The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,271 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: 9,377 out of 20271
  2. Mixed: 8,430 out of 20271
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20271
20271 movie reviews
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  1. Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India
    Lagaan may look naïve; it is anything but. This is a movie that knows its business — pleasing a broad, popular audience -- and goes about it with savvy professionalism and genuine flair.
  2. Heart of a Dog
    Heart of a Dog is about telling and remembering and forgetting, and how we put together the fragments that make up our lives — their flotsam and jetsam, highs and lows, meaningful and slight details, shrieking and weeping headline news.
  3. Orion: The Man Who Would Be King
    It’s a curious, bittersweet story, flecked with dashes of bombast and overstatement that Presley himself would have admired.
  4. Frame by Frame
    The film’s four-person shuffle turns into a bit of a hash.
  5. Fireworks Wednesday (2006)
    As with Mr. Farhadi’s other films, every detail of speech and body language resonates.
  6. Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS
    A mostly impressive array of experts (including, in the movie’s one unfortunate off note, Michael T. Flynn, who was forced to resign as national security adviser) adds to the merciless clarity of this tragic picture.
  7. All the President's Men
    The manners and methods of big-city newspapering, beautifully detailed, contribute as much to the momentum of the film as the mystery that's being uncovered. Maybe even more, since the real excitement of All The President's Men is in watching two comparatively inexperienced reporters stumble onto the story of their lives and develop it triumphantly, against all odds.
  8. Personal Problems (1980)
    This is a work that looks as if it were evolving even as portions of it were completed. That’s entirely appropriate. For all its rough edges, Personal Problems retains a vitality and an integrity that practically bounds off the screen.
  9. Prizzi's Honor
    From start to finish, this exhilarating adaptation of Richard Condon's phantasmagorical and witty novel -set inside the world of the Mafia - ascends, plunges and races around hairpin curves, only to shoot up again and dive over another precipice. [14 June 1985, p.C8]
    • The New York Times
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back
    It is an absorbing film. Whether one is a member of the under-30 set that regards Mr. Dylan as a spokesman, or one of the vanishing Americans over that age, this look into the life of a folk hero is likely to be both entertaining and occasionally disturbing.
  11. Aferim!
    Shot in richly toned, wide-screen black and white, Aferim! looks like an elegant exercise in period playacting. But it casts a fierce, revisionist eye on the past, finding the cruelty and prejudice that lie beneath the pageantry.
  12. Is God Is
    Is God Is asks us to pay heed — in ways subtle and bold — to its comedy and anguish. It demands, without seeming to, that we watch to see, really see.
  13. War Witch
    Superstition, witchcraft, exorcism, talismans that ward off evil: in this land of the supernatural, irrationality prevails. But War Witch is so cleareyed that it makes you wonder how much more irrational this world is than the so-called civilized one under its camouflage of material wealth.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    2001: A Space Odyssey
    The movie is so completely absorbed in its own problems, its use of color and space, its fanatical devotion to science-fiction detail, that its is somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring.
  15. Toy Story 4
    In other words, the movie is exactly what you expect — not more, not less — from an estimably well-oiled machine like Pixar.
  16. Darwin's Nightmare
    Mr. Sauper has produced an extraordinary work of visual journalism, a richly illustrated report on a distant catastrophe that is also one of the central stories of our time.
  17. My Winnipeg
    Maddin's real point -- and, for admirers of this brilliant and idiosyncratic artist, the true source of the movie’s interest -- is that Winnipeg explains him.
  18. On the Record
    Most of the accusations have been reported on extensively in the last two years in various publications. What the film does is bring these accounts to living, breathing and moving life, taking us beyond the media cycles of allegation and denial to a survivor’s intimate confrontations with cultural pressures and trauma.
  19. The White Ribbon
    An unnerving but unsatisfying chronicle of a German village filled with hidden cruelty, set on the eve of World War I.
  20. In My Room
    Abetted by Patrick Orth’s careful, almost obsessively calm camerawork, Köhler has concocted an uncommonly subtle and deliberately ambiguous work, one that’s delicately rewarding, if you meet it halfway.
  21. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
    Here is an American film, in Japanese with English subtitles, written, directed and photographed by Americans, made in Japan with a Japanese cast, which attempts to reveal the spiritual mysteries of a quintessentially Japanese phenomenon. That it doesn't succeed is almost a foregone conclusion. What is surprising, however, is that Mishima is as tolerable as it is, given all the strikes against it.
  22. Pride and Prejudice
    Hunt Stromberg and his associates have managed to turn out a film which catches the spirit and humor of Miss Austen's novel down to the last impudent flounce of a petticoat, the last contented sigh of a conquering coquette.
  23. Chicken for Linda!
    For all its playful color-block hues and deceptively casual illustrations, the movie delivers a sharp mix of pathos and humor.
  24. In the Heights
    It’s a piece of mainstream American entertainment in the best sense — an assertion of impatience and faith, a celebration of communal ties and individual gumption, a testimony to the power of art to turn struggles into the stuff of dreams.
  25. Fire of Love
    In their last years, the Kraffts spent most of their time studying the killers, hoping to discover patterns that would enable people living in the path of destruction to escape. They risked their lives to do this, and the movie argues that their sacrifice wasn’t in vain. More than that, it preserves their work and their idiosyncratic, unforgettable human presence.
  26. Blood Simple
    BLACK humor, abundant originality and a brilliant visual style make Joel Coen's Blood Simple a directorial debut of extraordinary promise.
  27. Oslo, August 31st
    Mr. Trier and Mr. Lie - a quiet, recessive but nonetheless magnetically self-assured screen presence - emphasize Anders's individuality above all. Oslo, August 31st has the satisfying gravity of specific experience, and also, true to its title, a prickly sense of place.
  28. Hamnet
    Buckley’s performance is ferocious and astounding, starting off strong and somehow picking up power as the movie goes along.
  29. The Witch
    With a gentle rap-rapping, Mr. Eggers intensifies the shivers with art-film moves, genre shocks and an excellent cast that includes a progressively rowdy menagerie.
  30. Looper
    Mr. Johnson throws a lot at the screen, blasted corpses included, yet little here is as initially transfixing as Mr. Gordon-Levitt's mug.
  31. Graduation
    Graduation is long and intense, a rigorously naturalistic film that at times feels as claustrophobic and suspenseful as a horror movie. Like Mr. Mungiu’s other work, it is a thriller of sorts, built around an excruciating ethical problem. He is unstinting in his sympathy and unsparing in his judgment.
  32. Kubo and the Two Strings
    The action is gorgeously fluid, the idiosyncratic 3-D visual conceits (including floating eyeballs undersea) are startling, and the story and its metaphors resolve in unexpected and moving ways.
  33. Aliens
    Under the direction of James (''The Terminator'') Cameron, [the special effects team has] put together a flaming, flashing, crashing, crackling blow-'em-up show that keeps you popping from your seat despite your better instincts and the basically conventional scare tactics.
  34. Room at the Top
    Room at the Top is quite conservative in its morality — although its sledgehammer ending still packs an emotional wallop.
  35. The Other Side of Hope
    The deadpan style of the acting functions as a vaccine against sentimentality, but there is no doubting the sincerity of this movie’s motives or the effectiveness of its methods.
  36. The Vast of Night
    The actors add some filigree to their genre types, but are consistently upstaged by the superb, supple camerawork. With the cinematographer Miguel Ioann Littin Menz, Patterson turns the camera into an uneasily embodied presence and when it takes flight so does the movie.
  37. Old Joy
    A triumph of modesty and of seriousness that also happens to be one of the finest American films of the year.
  38. Medea
    No admirer of Mr. von Trier's work should miss this compelling rarity.
  39. Momma's Man
    Mr. Jacobs has succeeded at one of the most difficult tasks given a director, which is to make a character come alive through the filmmaking, not exposition.
  40. You Were Never Really Here
    The gravity and force of Mr. Phoenix’s performance and Ms. Ramsay’s direction are impressive, but it’s hard not to feel that their talents have been misapplied, and that there is less to the movie than meets the eye.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    In the Name of the Father
    And, riskiest of all, the film makers eschewed another grainy documentary go at the subject in favor of a movie drama of one of the most compelling true stories of the modern troubles.
  42. Homo Sapiens
    Each individual shot creates a frisson of desolation that resonates far beyond the facile irony suggested by the movie’s title.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Girl Crazy
    With George Gershwin's music and plenty of elbow room, for its twin stars, Girl Crazy is a funny, fast and completely infectious entertainment.
  44. A Ghost Story
    A Ghost Story is suspenseful, dourly funny and at times piercingly emotional.
  45. Ballast
    Shot with a sure hand and a cast of unknowns, the film doesn't so much tell a story as develop a tone and root around a place that, despite the intimate camerawork, remains shrouded in ambiguity.
  46. Volver
    Volver, full of surprises and reversals, unfolds with breathtaking ease and self-confidence. It is in some ways a smaller, simpler film than either "Talk to Her" or "Bad Education," choosing to tell its story without flashbacks or intricate parallel plots, but it is no less the work of a master.
  47. The Square
    Even though The Square depicts widely covered recent events, it still feels like a revelation. This is partly because of the immediacy of Ms. Noujaim’s approach, which often puts the viewer in the midst of chaos as it unfolds.
  48. Widows
    The result is a fascinating and sometimes frustrating hybrid, a film that tries both to transcend and to exploit its genre.
  49. Love After Love
    Elegantly shot on film by Chris Teague, the movie feels unforced and at times shockingly authentic, allowing its emotions to percolate and rise of their own volition.
  50. Love Story
    It looks to be clean and pure and without artifice, even though it is possibly as sophisticated as any commercial American movie ever made.
  51. Position Among the Stars
    Engrossing, poetic and often very funny, "Position," like its predecessors, uses the lens of a single family to view the tumult of an entire country.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Venture Bros.: Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart
    If we were never to see the Ventures again, “Radiant” lets us part with them on a high note, but hopefully this end is just the beginning.
  53. Mapantsula
    Mr. Mogotlane makes Panic much more than a symbol, treating him as a raffish, amusingly overconfident figure at first and a visibly shaken man as the film progresses, until at last he utters the single syllable that encapsulates the film's final point.
  54. Synonyms
    Furious, brilliant, exhausting, Synonyms is the story of a man in self-imposed exile.
  55. Boys State
    By eliding the Legion’s history and focusing on winning personalities, the filmmakers have made an engaging movie about some kids who — as their jokes give way to debates, stratagems and even shocks — already seem to be drafting their own more interesting sequel.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Early Spring
    This modest classic also conveys the claustrophobia of office life better than any other film I've seen.
  57. Homicide
    Homicide, which refers to metaphorical as well as literal murder, may be Mr. Mamet's most personal and deeply felt work. It's also his most blunt and despairing. Both "House of Games" and "Things Change" deal with conspiracies of some sort. Yet the scam that is the center of this film is unconvincing.
  58. Museum Hours
    This movie is rigorously and intensely lifelike, which is to say that it’s also a strange and moving work of art.
  59. On Her Shoulders
    Alexandria Bombach’s direction and editing are exceptional; she captures images that are both subtle and formidable. Her film is, first and foremost, a profile of Murad and her mission. Yet it’s also a comment on the media and on government aid.
  60. The Bad News Bears
    Has a number of other virtues that make it a surprisingly painless adventure. Among these are the screenplay by Bill Lancaster, Burt's son, who has the talent and discipline to tell the story of The Bad News Bears almost completely in terms of what happens on the baseball diamond or in the dugout.
  61. Sense and Sensibility
    Grandly entertaining...matches the Austen-based "Clueless" for sheer fun. [13 Dec 1995]
  62. The Descendants
    To call The Descendants perfect would be a kind of insult, a betrayal of its commitment to, and celebration of, human imperfection. Its flaws are impossible to distinguish from its pleasures.
  63. First Man
    It reminds you of an extraordinary feat and acquaints you with an interesting, enigmatic man. But there is a further leap beyond technical accomplishment — into meaning, history, metaphysics or the wilder zones of the imagination — that the film is too careful, too earthbound, to attempt.
  64. The Terminator
    A B-movie with flair.
  65. Distant
    Such an accurate depiction of cramped spirits, small-mindedness and men unable to make changes in their lives takes its toll. Distant feels as if it's going nowhere in no particular hurry, and finally leaves us distant from its characters.
  66. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
    Burl Ives, Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Judith Anderson, Jack Carson and two or three more almost work and yell themselves to pieces making this drama of strife within a new-rich Southern family a ferocious and fascinating show. And what a pack of trashy people these accomplished actors perform!
  67. Snowpiercer
    Though the movie is playfully postmodern in its pastiche of styles and its mingling of sincerity and self-consciousness, there is also something solidly old-fashioned about the way it tells its story.
  68. Old Yeller
    In this very lean and sensible screen transcription of Fred Gipson's children's book, adapted by himself and William Tunberg, a warm, appealing little rustic tale unfolds in lovely color photography. Sentimental, yes, but also sturdy as a hickory stick.
  69. Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power
    The power of the collective, more so than any individuals, is the focus here. The film is anchored with the arresting faces of Lowndes locals and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizers, who recall a range of stirring details — from setting up camp in a house with no running water to internal debates over the term “Black power.”
  70. Eephus
    It dwells in some languid liminal space between hangout movie and elegy, a tribute to the community institutions that hold us together, that introduce us to one another and that, in an age of optimized life choices and disappearing public spaces, are slowly fading away.
  71. My Uncle
    Facing it squarely, "My Uncle" is perceptibly contrived when it lingers too long and gets too deeply into the dullness of things mechanical. After you've pushed one button and one modernistic face, you've pushed them all.
  72. Happy-Go-Lucky
    Mr. Leigh has never been an artist for whom happy (word or idea) has been an easy fit. Life is sweet, as the title of another of his films puts it with a heart-swelling yes, but it’s also an eternal fight against doom and gloom, the soul-crushing no.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Lassie
    Lassie balances cruelty and tenderness, pathos and humor without ever losing sight of its youngest audience member.
  74. Shrek
    A giggly cocktail, though it's more foam than drink.
  75. Youth (Hard Times)
    Shot in a present-tense vérité style, it stitches together micro-stories into a larger narrative in which negotiation can’t undo exploitation.
  76. The Letter
    It is an evil tale, plotted with an eye to its torturing effects. And Mr. Wyler has directed the film along those lines. With infinite care, he has created the dark, humid atmosphere of the rubber country. At a slow, inexorable pace, he has accumulated the details.
  77. Dave Chappelle's Block Party
    Mr. Chappelle looks and sounds alternately ebullient and weary. It was directed by Michel Gondry, the madcap genius behind "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," but in its tone and vibe feels like Mr. Chappelle's all the way.
  78. Victor Victoria
    It stars Julie Andrews, Robert Preston and James Garner, each giving the performance of his and her career in a marvelous fable about mistaken identity, sexual roleplaying, love, innocence and sight gags, including one that illustrates the dangers of balancing yourself on a champagne bottle on one finger within the range of a singing voice that shatters glass.
  79. Our Time Machine
    This often visually beautiful movie sometimes ventures full-time into Maleonn’s own dreams and is frank in its depiction of the conflicts in the family — as well as of Maleonn’s struggles to be a good son and an active artist, as his ambitions for the project run ahead of his financial resources.
  80. Dry Ground Burning
    Pimenta and Queirós invent a world in which Brazilian women at the very bottom of the social totem pole take matters into their own hands. They do so without an ounce of fear or self-pity — and in killer style to boot.
  81. The Day I Became a Woman
    What appears on the screen has a starkness that is almost indelible.
  82. The Quiet American
    Fowler may be the richest character of Mr. Caine's screen career. Slipping into his skin with an effortless grace, this great English actor gives a performance of astonishing understatement whose tone wavers delicately between irony and sadness.
  83. The Pinochet Case
    Eloquent, meticulously structured documentary -- Sober political and legal analysis alternates with grim first-hand accounts of torture and murder in a film that has the structure of a choral symphony that swells to a bittersweet finale.
  84. The Fallout
    Ortega nails her role as a levelheaded teen who, nevertheless, is still a teen, reeling from an unthinkable event on top of the usual growing pains.
  85. Life After
    Life After doesn’t equivocate; neither does it offer easy answers. It tackles a thorny topic in a challenging way, with the tenderness, complexity and — notwithstanding Davenport’s earlier wish — the personal perspective it deserves.
  86. Weiner
    Infuriating and depressing but rivetingly watchable.
  87. Stalag 17
    A humorous, suspenseful, disturbing and rousing pastime.
  88. Stonewalling
    Few movies capture the surreal comedy and engulfing horror of the money-driven world as piercingly as “Stonewalling.”
  89. Iraq in Fragments
    From 300 hours of material, Mr. Longley has created a collage of images, sounds and characters, an intimate, partial portrait of an unraveling nation -- a portrait that gains power partly by virtue of its incompleteness.
  90. Mystic River
    Mystic River is the rare American movie that aspires to -- and achieves -- the full weight and darkness of tragedy.
  91. Glengarry Glen Ross
    The reason the film prompts laughter, and finally elation, is not because it's jolly or has any feel-good words to live by. It's because of the utterly demonic skill with which these foulmouthed characters carve one another up in futile attempts to stave off disaster.
  92. Therapy Dogs
    Watching its sequences, you can feel both the immediacy of each moment and the nostalgia that’s already seeping in — each snippet of life becoming, by the minute, just a flicker in the teenagers’ minds, like the flashes in the film’s montages, immortalizing their youth before it’s lost to time’s grasp.
  93. The Tale of Silyan
    Some scenes are remarkably intimate — Nikola in his house on a stormy night drying off the stork, who falls asleep on his shoulder — and some are sweeping, which makes it an amazing portrait of a place on many scales.
  94. Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi
    Yes, the latest “Star Wars” installment is here, and, lo, it is a satisfying, at times transporting entertainment. Remarkably, it has visual wit and a human touch, no small achievement for a seemingly indestructible machine that revved up 40 years ago and shows no signs of sputtering out (ever).
  95. The Cove
    Like the director's cover story, the movie is a Trojan horse: an exceptionally well-made documentary that unfolds like a spy thriller, complete with bugged hotel rooms, clandestine derring-do and mysterious men in gray flannel suits.
  96. Rocco and His Brothers (re-release)
    Neither the neighborhood intimacy of "Mean Streets" nor the grandeur of the "Godfather" movies is imaginable without Visconti's example. Its richness, though, is inexhaustible, and well served by the spotless new 35-millimeter print being shown at Film Forum.
  97. Coal Miner's Daughter
    Like "Agatha" and the rock drama "Stardust," other movies of Mr. Apted's, Coal Miner's Daughter does a better job of setting its scenes than of telling a story. Its characterizations and its atmosphere work better than the action, which becomes shapeless and, in the manner of biographies of living subjects, slightly cramped by its good intentions.
  98. Mutual Appreciation
    It's the sort of unassuming discovery that could get lost in a crowd or suffer from too much big love, and while it won't save or change your life, it may make your heart swell. Its aim is modest and true.
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