The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,311 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: 9,399 out of 20311
  2. Mixed: 8,446 out of 20311
  3. Negative: 2,466 out of 20311
20311 movie reviews
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  1. Children of a Lesser God
    Watching Children of a Lesser God, the screen adaptation of Mark Medoff's 1980 Broadway play, is like being on a cruise to nowhere aboard a ship with decent service and above-par fast-food. Everything has been carefully programmed so that there are no surprises, no discoveries, nothing to do except to sit -with eyes propped open - and applaud the crew's efficiency.
  2. Project X
    a young folks' story, a sweet-natured boy-and-his-chimp tale (even the bad guys aren't all that bad), with a dose of Animal Liberation to give the impression that something of current signficance is going on.
  3. 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.
  4. Charade
    There's a lot to be said for it as a fast-moving, urbane entertainment in the comedy-mystery vein.
  5. XY Chelsea
    What’s left is a touching and tragic portrait of a vulnerable work in progress, one that for now might only be visible through a clouded lens.
  6. The Third Wife
    It’s too cool for melodrama and too pretty for politics, and the drama of May’s experience occupies a middle ground between pity and indignation.
  7. Young Ahmed
    Young Ahmed is suspenseful and economical, with a clear sense of what’s at stake, but something crucial — perhaps a deeper insight into the character or the contradictions that ensnare him — is missing.
  8. Deerskin
    A demented fetish comedy that escalates to startlingly nonchalant violence, Deerskin (written and directed by Quentin Dupieux) flickers tantalizingly between awful and awesome.
  9. The Misfits
    Mr. Huston's direction is dynamic, inventive and colorful. Mr. Gable is ironically vital. Miss Ritter, James Barton and Estelle Winwood are amusing in very minor roles, and Alex North has provided some good theme music. But the picture just doesn't come off.
  10. 21 Bridges
    Spraying what seems like several thousand rounds of ammunition, this sturdy thriller (the big-screen feature debut of the director Brian Kirk) has no patience for nuance. It’s a big, blunt, battering ram of a movie, but it’s not dumb.
  11. Days of Wine and Roses
    It is a commanding picture, and it is extremely well played by Mr. Lemmon and Miss Remick, who spare themselves none of the shameful, painful scenes. But for all their brilliant performing and the taut direction of Blake Edwards, they do not bring two pitiful characters to complete and overpowering life. [18 Jan 1963, p.7]
    • The New York Times
  12. Weathering with You
    The pace is sometimes so rapid that you scarcely have time to look, much less admire the translucent sheen of a plastic garbage bag or the meticulous lettering on a beer can (“Since 1978”). That’s to Shinkai’s purpose. As streets, homes, rooms and faces hurtle by, a textured world emerges detail by detail, one that looks like life yet is also expressionistic.
  13. The Black Godfather
    Because one of this Netflix documentary’s producers is Avant’s daughter, Nicole A. Avant, and both she and her husband, Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s head of content, appear as talking heads, this overlong love-in sometimes plays like an illustrated conflict of interest. But the anecdotes are gold.
  14. Joy
    Matching content with form, the movie is tight and merciless, even if parts play like a tract.
  15. Mike Wallace Is Here
    There are times when you wish Belkin wouldn’t cut away so quickly and would allow answers to tough questions (or Wallace’s own words) to play in full.
  16. A Face in the Crowd
    Mr. Schulberg and Mr. Kazan spawn a monster not unlike the one of Dr. Frankenstein. But so hypnotized are they by his presence that he runs away not only with the show but with intellectual reason and with the potentiality of their theme.
  17. Onward
    The film is a brightly rendered, sentimental ode to adolescence that hits all the right emotional buttons, even as it risks being forgotten itself.
  18. Whisper of the Heart
    Mr. Miyazaki wrote the screenplay for a love story about a shy girl and an aspiring violin maker (and a talking cat), but the result looks like a lot of non-Ghibli anime.
  19. Anna
    Anna isn’t as stylish or gripping as “Nikita,” but it does have its own demented charm, particularly in how it toys with structure, nesting competing narrative timelines within each other.
  20. Summer Night
    The film is transparently derivative, but it has enough visual panache and a feel for the rhythms of a laid-back summer evening that it’s tough to dislike.
  21. Ghost Fleet
    Ghost Fleet hits its marks as advocacy, but editing might have put more emphasis on the individual men, added further detail about the illicit networks or tracked Tungpuchayakul’s journey in a more focused and suspenseful manner.
  22. Emanuel
    The movie is primarily an act of bearing witness that does not ask to be judged on conventional filmmaking terms.
  23. Cat Ballou
    Cat Ballou does have flashes of good satiric wit. But, under Elliot Silverstein's direction, it is mostly just juvenile lampoon.
  24. Tank Girl
    Since this is thoroughly tongue in cheek, Tank Girl has a likable brashness, even when breathless, pointless plotting threatens to eclipse the movie's charms. Chief among its strong points is Lori Petty, a buzz-cut fashion plate in a Prozac necklace, who brings the necessary gusto to Tank Girl's flippancy.
  25. Blackboard Jungle
    As a straight melodrama of juvenile violence this is a vivid and hair-raising film.
  26. Two for the Road
    There are some precious moments of romantic charm in this bitter account of domestic discord amid surroundings that should inspire nothing but delight. And so one must seize upon them for the entertainment that is to be had, and endure the tedium of much of the picture.
  27. Tuff Turf
    Enough visual bravado to overpower the peculiarities of its class pretensions.
  28. Salt of the Earth
    The hard-focus, realistic quality of the picture's photography and style completes its characterization as a calculated social document.
  29. The Other Story
    The surfeit of subplots muddles the message.
  30. Extreme Prejudice
    It has a bold, bright look and a crisp tempo, propelling the action from one shootout to another until it finally reaches the most violent of its crescendos. By the time it has arrived at this last stage, the film is so close to being ludicrous that it's hard to know whether it is deteriorating or ascending.
  31. The Fourth Protocol
    A coolly efficient thriller with an octopus of a plot.
  32. For Keeps?
    Most of For Keeps is entirely predictable, but that should do little to diminish its interest for audiences of high-school age. Here again, Miss Ringwald is the very model of teen-age verisimilitude, and she's most impressive in making even the most hackneyed situations seem real.
  33. The Addams Family
    If this installment lays on the moral (all families are freaky in their own ways) a bit thick, it has just enough wit and weirdness to honor its source material.
  34. Gloria
    It has its charms but not for a minute is it believeable, and it's certainly never embarrassingly moving in the schmaltzy way of such slick Hollywood kidflicks as Paper Moon and even The Champ. [01 Oct 1980, p.19]
    • The New York Times
  35. The Jesus Rolls
    The movie doesn’t always work, but it’s never boring.
  36. Night Moves
    An elegant conundrum, a private‐eye film that has its full share of duplicity, violence and bizarre revelation, but whose mind keeps straying from questions of pure narrative to those of the hero's psyche.
  37. The Cat Rescuers
    While The Cat Rescuers movingly portrays the unique individuals committed to helping these cats, it doesn’t quite tackle the full complexity of this subject. Still, no animal lover should be surprised to find themselves holding back tears while watching this documentary.
  38. The Hunt
    Rage — shared by characters on both sides, even as they direct it at each other — is what “The Hunt” is all about. Anger is the source of its humor and its horror, both of which are fairly effective. The fights and shootouts are brisk and brutal. The dialogue pops with inventive profanity and familiar varieties of name-calling and woke-speak.
  39. Jirga
    Despite the performance’s credibility, few things are more irritating, artistically and historically, than the stranger-in-a-strange-land interloper who hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing.
  40. 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.
  41. Troop Beverly Hills
    Only fleetingly amusing, but Miss Long does make it fun for a while.
  42. Dolemite Is My Name
    It has a loose, friendly, house-party vibe, and it’s impossible not to have a good time watching the actors have a good time with one another. If there’s a problem, it’s that the good humor has the effect of lowering the film’s dramatic stakes, and risks turning its cultural reference points into cartoons.
  43. Motherless Brooklyn
    The high-mindedness of the movie, its showy conviction that its heart is in the right place, dulls some of its political insights. And its grandiosity undermines the ragged pleasures of the genre.
  44. Jojo Rabbit
    The humor is so audacious and the psychological insight at times so startling that it’s hard not to be dismayed when an easy and familiar dose of comfort is supplied at the end. This “Rabbit” is maybe just a little too cute, and a little too friendly.
  45. The Song of Names
    There is much to admire in the fluidity of Girard’s storytelling, in the music (Ray Chen did the violin solos) and in the complicated questions raised about social obligations. Still, the movie never quite justifies the contrivance of its puzzle-box construction.
  46. Guest of Honour
    The movie is consistently seductive, and it makes lovely use of a composition by Shannon Graham that is woven into Veronica’s work as a music teacher. But several story shortcuts . . . ensure that the characters’ anguish feels more constructed than organic.
  47. Saturday Fiction
    Star power is a logic unto itself, and Lou has ensured a limitless supply by casting Gong as an actress-spy. She conveys depths of pain and longing even when the script offers none, seducing us as effortlessly as Jean seduces her enemies.
  48. 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.
  49. Don't Let Go
    You get lost in its thickets because Estes hasn’t wholly figured out how to make toying with time work. But he has a fine cast and a good sense of place, including a feel for the spookiness of emptied-out spaces, and he makes his conspicuously low budget work for the near-claustrophobic intimacy.
  50. Before You Know It
    There are a good number of funny and pointed individual scenes and bit parts here (Alec Baldwin is droll as an inept therapist).
  51. Killerman
    The result might feel overlong and overwrought; yet thanks to Bader’s clever plotting and fruity dialogue — as well as strong supporting players — this grimy picture climaxes more satisfyingly than expected.
  52. Driven
    Somewhere deep inside Driven — Nick Hamm’s based-on-real-life crime caper — lies a fascinating movie.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Skin Game
    Garner and Gossett seem like originals out of American humor, and in a better movie they might have continued that way. But Skin Game is neither written nor directed with enough toughness, or enough compassion, to realize its potential.
  54. To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar
    Though he and his co-stars tackle their roles with mischievous humor, Beeban Kidron's direction stays flat even when the actors are funny.
  55. 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.
  56. The Son
    Schindel is more interested in suspense gamesmanship for its own sake, and all other provocations fade from the canvas.
  57. Kingdom
    The film acquits itself honorably, even if its ultimate message is disquieting.
  58. Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins
    While cuddling up to the adored one is a familiar biographical tactic, some critical distance might have made for a deeper, stronger movie.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Funhouse
    Mr. Hooper almost persuades us that he is up to more than just gore, creepiness and trauma.
  60. Halloween Ends
    Green has made a movie that’s less frantic and more intimate than its predecessor, one that unfolds with a mourning finality.
  61. Citizens Band
    Citizen's Band, is so clever that its seams show. Mr. Demme's tidiest parallels and most purposeful compositions are such attention-getters that the film has a hard time turning serious for its finale, in which characters who couldn't communicate directly come to understand one another at long last.
  62. *batteries not included
    Children may enjoy this, but their adult escorts will have a harder time...It's been well made and, especially in Miss Tandy's case, acted with a sense of fun. But the time for this brand of fantasy may have come and gone.
  63. The Missouri Breaks
    The film conveys a fine sense of place and period, of weather and mood and the precariousness of life, which are things that Mr. Nicholson responds to as an actor. Yet the plot, along with Mr. Brando, keeps intruding and throwing things out of balance.
  64. The Way Back
    The movie withholds a crucial bit of back story in early scenes only to drop it like an anvil later on. Since the revelation is known to the characters the whole time, the decision to deploy it as a surprise is cheap and shameless — a blatant foul in a movie otherwise filled with smoothly executed plays.
  65. The Stunt Man
    The film's cleverness is aggressive and cool, and so its mysteries, though elaborate, remain largely uninviting.
  66. Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight
    What "Tales From the Crypt" does best is sustain a look and tone that bring a comic-book's broad strokes into the realm of a live-action movie without seeming too mannered or arty. The film's gooey monsters with their electric green eyes and ferocious voracity are among the more convincing zombie demons to be found in a recent horror film.
  67. Jim Allison: Breakthrough
    Documentaries about innovative figures don’t always offer correspondingly innovative filmmaking. But even coloring within the lines of conventional biographical storytelling, Jim Allison: Breakthrough provides an accessible introduction to James P. Allison.
  68. Where Eagles Dare
    Where Eagles Dare is the ultimate metaphor. It encapsulates human experience into an ordered, comprehensible melodrama that is both absurd and entertaining.
  69. To All the Boys: Always and Forever
    Even at its most saccharine I can’t fault it for committing fully to what it is. I’m no fan of Valentine’s Day unless it’s a heart-shaped confection, but for those who are, “To All the Boys” is a light but satisfying dessert.
  70. Cruella
    This revisionist supervillain origin story, directed by Craig Gillespie (“I, Tonya”), doesn’t offer much that is genuinely new, but it nonetheless feels fresher than most recent Disney live-action efforts
  71. El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
    Paul’s performance was often overshadowed by Cranston’s during the series’s run, but he’s phenomenal here.
  72. The Vigil
    Keith Thomas’s slim but effective The Vigil milks terror from a minimalistic setup, relying on the shapes we make out with squinted eyes in the shadows.
  73. Dark Waters
    You do feel Haynes’s touch now and again, particularly in the sense of menace that seeps into a crepuscular law office and in the everyday eeriness that suffuses outwardly ordinary homes that are anything but normal.
  74. Blink of an Eye
    The interactions between these real-life characters are here recalled with fondness and rue by the surviving participants. Taublieb’s approach is straightforward, but also a little pedestrian.
  75. Black Christmas
    If the 2019 Black Christmas is not nearly as chilling as the original, it is genuinely barbed as gender satire, and it cleverly pre-empts obvious outrage.
  76. Disappearance at Clifton Hill
    For patient or forgiving fans of idiosyncratic thrillers, “Disappearance” may deliver satisfactory spills and chills.
  77. Dirt Music
    Every so often, a movie comes along that isn’t particularly good, yet somehow gets to you — even as your eyes start to roll, they can’t look away. “Dirt Music” is one of those, a strangely fascinating delivery system for so much visual beauty that its flaws scrabble to gain a purchase.
  78. Always in Season
    Olive weaves these stories together with fluidity and purpose, but the ideas of Always in Season sometimes crowd one another out.
  79. A German Youth
    The pace is too rapid for any nonexpert to absorb or glean the significance of all the details, which Périot generally leaves unexplained. But this documentary is fitfully thought-provoking, and particularly good at illustrating political fault lines of the time.
  80. The Last Full Measure
    The movie is written and directed, with undeniable sincerity, by Todd Robinson. While its story mechanics are creaky, the valor of Pitsenbarger is evoked cogently, in well-executed battle sequences
  81. Sink or Swim
    A gentle, genial dip into a pool of midlife despair.
  82. The Appaloosa
    Essentially a film of mordant feeling in which violence is always just below the surface of pokerfaced bluffing and fake Old-World Spanish courtesy.
  83. Harpoon
    It’s a sparse, nasty little thriller.
  84. Citizen K
    Although the film has long, engaging stretches, there is something slightly unsatisfying about the whole.
  85. Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn
    Long stretches are not a personal reckoning but an overview; many details overlap with “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” from last year, although the clips here are at least as good. It is also more sympathetic to Cohn than either Cohn’s reputation or the familial animosity would suggest.
  86. One, Two, Three
    That's about the nature of the picture. It is one with which you can laugh--with its own impudence toward foreign crises--while laughing at its rowdy spinning jokes.
  87. Experiment in Terror
    It takes more than two hours to come to a solution of the problem in this film. They would do it in one hour on TV, and it would probably be every bit as good.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Cat from Outer Space
    The Cat From Outer Space, is likely to keep the under-14's amused, at least if supplemented by plenty of popcorn.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Gus
    This is a decently average Disney film, with a few funny parts and other parts where you would agree to smile if you could.
  90. On the President's Orders
    The thesis of On the President’s Orders isn’t terribly original, but in a needlessly roundabout way, it makes its case that these killings are not the work of isolated individuals, but the product of a top-down culture that stems from Duterte's assent.
  91. Return from Witch Mountain
    The two young principals are serviceable, but not nearly as lively as some of their co-stars — Christian Juttner, as the tallest Earthquake, steals virtually every scene he doesn't share with Miss Davis or Mr. Lee.
  92. The Strongest Man in the World
    A Walt Disney comedy based on the old magic-formula story that's served the company well through thick (The Absent-Minded Professor) and thin (The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes). The new film, which opened at theaters throughout the city yesterday, is nowhere near as funny as the first but a lot better than the second.
  93. Farming
    Farming is a mystery movie in which the author investigates himself — and doesn’t fully share the answers.
  94. The Journey of Natty Gann
    If The Journey of Natty Gann were only a speedier, more energetic movie, Natty might have real staying power.
  95. Ximei
    This isn’t a groundbreaking documentary, but it does pay its subjects the ultimate courtesy, treating them as officials have not: as fully rounded human beings.
  96. Blank Check
    It's easy to see why this cheerfully dopey film has struck pay dirt.
  97. The Trial of the Chicago 7
    I don’t think, on balance, that this is a very good movie. It’s talky and clumsy, alternating between self-importance and clowning. But it’s also not a movie that can be easily shaken off. Partly this is an accident of timing.
  98. First Kid
    A clean-cut, affable family film without objectionable elements, beyond the brief and needless violence that complicates its finale.
  99. Queen of Hearts
    When the movie isn’t straining, the go-for-broke performances of Dyrholm and Lindh give it a specific, unusual tension — like the feeling you get when you’ve over-tightened a corkscrew and know the matter around it is about to crumble.
  100. To Be of Service
    Though To Be of Service skips over specifics, the big picture is clear, and its overriding point well made: These dogs are saving the lives of those who’ve sacrificed so much. Every person profiled here deserves an immense amount of respect. Every animal, too.
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