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. Uncle Drew
    It’s not every day that you can say, “Shaquille O’Neal was the best actor in that movie.” And yet that may well be true in the case of Uncle Drew, a genuinely unusual exercise in screen comedy.
  2. Bernard and Huey
    Devoted Feifferites, not to mention fans of Mr. Rash and Mr. Koechner, who get to flex their muscles nicely here, will be well sated.
  3. The Fourth War
    Mr. Frankenheimer relies on standard touches at times, but he also fills The Fourth War with interesting little asides.
  4. Katy Perry: Part of Me
    There are several reasons that Katy Perry: Part of Me is more interesting than similar movies about Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers. Most simply, she just has more talent than any of them, and her songs have a wider emotional range.
  5. Victory
    The beauty of the sport, especially the ultimate grace of a player of Pele's extraordinary caliber, is captured in a series of slow-motion shots that communicates something of the appreciation and excitement that can be experienced only by a true aficionado. The form of the film is conventional, but the manner in which it has been executed is not.
  6. The Look of Love
    Had The Look of Love focused more acutely on the father-daughter relationship or explored Mr. Raymond’s relationships with his two sons, only one of whom appears briefly, it might have amounted to something more substantial than a keenly observed period piece that keeps a celebrity journalist’s distance from its subject.
  7. Flesh and Bone
    Most of what keeps Flesh and Bone so gripping is the ways in which the characters themselves evolve.
  8. The Newton Boys
    If Mr. Linklater is not entirely at ease with action sequences (or with the obligatory having-fun montage once the brothers become successful), he still makes this (after ''Before Sunrise'' and ''Suburbia'') another admirable directorial stretch.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Safe in Hell
    Safe in Hell is a little reminiscent of "The Unholy Garden," with its tropic sanctuary where rogues of various nationalities live out their days in happy oblivion, safe from the long arm of extradition. The theme is a good deal sadder, a sort of meldodramatization of all those sad songs about the women who will die rapturously for their men.
  10. The Grand
    The actors certainly look as if they’re having a good time, and if you’re in the right mood, you might too.
  11. I, Olga Hepnarová
    Anchored by a startling performance by Michalina Olszanska, the Czech film “I, Olga Hepnarova” is an austere, hypnotic story of sadness, madness and murder.
  12. Crumb Catcher
    It’s an aspirationally farcical home invasion thriller that never fully thrills, despite a game cast that does its darnedest to liven up an unfocused script — Skotchdopole wrote and edited his film, too — that’s fashioned from genre odds and ends.
  13. The Forbidden Kingdom
    A faithful and disarmingly earnest attempt to honor some venerable and popular Chinese cinematic traditions.
  14. Albert Nobbs
    Ms. McTeer's sly, exuberant performance is a pure delight, and the counterpoint between her physical expressiveness and Ms. Close's tightly coiled reserve is a marvel to behold. The rest of the film is a bit too decorous and tidy to count as a major revelation, but it dispenses satisfying doses of humor, pathos and surprise.
  15. Simple Passion
    While keeping a stalwart female perspective, Simple Passion follows an arc so standard it could be called banal.
  16. What's Cooking?
    It's a meal you may feel you've eaten before, but you nonetheless walk away stuffed and happy.
  17. The Human Stain
    The film's powerful individual scenes seem like excerpts from a missing whole, well-appointed rooms in a house whose beams and girders have been cut away.
  18. Rocky III
    It's not giving away state secrets to report that Rocky finds that success has made him fat and that to triumph again, he has to learn to be ''hungry.'' Rocky's problem is thus not that of America in the 80's but more like America in the affluent 60's and early 70's.
  19. All Together
    If the characters are likable enough, they are underdeveloped and have little of the quirky individuality or dimension of the adventurous seniors portrayed in the superior (but sugarcoated) movie "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel." For a truthful film about those final years, you'll have to wait for Michael Haneke's heartbreaking masterpiece "Amour," which is to open in December.
  20. Lights in the Dusk
    This spare, minimalist film is not realistic. It has the simplicity of a silent movie, and the blocking of the actors, especially in the scenes with Koistinen and Mirja, emphasizes the distances between them.
  21. The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela
    It's like being trapped in a roomful of teenage girls for 80 minutes.
  22. Chimpanzee
    To experience Chimpanzee, the latest piece of gorgeously shot pablum from Disneynature, is to endure an orgy of cuteness pasted over some of the most asinine narration ever to ruin a wildlife movie.
  23. Teen Spirit
    Teen Spirit, Max Minghella’s sweet and touching directing debut, is both proudly clichéd and refreshingly different.
  24. Southpaw
    The plotting is somehow both flat-footed and operatic in its absurdity. Character arcs are tangled, flattened and foreshortened. Common sense is knocked silly. But Mr. Fuqua has never been a director to let ridiculousness get in the way of visceral action.
  25. Instant Family
    Instant Family isn’t a hellish movie, although it is very much a Hollywood one.
  26. Extraction 2
    Burdened by its bluster, Extraction 2 is merely a loud, blithering mess masquerading as fulfilling escapism.
  27. Land of Bad
    Land of Bad, directed by William Eubank from a script he wrote with David Frigerio, is commendable in the abstract for depicting the realities of 21st-century warfare both narratively and thematically.
  28. Happy Death Day 2U
    Jessica Rothe as Tree is still an appealing presence. But the film is overstuffed with unfunny self-parodying gore slapstick, half-felt sentimentality and semi-meta sci-fi.
  29. Shirley
    King is magnetic onscreen, nailing Chisholm’s accent and her steely persona. But there is little for her to do other than trade quips with the other characters, in a drama that is too content with telling rather than showing.
  30. Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve
    The film doesn’t really live up to its subtitle. There is little sense of what kinds of debates take place at board meetings or how pressure is applied behind closed doors.
  31. The Secret Life of Bees
    The film insists so strenuously on its themes of redemption, tolerance, love and healing that it winds up defeating itself, and robbing Ms. Kidd’s already maudlin tale of its melodramatic heat.
  32. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
    Mr. Burton, whose artistry is at times most evident in its filigree, can be a great collector when given the right box to fill, as is the case here. He revels in the story’s icky, freaky stuff; he’s right at home, which may be why he seems liberated by its labyrinthine turns and why you don’t care if you get a little lost in them.
  33. Miss Potter
    This much sweetness and light in a movie is all very well. But there's a reason that recipes for cake and cookies call for a pinch of salt. In Miss Potter, there is only a grain or two -- not enough to dilute the sugary overload. The film is the cinematic equivalent of a delicate English tea cake whose substance is buried under too many layers of icing.
  34. Lovely, Still
    It's beautifully played and will hit home with anyone who has had to struggle with the most difficult aspects of aging.
  35. Christine
    The early parts of the film are engaging and well acted, creating a believable high school atmosphere. Unfortunately, the later part of the film is slow in developing, and it unfolds in predictable ways. The special effects are good, the performances are nicely deadpan, and the score is clever. But Christine herself is something of a bust.
  36. Piranhas
    In its reliance on a conventional narrative through-line, it’s more reminiscent of “The Public Enemy” than “Goodfellas” in spite of its stylings of contemporary cinematic realism.
  37. The Best of Times
    THE muddy football game that concludes The Best of Times is such a rouser that it almost makes up for the incomplete passes and stopped runs that precede it.
  38. Easy Money: Hard to Kill
    For the second film, Babak Najafi has succeeded Daniel Espinosa as director. The structure here is more mechanical, and the ambience scruffier, as the complicated story shifts from one disreputable lowlife to another.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Hammer
    Rambling and disorganized. At the same time, though, The Hammer also has dry wit and unforced working-class swagger, and hits some surprising emotional notes.
  40. Limelight
    As a trippy, trifling memorial to a time before its eponymous club was a mini-mall and rave culture a woozy memory, Limelight delivers the messed-up goods.
  41. The First Monday in May
    The movie is sloppy.
  42. Evil Dead
    Doesn’t have the original’s wooden performances, puffy clothes and hairdos or its amusingly crude special effects, but it does share its blood lust.
  43. In the Name of My Daughter
    Mr. Téchiné ’s methodical storytelling covers more narrative ground than the drama requires, sapping the film’s energy.
  44. Thor: Love and Thunder
    Waititi’s playfulness buoys Love and Thunder, but the insistence on Thor’s likability, his decency and dude-ness, has become a creative dead end. The movie has its attractions, notably Hemsworth, Thompson and Crowe, whose Zeus vamps through a sequence with a butt-naked Thor and fainting minions.
  45. Madagascar
    Madagascar arouses no sense of wonder, except insofar as you wonder, as you watch it, how so much talent, technical skill and money could add up to so little.
  46. The Burnt Orange Heresy
    There’s some grim stuff here, but very little of Willeford’s mordant humor. A small and potent quantity of this quality is delivered by the larger-than-life rock star Mick Jagger in the role of Cassidy. Jagger shows a refreshing lack of conventional vanity by allowing both Bang and Debicki to tower over him.
  47. Mardi Gras: Made in China
    With any luck, this film will manage to open a few closed eyes (or minds).
  48. Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
    Precisely because their attitudes are so bluntly hedonistic and apolitical, Harold and Kumar manage to be fairly persuasive when they get around to criticizing the status quo, which the movie has the wit to acknowledge itself as part of.
  49. City of Ghosts
    Richly atmospheric and suspenseful.
  50. My Life Without Me
    Ms. Polley is a naturally subtle actress, and part of her appeal lies in an unusual ability to seem at once forthright and enigmatic, but this time she comes off as a bit smug.
  51. The Grandfather
    Brims with understanding of the complexities of relationships, the frailties of humankind and the possibilities of joy.
  52. Titus
    Makes the best possible argument for a cautionary drama that contemplates the absolute worst in us.
  53. Saints and Sinners
    For an outside observer, Saints and Sinners doesn't make particularly compelling viewing, but Ms. Honor has given her subjects an excellent present on their big day: the ultimate wedding video.
  54. Amen.
    In the end Amen is neither as moving nor as illuminating as it should be. It suffers especially when compared -- as is inevitable, given the closeness of their release dates -- with "The Pianist," Roman Polanski's movie about a Polish Jew during the Nazi occupation.
  55. Hannibal
    Hannibal, a silly though handsomely staged adaptation of the Thomas Harris novel directed by Ridley Scott, is a movie meant for the whole family -- the Manson family.
  56. Code 46
    The movie's atmosphere is, in many ways, more interesting than its story. Mr. Robbins and Ms. Morton are not the warmest actors. He can be mannered and smug, and she often seems to beam her performances from a strange, private mental universe.
  57. Chalk
    Finally fails to escape the conventions of the Hollywood cinema it so proudly deplores.
  58. Catching Out
    The scruffy, outspoken train-hoppers in Sarah George's exhilarating documentary, Catching Out, are a sure sign that the pioneer spirit still flickers in pockets of TV-wired America.
  59. The Cloud of Unknowing
    It takes skill to drain a perfectly good story like that of all intrigue and momentum, but Richard Sylvarnes, a photographer who directed the movie, manages to pull it off.
  60. Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land
    This one-sided account brings some lesser-known offenses to light and advances a scenario that is bold and detailed. But it is hardly dispassionate.
  61. Winning Girls Through Psychic Mind Control
    Dan Harnden's screenplay keeps things relatively interesting, despite the very thin plot.
  62. Yat luk che
    Like Giuseppe Tornatore's "Cinema Paradiso," Just One Look is a tribute to the formative power of cinema, a coming-of-age film that nimbly interweaves the adolescent hero's struggles with clips from the movies that shape his romanticized notions of life.
  63. Derailroaded
    Larry (Wild Man) Fischer, the psychotic songwriter and performer (found to be both paranoid-schizophrenic and bipolar) is sympathetically profiled in Josh Rubin's documentary.
  64. Light from the East
    Mostly the film is a testament to the egomania of the theater: despite what's going on around them, these actors can't see just how minor their modest project really is.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Laura Smiles
    Part domestic drama, part thriller, the microbudget shot-on-video feature Laura Smiles is so ambitious that its ultimate failure is more depressing than anything in its dark script.
  66. War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death
    Unsubtle, condensed and bullet-point simple, “War Made Easy” avoids fancy visuals for a uniformly drab and dispiriting aesthetic. Sporadically narrated by Sean Penn (evincing all the personality of a potato), the movie is cinematically inert if ultimately persuasive.
  67. The Stone Angel
    This multigenerational family history has enough gripping moments to hold your attention, but ultimately it leaves you frustrated by its failure to braid subplots and characters into a gripping narrative.
  68. Sixty Six
    Charts a sentimental struggle toward manhood with period-appropriate charm.
  69. The Sun Behind the Clouds: Tibet's Struggle for Freedom
    The filmmakers, chronicling the Dalai Lama’s somewhat muddled attempts to respond to the protesters’ calls while not antagonizing China, do a fair amount of muddling themselves. They lurch awkwardly between reverence for the Dalai Lama and hints that he has become, politically, irrelevant or an obstacle.
  70. The Infidel
    The director, Josh Appignanesi, has a nice sense of comic timing, slipping in some of the best jokes when you least expect them.
  71. Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll
    Its flashes of style are sometimes lively but more often seem, like the slavish period décor, to be desperate attempts to overcome the built-in inertia of the genre.
  72. The Anchorage
    At several points the depiction of Ulla's isolation takes on slasher-movie overtones, which undercuts the general solemnity but doesn't really add anything to the experience.
  73. Shake Hands with the Devil
    Filmed in Rwanda, Shake Hands With the Devil is certainly panoramic. But the best that can be said of the film is that it is an honorable dud.
  74. The Gift to Stalin
    Immersed in the alien beauty of the Kazakh steppe, "The Gift to Stalin" moves slowly but engages thoroughly.
  75. Daydream Nation
    Daydream Nation hopscotches forward and backward and in and out of the surreal; its abrupt tangents are announced by chapter headings. In the most complicated sequence the film tracks three characters simultaneously. The cinematography is darkly lush in an ominous "Twin Peaks" mode.
  76. Barbershop Punk
    An engaging, provocative documentary.
  77. Painted Skin: The Resurrection
    That said, this deliciously nutty love story - sample dialogue: "Let me eat this heart, then we can pick azaleas together" - is blindingly gorgeous to look at and exceptionally well acted, at least by the women.
  78. The Flying Swords of Dragon Gate
    Surprisingly old-fashioned. It seems to be having an argument with itself: the dazzling but often antiseptic immersiveness of the viewing experience is countered by storytelling suffused with nostalgia for a simpler, messier, livelier period in Chinese film.
  79. An Affair of the Heart
    An agreeable documentary about the pop singer Rick Springfield and his legions of female fans.
  80. The Maze Runner
    A perfectly serviceable entry in the young-adult dystopian sweepstakes.
  81. The Story of Luke
    When it works, the film serves as a modest reminder that the challenges of autism may sometimes be no more daunting or fearsome than those that face anyone in search of an independent life.
  82. Wampler's Ascent
    It’s then, as nature documentary and inspirational device, that Wampler’s Ascent finds its power.
  83. Geography Club
    The film is at its strongest when Russell and Kevin face tests of their character brought on by their interactions with homophobic students.
  84. Peter Brook: The Tightrope
    Simon Brook used five hidden cameras, and the audience has a sense of witnessing intimate moments rather than watching a performance.
  85. The Sleepwalker
    With strong assists from the cinematographer Zachary Galler and her ex-husband, the composer Sondre Lerche, Ms. Fastvold, previously a director of music videos, has painted a resonant tableau of dysfunction.
  86. A Fuller Life
    It’s a proud film but average.
  87. Life Inside Out
    This low-key drama so insistently resists epiphanies that it verges on bland.
  88. The Barefoot Artist
    Mr. Holsten, was a maker of the winning 2012 documentary “OC87,” a study of obsessive-compulsive disorder. His gift for portraiture shows only further refinement here.
  89. On the Way to School
    On the Way to School never wavers in its bland uplift.
  90. Eva
    The story has several well-disguised twists, and although it’s a drama, it is sprinkled with touches of whimsy, thanks to a colorful collection of robots.
  91. In the Courtyard
    Falling back repeatedly on in-your-face symbolism — especially with regard to the specter of decline — Mr. Salvadori seems content to idle in neutral.
  92. Below Dreams
    Ms. Bradley’s debut feature flutters along with inoffensive lyricism and a kindly eye, but it’s not enough to bring off a full-fledged portrayal that holds together.
  93. Band of Robbers
    This comic take on “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” is infused with a gleefully absurdist sense of humor while retaining a childlike sense of wonder.
  94. Look at Us Now, Mother!
    For a movie that promises an “epic journey” to explore a family’s “long-buried suffering,” it’s strangely unsatisfying, and eventually wearisome, to find that this clan is deeply troubled perhaps only in the eyes of its filmmaker.
  95. Lowriders
    Cars could easily have been the stars of Lowriders, but the film makes them supporting players in a family drama that’s a mix of strong scenes and shopworn ones punctuated by clichés.
  96. Strange Weather
    A case of excellent actors’ straining to elevate a contrived screenplay.
  97. Finding Altamira
    In Antonio Banderas, Mr. Hudson has a winning de Sautuola of personal modesty, scientific integrity and paternal warmth.
  98. Making a Killing: Guns, Greed, and the NRA
    Making a Killing generates a disgust that can’t be shaken.
  99. Big Time
    Clearly, the architect and the filmmaker are tight, which does not entirely benefit Big Time.
  100. The Wilby Conspiracy
    The best thing about the movie, flimed mostly in Kenya, is its performances, funny and hip and self-assured in the manner of television personalities working in front of loving audiences. Mr. Caine and Mr. Poitier are never unaware that their material may not be the greatest, but that doesn't spoil their good spirits, and when a good line comes along they get maximum results without stomping on it or us.
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