The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,271 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 20271
  2. Mixed: 8,430 out of 20271
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20271
20271 movie reviews
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  1. The Waiting Room
    Scrupulously apolitical, The Waiting Room is the opposite of a polemic like Michael Moore's "Sicko." But by removing any editorial screen, it confronts you head-on with human suffering that a more humane and equitable system might help alleviate.
  2. Stray Dogs
    Until it goes haywire with the cabbage scene, Stray Dogs sustains a hypnotic intensity anchored in exquisite cinematography that portrays the modern industrial cityscape as a chilly wasteland.
  3. The Rescue
    The mechanics of the operation boggle the mind, and in presenting them so elegantly, Vasarhelyi and Chin offer more edge-of-your-seat drama than most thrillers — certainly enough to make the Hollywood version in the works from Ron Howard feel surplus to requirements before cameras have even rolled.
  4. Universal Language
    It’s a pensive meditation in an era of displacement, even if the film never tries to make a big point. The mood is palpable, and the meditation legible, even if Winnipeg and Iranian cinema are to you as remote as a chilly winter moon.
  5. Together
    One of the most pleasant foreign films of the year, a funny, graceful and immensely good-natured work.
  6. Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary
    For all its eccentricities and technical quirks, Dracula is a compelling expressionistic work.
  7. 13 Assassins
    A stirring, unexpectedly moving story of love and blood.
  8. Northern Light
    There’s a stillness to the filmmaking, coupled with Saunder Jurriaans and David Bensi’s truly lovely original score, that lends specific shots... a near-heartbreaking melancholy.
  9. 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.
  10. Boxing Gym
    Pugilists and philosophers of all kinds converge in Frederick Wiseman's mesmerizing documentary Boxing Gym.
  11. The Blue Caftan
    Touzani’s film becomes an ode to the many kinds of love that persist, even in an unforgiving world.
  12. Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench
    Visually distinctive and aurally delightful, "Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench" has style to burn. A soulful black-and-white commentary on love, art and their competing demands, this Boston-based musical from Damien Chazelle floats on a wave of spontaneity and charm.
  13. Crazy Heart
    A small movie perfectly scaled to the big performance at its center.
  14. The Fool
    The Fool is a hard movie to shake.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Wrong Man
    Frighteningly authentic, the story generates only a modicum of drama.
  16. Stray
    The filmmaker's eyes may rarely leave the dogs, but what she’s really looking at is us.
  17. Goodbye, Dragon Inn
    Has a quiet, cumulative magic, whose source is hard to identify. Its simple, meticulously composed frames are full of mystery and feeling; it's an action movie that stands perfectly still.
  18. De Palma
    Like any good work of criticism, De Palma will be catnip for passionate fans while also serving as a primer and a goad for the skeptical and the curious. Mr. De Palma is remarkable company — witty, insightful and neither unduly modest nor overbearingly vain.
  19. Local Hero
    Local Hero is a funny movie, but it's more apt to induce chuckles than knee-slapping. Like Gregory's Girl, it demonstrates Mr. Forsyth's uncanny ability for making an audience sense that something magical is going on, even if that something isn't easily explained.
  20. The Exorcist
    The care that Mr. Friedkin and Mr. Blatty have taken with the physical production, and with the rhythm of the narrative, which achieves a certain momentum through a lot of fancy, splintery crosscutting, is obviously intended to persuade us to suspend belief. But to what end? To marvel at the extent to which audiences will go to escape boredom by shock and insult.
  21. A Little Princess
    Shaking off the solemnity that smothers many a well-meaning, high-minded family film, this one revels in an exuberant sense of play, drawing its audience into the wittily heightened reality of a fairy tale. The material, like the title, is a tad precious, but the finished film is much too spirited and pretty for that to matter.
  22. His Three Daughters
    Jacobs’s women are at once clinging to the past and looking toward the future. It’s the present that proves so extraordinarily difficult for them, a truth that Jacobs beautifully conveys in a movie that is very much about agonizing loss yet is also, fundamentally, about what it simply takes to keep on living.
  23. Custody
    Mr. Legrand is skilled in the techniques of dread and suspense, and without sensationalizing or cheapening the story, he gives this closely observed drama the tension and urgency of a thriller.
  24. Under the Shadow
    War may be terrible, but for a woman like Shideh there’s no horror like home.
  25. Voyages
    This movie operates in the limbo between memory and oblivion that we recognize as daily life. It bears courageous and stringent witness to the impossibility of bearing witness.
  26. Adaptation.
    I realize that the fear of contracting writer's block from a fictional character is crazy, but in the brilliantly scrambled, self-consuming world of Adaptation it has a certain plausibility.
  27. Fighter
    In juxtaposing two extraordinary personal histories, it ponders in a refreshingly original way unanswerable questions about memory, imagination, history and that elusive thing we call truth.
  28. Baby Doll
    Mr. Kazan keeps the courtship bouncing between the emotional and the ludicrous. The nonchalance of the pursuer is its most entertaining grace.
  29. The Snapper
    A small, joyful lark of a film.
  30. The Forbidden Room
    On one viewing, at least, it is a typically impenetrable Maddin film: zany one minute, pompous the next. Ardent Maddin admirers, of whom I am not one, might discern a grand design of what often feels like a post-Freudian horror comedy.
  31. Network
    Network can be faulted both for going too far and not far enough, but it's also something that very few commercial films are these days. It's alive. This, I suspect, is the Lumet drive. It's also the wit of performers like Mr. Finch, Mr. Holden, and Miss Dunaway.
  32. My Dinner with Andre
    It's the achievement of Mr. Malle, the director of Atlantic City, Pretty Baby and a lot of other very fine, conventional movies, that he has successfully turned his two real-life personalities into actors capable of representing themselves.
  33. An American in Paris
    It is the wondrously youthful Miss Caron and that grandly pictorial ballet that place the marks of distinction upon this lush Technicolored escapade.
  34. The Secret of the Grain
    An entire family chronicle, along with four decades of French social and economic history, is recapitulated as a lavish, hectic dinner, complete with music and belly dancing. It will leave you stunned and sated, having savored an intimate and sumptuous epic of elation and defeat, jealousy and tenderness, life and death, grain and fish.
  35. Trainspotting
    The stylish irreverence of Trainspotting mimics that drug high and delivers its own potent kick.
  36. Welcome to the Dollhouse
    With a fine vengeance along with flashes of great, unexpected tenderness, Mr. Solondz lethally evokes every petty humiliation that his seventh-grade heroine can't wait to forget.
  37. The Graduate
    Funny, outrageous, and touching, The Graduate is a sophisticated film that puts Mr. Nichols and his associates on a level with any of the best satirists working abroad today.
  38. Miss Kiet's Children
    As in Nicolas Philibert’s similar French documentary “To Be and to Have” (2002), the relative absence of conflict in the interactions between a seasoned teacher and wonderful pupils grows tedious at feature length, and there is — presumably by design — relatively little meat on this documentary’s bones.
  39. The Other Side of Everything
    Engrossing despite its daunting scope and tangled politics, The Other Side of Everything offers an uncommon opportunity to view the shifting borders and identities of an entire region through the eyes of the Eastern European intellectuals caught in the turmoil.
  40. The Ground Beneath My Feet
    This is crafty, first-rank filmmaking.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Horse Feathers
    Some of the fun is even more reprehensible than the doings of these clowns in previous films, but there is no denying that their antics and their patter are helped along by originality and ready wit.
  42. Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk
    Put Your Hand on Your Soul and Walk is not just a document of a life and a hope extinguished. It is also the best way to hear from Hassouna. And it’s a film about crossing borders; we get to see just a little of what she saw.
  43. Between the Temples
    The movie is consistently funny, but its humor tends to be fairly gentle because it’s rooted in human behavior rather than in condescending, judgmental ideas about such behavior.
  44. The Wind Rises
    Mr. Miyazaki renders Jiro’s life and dreams with lyrical elegance and aching poignancy.
  45. Fantastic Mr. Fox
    In some ways his (Anderson) most fully realized and satisfying film. Once you adjust to its stop-and-start rhythms and its scruffy looks, you can appreciate its wit, its beauty and the sly gravity of its emotional undercurrents.
  46. Limbo
    Limbo, written and directed by a ferociously talented filmmaker, Ben Sharrock, takes an insinuating, poetic and often wryly funny approach. And it’s both heartbreaking and heartlifting.
  47. In the Loop
    A sharply written, fast-talking, almost dementedly articulate satire on modern statecraft.
  48. Bus 174
    So wrenching and absorbing that you can easily lose sight of the sophistication of its techniques.
  49. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
    Seen with or without foreknowledge of its methods, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is only fitfully engaging — suspect as documentary, insubstantial as fiction.
  50. Soul
    It’s a small, delicate movie that doesn’t hit every note perfectly, but its combination of skill, feeling and inspiration is summed up in the title.
  51. Terrestrial Verses
    Each small humiliation, taken alone, will raise your blood pressure a little. But put them all together, and more seismic reverberations may finally rattle a society to its core.
  52. Amores Perros
    A film in which nothing is what it seems, this is the kind of genre touch that Mr. González Iñárritu expands into something far more haunting.
  53. Osama
    Osama's unvarnished vulnerability, along with the director's combination of tough-mindedness and lyricism, prevents the movie from becoming at all sentimental; instead, it is beautiful, thoughtful and almost unbearably sad.
  54. Sunday Best: The Untold Story of Ed Sullivan
    A music journalist-turned-filmmaker, Jenkins had the hip-hop bona fides to guarantee “Sunday Best” would not be a white savior tale. Instead, his film reveals the authentic amity and steadfast values of an ally.
  55. The Salt of the Earth
    The Salt of the Earth leaves no doubt about Mr. Salgado’s talent or decency, and the chance to spend time in his company is a reason for gratitude. And yet his pictures, precisely because they disclose harsh and unwelcome truths, deserve a harder, more robustly critical look.
  56. Glory
    The variable incongruities of Glory give it a queasy power uncommon in contemporary cinema. It’s the feel-bad movie of the spring.
  57. Rat Film
    Equal parts disturbing and humorous, informative and bizarre, Rat Film is a brilliantly imaginative and formally experimental essay on how Baltimore has dealt with its rat problem and manipulated its black population.
  58. The Librarians
    From its superb opening-credits sequence paying tribute to card catalogs of yore to its sharp selection of vintage clips and intimate reportage, The Librarians is as well-crafted as it is profoundly alarming.
  59. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
    The Disney people naturally have made it as elaborate as it was made by Verne. And they have likewise developed all the other intriguing potentials of the yarn with a joyful exaggeration that is expected in science-fiction films.
  60. Sing Sing
    The cinematography (by Pat Scola) does its own cagey and elegant work, giving Sing Sing an undercurrent shine while evoking the rougher intimacy of a documentary. The movie’s casting — more than 85 percent of the cast participated in Sing Sing’s R.T.A. program — achieves something similar.
  61. Karen Dalton: In My Own Time
    An excellent documentary directed by Richard Peete and Robert Yapkowitz.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    20 Days in Mariupol
    20 Days in Mariupol, a relentless and truly important documentary, engulfs us in the initial ferocity of Russia’s siege of a city whose name has become a byword for this war’s inhumanity: My Lai, Srebrenica, Aleppo, Mariupol.
  63. 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.
  64. Lingui, The Sacred Bonds
    Again and again, Haroun shows you Amina and Maria alone and together, at times exchanging hugs or tenderly bowing their heads toward each other. Every so often, you see each running along a street alone, her clothes fluttering and body straining with effort. He shows feet and braids, a flash of a bared leg, the teasing glimpse of a belly. He shows you women in motion and in revolt, fleeing and escaping and at times running sly, joyous circles around the men in their lives.
  65. Office
    The songs in Office aren’t especially memorable. But it’s hard to care too much when you have a director who knows how to create tension by moving the camera and characters even while he’s delivering a nimble political softshoe with filmmaking dazzle.
  66. Hesburgh
    Hesburgh is consistently smart about its subject. It makes a convincing case that the priest was one of a handful of whites in the civil rights movement who understood the systemic nature of racism in the United States.
  67. Being There
    Hal Ashby directs Being There at an unruffled, elegant pace, the better to let Mr. Sellers's double-edged mannerisms make their full impression upon the audience.
  68. Who Framed Roger Rabbit
    A film whose best moments are so novel, so deliriously funny, and so crazily unexpected that they truly must be seen to be believed.
  69. Chop Shop
    There is nonetheless a lyricism at its heart, an unsentimental, soulful appreciation of the grace that resides in even the meanest struggle for survival.
  70. Moonstruck
    The process whereby Loretta and Ronny fall in love is a lot less appealing than the large-family drama unfolding around the Castorinis' kitchen table. [16 Dec 1987, p.C22]
  71. Raising Victor Vargas
    Delicate and altogether satisfying romantic comedy.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    42nd Street
    The liveliest and one of the most tuneful screen musical comedies that has come out of Hollywood.
  73. Babi Yar. Context
    Loznitsa has assembled a wrenching and revelatory collage.
  74. '71
    Mr. Demange makes his feature directing debut with ’71, but he already knows how to move bodies through space and the complex choreography that he’s worked out in this movie is a thing of joy.
  75. The Cave
    Entering theaters at a timely moment, The Cave is a frightening immersion in life under siege in Syria that, as difficult as it often is to watch, can’t come close to replicating how harrowing it must have been to film.
  76. Blackfish
    Unapologetically designed both to inform and affect, Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s delicately lacerating documentary, Blackfish, uses the tragic tale of a single whale and his human victims as the backbone of a hypercritical investigation into the marine-park giant SeaWorld Entertainment.
  77. The Guilty
    Unfolding in real time, this immediately involving story bends and turns in surprising, sometimes horrifying ways. Enriched by Oskar Skriver’s marvelous sound editing, which takes us from a speeding van to a bloodcurdling crime scene with equal authenticity, the movie smoothly blends police procedural with character study.
  78. Field Niggas
    While the movie’s multiple images are never less than numinous, and its rhythms sometimes skirt the strangely seductive, this astonishing movie is the opposite of hypnotic.
  79. Prayers for the Stolen
    The film swings back and forth from scenes of pastoral bliss to brutality, generating a narrative that, while unfocused, is nevertheless anchored by the tender and wounded performances by its adolescent cast.
  80. I Wish I Knew
    In effect, with I Wish I Knew, Jia is building not just a portrait of a city, but of a fragmented people — one story and memory at a time. He is finding meaning in collective remembrance and revealing a world, to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin, “under the gaze of the melancholy man.”
  81. The Girl and the Spider
    The film demands and rewards repeat viewings; it’s different, and more entrancing, every time.
  82. Corpse Bride
    There is something heartening about Mr. Burton's love for bones and rot here, if only because it suggests, despite some recent evidence, that he is not yet ready to abandon his own dark kingdom.
  83. Full Time
    The film is a portrait of modern labor that moves with the breathless tension of a Safdie brothers’ joint. But instead of gangsters and cocaine, it finds a flurried momentum in one ordinary woman’s everyday obligations.
  84. The Territory
    To see the villagers take matters into their own hands, capturing proof of the encroachment on their land that the government chooses to ignore, is a special kind of thrill.
  85. Young Frankenstein
    As played by Gene Wilder in Mel Brooks's funniest, most cohesive comedy to date, this Dr. Frankenstein is a marvelous addled mixture of young Tom Edison, Winnie-the-Pooh, and your average Playboy reader with a keen appreciation of beautiful bosoms.
  86. Predators
    As David Osit’s probing, troubling documentary Predators demonstrates, the sociological implications of the show were (and are) anything but simple, beginning with what the series’ popularity suggests about the viewers who watched it.
  87. Project Nim
    There is no doubt that Nim was exploited, and also no doubt that he was loved. Mr. Marsh, by allowing those closest to Nim plenty of room to explain themselves, examines the moral complexity of this story without didacticism. He allows the viewer, alternately appalled, touched and fascinated, to be snagged on some of its ethical thorns.
  88. Neil Young Trunk Show
    As concert documentaries go, both “Neil Young: Heart of Gold” (2006) and the new Neil Young Trunk Show are luxury goods.
  89. National Velvet
    Indeed, in its simple comprehension of the faith and affection of youth it is likely more tender and affecting than even the story of Lassie was. And it certainly is more exciting in its vivid, dramatic display.
  90. The Lighthouse
    Eggers meticulously sets the scene, adds texture and builds tension and mystery from men locked in battle and sometimes in embrace. He has created a story about an age-old struggle, one that is most satisfyingly expressed in this film’s own tussle between genre and its deviations.
  91. Spider-Man 2
    Better than its predecessor, and also superior to most other comic-book-based movies. It has a more credible (and more frightening) villain, a more capacious and original story and a self-confidence based not only on the huge success of the first "Spider-Man" but also on Mr. Raimi's intuitive and enthusiastic grasp of the material.
  92. True Grit
    A marvelously rambling frontier fable packed with extraordinary incidents, amazing encounters, noble characters and virtuous rewards.
  93. Viet and Nam
    Quy treats the love affair between Viet and Nam with exquisite tenderness.
  94. Rose Plays Julie
    Amid the lush greenery of the setting, the atmosphere is perpetually bone-chilling — complete with an ominously high-pitched score — making the film seem distant and difficult to fully embrace
  95. Saint Frances
    With a warm heart and a nonjudgmental mind, Saint Frances weaves abortion, same-sex parenting and postpartum depression into a narrative bursting with positivity and acceptance.
  96. Mandy
    The movie’s imagery is consistently unearthly; its pacing has a magisterial weight. Call it pulp Tarkovsky, maybe.
  97. When We Were Kings
    Mr. Gast skillfully blends photographs, celebrity interviews with Norman Mailer and others, and colorful forays into the Zairian countryside, where Ali fostered black brotherhood and became a huge favorite, in a film that ''gazes well beyond the ring and seeks engagement with history''.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    20 Feet from Stardom
    This generous, fascinating documentary about the careers of backup singers, most of them African-American women, seeks to rewrite the history of pop music by focusing attention on voices at once marginal and vital.
  99. Avatar
    Glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged.
  100. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
    Mr. Morgen was given access to Cobain’s archives — “art, music, journals, Super 8 films and audio montages” — and his exhilarating, exhausting, two-hour-plus film, both an artful mosaic and a hammering barrage, reflects years of rummaging through that trove.
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