The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,280 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: 9,381 out of 20280
  2. Mixed: 8,435 out of 20280
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20280
20280 movie reviews
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  1. Anything
    It’s easy to second-guess a scene or three in Anything. Yet this is a film that wagers you’ll put aside your doubts and open up to its gentle emotions. It’s a bit of a risk for a viewer. But I’d take it.
  2. White Wedding
    Wedding chaos has been heavily mined by both film and stage comedies, but Jann Turner, the director here, keeps this story fresh, aided by the effortless interplay between Mr. Nkosi and Mr. Seiphemo (who are credited with Ms. Turner as writers). The goat helps too.
  3. Sea Fever
    It’s all very resonant stuff, performed by an earnest and committed cast. But Sea Fever speeds through these turns of plot as if to check them off a list, with characters dropping dead before they’ve had a chance to earn our sympathy.
  4. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
    Mr. Elba’s towering performance lends “Long Walk to Freedom” a Shakespearean breadth.
  5. Brothers at War
    Well shot but generically scored, Brothers at War has its share of potent moments, most of them with Mr. Rademacher’s family in the States.
  6. Fred Won't Move Out
    Except for a subplot about a missing cat that suggests that Fred may be considerably dottier than he appears, the movie gets almost everything right about the uncomfortable moment when grown children are forced to be their parents' parents.
  7. The Bear
    No less amazing than the material Mr. Annaud has captured on the screen is the fact that he has gone to such crazily elaborate lengths to capture it at all.
  8. Saw X
    The traps are disgusting; the plot, so self-serious its absurd (and knowingly so). And unlike the sundry sequels before it (by the third “Saw,” any pretense of ingenuity had been hacked off), this one manages to make you feel something beyond gross-out adrenaline — assuming you have affection for the franchise’s mainstays.
  9. Kompromat
    Salle’s approach leaves the physical details of Mathieu’s escape foggy. It’s not always clear how long Mathieu spends in hiding, or how he acquires the tools needed to sustain his flight.
  10. The Other Half
    Mr. Klein is well served by his actors, who exude conviction, charisma and palpable ardor.
  11. RED
    It is possible to have a good time at RED, but it is not a very good movie.
  12. Citadel
    This spare first feature from the Irish filmmaker Ciaran Foy (drawing on his own experiences) has an atavistic pulse, evoking a decaying society where elevators fail and bus drivers cower behind mesh grills.
  13. Goosebumps
    More often than not, Mr. Letterman uses his movie as a toy chest of characters more than as a medium, the muggy Mr. Black included.
  14. Magic Farm
    Ingeniously simmering under the folly is a health crisis that has afflicted the agricultural area for decades. This is the film’s joke: If the crew could only get their heads out of their rears, they would uncover a gonzo documentary gold mine.
  15. An Officer and a Spy
    An Officer and a Spy is well-crafted; Polanski’s movies generally are. Its contribution to cinema’s role in historical storytelling, though, seems largely as an allegory about Polanski.
  16. Den of Thieves 2: Pantera
    Den of Thieves 2: Pantera isn’t groundbreaking, but it delivers what it promises: lovable scoundrels trading bullets and traversing borders.
  17. Rules Don't Apply
    The wonder of the movie, which Mr. Beatty wrote and directed from a story he wrote with Bo Goldman, is that it is so good-humored. Fools and idiots abound, but demonic, systemic evil does not.
  18. Train Man
    Though clearly aimed at teenagers, this unashamedly heartstruck movie is neither obsessed with sex nor driven to humiliate its characters. Compared to those of the average American teen movie, its ambitions are so innocent they’re almost childlike.
  19. Interview with the Assassin
    Mr. Burger has a performer who can dart between stentorian self-assurance and cringing pathos, maintaining his character's ambiguity until the final sequence of this resourceful and ingenious entertainment.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Otomo
    A bleak and powerful work, one we probably need more than ever these days.
  21. Spartan
    A vigorous and engrossing genre exercise that manages the difficult trick of being both logically meticulous and genuinely surprising. Its elaborately implausible story gestures now and then toward an idea, but the movie's main concern is technique.
  22. The Debut
    Sometimes amateurishly acted by the appealing younger cast but is nonetheless a neat blend of well-drawn major characters and drama, music, dance, romance and humor that generates considerable charm and achieves a heartwarming resolution of its generational conflict.
  23. Gangster No. 1
    The psychological underpinnings give this picture a charged emotional atmosphere. The dizzying unspoken feelings between the two men mesh so well that the movie seems to have been worked out like a perverse drawing-room comedy.
  24. Happy Accidents
    As impressive as it is in the abstract, all the detail ultimately drags the movie down and lengthens it unnecessarily.
  25. Cellular
    It's an honest, unpretentious, well-made B picture with a clever, silly premise, a handful of sly, unassuming performances and enough car chases, decent jokes and swervy plot complications to make the price of the ticket seem like a decent bargain.
  26. Never Been Kissed
    So hopelessly cartoonish and wrongheaded in its details that there's not even a semblance of reality.
  27. Brassed Off
    Brassed Off is shamelessly manipulative and sentimental, but in an agreeably familiar way.
  28. Conventioneers
    Smart, resourceful indie.
  29. Behind the Burly Q
    A charming, uncritical, often entertaining jumble, the documentary was written and directed by Leslie Zemeckis.
  30. Max Manus
    Buffed to an expensive-looking gloss and dressed in period-perfect finery, Max Manus has an old-fashioned sincerity that entertains without engaging.
  31. Korkoro
    Korkoro (the word means freedom in Romani) has an unexpectedly leisurely quality as it shows the texture of Gypsy life - the music-making, the intense bonds with horses and the natural world - and its awkward fit with modernity.
  32. Happy, Happy
    Sets out to puncture the clichéd image of Scandinavians as rosy-cheeked choristers bonded in communal togetherness. But its subversive intentions are ultimately undercut by its lack of nerve, along with a lurking sentimentality.
  33. Sidewalls
    Smart, wordy and sweetly sympathetic to lives lived online, Sidewalls coasts on Martín and Mariana's twin voice-overs, alternate musings on themselves and their city.
  34. RA. One
    If the storytelling disappoints (shocking!), the film mostly doesn't. It relies on action and effects and Bollywood's trump card, star power, to carry the day. This is Mr. Khan's movie, and once he sheds Shekhar's droopy locks, he shines as the deadpan, action-hero robot with digital snot and smooth moves on the dance floor.
  35. The Other F Word
    What begins as an amusing fluff piece ("Daddy's messed up," mumbles one woozy subject after dropping his gurgling infant) slowly emerges as a compelling and often touching peek at punk paternity.
  36. Brahmin Bulls
    Mr. Pailoor (who wrote the screenplay with Anu Pradhan) shows a taste for blunt metaphor... It’s hard to find fault with the performances, though, particularly Mr. Seth’s.
  37. Sacred
    A kaleidoscopic travelogue depicting demonstrations of faith worldwide.
  38. The Blues Brothers
    There are parts of The Blues Brothers that would have played infinitely better with a knock-about feeling, a sloppiness like that of "Animal House." As it is, the movie is airless. The stakes needn't have been so suffocatingly high.
  39. The Battleship Island
    Though Mr. Ryoo’s taste for heightened theatricality threatens his story’s credibility at times, there is no denying his skill with a large-scale action set piece.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Andromeda Strain
    Despite all the drama of the situation (United States threatened with biological destruction from outer space, etc.) nothing very exciting goes on in The Andromeda Strain. Since nobody greatly feels or acts, we are left with the drama of people tensely sitting around in chairs, twisting dials and watching TV monitors. From time to time, somebody gets up and paces the room.
  41. Maineland
    Maineland takes up a large and complicated set of topics — the global economy, the shifting relations between East and West, the commodification of American education — and addresses them with understated delicacy.
  42. Make Mine Music
    Vivid, motley, ornamental and just-a-bit questionable in spots.
  43. Cat Ballou
    Cat Ballou does have flashes of good satiric wit. But, under Elliot Silverstein's direction, it is mostly just juvenile lampoon.
  44. Escape to Witch Mountain
    Escape to Witch Mountain is a Walt Disney production for children who will watch absolutely anything that moves...It's not very scary, but neither is it very exciting.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Murder to Mercy: The Cyntoia Brown Story
    This is a quiet, elegant memoir that humanizes a systemic American challenge — and offers a narrative catharsis only possible with real-life mercy.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Coffy
    Leaves a viewer with the happy thought that she now can get back to nursing and away from films like Coffy.
  47. Between Two Worlds
    Carrère — known primarily in Europe as a writer of nonfiction books with a literary twist — applies a mood of cool journalistic sobriety to Marianne’s scandalous discoveries. . . Less compelling is the sentimental crisis that plays out because of Marianne’s deception.
  48. Rolling Papers
    It’s full of discussion points but lets them go by undiscussed.
  49. Analyze This
    As he demonstrated in "Groundhog Day," Ramis knows how to handle a high-concept story with unusual cleverness, and he does it again here. It helps to no end that De Niro and Crystal, despite their obvious differences, are perfectly in tune.
  50. Mrs. Hyde
    Whenever the movie tries to say something insightful about racial integration — or education, or any number of issues — it backs off or bogs down. It’s so tonally and ideologically unfocused that its ideas just slip away.
  51. The Power
    The film stumbles in delivering a cohesive vision.
  52. Kumaré
    A goal of this practical program of discipline and reflection is to cultivate an inner guru so that you don't need someone like Kumaré.
  53. Vice Is Broke
    Huang has made an eye-opening capsule history that will resonate most keenly with Vice fans. But there’s something more widely instructive, too, in his portrait of a culture clash that turned into an unlikely courtship: ragtag punks and the investment bankers eager to hit the “millennial sweet spot.”
  54. Benny's Video (1992)
    What gives the film a chilly authenticity is the creepy performance of Arno Frisch in the title role. Cool and unsmiling, with a dark inscrutable gaze, his Benny is the apotheosis of what the author George W. S. Trow has called the cold child, or an unfeeling young person whose detachment and short attention span have been molded by television.
  55. They Came Together
    Mr. Wain, who made a delightful comedy with “Role Models” and a cult favorite with “Wet Hot American Summer,” has opted to deliver a series of hit-and-miss sketch-comedy bits rather than a fully realized movie that might have gutted contemporary rom-com clichés rather than just weakly aping them.
  56. Bad Tales
    The story is both overwrought and underdeveloped, with potentially important plot details insufficiently explained or left out altogether.
  57. Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Audacity to be Free
    Throughout, the writer and director Cordula Kablitz-Post asserts Andreas-Salomé’s commitment to her own independence. But Ms. Kablitz-Post’s focus on Andreas-Salomé’s suitors has the effect of chaining the early feminist’s legacy to exactly the patriarchal conventions she claims to reject.
  58. To the Stars
    It’s always nice to see characters break free, but you need to care whether they do. One insurmountable problem with this story is that Iris just isn’t interesting enough and certainly not developed enough either as a character or in terms of the performance.
  59. Moving On
    Something else is missing here — a farcical energy or satirical audacity that might shock the premise to unsettling life, or else a deeper, darker core of feeling. Moving On takes refuge in pleasantness, and in the easy charm of its stars.
  60. Isn't It Romantic
    The film’s reliance on conventions even as it snickers at them gives it the faint air of a con.
  61. The Columnist
    The Columnist doesn’t seem to care about making a cogent statement about feminist revenge or online culture. Perhaps it just needed an excuse to carry out its bloody high jinks, which are decent fun in their own right.
  62. The Decline of the American Empire
    Mr. Arcand's dialogue is not didactic. It's spontaneously funny and rueful and full of oblique revelations. Though highly intelligent, his characters are prone to self-delusion. They're nothing if not civilized, but they don't hesitate to lie and cheat in their own interests.
  63. Red Dragon
    The entire picture is a third-generation Xerox copy, in part because adapting Mr. Harris's books for the screen seems to turn directors into rigid formalists.
  64. The Beaver
    Nasty, brutish and as cuddly as a crusty old sock fished out of a sewer, the beaver or the beav, as I like to think of him, owns the film.
  65. Time and Tide
    A woozy, disconnected piece of filmmaking about drugs, rock 'n' roll and the aftermath of sex.
  66. Manic
    The camera work is so self-conscious and so intrusive that it consistently overrides our interest in the characters and their individual dramas.
  67. Calendar Girls
    When the biggest compliment you can pay a picture is that it is professional and not smug, there's a little something missing, like invention.
  68. Gray's Anatomy
    This direction is more ambitious than apt, since it calls attention to the artifice that Mr. Gray otherwise conceals so well. Cuts and scene changes become distractingly blunt, as do the star's efforts to suggest spontaneous enthusiasm.
  69. Tokyo Pop
    You don't have to be a fan of rock music to get a kick out of Tokyo Pop, a wedding of American and Japanese youth cultures as seen through a fun-house mirror.
  70. Norman
    Norman may not conquer the box office, but it will certainly be a worthy calling card for its director and its leading man.
  71. Soul Boys of the Western World
    Maintaining a sunny, scrubbed-clean tone, Ms. Hencken allows no possibility of dazed groupies or drunken meltdowns — and only the briefest whiff of cocaine — to darken her portrait.
  72. The Iceman
    If the narrow biographical focus of “The Iceman” prevents it from being a great crime movie, on its own more modest terms it is an indelible film that clinches Mr. Shannon’s status as a major screen actor.
  73. Mighty Aphrodite
    Dependably well made and not quite like any Allen film that came before. Nimble film making like this isn't necessarily geared to the magnum opus, but Mr. Allen can achieve fine, amusing results even while thinking small. [27 October 1995, P.C1]
  74. Len and Company
    Len and Company...never strains for profundity. Instead, it savors observational subtleties, especially in Mr. Ifans’s assured performance. For a baby-boomer-meets-millennial family drama, that’s plenty.
  75. The Aeronauts
    Gorgeous and goofy, fanciful and unrepentantly old-fashioned, this Victorian adventure (it’s set in 1862) delights much more when its head is in the clouds than when its feet are on the ground.
  76. A Magnificent Life
    There’s more to love in the details than in this overloaded sprint through history, which the film frames from the perspective of an aging Pagnol as he talks to a phantom version of his younger self and attempts to begin writing his memoirs.
  77. Little Joe
    Little Joe manages to exert a peculiar pull in spite of being constructed with material you’ve likely seen elsewhere.
  78. All Day and a Night
    Choice, for many, is an illusion. This message repeats itself throughout the film, and while at times it feels clumsy, it is never tedious. Sanders especially shines among a formidable cast, and in his portrayal, excellently reflects on the herculean task his character faces.
  79. The Godfather: Part III
    One of this film's greatest accomplishments is its making an audience believe that the Corleones and their various partners in crime have been entirely in character during the intervening decades, but have simply neglected to turn up on screen.
  80. Trust
    The mantle of social relevance can be a heavy one, but Trust, a smooth drama about a girl's seduction and rape by a middle-aged Internet predator, is neither preachy nor hysterically overreaching.
  81. Night Always Comes
    The movie resolves into a relatively deft combination of message picture and suspense thriller.
  82. Under the Silver Lake
    The sweet smarts of Mitchell’s first movie, “The Myth of the American Sleepover” (treated to a bit of auto-allusion in “Silver Lake”) aren’t much in evidence here. Nor are the slippery psychosexual scares of “It Follows,” his breakthrough horror movie from 2015. The ambitions this time are grander, but also vaguer and duller.
  83. Happy Here and Now
    Like some other contemporary films that try to stitch together a small army of characters into a community of sorts, Happy Here and Now feels like a symptom in search of a cure.
  84. Tap World
    It would be better if it had a bit less proclaiming and a bit more nuts-and-bolts information, but still, it’s refreshing to see people bubbling over with enthusiasm for an art that is somewhat out of the mainstream.
  85. The Fencer
    The director, Klaus Haro, films the proceedings involvingly enough.... But the movie is almost relentlessly predictable and formulaic — a story of one man’s refusal to conform that dutifully hits all its marks.
  86. Finally Dawn
    Finally Dawn is at its most intriguing as Costanzo entrusts his curly haired, wide-eyed naïf to maneuver the looking glass of Italian versus Hollywood cinema. Hint: Italy comes off more soulful.
  87. The Sisterhood of Night
    Even with sections recalling both “The Crucible” and an “Afterschool Special,” it still fashions a story that’s fairly fresh and often absorbing.
  88. What About Bob?
    What About Bob? does work as comedy for a while, thanks to the fortuitous teaming of Mr. Dreyfuss and Mr. Murray.
  89. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
    The whole thing just makes me miss how horny and violent movies used to be. Here, all the violence is sex. Only, it’s not. It’s just winking.
  90. Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted
    Where Madagascar 3 soars is in its visuals: A Monte Carlo chase is vertiginously madcap; a Cirque du Soleil-style spectacle dazzles with rich pastels; the 3-D effects have wit and invention. Kids will be stimulated. And, parents, you'll enjoy the sights.
  91. Unveiled
    With its deliberately overexposed film stock and driving electronic score, Ms. Maccarone's film occasionally suffers from a self-conscious artiness, but at its center is an extraordinary performance by Ms. Tabatabai as Fariba, a young woman whose expectations have been lowered by a lifetime of systematic mistreatment but who still holds out hope for the possibility of both justice and love.
  92. Electrick Children
    Electrick Children is well acted and refreshingly nonjudgmental, but its narrative continuity is tenuous at best. As it jounces along toward a pat, unsatisfying ending, it leaves essential questions unanswered. But the movie’s underlying sweetness leaves a residual glow.
  93. My Blind Brother
    It’s made watchable by an appealing cast.
  94. Coma
    Plausibility is not always important, but in a film as bereft of distinctive style and wit as Coma, it helps to believe in something. It can even help if one is offended. The aftereffect of Coma is a catlike yawn, benign and bored.
  95. Pilgrimage
    Pilgrimage raises a question or two about unexamined beliefs and religious zeal. Those questions, as well as all that blood, won’t appeal to everyone. But those who can stomach them will receive some dark rewards.
  96. Wayne's World 2
    A very good-humored sequel for anyone in tune with its subject.
  97. The Caddy
    For the most part, this scatter-brained fiction, in which Mr. Lewis is teamed with his popular partner, Dean Martin, is a cut-to-size Martin-Lewis farce, wherein the two playmates lightly fancy that they are a golf contestant and his caddy, respectively.
  98. Go for Zucker
    It's the rare German movie calling itself a comedy that is actually funny, even if only in bits and pieces.
  99. A/k/a Tommy Chong
    Tells the depressing, often ridiculous and generally enraging story of how and why Mr. Chong, an extremely laid-back and genial camera presence, ended up doing time in the minimum-security Taft Correctional Institution in Taft, Calif.
  100. Gifted
    What’s in a child’s best interest? It depends on who’s answering the question. That’s the crux of Gifted.
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