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. After Louie
    Some stronger filmmaking would be welcome, sure, but After Louie has an honesty that’s often just as valuable.
  2. Phenomena
    The gore starts spattering in earnest too late to save Creepers, a dim-witted horror movie.
  3. Moss
    With its gently twanging score, Moss is a film made in a minor key and its pleasures are minor, too. It passes like a lazy afternoon spent gently high. There’s not much this movie wants to accomplish, but it maintains a mood that sets the mind at ease.
  4. Bikini Moon
    Bikini Moon is better in separate scenes than as a whole, where Manchevski’s overreaches and plot lapses become more glaring. In this film, the harshest truths — make that “truths” — are best served in small doses.
  5. Split Image
    The shrill, melodramatic quality of the film's final sections, so unlike its calmly controlled beginning, suggests that no one connected with Split Image really knew which way this story was heading.
  6. Greased Lightning
    Mr. Pryor is especially successful in presenting Mr. Scott as a man who guards his energy and intelligence carefully, betraying very little to his enemies and saving a great deal for the moments that matter.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Big Jake
    Jogs along fairly tediously on the rescue trail, with the star being his laconic self, plus conventional spurts of violence, likewise the saddle humor.
  8. The Onion Field
    This is a strong, affecting story but it's also a straggly one, populated by tangential figures and parallel plotlines; the criminals' histories are every bit as convoluted and fascinating as those of the policemen they abducted. Even the courtroom drama is unusually complicated, introducing a new legal team with each new trial.
  9. Skyman
    Subdued and temperate, Skyman refuses to lean into the mystery of Carl’s claims or wind us up for a final resolution. Those elements might be present, but they’re never allowed to obscure what is essentially an empathetic, textured portrait of loneliness and loss.
  10. Aggie
    However great Gund’s influence on other collectors and philanthropists has been, and however progressive and righteous her advocacy for racial justice, Aggie doesn’t match her originality with an accordingly innovative approach.
  11. The Haunting of Julia
    Based on a novel by Peter Straub, The Haunting of Julia manages to draw on every horror movie cliche imaginable and still make very little sense.
  12. Indemnity
    A South African thriller haunted by the ghosts of many Hollywood blockbusters past, Indemnity trades plausibility and originality for a worthy substitute: a great deal of fun.
  13. Human Flowers of Flesh
    There is little story beyond the snatches of conversation we receive, but Human Flowers of Flesh brims with visual and aural detail from the rocky coasts and gurgling reefs.
  14. Saint Jack
    There are some pleasant things in Saint Jack, but there are few surprises, except for the fact that either the movie's editor or Mr. Bogdanovich, who directed the film and wrote the screenplay with Howard Sackler and Paul Theroux (based on the novel by Mr. Theroux), hasn't found a simple way to indicate the passage of time.
  15. Neptune's Daughter
    It has some quite clever popular music, Ricardo Montalban to make Latin love—and it has, above all, Red Skelton and Betty Garrett to play the buffoons.
  16. Iron Man 2
    You’re left wanting more, but not quite the “more” Iron Man 2 works so hard to supply.
  17. Our Friend
    This drippy drama presents precisely the kind of prettified portrait of death that Teague’s candid writing sought to rebut.
  18. The Muse
    A delectable comic performance by Sharon Stone.
  19. Baby Ruby
    As moody and messy as its eponym, Baby Ruby aspires to demonstrate how postpartum psychosis can feel like a horror movie. It just fails to make the condition feel like a particularly convincing or cohesive horror movie.
  20. John Rabe
    John Rabe, has its visceral moments. But it is also burdened by manipulative clichés of a screenplay in which exposition outweighs character development. Inspired by Rabe’s diaries, from which short excerpts are read, it tells the story almost exclusively from a Western point of view.
  21. Barbarians
    “Antichrist” may have been chauvinistic in its own right, but at least was interesting to watch. Barbarians doesn’t provide much excitement at all.
  22. Cars 2
    It is not entirely without charm or wit. Directed by John Lasseter (with Brad Lewis credited as co-director) from a script by Ben Queen, Cars 2 lavishes scrupulous imaginative attention on its cosmopolitan settings.
  23. Journey to the Center of the Earth
    If this movie is not a ride, then what is it? One thing it may not be, quite, is a movie.
  24. The Revenant
    A middling zombie movie elevated by clever writing and gooeylicious special effects, Kerry Prior's Revenant toys with big themes but settles for uneasy laughs.
  25. Days of the Bagnold Summer
    Amiably anecdotal, the movie gets wry results from Dolan and other players, including Rob Brydon as a would-be ladies man and Tamsin Greig as a “hipper” mom than Sue.
  26. France
    While France remains interesting, thanks to Seydoux’s tough and resourceful performance, “France” loses its emotional force and its intellectual focus. A potentially insightful exploration of the loss of self in a media-saturated world amounts, in the end, to a series of shallow images.
  27. Hatchet
    Horror without suspense is like sex without love: you can appreciate the technicalities, but ultimately there’s no reason to care.
  28. Toast
    Ms. Bonham Carter's hearty performance makes Mrs. Potter almost lovable. You may laugh at her garishness, but you applaud her pluck and stamina.
  29. Cirkus Columbia
    Half of the time, the movie - based on a novel by Ivica Dikic, who collaborated with Mr. Tanovic on the screenplay - has the tone and pace of a farce. The other half, it plays like an unconvincing melodrama. The film assumes knowledge about the history and politics of the former Yugoslavia and the wars involved in its breakup that most Americans don't possess.
  30. Right at Your Door
    The film, especially in its resolution, feels a bit like a “Twilight Zone” episode and might have been better at that length, but the acting’s pretty good, and the cinematography keeps things lively.
  31. Little Big League
    The scenes on the ballfield have a credibility that is unusual in a baseball film. Adding to the realism are the appearances of a number of major league players as the Twins' opponents. The glow and cleancut innocence of these scenes evokes the magic of the game as seen through the eyes of a youthful fan.
  32. Cold Pursuit
    I can’t deny that the glum, resentful, not-giving-a-damn masculine vibe of Cold Pursuit has its appeal, as does Moland’s blunt knack for efficient screen violence.
  33. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
    The movie has the pleasingly demented texture of early Tim Burton. It bears the logo of Steven Spielberg’s Amblin company and is seen from a Spielbergian child’s-eye view.
  34. Generation War
    As television drama, Generation War is unquestionably effective. As dramatized history, it is pretty questionable.
  35. Robin Hood
    The visual style is charmingly conventional, as gently reassuring as that of a Donald Duck cartoon, sometimes as romantically pretty as an old Silly Symphony.
  36. Strangers with Candy
    Devotees of the series, admirers of Ms. Sedaris and fake-news junkies who can never get enough of Mr. Colbert will find reasons to see it and to convince themselves that it is funnier and more satisfying than it really is. Count me in.
  37. Dog Pound
    Kim Chapiron, proves an excellent choreographer of brutality...But without a strong political point (unlike its source material), Dog Pound feels hollow and hopeless.
  38. Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure
    A dandy little documentary whether you view the story it captures as a precursor to the flash fame of the Internet age or as one of the last genuine underground phenomena before the Internet made that whole concept obsolete.
  39. The Wall
    The vein-popping mood is ultimately more exhausting than exciting.
  40. The Addams Family
    The film's aimlessness and repetitiveness eventually become draining. And its small touches often work better than its more elaborate ones, like an extended party sequence that seems awkward and largely unnecessary.
  41. Saudate for the Future
    Despite its sociological tidbits and flashes of musical vitality, Saudade do Futuro never goes anywhere.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Scorpio
    The aphoristic style, combined with Winner's unwavering visual instinct for crushingly obvious detail, helps to push Scorpio out of low dullness into vertiginous absurdity.
  43. The Wildest Dream
    You may not believe it's possible to bore people to death with a film about risking your life, but The Wildest Dream comes shockingly close.
  44. Charlie Says
    It’s a tough, difficult story that, anchored by Guinevere Turner’s script, Harron recounts with lucid calm, compassion and intelligent interpretive license.
  45. Bubba Ho-tep
    There is a grungy high spirit during the first third of this film, but then it dissipates like a mist from an aerosol can.
  46. Ordinary Angels
    Despite its bona fides, the movies narrative and characterizations practically gorge on clichés.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Killer Elite
    Mr. Peckinpah is mannered and inventive, and these qualities both give the film its strengths and undermine it horrendously. Cleverness, for one thing, gets in the way of comprehensibility.
  48. Tornado
    The movie quickly establishes itself as a revenge narrative, and each bad guy goes down in a way designed to suit the viewer’s justified bloodlust.
  49. Snow White and the Huntsman
    Though it is an ambitious - at times mesmerizing - application of the latest cinematic technology, the movie tries to recapture some of the menace of the stories that used to be told to scare children rather than console them.
  50. Greetings from Tim Buckley
    It’s sweet, sentimental, almost inevitably touching if not especially persuasive, brushing against the thorns in each man’s life without drawing blood.
  51. Black Sunday
    The characters don't motivate the drama in any real way. They are cut and shaped to fit it, and if the cast of Black Sunday were not so good, and if Mr. Frankenheimer were a less able director, the movie would be unendurably boring.
    • The New York Times
  52. Finch
    Finch is sweet, yet disappointingly uneventful.
  53. Coach Carter
    This may be the coach's story, but to the extent that Coach Carter is interesting rather than merely inspirational, it's because of the team.
  54. Assisted Living
    May be a comedy, but its images of physical frailty are inescapably unsettling. As the camera fixates on frail, spotted trembling hands unsteadily reaching out, it is impossible not to imagine a future in which those hands could be yours.
  55. 1,000 Times Good Night
    What makes 1,000 Times Good Night more than a dramatic essay on wartime journalism is Ms. Binoche’s wrenchingly honest portrayal of a woman of conscience driven by a mixture of guilt, nobility and self-importance, reckoning belatedly with her destructive impulses.
  56. How It Ends
    The film plays as a series of perfectly enjoyable sketches strung together, an excuse for veteran actors to chew on playful dialogue.
  57. The Perfect Find
    Good thing Union steers The Perfect Find with such sunny warmth and relatable poise, too, because the director, Numa Perrier, and screenwriter, Leigh Davenport (adapting Tia Williams’s 2016 novel of the same title), are not as assured.
  58. The Quiet One
    Wyman narrates throughout, and his innate common sense can be persuasive.
  59. Brighton Rock
    By discarding most of the theological debate, the movie is no longer a passion play but a gritty and despairing noir. That's good enough for me.
  60. High School Musical 3: Senior Year
    A candy-colored never-never land that Peter Pan might envy.
  61. Somebody I Used to Know
    The film lacks the indelible details and authentic feeling necessary to encode it in long-term memory. Indeed, soon after finishing the movie, it already feels far away.
  62. The Great New Wonderful
    It is hard to feel much warmth toward people whose most salient feature is their disconnection from reality.
  63. The People Under the Stairs
    Though the new movie has its share of blood and gore, it is mostly creepy and, considering the bizarre circumstances, surprisingly funny.
  64. Kate Nash: Underestimate the Girl
    It is endearing in its frankness: a profile of a star after her return from the firmament.
  65. The Dinner
    Despite frequent flashbacks and Bobby Bukowski’s richly dimensional photography, the movie has a static, stagy look that amplifies the oppressiveness of its increasingly unpleasant exchanges.
  66. Home for the Holidays
    Ms. Foster and the screenwriter, W. D. Richter, have given this film some peculiar mood swings, so that it starts out zanily and winds down to a wistful note.
  67. Hell of a Summer
    Wolfhard and Bryk don’t relish violence or gore: Hell of a Summer is surprisingly tame, with most of its kills kept tastefully offscreen.
  68. The Quiet Ones
    The theft that inspired the movie has been called one of the biggest in Denmark’s history. It deserved a sleeker film.
  69. Confetti
    Content to go only a third of the way to the bottom of its characters, the movie gives each a few comic tics and leaves it at that.
  70. A Walk Among the Tombstones
    Nasty, brutal and unforgiving, A Walk Among the Tombstones is one of those rare contemporary cinematic offerings: intelligent pulp.
  71. Significant Other
    Significant Other does not reinvent the genre, but its narrative flourishes make for an exciting outing.
  72. Backstage
    As long as it focuses on its feverishly needy central characters, neither of whom you would ever want to have as a friend, it remains true to itself.
  73. Morning Glory
    A passably amusing romantic comedy with a laugh-strewn script that's almost undone by the hard sell of an enterprise that drills every emotional beat into your head.
  74. American Pop
    American Pop is a dazzling display of talent, nerve, ideas (old and new), passion and a marvelously free sensibility. The man may well be a genius, though that sort of pronouncement will have to wait on time.
  75. Traveller
    Traveller is just a hot little sleeper with strong characters and a story to tell.
  76. Viper Club
    Viper Club falters with mawkish flashbacks of the mother and son, and with its ham-fisted, repeated emphasis on the smarm of government officials. But it is mostly gripping.
  77. The Last Kiss
    The fallibility of the romantic ideal -- which is nonetheless indispensable on screen and off -- is something Hollywood has trouble dealing with. "The Break-up," in which Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughan did just what the title promised, would have been a more notable exception if it were anything like a good movie. The Last Kiss, while not quite a good movie either, at least deserves credit for its honesty.
  78. The Tavern
    Astringent and unsentimental, it is a case study of losing, its clear eye focused unwaveringly on the realities of commerce and kinship.
  79. Sasayaki
    There's a little more sex than you'll see on WB, but mostly there's an atmosphere of brooding psychodrama and erotic cruelty that falls somewhere between "Cries and Whispers" and "Say Anything."
  80. The Man from Elysian Fields
    By the end, after an hour and a half of wondering -- sometimes amusedly, sometimes impatiently -- just what this strenuously unconventional movie is supposed to be, you discover that the answer is as conventional as can be.
  81. Up at the Villa
    It reminds us that Italy is beautiful, that Fascism was a dreadful nuisance and that Sean Penn is a great actor, deserving of better vehicles than this vintage lemon.
  82. Alila
    The movie...tries to juggle too many characters at once (its title means "story plot" in Hebrew), and in several cases their connections aren't adequately explained.
  83. Memoir of War
    Ms. Thierry plays Marguerite with an understatement that can be enigmatic, seductive, or deliberately confounding. The picture as a whole doesn’t do justice to her committed performance.
  84. Three Peaks
    Three Peaks has a placid surface, but Zabeil uses abstraction — with edits that elide information or play tricks with spatial perception — to deepen a trite scenario.
  85. Wind
    Wind is not commonplace movie making. The sailing sequences, including one short, very funny race off Newport involving the kind of small boats you and I might sail, surpass anything I've ever seen on the screen. There are collisions at sea, wrecked spinnakers and freak accidents, like the one during a race when a sailor finds himself hanging upside down from the mast as the other boat gains. These things exhilarate as they threaten to stop the heart.
  86. Wrath of Man
    Ritchie reveals crucial story points with clever time-juggling editing, and keeps up the tension well into the movie’s climax, which delivers exactly what the viewer will have come to hope for.
  87. Today's Special
    An immigrant-family comedy that hits all the sentimental clichés of the genre as if they were stops on the No. 7 train.
  88. The Mountain
    Some might see the final act as body horror. To the director, it’s a metaphysical sacrament — and all along, his camera has hinted that mankind must commit to the planet before it’s too late.
  89. Jules
    Underneath its ridiculous framing and outer-space high jinks, “Jules” is full to the brim with empathy for its elderly characters and their desire for personal agency.
  90. Mascots
    Although Mascots is neither as funny nor as satirically acute as its forerunner, it would be churlish to complain too loudly. And the sharpest verbal jokes in the screenplay by Mr. Guest and the actor and writer Jim Piddock are as inspired as ever. Mr. Guest’s gift for the archly comedic mot juste is undiminished.
  91. Last Chance Harvey
    There’s something irresistible about watching two people fall in love, even in contrived, sniffle- and sometimes gag-inducing films like Last Chance Harvey.
  92. Horrible Bosses
    The laughter is mean but also oddly pure: it expels shame and leaves you feeling dizzy, a little embarrassed and also exhilarated, kind of like the cocaine that two of the main characters consume by accident.
  93. First Love
    All setup and no payoff.
  94. True Adolescents
    True Adolescents, like most indie movies related to the mumblecore school, is a delicate piece of machinery. Its truth lies in the tiniest details: the pauses, the stricken looks, the false bravado, the pathetically redundant slang (so many "dudes").
  95. Mama
    Instead of delivering buckets of guts and gore, this ghost story offers a strong sense of time and place, along with the kind of niceties that don't often figure into horror flicks, notably pictorial beauty, an atmosphere throbbing with dread and actors so good that you don't want anyone to take an ax to them.
  96. The Company You Keep
    This earnest, well-intentioned movie elicits frustration that its story had to be packaged as a conventional, not very suspenseful fugitive thriller with a bogus Hollywood ending.
  97. 13: The Musical
    While every image is as bright and colorful as a new box of crayons, the kids themselves never come across as artificial, thanks in part to Jamal Sims’ naturalistic but crisp choreography, which emphasizes stomps and leans and long-legged strides.
  98. Not Without My Daughter
    It's a seriously intended movie that goes grossly comic when it means to be most solemn. It's a tale of mother love and freedom that is both mean and narrow.
  99. Forks Over Knives
    While at times fascinating, this trudge through statistics, graphs and grainy film of cholesterol bubbles and arterial plaque may challenge even the most determined viewer.
  100. Cujo
    As directed by Lewis Teague, Cujo is by no means a horror classic, but it's suspenseful and scary. The performances are simple and effective, particularly Miss Wallace's. And Danny Pintauro does a good job as the frightened child.
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