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. Parthenope
    Parthenope, like Sorrentino’s previous films, is an intentionally garish display of sex and luxury that is both irritating and oddly seductive.
  2. The Surfer
    If this movie leaves Cage adrift, he doesn’t seem at all uncomfortable about it.
  3. M3GAN 2.0
    Maximalism has its place, but it wears out its welcome here.
  4. Drop
    Drop is pleasantly silly and minimally suspenseful.
  5. Black Barbie: A Documentary
    On the surface, the documentary is about what led to the 1980 release of Black Barbie, but the issues it explores run much deeper: the harm of lacking a “social mirror,” the slow pace of progress and the tensions around darkening a white fictional character.
  6. Gazer
    There’s an amusing, low-fi thriller here amid what prove to be too many twists and thickets of cinematic allusion.
  7. It Ends with Us
    Adapted from Colleen Hoover’s best seller by Christy Hall, “It Ends With Us” is fitfully diverting, at times touching, often ridiculous and, at 2 hours and 10 minutes, almost offensively long.
  8. Piece By Piece
    Piece By Piece sidesteps feeling rote by doing something that seems, frankly, bizarre. That it works at all is a product of the quirky form fitting the subject well. It’s chaotic, sure. But that’s the fun of it.
  9. The Damned
    Its tension weakens, and tediousness sets in, though that effectively evokes what the characters are experiencing. But a period of slog reduces the story’s immersive quality, slowing momentum. What’s best about the movie, though, is how it eventually picks back up and morphs into something a bit different from straight-ahead horror.
  10. Buck and the Preacher
    Buck and the Preacher, Sidney Poitier's first film as director as well as star, is a loose, amiable, post-Civil War Western with a firm though not especially severe Black Conscience.
  11. The Fabulous Four
    This is sloppier and more personality-driven than [Moorhouse's] past work, but the performances are so shamelessly exuberant that, after a while, you simply throw up your hands at the flaws.
  12. The Wasp
    There’s not much in terms of social commentary beyond the obvious. Still, the tension between the two women comes across, at times rivetingly, because of Harris and Dormer.
  13. The Knife
    With its twists and rug-pulls, The Knife makes for an absorbing drama, but it’s also deeply exasperating in that it feels less like a social commentary grounded in reality than an edgy play on emotions.
  14. Find Me Falling
    The writer-director Stelana Kliris is undaunted by, though not entirely in control of, balancing her material’s at times somber, at other times blithe, notes.
  15. Last Hurrah for Chivalry
    It's a rare entry into old-school swordplay for him, yet still centering on his themes of honor and betrayal -- with a not entirely successful attempt to blur those lines. "Chivalry" is still intense and watchable, nonetheless. [27 Jun 2003, p.E3]
    • The New York Times
  16. The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
    The movie manages to provide moments of witty dialogue while moving forward with its spiritual duties.
  17. Only the River Flows
    The filmmaker has a gift for disorientation — a chilling cut connects a scene of a pregnancy ultrasound to Ma Zhe flipping through slides of murder evidence — that partly compensates for the muddiness of the plot.
  18. Hollywoodgate
    The frustration of Hollywoodgate is that it could only ever feel incomplete.
  19. Unicorns
    Hardy peels back the layers to reveal Luke’s sexual awakening so viscerally that it’s easier to overlook the film’s narrative shortcuts.
  20. Girl You Know It's True
    Viewers who press play with intent to scoff may be surprised with how genuinely caught up they become.
  21. The Tales of Hoffmann
    Oddly enough, despite its opulence, coupled with a brilliant rendering of the score by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Sir Thomas Beecham's bristling baton and some masterly singing of the libretto (in English) by a host of vocal cords, this film version of the opera is, in toto, a vastly wearying show.
  22. Transformers One
    Most palpable in its frames are the heart and genuine love for this universe, and when the bots start colliding, with action sequences toward the end that are thrillingly punchy, it’s easy to surrender to the lore.
  23. Caligula: The Ultimate Cut
    The great production designer Danilo Donati’s contributions alone are worth the trip.
  24. Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story
    “A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story” is a largely enjoyable, cozily intimate movie that plays like it was made by a fan.
  25. Sonic the Hedgehog 3
    It’s hard to settle on what’s more bombastic: Carrey’s admittedly virtuoso double act, or the teeming computer graphics gadgetry of death and destruction spilling out of every corner of the screen.
  26. Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln
    The documentary tends to linger on some assertions about sexuality in Lincoln’s era while papering over others. But the general effort of bringing to light (and potentially to history books) an underrepresented part of American experience remains vital beyond defining Lincoln’s identity.
  27. The Penguin Lessons
    While Juan Salvador is a shameless exhibitionist, Coogan’s performance is understated; he conveys Tom’s softening without nudging the viewer too much.
  28. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
    Because she lacks a conception of colonialism, Davidtz sometimes struggles to negotiate the film’s fidelity to her point of view with a more complete picture of the war.
  29. Saturday Night
    Saturday Night is a movie made by fans, but because Reitman assumes that his viewers are fans, too, and because he’s racing against the clock, he gestures at instead of digging into the show, its humor and history.
  30. Mad About the Boy: The Noel Coward Story
    The documentary’s biggest challenge is shaping Coward’s biography into a satisfying roller coaster of highs and lows.
  31. On Swift Horses
    It doesn’t always work, but you won’t mind that much, because it’s so beautiful to look at.
  32. The Assessment
    A sterile drama about state-controlled procreation, “The Assessment,” the first feature from the French director Fleur Fortuné, is visually stark and emotionally chilling.
  33. Daniela Forever
    The philosophical window dressing — would you rather your loved one live a better life if it meant living without you? — doesn’t play to Vigalondo’s strengths.
  34. Wolf Man
    In one sense, Wolf Man is a generic, and not especially scary, cabin-in-the-woods frightener that leans too often on tenebrous lighting and ear-shredding sound effects. . . Yet the extreme pathos of Blake’s plight is palpable, and Whannell is determined to make us feel it.
  35. My Uncle
    Facing it squarely, "My Uncle" is perceptibly contrived when it lingers too long and gets too deeply into the dullness of things mechanical. After you've pushed one button and one modernistic face, you've pushed them all.
  36. Strange Harvest
    The film is naturalistic enough to be convincing and sick enough to be disturbing, even if the acting falls scattershot on the persuasiveness scale.
  37. The Bibi Files
    Beyond the videos, the movie takes a thorough, methodical approach to laying out the case against Netanyahu, even if few of its arguments are new.
  38. Who by Fire
    Lesage’s characters may talk a lot, but because he avoids exposition, he ends up overloading the story with dramatically heightened episodes. These keep things simmering, but they often overstate the obvious as much as any telegraphing dialogue might.
  39. The Lord of the Rings
    The Lord of the Rings, is both numbing and impressive. Yet it would be difficult to recommend this movie to anyone not wholly absorbed by the uses of motion-picture animation or to anyone not familiar with Tolkien's home-made mythology, which borrows liberally from various Norse myths, the Eddas, the Nibelungs and maybe even Beatrix Potter.
  40. Hot Frosty
    Everyone involved knows exactly what movie they’re making — especially Craig Robinson as the hilarious town sheriff.
  41. Ash
    The high-concept sci-fi horror film “Ash,” a hazy story about an amnesiac deep-space explorer who awakens to discover her entire crew was killed, is light on answers but heavy on style.
  42. Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling
    Jo Jo Dancer is a far from great movie. However, there's something revivifying about seeing Mr. Pryor take this flyer in writing, directing and acting in his own work.
  43. Dream Team
    Nothing about Dream Team is very serious, and it would be a waste of time to force meaning onto it. But that’s not a mistake; it’s the whole idea.
  44. Lilo & Stitch
    There’s just enough to make for a moderately fun, mostly serviceable and often adorable revamp that will probably satisfy fans of the original.
  45. The Colors Within
    The Colors Within has such an aloof tone that the deeper motivations and stakes for each character, though alluded to, don’t feel substantial enough to provide the story with any sense of urgency.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    It All Came True
    A diverting trifle with Humphrey Bogart and Ann Sheridan that must have been shot during a Warner lunch hour. But it makes good, raffish fun. [18 May 1986, p.2A]
    • The New York Times
  47. Sister Midnight
    In his first feature, Kandhari makes use of morbid humor and expressive imagery, including stop-motion effects. He rarely relies on dialogue and favors a fuzzier plot, which leaves the story with a shapeless and sometimes confusing midsection.
  48. Lightning Strikes Twice
    Lightning Strikes Twice, in short, is not explosive fare, but it does crackle on occasion.
  49. Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius)
    The movie gets lost in the gulf between standard, if illuminating, biography and roiling existential crisis.
  50. Fight or Flight
    Hartnett and Chandran’s laid back chemistry steady the film’s turbulent tonal shifts, adding a punch that the shakily choreographed action lacks.
  51. Millers in Marriage
    Its characters may be stressed out, but its rhythms are leisurely, the skill of the actors mostly countering the weaknesses in the script.
  52. Checkpoint Zoo
    Checkpoint Zoo portrays a caged and dependent menagerie that bewilderingly experienced humans at their worst and, fortunately, their best.
  53. Sex
    Sex is a curious movie, with a mix of moods and intentions that are, by turns, inviting and seriously off-putting.
  54. Love, Brooklyn
    It has its moments — Nicole and Roger on the steps of her brownstone, for one. And it’s awfully lovely to look at (cinematography by Martim Vian). But, like its characters, it’s a little too comfortable with being betwixt and between.
  55. By Design
    Kramer has constructed an ironically detached artifact that invites questions about ownership and image and then bats them away, making it a frustrating experience with an intriguing veneer.
  56. Omaha
    I was left befuddled about the movie’s message and, indeed, what I was supposed to make of the whole thing. That’s frustrating, and it’s not the sort of feeling you want to have when leaving a movie like this; it overwhelms whatever impression the rest of the movie might have left.
  57. Atropia
    The movie, written and directed by Hailey Benton Gates, wants to be a lot of things at once, including a satire and a dark rom-com. It bites off more than it can comfortably chew. However, the cast, also featuring Tim Heidecker, Chloë Sevigny and Channing Tatum, is charismatic and at times piercingly funny.
  58. Rule Breakers
    The director Bill Guttentag and his cast get the can-do spirit at its core, as well as the societal constrictions that make such perseverance especially impressive, but it’s also a story that could have been told with more concision and subtlety.
  59. Oh, Hi!
    To the degree it works — and it does, a lot of the time — it’s a testament to its performers, especially Gordon and, once she arrives on the scene, Viswanathan, both of whom bring an energy to the screen that always has a touch of mischief, like they could veer off into lunacy or ecstasy at any time.
  60. Together
    It’s clever in concept and kind of silly in execution, which wouldn’t be a bad thing if it knew how to commit to its goofiness.
  61. La Dolce Villa
    To be honest, the longer I watched La Dolce Villa, the more I started to think its very nonsensicality was the charm. It is not aiming for realism, even the kind of realism a previous generation of romantic comedy might have tried to evoke.
  62. Dead Lover
    It’s too much yet not enough.
  63. Bunnylovr
    Bunnylovr, the first feature from Katarina Zhu, touches on various themes, none of which feels fully realized. Yet there is such a sweet symbiosis between Zhu’s intimate, easy directing style and her unselfconscious performance in the lead role — beautifully illuminated by Daisy Zhou’s gentle cinematography — that the movie’s aimlessness rarely grates.
  64. Jezebel
    It is still an interesting film, though, in spite of our sniffs at its climax; colorful, generally well-performed and admirably directed by William Wyler.
  65. King Solomon's Mines
    There is more than a trace of outright hokum in this thriller...but there is also an ample abundance of scenic novelty and beauty to compensate.
  66. Another Simple Favor
    Another Simple Favor is a two-hour vacation I’m not mad to have taken.
  67. Picture This
    For all the potentially crushing challenges Pia faces — losing her business, not living out her dream of being a photographer, alienating her beloved younger sister — Picture This, keeps it light, never letting the sharp edges of potential failure come into focus.
  68. Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse
    Everyone is engaging, the art is magnificent and the whole thing pleasant, if overly cozy and hagiographic. That’s too bad. Then again — with “Maus” and his other work — Spiegelman has already produced his definitive biography.
  69. Dreams
    Dreams might feel distant and frosty, but it has a lot to say about inequality and the prerogatives of privilege.
  70. How to Get Ahead in Advertising
    The movie grows more and more desperate until it seems to go to pieces like poor brilliant Bagley. The final madness has less to do with wit than with a cinematic effect. The film's good humor, however, is consistent.
  71. Rats!
    If anything, the onslaught of weirdness is hypnotizing. As a visibly small-scale and local undertaking, the film feels genuinely connected to a vision of working-class Texas and its various characters.
  72. The Blue Trail
    Alas, Tereza, whose interior life remains largely obscured from start to finish, isn’t a compelling vessel for whatever Mascaro is trying to do in this movie. And, as it drifts from one place to another, one encounter to another, one sketchy idea to another, so may your attention.
  73. Being Maria
    If the meandering nature of the film makes the psychic fallout seem tonally scattered, it nevertheless conveys the sense that she’s sleepwalking through life — and always fighting to snap out of it.
  74. Young Hearts
    Naturalistic performances and quiet scenes of summertime idling bring to mind Luca Guadagnino’s drama “Call Me By Your Name,” though Young Hearts is a more wholesome, and ultimately more cliché, endeavor.
  75. Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna
    The film’s biggest letdown lies in its cursory tour of who Hutchins was apart from her final hours. Despite testimony from Hutchins’s friends that repeatedly references her artistry, Mason rarely incorporates clips of Hutchins’s cinematography outside “Rust.”
  76. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
    While much of this is muddled and repetitive, it is also now and then slyly amusing.
  77. Are We Good?
    Part of the accomplishment of Feinartz’s film, which at times comes across as too deferential, is that it fitfully succeeds in cracking his shell.
  78. Project Hail Mary
    Lord and Miller, almost by default, accentuate the positive to the detriment of the very movie that they’ve painstakingly created. Like a lot of Earthlings, they seem more at home in a far-out fantasy than on our ordinary, terrifying planet, which is why this particular message of hope ends up being a bummer.
  79. The Running Man
    There’s nothing wrong (or incorrect!) about either Wright’s desire to please or the righteousness, and at times you can sense a bit of anger wafting off the screen, even if Wright and Powell mostly seem to be having a very good time.
  80. Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII
    It is a glimpse into a vanished era, of self-indulgence mixed with wide-eyed experimentation, to watch ''A Saucerful of Secrets'' - with the band banging wildly at its instruments above Nick Mason's drumbeat - as musicians and director take everything very, very seriously. [13 May 1984, p.32]
    • The New York Times
  81. Queens of Drama
    With playful visual flourishes, a willfully garish palette and winks galore (including one to the French feminist writer Monique Wittig), Langlois’s debut has stylistic ambition for days. But it’s not as genre-fluent as “Love Lies Bleeding” and “I Saw the TV Glow,” or as swoon inducing as its volatile couple deserves.
  82. Like Father Like Son
    This slick movie proves how much fun it can be to watch first-rate actors challenge our credulity and rise above a second-rate script.
  83. Roofman
    Here is a protagonist who clearly straddles the line between right and wrong; the trouble is that in Roofman, that line wobbles, leaving the movie somewhere between a fun-loving caper and a finger-wagging morality tale.
  84. 1-800-on-Her-Own
    This is the kind of relatively pedestrian musician documentary that’s intended mostly for fans, who will encounter plenty of nostalgia. It’s a vulnerable glimpse at an artist figuring out what the creative life looks like in a world that keeps changing.
  85. Heads of State
    It’s loud albeit harmless japery, best appreciated with your air-conditioning cranked to movie theater levels.
  86. Words of War
    Some deviations are inevitable, but the expository dialogue — and the convention of having Russian characters speak English, with British accents — are distractions. Even so, Politkovskaya’s bravery, and Peake’s commitment to honoring it, is enough.
  87. The Bride!
    It doesn’t always make sense tonally and intellectually, but the whole thing is energetic, handsome and stocked with enough expert, appealing performers to hold your interest through the rougher, less coherent passages.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Ring
    An old and rather a thin story, but well told and well acted by Carl Brisson, Ian Hunter and Lilian Hall Davis.
  89. Everything's Going to Be Great
    By turns heartfelt and, especially in the ghost tête-à-têtes, irksome, the movie is helped substantially by its cast, especially Cranston, who brings a welcome sincerity to a quixotic, potentially cloying character.
  90. Bone Lake
    The only serious liability is the script, which never quite goes far enough. The provocative questions don’t have provocative answers, and though the film gestures toward edginess, it feels altogether too tame, lacking a bunny-boiling moment that would really make you squirm.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blackmail
    It is a murder story based on a play by Charles Bennett and in spite of its many artificial situations and convenient ideas it possesses a dramatic value that holds the attention.
  92. Anemone
    There is, of course, enormous pleasure in watching Daniel Day-Lewis, an actor of extraordinary sensitivity whose ability to convey a character’s interiority — the delicacy and the violence — can seem almost mystical. The problem is that as Anemone continues, the strength of the actor’s performance lays bare the banality of the writing, and Ray’s grip on your imagination loosens even as Day-Lewis’s remains fixed.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Murder!
    Although the final scenes in Murder...do not live up to many that have gone before and there is a strange absence of true psychology in these closing stretches, there are episodes in this picture that are possessed of considerable merit.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
    This is an impressive study in anticlimax, more distinguished than the usually quoted classic example of "For God, for country and for Yale." The picture has a very, very excellent begining, a mediocre middle and a most deplorable ending.
  95. Good Fortune
    This is a movie that wants to have it both way.
  96. Diciannove
    If the dearth of character development is a gag, Diciannove doesn’t offer much of a punchline. But Tortorici’s filmmaking is stylish enough to make even the slipperiest sequences pop.
  97. Sovereign
    Sovereign is most intriguing for its subtle, if incomplete observations of the more complicated realities of both sides of the law that inform and ripple from Jerry’s paranoid world.
  98. Sunlight
    A little of Sunlight, which she directs and co-wrote with Allen, goes a long way. But there’s still something to seeing a performer go for broke, purging a character’s shame and despair through a screwy, confessional sense of humor.
  99. Slumlord Millionaire
    Because Slumlord Millionaire has assembled a dynamic and engaging group of activists, it seems churlish to complain that it hasn’t found a way to make the material cinematic.
  100. Brick
    Brick is built almost entirely of hints and twists.
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