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. The Voices
    Grisly but not especially suspenseful, tongue-in-cheek without any real wit, The Voices aims to hit the intersection of horror and comedy but tumbles into an uncanny valley of tedious creepiness.
  2. Free Men
    Hilali and Benghabrit were real people. Mr. Ferroukhi, who wrote the script with Alain-Michel Blanc, deftly interweaves their stories with the adventures of the fictional Younes, and so contributes a worthy and interesting chapter to the tradition of World War II dramas of conscience.
  3. The Coca-Cola Kid
    The Coca-Cola Kid is of more interest for these oddball peripheral touches than for its awkward attempts at satire.
  4. ...and justice for all.
    With the exception of Mr. Strasberg and Mr. Levene, the actors are as hysterical as their material. The screenplay has one funny exchange. Other than that, the screenplay and the direction are a complete muddle.
  5. Sam & Kate
    Twists of fate lose their magic when they’re obvious as clumsy script contrivances.
  6. The Triumph of Love
    Triumph of Love, Marivaux's 270-year-old romantic comedy, is a beguiling trifle, a gauzy, teasing inquiry into the fungibility of emotions.
  7. Pipe Dream
    It's clear that this is a farce about ambition that is not ambitious enough, right down to its cutesy, punning title.
  8. NASCAR: The IMAX Experience
    Those seeking a serious sociological examination of the role of stock car racing in late capitalist America will probably want to search elsewhere, but audiences looking for a kick will find one -- almost literally -- in Mr. Wincer's work.
  9. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
    The performances by Mr. Johnson, Mr. Hart and Mr. Black seem informed by the conviction that if they amuse themselves, they will also amuse others. They are not entirely wrong, but they are also not sufficiently right.
  10. Beuys
    Even if you don’t need Beuys justified or explained to you, the movie is an exhilarating portrait of a unique truth-teller.
  11. Moonshot
    Sprouse plays it a touch broad, veering sometimes from endearing to goofy. But Condor is note-perfect, and Winterbauer directs with a light, playful touch, giving the movie an energy that’s nimble and vibrantly sexy.
  12. God Help the Girl
    Belle and Sebastian fans will be fully sated; everyone else might feel as if they’d consumed a meal consisting entirely of meringue.
  13. Wildling
    This creature feature from the director Fritz Böhm is functional but lacks flavor, an imaginative spark that might distinguish it from any number of other I-was-a-teenage-monster movies.
  14. The Fast and the Furious
    Neither fast nor furious, this film belongs in the section of the supermarket where blah-white labels and big block lettering denote brandless cigarettes, vodka, crushed pineapple and, in this case, action picture.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Meat Loaf: In Search of Paradise
    In Search of Paradise portrays Meat Loaf as an obsessive, self-punishing performer, striving in vain to put on a live show that matches the visions in his head.
  16. Amira & Sam
    Written and directed by Sean Mullin, a comedian and onetime Army officer (he plays a comic in the film), Amira & Sam is more successful as a portrait of veteran alienation than as a romance.
  17. Blood for Dust
    This sluggish, self-serious job-gone-wrong movie could itself stand to be jolted to life.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Split
    That first hour, although it is not too well or tightly written, is extremely well directed, by Gordon Flemyng, with fine chases on the order of "Bullitt" and meaningful uses of the split screen when the credits are on.
  19. Brian Banks
    Brian Banks isn’t a great movie, but it is a worthwhile one. And if it’s indicative of a new direction for its director, you won’t hear any complaints from me.
  20. Norwegian Wood
    The film has the loose narrative structure of a quasi-poetic personal journal that is more a series of reflections than a cohesive story.
  21. Baskin
    This proudly derivative genre exercise will not be to every taste (or stomach), but the director, Can Evrenol, shows a certain knack for tension and for framing viscera in wide screen, even if his cutting is sometimes too quick.
  22. Sell/Buy/Date
    Jones — who wrote, directed and stars in the film — doesn’t treat the tensions between exploitation and empowerment, personal agency and systemic cruelties, as binaries. Instead, they are riveting, confounding and, as exchanges between Jones and her mother attest, personal.
  23. Oliver & Company
    It's not that Oliver and Company is not up to par. It actively denies its own unique heritage. [18 Nov 1988, p.C8]
    • The New York Times
  24. To the Wonder
    The fine intentions of To the Wonder pave a road to puzzlement, not awe.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fame
    Apart from its virtues or defects as a general feature film, Fame - in its attitude toward the performing arts - strikes a new note. It is a streetwise film with streetwise characters. In its deflating moral for every protagonist, it sees these arts as meshed into a smog of urban existence. Its novelty is its anti-Romantic, ironic view toward these callings. [27 July 1980, p.8]
    • The New York Times
  26. Lady Sings the Blues
    The former lead singer of the Supremes is on-screen from start to finish, which is to say almost endlessly, but her only apparent limitations are those imposed on her by a screenplay and direction seemingly designed to turn a legitimate legend into a whopper of a cliché.
  27. Steep
    An undeniably impressive visual spectacle that follows the sport of extreme skiing.
  28. A Kid Like Jake
    Directed by Silas Howard from a screenplay by Daniel Pearle, who adapted his own stage play, A Kid Like Jake is humane, compassionate and strangely detached, almost to the point of inconsequentiality.
  29. The Accountant 2
    All that counts in The Accountant 2 is that it’s adroitly paced, unburdened by narrative logic (there are almost as many coincidences as corpses) and buoyed by its well-synced, charismatic leads.
  30. Hitch
    An average romantic comedy put together with enough professionalism to keep your cynicism momentarily at bay, featuring good-looking actors who also, in this case, seem like pretty nice people.
  31. Zero Bridge
    Handicapped by Mr. Tapa's sometimes sketchy screenplay and the limitations of his nonprofessional cast. (His clumsy staging of their dialogue scenes doesn't help.)
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Enforcer
    The action is reasonably fast and competently photographed. The picture doesn't exactly drag. But it is maggoty with non‐ideas.
  33. Shivers
    It's apparent that someone connected with They Came From Within has an impertinent sense of humor even though the film is so tackily written and directed, so darkly photographed and the sound so dimly recorded, that it's difficult to stay with it.
  34. Lover Come Back
    One of the brightest, most delightful satiric comedies since It Happened One Night.
  35. Baby God
    Olson’s poetic b-roll and Will Epstein’s soft, pulsing piano score buff away the lurid shocks.
  36. Ruth: Justice Ginsburg in Her Own Words
    Though filled with valuable details, the documentary has the misfortune of arriving after countless other appraisals.
  37. Sunday in New York
    Well, the extent of the film's disconcertion and delight for a viewer will depend upon how prone one may be to a juvenile quandary and to the nimble performing of a pleasant cast.
  38. Operation Finale
    It’s a story very worth telling, told pretty well, with self-evident virtues and obvious limitations. Viewers who see it out of a sense of duty will find some pleasure in the bargain. Call it the banality of good.
  39. The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio
    Gently, affectionately and with wit, this lovely movie gives the 1950's its due, but not for a moment does it go overboard and make you want to go back there.
  40. Before I Fall
    Before I Fall is tactful rather than maudlin, tasteful rather than lurid, soothing rather than creepy. None of that is good news.
  41. Life in a Day
    It's a hard movie to engage with or even sit through, despite the fact that much of the material is interesting in its own right. Oddly, but perhaps predictably, the problem is the resolutely conventional and soft-headed way in which that material has been assembled.
  42. Dolphin Tale 2
    For the right age group, though, the film hits its marks: It’s wholesome, engaging and rife with impressive aquatic photography.
  43. August: Osage County
    August: Osage County falls into an uncanny valley between melodrama and camp, failing to achieve either heights of operatic feeling or flights of knowing parody. The jokes are too labored, too serious.
  44. It: Chapter Two
    This 2-hour-49-minute movie drags more than it jumps, wearing out its premise and possibly also your patience as it lumbers toward the final showdown. Along the way there is some fun — some scares, some warm feelings, some inventive ickiness — to be found.
  45. Spin Me Round
    Although Plaza’s character makes it clear this is a story about complicity and manipulation, Baena keeps the tone silly, barely striving for scares even when creepy masks slink into view. He’s content to let the music take over — and so are we with its sly needle-drops that pull from heady italo disco and giallo horror scores.
  46. American Anarchist
    A study in denial, American Anarchist may be illuminating for being unilluminating.
  47. Stray Dolls
    Despite its sense of dead-end desperation, Stray Dolls is made worthwhile by the richness of Shane Sigler’s nighttime cinematography and the consistent empathy of its tone. Sinha, herself a first-generation immigrant, isn’t about to judge anyone for reaching.
  48. Twice in a Lifetime
    An enjoyable, second-rate family drama rich in the kind of folk wisdom that can ordinarily be found on daytime television.
  49. The Wisdom of Crocodiles
    Mr. Law doesn't disgrace himself here, though he doesn't have much to do, and the director, Po Chih Leong, is deft at creating atmosphere, but it's an atmosphere we've all seen before.
  50. Hats Off
    Ten years in the making, Hats Off is a documentary tribute to the 93-year-old actress Mimi Weddell, one of those people for whom the word “individual” seems especially apt.
  51. Troubadours
    The enjoyable, lightweight Troubadours is a musical scrapbook that throws together a bit of this and a bit of that.
  52. Tokyo Tribe
    "The Warriors” and the “Mad Max” films will come to mind as you watch Tokyo Tribe, and from scene to scene Mr. Sono’s visual inventiveness and sure hand with action stand up to the comparison. The cumulative effect, however, is numbing.
  53. It Happened in L.A.
    As a screenwriter, Ms. Morgan is nimble with glib conversation, and she is fearless at playing an often unlikable character. But this movie might only narrowly pass the Bechdel test, and mustering sympathy for Annette’s affluent, insular circle is difficult. The plot resolutions ultimately feel pat, and the conflicts, in retrospect, thin.
  54. Yusuf Hawkins: Storm Over Brooklyn
    The competing agendas surrounding the case would prevent anyone from making a cohesive Hawkins documentary, and Storm Over Brooklyn never settles on a satisfying point of view.
  55. The Mist
    Until the director Frank Darabont decides that he’s saying something important instead of making a nifty horror movie, The Mist isn’t half bad.
  56. Troop Zero
    What Troop Zero lacks in complexity, it makes up for in heart.
  57. Jug Face
    Some low-budget manifestations of the supernatural jazz up the frights now and again, but as the novelty of worshiping a hole in the ground fades, the film paints itself into a corner.
  58. F9: The Fast Saga
    The director Justin Lin, happily brandishing all the expensive digital tools at his disposal, makes “F9” feel scrappy and baroque at the same time. The identity of the brand rests on twin foundations of silliness and sincerity, both of which are honored here.
  59. X-Men: The Last Stand
    Mostly, as so often with these types of empty entertainments, you are left to wonder why companies that hire so many fine actors to run around under latex and foam and have the best technological wizardry money can buy seem to spend so little attention to the screenplay.
  60. You've Got Mail
    The film's mix of romance and reading matter is seductive in its own right, providing comfy book-lined settings and people who are what they read and write.
  61. Adam Resurrected
    The film is so flat that it leaves you wondering if Mr. Kaniuk's book is ultimately untranslatable to the screen.
  62. Videodrome
    Though Videodrome finally grows grotesque and a little confused, it begins very well and sustains its cleverness for a long while.
  63. Lads & Jockeys
    Lads & Jockeys conveys first-race terrors and last-place humiliation with indulgent thoroughness.
  64. Jarhead
    Mr. Swofford's book has earned a place alongside the classics of military literature, but Mr. Mendes's film is more like a footnote - a minor movie about a minor war, and a film that feels, at the moment, remarkably irrelevant.
  65. Cosmopolis
    A cold, funny number about the erotics of money and the seduction of death.
  66. Acts of Worship
    It's about individuals, not about sensations. If the characters' backgrounds are not examined in detail, the movie still conveys an intimate sense of who they are and their emotional connections.
  67. Class Action
    Class Action won't put you to sleep. Yet it vanishes from the memory as fast as anything dreamed in the conventional manner.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dillinger
    In making his debut as a director, Mr. Milius gives us a "Dillinger" that is fascinating for its speed, action and firepower. But as character studies of decidedly interesting types out of explosive history, "Dillinger" shoots blanks most of the time.
  69. Footloose
    Somehow Footloose never finds its rhythm. The maudlin scenes drag on, and the livelier moments pass by too quickly. It only works when it settles down and lets the characters (and the audience) hang out and have a little fun.
  70. Jason Bourne
    The tedium, I would argue, is not incidental but essential, because this is not really a spy thriller or even a foot-chase and fist-fight-driven action movie, but rather a somber meditation on the crisis of the Gen-X professional in the throes of middle age.
  71. Love Liza
    The movie is so small and emotionally constricted that it gives Hoffman too little room to explore his range.
  72. Swimming Upstream
    The role, one of the meatiest of Mr. Rush's career, is equal in flash and complexity to his turns as the pianist David Helfgott in "Shine" and the Marquis de Sade in "Quills."
  73. Nocturne
    Contrivances are par for the course in this genre, but Nocturne lacks the stylistic flair to make them fun.
  74. Kansas City
    If the movie, which uses blues-based Kansas City jazz as a raucous, nonverbal Greek chorus, lacks the emotional range of Mr. Altman's masterpiece, ''Nashville,'' it still has its own brawling vitality.
  75. Disclosure
    The storytelling of Disclosure is too forced and polemical to be on a par with better Crichton tales like "Jurassic Park." This time, it's the author who's the dinosaur.
  76. Flamin' Hot
    Longoria, working from a screenplay by Lewis Colick and Linda Yvette Chávez, sprinkles lessons in self-esteem throughout. (The movie is Longoria’s feature directing debut.) And the women here — including Montañez’s mother and Judy — are more than run-of-the-mill catalysts. Still, should it come as a surprise that a movie this puffed up has a dusting of flavors that might not be real?
  77. Stan Lee
    It’s disappointing, yet inevitable that the creation story of Lee gives way to the characters he helped create.
  78. Victoria and Abdul
    In the shift from comedy to drama the movie goes wobbly.
  79. The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
    The film genre that might be called Old People Behaving Hilariously gets an appealing new entry with The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared, a sometimes daffy, often droll Swedish movie.
  80. The Last Shift
    So far, so good, in the mismatched maybe-eventual-buddy-comedy department. But the movie, written and directed by Andrew Cohn, wants a deeper dimension, and in pursuing that, goes wrong.
  81. Boston Strangler
    Washed in an unappetizing sludge of grayish green, the movie aims for serious and settles on bilious. The real McLaughlin was a fascinating, pioneering newshound; you’re unlikely to find her here.
  82. Edgar G. Ulmer - The Man Off-screen
    In the main, Mr. Palm sticks to the usual biopic formula: a chronological account of a heroic individual told through talking heads, still photographs and film clips. Mr. Palm's principal deviation from this formula is that some of the interviews take place in moving cars.
  83. Luck by Chance
    It is Mr. Akhtar whose understated performance holds together this far-ranging, cameo-filled film.
  84. Gogol Bordello Non-Stop
    Choppy, high-energy documentary.
  85. Heneral Luna
    I’m only a little embarrassed at liking Heneral Luna, an audaciously manipulative movie that’s more involving than it should be. But really, when a film works this hard to rouse you, there’s no shame in just giving in.
  86. Altered States
    The film is in fine shape as long as it revels in its own craziness, making no claims on the viewer's reason. But when it asks you to believe that what you're watching may really be happening, and to wonder what it means, it is asking far too much.
  87. Tuvalu
    Helmer's wildly whimsical debut film, Tuvalu, is the kind of movie that might one day find itself in the hall of fame of surreal movie weirdness alongside cult favorites like "Eraserhead," "Delicatessen" and the avant-garde frolics of Guy Maddin.
  88. Help!
    The boys themselves are exuberant and uninhibited in their own genial way. They just become awfully redundant and—dare I say it?—dull.
  89. No Stone Unturned
    What Mr. Gibney uncovers is grave and shocking and could make a viewer concerned for the safety of the filmmaker. But its presentation is flawed.
  90. Wolf Totem
    The landscape and painstakingly trained wolves are the true stars.
  91. The Model
    Mr. Matthiesen seems as if he might have been trying to make an indictment of sexism and exploitation in the fashion world, but if so he doesn’t hit the theme nearly hard enough.
  92. Pirate Radio
    Stuffed with playful character actors and carpeted with wall-to-wall tunes, the film makes for easy viewing and easier listening.
  93. The Reader
    The film is neither about the Holocaust nor about those Germans who grappled with its legacy: it's about making the audience feel good about a historical catastrophe that grows fainter with each new tasteful interpolation.
  94. Balls Out
    Besides a clever, blithely ribald script by Bradley Jackson, the movie benefits from a potent “Saturday Night Live”-empowered cast.
  95. Year of the Dragon
    In Year of the Dragon, a busy and elaborate film that manages to be inordinately messy, his tactics are a constant distraction, dissipating the viewer's interest at every turn.
  96. Cleopatra Jones
    The movie seems to want to be a James Bond sort of adventure in black drag, but it's more reminiscent of Batman.
  97. Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus
    Occasionally, this richly lyrical movie passes over the line separating sympathetic exploration from freak-show condescension.
  98. The Swan
    Director Asa Helga Hjorleifsdottir never displays the passion that her characters suggest in their stories. If her film ever diverged from its ubiquitous images of misty mountains or its plodding piano score, perhaps its characters’ incessant mythmaking would convey deeper mysteries, inner worlds that are not visible to the eye.
  99. Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power
    Limited to a mere pointing out of which kinds of images are empowering to women and which aren’t, the documentary ultimately does a disservice to the art form, feminist or otherwise.
  100. The Fortune
    It's a marvelous attempt to recreate a kind of farce that, with the notable exceptions of a handful of films by Blake Edwards and Billy Wilder, disappeared after World War II.
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