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. Cyclo
    An oblique narrative and shadowy thoughts, in a film that divides itself abruptly between wordlessness and outright poetry, become too fragile to rise above harsher images that overwhelm the viewer. Cyclo never achieves the balance to make such contrasts work as lucidly as they might.
  2. I.S.S.
    What follows is consistently watchable and sometimes tense but, despite some twists, largely unsurprising.
  3. Happer's Comet
    Sometimes wearying, sometimes pointlessly cryptic, Happer’s Comet nevertheless has a distinct way of viewing the world.
  4. American Pain
    The utility of an energetic character study of depraved opioid kingpins is questionable. But the documentary unspools with enough style and spark to engage.
  5. Dumb Money
    An energetic, ingratiating dramatization of the GameStop stock craze of 2021.
  6. I'll Show You Mine
    It’s a good thing that Jagannathan and Brown have training in the theater: They imbue Priya and Nic’s densely verbal jousts, dodges and truths with compelling chiaroscuro hues.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Public Enemy
    It is just another gangster film...weaker than most in its story, stronger than most in its acting, and like most maintaining a certain level of interest through the last burst of machine-gun fire.
  8. Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music
    We do see some of the audience participation, which was an integral part of the show, but we don’t hear from attendees. It’s a loss, because the event was, in essence, about the making of community through the ages but also through one day and night.
  9. In the Company of Rose
    In the Company of Rose is a pleasant portrait of an admittedly rarefied world, but one that doesn’t transcend its vanity-project origins. Perhaps it doesn’t intend to.
  10. Stephen Curry: Underrated
    There’s little in “Underrated” that comes across as spontaneous. That may be because Nicks didn’t discover much that feels fresh. Or it may be that the project, like Curry today, doesn’t have anything to prove.
  11. Love at First Sight
    What are the odds that a premise as unimaginative as this one should emerge as a sturdy little romantic drama?
  12. Bobi Wine: The People's President
    The documentary’s raw material arguably could have yielded a more powerful fit with a tighter edit. Nevertheless, this is a mostly engaging portrait.
  13. Brother
    The ultimately sparse dramatic elements here feel more suited to a short film; in a feature-length production, they become too thin to support the big feelings and weighty themes the movie wants to leave us with.
  14. Madeleine Collins
    Despite Efira’s efforts, Judith’s inevitable breakdown never hits a satisfyingly deranged register. Her motivations turn out to be less spicy, and more blandly sympathetic than one had hoped from this pressure cooker of a film.
  15. 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.
  16. Zoey 102
    It’s not an easy task to make a movie out of a kids’ show from a bygone era, but the film does a relatively smooth job of dipping into — but not overdoing — the nostalgia and retaining the lighthearted, wacky tone that was the show’s signature.
  17. Coup de Chance
    Coup de Chance is more sketched-in than satisfyingly detailed. Most of the characters are types, and despite some local color, the story might as well play out in New York, but it’s amusing, technically adept and looks like a professionally made movie (no small thing in the streaming age).
  18. Ceddo
    Ceddo is a folk tale presented as the kind of pageant you might see enacted at some geographic location made famous by history and now surrounded by souvenir stands. It's not cheap or gaudy, but it's an intensely solemn, slightly awkward procession of handsomely costumed scenes designed to pass on a lot of information as quickly and efficiently as possible.
  19. A Million Miles Away
    In peddling the mythical American dream narrative, the film misses an opportunity for conflict or character development and falls short of delving into bigger, more interesting themes: assimilation, immigration, gender roles, family conflict.
  20. Eureka
    Ultimately, the film feels a bit misshapen.
  21. Love in Taipei
    A charming but ultimately formulaic exploration of cultural identity.
  22. Mr. Jimmy
    “That is the meaning of tribute. Not showing myself at all. There is no ‘me’ to begin with,” Sakurai, who is now 59, says at one point. This is a terrifying notion, but the movie doesn’t choose to run with it.
  23. 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.
  24. The Storms of Jeremy Thomas
    The whole effort comes across more as an advertisement for Thomas’s genius — and Cousins’s obsession with him — than a true portrait of a discerning producer of outsider cinema.
  25. Remembering Every Night
    Ghosts linger, cameras linger. This is pensive, slow-slow cinema, like Bela Tarr with color but less compositional heft or, sometimes, clarity.
  26. Oceans Are the Real Continents
    The much-in-vogue hybrid mode proves more cryptic than edifying this time around.
  27. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour
    It’s a shame that the shots here are all over the place — the stage, the sky, too close, too far, too kinetic; only occasionally, in medium close-ups, just right. The director is Sam Wrench, and it’s unclear whether he’s making a movie or a salad. Under the circumstances, he’s done the best he probably could.
  28. 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.
  29. Finally Dawn
    Finally Dawn is at its most intriguing as Costanzo entrusts his curly haired, wide-eyed naïf to maneuver the looking glass of Italian versus Hollywood cinema. Hint: Italy comes off more soulful.
  30. 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.
  31. Poolman
    Pine wisely avoids winks to the audience. But he whiffs at making the mystery especially gripping, leaving one instead to savor the moments, like a note-perfect Bening calmly talking Pine’s befuddled pool man through his latest setback.
  32. Ezra
    What keeps the story sweet is the chemistry between Cannavale and Fitzgerald, who build a bond worth cherishing.
  33. Society of the Snow
    The material is fundamentally gripping, and parts of it are tough to resist . . . But Society of the Snow is a perverse movie to watch the way most people will see it — on Netflix, in the comfort of their homes, with a refrigerator nearby.
  34. Old Dads
    Burr is skilled at this, for sure. And Woodbine and Cannavale, who are better actors overall, slide into Burr’s mode with ease. The results will prove satisfactory and maybe cathartic for his fans.
  35. Neither Confirm Nor Deny
    The story assembles before our eyes like an illustration in a manual for superspies.
  36. My Sailor, My Love
    The actors are in full command of our empathy, especially Brennan’s gray-haired caretaker who, when she cracks open her heart, seems to glow from within.
  37. Mean Girls
    It’s not especially tart and is undeniably over-padded, but its charms and ingratiating likability remain intact.
  38. Mountains
    As a drama, Mountains, whose characters move fluidly between English and Haitian Creole, is too low-key to leave much of an impression. But as a portrait of intergenerational tensions in an immigrant family, it is poignant, and it captures an area of Miami that is rarely seen onscreen.
  39. Another Body
    Another Body is most persuasive when experts weigh in on the reality-upending aspects of deepfake technology and image-based sex abuse.
  40. Wish
    Oddly — and rather fascinatingly — this is a film about a spiritual revolution.
  41. Infested
    There are no fresh ideas in the French creepy-crawler Infested, yet this first feature from Sébastien Vanicek scurries forward with such pep and purpose that its shortcomings are easily forgivable.
  42. We Grown Now
    Some of this is effective, even if too many of Baig’s filmmaking choices — the honeyed cinematography, the score’s agitated violins and Malik’s preternaturally knowing voice-over — finally overwhelm the story’s fragile lyrical realism.
  43. The Book of Clarence
    If The Book of Clarence doesn’t totally work, its combination of the sacred and the irreverent is enchanting. It gets bogged down in its own mud, but it’s certainly shooting for the stars.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blast of Silence
    Molly McCarthy, however, is deceptively unaffected as the heroine, and her spirited attack on her two big scenes has the quality of the film as a whole—over-eager, unsuccessful, but worth watching.
  45. Daaaaaalí!
    Dupieux captures Dalí’s self-promoting genius but the constant trickery eventually becomes a little tiresome.
  46. This Much We Know
    As eloquent as it is, This Much We Know may also be exploitative.
  47. 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.
  48. The Fall Guy
    The Fall Guy is divertingly slick, playful nonsense.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Black God, White Devil
    At once, one of the most visually effective and artistic examples of the work of Glauber Rocha, a leading light among Cinema Novo's young directors. But as a contemporary allegory fulminating darkly against miseries inflicted on the poor by landowners and the Government, it is more mystically stylized than moving.
  50. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
    “Frozen Empire” is an eclectic, enjoyable barrage of nonsense.
  51. The Belly of an Architect
    The Belly of an Architect does have a humanizing element in the form of Mr. Dennehy, who brings a robust physicality to Kracklite without missing the essentially cerebral nature of the role; this is one of the best things he has done.
  52. Merchant Ivory
    Like many documentaries of this sort, “Merchant Ivory” opts to be a survey without a thesis — informative, even engaging, but lacking an argument that might drive the documentary itself forward.
  53. Arthur the King
    Wahlberg and company manage to hold your attention, and not just because there’s a cute dog in the frame.
  54. Coup de Torchon
    Coup de Torchon, which opens today at the Paris, has Mr. Tavernier's typical polish, which means it has much to recommend it. But however impressive the meticulousness and conviction on display here, or the performances Mr. Tavernier has elicited, Coup de Torchon seems strangely lacking in overall momentum and direction.
  55. 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.
  56. Who We Become
    The issues explored in Who We Become are essential, but the film’s content can occasionally feel superficial.
  57. The American Society of Magical Negroes
    Even as the movie is lampooning one trope, it keeps taking refuge in other conventions in ways that undercut the pop of its premise and make one wish for greater depth to its thought experiments.
  58. The Archies
    It’s an extravagant stunt perked up by moments of absurdity.
  59. 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.
  60. 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.
  61. 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.
  62. Which Brings Me to You
    Which Brings Me to You is cleverly structured but often feels too crowded with the ghosts of lovers past.
  63. American Star
    Despite an oddball taste for wide-angle lenses, the director, Gonzalo López-Gallego, can sustain a solid slow burn. Still, neither McShane nor the scenery can take the rust off the basic scenario.
  64. 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.
  65. Havoc
    Because what Havoc lacks in characters and story, it delivers in two audacious waves of indiscriminate killing that are so bruising and relentless they make the “John Wick” movies look like “Sesame Street.”
  66. The President’s Wife
    While Deneuve brings a wonderful blend of neuroses and feigned indifference to her character, the film’s pop-feminist through line dulls the comedy, creating a more conventionally celebratory portrait.
  67. Dario Argento Panico
    Part career profile and part psychological exploration, “Panico” smoothly accomplishes the first but teases gold with the second.
  68. Abigail
    A horror flick that’s serviceable enough to make you occasionally giggle or flinch, yet is also so aggressively unambitious that it scarcely seems worth griping about.
  69. Nightbitch
    Adams is a performer whose emotional transparency can make her characters seem unguarded and appealingly vulnerable, and the movie works as well as it does in great part because of her.
  70. Upgraded
    The movie is unevenly directed, and some scenes struggle to clear even the low bar set by more polished streaming originals. But Young succeeds nonetheless in channeling the freshman thrill of plunging into an alluring adult milieu.
  71. Freaky Tales
    High on revolutionary spirit, Freaky Tales is a frisky, frantic pastiche that doesn’t always make sense. . . Yet the visuals are meaty, and the filmmakers (whose last feature collaboration was on “Captain Marvel” in 2019) show considerable affection for their movie’s setting.
  72. Girls State
    Girls State endears, but it also leaves viewers with the sense that, for a film about young women eager to take on the world’s challenges, the movie could stand to tackle a few more.
  73. In a Violent Nature
    Claiming inspiration (in the film’s press notes) from Terrence Malick and others, Nash has attempted an ambitious blend of art house and slaughterhouse whose rug-pulling ending will polarize, even as its moody logic prevails.
  74. Porcelain War
    Impressively, nearly everything was shot by the documentary’s subjects. Yet although their double duty is an awful fact of life in Ukraine, the film lurches between its varying components and tones.
  75. Thelma
    Margolin’s empathy for Thelma (he based the story on a scam perpetrated on his own grandmother) lends the film a sweetness and occasional poignancy that help mitigate much of the foolishness.
  76. Outlaw Posse
    In direct conversation with cinema’s many spaghetti westerns, Van Peebles’s shaggy script relies on winking nods and plentiful shootouts in lieu of production value. Outlaw Posse may not be innovative, but its regard for family affairs is worth treasuring.
  77. Kneecap
    The film, as a result, feels wildly uneven, though it cruises on the strength of its underdog narrative and its weird, sordid touches.
  78. Monkey Man
    Patel does some fine work in Monkey Man even if its fight sequences rarely pop, flow or impress; they’re energetic but uninspired.
  79. Monolith
    Lily Sullivan plays this unnamed reporter with cagey, harried intensity, and she is more than capable of carrying this one-woman show.
  80. Irish Wish
    The movie (directed by Janeen Damian and written by Kirsten Hansen) skips over Maddie savoring the outcome of her wish, and shifts right into charming comedy around her confusion, including having no memory about how she got engaged.
  81. They Called Him Mostly Harmless
    It’s a film for those who don’t know the outcome, playing upon the viewers’ thirst for answers as it chips away at a clearer portrait of the man.
  82. Moana 2
    Squint your eyes against the specifics, and the odyssey tends to deliver a mood that fluctuates along a scale of benign to bright.
  83. Joy
    This is one of those pictures where the actors outdo the conventional material they are given to work with.
  84. Scoop
    What Scoop offers is the modest pleasure — to which any journalist is susceptible — of rooting for a reporting team to get a story.
  85. The Space Race
    A theme running through the interviews is that for the U.S. government, sending a Black astronaut to space was more a matter of propaganda than racial justice.
  86. Space: The Longest Goodbye
    Space: The Longest Goodbye leaves open the question of whether anyone could get to the red planet with his or her sanity intact.
  87. Red Island
    Red Island is by turns seductively sultry and frustratingly elliptical, with a structure that brings to mind matryoshka dolls, those colorful nesting figurines of differing sizes. For the most part, Campillo introduces these nesting elements just fine; it’s integrating them that proves difficult.
  88. I Don't Understand You
    In trying to be both subversive and sincere, I Don’t Understand You ends up not quite pulling off either.
  89. Alien: Romulus
    Alien: Romulus is a nuts-and-bolts action-adventure horror story with boos and splatter. It doesn’t have much on its mind but it has some good jump scares along with a disappointingly bland heroine, a sympathetic android and the usual collection of disposable characters who are unduly killed by slavering, rampaging extraterrestrials.
  90. Humane
    This isn’t a movie with much to say, but it’s the sort of thought experiment that will keep you up at night.
  91. Turtles All the Way Down
    What “Turtles” does offer in surplus is texture, thanks to Marks’s springy, stylish direction.
  92. TRON: Ares
    Ranked against other “Tron” feature-length installments, while this one fails to capture the adolescent low-fi charm of the 1982 film, it’s appreciably more enjoyable (and, frankly, comprehensible) than “Legacy.”
  93. The Beach Boys
    Any deviations from the film’s obligatory timeline tour are very welcome, like a mortifying studio recording of Murry holding forth, and it’s a treat to hear the esteem for Brian among the Wrecking Crew, the storied group of session musicians.
  94. Boris and Natasha
    Fans of Rocky and Bullwinkle won't be disappointed.
  95. Young Woman and the Sea
    This is one of those movies that proves, when they’ve got a mind to, they can still make them like they used to.
  96. Slow
    Grineviciute and Cicenas, however, give depth to a story that becomes stuck on the sorrows of the couple’s discrepancies.
  97. Karate Kid: Legends
    There is at once a roughshod, zippy energy coupled with a sedateness here that results from the simple fact that the film never quite knows how to square the pure awkwardness of two teachers — two stars from different eras of a franchise — instructing a karate kid at once.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Magnificent Obsession
    Playing his first major role, the strapping, manly Mr. Hudson gives a fine, direct account of himself, in the film's only real surprise. Otherwise, Universal has delivered the goods—or good—exactly as prescribed by the doctor.
  99. Blues Brothers 2000
    The movie only really comes alive when the music plays and people sing and dance.
  100. The Instigators
    So if the plot of “The Instigators” kind of goes nowhere, its characters give it the feel of a hangout movie with some added shootouts and car chases and a few well-timed explosions. And that, at least, is wicked good.
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