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. My Father and The Man In Black
    No one in this complex and haunting documentary feels fully explained.
  2. Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives
    Chris Perkel’s reverent documentary Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives is a valedictory for Mr. Davis.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Woman's Face
    As melodrama, sheer and simple, the story behind Anna Holm's murder trial is often superbly effective, but when it attempts to become a study of emotional anguish it merely betrays the essential hokum of which the film is constructed.
  4. The Laundromat
    Soderbergh and his top-notch cast (Sharon Stone shows up, as do Jeffrey Wright and Matthias Schoenaerts) keep things lively, playing out parables of betrayal and deception with pulpy, TV-movie flair.
  5. Surrounded
    Wright’s lean, long face is sometimes all hard angles, and she enacts the largely stoic mien of her character with weight. If Surrounded had carried through its overdetermined premise more assuredly, she’d have made a compelling hero/heroine here.
  6. The Zookeeper's Wife
    Ms. Chastain’s watchful, layered performance helps keep the film on an even keel, but it is not enough to prevent The Zookeeper’s Wife, with its reassuringly cuddly critters, from feeling like a Disney version of the Holocaust.
  7. Ezra
    What keeps the story sweet is the chemistry between Cannavale and Fitzgerald, who build a bond worth cherishing.
  8. Last Letter from Your Lover
    In short, it too efficiently glosses over multiple plotlines to have much of an emotional impact. What remains are mostly generic beats. Still, the formula is engrossing enough, and its midcentury vintage appeal — the pillbox hats, headscarves and swanky soirees — is particularly seductive.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Laughing Policeman
    A number of bit performances, including actual police squads and a team of emergency-room doctors, lend vivid local color and authenticity to an engrossing and adult crime caper.
  10. Spinal Tap II: The End Continues
    It’s almost always pleasant to hang out with old friends, particularly when no one overstays their welcome. The good news about “Spinal Tap II” is that everyone involved seems to have understood the assignment, which makes for a genial 83 minutes of soft jokes and jowls.
  11. Dreamland
    It’s a lot of hooey and might have been at least tolerable if the movie had been rougher, meaner, tighter, and if the filmmakers — the writer is Nicolaas Zwart, the director is Miles Joris-Peyrafitte — had never watched a Terrence Malick movie.
  12. Birds of Paradise
    Structured around a countdown to the ultimate prize, the story is a soapy slog of sabotage and betrayal. Sex and drugs are as prevalent as pliés, the absence of a likable character as irksome as the constant conniving.
  13. White Wash
    Has a complicated story to tell, about black surfers and, more broadly, about African-American history and the history of surfing. Great topics all, but that's a lot of ground to cover and, unsurprisingly, the film often feels a bit scattershot.
  14. Ip Man 3
    Despite Mr. Yen’s impressive physical virtuosity, his stoic, often humorless presence tends to neutralize the emotional temperature.
  15. The Thing
    The Thing is too phony looking to be disgusting. It qualifies only as instant junk.
  16. Small Engine Repair
    The film, which Pollono also directs, provides more depth than the original but still flounders in the translation from stage to screen.
  17. Born in China
    The narrative, read by John Krasinski, is kid-friendly in a cloying sort of way, and unpleasant realities like China’s pollution are not mentioned. So as an introduction for children to exotic creatures in picturesque landscapes, the movie is harmless enough.
  18. India Sweets and Spices
    Without sacrificing comedic buoyancy, Malik and her ensemble make palpable a community that is vibrant and claustrophobic.
  19. Ocean's 11
    Lewis Milestone's direction suits the movement of Harry Brown's and Charles Lederer's script, which is entirely centripetal, focusing exclusively on Mr. Sinatra and his gang. Young people are likely to find this more appropriate and bewitching than do their elders. The latter are likely to feel less gleeful in the presence of heroes who rob and steal.
  20. The Woman in the Fifth
    Although Mr. Pawlikowski often shows Mr. Hawke in medium and long shots, the actor draws you close. There's anguish in Tom's face that speaks of a terrible fragility and that leavens the story's mysterioso proceedings with a real, recognizable humanity.
  21. The World Is Not Enough
    In his third and most comfortable effort to model the Bond mantle, Pierce Brosnan bears noticeably more resemblance to a real human being.
  22. Jane by Charlotte
    Clearly a pet project for Gainsbourg (whose own electronic pop songs feature prominently in the soundtrack, clashing against her mother’s classic tunes), the documentary is defiantly insular and lacking in context.
  23. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them
    As a whole, it doesn’t quite work, but the parts — particular moments, observations and insights about the way people behave and perceive themselves — are frequently excellent.
  24. Field of Dreams
    A work so smartly written, so beautifully filmed, so perfectly acted, that it does the almost impossible trick of turning sentimentality into true emotion.
  25. Ragtime
    The movie is sorrowful, funny and beautiful. It is also, finally, very unsatisfactory.
  26. A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop
    The director Zhang Yimou honors the unlikely affinity between himself and Joel and Ethan Coen with a remake of their movie "Blood Simple."
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football
    Fordson, however, does not condemn the United States. It rather proudly affirms the American dream, reclaiming it for Muslims who see no conflict between their patriotism and their faith.
  28. Mr. Six
    The baggy 137-minute story drowns out Mr. Feng’s assorted sharp moments with hoary family drama and clumsy plotting, and Li Yifeng is generic as Mr. Six’s son.
  29. Lace Crater
    Ms. Burdge — all quicksilver emotion and exposed nerve endings — is an endlessly watchable focal point. Her character’s vulnerability, uncertainty and growing self-acceptance lend the movie a necessary gravity.
  30. Dicks: The Musical
    Its only point is highly self-aware pseudo-gonzo provocation, peaking in a denouement that feels both surprising and inevitable, and looks as if it had been engineered to deliberately unsettle some viewers.
  31. Flicka
    An entertainingly ridiculous update of Mary O’Hara’s 1941 children’s novel, “My Friend Flicka.”
  32. Vamps
    Aging is probably the real theme here, but it's approached sidelong and has no punch. Still, only the nostalgia has any real conviction.
  33. Bram Stoker's Dracula
    Dracula has the nervy enthusiasm of the work of a precocious film student who has magically acquired a master's command of his craft. It's surprising, entertaining and always just a little too much.
  34. Master of the Flying Guillotine (re-release)
    Just know that you'll owe Master of the Flying Guillotine for the pleasure you'll get from viewing a venerable example of the kung fu genre.
  35. Mifune's Last Song
    The brusque realism of Kragh-Jacobsen's style -- his careful suppression of style -- allows a surprising sweetness to emerge.
  36. Lisa Picard Is Famous
    This hilarious fake documentary -- deserves a place beside the comedies of Christopher Guest in the hall of fame of semi-deadpan spoofs.
  37. Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over
    An enjoyable, noisy romp.
  38. Flesh and Blood
    A dreary pileup of hard-luck monologues and run-down locations, Mark Webber’s Flesh and Blood straddles the line between fact and fiction with exhausting earnestness and a fatal dearth of narrative.
  39. The Intouchables
    It is possible to summarize the experience of watching The Intouchables in nine words: You will laugh; you will cry; you will cringe.
  40. Thor
    The absolute and unbroken mediocrity of Thor is evidence of its success. This movie is not distinctively bad, it is axiomatically bad. And THAT is depressing. A howling turkey is at least something to laugh at, and maybe even something to see. But Thor is an example of the programmed triumph of commercial calculation over imagination.
  41. Permanent Midnight
    Permanent Midnight is as enveloping as it is darkly cautionary, thanks to the effectively varied layers of Mr. Veloz's direction and the bitter intensity Mr. Stiller brings to his central role.
  42. Me and You
    [A] small, beautifully made film.
  43. Trick or Treat
    It's genial, not too frightening and even rather sweet.
  44. The Wandering Earth
    It is just as awash in murky computer imagery, stupefying exposition and manipulative sentimentality as the average Hollywood tentpole.
  45. Body of Lies
    As it is, the movie is a hodgepodge of borrowings and half-cooked ideas, flung together into a feverishly edited jet-setting exercise in purposeless intensity.
  46. The Wedding Guest
    The scenery, nicely shot by Giles Nuttgens and covering a wide swath of the country — Amritsar, New Delhi, Jaipur and Goa — is always great, and Patel and Apte’s chemistry approaches scalding levels as their characters grow closer.
  47. Towelhead
    A crude but scathing portrait of suburban life.
  48. Antlers
    The film’s self-seriousness is as oppressive as its setting’s monotonous fog.
  49. The Notebook
    The Notebook is a skillfully made movie, with sequences that may haunt you after you leave the theater. But it lacks the power to turn its virtuosity, or the emotional discipline of its remarkable young leads, into a source of insight.
  50. Teeth
    Teenage horror-movie spoof, John Waters parody, No Nukes protest movie, twisted sex-education film, quasi-feminist fable, outrageous stunt: Mitchell Lichtenstein’s clever, crude comedy, Teeth, is all these and more.
  51. Road House
    Though two hours long, the movie moves as swiftly as a greased ferret through a Habitrail and delivers hallucinatory action highs for its extended climax.
  52. I Don't Understand You
    In trying to be both subversive and sincere, I Don’t Understand You ends up not quite pulling off either.
  53. The Grand Seduction
    It’s adorable.
  54. Space Jam
    It's both a frantic, innovative mixture of animation technologies and a fan magazine full of adulation for Michael Jordan. He handles this tribute with regal bearing and good grace.
  55. The Groomsmen
    The biggest hole in a movie that falls sadly short of being another "Diner" or "Trees Lounge" is Mr. Burns's failure to make his alter-ego character anything other than the best-looking and most affluent member of the pack, standing there and discreetly gloating.
  56. Adult Beginners
    The three leads remain watchable, but only the sourness in Jake’s face when he moves into Justine’s house hints at the kind of true and complex emotions that, bromide by bromide, this movie insistently denies.
  57. Scent of a Woman
    The good thing is that the principals and film makers make the absolute most of a conventional opportunity.
  58. 16 Years of Alcohol
    The tedium of this antidrinking hoodlum's tale inspires the wrong kind of longing entirely.
  59. The Last Tycoon
    The Last Tycoon doesn't really build to any climax. We follow it horizontally, as if it were a landscape being surveyed by a camera in a long pan-shot.
  60. Run This Town
    The movie never quite reconciles its assorted perspectives into a coherent point of view.
  61. Little Buddha
    Little Buddha displays a deliberate innocence that suits its subject, even if it contrasts so markedly with much of Mr. Bertolucci's moodier, more unsettling work.
  62. Happy Endings
    It's possible that Maggie Gyllenhaal will never become a major star, but there isn't an American actress in movies today who holds the screen with as much deep-seated soul.
  63. The Missing Person
    Sluggish, stylized and frequently washed in a bilious green tint, The Missing Person is yet oddly irresistible.
  64. Cesar's Last Fast
    Chavez (1927-1993), a founder of what became the United Farm Workers union, faced brutal odds, as this compelling documentary demonstrates.
  65. The Golden Era
    This tribute is overlong and too reverent, conveying little sense of Xiao Hong the person and even less of her talent.
  66. Powaqqatsi
    Powaqqatsi, which is the second part of a planned trilogy, reaffirms Mr. Reggio's diligence and sincerity, though it does not signficantly advance his achievement.
  67. Cowboy del Amor
    Directed by Michèle Ohayon with a light touch and an attentive ear for the regressive attitudes beneath the humor, Cowboy del Amor follows the fortunes of Rick, an easygoing truck driver who thinks most American women are "too hard to please."
  68. Kodachrome
    If this earnest and forgettable road movie represents a meaningful tribute to taking pictures, we ought to go back to cave drawing.
  69. Heaven's Gate
    Nothing in the movie works properly. For all of the time and money that went into it, it's jerry-built, a ship that slides straight to the bottom at its christening. Heaven's Gate is something quite rare in movies these days - an unqualified disaster.
  70. Encounter
    After setting up a potentially powerful study of damage and delusion, Pearce (whose 2018 feature debut, “Beast,” signaled an unusual talent) remains torn between science fiction and psychological fact.
  71. The Boys Are Back
    Has a burnished, high-quality look and a heart swollen with maudlin self-regard.
  72. The Red Violin
    Wants to make a grand statement about the mystical power (both celestial and demonic) of great music. But give or take some scattered musical moments, the frame in which that message is couched is too kitschy to let that vision catch fire.
  73. Hey! Is Dee Dee Home?
    A rueful, reflective companion piece to "Born to Lose."
  74. Bossa Nova
    There must be a name for a picture so inconsequential, in which the music provides so much of the chemistry that you get the feeling Bossa Nova would be funereal without it.
  75. Mr 3000
    If there was any question about how well Bernie Mac's charm, demonstrated in stand-up comedy and on his Fox sitcom, would play on the big screen, the news is good: no problem.
  76. 13 Going on 30
    The performances give the movie more flavor and life than the situation does; it often feels like prechewed Bubble Yum.
  77. Agnivarsha: The Fire and the Rain
    Has a lavish ceremonial gloss. It is also a very erotic movie.
  78. Modus Operandi
    You can admire the craftsmanship and enjoy the retro soundtrack, supplied by a roster of Milwaukee musicians, but it seems likely that Modus Operandi was more amusing to make than it is to watch.
  79. Sacrifice
    It's tough to care about characters who spend most of their lives obsessing over the violent deaths of others.
  80. The Big Fix
    The film's most upsetting scenes are its interviews with residents whose livelihood has been decimated and whose health has been compromised.
  81. Bright Days Ahead
    Struggling to get out from under the film’s too-cheery surface is a much more serious movie about grown-ups confronting the depredations of old age.
  82. The Last
    As the impossible Claire, the longtime character actor Rebecca Schull (a 90-year-old playing 92) is spectacular. Her character is lucid in her awfulness, and she almost never shuts up, relating endless anecdotes that don’t just force her family to face awful truths, but rub their noses in them.
  83. Pedro Páramo
    Where this rich, metaphysical text might have come alive in dreamlike abstraction, Prieto and his screenwriter, Mateo Gil, instead content themselves with a prestige Western on terra firma — grave, good-looking and uninspiring.
  84. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
    As written by the TV veteran Robert Carlock, Kim’s rise-and-fade arc is sympathetically rendered, with humor and the urgency of an underhand pitch.
  85. Fifty Dead Men Walking
    A streamlined, adrenalized thriller that is not as deep as it would like to appear, treads a retrospective political tightrope.
  86. Chemical Hearts
    Despite the movie’s sympathy for the high stakes of Henry’s adolescence, the myopia of his point of view settles over “Chemical Hearts” like a layer of grime.
  87. Army of the Dead
    With its sticky pacing and divinely unsubtle soundtrack (though The Cranberries’ “Zombie” is always excusable), Army of the Dead is an ungainly, yet weirdly mesmeric lump of splatter-pop filmmaking.
  88. How I Live Now
    As sun-dappled infatuation abruptly crashes into post-apocalyptic survival, Mr. Macdonald struggles to balance a nebulous narrative on tentpole moments of rich emotional resonance.
  89. Kinky Boots
    All it wants is to divert you for about 100 minutes and leave you with the glow of vicarious comradeship, as blue-collar blokes and drag queens pull together to save the day. Foot fetishists will drool.
  90. Sushi: The Global Catch
    As storytelling, "The Global Catch" often falls short. It has too much to cover to be comprehensive and can seem a bit random. As a consciousness raiser, the film fares much better.
  91. Our Kind of Traitor
    The director Susanna White makes a lot of strange choices, including the dark, fussy visuals best described as stained-glass noir. As an Expressionist choice, it doesn’t make much sense. Then again, neither does much of Our Kind of Traitor, which has loads of twists and all the ritualistic pessimism you expect, but none of the political and moral outrage that might have elevated this genre story into a le Carré one.
  92. How to Live Forever
    Mr. Wexler has found interesting people and useful, funny and sometimes crackpot-seeming information.
  93. Just One of the Guys
    Familiar but likable, thanks largely to Mr. Jacoby's irrepressible clowning and Miss Hyser's good-sport manner.
  94. Brainstorm
    However adversely it must have affected the morale of those involved in making Brainstorm, the death of Natalie Wood hasn't damaged the film. Her performance feels complete. Playing a more mature character than she had done before, Miss Wood brought hints of a greater sturdiness and depth to this role, which is pivotal but relatively small.
  95. Arcadian
    A competent director can do only so much with a poor script, and Arcadian is littered with shortcuts and screenwriting clichés. It is vague to the point of careless, and often seems to be inventing rules for its monsters as it goes along.
  96. Smart People
    The great virtue of Smart People, attributable to Noam Murro’s easygoing direction as well as to Mr. Poirier’s wandering screenplay, lies in its general preference for small insights over grand revelations.
  97. 200 Motels
    200 Motels is not all bad, but because it's a movie with so many things going on simultaneously, it becomes too quickly exhausting—in actual effect, soporific.
  98. Candy
    Doesn’t add anything substantively new, though it has been nicely directed by Neil Armfield, known in his country for his theater work, and features striking performances from Heath Ledger and Geoffrey Rush.
  99. Bad Words
    It would be something to see Mr. Bateman go authentically dark (perhaps not that dark), but it’s also enough just to watch him as he widens his eyes, furrows his brow and shows off his excellent timing.
  100. Natural Selection
    Aside from Ms. Harris's performance, the main reason to recommend Natural Selection - very conditionally - is that its creator clearly has talent. He simply lacked the resources to make the movie he envisioned.
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