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. My Beautiful Stutter
    The lessons — for stutterers and non-stutterers — still hold.
  2. Ted K
    The film is a tad reductive, leaning too heavily on currently fashionable explanations for why lonely white men resort to violence. But Stone makes up for it with some magnificently eerie moments.
  3. Truth or Consequences
    The realization that Jayanti is using these things to buttress a fiction — albeit a fiction that could perhaps become true in the blink of an eye — is disquieting in a way the filmmaker might not have intended.
  4. Mannequin: On the Move
    This film has enough new characters and independent spirit to have a light, cheery style of its own.
  5. Unlawful Entry
    Unlawful Entry manages to be more gripping than it is convincing, thanks to the story's inevitable movement toward a violent showdown.
  6. Noises Off...
    There are a number of hefty laughs scattered throughout "Noises Off," Peter Bogdanovich's screen version of Michael Frayn's English stage farce. Yet there are nowhere near as many as the source material deserves and Mr. Bogdanovich's cast might otherwise have earned.
  7. Own the Room
    Tucked like a pair of aces into a solid but unremarkable hand of poker is a story arc that not only heightens the dramatic tension, but also clarifies the film’s more compelling ideas, skillfully tying the stories of the documentary’s subjects to their political subtext.
  8. Happily
    Grabinski has both wit and energy, and these qualities, along with a game cast, help keep “Happily” afloat for far longer than most made-in-L.A. dark domestic comedies. But the movie wants to do too many things, and grows diffuse.
  9. Still Life in Lodz
    The individual stories are powerful, as are the visual comparisons between present-day and historical locations. A few animated sequences effectively evoke the evanescence of memory.
  10. The Man Who Sold His Skin
    The lustrously shot movie breaks Sam out of the gallery grind through Hollywood-grade somersaults in storytelling (one of them so breezily violent as to feel a little tasteless)
  11. Martha: A Picture Story
    The film does a fair job of explaining Cooper’s temperament. (An editor who tried to assign her to photograph pollen for National Geographic found that wasn’t a great fit.) Ultimately, though, the photos are the thing. A conventional biographical portrait almost feels redundant. Cooper has already documented her own life story
  12. Renegades
    With a little more wit and a little less blood, Renegades could have been Lethal Weapon Jr. It is a fast, violent, implausible film about mismatched partners, and though it doesn't exactly break the bounds of its trashy genre, it's not at all bad for what it is.
  13. Arlo the Alligator Boy
    Long before the motley crew crashes the Met Gala, it’s clear that director Ryan Crego is bolting wacky gee-gaws onto a rote plot. Still, several gags pay off.
  14. Swan Song
    Kier is unfailingly captivating in the film, which makes it all the more bothersome that the film itself doesn’t match him.
  15. Our Towns
    As enjoyable as their writing can be, the filmmaking around them — aerial shots, time lapse photography, cuts to the couple looking engrossed — is less inspired than their project.
  16. The Columnist
    The Columnist doesn’t seem to care about making a cogent statement about feminist revenge or online culture. Perhaps it just needed an excuse to carry out its bloody high jinks, which are decent fun in their own right.
  17. Jennifer 8
    One of the most surprising things about Jennifer 8, a strikingly atmospheric film even when not an entirely convincing one, is a running time that is in excess of two hours. Losing 20 minutes would almost certainly have heightened the film's sense of purpose, which is sometimes in danger of drifting away.
  18. Stay Tuned
    A cleverly plotted movie that offers ample opportunity for spoofing anything and everything that can be found on television. Unfortunately, most of its takeoffs -- of a black-and-white gangster film, a spaghetti western and a period swashbuckler -- show no feel for genre and no genuine wit.
  19. Q & A
    The dialogue is often brutally comic, and individual scenes cut deep. Yet the narrative finally becomes almost impenetrable. The focus that the director would have demanded of another writer is lacking here.
  20. The Water Man
    The keen affinity the actor David Oyelowo has for his fellow performers is the best thing about The Water Man.
  21. Madhouse
    To his credit, Mr. Ropelewski comes up with fairly novel forms of mayhem and makes an effort to tie up most of the loose ends when the film is over.
  22. Downton Abbey: A New Era
    Fellowes manages to navigate Downton Abbey to charm both reactionaries and revolutionaries.
  23. 8 Billion Angels
    The unfocused editing somewhat defangs the film’s urgency, but it does give a sense of the scale of the issue and the corporate greed that fuels overconsumption.
  24. Take Me Out to the Ball Game
    For all its high spots, however, the show lacks consistent style and pace, and the stars are forced to clown and grimace much more than becomes their speed. Actually, the plotted humor is conspicuously bush-league stuff. Don't be surprised if you see people getting up for a seventh-inning stretch.
  25. Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens
    It's a frenetic farce that takes the form of a folksy study of Smalltown, U.S.A., where there is no problem that can't eventually be solved on top of a bed, in a bath.
  26. Last Letter from Your Lover
    In short, it too efficiently glosses over multiple plotlines to have much of an emotional impact. What remains are mostly generic beats. Still, the formula is engrossing enough, and its midcentury vintage appeal — the pillbox hats, headscarves and swanky soirees — is particularly seductive.
  27. Old
    Shyamalan’s fluid filmmaking style, outstanding features of which are an almost ever-mobile camera and a bag of focus tricks, serves him especially well here.
  28. The Boy from Medellín
    Heineman delivers a relatively sophisticated form of celebrity publicity in this film, armed with stunning concert footage but unoriginal insights into the burdens of modern fame, like the difficulty of balancing the expectations of fans with personal desires.
  29. The Last Mercenary
    The fight scenes have wit and Van Damme delivers his lines with just the right amount of weary good humor.
  30. Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm
    This stuff is best appreciated by rock mavens. Many of the other bands telling their stories (including the Boo Radleys and the Charlatans) didn’t have much of an impact in the States, so Anglophilia helps, too.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Condorman
    It is painless and chaste, and it has a lot of beautiful scenery and beautiful clothes. There are worse things to watch while you eat popcorn.
  32. Chasers
    But Mr. Berenger, grousing steadily, and Mr. McNamara, in a boyish Ricky Nelson mode, are likably matched. Ms. Eleniak, who also made a playful and picturesque Elly May Clampett in "The Beverly Hillbillies," succeeds here in rising above the cheesecake level.
  33. No Sudden Move
    The schematic for No Sudden Move remains perfectly intact, and the thing itself works pretty much according to the specifications. A consumer-rating agency would give it high marks for safety and efficiency, but it never leaves the showroom.
    • 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.
  35. Playing with Sharks
    Playing With Sharks would like to position Valerie as both intrepid diver and valiant activist, but with its focus on thrills and gills, the film goes light on the context needed to reconcile these two identities.
  36. Catch the Fair One
    The nexus of racism, patriarchal power and sexual exploitation gives Catch the Fair One a pulse of righteous anger, and Reis’s charisma — her willingness to show fear as well as resolve — makes Kaylee a magnetic protagonist.
  37. No Man of God
    For anyone who has heard audio of Bundy, Kirby’s impersonation will sound chillingly close to the real killer’s deadened, yet at times disturbingly raffish, cadence. Wood is persuasive, too, although Kit Lesser’s script writes the character as a cliché.
  38. Les Nôtres
    The film’s drama wrestles itself to a standstill (along with leaving some characterization sketchy, like that of a concerned social worker). Yet Leblanc might come closer to the sensation of concealed trauma than movies with more familiar storytelling beats.
  39. Ahead of the Curve
    The film’s subjects are overwhelmingly earnest, but the movie suffers for its substitution of enterprise over entertainment.
  40. Vice Versa
    The film's best scenes are those between the goofily nonchalant Mr. Reinhold and the precociously stern Mr. Savage, however bluntly these moments call attention to the craziness of the premise.
  41. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
    Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is closer to a curiosity than to a triumph, though its conception is certainly ambitious.
  42. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
    A film unintentionally stuck in its own kind of adolescence, “Mutant Mayhem” has plenty of charms but tries so hard to be cool, funny and relevant — so totally online — that it forgets to kick back with a slice, some buds and just, you know, vibe.
  43. Titane
    For all its reckless style and velocity, Titane doesn’t seem to know where it wants to go.
  44. Hold Me Tight
    For all the intensity of Krieps’s performance and the power of the piano repertoire, Hold Me Tight proceeds through the mourning process with a strange detachment, using Clarisse’s agony as scaffolding for ideas about memory and storytelling that seem more imposed on life than pulled from it.
  45. Aline
    The movie’s passion is incredible — but, boy, is it embodied in something awkward.
  46. The River Wild
    [Hanson] does another deft job of conveying a heroine's secret anxieties, at least during the first half of his story.
  47. Dinner in America
    There is, perhaps, an argument to be made for representing a time and place truthfully, but because the film does not critically engage with the uglier elements of the society it portrays, these become a distraction. And a viewer might find it difficult to get sucked into the love and music story at its center.
  48. The Last Tycoon
    The Last Tycoon doesn't really build to any climax. We follow it horizontally, as if it were a landscape being surveyed by a camera in a long pan-shot.
  49. Dating & New York
    A winning cast helps sell that familiar premise — not just Reale and Young-White, who have definite chemistry and an easy-flowing banter, but also the brassy, scene-stealing Catherine Cohen.
  50. tick, tick...Boom!
    Miranda’s devotion to his idol keeps him from expanding the musical’s myopic fretting into a universal story of sacrifice and resolve. Garfield at least gives Larson an endearing vulnerability.
  51. The Meaning of Life
    Monty Python's the Meaning of Life is funny but, being unreasonable, I wish it were funny from start to finish.
  52. Against the Current
    It’s not difficult to be moved and impressed by Gretarsdottir’s life story, especially when she details the secrecy of her struggles, but the story falls short in tying these emotional threads with her athletic accomplishments in an eloquent manner.
  53. Vacation Friends
    Clay Tarver, a veteran of the TV series “Silicon Valley” (and a founder of the postpunk band Chavez) directs with an eye and ear that’s a cut above what one usually gets with this sort of fare.
  54. Juniper
    Predictably, their relationship softens up, but the film nevertheless maintains some of its prickly charm, in no small part because of the feisty Rampling, whose ice-queen persona here straddles bone-dry humor and withering tragedy.
  55. The Boy Behind the Door
    Charbonier and Powell, themselves childhood friends from Detroit, focus on the boys’ allegiance to each other with an unwavering focus. This intent minimalism is also why the movie does not transcend its virtuosic, almost abstractly taut storytelling.
  56. All the Streets Are Silent: The Convergence of Hip Hop and Skateboarding (1987-1997)
    The film excels when it harnesses the wistful thrill of a bygone era, reminding us of a rich, creative past that deserves ample recognition.
  57. Bullet Train
    It’s watchable — it stars Brad Pitt — jokey, sometimes funny and predictably stupid.
  58. The Boys in the Band
    Crowley has a good, minor talent for comedy-of-insult, and for creating enough interest, by way of small character revelations, to maintain minimum suspense.
  59. Ascension
    This aestheticization of Chinese society doesn’t exactly sit well with this viewer: one wonders if this counts as a kind of tourism.
  60. We Intend to Cause Havoc
    The music itself is exciting enough that it washes out some of the unpleasant taste of the film’s early “white people discovering stuff” tone. And Chanda himself is incredibly winning, especially when he takes the stage.
  61. The Harder They Fall
    Samuel makes the most of his formidable cast. If anything, he may be overgenerous. The narrative sometimes flags so that everyone can get in a few volleys of the salty, pungent dialogue on the way to the next round of gunplay or fisticuffs.
  62. Scales
    Ameen prioritizes symbolism teeming with sensory spirit over plot-based narrative, which ultimately renders her attempt at making a political statement too opaque and disjointed to have much of an impact.
  63. Kipchoge: The Last Milestone
    The athleticism, physics and what one person calls the “bit of ballet” of the event are all stirring to witness.
  64. Scenes from an Empty Church
    “Scenes” has its moments, as any film that sits Ryan and Corrigan opposite each other in a confessional would. But even special effects near the end play more like the response to a challenge than a spark of inspiration.
  65. Tailgate
    This well-choreographed hunt is chilling, sure — particularly because of de Wolf’s terrifying performance and unconventional choice of weapon — but it’s also a little bit fun.
  66. Ghost in the Machine
    It is a competent, occasionally witty genre piece that never tries to be anything more.
  67. Everything Went Fine
    Understated almost to a fault, the film pitches its tone somewhere among the looming sorrow, gentle comedy and bureaucratic tedium that death, especially when planned, can entail. If the result is bracingly unsentimental, it’s also a touch inert — a little too poised to compel emotionally.
  68. Materna
    As it stands, the glue uniting these women of different ethnicities and backgrounds reads like a failed attempt to carve a more ambitious meaning out of individual stories already brimming with possibility.
  69. Turning Red
    It’s too bad that Turning Red fumbles its storytelling, because at the very least it has fun when it lets its fur fly.
  70. Unclenching the Fists
    Ada’s psychological tumult is captured in intimate close-ups and fluttering camera movements, while the absence of a score complements the film’s uneasy mood of pent-up rage and stifling despair.
  71. In Front of Your Face
    The secret is poised somewhere between triteness and disarming simplicity.
  72. Freaks vs. the Reich
    Its splashy, curiously filter-free adventures unfold in Italy and Germany during World War II, to sometimes awkward effect.
  73. The Alpinist
    The movie could stand to demystify how some of its most terrifying early shots were filmed. (Later on, we’re told Leclerc agreed to carry a small camera himself to shoot part of a conquest in Patagonia.) But it does capture its subject’s philosophy.
  74. Night Raiders
    Goulet’s sleek, lo-fi world-building — decrepit gray cityscapes; fields covered with smoke-spewing factories — is more compelling than her storytelling, which grows increasingly predictable as Niska and the vigilantes plan a raid on Waseese’s academy. Yet the film’s use of clichés can also be thrillingly subversive at times.
  75. The Year of the Discovery
    If the convoluted history and corresponding formal conceits are difficult to absorb, that is part of the point.
  76. Wolf
    Wolf may lead with an open curiosity, but in tackling big ideas about identity, openness is not always enough.
  77. Coming Home in the Dark
    While the whole thing is ruthlessly well done, it also sometimes seems to lean into a kind of moral relativism.
  78. Hellbender
    While the result is a mostly-compelling tale of matriarchal megalomania, occasionally this group composition feels more like a jumble.
  79. Yojimbo
    As in most Westerns, the dramatic penetration is not deep, and the plot complications are many and hard to follow in Japanese. Kurosawa is here showing more virtuosity than strength. Yojimbo is a long way (in the wrong direction) from his brilliant Rashomon.
  80. La Civil
    Its rigor is impressive, but also something of a narrative trap. Once the futility of Cielo’s situation, and her persistence in the face of it, are definitively established, a feeling of paralysis sets in.
  81. Hypnotic
    The movie is, if nothing else, ruthlessly efficient enough in delivering its crowd-pleasing bits that truly starving suspense genre hounds, at least, won’t necessarily mind.
  82. The Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star
    Anyone who has seen one of these movies can just take over for the characters and guess their lines as easily as the three cousins can swap clothes and accents to impersonate one another.
  83. Memory House
    Trapped in a hopelessly alienating world, Cristovam would rather buck than surrender; a fatal end would seem inevitable, but wisely, Miranda Maria pulls back the reins with a glimpse of empathy that teases a potential way forward.
  84. Fauci
    Fauci is at its best when it draws parallels between the pandemics that define Dr. Fauci’s career. It vexes when it leans on straightforward biography
  85. Cyrano
    From the moment Cyrano enters the action, his charisma and intelligence are on splendid display, and Dinklage — jaunty, melancholy, sly — takes possession of the movie. But that means that the argument on which the drama depends is over before it has even begun.
  86. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
    The self-reflexiveness of the entire enterprise only breaks the spell that Slate and Camp work hard to maintain — one which Rossellini effortlessly keeps intact with intelligence, beautifully controlled phrasing and a soft, melodious warmth that feels like a tender caress.
  87. Come from Away
    This amiable production’s temperature never rises above lukewarm: good sentiments are, unfortunately, difficult to dramatize, an issue compounded by a score that can feel like aural wallpaper.
  88. Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody
    Ackie doesn’t much resemble the superstar, although her carriage is correct: eyes closed, head flung back, arms pushing away the air as if to make room for that mezzo-soprano. That the film sticks to Houston’s surfaces is half excusable.
  89. Learn to Swim
    Learn to Swim is lovely to behold, but the sullen artist at the center feels too often like he’s drowning in melancholia and might take us down with him.
  90. Murina
    For the most part, the director cuts loose her characters and lets them and the story’s vague ideas — about gender, sexuality, money and power — swirl and drift, leaving you to decide how and whether they all fit together, or don’t.
  91. The Forgiven
    Fiennes peels David in layers, unraveling this man until you see his hollow interior.
  92. Saint-Narcisse
    For the most part, LaBruce tries to maintain fidelity to the idea that camp is best performed straight. If keeping up the pretense of unwinking entertainment causes the pace to drag at times, at least this movie never fails to follow through on its scandalous promise.
  93. Old Henry
    Old Henry makes a solid, honorable go of proving once again that the foursquare western isn’t dead, though in paying homage to its forebears, it inevitably stands in their very long shadows.
  94. Earwig
    Hadzihalilovic is an expert conjurer of other worlds, and “Earwig” unearths a startlingly seductive array of visual and sonic textures that don’t quite add up to much more than a powerful mood.
  95. Bingo Hell
    Despite the generally humorous vibe, Bingo Hell quietly accumulates an unignorable pathos.
  96. Madres
    A subdued score and some by-the-book camerawork can make this urgent story drag, but what it lacks in sting it makes up for with an original script (by Marcella Ochoa and Mario Miscione) and a ferociously pregnant protagonist who would make the “Fargo” character Marge Gunderson proud.
  97. The Manor
    Despite some flat cinematography and borderline goofy special effects, The Manor gives us a distinctive 70-year-old woman as its protagonist and a twisty ending sure to polarize.
  98. The Tender Bar
    It’s not the kind of movie that will knock you out, but it won’t leave you with a headache and a dry mouth, either. It’s a generous pour and a mellow buzz.
  99. Britney Vs. Spears
    Britney vs Spears underscores how tricky it is to make a credible documentary about a celebrity under duress without repeating many of the gestures that treat fame as the sine qua non of American culture.
  100. Medusa
    Though dressed in shock-value clothing, Medusa is also a straightforward character study, tackling issues like the scourge of Western beauty standards and the difficulties of leaving an abusive relationship along the way
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