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. Freaky Tales
    High on revolutionary spirit, Freaky Tales is a frisky, frantic pastiche that doesn’t always make sense. . . Yet the visuals are meaty, and the filmmakers (whose last feature collaboration was on “Captain Marvel” in 2019) show considerable affection for their movie’s setting.
  2. Life Is Beautiful
    Benigni effectively creates a situation in which comedy is courage. And he draws from this an unpretentious, enormously likable film that plays with history both seriously and mischievously. Piety has no place here, nor do tears until the final reel. Life is Beautiful plays by its own rules
  3. Defamation
    Disorganized and somewhat annoying.
  4. Child's Play
    Child's Play has some limp dialogue among the clever touches. Its appeal is clearly for upscale horror fans rather than a general movie audience. Yet it is a fitting successor to the classic television horror stories it takes off from.
  5. The Firm
    The movie is extremely long (two hours and 34 minutes) and so slow that by the end you feel as if you've been standing up even if you've been sitting down.
  6. Stoker
    The final act of Stoker walks a fine line between the sensational and the silly. Mr. Park is less interested in narrative suspense than in carefully orchestrated shocks and camouflaged motives.
  7. The King
    Fitfully engaging, finally exasperating.
  8. Love & Air Sex
    Love & Air Sex has a spontaneity and cheeky attitude... along with spirited naturalistic performances that infuse the standard rom-com formula with a zany vitality.
  9. Trouble with the Curve
    Regrettably, it is not a home run or a perfect game, but it isn't a wild throw, an errant bunt or a dropped fly ball either. Trouble With the Curve is either an off-speed pitch that just catches the edge of the strike zone or a bloop single lofted into right field. The runner is safe. The movie is too.
  10. Hard Candy
    During the ensuing narrative unpleasantness and visual incoherence (meaningless choker close-ups, pointless slow motion), Hayley subjects Jeff to a range of torture, all in the name of, well, what? Despite the two fine performances, it's hard to say.
  11. Go Further
    Mr. Harrelson seems appealingly goodhearted, but his naïve idealism leaves him always on the edge of self-parody.
  12. The Object of Beauty
    The Object of Beauty might have been practically perfect escapist entertainment if the screenplay had been as smooth as the cast. Mr. Lindsay-Hogg has written some attractive characters and a lot of bright lines, but he needs a script doctor. He has let the plot confuse things.
  13. Defiance
    Defiance presents itself as an explicit correction of the cultural record, a counterpoint to all those lachrymose World War II tales of helplessness and victimhood. This is a perfectly honorable intention, but the problem is that, in setting out to overturn historical stereotypes of Jewish passivity, Mr. Zwick (who co-wrote the screenplay with Clayton Frohman) ends up affirming them.
  14. Under Siege
    As wild as the premise is, Under Siege is almost guiltily enjoyable.
  15. Nerve
    For all its hints at imminent catastrophe, Nerve feels surprisingly tame.
  16. Eternity
    Sappy and silly, Eternity made me thank heaven for Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early as the quick-witted coordinators tasked with guiding our threesome to perpetual bliss. They’re a comic delight, and they aerate a movie that’s most touching when it’s least frantic.
  17. The Keeping Room
    Mr. Barber can work up a fair sense of menace, but he seems to have directed most of the talented cast to speak their lines in a mannered fashion learned from other movies.
  18. The Highwaymen
    This isn’t an especially good movie — it’s too long, too drenched in Thomas Newman’s cloyingly eclectic score, too full of speechifying and self-regard — but it is a coherent one, with the courage of its vengeful, murderous, politically terrifying convictions.
  19. An American Pickle
    Pickles can be comfort food. Not too filling, good for the digestion, noisy and a little sloppy rather than artful or exquisite or challenging. This one, as I’ve said, isn’t bad, and even allows a soupçon of profundity into its formula.
  20. Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising
    Proudly crass and amiably dumb, Nicholas Stoller’s gag-crammed sequel essentially takes the bones of the 2014 original and gives them a gender flip.
  21. The Bridge
    This eerie and indelible documentary about suicide juxtaposes transcendent beauty with personal tragedy.
  22. Brown Sugar
    Sustains the charm of an early 60's New York romance.
  23. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning
    This bloody wallow in sweat, guns and fisticuffs - for those who swing that way - delivers.
  24. Gayby
    Inoffensive and low-key, Gayby is too diffuse to have much pop when it comes to the topics at hand: love and friendship, and how unconventional modern permutations might help rewrite the script of romance.
  25. Orchestra of Exiles
    Orchestra of Exiles aspires to a level of primary research that other historical documentaries could take a page from.
  26. The Rocketeer
    A benign adventure saga that has attractive stars, elaborate gimmicks and nice production values -- everything it needs except a personality of its own.
  27. The House of Tomorrow
    Working from Peter Bognanni’s 2010 novel, the writer and director, Peter Livolsi, has created a painfully quirky tale that’s so contrived you can almost hear the gears of the plot grinding.
  28. Hollow in the Land
    Alison closely resembles Jennifer Lawrence’s character in “Winter’s Bone,” another self-sufficient young woman whose family and community turn against her. This movie is not as tense, but it gets close thanks to Ms. Agron’s resolute performance and the movie’s hostile small town setting.
  29. Duck Butter
    [Ms. Shawkat] and Mr. Arteta, a sensitive observer of life’s everyday churn (his credits include “Beatriz at Dinner”), do some lovely work in a movie that reminds you that sometimes all you need in realist fiction is a glimpse into another person’s being — but with heart and intelligence, good craft and technique.
  30. Crimes of the Heart
    As adapted by Miss Henley and directed by Bruce Beresford, this Crimes of the Heart has been turned into a majestic, totally humorless star turn for three individually splendid, collectively lost actresses -Diane Keaton (Lenny), Jessica Lange (Meg) and Sissy Spacek (Babe).
  31. High & Low: John Galliano
    The director Kevin Macdonald asks Galliano questions in “High & Low,” but the answers are largely self-serving and unsatisfying in a movie that, for the most part, plays like yet another installment in a highly publicized redemption narrative.
  32. Titan: The OceanGate Disaster
    Directed by Mark Monroe, the film wisely does not linger in the lurid details of the Titan’s catastrophic end, and instead uses an investigative framing that sketches the company’s origins and use of carbon fiber while chronicling a series of problematic dives leading up to its final plunge.
  33. The Mule
    The story shifts and lumbers toward redemption that Earl doesn’t earn and that sentimentalizes a movie that is never especially good and often teasingly offensive but also fitfully entertaining and willfully perverse.
  34. Shrek Forever After
    What fortifies Shrek Forever After are its brilliantly realized principal characters, who nearly a decade after the first “Shrek” film remain as vital and engaging fusions of image, personality and voice as any characters in the history of animation.
  35. Apex
    This Netflix thriller is a fun-enough time that is elevated by the performances of predator and prey.
  36. The Oath
    It was said by many after the 2016 election that the Trump administration would yield great satirical art. This is not an example of that.
  37. Turbo
    It is interesting to note that a movie strenuously preaching the virtue of being different should be so fundamentally — so deliberately, so timidly — just like everything else of its kind... Still, even in the absence of originality, there is fun to be had, thanks to some loopy, clever jokes...and a lively celebrity voice cast.
  38. TRON
    It is beautiful -spectacularly so, at times - but dumb. Computer fans may very well love it, because Tron is a nonstop parade of stunning computer graphics, accompanied by a barrage of scientific-sounding jargon. Though it's certainly very impressive, it may not be the film for you if you haven't played Atari today.
  39. Beloved
    Beloved works on its own but is much enhanced by familiarity with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. In so ambitiously bringing this story to the screen, Ms. Winfrey underscores a favorite, invaluable credo: read the book.
  40. Psycho III
    Unlike most sequels, which seem to get bigger, fancier and emptier the further removed they are from their source material, Psycho III has a lean, serviceable, stripped-down quality to it.
  41. The Spine of Night
    Alas, all the world-building filmmakers may contrive doesn’t count for much if they don’t put it across visually. And this heavily rotoscoped vision does not get where it needs to be to achieve genuine trippiness.
  42. Bottom of the 9th
    The result is pleasing — a stadium snow cone, palatable despite being sweetened with corn syrup.
  43. Sisters
    Sisters is both too careful and too sloppy to take full advantage of the thornier implications of its premise. It’s too awkward — because scenes drag when they should swing and jokes sag when they should pop — and not awkward enough.
  44. Unleashed
    The infinitely silly, unconscionably entertaining action film Unleashed earns most of its juice from the martial-arts star Jet Li.
  45. Biutiful
    Mr. Bardem, best known to American audiences for his chillingly persuasive embodiment of evil in "No Country for Old Men," combines muscular, charismatic physicality with an almost delicate sensitivity, and this blend of the rough and the tender gives Biutiful a measure of emotional credibility that it may not entirely deserve.
  46. The Dictator
    That potential is mostly squandered in The Dictator, which gestures halfheartedly toward topicality and, with equal lack of conviction, toward pure, anarchic silliness.
  47. Quantum of Solace
    The violence in his (Craig's) first outing, "Casino Royale," was notably intense, and while Quantum of Solace is not quite as brutal, the mood is if anything even more grim and downcast.
  48. Roman J. Israel, Esq.
    It offers tonal whiplash for viewers, with several potentially great ideas that don’t settle into a coherent whole.
  49. Blossoms of Fire
    It's easy to be seduced by this film's warmhearted, if slightly utopian, vision.
  50. Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life
    The puppets and the music make Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life engaging, but it is also visually hectic and lacks either the dramatic intensity or the arresting insight that might have lifted it out of the pedestrian realm of the admiring biopic.
  51. ...And They Lived Happily Ever After
    Nobody does adultery in movies with more style and zest than the French, especially when the mode is frivolous. And anyone who watches Happily Ever After can identify with the grass-is-always-greener daydreams that haunt its characters.
  52. Danny Collins
    What authenticity Mr. Cannavale and Ms. Bening bring to their roles is the sense of groundedness and integrity for one-note characters in a movie whose screenplay is little more than an efficiently executed outline.
  53. Uncle Frank
    In Uncle Frank, the writer-director Alan Ball (“True Blood”) combines several overworked genres — the coming-of-age picture, the road-trip odyssey, the angst-filled family-reunion movie — and mostly steers clear of the obvious pitfalls.
  54. Tragedy Girls
    Tragedy Girls might add group texts to its instruments of death alongside marauding table saws and falling barbells, but the movie’s gender stereotypes keep it chained to the past.
  55. Come Play
    Come Play feels secondhand in its overarching conceit, its scare tactics and even its sentimentality.
  56. Rise of the Guardians
    Works so hard at celebrating wide eyes and naïve joy that it comes close to spoiling its own intermittent wonderfulness.
  57. Freaked
    Freaked, which was directed by Mr. Winter and Tom Stern from a screenplay they wrote with Tim Burns, has the candy-colored glow of a goofy psychedelic comic book and the irreverent sensibility of Mad Magazine.
  58. Snakes on a Plane
    What they give us is the chance to win, not with righteous morality, but with an old-fashioned swagger that says, much like the film itself, Hey, we may be stupid, but we rock.
  59. L'Attesa (The Wait)
    The performances are vivid and moving, but there is ultimately less to this well-made, impeccably acted film than meets the eye. Its meticulousness is to some degree a flaw, an evasion of nearly every variety of human messiness.
  60. Pioneer
    Mr. Skjoldbjaerg, who also tapped Norwegian history with his bank robbery re-enactment “Nokas,” doesn’t convey a creeping atmosphere of moral rot so much as an irksome glumness.
  61. El carro
    A huge hit at home, El Carro here plays for mild laughs and gentle pathos, though it arrives a little lost in translation.
  62. When a Stranger Calls
    The gimmick behind When a Stranger Galls is a scary one, but it's been played for more than it's worth.
  63. Lean on Me
    Audiences are apt to root for the film's Mr. Clark even when they aren't entirely enthusiastic about what he's doing. Much of this is attributable to Mr. Freeman's fiery and compelling performance, but a lot of it also comes from the director John G. Avildsen (''Rocky''), who has stacked the deck in every way he can.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Blob
    It is truly providential that a new horror melodrama called The Blob is so woodenly presented on the whole, for a little astute showmanship applied to such a plot would have been enough to scare the quills off a porcupine.
  65. Ferdinand
    Ferdinand, the new computer-animated adaptation from Carlos Saldanha (the “Ice Age” movies), speaks to its own time in a different way, dutifully adhering to the template for contemporary children’s films while avoiding much personality or distinction
  66. Easy Virtue
    In its cold-eyed assessment of the English aristocracy Easy Virtue has none of the lurking Anglophilia found in Merchant-Ivory movies.
  67. K-19: The Widowmaker
    (Director Bigelow) piles up one nerve-racking crisis after another, interspersed with moments of ethereal, almost otherworldly beauty.
  68. The Hunt for Red October
    The movie finally is never very convincing. Even the special effects aren't great. Mr. Connery, however, wears the movie as if it were a favorite old hat. He makes it look good.
  69. The Grey Zone
    Certainly an honorable film. But honorable is not always watchable.
  70. Solomon & Gaenor
    Does an almost dismayingly good job of conveying its characters' grim, bare-bones existence and the stultifying sexual and religious taboos that the lovers flout.
  71. Virgil Bliss
    It is enough of an act of optimism just to raise the specter of heroic nobility, something that Virgil Bliss accomplishes with subtlety and poignancy.
  72. Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism
    Outfoxed will inevitably be discussed in the same breath (or with the same hyperventilating rage) as Michael Moore's ''Fahrenheit 9/11,'' but it lacks both the showmanship and the scope of that incendiary film.
  73. Small Voices
    This tiny film is heartfelt, well made and worthy of attention.
  74. 13 Minutes
    With a little more shading and originality, 13 Minutes might have pushed beyond its familiar Nazi tropes to shape something more immediate and infinitely more potent: an ominous portrait of radicalization.
  75. Happily
    Grabinski has both wit and energy, and these qualities, along with a game cast, help keep “Happily” afloat for far longer than most made-in-L.A. dark domestic comedies. But the movie wants to do too many things, and grows diffuse.
  76. Days of Grace
    Mr. Gout combines a slick, kinetic style with a somber ethical sense. His movie is flashy and entertaining, but also earnestly concerned with the collapse of trust and integrity at every level of society.
  77. Dean
    If Mr. Martin’s take on grief is facile, the movie overall is a pleasant trip, and Dean’s doodles — by Mr. Martin himself — are a treat.
  78. Frontera
    Frontera settles into a shallow, unconvincing drama with two heroes.
  79. The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years
    Even those who would never, without the urging of wild horses, dream of attending a film about the seamy world of heavy-metal music are sure to find Penelope Spheeris's The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years of unexpected interest.
  80. Fuck
    Is this evidence of cultural decline? It's hard to think of a short answer that wouldn't be made more vivid by the insertion of the forbidden word. So skip it. No, not the movie. What, are you kidding me? No way. Go. Help yourself.
  81. The Prey
    It doesn’t aspire to art-house significance, just to white-knuckled entertainment.
  82. Just a Sigh
    The movie is beautifully acted, and the chemistry between Ms. Devos, who is 49 (her character is 43), and Mr. Byrne, 63, is heated in a sadder-but-wiser, grown-up way.
  83. Creative Control
    Concocted with heaps of style but only a smattering of substance, Benjamin Dickinson’s sophomore feature, Creative Control, is as brittle and unwelcoming as its characters’ surroundings.
  84. Four Samosas
    Unlike so many new movies that seem to be algorithmically manufactured to appeal to diverse audiences and tick the boxes of representation, Four Samosas feels organic and true as a slice of Indian American life — even if it’s all fun and games and movie magic.
  85. Jojo Rabbit
    The humor is so audacious and the psychological insight at times so startling that it’s hard not to be dismayed when an easy and familiar dose of comfort is supplied at the end. This “Rabbit” is maybe just a little too cute, and a little too friendly.
  86. Mother Mary
    The downer here is that Lowery doesn’t seem to know what to do with his stars, performers who are never better than when they’re just doing what they do best — you know, acting.
  87. Closing Escrow
    Even naysayers of reality TV’s simplistic structure, which the film openly borrows, may find themselves rooting for a couple of choice -- and having fun in the process. The real-estate game can actually be a laughing matter when you’re not a contestant.
  88. The Express
    If a movie of this kind didn't traffic in overstatement, it wouldn't be doing its job, which is to provide a strong dose of simple, rousing emotion.
  89. Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero
    The director, Richard Lanni, whose biography also cites work as a battlefield tour guide, manages a fair amount of wit, particularly with a postcard montage of Stubby’s first trip to Paris.
  90. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
    If there is a bit more humor on display here -- some of it evidence that an element of self-conscious self-mockery is sneaking into the franchise -- there is also more violence, and, true to the film’s title, a deeper intimation of darkness. What there isn’t, as usual, is much in the way of good acting, with the decisive and impressive exception of Ms. Stewart, who can carry a close-up about as well as anyone in movies today.
  91. Die Hard: With a Vengeance
    The movie turns two hours of bombings, subway crashes, car chases and helicopter pursuits into the ultimate roller-coaster ride.
  92. Work It
    Work It is no “Step Up,” but its best sequences involve Jake and Quinn, who share a chemistry in motion that, for a beat or two, conjures the genre’s magic.
  93. Lights Out
    Spackling over any copycat cracks with strong acting and fleet editing, Lights Out delivers minimalist frights in old-school ways.
  94. The Deer King
    The film is tenderly wrought and brilliantly animated, with transitions that emphasize the communion between the land and the human body.
  95. Gabi on the Roof in July
    Their characters are instantly recognizable; how you respond to the film may depend largely on whether you find any of them in the least likable and whether you think that matters.
  96. The Woman
    The Woman is not, obviously, a family movie, but it is, like much of the best drama, about a family - here, how an outsider upends its unhinged equilibrium. True to its genre, there is gore and sudden shrieks.
  97. The Cleanse
    The Cleanse” embarks on an allegorical journey with only the vaguest notion of a destination. As a result, the movie feels frustratingly repetitive — a single joke repeated ad nauseam.
  98. World's Best
    What works is the high energy, kooky cast who fling themselves into the carefree choreography — especially Magnus, a mugging, contagious delight.
  99. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
    Has moments of slackness and chaos (the book does, too), but for the most part it’s a lively, charming excursion.
  100. Cry Macho
    This one is something different — a deep cut for the die-hards, a hangout movie with nothing much to prove and just enough to say, with a pleasing score (by Mark Mancina) and some lovely desert scenery (shot by Ben Davis). If the old man’s driving, my advice is to get in and enjoy the ride.
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