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. Them That Follow
    We learn so little about these characters or the forces that shaped them that we’re never drawn into their drearily blinkered world.
  2. Legal Eagles
    Though publicized as a breakthrough into adult comedy for Mr. Reitman (''National Lampoon's Animal House,'' ''Meatballs,'' ''Ghostbusters''), this new film is less a true adult comedy than a teen-age comedy populated by adults who are functioning in an adult world.
  3. Antibodies
    As is often the case when ambitious young filmmakers have murder and profit on their minds, Mr. Alvart is finally less interested in the nature of man than in the cool stuff you can do with a camera, which he tosses about the set, swooping it up and down and all around, without rhyme or reason.
  4. Proxy
    Employing scaled-down sets and low-budget audacity, Mr. Parker, an intelligent and boundary-testing filmmaker, proves less concerned with logic than with how far he can push his characters.
  5. Galveston
    With shadowy imagery that pushes the boundaries of visibility and a mumbly lead performance from Ben Foster that strains the limits of intelligibility, Galveston goes past film noir and lands at film murk.
  6. Cet amour-là
    Ms. Moreau, still an imperious presence at age 75, makes no effort to look or sound like Duras -- this is one sacred monster stepping in for another.
  7. Dark Blue
    Unfortunately, the rest of the movie does not live up to Mr. Russell's performance.
  8. Two Men Went to War
    It mocks the absurdity of war, but between the chuckles, and especially near the end, it plucks the heartstrings.
  9. Bread and Roses
    He plies his viewers with plenty of bread -- chewy and, to some tastes, dry and starchy scenes -- but he also scatters petals of whimsy and delight to nourish the senses.
  10. Michael Jordan to the Max
    The format and the purposeful blandness of the script make Jordan seem remote, more icon than human being.
  11. AmnesiA
    The first feature written and directed by Martin Koolhoven. It reveals him as a skillful manipulator of disturbing visual images (much of the film is washed in inky blue) and a screenwriter adept at sustaining a mood of impending doom.
  12. Disappearances
    The movie, though lovingly handmade by Mr. Craven, has a frustratingly disjunctive rhythm.
  13. Burden
    Though the themes of Burden feel uncomfortably current, their execution is leaden and dismayingly artless.
  14. Flash of Genius
    It has the tone and texture of a well-made but forgettable television movie.
  15. Brother to Brother
    Filled with ideas and some nice acting, particularly from Mr. Mackie and Mr. Robinson, both of whom hold the screen easily, Mr. Evans has crammed a great deal of thought and a lot of obvious feeling into his first dramatic feature.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    G.I. Jesus
    May be a mixed bag, but it is so impressive in so many ways that it demands to be taken seriously. It's a black comedy about a returning Iraq war veteran named Jesús (Joe Arquette) that aims for an absurd, satirical tone (think "Dr. Strangelove" by way of "Coming Home") but rarely hits the mark.
  17. You've Been Trumped
    Mr. Trump comes across as an insensitive, lying bully who will do whatever it takes to realize his dream of creating what he promises will be the world's greatest golf resort.
  18. It's Complicated
    Pleasurable, daffy if at times daft.
  19. Back to the Future Part II
    Back to the Future deserved a chance to come back, especially under the cheerful, enterprising, mathematically minded stewardship of Mr. Zemeckis and Mr. Gale. Their new film isn't an ordinary sequel. It's as if the earlier film had been squared.
  20. little man
    Weighing in at almost exactly one pound and unable to breathe or eat on his own, Nicholas James Baba-Conn seemed doomed to a very short life; his chance for survival was calculated at close to zero.
  21. Museum Town
    For those even mildly curious about the story of one of the country’s largest visual and performing arts spaces, Museum Town is worth watching.
  22. Nicholas and Alexandra
    The problem with "Nicholas and Alexandra" is not inflation, but deflation, the attempt to cram too big a picture into too small a frame.
  23. Magic Hour
    A crafty reveal does not a clever film make, and even at a merciful 80 minutes, the device eventually feels more tired than the sullen Erin, who soldiers on through her suffering.
  24. Havoc
    Because what Havoc lacks in characters and story, it delivers in two audacious waves of indiscriminate killing that are so bruising and relentless they make the “John Wick” movies look like “Sesame Street.”
  25. I Origins
    “Another Earth” was a heartfelt entertainment that managed to infuse a tantalizing science fiction premise with thought and feeling. I Origins is too committed to explaining itself to repeat the trick and falls into the trap of taking its daffy intellectual conceits far too seriously.
  26. Unfinished Song
    The movie, originally titled “Song for Marion,” has more emotional clout than you might reasonably expect from a piece of inspirational hokum.
  27. Casanova
    In any case, what is on screen is a delightful respite from awards-season seriousness - a feather film, you might say, that actually tickles.
  28. War Dogs
    [Todd Phillips] delivers an entertaining tale, especially when one or both men have to travel from their home base in Florida to overseas hot spots to correct their ineptitude.
  29. Rubberneck
    It’s dragged down by non-scene after non-scene, and filmmaking choices that don’t earn their keep.
  30. The Equalizer
    Mr. Fuqua, while not the world’s most subtle filmmaker, directs the action sequences with bluntness and clarity and effectively uses his star as an oasis of calm in a jumpy, nasty universe.
  31. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
    A competently made, moderately diverting variation on a genre standard.
  32. Sherlock Holmes
    There are worse things than loutish, laddish cool, and as a series of poses and stunts, Sherlock Holmes is intermittently diverting.
  33. Immaculate
    Immaculate doesn’t try to reinvent anything but instead cheerfully embraces the familiar, which is part of what makes the movie enjoyable.
  34. Viral: Antisemitism in Four Mutations
    The trouble with this skimmed approach is that by sidelining historical analysis, the film denies its audience the best defense against distortion, a rational necessity when interpreting a conversation that often seems to happen in code.
  35. Wedding Season
    Wedding Season is mostly flavorless, but its interest in capitalistic success inspires a pucker of bad taste.
  36. The Intervention
    Despite her script’s omissions...Ms. DuVall juggles the emotional dynamics with fluid editing and light comic touches. The skilled cast members must flesh out their characters, and the unselfconscious Ms. Lynskey, who invites the audience’s mockery and ends up with its sympathy, is the revelation.
  37. Born in East L.A.
    Enormously good-natured - exactly the wrong tone for a comedy that needs all the rambunctious lunacy it can get. Instead, this story of an American mistakenly deported to Mexico as an illegal alien is amiable and plodding, the very last things you'd expect from Cheech, with or without Chong.
  38. The Sasquatch Gang
    There’s precious little to laugh at in The Sasquatch Gang, a sad attempt to board the loser-nerd comedy bandwagon.
  39. Skins
    Might have been better off as a documentary, with less of Mr. Eyre's uninspired dramatics and more of his sense of observation and outrage.
  40. Brotherhood of the Wolf
    The picture has a daring attention-span deficit and an epic silliness that can be awesomely entertaining.
  41. The Art of Amália
    Only twice does the film give a tantalizing glimpse at the personality behind the voice.
  42. Cecil B. DeMented
    Consistently amusing and smart in its choice of targets, but it lacks the manic edge of some of Waters' earlier movies.
  43. Salvation Army
    For a film rooted in a personal story, Salvation Army feels awfully remote.
  44. Sweethearts
    This direct-to-streaming bauble benefits from two leads whose charm effortlessly outshines the material.
  45. White Christmas
    Everyone works hard at the business of singing, dancing and cracking jokes, but the stuff that they work with is minor.
  46. Shoot to Kill
    This is essentially a formula film, and as such it's nothing fancy. But it has crisp, spare direction, enormous momentum and a story full of twists and turns. For anyone who thinks they don't make spine-tingling detective films the way they used to, good news: they've just made another.
  47. Ghosts of Mississippi
    True as it is, Reiner's film feels like the Hollywood version.
  48. The First Grader
    This ambition - to provoke thought while tugging at heartstrings - makes The First Grader fascinating and frustrating in almost equal measure.
  49. The Fearless Vampire Killers
    This beautifully produced, superbly scenic and excitingly photographed spoof of old-fashioned horror movies is as dismal and dead as a blood-drained corpse.
  50. Dogfight
    The film wants to be honest (and in its cruelties, it is), but the operative sensibility is that of a sitcom world. The characters aren't necessarily idealized, but they are flat and uninteresting. The material is lugubrious. The only seemingly spontaneous moment comes at the very end, which is too late.
  51. Settlers
    Settlers purports to challenge violence against women and colonialism. Instead, the female protagonist wallows in powerlessness for most of the movie, and a boxy robot is ultimately presented as more sympathetic than a displaced brown man.
  52. Opal Dream
    A warning to parents everywhere about the dangers of indulging irrational behavior, Opal Dream is a sickly sweet tale of deep dysfunction masquerading as family solidarity.
  53. Best and Most Beautiful Things
    Ms. Smith does not fit easily into any box, and neither does this thought-provoking film.
  54. Combat Obscura
    Leaning in to the style its patchwork of source material requires, Combat Obscura, is an eye-opening dispatch from a conflict mired in confusion.
  55. Ezra
    The movie’s sense of time is as vague as Ezra’s perception of it. Chaos is all he knows. Making Ezra even harder to follow, and undermining its authenticity, is the fact that its mostly African cast speaks in a heavily accented English. Mr. Kamara’s glowering lead performance, however, is riveting.
  56. Collaborator
    Collaborator has the tone and structure of an extended one-act play. Its uniformly wooden dialogue lends it the stage-bound feel of a tortured writing exercise.
  57. Date and Switch
    Like a fresh ripple in the near-stagnant high school movie pool, Chris Nelson’s Date and Switch balances formula with winning performers, genuine humor and a generosity of spirit that this genre too often lacks.
  58. The Kingdom
    The result is a slick, brutishly effective genre movie: “Syriana” for dummies. Which is not entirely a put-down.
  59. Good for Nothing
    Good for Nothing may be slight, but it portends a promising frontier for Mr. Wallis.
  60. Uncle John
    It’s tantalizing, sublimely creepy stuff that keeps you guessing even after the credits roll.
  61. Koko-di Koko-da
    Though at times tasteless and barely coherent, the story is oddly affecting, the very strangeness of Nyholm’s folkloric vision and its unnerving execution pulling you in.
  62. Extraction
    The fight scenes are plastic and glossy. Hargrave mistakes gore for cool and technical prowess for choreography, deploying overlong one-take shots that look like “Call of Duty” outtakes. He does commit to the location, though, creating a properly global thriller with a fine ensemble cast.
  63. May in the Summer
    The hand-wringing and revelations are familiar from many wedding movies, but May in the Summer gains added potency from its cross-cultural tensions and the drama the characters face in reconciling tradition with modern life.
  64. The Good Traitor
    Rosendahl’s framing complicates any “great man” narrative of the period, and shows how the energies of public and private worlds course back and forth.
  65. 3 Hearts
    The screenplay relies on so many mechanical contrivances to make the story gripping that you can hear the rusty machinery clanking.
  66. Save Me
    Never quite shakes off its aura of second-rate made-for-TV movie, Save Me has a lot of heart but little nerve and no surprise.
  67. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here
    Ms. Wallach has fashioned a multifaceted, informative portrait conveying the emotional urgency of the Kabakovs’ work.
  68. A Very Brady Sequel
    This carefree comedy film does its best with material that would have been totally ephemeral in a less Brady world.
  69. Mufasa: The Lion King
    The overall results are generally pretty, mildly diverting, at times dull and often familiar, despite a few unusually sharp, brief departures from Disney’s pacifying formula.
  70. Minions: The Rise of Gru
    Amiable and colorful as it is, the movie is also spectacularly inconsequential.
  71. Buffalo Soldiers
    Sloppy when it should be incisive, indulgent when it should be astringent, and ultimately unsure of what it is mocking and in what spirit.
  72. The Night We Never Met
    The Night We Never Met is never lifelike enough to evoke the madly romantic New York atmosphere it seems to be after. The actors try hard, but they are hamstrung by too many broad strokes and silly inconsistencies.
  73. Infinite Storm
    With this role, Watts is reminding us that she can hold the screen by herself and without saying a word tell you everything you need to know about a character — and all the while looking fantastic.
  74. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
    Try as it might to be refined and provocative, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer never rises above the pedestrian creepiness of its conceit.
  75. Rising Sun
    The film's mysteriousness is not profound. Anybody who hasn't guessed the killer's identity after 30 minutes should be forced to watch Rising Sun three times a day until Christmas.
  76. The Commuter
    It’s not even very good as a genre exercise, and can’t always keep track of which genre muscles it wants to flex. For a while it’s a locked-room mystery. Then it’s a runaway-train thriller.
  77. The Escapist
    Shapes a standard prison-break drama into a metaphysical study of freedom and reparation.
  78. Non-Stop
    A breathless dash to nowhere in particular, doesn't feel bad.
  79. The Lizzie McGuire Movie
    The picture unfolds as a light romantic comedy that adults will probably find familiar but tolerable, while their age-appropriate offspring will be transported to new heights of cinematic enchantment.
  80. Hidden in Plain Sight
    A sober, focused piece that asks Americans to take another look at what is going on in their own backyard.
  81. Leaving
    Here, a contemporary French white woman who yearns for liberté, égalité and fraternité is as much a prisoner of her circumstances as women were once upon a time and still are in some cultures, though truly it's all the clichés in this film that make her a captive.
  82. The Journals of Musan
    Mr. Park's screenplay, pedestrian direction and stolid performance don't set us up to care.
  83. G.B.F.
    Unlike such forerunners as “Clueless” and “Mean Girls,” however, this movie, doesn’t have a believable moment in it.
  84. Pump
    The movie goes beyond alarmism with solutions that on the surface would seem to find common ground between environmental advocacy and unfettered capitalism.
  85. Monk With a Camera
    This superficial movie plays like a fashion shoot with robes.
  86. I Am Michael
    While intellectually laudable, Mr. Kelly’s determined objectivity is so distancing that it takes an inherently intriguing story (based on a 2011 article in The New York Times Magazine) and sucks the life out of it.
  87. Mad Tiger
    The movie is obviously heartfelt, but the directors, Jonathan Yi and Michael Haertlein, never turn this motley crew into compelling characters.
  88. Dream Boat
    Some of the tougher interviews suggest that Mr. Milewski would like Dream Boat to be more substantial, but that impulse is mostly kept at bay in favor of lighter scenes.
  89. ACORN and the Firestorm
    Although the documentary makes clear how some accusations proved false or overblown, perhaps its biggest flaw is that it’s too eager to hand-wave any actual mistakes that Acorn made.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Legend of Hell House
    If John Hough, the director, and his small, willing cast maintain mild tension during their harried visit to this haunted "hell house," the few chills they provide are of little help.
  91. God's Time
    The three principal actors, particularly Sierra, are appealing. But the story is thin, and the jokes are more cute than funny.
  92. Reality Winner
    The film is clear in showing how the media put her into boxes: a traitor, a terrorist, a progressive, an innocent, a lost cause. But who is Reality Winner? This documentary doesn’t dig deeper than her patently well-meaning exterior.
  93. The Corruptor
    The movie may be a conventional story of police corruption, temptation and conflicting loyalties, but it never loses its smarts.
  94. Die Another Day
    Perhaps the most satisfying Bond movie since "The Spy Who Loved Me."
  95. Weightless
    Several long, wordless stretches arise during the film, all of them thoughtful. Jaron Albertin, directing his first feature, cultivates tension in small moments and doesn’t force the drama.
  96. Excalibur
    Mr. Boorman takes these myths very seriously, but he has used them with a pretentiousness that obscures his vision.
  97. The Driver
    Written and directed by Walter Hill, who once wrote and directed a good movie, Hard Times, with Charles Bronson. This one is not good. It is Awful Movie. It is Pretentious Movie. It is Silly Movie. It talks just like this.
  98. La Maison de la Radio
    As Mr. Philibert continues to pop in and out of different studios, in and out of the building, flitting from one face to the other, it feels as if he were searching for a story that never emerges.
  99. 7 Chinese Brothers
    Drifting and sweet, 7 Chinese Brothers (like Mr. Byington’s gentle 2009 love story, “Harmony and Me”) leaves a melancholy but hopeful aftertaste.
  100. Diary of a Chambermaid
    Ms. Seydoux’s triumph is her skill at imbuing Célestine with an almost angelic radiance that clashes with her underlying coarseness.
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