds of mistrust in one of his motion pictures he can raise more goose pimples to the square inch of a customer's flesh than any other director of thrillers in Hollywood.
  27. Inside Out
    Inside Out is an absolute delight — funny and charming, fast-moving and full of surprises. It is also a defense of sorrow, an argument for the necessity of melancholy dressed in the bright colors of entertainment.
  28. My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow
    I’m trying to avoid hyperbole, but I don’t know how else to say this: It is perhaps the most essential investment of time you can make in a movie theater this year. And yet it is not just “important” or consequential — it is brilliant, riveting, vital, devastating.
  29. Sideways
    Like the film itself, the performance (Giamatti's) is deeply controlled, played with restraint and with microscopic attention to detail.
  30. Meet Me in St. Louis
    Vincente Minnelli, in his direction, has got all the period charm out of ladies dressed in flowing creations, gentlemen in straw "boaters" and ice-cream pants, rooms lush with golden-oak wains-coating, ormolu decorations and red-plush chairs.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Sunset Boulevard
    Sunset Boulevard is that rare blend of pungent writing, expert acting, masterly direction and unobtrusively artistic photography which quickly casts a spell over an audience and holds it enthralled to a shattering climax.
  32. The Apartment
    Mr. Wilder has done more than write the film. His direction is ingenious and sure, sparkled by brilliant little touches and kept to a tight, sardonic line.
  33. Apocalypse Now
    Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now lives up to its grand title, disclosing not only the various faces of war but also the contradictions between excitement and boredom, terror and pity, brutality and beauty. Its epiphanies would do credit to Federico Fellini, who is indirectly quoted at one point.
  34. The Gunfighter
    One of the tautest and most stimulating Westerns of the year.
  35. Chess of the Wind (1976)
    Aslani pulls story threads together with an elegant moving camera that doesn’t immediately give up all the secrets a scene may contain.
  36. We Were Here
    Throughout We Were Here there is not a hint of mawkishness, self-pity or self-congratulation. The humility, wisdom and cumulative sorrow expressed lend the film a glow of spirituality and infuse it with grace.
  37. Faces Places
    Faces Places reveals itself as a powerful, complex and radical work.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Days of Heaven
    It is full of elegant and striking photography; and it is an intolerably artsy, artificial film.
  39. Past Lives
    The movie’s modesty — its intimacy, human scale, humble locations and lack of visual oomph — is one of its strengths.
  40. Chimes at Midnight
    A confusing patchwork of scenes and characters.
  41. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
    It's been a long time since a commercially oriented film with the scale of "King" ended with such an enduring and heartbreaking coda.
  42. Badlands
    One may legitimately debate the validity of Malick's vision, but not, I think, his immense talent. Badlands is a most important and exciting film.
  43. Call Me by Your Name
    Call Me by Your Name is less a coming-of-age story, a tale of innocence and loss, than one about coming into sensibility. In that way, it is about the creation of a new man who, the story suggests, is liberated by pleasure that doesn’t necessarily establish sexual identity.
  44. Trenque Lauquen Parte I
    The pleasure lies in the telling — the invention of fictions, the performance of emotions — rather than in the details of plot. Once you lose yourself in the thickets of “Trenque Lauquen,” you won’t want to be found.
  45. Trenque Lauquen Parte II
    The pleasure lies in the telling — the invention of fictions, the performance of emotions — rather than in the details of plot. Once you lose yourself in the thickets of “Trenque Lauquen,” you won’t want to be found.
  46. Carlos
    Like the convictions of some born into religious families, his (Carlos) Marxism seems more a matter of habit than faith. What seems to turn him on is power, which, the movie suggests, he nurtured alongside his luxe tastes.
  47. First Cousin Once Removed
    Mr. Berliner’s film bravely brings us to the edge of language and experience.
  48. Blue Heron
    An exquisite debut feature.
  49. Marriage Story
    It’s funny and sad, sometimes within a single scene, and it weaves a plot out of the messy collapse of a shared reality, trying to make music out of disharmony. The melody is full of heartbreak, loss and regret, but the song is too beautiful to be entirely melancholy.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The French Connection
    The French Connection is a film of almost incredible suspense, and it includes, among a great many chilling delights, the most brilliantly executed chase sequence I have ever seen. [8 October 1971]
  51. La La Land
    La La Land succeeds both as a fizzy fantasy and a hard-headed fable, a romantic comedy and a showbiz melodrama, a work of sublime artifice and touching authenticity.
  52. Petite Maman
    With delicacy, minimal dialogue and lucid, harmoniously balanced images, Sciamma (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) invites you into a world that is by turns ordinary and enigmatic.
  53. Lady Bird
    You might think you’ve seen this all before. You probably have, but never quite like this. What Ms. Gerwig has done — and it’s by no means a small accomplishment — is to infuse one of the most convention-bound, rose-colored genres in American cinema with freshness and surprise.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Magnificent Ambersons
    All in all, The Magnificent Ambersons is an exceptionally well-made film, dealing with a subject scarcely worth the attention which has been lavished upon it.
  55. Reversal of Fortune
    What makes it so instructively entertaining is the pivotal character of Claus von Bulow, played by Jeremy Irons within an inch of his professional life. It's a fine, devastating performance, affected, mannerly, edgy, though seemingly ever in complete control. [17 Oct 1990]
    • The New York Times
    • 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.
  57. All We Imagine as Light
    One of the pleasures of Kapadia’s filmmaking is that she’s inviting you to discover her characters on their terms, which means embracing the inner and outer rhythms of their lives.
  58. David Byrne’s American Utopia
    Some filmed stage shows die on the screen from a sheer lack of visual energy and invention. Lee, a master of the art, uses cinema’s plasticity to complement this production, making it come alive in two dimensions.
  59. Masculine Feminine
    This document of youthful confusion has not aged one minute. If anything, its detached, discursive and sympathetic observation of the earnest foolishness of post-baccalaureate, pre-1968 Parisians is more acute, and more prophetic, than ever.
  60. Shoplifters
    In the past, Kore-eda’s delicacy has at times enervated his movies. Here, though, the family’s toughness, thieving and secrets, its poverty and desperation, work like ballast on his sensibilities. In their grubby imperfections, Kore-eda finds a perfect story about being human.
  61. Shoah: Four Sisters
    Their stories are as harrowing, complicated and rife with imponderables as any Lanzmann filmed. And together, collected in a form that is much less labyrinthine than “Shoah,” they represent an ideal introduction (and capstone) to Lanzmann’s project.
    • 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.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The 39 Steps
    By comparison with the sinister delicacy and urbane understatement of The Thirty-nine Steps, the best of our melodramas seem crude and brawling.
  64. Toni Erdmann
    Toni Erdmann, proceeding in a perfectly straightforward manner, from one awkward, heartfelt, hilarious scene to the next, wraps itself around some of the thorniest complexities of contemporary reality.
  65. No Other Land
    Its subject — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — couldn’t be more consequential, and its approach, which includes a directorial team of two Israelis and two Palestinians, feels genuinely daring and bold.
  66. Uncut Gems
    Lots of stuff happens, lots and lots, and some of it can be hard to track. But the bedlam is intentional and amusing. All you need to do is latch onto Howard as he runs from here to there, yelling greetings, taking calls, making deals, always moving amid jump cuts, zooms and lurid close-ups.
  67. 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.
  68. Inside Llewyn Davis
    This is not a biopic, it’s a Coen brothers movie, which is to say a brilliant magpie’s nest of surrealism, period detail and pop-culture scholarship. To put it another way, it’s a folk tale.
  69. The Best Years of Our Lives
    It is seldom that there comes a motion picture which can be wholly and enthusiastically endorsed not only as superlative entertainment but as food for quiet and humanizing thought.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Band of Outsiders
    "All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun," Godard famously asserted, and Band of Outsiders, his seventh feature, is his demonstration of how to concoct a film out of the materials at hand.
  71. Stagecoach
    Here, in a sentence, is a movie of the grand old school, a genuine rib-thumper and a beautiful sight to see.
  72. Our Body
    Simon’s belief in the interconnectedness yet singularity of the varied patients is palpable. She rewards our patience with a deeper understanding of our bodies and ourselves.
  73. The Burial Of Kojo
    The Burial of Kojo is a near-virtuoso work, a feast of emotion, nuance and beauty, and a startling feature directing debut.
  74. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1945)
    Colonel Blimp is as unmistakably a British product as Yorkshire pudding and, like the latter, it has a delectable savor all its own.
  75. 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.
  76. 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.
  77. TÁR
    To search the movie for a consistent argument is to miss the point and fall into a category error, misconstruing the extraordinary coup that Field and Blanchett have pulled off. We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art.
  78. Sherpa
    An exceptionally absorbing documentary.
  79. There Will Be Blood
    The film is above all a consummate work of art, one that transcends the historically fraught context of its making, and its pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic. It reveals, excites, disturbs, provokes, but the window it opens is to human consciousness itself.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Tristana (re-release)
    Buñuel has made a marvelously complex, funny and vigorously moral movie that also is, to me, his most perfectly cast film. [21 Sept. 1970]
    • The New York Times
      • Posted Feb 21, 2013
  81. President
    Nielsson’s access to Chamisa allows for an intimate look at the Catch-22 of establishing a democracy amid state-sanctioned violence and corruption, and the grit of those fighting for it.
  82. The Last Picture Show
    Peter Bogdanovich's fine second film, The Last Picture Show, adapted from Larry McMurtry's novel by McMurtry and Bogdanovich, has the effect of a lovely, leisurely, horizontal pan-shot across the life of Anarene, Tex., a small, shabby town on a plain so flat that to raise the eye even 10 degrees would be to see only an endless sky.
  83. Hard to Be a God
    Mr. German was just as stubborn in sticking to his personal vision (and revisions) as he was innovative in his storytelling, and he’s left behind a final opus that is hard to shake.
  84. Do the Right Thing
    A remarkable piece of work. [30 June 1989]
    • The New York Times
  85. Sita Sings the Blues
    And the ingenuity of “Sita” — is dazzling. Not busy, or overwhelming, or eye-popping. Just affecting, surprising and a lot of fun.
  86. The Decline of Western Civilization
    A shrewd and engrossing documentary even for audiences who have absolutely no patience for the music it includes.
  87. Werckmeister Harmonies
    Mysterious, poetic and allusive, The Werckmeister Harmonies beckons filmgoers who complain of the vapidity of Hollywood movie making and yearn for a film to ponder and debate.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Top Hat
    When Top Hat is letting Mr. Astaire perform his incomparable magic or teaming him with the increasingly dexterous Miss Rogers it is providing the most urbane fun that you will find anywhere on the screen.
  89. Brother's Keeper
    It's a rich slice of Americana that would seem to belong to an earlier, pre-television era, except that television comes to play a large part in Delbert's story. It's also about an aspect of life in rural America that's seldom seen by people who drive through it, and seldom if ever glimpsed in movies.
  90. Sankofa
    [Mr. Gerima's] film is ambitious in its depiction of slavery and accomplished in its visual command.
  91. Sam Now
    Reed’s initial overeager stylings fall back to reveal a mature reckoning with love, hurt, independence, and hard-won wisdom.
  92. Crumb
    It succeeds at showing how one man's psychic wounds contributed to an art that transmutes personal pain into garish visual satire.
  93. No Bears
    Panahi, whose courage and honesty are beyond doubt, has made a movie that calls those very qualities into question, a movie about its own ethical limits and aesthetic contradictions.
  94. 8½
    It has no more plot than a horse race, no more order than a pinball machine, and it bounces around on several levels of consciousness, dreams and memories as it details a man's rather casual psychoanalysis of himself. But it sets up a labyrinthine ego for the daring and thoughtful to explore, and it harbors some elegant treasures of wit and satire along the way.
  95. 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.
  96. Spotlight
    Spotlight is a gripping detective story and a superlative newsroom drama, a solid procedural that tries to confront evil without sensationalism.
  97. The Band Wagon
    Joined with the equally nimble talents of Fred Astaire. Jack Buchanan and Cyd Charisse and some tunes from the sterling repertory of Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, this literate and witty combination herein delivers a show that respectfully bids for recognition as one of the best musical films ever made.
  98. Late Spring (1949)
    Ozu's recognition of the wall of skin separating the mind of the character from the viewer is an integral part of his philosophy. It amounts to a profound respect for their privacy, for the mystery of their emotions. Because of this—not in spite of this—his films, of which Late Spring is one of the finest, are so moving.
  99. Ikiru
    If it weren't so confused in its story-telling, it would be one of the major postwar films from Japan. As it stands, it is a strangely fascinating and affecting film, up to a point—that being the point where it consigns its aged hero to the great beyond.
  100. Sunday's Illness
    The often-tense mother-daughter dance of recrimination and forgiveness is spectacularly acted.
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