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. One Fine Day
    One Fine Day makes for sunny, pleasant fluff. Both stars are enjoyably breezy, and there's enough chemistry to deflect attention from the story's endless contrivances. The screenplay by Terrel Seltzer and Ellen Simon is full of energetic wisecracks. But it's jokey rather than actually funny most of the time.
  2. Kirikou and the Sorceress
    It's more a piece to admire than to be involved by, yet it's easy to imagine children hypnotized by a hero tinier than they are when "Kirikou" is continually loaded into the VCR.
  3. I Used to Be Famous
    It’s all pretty predictable . . . This has the effect of making the finale, which actually takes an exit ramp off triumphalist clichés, genuinely surprising.
  4. Sidney
    The inescapable impression is of a picture buckling beneath the weight of its subject’s achievements. Yet there are moments when the focus shifts and the movie shrugs off its hagiographic shackles.
  5. About Fate
    It would all be pretty boilerplate, but Mann’s anchoring appeal — his lean into Griffin’s modesty and decency — saves the movie from a sorrier fate.
  6. El Tiempo Perdido
    You couldn’t ask for richer reading material, even if the film doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its premise.
  7. Hellraiser
    As an ambitious allegory for the chaos and torment of addiction, Hellraiser works mainly because of A’zion, who gives her scattered character a deeply human desperation.
  8. Confess, Fletch
    Getting peeved at Mottola and Hamm’s easygoing efforts would be like getting mad at a cat for sleeping too much.
  9. Another Thin Man
    This third of the trademarked Thin Men takes its murders as jauntily as ever, confirms our impression that matrimony need not be too serious a business and provides as light an entertainment as any holiday-amusement seeker is likely to find.
  10. Luckiest Girl Alive
    Kunis’s alpha female appears at once ferocious and like a conspicuous sham. (Imagine Sheryl Sandberg as a “Scooby-Doo” villain.) Her performance carries the film — a fortunate break for the director Mike Barker, who has the near-impossible challenge of shepherding the tone from snark to painful sincerity.
  11. The Good Nurse
    In the judgment of the film, Cullen is just a side effect of an institutional cancer.
  12. All Quiet on the Western Front
    Berger has more tools at his disposal than Milestone did with the challenges of the early sound era, yet those advantages somehow make this update less impressive: The magnification in scale and dexterity lends itself to showing off. Still, the movie aims to pummel you with ceaseless brutality, and it’s hard not to be rattled by that.
  13. How to Blow Up a Pipeline
    How to Blow Up a Pipeline is at its best when it functions as a kind of roughed-up caper movie; it has a degree of suspense and efficiency that are becoming all too rare in the mainstream.
  14. Lady Chatterley's Lover
    Magee and Clermont-Tonnerre’s adaptation emphasizes the romance of Lawrence’s book over the radicalism of his vision. This Lady Chatterley’s Lover is faithful to the novel, while also revealing how safe, how domesticated, it has become.
  15. We Are As Gods
    We Are as Gods is a mildly interesting documentary about a very interesting man.
  16. Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)
    Squaring the Circle is slick and enjoyable enough, but it is also, like the company it chronicles, something of a boutique item, and the reminiscences grow faintly monotonous after a while.
  17. 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.
  18. Butcher's Crossing
    It’s a mostly well-crafted film with decent visual scope. The film’s greatest flaws are in Cage’s shakily written character.
  19. What's Love Got to Do with It?
    A glossy lesson in how to pour nontraditional content into a traditional rom-com mold, Shekhar Kapur’s What’s Love Got to Do With It? shapes competing notions of happily-ever-after into comfort food.
  20. Missing
    Missing captures the constant distractions of the modern age. Pop-up windows continually tug at June’s attention. However, the film’s more engaging moments tap into the older cyber nostalgia of text-based adventure games from the 1970s, where problems are solved by typing the right command.
  21. Magic Mike's Last Dance
    Hayek Pinault and Tatum have a tantalizing chemistry, but the script doesn’t always help them activate it.
  22. Knock at the Cabin
    For all its skill and cunning, Knock at the Cabin is an overwrought quasi-theological melodrama that also manages to be a half-baked thought experiment. It’s a thrill ride in a toy trolley.
  23. Eternal Spring
    While the animation gives the documentary some distinction, the narrative can’t entirely shake the sense that this momentous but brief episode is scaled more for a short than a feature.
  24. Deadpool & Wolverine
    Deadpool & Wolverine is a “Deadpool” movie, which means it’s rude and irreverent, funny and disgusting, weird and a little sweet. Reynolds and Jackman are fun to watch, in part because their on-screen characters contrast so violently with their nice guy personas off screen.
  25. InHospitable
    InHospitable is a decent advocacy documentary that compellingly argues a couple of points that aren’t easy to make compelling onscreen.
  26. 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.
  27. A Haunting in Venice
    In straddling genres, “Haunting” can get stuck in the middle. But there’s fun to be had there. What’s consistent is the elegant visuals — striking cinematography by Haris Zambarloukos — which mark this movie’s real genre as lavish old-fashioned Hollywood entertainment.
  28. Unicorn Wars
    Unicorn Wars is forcefully provocative, trying too hard to push buttons at the cost of more nuanced explorations of masculinity and power. For Vázquez, a pile of cartoon corpses makes enough of a point.
  29. Mama's Boy
    That the screenwriter’s mother was changed by her empathy for people different than her is an admirable value to have. But the film takes a somewhat myopic approach to Black’s reach-across-the-aisle activism philosophy, focusing primarily on his work toward marriage equality.
  30. Peaceful
    The film frequently dips into unintentional absurdity, yes, but it also captivates, thanks to the powers of the Gallic film-world heavyweights Benoît Magimel (playing Benjamin) and Catherine Deneuve.
  31. To the End
    Lears clearly feels earnest sympathy for her subjects and passion for their cause, but the film often replicates for viewers the same atmosphere of hopelessness that makes climate activism a hard sell for voters.
  32. The Estate
    This is a comedy that takes a vicious, over-the-top look at family greed, and fortunately, the cast members are game to play their characters’ attempts at flattery in the most unflattering manner possible.
  33. Gilda Live
    Nothing in Gilda Live is funnier than, or a substantial departure from, the material Gilda Radner does on "Saturday Night Live." But the film ought to satisfy her fans.
  34. Inside
    It’s disruptive, and then cathartic, to watch Dafoe’s primal performance dominate this museum/mausoleum and force us to side with humanity. He’s perfectly cast in a part that calls for quietly whirring intelligence.
  35. Amerikatsi
    It’s an intriguing scenario, though not always played out skillfully. For better and worse, we feel Charlie’s confinement fully, as he watches another’s life go by and yearns for a proper home of his own.
  36. Only in Theaters
    Ultimately the movie is as scattershot as it is enthusiastic. . . . But the narrative about the theaters’ present-day fight for survival is undeniably compelling.
  37. Bantú Mama
    It’s a quiet film that stays close to the central characters, but it could have benefited from broadening its view, giving context to some of the issues presented in the film — in particular how Blackness is perceived and experienced on the island.
  38. The Sound of Christmas
    The relationship between Montana and the kids is a highlight, as are some of the other secondary relationships. And though the film is as predictable and saccharine as one might expect of holiday fare, viewers who grew up in the Black church may enjoy seeing a relatable and chaste romantic story on-screen.
  39. Reckless
    Contrived and cliched as it turns out to be, Reckless has enough vitality to carry it for a while, although it never stops recalling other films.
  40. Kitchen Brigade
    Kitchen Brigade is a white-savior story par excellence, though at least it’s not difficult to swallow — the young people are lovely, and so is the food.
  41. Cassandro
    Williams, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, is an expert orchestrator of naturalism. The trouble is that lucha libre, built on glitz, is anything but naturalistic. The self-assured freedom Saúl channels in bed never makes its way into scenes in the ring, which tend to tire when they should dazzle.
  42. Kim's Video
    Kim’s Video, co-directed by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin and narrated by Redmon, is less a retail history than a shaggy dog story. One that actually appears to be true. Go in knowing that and you might get a kick out of it.
  43. Shortcomings
    The movie is funny and touching, with a star-making performance by Min and a script full of lovely, self-aware little touches . . . But it’s shot like a sitcom — flat, shiny, perfunctory — and structured like one, too, with quip-heavy vignettes that resolve in pat conclusions.
  44. Remember This
    Remember This is, quite literally, a filmed play, and Goldman and Hutchens don’t make any attempts to define or elevate itself outside the confines of the stage.
  45. Cinema Sabaya
    Rotem’s organic approach steers clear of icky idealism, but its conclusions nevertheless feel worn out. Talking helps, sure, but getting people in the same room is too often the stuff of fiction.
  46. The Persian Version
    The result is a personal film that feels oddly impersonal. The tonal clutter overwhelms Keshavarz’s genuinely interesting story.
  47. Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project
    The documentary offers only what the poet is willing to give.
  48. Murder Mystery 2
    As they have in past team-ups, Sandler and Aniston maintain a charming midcareer looseness, and have a palpable affability as a duo — one can sense the fun they had making such silliness, even if the result isn’t gold.
  49. Hidden Blade
    However crisp and stylishly executed, the parts don’t quite add up to a satisfying whole.
  50. 88
    The result is dramatically wonky — and eccentrically thought-provoking.
  51. The First Step
    At once a story of legislative struggle and an admiring profile of a crusader, The First Step sometimes gets bogged down in bromides about community and common ground rather than unpacking the specifics of Jones’s approach and how it differs from his detractors’.
  52. In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis
    A repetitious feel begins to take over. For some viewers, quietude may yield to boredom.
  53. Leo
    Leo sometimes has trouble identifying its audience.
  54. Pain Hustlers
    The movie is constrained by its own conscience.
  55. The Mother
    Apart from some deadpan exchanges between the Mother and Zoe, Lopez plays the role fierce. Even so, it isn’t always clear which gestures in the film should be taken seriously, and which make sport of the genre’s masculine posturing while offering an allegory about a birth mother’s sacrifice.
  56. Superpower
    Penn scores a coup by getting an on-camera interview with Zelensky on the first day of Russia’s invasion, and he films him on two additional occasions, in a video interview and in person on a later visit.
  57. The Caddy
    For the most part, this scatter-brained fiction, in which Mr. Lewis is teamed with his popular partner, Dean Martin, is a cut-to-size Martin-Lewis farce, wherein the two playmates lightly fancy that they are a golf contestant and his caddy, respectively.
  58. The Assassination Bureau
    Like an old electric automobile, the movie rolls forward, without surprises, steadily and almost soundlessly, except for the bomb explosion on the soundtrack. It's never as funny as it looks, but it's a pleasant enough ride if you like your companions.
  59. What We Do Next
    The result doesn’t make the best use of the medium’s powers, but the chatty ride does make for good food for thought.
  60. The Magic Flute
    In a way it’s kind of neat. In another way it’s kind of dopey. The movie toggles between those two states throughout.
  61. Wild Life
    Kris and Doug’s moving love story should be the emotional foundation of the documentary, but it’s edited in a bit too late. Paradoxically, however, we also crave more scenes of their individual transitions from bohemians to business titans.
  62. Rare Objects
    Holmes is a generous but indiscriminate director of actors: She has the tendency, not uncommon among actors turned directors, of extending a cast of inconsistent talent a degree of latitude better reserved for the heaviest hitters. (She doesn’t have this problem with her own performance, which is both compelling and well-situated in the context of the film.)
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Sssssss
    Toned down, without the final fireworks, the picture would have emerged as a real sleeper for thriller fans, who should catch it anyway. It's certainly original.
  64. William Shatner: You Can Call Me Bill
    "You Can Call Me Bill" is fundamentally a case of an actor presenting himself as he wants to be seen.
  65. Quasi
    It’s dumb fun that is at times entertaining, at times flat.
  66. Trolls Band Together
    The animation is strong, if too candy-coated, and the film is clever and funny from time to time. And parents might even find their own inner boy band fever ignited alongside their kids.
  67. The Young Wife
    These are familiar, even hackneyed themes, which make the film’s relentless theatrics feel gratuitous and somewhat exhausting. Style overpowers substance, though Poe’s fantastic eye for composition and Clemons’s vivacious screen presence are undeniable.
  68. Tommy Guns
    It’s a stylized spectacle, and the effects can feel discordant. Conceição eventually chips through the horror genre enamel to expose a message about the futility of war, but the tale’s miscellany of moods dulls its ultimate power.
  69. Story Ave
    Story Ave is marred by late revelations that appear designed, in a studio-notes sort of way, to clarify motivations. What’s unspoken — and what’s seen — does enough.
  70. The Wild One
    Although the reality of it goes soft and then collapses at the end, it is a tough and engrossing motion picture, weird and cruel, while it stays on the beam.
  71. Influencer
    Harder has made good and entertaining use of a premise that could have become a simple gimmick, and Naud and Saper prove strong leads as their characters try to read each other between the likes.
  72. Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting
    In tuning the project to the key of advocacy, the directors have created a film to nod along with, not one that unpacks complexity.
  73. Stan Lee
    It’s disappointing, yet inevitable that the creation story of Lee gives way to the characters he helped create.
  74. Shooting Stars
    For what it sets out to do, detailing the bond of young boys under surreal circumstances, Shooting Stars is a relatively sturdy retelling.
  75. World's Best
    What works is the high energy, kooky cast who fling themselves into the carefree choreography — especially Magnus, a mugging, contagious delight.
  76. It Lives Inside
    It’s a promising debut from Dutta, who offers a fresh premise that proves a natural fit for the genre.
  77. Slava Ukraini
    Artistic values aren’t really the point, which is to meet Ukrainians and to see different corners of the bombarded country, where residents, Lévy suggests, have in many cases become inured to the sight of a bombed office building or to the sound of warning sirens.
  78. Giving Birth to a Butterfly
    The forced profundity of the “Butterfly” script undermines the film’s enthralling sense of atmosphere, which drips with melancholy, menace and wonder.
  79. Being Mary Tyler Moore
    The film itself is so smitten by Moore that it skips over the worst of her self-inflected wounds.
  80. Frybread Face and Me
    The movie is overfamiliar and earnest, but you can’t accuse it of not being heartfelt.
  81. The Taking
    Had it included more current images of the region and the realities of the Navajo people, it may have been more effective in replacing these myths, going beyond film analysis to altering imagination.
  82. Bird Box Barcelona
    The result is a bleakly hopeless view of human nature that the finale, while cracking the door to a further expansion of the story, fails to refute.
  83. The Monkey King
    The rare moments in which an image pauses to catch its breath can be stunning, such as a shot of an endless expanse of flaming lanterns dangling over countless white ghosts — how the artist Yayoi Kusama might have designed the afterlife. There’s enough gags that a dozen land.
  84. The Creator
    Despite the impressively sweeping C.G.I. running battles in Thai fields or seaside settlements, or the gritty “Blade Runner”-lite interludes in crowded metropolises, the story’s engine produces the straightforward momentum of your average action blockbuster — one thing happens, then the next thing, complete with punchy (sometimes tin-eared) one-liners.
  85. Nimona
    Attention has been paid; it’s just not equally distributed. The tone is uneasy teetering on anarchic, veering from giddily moronic one-liners to — more shockingly — a climax with deep empathy and visual awe.
  86. Butterfly Vision
    The film might aim to deliver an aesthetic and emotional jolt, but it is the mundane, interpersonal moments that linger.
  87. Sunday in New York
    Well, the extent of the film's disconcertion and delight for a viewer will depend upon how prone one may be to a juvenile quandary and to the nimble performing of a pleasant cast.
  88. White Balls on Walls
    With access to behind-the-scenes processes, the documentary can be instructive about the work of changing legacy institutions, but also wincingly cautionary as Wolfs, his administrators and curators get tangled up in numbers and nomenclature.
  89. Four Daughters
    The re-enactments map out the family’s tension and lay bare their wounds, but the lost daughters remain cyphers — the appeal of radicalization frustratingly murky through the end.
  90. The Breaking Ice
    The setting is rife with metaphoric potential, and it is here that Chen falters as a director.
  91. The Delinquents
    The Delinquents wants to live modestly. It’s less concerned with satisfying the expectations of its genre than in finding waggish ways to deviate from them. To the film’s thinking, narrative is only a construct.
  92. Close Your Eyes
    Close Your Eyes has its virtues, certainly, including some pleasurably loose interludes at the beachfront compound where Miguel lives. These have a delicate, unforced quality that creates pinpricks of light in a movie that, as it struggles to engage meaningfully with the past, sinks into ponderousness.
  93. Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara
    One gets the sense that the director, in not wanting to rob the adult Edgardo (Leonardo Maltese) of his agency, even if it was woefully compromised, resorts to a horror-inflected score and overdramatic scenes of parental anguish to make clear the devastating consequences of a child separated from his family. The heightened drama seems hardly necessary.
  94. Concerned Citizen
    Haguel builds this brief but densely structured film in an interestingly modular, rhythmic way, thanks to a percussive score by Zoe Polanski and occasional, abrupt cuts to black following key scenes.
  95. My Best Friend Is a Vampire
    My Best Friend Is a Vampire does manage to come up with a few witty scenes.
  96. Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed
    In the end, with only Hudson to deal with, Kijak gets the big picture.
  97. 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.
  98. Apes Together Strong
    The lessons here are old, and at one point, the filmmakers use the phrase “the house always wins.” But there’s hope, because there’s always hope in such tales
  99. Chasing Chasing Amy
    Rodgers, a sheepish and at times bewildered guide, seems ill-equipped to reconcile Adams’s reflections with his admiration for Smith and “Chasing Amy,” and instead pivots the story to focus on his own personal and professional evolution.
  100. Users
    This negotiation between techno-pessimism and techno-fetishism is at the heart of Users, though Almada’s scattered movie struggles to keep them in balance; her broad, rhetorical voice-over is a poor match for the complexity of the film’s images.
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