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. Lone Survivor
    It is a modest, competent, effective movie, concerned above all with doing the job of explaining how the job was done.
  2. King Ivory
    While this slick film wants to use their stories to put faces to the fentanyl epidemic, Swab’s genre instincts get the better of him.
  3. Smallfoot
    The movie, directed by Karey Kirkpatrick, has just enough wit and visual invention to get by. (The “Bad Santa” team of John Requa and Glenn Ficarra are among those credited with the story.) But for all the hints of darkness around its edges, the film is ultimately like its heroes: cuddly, cute and harmless.
  4. Bandits
    Guilty of behaving like a petty thievery corporation; it steals from so many other sources that we're forced to realize that it has little of its own to offer. As such, it can't help but fail to meet expectations, given the talents involved.
  5. Treasure Planet
    The delicate magic of, for instance, Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away," which Disney released earlier this fall, is absent from this brainless, mechanical picture.
  6. Price of Gold
    A noncommittal, occasionally surreal portrait of hardscrabble lives and omnipresent risk.
  7. House of Gucci
    For all that abundance, something is missing. A lot of things, really, but mostly a strong idea and a credible reason for existing.
  8. Middle Men
    Originally intended as a cable television series, Middle Men bears some telltale scars of hasty, clumsy truncation. Still, there is a raffish vigor that makes the movie watchable despite all-over-the-map storytelling and a fuzzy, superficial grasp of the salient themes.
  9. Being the Ricardos
    The Lucy in Being the Ricardos is scarcely interested in messy politics. Mainly she plays the role of the jealous, suspicious wife and harridan star who everyone really does love even if she’s a bitch. That shortchanges and flattens Ball, despite Kidman’s efforts.
  10. Bad Moms
    If I could write sonnets, I would write one about Ms. Hahn, whose timing — she finds depths in that little pause before a joke crests — can turn laughs into howls.
  11. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
    Ms. Streep’s near total absence leaves a hole Cher is expected to fill. It’s too little, way too late, of course, and because it’s Cher, it’s also too much.
  12. Life of Crime
    As a late-summer caper movie, it hits the spot. The film offers the intriguing contrast of actors and a director (Daniel Schechter) taking a different approach to known material.
  13. Thin Ice
    Thin Ice itself, while not entirely unpleasant, is gnawingly familiar, a slice of room-temperature heartland quirk that tries to blend low-key comedy with violence and mayhem.
  14. Lonely Hearts
    As fictional characters in a movie that is fetishistic in its attention to period detail, Mr. Leto and Ms. Hayek work well together as an unsavory couple two rungs down the social ladder from Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in "Double Indemnity."
  15. Nell
    What's remarkable is how seldom it delivers. For all its technical brilliance, not even Ms. Foster's intense, accomplished performance in the title role holds much surprise.
  16. True Romance
    A vibrant, grisly, gleefully amoral road movie.
  17. Hateship Loveship
    Ms. Johnson and the screenwriter, Mark Jude Poirier, have transformed a taciturn masterpiece into an absorbing, messy, modest story of damaged relationships.
  18. This Changes Everything
    Moving, humane and unfailingly polite, This Changes Everything presents a Panglossian view of approaching disaster that (according to the film’s publicity notes) seeks to empower rather than to scare. But we should be scared.
  19. Bedknobs and Broomsticks
    A tricky, cheerful, aggressively friendly Walt Disney fantasy for children who still find enchantment in pop-up books, plush animals by Steiff and dreams of independent flight.
  20. Self Reliance
    The movie is too juvenile and too timid to acknowledge the real-world chill of its online cabal of murderous social misfits.
  21. Clock
    Clock is a psychological thriller, or perhaps even a satire, in horror clothing, tantalizing us with thought-provoking ideas, only to abandon them: nature versus nurture, the influence of the wellness-industrial complex over minds and bodies, the oppressive expectations placed on women — including by themselves.
  22. Rust Creek
    Corfield is fine in a role that gives her little opportunity to do more than run and fight, but a woman this empowered removes the question mark from her survival — and the tension from the movie.
  23. Celeste and Jesse Forever
    While Celeste and Jesse is decidedly conventional in most respects, it's pretty swell as an exploration of a relationship between a man and a woman that's no longer predicated by mutual desire.
  24. Captive
    The middle section of the film has some of the superficiality of a made-for-Lifetime drama of female distress and resilience, a bit too eager to make its points and solve its dramatic problems at the cost of the messiness that would bring the story fully to life.
  25. Metal Lords
    Conventional but genuine, Metal Lords comprehends the riot of adolescent emotions and the many ways teenagers manage them.
  26. Under the Same Moon (La misma luna)
    This is screenwriting by numbers. Unlike, say, Ken Loach’s marvelous “Bread and Roses,” Under the Same Moon is too busy sanctifying its protagonists and prodding our tear ducts to say anything remotely novel about immigration policies or their helpless victims.
  27. Hippocrates: Diary of a French Doctor
    Hippocrates unfolds pretty much like an average episode of “ER,” though with more French flag waving and less storeroom romancing.
  28. Standing Tall
    Mr. Paradot’s performance is so viscerally intense that there is no escaping its force.
  29. Killing Ground
    Certainly, the senselessness of bloodshed may be Mr. Power’s point. But with this setup, such a message is all but muted.
  30. Anthropoid
    It takes Sean Ellis’s World War II thriller Anthropoid a while to build steam, but once it does, hang on.
  31. The Red Orchestra
    Films like "The Pianist" and "Schindler's List" immerse viewers in the bleakness of that time. The Red Orchestra is set in a sunnier world, which seems more frighteningly false. The bright, quotidian landscape seems a facade that threatens to tumble at any moment.
  32. Nobody's Perfect
    Rare enough to make NoBody’s Perfect an exemplar of fresh-air filmmaking that addresses the devastating legacy of the drug thalidomide with acidic wit and grumpy honesty.
  33. Audrey the Trainwreck
    Frank V. Ross wrote and directed this slice of Midwestern mumblecore in a style -- overlapping dialogue, off-center compositions, a jumpy, disconnected narrative -- that suggests Robert Altman without any of Altman's instincts for character and poetry.
  34. Girl Rising
    Though some of the writers inject a force of metaphor and strength of voice, no one would confuse the movie with a short-story collection. But it’s more ambitious and effective at blunting cynicism than most consciousness-raising efforts.
  35. Ways to Live Forever
    A little wan but a lot likable, Gustavo Ron’s Ways to Live Forever is a forthright and surprisingly buoyant drama about facing death before you have really lived.
  36. Beyond the Edge
    This absorbing account of the first recorded summit of the world’s highest mountain is a rare documentary for which re-enactments make complete sense.
  37. We Live in Time
    Almut’s ambitions give her spark and grit, and they make the character appealingly contemporary, as does Pugh’s vibrancy and emotionally charged performance. The actress handles the shifting periods and deepening drama adroitly, even when the filmmakers begin selling out her character.
  38. Heli
    Heli, which won the directing prize in Cannes last year, is at once extreme and unspectacular, a grisly and lurid slice-of-life drama.
  39. She's Lost Control
    She’s Lost Control sustains a mood of deepening alienation, but the attitude of the movie is too detached for it to be emotionally gripping, and its ending is botched.
  40. Sibyl
    Whether psychological drama or sexual farce — and, really, there’s no way to tell — Sibyl is a soapy mess.
  41. Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man
    In its quest to give us a little bit of everything, it finally delivers not nearly enough of anything.
  42. Mortal Kombat
    The movie's extensive martial arts sequences, in which combatants bounce off each other doing triple handsprings, suggest a slightly more earthbound version of the aerial ballets in Hong Kong action-adventure films.
  43. Ping Pong
    Stylistically stunning and completely nuts, Ping Pong is nevertheless perceptive about male social hierarchies and the benefits of knowing your place.
  44. Gunnin' for That #1 Spot
    As guileless and eager as the most avid fan, Gunnin’ is neither cautionary nor analytical, allowing its insights to occur organically and without fancy camera moves.
  45. Fantasia 2000
    Not especially innovative in its look or subject matter.
  46. Only the Strong Survive
    In its zeal to bring recognition to an underappreciated genre, it has an agenda similar to that of last year's revelatory documentary "Standing in the Shadows of Motown."
  47. Big Eden
    The movie is as flat and plain as a television program, and most of the supporting characters (including Louise Fletcher as a kindly schoolmarm) seem equally two-dimensional, as if they had wandered in from the set of "The Andy Griffith Show."
  48. The Rundown
    The director, Peter Berg ("Very Bad Things"), keeps the predictable story line on course without developing a truly compelling momentum in the action sequences or finding anything fresh in the interaction of the stock characters.
  49. The Perfect Storm
    The Perfect Storm is no "Titanic."
  50. Attitude
    Typical Nilsson mix of the audacious and the cringe-inducing.
  51. Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements
    The film’s deaf subjects feel creatively and philosophically shortchanged.
  52. Life
    Mr. Corbijn picturesquely frames the back story to the shoot, but his muffled retelling drifts with Dane DeHaan’s murmurous impersonation of Dean and Robert Pattinson’s almost perversely listless turn as Stock.
  53. Private Benjamin
    Mr. Zieff demonstrates great skill in keeping the gags aloft and in finding new ways by which to free the laughs trapped inside old routines about latrine duty, war games, forced marches and calisthenics. [10 Oct 1980, p.C6]
    • The New York Times
  54. Beowulf
    The 3-D is necessary to the film only in so far as it keeps your eyes engaged when your mind starts to wander. Stripped of much of the original poem’s language, its cadences, deep history and context, this film version of Beowulf doesn’t offer much beyond 3-D oohs and ahs, sword clanging and a nicely conceived dragon, which probably explains why Mr. Zemeckis and his collaborators have tried to sex it up with Ms. Jolie, among other comic-book flourishes.
  55. Voyeur
    Choosing not to delve too deeply into the mind of either man — or to question Mr. Talese’s journalistic ethics and less-than-scrupulous fact-checking — the directors are content to mostly watch as each vies for control of the movie, and his legacy. It’s an entertainingly desperate joust, playing out beneath defiantly unattractive lighting.
  56. The Humbling
    The movie is too shrewd to qualify as a jeremiad, but underneath the comedy are boiling undercurrents of anger and despair.
  57. See for Me
    This uninvolving thriller is as lacking in tension as credibility.
  58. White Boy Rick
    Squint and you can sometimes make out the bigger, more complex stories in White Boy Rick, including those of a great city violently brought low; of fragile communities left to fail and rot; and of a legal system that seems permanently broken. Too often, though, the movie traffics in genre clichés and the usual suspects.
  59. Hidden Blade
    However crisp and stylishly executed, the parts don’t quite add up to a satisfying whole.
  60. Being Maria
    If the meandering nature of the film makes the psychic fallout seem tonally scattered, it nevertheless conveys the sense that she’s sleepwalking through life — and always fighting to snap out of it.
  61. The Secret Garden
    In a year defined by surprise, the predictability of The Secret Garden — a new film adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved 1911 novel — proves more charming than tedious.
  62. The Last Mimzy
    Despite leaden direction and a story crammed with pseudoscientific flotsam -- including palm reading, levitation, time travel and telepathy -- The Last Mimzy is a wholesome, eager entertainment that doesn't talk down.
  63. Seeds of Time
    Perhaps it’s a hazard tied to a subject, seeds, which are all about potential, but Ms. McLeod’s film feels naggingly diffuse and insufficiently vivid in evoking diversity.
  64. The Wanted 18
    Even at 75 minutes, it can feel padded with footage whose connection to the central plot is tenuous. But at its best, The Wanted 18 follows a worthy tradition of highlighting absurdities that arise during conflict.
  65. Breakfast on Pluto
    In a year overcrowded with wonderful performances by lead actors, Mr. Murphy's immensely appealing turn ranks among the strongest.
  66. Yosemite
    Ms. Demeestere’s direction winds up frustratingly splitting the difference between thoughtfully detached and just plain vague.
  67. Spider-Man 3
    The bittersweet paradox of this franchise is that while the stories have grown progressively less interesting the special effects have improved tremendously, becoming at once more plausible -- when Spider-Man swings through the urban canyons he finally looks almost real -- and more spectacular.
  68. Lousy Carter
    Between the hammering misanthropy, the herky-jerky editing and almost defiantly crummy sound mix, this exasperating film keeps you enjoyably off-balance.
  69. Mission: Impossible II
    Once the basic conflict is established, the story plods along, alternating between preposterous -- in a bad way -- speeches and even more preposterous -- but in a good way -- shootouts and slugfests.
  70. Disco and Atomic War
    Disco and Atomic War describes propaganda battles between the Soviet Union and the West, with Estonian Communist officials charged to gain the upper hand, but they were helpless amid the onslaught.
  71. Drew: The Man Behind the Poster
    At length, the cheerleading...becomes a mildly taxing torrent. And Mr. Struzan, while an agreeable presence, is not an especially engrossing speaker. But then there is his artwork, an essential aid to the movies — and often their superior.
  72. Taste
    There’s something here. It’s just undercooked. The cinematic philosophy around these minimalist hallucinations comes down to whether the images ought to amount to anything, as they always do with Weerasethakul and almost always with Reygadas.
  73. Mom and Dad
    Mr. Taylor offers up nothing but glitchy editing and bad vibes.
  74. Road to Nowhere
    If Mr. Hellman's movie only partly fulfills its promise as a gripping neo-noir mystery, his stylistic hallmarks lend it a singularly haunting atmosphere.
  75. Mojados: Through the Night
    Manages to capture firsthand the danger, fatigue and sheer tedium of an arduous illegal border crossing from Mexico without ever becoming tedious itself.
  76. Unconscious
    If Unconscious consistently overplays its hand, its fusion of a Sherlock Holmes-style detective story (Alma is the master sleuth, and Salvador her Dr. Watson) with a delirious bedroom farce in the spirit of early Pedro Almodóvar is frequently very funny.
  77. Unbroken
    What the movie ends up in desperate need of is a sense of life made real and palpable through dreadful, transporting details, not a life embalmed in hagiographic awe.
  78. Into the Forest
    Ms. Rozema tries to build tension and sustain interest by thickening the atmosphere and layering on details rather than big incidents. Yet while she creates intimacy as well as interiority by visually closing in on each sister...the movie lacks urgency.
  79. Fuze
    Despite a plot (by Ben Hopkins) bursting with double- and triple- crosses, the movie feels programmatic, its characters bland cogs in a Rube Goldberg machine.
  80. Seducing Doctor Lewis
    The film's warm, sweet sentiments are genial and unchallenging, and its jokes are low-key and gentle.
  81. The Living Daylights
    Mr. Dalton, the latest successor to the role of James Bond, is well equipped for his new responsibilities.
  82. The Shallows
    Mr. Collet-Serra’s busy visual style, which uses a lot of fast-cutting, willy-nilly variations between slow and fast motion, and illogical but vivid point-of-view shots, seems at least somewhat apt under the exhilarating circumstances.
  83. The Experiment
    It's empty calories trying to trumpet its bogus nutritional value, and the strain for social importance undermines the picture.
  84. The Clovehitch Killer
    With its achingly slow build and understated performances, The Clovehitch Killer strains to surmount its lack of urgency.
  85. Make Believe
    The buildup to the actual competition is perfectly paced, with the film never tipping its hand as to the winner. And the championship has all the drama of a high-stakes sporting event: failure under pressure, unexpected triumph, gracious losers and winners both.
  86. Torn
    Slowly uncovering the prejudices that calamity can unleash, Michael Richter’s screenplay lays bare the damage wrought by Sept. 11 while deftly dodging hysteria, wondering how we differentiate between innocent teenage behaviors and dangerous red flags.
  87. 24 Days
    Mr. Arcady’s reliance on heavy-handed melodrama, on screaming women and on worried-looking men, winds everything so tightly that the anguish plateaus and the characters begin to seem like chess pieces in an argument.
  88. Obsession
    Whatever shred of credibility the movie retains is dispersed by the final, dead serious directorial hocus‐pocus.
  89. Jin Roh: The Wolf Brigade
    Something to behold; it's just not much to watch, despite admirable ambition and a few tense, well-thought-out sequences.
  90. L'ennui
    Overly schematic, not always believable in its crude sexual mechanics and ultimately unsensual. But it lays out the laws of erotic attraction with a brutal directness that is downright scary.
  91. Waking the Dead
    Forever stumbling over itself and breaking its own spell.
  92. A Home at the End of the World
    In parceling his story into discrete scenes, Mr. Cunningham has turned a delicate novel into a bland and clumsy film. A Home at the End of the World, is so thoroughly decent in its intentions and so tactful in its methods that people are likely to persuade themselves that it's better than it is, which is not very good.
  93. The Best Man Holiday
    Mr. Lee’s film is more traditional than its sexually frank humor might indicate, with faith and charity ultimately given pride of place (right alongside human pettiness). But even if some of the crudeness and the drama feel forced, it’s hard to hate.
  94. Copying Beethoven
    Topped with that messy salt-and-pepper wig that frames and obscures his scowling, searching face, [Harris] invests Beethoven with a violent turbulence that sometimes floods the room but mostly stays coiled inside, where it seethes.
  95. Restless City
    Mr. Dosunmu seems to have directed all his actors to pause before delivering lines, giving a languor to the film that comes to feel studied.
  96. Two Plains & a Fancy
    The mode of humor is close to cliquish anticomedy, and viewers not attuned to it may feel like there’s a joke they’re missing.
  97. Outlaw King
    Mackenzie does nice, tight work now and again, mostly in more intimate sequences, but too many scenes drag, and his fetishistization of violence proves numbing.
  98. Biosphere
    I can say without hyperbole that there are conversations in this movie that I have never heard before (and refuse to spoil). Better, I can confirm that Brown — the straight man to Duplass’s comic relief — delivers his half with conviction.
  99. Shakespeare High
    Performing Shakespeare can save children's lives. That is the persuasive argument of Alex Rotaru's documentary Shakespeare High, an inspiring, if too short and overcrowded, examination of the competition among high schools at the 90th annual Drama Teachers Association of Southern California Shakespeare Festival.
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