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. Das Boot
    Das Boot is yet another moving testament to the wastefulness of battle.
  2. Restrepo
    As the war in Afghanistan returns to the front pages and the national debate, we owe the men in Restrepo, at the very least, 90 minutes or so of our attention. If nothing else, this film, in showing how much they care about one another, demands the same of us.
  3. Chan Is Missing
    Chan Is Missing is not only an appreciation of a way of life that few of us know anything about; it's a revelation of a marvelous, completely secure new talent.
  4. Starless Dreams
    If Starless Dreams inspires conflicted feelings in viewers, it may be by design. It’s hard not to want to flee, and it’s hard to look away.
  5. The Departure
    Sad, tender and quietly moving, The Departure never says more than it needs to, much like its subject, a Buddhist priest who counsels those contemplating suicide.
  6. Sunless Shadows
    Mehrdad Oskouei’s latest documentary, Sunless Shadows, is a startling, raw confrontation with Iran’s patriarchy.
  7. Beyond Utopia
    The engrossing, often tense proceedings are slightly marred by a pushy score. All the same, being able to experience the escape alongside these subjects greatly distinguishes this documentary.
  8. Vermiglio
    Vermiglio is so devoted to evoking a time and place that much of its subtlety does not become apparent until a second viewing. It is a rich, enveloping film that asks viewers to approach it as if tiptoeing through the snow.
  9. 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.
  10. The Iron Giant
    A smooth, skilled example of animated filmmaking.
  11. Beanpole
    This is only the second feature from the sensationally talented Russian director Kantemir Balagov (who was born in 1991), and it’s a gut punch. It’s also a brilliantly told, deeply moving story about love — in all its manifestations, perversity and obstinacy.
  12. Won't You Be My Neighbor?
    It is that emphasis — the earnest, critical attention to the public Mister Rogers and his legacy — that makes Won’t You Be My Neighbor? feel like such a gift.
  13. Passing Strange
    A show not simply preserved by Mr. Lee’s camera, but brought, somehow, to its fullest, strangest, most electrifying realization.
  14. 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.
  15. The Long Day Closes
    A deeply personal film, and at times a touching one, it is a collection of fragments and memories artfully pieced into a quirky, captivating book of dreams.
  16. The Marquise of O
    It's a dazzling testament to the civilizing effects of several different arts, witty, joyous and so beautiful to look at that it must seem initially suspect to those of us who have begun to respond to spray-painted subway graffiti as the fine art of our time.
  17. Fruitvale Station
    Mr. Coogler, with a ground-level, hand-held shooting style that sometimes evokes the spiritually alert naturalism of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, has enough faith in his actors and in the intrinsic interest of the characters’ lives to keep overt sentimentality and messagemongering to a minimum.
  18. I'm Still Here
    I’m Still Here does not present as a simple polemic about a historical and political situation, and that’s the secret to its global appeal. It’s also a moving portrait of how politics disrupts and reshapes the domestic sphere, and how solidarity, community and love are the only viable path toward living in tragedy. And it warns us to mistrust anyone who tries to erase or rewrite the past.
  19. 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.
  20. Rachel Getting Married
    It’s a small movie, and in some ways a very sad one, but it has an undeniable and authentic vitality, an exuberance of spirit, that feels welcome and rare.
  21. The Last Days
    Each person's story is so compelling it is worthy of a feature-length documentary itself. If The Last Days has a flaw, it is that the stories have been so abbreviated to keep the film moving quickly that they feel incomplete.
  22. Watchers of the Sky
    Watchers of the Sky is a film that can dash hopes about humanity but also raise them in depicting the stories of these tireless defenders.
  23. Paragraph 175
    At once admirable and deeply unsettling.
  24. Sound and Fury
    Powerful, insightful, important and emotionally wrenching.
  25. The Circle
    The political implications of the film are manifest, as is the quiet courage of making it.
  26. Since Otar Left
    Sustains a perfect balance of pathos, humor and a clear-headed realism. One tiny misstep, and it could have tumbled into an abyss of tears.
  27. Atlantic City
    A rich, gaudy cinema trip.
  28. The Eternal Memory
    An uncannily intimate portrait of a couple adapting their relationship to a disease that affects the mind, The Eternal Memory doesn’t aim to hold spectators’ hands.
  29. The Handmaiden
    A rebus, a romance, a gothic thriller and a woozy comedy, The Handmaiden is finally and most significantly a liberation story.
  30. EO
    No movie that I’ve seen this year has moved me as deeply, made me feel as optimistic about cinema or engaged me with such intellectual vigor as “EO,” whose octogenarian genius auteur and all the donkeys who play EO — Hola, Tako, Marietta, Ettore, Rocco and Mela — deserve all the love and the carrots, too.
  31. Slumdog Millionaire
    In the end, what gives me reluctant pause about this bright, cheery, hard-to-resist movie is that its joyfulness feels more like a filmmaker's calculation than an honest cry from the heart about the human spirit (or, better yet, a moral tale).
  32. Juliet of the Spirits
    Invites you to contemplate the symbolic vibration of every hue in its teeming, overcrowded canvas.
  33. Against the Tide
    Sarvnik Kaur’s breathtaking documentary about Indigenous fishermen in Mumbai, India, dispels the myth that cinematic beauty has to do with the power of the camera or the glossiness of the image. Shot by Ashok Meena, the film finds beauty, simply, in perspective.
  34. The Work
    Opening an aperture into a process so ego-stripping that it feels unseemly to witness, The Work is enlightening yet also punishing.
  35. A Christmas Tale
    A movie that is almost indecently satisfying and at the same time elusive, at once intellectually lofty -- marked by allusions to Emerson, Shakespeare and Seamus Heaney as well as Nietzsche -- and as earthy as the passionate provincial family that is its heart and cosmos and reason for being.
  36. Valentino's Ghost
    You may not agree with every observation in Michael Singh’s documentary Valentino’s Ghost. But this engrossing examination of American perceptions of Arabs and the Arab world gets you thinking.
  37. White on White
    Court — whose languorous pacing heightens the film’s brief, bewildering moments of action — summons an unsettling experience from relatively restrained gestures.
  38. The Plains
    Fans of structural film, “Jeanne Dielman” and Google Maps will find much to treasure, even if the narrative elements — and occasional cutaways to imagery shot in a more remote area in western Victoria — upset the movie’s rigor and purposeful tedium.
  39. Paranoid Park
    A haunting, voluptuously beautiful portrait of a teenage boy who, after being suddenly caught in midflight, falls to earth.
  40. Giant
    Thanks to Mr. Stevens' brilliant structure and handling of images, every scene and every moment is a pleasure. He makes "picture" the essence of his film.
  41. Out of Sight
    The film's sleek moodiness and visual sophistication are so effective that there's even a scene here that makes Detroit look like the most romantic city in the world.
  42. 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.
  43. In the Shadow of the Moon
    In the Shadow of the Moon is such a morale booster. The power of its archival images hasn’t diminished with familiarity.
  44. The Big Risk
    A tough and touching exploration of honor and friendship among thieves.
  45. Get on the Bus
    Some of the film's best and most comfortable moments find the bus passengers simply singing together in a show of warm, spontaneous unity.
  46. 76 Days
    76 Days, which gets its title from the Wuhan lockdown imposed from January 23 to April 8, is defined more by the human capacity for resilience and compassion than by a relentless sense of doom (or by a focus on China’s policy decisions).
  47. 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.
  48. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
    The director-writer Kelly Fremon Craig’s rendering of the book about puberty, family and nascent spirituality offers lessons in how a cherished object, when treated with tender and thoughtful regard, needn’t turn precious.
  49. Secret Sunshine
    It is a great movie, by a major figure in world cinema.
  50. The Truffle Hunters
    A charming and slyly poignant documentary.
  51. Children of Men
    Children of Men may be something of a bummer, but it’s the kind of glorious bummer that lifts you to the rafters, transporting you with the greatness of its filmmaking.
  52. Judas and the Black Messiah
    Judas and the Black Messiah represents a disciplined, impassioned effort to bring clarity to a volatile moment, to dispense with the sentimentality and revisionism that too often cloud movies about the ’60s and about the politics of race. It’s fascinating in its own right, and even more so when looked at alongside other recent movies.
  53. Broadcast News
    Mr. Brooks's screenplay overstates matters both at the beginning of the film and at the end, with a prologue that strains to be cute and an epilogue that is just unnecessary. In between, however, the movie is a sarcastic and carefully detailed picture of a world Mr. Brooks finds fascinating and also a little scary.
  54. Revanche
    The characters and situations are interesting enough, and the filmmaking is sufficiently skilled to provide a measure of reasonably thoughtful entertainment.
  55. The Man Without a Past
    Like the great films of the 1930's and early 40's, it is at once artful and unpretentious, sophisticated and completely accessible, sure of its own authority and generous toward characters and audience alike -- a movie whose intended public is the human race.
  56. American Movie
    The rare documentary that combines a wildly charismatic subject with an elegant structure...not-to-be-missed.
  57. Husbands and Wives
    It's also an ensemble piece acted to loopy perfection by a remarkable cast headed by Judy Davis, Sydney Pollack, Mia Farrow, Juliette Lewis, Liam Neeson and Mr. Allen, who's also the writer, director and ringmaster, as well as his own best friend.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    King & Country
    King and Country is an uncompromising film. Some of its scenes are so strong they shock. Those who can take it will find it a shattering experience.
  59. Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood
    It’s a western, for Pete’s sake. Politics are wound into its DNA, and Tarantino knows the genome better than anyone else. Which is just to say that like other classics of the genre, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” is not going anywhere. It will stand as a source of debate — and delight — for as long as we care about movies. And it wants us to care.
  60. After the Storm
    Mr. Kore-eda, whose most noteworthy family dramas include “Still Walking” (2009) and “Like Father, Like Son” (2014), works in a quiet cinematic register, and the slightest error in tone could upend the whole enterprise. Slow-paced, sad, rueful and sometimes warmly funny, After the Storm is one of his sturdiest, and most sensitive, constructions.
  61. Moonrise Kingdom
    Moonrise Kingdom breezes along with a beautifully coordinated admixture of droll humor, deadpan and slapstick. Like all of Mr. Anderson's films, though, there's a deep, pervasive melancholia here too.
  62. The President's Cake
    It’s a striking, mature debut.
  63. Through a Glass Darkly
    It has a simple, straight cinematic form, unifying a little tangle of experience within a modest frame. It may strike one as slight and disappointing alongside the intellectual magnitude of such as his film "The Seventh Seal." But it suggests a new mood of its author—introspective, troubled, cold.
  64. Calle 54
    Even better on a second viewing because the film is such a pure expression of the director's love for the music, a love so infectious it should leave you elated.
  65. Horse Money
    The puzzle-box narrative only grows more hypnotic with repeat viewings. The movie insists on having the audience, like Ventura, pass through madness to reach catharsis.
  66. Up the Yangtze
    An astonishing documentary of culture clash and the erasure of history amid China’s economic miracle.
  67. Farewell My Concubine
    A vastly entertaining movie. It's also one of such recognizably serious concerns that you can sink into it with pleasure and count it a cultural achievement.
  68. Sinners
    Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a big-screen exultation — a passionate, effusive praise song about life and love, including the love of movies.
  69. High Hopes
    High Hopes manages to be enjoyably whimsical without ever losing its cutting edge.
  70. Limelight
    Neither comedy nor tragedy altogether, it is a brilliant weaving of comic and tragic strands, eloquent, tearful and beguiling with supreme virtuosity.
  71. Intercepted
    Intercepted is yet another crucial eyewitness document of the Russia-Ukraine war, one that makes the personal stakes painfully vivid. It’s a reminder that war isn’t waged by putative monsters but by monstrous human beings who sometimes need to hear the sounds of their mothers’ voices.
  72. McQueen
    The filmmakers’ emphasis on drama honors the driven personality of their subject, while tracing a fairly conventional glad-rags-to-riches narrative arc.
  73. 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.
  74. Earth Mama
    There are moments in Earth Mama, a drama about motherhood at its most fragile, when the movie’s quiet intensity seems to settle in your chest, as if a heavy stone had been placed over your heart.
  75. Booksmart
    The rapid-fire, note-perfect dialogue is punctuated with moments of brilliant conceptual whimsy: animated and underwater sequences; horror-movie jump scares; immersive theater.
  76. Wise Blood
    One of John Huston's most original, most stunning movies. It is so eccentric, so funny, so surprising and so haunting that it is difficult to believe it is not the first film of some enfant terrible instead of the 33d feature by a man who is now in his 70's and whose career has had more highs and lows than a decade of weather maps.
  77. Writing with Fire
    At a time when the profession faces increasing dangers in India, the film’s faith in the powers of grassroots journalism is nothing short of galvanizing.
  78. Small Axe: Red, White and Blue
    Some of Red, White and Blue is hard to watch, but the film is eloquent on how an institution will resist change, perhaps especially from inside its own walls.
  79. Ascension
    This aestheticization of Chinese society doesn’t exactly sit well with this viewer: one wonders if this counts as a kind of tourism.
  80. Lantana
    Astonishingly well acted film, so much so that it seems unfair to single out any of the performances. Mr. Lawrence's camera sense is as sure and unobtrusive as his feel for acting. The movie just seems to happen, to grow out of the ground like a thorny plant, revealing the intricate intelligence of its design only in hindsight.
  81. The Friends of Eddie Coyle
    The Friends of Eddie Coyle is so beautifully acted and so well set (in and around Boston's pool halls, parking lots, side-streets, house trailers and barrooms) that it reminds me a good deal of John Huston's Fat City. It also has that film's ear for the way people talk—for sentences that begin one way and end another, or are stuffed with excess pronouns.
  82. Reality
    Satter, a veteran theater director, makes a smooth transition into her feature film debut, written with James Paul Dallas. She’s skilled at evoking tension from a minimal set.
  83. Séraphine
    The mystery of Séraphine de Senlis -- who died in a mental hospital in 1942 and whose work survives in some of the world’s leading museums -- is left intact at the end of Séraphine. Rather than trying to explain Séraphine, the film accepts her.
  84. Oliver Twist
    A superb piece of motion picture art and, beyond doubt, one of the finest screen translations of a literary classic ever made.
  85. Marx Can Wait
    It’s a complicated and painful story, humanely and sensitively told.
  86. 49 Up
    Suzy's marriage, Nick's divorce, Paul's work history: none of it is my or anyone else's business. But these things -- these people -- have become, through Mr. Apted's films, a vital part of modern life, which seems to grow richer every seven years, when the new "Up" movie comes out.
  87. BPM (Beats Per Minute)
    in spite of its historical specificity, BPM never feels like a bulletin from the past. Its immediacy comes in part from the brisk naturalism of the performances and the nimbleness and fluidity of the editing. The characters are so vivid, so real, so familiar that it’s impossible to think of their struggles — and in some cases their deaths — as unfolding in anything but the present tense.
  88. The Joy Luck Club
    Those unfamiliar with the book will simply appreciate a stirring, many-sided fable, one that is exceptionally well told.
  89. 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.
  90. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
    The Seed of the Sacred Fig asks us to enter a family’s story, but also to acknowledge that we are part of it. We’re extras in the background, no matter how far away we are. For Rasoulof, the world he’s created is far from theoretical. The consequences have been, too.
  91. The Postman Always Rings Twice
    The picture achieves its distinction through the smart way in which it has been made and through the quality of its representation of two passion-torn characters.
  92. Trafic
    For all of the laughter in "Traffic," there are moments when the banal utilitarianism of the super-highway is seen as a work of extraordinary art.
  93. To Leslie
    The director, Michael Morris, knows from the start what movie he’s making: one that robs us of our easy assumptions about who Leslie is. She’s unbearably flawed, and the screenwriter Ryan Binaco explains why without forcing long beats of exposition upon the viewer.
  94. American Beauty
    If you don't share the film's piercing vision of what really matters, someday you will.
  95. 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.
  96. Harmonium
    This chilly tale of violent secrets and unvoiced misery relies heavily on the skill of actors who seem to know that one false move could tip the whole enterprise into comedy.
  97. Kagemusha
    There is beauty in Kagemusha but it is impersonal, distant and ghostly. The old master has never been more rigorous. [06 Oct 1980, p.14]
    • The New York Times
  98. Far From Heaven
    It rediscovers the aching, desiring humanity in a genre -- and a period-- too often subjected to easy parody or ironic appropriation. In a word, it's divine.
  99. No Man's Land
    One of the movie's dark running jokes is that everyone seems to speak a different language and has trouble communicating. The continual struggle of people to make themselves understood becomes a metaphor for the war itself.
  100. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
    A comedy that can't quite support its tragic conclusion, which is too schematic to be honestly moving, but it is acted with such a sense of life that one responds to its demonstration of humanity if not to its programmed metaphors.
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