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. Ice Age: The Meltdown
    The animation is uninspired (with so much ice, the creatures need to be twice as good-looking), and the story is humdrum. (The saber-toothed tiger learns to swim!)
  2. Lakeboat
    Mr. Mantegna, who as an actor is one of the leading interpreters of Mr. Mamet's work, gives generous room to the movie's first-rate ensemble.
  3. Langrishe Go Down
    A teasing, oblique curiosity of a movie.
  4. Intact
    The latest movie from Spain to use the conventions of the thriller to explore knotty and fascinating philosophical questions.
  5. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
    Several love beads short of its predecessor. Intermittently hilarious comedy.
  6. Nico and Dani
    Amazingly, Cesc Gay's delicate but unblinking film Nico and Dani succeeds in capturing and sustaining the fragile emotional climate of curiosity, fear, innocence and prurience that surrounds adolescent sexual experimentation.
  7. Signs
    Mr. Shyamalan never gives us anything to believe in, other than his own power to solve problems of his own posing, and his command of a narrative logic is as circular -- and as empty -- as those bare patches out in the cornfield.
  8. The Front Line
    A movie that reserves its final sickening wallop for a grueling half-hour that leaves you as emotionally battered as the soldiers are forced to return to hell for one last senseless round.
  9. Dangerous Liaisons (2012)
    Schadenfreude carries a delectable tang no matter the language, and as the history of Hollywood shows, stories about pretty people behaving badly remain reliably alluring.
  10. Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead
    If the movie’s hilariously cruel treatment of the halt and the lame upsets you, you can enjoy the crisp cinematography, operatically repulsive effects and frequently witty dialogue.
  11. Simon
    Tackles weighty social issues with quiet intelligence and low-key charm.
  12. Bridget Jones's Baby
    Despite an abundance of mostly tepid jokes that keeps the comedic tone at a quiet simmer, Bridget Jones’s Baby doesn’t jell. Ms. Zellweger floats through the picture, charming but strangely detached from her suitors.
  13. A Very British Gangster
    Plays less like a documentary than an E! exposé of lowlife skulduggery.
  14. Suntan
    Replete with sometimes startling imagery...Suntan captures a set of very specific feelings: the exhilaration and embarrassment of falling, followed by the desperate denial that one has landed in a very bad place.
  15. The Napa Boys
    The humor is over-the-top and often exaggeratedly juvenile, but like many nominally “dumb” comedies, it’s the product of a keen and deliberate intelligence.
  16. Elvis & Nixon
    Despite Mr. Shannon and Mr. Spacey, who appear to be having a fine time working off each other, the meeting is anticlimactic.
  17. Legally Blonde
    The character as written is incoherent, but Ms. Witherspoon has the reflexes to make Elle both appealing and ridiculous. It's funny -- in that slightly queasy, un-P.C. Doris Day kind of way.
  18. The Final Girls
    A horror comedy that proves that with the right actors you can make an amusing movie even if a lot of your ideas are borrowed.
  19. Quiz Lady
    Quiz Lady, a mostly winning comedy directed by Jessica Yu, is elevated most of all on the shoulders of Oh’s delightful and nuanced performance.
  20. The Pact
    Neumann’s baroness is grandiose and transfixing (as are Anne-Dorthe Eskildsen’s handsome costumes).
  21. Cars 3
    If you can roll with it, the movie is both breezy fun and a pain-free life lesson delivery vehicle
  22. Good Grief
    Good Grief does that rare, beautiful thing: It trusts the audience to pay attention.
  23. Moonlight Mile
    Though its conclusion is too tidily therapeutic, and though elements of its story strain credibility, Moonlight Mile has an understated, lived-in quality and a wry, unforced sense of the absurd.
  24. Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie
    Serviceably, at times awkwardly, directed by Mandie Fletcher, the movie skews softer than the series at its barbed best, partly because the celebrity culture that once provided such rich material has become just another ratings opportunity for the Kardashians.
  25. The Dead Lands
    As it dives into this infrequently depicted culture, Mr. Fraser’s film is caught shuttling uneasily between speeches and action.
  26. Pearl Jam Twenty
    Before viewers learn this venerable ensemble's story, much less see its members rock out on screen, they are subjected to Mr. Crowe's voice-over account of his own early discovery of the Seattle scene.
  27. Savages
    Savages is a daylight noir, a western, a stoner buddy movie and a love story, which is to say that it is a bit of a mess. But also a lot of fun, especially as its pulp elements rub up against some gritty geopolitical and economic themes.
  28. Salvo
    A soulful romance, an existential action flick and something of a miracle movie — the appealing slow-burner Salvo hovers at the crossroads of genre.
  29. Roll Bounce
    A drowsy comedy about a handful of kids grooving and roller-skating, Roll Bounce has heart and good vibes but little else to recommend it.
  30. Abigail Harm
    Abigail and her Asian friend’s own “forest” is filled with overburdened metaphors and quivering emotions, quirks and tics and even regulation Malick-like twirling. Some of this is pretty; none of it sticks.
  31. For a Woman
    The 1980s sequences, with their tears and epiphanies, are less vivid and less convincing. An inviting sense of mystery hangs over the events of 1947, Ms. Kurys’s origin story.
  32. Shot Caller
    Shot Caller effectively conveys the vise grip of Jacob’s options, but that doesn’t make it less ludicrous from scene to scene.
  33. Together
    That it’s bearable at all is entirely because of the superlative acting skills of James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan as an unnamed couple forced to endure an extended London lockdown.
  34. Molière
    Less forgivably, the movie is dull.
  35. The Lie
    Comprising small, near-perfect scenes played out largely at dinner tables and on couches, The Lie wonders if it's possible to rewrite lives and remake choices.
  36. A Star Is Born
    Streisand never plays to or with the other actors. She does A Star Is Born as a solo turn. Everybody else is a back‐up musician, which is okay when she's belting out a lyric, but distinctly odd when other actors come into the same frame.
  37. Mission: Impossible
    A sleek, whooshingly entertaining update of the vintage television series.
  38. Independence Day
    Two reasons it's impossible to resist "Independence Day": because of its pitch-perfect cartoonish dialogue ("Now you're never gonna get to fly the space shuttle if you marry a stripper!") and because the Captain, like Indiana Jones, is so unflappably tough.
  39. The Sticky Fingers of Time
    Works, in its deliberately low-key way.
  40. Sliding Doors
    Once the movie throws in a jolting, late-in-the-gameplot twist that could have been borrowed from "City of Angels," it never regains its balance.
  41. Confidence
    If Confidence was made by people who have seen too many movies, it seems to be aimed at people who have seen too few. It offers up stale lessons in vocabulary and technique, all of them easily gleaned on a trip to the video store, as if they were choice bits of inside knowledge.
  42. Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi
    The picture is a bland procession of loosely framed close-ups, which serve only to underline the amateurish performances.
  43. American Pimp
    What we are left with is a mildly entertaining "man on the street" gloss, seasoned with fragments from blaxploitation movies and music by Isaac Hayes, Marvin Gaye and others.
  44. The Boys & Girl from County Clare
    Appealing if obvious little fable.
  45. Red, White & Wasted
    Distracted by Confederate flags and twerking women, the directors, Andrei Bowden Schwartz and Sam Jones, make only a halfhearted attempt to illuminate a disappearing subculture.
  46. Wish Dragon
    Wish Dragon is a transporting experience, but it’s far from a whole new world.
  47. The Drama
    Zendaya and Pattinson are both enjoyable to watch, but she’s given too little to do and he’s given too much.
  48. Dawn of the Dead
    The eventual video game is bound to be a lot more fun -- and less slowed down by bad dialogue -- than this "Dead."
  49. Mendy
    Ms. Dias gives the role an understated allure, and Mr. Sandomire is as good as his character's inconsistencies allow. Their performances and Mr. Vardy's ability to be reverent when he wants to be are the film's strengths.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Noriko's Dinner Table
    This 159-minute feature doesn't quite cohere. Mr. Sono's direction is haphazard; he oversells the first half's whimsical touches and the second half's spiral-of-doom emoting. Still, the movie is worth seeing, if only to experience a small story with impossibly grand ambitions.
  51. Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love
    Perhaps because the music is so good, with its purity of tone and dazzling rhythmic precision, the flaws of the surrounding movie become all the more obvious.
  52. Two in the Wave
    Two in the Wave honors that collaboration by carefully recounting its details and arguing for its significance. The films of Truffaut and Mr. Godard stand or fall by themselves, but together they made history.
  53. Ip Man
    Over all, the film is a prime exhibit in the relentless and regrettable shift away from a natural, allusive, romantic Hong Kong style and toward a mainland studio aesthetic that is stagebound, literal, overstuffed and sentimental - like the big-budget Hollywood weepies of the '60s or the '80s.
  54. Surviving Progress
    Like too many short documentaries, it can't do justice to its complex topic or finally to those of us watching. Because, while Surviving Progress puts forth a lot of general advice (stop the deforestation of the Amazon), it offers little in terms of real, practical, graspable solutions. People need hope; moviegoers do too.
  55. Who Bombed Judi Bari?
    Relies too much on rehash and preaching to the choir to kindle a broad-based outrage, but it does make you wonder what really happened on May 24, 1990.
  56. The Most Unknown
    The Most Unknown works best as inspiration to delve deeper into these disciplines, and as a celebration of science. And when the film comes up short, it still functions like an intriguing experiment: It doesn’t have to be entirely successful for you to learn something.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Apple Dumpling Gang
    Walt Disney started by making movies in which animated drawings played the parts of people or animals who stood for people. Later he turned to making movies in which people or animals play the parts of animated drawings. They bound, they double-take, they simper when moved and quack when angry. Their disasters—crashes, plunges through space, explosions—are weightless. The Apple Dumpling Gang is a fair example.
  58. The Hand
    A suspense-horror film of unusual psychological intelligence and wit.
  59. My Darling Supermarket
    Better late than never, the film’s spiritual thrust becomes clear by the third act. The stark symmetry of the shelved merchandise and the eerily dissonant score assumes an otherworldly, ritualistic power when our subjects begin musing on faith and the nature of existence.
  60. Drifting Home
    Though Drifting Home delivers a great visual concept . . . it doesn’t deliver on the action. The pacing lags and the beats are predictable; the film’s go-to antic is having children repeatedly topple overboard.
  61. The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer
    It is all reminiscent of some of those gay, galvanic larks that Gregory LaCava and Leo McCarey used to make ten or more years ago. And a higher recommendation we can't give to a light summer show.
  62. The President’s Wife
    While Deneuve brings a wonderful blend of neuroses and feigned indifference to her character, the film’s pop-feminist through line dulls the comedy, creating a more conventionally celebratory portrait.
  63. Hava Nagila: The Movie
    The interviews are mostly good and instructive, but the well-chosen historical footage is better.
  64. My Zoe
    An unusually compelling domestic drama with sharp ears, a sharp eye, and up to a point, sharp teeth.
  65. Women Is Losers
    It’s arguable that Celina’s emotional distance is a true reflection of how working class women manage their feelings in order to cope. But it could be dissatisfying to a viewer craving to see women’s interior lives; their pain rather than their resilience.
  66. The Forgiven
    Fiennes peels David in layers, unraveling this man until you see his hollow interior.
  67. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
    There is so much talent on display in Park Chanwook's Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, it is a drag that the film never rises to the level of its director's obvious ability.
  68. Moonlight
    Though rife with topics and images American audiences may find offensive, Moonlight addresses them fearlessly and with some artistry.
  69. Murder by Death
    Murder by Death is as light and insubstantial as one could wish.
  70. Limitless
    An energetic, enjoyably preposterous compound - it's a paranoid thriller blended with pseudo-neuro-science fiction and catalyzed by a jolting dose of satire.
  71. Nobody 2
    Like many sequels, this one ramps up everything, including the body count. The fight sequences here are well-staged, shot and cut, more elaborate than in the earlier movie and at times gleefully grisly, with skewered and barbecued flesh.
  72. Running from Crazy
    This heart-wrenching and deceptively conventional documentary manages the tensions in its subject and in the vérité approach in a fruitful, illuminating and surprisingly moving way.
  73. Jurassic World
    There’s more flab than muscle packed on this galumphing franchise reboot, which, as it lumbers from scene to scene, reminds you of what a great action god Steven Spielberg is. Too bad he didn’t take the reins on this.
  74. On the Ice
    Glinting white vistas and endless light blanket On the Ice, a frigid drama that's tough to warm up to.
  75. Realive
    Like a “Black Mirror” episode combined with a philosophy seminar, Realive has plenty of brains. Yet it has a heart, too, and that adds a surprising amount of emotion to this above-average science-fiction film.
  76. The Last Dragon
    Berry Gordy's The Last Dragon is a multimedia movie of sorts, designed for those who can't bear the monotony of only one thought or sound or activity at a time.
  77. The Black Sea
    Grounded by Harden’s natural and loosely charming performance, Khalid treats his nightmare scenario with an alternating sense of anxiety and buoyant, joshing can-do attitude.
  78. Day Watch
    Unfolding in a decrepit, present-day Moscow, Day Watch dazzles and confuses with equal determination.
  79. Rubber
    While it can be seen as an environmental horror movie (if you must), Rubber doesn't dig down but instead merrily rolls on, as Mr. Dupieux plays with narrative and form. In one wonderful cinematic coup the tire spots a crow and shifts toward the bird so that it's framed in the tire hole, an angle that turns the tire into a camera. Point. Click. Explode.
  80. Junior
    Proceeds efficiently but never quite lives up to its own potential as a sight gag.
  81. Michael Collins
    The film itself works eagerly to emphasize the frankly entertaining aspects of its story.
  82. The Dead
    Its scenes frequently feature Africans machine-gunning other Africans or hacking them to death with machetes. This is a disturbing sight indeed. Maybe it was intended as a metaphor, but this movie isn't nearly sophisticated enough to pull off that kind of commentary. It's not really even sophisticated enough to be an absorbing zombie movie
  83. We Are Wizards
    Amusing if unfocused documentary peek at some of the more engaged fans (and opportunists) circulating in the Harry Potter world.
  84. Strike a Pose
    Beyond the personal stories, the movie frames the tour and Truth or Dare as landmarks in the push for gay rights and awareness, and makes a convincing case.
  85. 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.
  86. Naqoyqatsi
    By far the grimmest of these nonnarrative, nonverbal cinematic tone poems with epic ambitions. Although none of the three could be described as cheery, Naqoyqatsi, whose title is the Hopi Indian term for war as a way of life, reeks of doomsday.
  87. Madame Satã
    It is a voluptuous, hot-blooded portrait of a social outcast, a black, homosexual criminal who in acting out his gaudiest Hollywood dreams, transcendently reinvented himself.
  88. The Children of the Century
    Though well dressed and well made, ultimately falls prey to the contradiction that afflicts so many movies about writers. What makes them so fascinating, so representative, cannot really be shown on screen.
  89. Barbershop 2: Back in Business
    Given the stature and the presence that the entrepreneurial rappers-turned-film-moguls Ice Cube and Queen Latifah possess, the fizzle of their scenes is doubly disappointing.
  90. The Shape of Things
    Unfortunately, these actors are subject to Mr. LaBute's usual dramatic method, which is to cobble together a preposterous moral outrage and then wave it in front of our faces, asking us to believe that it is a window, or even a mirror.
  91. I, Robot
    Lacks both the intellectual rigor and the soulful sublimity of "A.I.," but it nonetheless allows some genuine ideas and emotions to pop up amid the noise and clutter.
  92. Valley of Love
    This movie is finally only about Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu, and that’s enough.
  93. Our Mothers
    Díaz’s approach is plain and solid, like a well-built wooden chair before varnishing.
  94. The Mack
    Even as action melodrama of a Shaft sort, the film is inept, so confused that occasionally it seems surreal.
  95. A Banquet
    You’re likely to leave this film starving for answers, but that hunger can be just as stimulating as it is burdensome.
  96. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
    And yet something vital here works. There are, come to think of it, a lot of little things.
  97. Dalíland
    While Dalíland occasionally edges into caricature, its take on Gala’s role in the marriage, her temperament and feverish attention to money is happily more complicated.
  98. Detroit Unleaded
    Detroit Unleaded is about as gentle as comedies come these days, commendably so.
  99. In Darkness
    In Darkness moves along so smartly that near the end, when the filmmakers entreat you to follow them just a bit more, you’ll likely oblige. And why not. They’ve already gotten you to invest quite a lot in this clever little thriller.
  100. I Love My Dad
    Since the audience is in on the scheme from the start, what we get is excruciating, uncut. But not too excruciating, because Franklin is such a drab cipher it’s hard to work up much empathy for him.
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