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. Coma
    Coma pushes the boundaries of the so-called lockdown movie with its thrilling, chaotic form.
  2. In Our Day
    As warm and wise as it is simple and languid.
  3. IF
    This is a film that spells out its intentions for an audience still learning its ABCs, a film where Michael Giacchino’s misty violins never stop insisting how to feel, where Krasinski’s goofy dad literally wears a heart on his chest.
  4. The Strangers: Chapter 1
    The hapless script — written by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland and based on the original — offers nothing fresh in a tiring 91 minutes, and nothing daring to justify a new “Strangers” film, let alone a new series, especially when Bertino’s formidable film is streaming on Max.
  5. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
    Miller is such a wildly inventive filmmaker that it’s been easy to forget that he keeps making movies about the end of life as we know it. It’s a blast watching his characters fight over oil, water and women, yet while I’ve long thought of him as a great filmmaker it’s only with “Furiosa” that I now understand he’s also one kick-ass prophet of doom.
  6. Poolman
    Pine wisely avoids winks to the audience. But he whiffs at making the mystery especially gripping, leaving one instead to savor the moments, like a note-perfect Bening calmly talking Pine’s befuddled pool man through his latest setback.
  7. Power
    The point isn’t the data, but the spider-web nature of the argument; seemingly disparate things (labor strikes, slave patrols, the removal of Indigenous Americans from their land) are drawn together in “Power,” which becomes an act of pattern recognition. It is not easy viewing, but it’s a strong introduction to a topic that seems freshly relevant every day.
  8. Aisha
    “Aisha” resists tidy answers through the gentle force of its performances and by staying on the rebuffs and uncertainty Aisha suffers.
  9. A Prince
    That passion could bloom in such spontaneous and unexpected forms is part of this enigmatic film’s potency.
  10. AGGRO DR1FT
    Korine achieves what he set out to do, which is locate a strange liminal zone between avant-garde filmmaking and searing viewers’ faces with a frying pan.
  11. Gasoline Rainbow
    There’s an uncommon sweetness to this film, which is less about running away from something and more about discovering the road of life is littered with goodness, if you know where to look.
  12. Mother of the Bride
    Mother of the Bride is directed by Mark Waters (“Mean Girls”) with an apparent allergy to verisimilitude.
  13. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
    It probes how the act of co-opting idealisms and converting them to dogmas has occurred many times over. What’s more, it points directly at the immense danger of romanticizing the past, imagining that if we could only reclaim and reframe and resurrect history, our present problems would be solved.
  14. Unfrosted
    The jokes spill forth so fast that there’s no time for the shtick to get soggy.
  15. Evil Does Not Exist
    It’s far rarer when a movie, as this one does, speaks to everyday life and to the beauty of a world that we neglect even in the face of its calamitous loss.
  16. Wildcat
    Half-sketched and sometimes hard to follow, the stories glimpsed here ultimately fail to produce a fully legible or consistently engaging arc of what must be a roiling inner world.
  17. Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg
    Pallenberg is finally in focus. But the picture is tough to look at.
  18. Jeanne du Barry
    Since Maïwenn created Jeanne for herself, it may seem paradoxical to state that she’s all wrong for it. Nevertheless, her broad performance is a consistently unfortunate case study in “whatever she thinks she’s doing, this isn’t it.”
  19. Slow
    Grineviciute and Cicenas, however, give depth to a story that becomes stuck on the sorrows of the couple’s discrepancies.
  20. Turtles All the Way Down
    What “Turtles” does offer in surplus is texture, thanks to Marks’s springy, stylish direction.
  21. The Idea of You
    More than once, I was struck by how authentically 40 Solène seemed to me — a woman capable of making her own decisions, even ones she thinks might be ill-advised — and how weirdly rare it is to see that kind of character in a movie.
  22. I Saw the TV Glow
    What’s most effective, and staggering, is Schoenbrun’s storytelling, which weaves together half-remembered childhood elements in the way they might turn up in a nightmare, weaving in sounds and lights and colors and the gloriously inexplicable.
  23. The Fall Guy
    The Fall Guy is divertingly slick, playful nonsense.
  24. Stress Positions
    With shimmer, shadow and verve, Stress Positions . . . captures the often hallucinatory pandemonium wrought by that “long-ago” moment.
  25. Humane
    This isn’t a movie with much to say, but it’s the sort of thought experiment that will keep you up at night.
  26. Terrestrial Verses
    Each small humiliation, taken alone, will raise your blood pressure a little. But put them all together, and more seismic reverberations may finally rattle a society to its core.
  27. Infested
    There are no fresh ideas in the French creepy-crawler Infested, yet this first feature from Sébastien Vanicek scurries forward with such pep and purpose that its shortcomings are easily forgivable.
  28. The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed
    Arnow’s sophisticated point — the one referenced in the film’s unwieldy title — is what drives interest until our own spirits snap.
  29. Nowhere Special
    The mostly low-key mode of Nowhere Special is the right one. Norton is spectacular, but little Lamont delivers one of those uncanny performances that doesn’t seem like acting, and makes you feel for the kid almost as much as his onscreen parent does.
  30. Unsung Hero
    Viewer beware: Between the uplift and the cringe, this movie may cause whiplash.
  31. Challengers
    One of the other pleasures of Challengers is that despite some tears, tightened jaws and its fussy chronology, the movie isn’t trying to say anything important, which is a relief. It wants to engage and entertain you, and it does that very nicely.
  32. Boy Kills World
    The only point of this ridiculousness is to watch Skarsgard flex his sculpted arms and take a great deal of brutal punishment so that he can dole out more. Rinse, repeat.
  33. Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver
    A delirious, pulpy mishmash of knockoffs, The Scargiver isn’t good, but it sure is something.
  34. Egoist
    As the film leans into melodrama, it loses both its friction and frisson, and a steaming-hot premise turns into something cold to the touch.
  35. Blood for Dust
    This sluggish, self-serious job-gone-wrong movie could itself stand to be jolted to life.
  36. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
    The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is not a good movie nor a terribly enjoyable one, if you’re paying attention to it. But as background noise, it’s diverting and intermittently amusing.
  37. We Grown Now
    Some of this is effective, even if too many of Baig’s filmmaking choices — the honeyed cinematography, the score’s agitated violins and Malik’s preternaturally knowing voice-over — finally overwhelm the story’s fragile lyrical realism.
  38. Abigail
    A horror flick that’s serviceable enough to make you occasionally giggle or flinch, yet is also so aggressively unambitious that it scarcely seems worth griping about.
  39. Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion
    Cult documentaries are so popular that I’m a little surprised the film didn’t head more heavily in that direction. But the chorus of voices in the movie makes it clear that consumers should be paying attention. And it’s obvious, too, that the problem is much bigger than Brandy Melville.
  40. In Flames
    Kahn manages to assemble the story in a way that escapes feeling like a series of object lessons.
  41. The Greatest Hits
    There’s an interesting film dancing around the edges of The Greatest Hits, but there’s both too much sentimentality and not enough thought, and that’s too bad.
  42. Sasquatch Sunset
    Surrender to its shaggy rhythms and you’ll find this sometimes tiresome portrait of a family of mythical beasts is not without intelligence and a strangely mesmeric intent.
  43. Food, Inc. 2
    You might devour less after watching Food, Inc. 2, and what you eat will probably be healthier.
  44. Omen
    The film’s frenetic world-building eventually becomes numbing, in part because the uneven human dramas — each one offers a vague message about marginalization — lose momentum in all the commotion.
  45. Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead
    It’s a snappy, gutsy comedy about how kids are spoiled and ignorant, and yet the adult workplace is only passingly more mature.
  46. Arcadian
    A competent director can do only so much with a poor script, and Arcadian is littered with shortcuts and screenwriting clichés. It is vague to the point of careless, and often seems to be inventing rules for its monsters as it goes along.
  47. Civil War
    Rarely have I seen a movie that made me so acutely uncomfortable or watched an actor’s face that, like Dunst’s, expressed a nation’s soul-sickness so vividly that it felt like an X-ray.
  48. Indigo Girls: It's Only Life After All
    The film is especially good about contextualizing the band’s emergence in the midst of condescension (at best) from the mainstream media.
  49. Música
    Música, Mancuso’s phenomenal feature debut, is a comic trip inside a mind that’s forever feverishly creating — even against his will.
  50. Housekeeping for Beginners
    In its cheerfully disordered way, “Housekeeping” tells us that families, like last-minute meals, must sometimes be created from whatever ingredients are at hand.
  51. The Old Oak
    In place of magical thinking and a happy ending, The Old Oak serves up something harder: a meditation on hope.
  52. Girls State
    Girls State endears, but it also leaves viewers with the sense that, for a film about young women eager to take on the world’s challenges, the movie could stand to tackle a few more.
  53. Chicken for Linda!
    For all its playful color-block hues and deceptively casual illustrations, the movie delivers a sharp mix of pathos and humor.
  54. The Beast
    This shamelessly ambitious epic is about, among other things, civilizational collapse and existential retribution, yet it is held together by something delicate.
  55. Kim's Video
    Kim’s Video, co-directed by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin and narrated by Redmon, is less a retail history than a shaggy dog story. One that actually appears to be true. Go in knowing that and you might get a kick out of it.
  56. The People's Joker
    It’s aggressively self-indulgent, cinematically topsy-turvy and exhausting. It’s also singular, daring and an uncompromising cannonball into the queer cinema pool.
  57. Yannick
    Dupieux’s fans will be happy to know that his surreal humor is gloriously intact, while newcomers might find in this movie a gateway into one of contemporary cinema’s most idiosyncratic universes.
  58. Monkey Man
    Patel does some fine work in Monkey Man even if its fight sequences rarely pop, flow or impress; they’re energetic but uninspired.
  59. Coup de Chance
    Coup de Chance is more sketched-in than satisfyingly detailed. Most of the characters are types, and despite some local color, the story might as well play out in New York, but it’s amusing, technically adept and looks like a professionally made movie (no small thing in the streaming age).
  60. The First Omen
    The film revels in mashing up familiar genres: the monster movie, body horror and the Gothic church thriller. But it injects a revitalizing juice into the franchise — smartly edited and well paced, with a good cinematic eye.
  61. Scoop
    What Scoop offers is the modest pleasure — to which any journalist is susceptible — of rooting for a reporting team to get a story.
  62. The Listener
    For their part, Buscemi and Thompson utilize the complementary power of stillness and the close-up to create a portrait of a woman who hears so much and divulges so little.
  63. Wicked Little Letters
    The movie is full of goofy side characters and one-liners, yet elevated occasionally to genuine complexity by Colman and Buckley, who are consistently the best thing about any movie they’re in.
  64. Asphalt City
    This jittery drama wants viewers to appreciate the unique burdens facing emergency medical workers. Its approach to achieving this goal, however, involves a profusion of overly literal allusions to the paramedics as arbiters of life and death.
  65. The Beautiful Game
    The Beautiful Game is a model of a modern “nice” movie.
  66. Lousy Carter
    Between the hammering misanthropy, the herky-jerky editing and almost defiantly crummy sound mix, this exasperating film keeps you enjoyably off-balance.
  67. DogMan
    The strangest, possibly silliest movie of the veteran director’s idiosyncratic career. It is also borderline brilliant.
  68. On the Adamant
    That Philibert doesn’t stick to a “main character,” or impose a phony narrative arc, vibes well with the facility’s free-spirited methods, even if the documentary lacks the drama of a more structured production.
  69. La Chimera
    Rohrwacher’s digressive storytelling can make La Chimera seem unstructured, but she’s going where she wants to go and at her own pace. She likes detours, lived-in (nonplastic) faces and the kind of revelatory details that might go unnoticed, if she didn’t direct your gaze at them.
  70. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
    The best stretches involve Kong lumbering through the landscape, Godzilla stomping around crushing things, and of course the inevitable final confrontation, which has a few surprises up its proverbial sleeves.
  71. The Truth vs. Alex Jones
    The Truth vs. Alex Jones offers a lesson in just how vicious and pervasive conspiracy theories can become and a chilling portrait of how little they may trouble their purveyors.
  72. Art Talent Show
    Art Talent Show is itself provocative but also hilarious, both a sendup and a tribute to the complexity of contemporary art.
  73. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
    The movie is overflowing with ideas — about history, capitalism, cinema, representation — but it also tests your patience before amply rewarding it.
  74. Road House
    Though two hours long, the movie moves as swiftly as a greased ferret through a Habitrail and delivers hallucinatory action highs for its extended climax.
  75. Shirley
    King is magnetic onscreen, nailing Chisholm’s accent and her steely persona. But there is little for her to do other than trade quips with the other characters, in a drama that is too content with telling rather than showing.
  76. Free Time
    Burgess carries this succinct (and arguably slight, narratively disjointed) comedy without making you want to strangle his often willfully naïve character.
  77. Femme
    The film avoids a cut-and-dried triumphalism for something more slippery and, perhaps, more meaningful, too.
  78. William Shatner: You Can Call Me Bill
    "You Can Call Me Bill" is fundamentally a case of an actor presenting himself as he wants to be seen.
  79. Riddle of Fire
    Razooli wants us to see the fantastical narratives children conjure to manage real-world uncertainties, but his vision lacks focus.
  80. Limbo
    Sen, who also handled both the black-and-white cinematography and the editing, has a terrific eye for shot composition and sets a deliberate pace that feels implacable rather than merely slow.
  81. Late Night with the Devil
    The result is a nasty and delicious, unapologetic pastiche with a flair for menace. I had a blast.
  82. Immaculate
    Immaculate doesn’t try to reinvent anything but instead cheerfully embraces the familiar, which is part of what makes the movie enjoyable.
  83. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
    “Frozen Empire” is an eclectic, enjoyable barrage of nonsense.
  84. Stormy
    After so much media coverage, certain details of the events feel overly familiar. But the director, Sarah Gibson, is often able to put the episodes into fresh contexts.
  85. The American Society of Magical Negroes
    Even as the movie is lampooning one trope, it keeps taking refuge in other conventions in ways that undercut the pop of its premise and make one wish for greater depth to its thought experiments.
  86. Irish Wish
    The movie (directed by Janeen Damian and written by Kirsten Hansen) skips over Maddie savoring the outcome of her wish, and shifts right into charming comedy around her confusion, including having no memory about how she got engaged.
  87. One Life
    In trying to capture this almost stoic modesty, the film, directed by James Hawes, falls into a dramaturgical trap.
  88. Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus
    For the fan, it’s an intensely moving experience. But even for the viewer without much knowledge of Sakamoto’s work, “Opus” holds its own as the rare cinematic space for contemplation.
  89. The Shadowless Tower
    This movie opens itself to you with its feeling for people, its grace notes and a few bravura moments that close the distance between characters beautifully.
  90. The Animal Kingdom
    Narrative ambiguity can be fruitful but also a cop-out, as too many would-be art films tediously demonstrate. Here, though, the movie’s vagueness dovetails with both François’s and especially Émile’s confusion, and importantly, it also serves as a counterpoint to their unshakable love for Lana.
  91. Arthur the King
    Wahlberg and company manage to hold your attention, and not just because there’s a cute dog in the frame.
  92. French Girl
    French Girl is a love triangle farce that’s mostly set in Quebec City but takes place on Planet Rom-com where bipedal characters act out in ways that rarely resemble human behavior.
  93. Knox Goes Away
    Knox Goes Away” is, like its antihero, smart, unconventional and almost obsessively careful. Its unhurried pacing and mood of quiet deliberation won’t be for everyone; but this low-key thriller resolves its shockingly high stakes with a twisty intelligence.
  94. Snack Shack
    With its rambling momentum and quick-witted, almost musical dialogue, it feels less like “Superbad” than a Robert Altman movie, sort of like a pint-size “California Split.”
  95. The Tuba Thieves
    Its connective tissue is an idea, an exploration, and it’s designed to be more absorbed than understood. But for the patient audience, it’s richly illuminating.
  96. Imaginary
    Fans typically expect well-executed jump scares, fun plot twists and the occasional rubbery monster. What they probably don’t expect is the sophisticated allegory that Imaginary appears to be flirting with — and comes close to pulling off — before losing its nerve.
  97. Damsel
    Damsel is evidence that studios still don’t realize that a “strong female lead” is not enough to make a movie good. More is required: a strong set of supporting characters, a strong plot, a strong sense of what makes a movie interesting to an audience.
  98. Glitter & Doom
    This is not a deep movie. A lot of it isn’t even good. The images and story are chaotically assembled. The arrangements bring the music too naggingly close to the rounded, boppy, angsty gleam of certain 21st-century stage musicals . . . Even so, the people who’ve made this thing understand what the Indigo Girls are all about.
  99. Space: The Longest Goodbye
    Space: The Longest Goodbye leaves open the question of whether anyone could get to the red planet with his or her sanity intact.
  100. Cabrini
    It’s inspiring stuff, rendered stodgy and repetitive.
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