The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,269 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: 9,377 out of 20269
  2. Mixed: 8,428 out of 20269
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20269
20269 movie reviews
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  1. The Inner Cage
    The Inner Cage isn’t exactly a feast for the senses. Even so, if you’re in the mood to listen, the film’s careful conversations occasionally serve up food for thought.
  2. Freud's Last Session
    The look of Freud’s Last Session could make one doubt the presence of a cinematographer.
  3. Migration
    In the end, Migration moves along at jet speed while often feeling labored.
  4. The Iron Claw
    There’s pleasure and meaning in the sons’ roughhousing and camaraderie, as well as beauty, heat and melancholy in their heartbreakingly fleeting physical perfection. Yet as the story’s uglier side emerges, Durkin hedges.
  5. Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire
    Boutella is a pleasingly game and lithesome heroine, but the movie around her feels curiously indifferent, a crammed, compressed delivery system for its maker’s dorm-room dreams.
  6. All of Us Strangers
    Haigh is a tremendously lyrical filmmaker, and All of Us Strangers unfolds in a space that seems like a dream, or a hallucination, pulsing with the rippling soul rush of love turning a life from monochrome to full color.
  7. Anyone But You
    Sweeney and Powell could do wonders with a better script, something that makes more use of the way they grin at each other like they ate knives for lunch. She’s skilled at layered insincerity; he specializes in smirky, put-on machismo, shooting the camera a horrifically funny tongue waggle.
  8. The Color Purple
    For the first two hours, it’s absorbing: big song-and-dance numbers and emotional set pieces, dynamic performances from everyone, and a feeling of reverence for the story and what it’s meant for 40 years give it gravitas and heart. . . Yet by the end it’s clear that the story remains slippery to would-be adapters.
  9. The Family Plan
    This is pretty routine material, but it’s been realized with charm and enthusiasm: The director, Simon Cellan Jones, maintains a good handle on the comic-thriller tone and shoots the action with wit and creativity.
  10. The Zone of Interest
    All that is clear from what’s onscreen is Glazer has made a hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise set in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.
  11. Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget
    When the source material was so fun, the cover is bound to be enjoyable, and this one is, even if it sags a little around the two-thirds mark. There’s punning, and contraptions, and ducks that shoot lasers out of their eyes. It’s a good time.
  12. American Fiction
    To make good on his movie’s message, Jefferson is determined to give space to the moments of Monk’s life that don’t hinge on race at all.
  13. Immediate Family
    Tedesco is the son of the West Coast guitar great Tommy Tedesco, and he clearly has a knack for getting musicians to open up. The band members.
  14. Wonka
    The movie is overly busy, as these kinds of eager-to-please diversions tend to be, and at two hours it overstays its welcome.
  15. Kevin Hart & Chris Rock: Headliners Only
    The film (which feels more like a commercial than a documentary) works best as a behind the scenes hang with an odd couple.
  16. Into the Weeds
    The movie makes clear just how difficult it is for one person to take on a corporation that has vast resources, dexterity in countering evidence and — the film argues — unfairly easy access to regulators.
  17. Total Trust
    Total Trust is not a chronicle of how circumstances can go from a simmer to a boil, but rather a moment’s temperature check.
  18. Wish You Were Here
    Wish You Were Here has a quaint, inviting period look - the year is 1951, the setting a British coastal village - and a cast that's well attuned to Mr. Leland's brand of cleverness.
  19. Concrete Utopia
    Smoothly shaping familiar genre tropes into a brutal study of class warfare and the stifling of pity, the director, Um Tae-hwa (who wrote the script with Lee Shin-ji), makes human kindness the first casualty of social disorder.
  20. Waitress: The Musical
    This is Bareilles’s show in every way. While she doesn’t quite match the emotional subtlety of Jessie Mueller, who originated Jenna, she has grown in leaps and bounds as an actress and provides a warm anchor for the movie.
  21. Our Son
    A simple yet engaging melodrama.
  22. Poor Things
    It isn’t long into Poor Things that you start to feel as if you were being bullied into admiring a movie that’s so deeply self-satisfied there really isn’t room for the two of you.
  23. The Archies
    It’s an extravagant stunt perked up by moments of absurdity.
  24. Anselm
    A film like Anselm is another level of preservation as well as a contemplative experience, in which the past and the future meet, in a way we can feel as much as see.
  25. Origin
    It is a great big swing about taking a great big swing, and while the film is more persuasive as a drama than the argument it relays, few American movies this year reach so high so boldly.
  26. Leave the World Behind
    After a while, the movie plays like a bulleted list of everything wrong with America — fair enough — but hurled so relentlessly at the audience that you can only assume the goal is for anyone watching the movie to find something they agree with. In the onslaught, the narrative tension dulls into passivity, both for us and for the characters.
  27. Werner Herzog - Radical Dreamer
    The movie also provides a smart primer on the “New German Cinema” Herzog helped bring into being during the 1960s.
  28. Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé
    I don’t know if it’s entirely possible to be supremely conscious of one’s self and yet be vividly unselfconscious, but that’s where Beyoncé finds herself.
  29. Bad Press
    Landsberry-Baker and Peeler could linger more on details about the people involved instead of the horse-race suspense of vote counts. But who can blame them when freedom is in the balance, and as local media outlets dwindle nationally.
  30. Who We Become
    The issues explored in Who We Become are essential, but the film’s content can occasionally feel superficial.
  31. Dutch
    Dutch is never more than glancingly comic, and rarely even that.
  32. South to Black Power
    In a nice bit of journalistic even-handedness, several of Blow’s interviewees are not entirely convinced by his thesis, or they believe there are other paths to political gains.
  33. Silent Night
    This is suspenseful and cathartic, and even the schmaltzy stuff is so distinctly John Woo that it’s welcome.
  34. The Sweet East
    Maybe it’s low hanging fruit that the white supremacist character is the best comic fodder, but the film’s trolling is stranger and more esoterically inclined than its selection of political punching bags would seem to warrant.
  35. American Symphony
    While some of the backstage material has an official feel (Batiste and Jaouad are listed among the many executive producers, along with Barack and Michelle Obama), the documentary does not shy from showing private moments.
  36. May December
    Moore and Portman are tremendous, but it’s Melton’s anguished performance that gives the movie its slow-building emotional power.
  37. Godzilla Minus One
    The heroic arc is creaky, but despite the chintzy clichés about Godzilla movies, this one keeps bringing blockbuster brio to heel with a sometimes heavy heart.
  38. La Syndicaliste
    Sometimes the best reason to watch a movie is because Isabelle Huppert is in it. That’s pretty much true of La Syndicaliste, a tangled if certainly watchable French true-crime drama about dirty political doings in the nation’s nuclear energy industry.
  39. Eileen
    Eileen is a mean movie, but I intend that as a compliment: There’s no lesson here, no revelation, no good vibes to wander away with. Spiky and cold, it’s a bitter holiday treat.
  40. Family Switch
    The real nail in the coffin is the film’s messaging about the power of family, which is about as tacked-on and stilted as they come — hardly a shock in light of the rest of the Netflix holiday movie lineup.
  41. Ornette: Made in America (1985)
    Miss Clarke's methods tend to be as fanciful as Ornette Coleman's are rigorous and abstract, but the collaboration between film maker and subject has its own kind of harmony.
  42. Napoleon
    Napoleon is consistently surprising partly because it doesn’t conform to the conventions of mainstream historical epics, which is especially true of its startling, adamantly unromanticized title character.
  43. Frybread Face and Me
    The movie is overfamiliar and earnest, but you can’t accuse it of not being heartfelt.
  44. Against the Tide
    Sarvnik Kaur’s breathtaking documentary about Indigenous fishermen in Mumbai, India, dispels the myth that cinematic beauty has to do with the power of the camera or the glossiness of the image. Shot by Ashok Meena, the film finds beauty, simply, in perspective.
  45. Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
    Hints, whose grandmother introduced her to the smoke-sauna ritual, uses the documentary to speak volumes about what it means to be a woman, even as the focus remains fixed on a single location: a cramped sauna-cabin located in a forest.
  46. Menus Plaisirs - Les Troisgros
    There’s individual genius in the Troisgros kitchens, no doubt, but also enormous collaborative effort, which makes the documentary a nice metaphor for filmmaking itself. “Everything is beautiful,” a visibly moved Michel says of his estate; the same holds true of this deeply pleasurable movie.
  47. Monster
    Lovingly detailed and accented by an aching score from Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died in March, Monster is one of the finest films of the year, and its structure — like its circle of characters — carries secrets that can only be unraveled through patience and empathy.
  48. Cypher
    A cunning experiment in cross-genre filmmaking, Cypher is all fun, games and hagiography until it’s not, effectively deceiving at every conspiratorial turn.
  49. Wish
    Oddly — and rather fascinatingly — this is a film about a spiritual revolution.
  50. Leo
    Leo sometimes has trouble identifying its audience.
  51. Maestro
    Maestro is as ambitious as Cooper’s fine directorial debut, “A Star Is Born,” but the new movie is more self-consciously cinematic.
  52. Genie
    The holiday themes feel arbitrary and tacked on; one guesses the script was rescued from Curtis’s bottom drawer and spruced up with some Christmas fairy dust. The story, finally, is only about a man who learns the true meaning of punctuality.
  53. Stamped from the Beginning
    In a film brimming with visual gestures, these mini portraits of anti-racists are among its most memorable.
  54. Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later
    Peddle hews close to his original film’s style: he asks his subjects to define themselves and then he keeps watching, letting their actions color in the lines of their self-definition. It’s an approach which grants dignity to his subjects, an effect which is only amplified by the passage of time.
  55. Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain
    The frustrating thing is that Marshall, Herlihy and especially Higgins really are funny, and the film has some huge laughs. That’s enough for a sketch show. It’s not quite enough for a film.
  56. JFK: What the Doctors Saw
    You will finish the film agreeing that what the doctors saw is crucial. But what it all means for America’s most enduring mystery is less clear.
  57. Saltburn
    Saltburn is the sort of embarrassment you’ll put up with for 75 minutes. But not for 127. It’s too desperate, too confused, too pleased with its petty shocks to rile anything you’d recognize as genuine excitement.
  58. Fallen Leaves
    Fallen Leaves is consistently funny, but its laughs arrive without fanfare. They slide in calmly, at times obliquely in eccentric details, offbeat juxtapositions, taciturn exchanges, long pauses and amiably barbed insults.
  59. Next Goal Wins
    Bland photography and perfunctory writing are the very least of my issues with Next Goal Wins, a movie-shaped stain on the class of entertainment known as the sports-underdog comedy.
  60. Thanksgiving
    [Roth] knows his stuff and he’s very adept at serving up both gross-outs and real leap-from-your-seat moments.
  61. The Stones and Brian Jones
    [Broomfield’s] announcer-like voice-over and sometimes dishy interviews might evoke a “Behind the Music” exposé, but he seems most like a fan with a rueful sympathy for his devil of a subject.
  62. The Disappearance of Shere Hite
    Nicole Newnham’s film recoups Hite’s story from the margins of feminist history with both style and substance, taking its cue from its subject.
  63. 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.
  64. Best. Christmas. Ever.
    At barely 80 minutes (and ending with a musical number from Brandy), Best. Christmas. Ever! resembles a television holiday special more than a feature film, and its plot follows the predictable Christmastime themes of love, acceptance, and being thankful for what you’ve got.
  65. Rustin
    Every so often an actor so dominates a movie that its success largely hinges on his every word and gesture. That’s the case with Colman Domingo’s galvanic title performance in Rustin.
  66. The Strangler (1970)
    It’s like “Peeping Tom” meets one of Dario Argento’s giallo joints, but slathered in a coat of melancholic malaise.
  67. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
    Our world so hauntingly echoes Collins’s fictions that the film, shot last summer, moves us to spend its gargantuan running time reflecting on contemporary headlines, mourning the generational tragedy of anger and fear begetting anger and fear.
  68. David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived
    “The Boy Who Lived” provides an unusual behind-the-scenes portrait of how life goes on after movies are made.
  69. The Lady Bird Diaries
    Many of the archival images Porter so fluidly employs will be familiar, but they gain fresh energy and timely urgency from Johnson’s absorbing narration and her often stirring observations about Lyndon Johnson, their political partnership, the environment and the two events she so presciently knew would shape us for decades to come: the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.
  70. The Killer
    The character is boring and so is this movie, but like the supremely skilled Fincher, who can’t help but make images that hold your gaze even as your mind wanders, Fassbender does keep you watching.
  71. Orlando, My Political Biography
    Preciado’s superpower in this warm, generous movie is that while he speaks brilliantly to the cages of identity, he sees — and shares — a way out of them. He talks and listens, he exhorts and confesses. He insists on pleasure, speaks to happiness, invites laughter and opens worlds. Here, joy reigns supreme, and it is exhilarating.
  72. A Still Small Voice
    It’s human and messy — and it’s divine.
  73. Journey to Bethlehem
    The magic of movies does depend on a certain suspension of disbelief, but “Journey” tests the viewer beyond rational credulity, even as it persists in asserting the reality of its existence.
  74. Manodrome
    Crude and sensationalizing, Manodrome is like an amalgam of all the headlines you’ve read about the kinds of men who succumb to warped ideologies.
  75. Youth (Spring)
    While the running time may be indulgent, the experience of feeling trapped in this world is difficult to shake.
  76. Albert Brooks: Defending My Life
    While Brooks deserves acclaim, he deserves it in a format as compelling and dynamic as he is. “Defending My Life” is simply too flat.
  77. This Much We Know
    As eloquent as it is, This Much We Know may also be exploitative.
  78. Dream Scenario
    Pondering the downside of notoriety and our willingness to exchange safety for fame, Dream Scenario is often funny and frequently surreal.
  79. The Marvels
    It’s frustrating what weak tea this movie is because the director, Nia DaCosta (“Little Woods,” “Candyman”), has talent, the cast is appealing, and there’s a lightly gonzo scene that shows you what the other 100 minutes could have been. It’s almost as if the suits at Marvel Studios know it doesn’t matter if their movies are any good.
  80. You Were My First Boyfriend
    Despite its title, You Were My First Boyfriend is at its most effective when Aldarondo moves beyond teen lust and into the more complicated aspects of her upbringing.
  81. In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50
    Fripp, an endlessly thoughtful and meticulously articulate guitarist, is the group’s most tireless and paradoxical explainer in the film.
  82. Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project
    The documentary offers only what the poet is willing to give.
  83. Radical
    Despite its foundation in reality, Radical is as by the books as it gets.
  84. Sly
    Stallone’s flair for words — and his references to Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge” and the 1968 dynastic drama “The Lion in Winter” — make one wish he’d talked about much more than his greatest hits and misses.
  85. Beyond Utopia
    The engrossing, often tense proceedings are slightly marred by a pushy score. All the same, being able to experience the escape alongside these subjects greatly distinguishes this documentary.
  86. Fingernails
    This gently humorous movie operates so smoothly you may not notice its subversiveness.
  87. Quiz Lady
    Quiz Lady, a mostly winning comedy directed by Jessica Yu, is elevated most of all on the shoulders of Oh’s delightful and nuanced performance.
  88. Nyad
    Diana wants our respect — and by the end of the movie, she’s earned it. While she’s one of the prickliest protagonists you’ll see this year, she’s so raw and earnest and apologetically herself that you adore her anyway — from the safe distance of the screen.
  89. Subject
    Subject is at its clearest when interrogating the material conditions of documentary filmmaking, as during a segment about whether the subjects of nonfiction films have the right to be paid for their participation; it feels slipperier when glossing issues of diversity and representation.
  90. What Happens Later
    While it’s unlikely to join the rom-com pantheon, its charming leads and humorous truths do invoke the spirit of Ephron, to whom the film is dedicated. It’s a worthy tribute to her, delivered by perhaps the most qualified person to create one.
  91. The Marsh King's Daughter
    A game Ridley, along with a brief cameo by a soulful Gil Birmingham, provides the necessary stakes for Burger’s film not to idle in narrative mud.
  92. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
    Exquisite use of close-ups, fluid editing and a deeply observant sound design renders Mack’s story tactile but also poetic, making plain that the salt here is the stuff of tears, the stuff of sorrows and of joys.
  93. Wingwomen
    The Frenchwomen twist on the supersquad action movie has its charms, but it’s not enough to eclipse the script’s uninspired angles.
  94. Colette and Justin
    The result is a film both intimate and political; informative and profound. It highlights the deep and far-reaching wounds of colonization and offers a balm for its scars.
  95. Last Stop Larrimah
    The bloat saps the fun and intrigue from the film, which can’t navigate between playing up eccentricity and committing to the notion that hell can be other people (even in a one-time refuge).
  96. No Accident
    Jacobson’s account does the necessary work of restating the facts and showing that people can be held accountable for fomenting this kind of terror and harm.
  97. The Insurrectionist Next Door
    In the end, as a document, it’s undeniable: The unvarnished human detail gives the film a life of its own that escapes any particular polemic or hope.
  98. The Devil on Trial
    Instead of challenging assumptions, exploring implications or discussing the difficult questions here, Holt merely mines the material for superficial shock value and lurid titillation.
  99. Five Nights at Freddy's
    You may chuckle, but it’s hard to tell if the movie is laughing with you.
  100. After Death
    Whether you believe these phenomena are spiritual journeys or visions created by the human mind (or both), the film loses its sense of epiphany in the lackluster jumble of its moviemaking.
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