The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,280 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: 9,381 out of 20280
  2. Mixed: 8,435 out of 20280
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20280
20280 movie reviews
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  1. Fairhaven
    There isn't a dishonest moment in Fairhaven, Tom O'Brien's piercing, wistful portrait of three longtime buddies in their mid-30s who reunite around a funeral in a southeastern Massachusetts fishing community.
  2. Entanglement
    Impressively photographed and perkily paced, Jason Filiatrault’s story never droops quite as much as its lead character, injecting a welcome poignancy that tempers the cuteness.
  3. Escape from L.A.
    Escape From L.A., which the director wrote with Mr. Russell and Debra Hill, is much too giddy to make sense as a politically astute pop fable. As amusing as some of its notions may be, none are developed into sustained running jokes. [09 Aug 1996, p.C5]
    • The New York Times
  4. Wasp Network
    There are times in which Wasp Network feels like a John le Carré tale drenched in Miami sun, or even a serious-minded “Top Gun” variant. But it’s also a provocative demonstration of how strange life can get when the political and the personal intertwine like roots of a mammoth tree.
  5. What We Did on Our Holiday
    A damp-eyed comedy whose banal title isn’t the only thing needing improvement.
  6. False Positive
    Despite its vaguely unsettling clinical ambience, very little about the film as it makes its way to an ultimately flat and predictable final twist, manages to feel tense or thrilling. Or even funny for that matter.
  7. Clip
    Cheerless and voyeuristic, Clip (which was banned in Russia) seems a sincere attempt to portray a lost and disaffected generation. But the film’s brutally honest parade of callous behavior and casual, almost cruel sex has a depressing prurience that wears you down.
  8. Eddie the Eagle
    This film doesn’t seem to trust the inherent likability of his story. The director, Dexter Fletcher, and the writers, Sean Macaulay and Simon Kelton, load it up with tropes that actually make it less endearing.
  9. The Discovery
    The story stays intriguing for much of the way, but eventually things cease to make sense.
  10. Bride of Re-Animator
    Bride of Re-Animator is less a sequel to the critically praised 1985 horror film Re-Animator than a rehash based on the same H. P. Lovecraft stories.
  11. The Star
    Even though redundant and familiar, as this performance inevitably is, with its obviously patterned reproduction of a caustic and vanity-ridden dame, Miss Davis still makes it sizzle with stinging sarcasm and feminine fire, so that it gives the illusion of emerging as a shaft of withering light from Hollywood.
  12. The Critic
    Visually, The Critic is polished enough, despite some splashes of apparent digital lacquer. But Marber hasn’t supplied an incontrovertible motive to bind Nina to Jimmy. And there is something arguably troubling about the way McKellen’s character has been conceived.
  13. M3GAN 2.0
    Maximalism has its place, but it wears out its welcome here.
  14. Bobby
    When you hear his (Robert Kennedy's) patient, meditative speeches, from which every note of demagoguery or pandering has been purged, you glimpse the film Mr. Estevez set out to make -- the one you may wish you were watching.
  15. Booty Call
    This contemporary sex farce, directed by Jeff Pollack, has the attention span of a hyperactive child, but its bawdy sexual humor rarely flags.
  16. Moxie
    Unfocused and too often unbelievable, Amy Poehler’s Moxie feels like a battle between two competing visions: go-girl crowd-pleaser and serious high-school harassment drama. Neither wins.
  17. Seberg
    A flawed and fascinating film about fame and martyrdom.
  18. Saturday Fiction
    Star power is a logic unto itself, and Lou has ensured a limitless supply by casting Gong as an actress-spy. She conveys depths of pain and longing even when the script offers none, seducing us as effortlessly as Jean seduces her enemies.
  19. A Decent Factory
    A cursory, irritatingly facile look at the human cost of globalization.
  20. The Forgotten Space
    Unabashedly polemical and rigorously pessimistic, a sustained Marxian indictment of 21st-century capital. The narration, by Mr. Sekula, is at times lyrical and rarely subtle, but the film is most graceful and moving when its argument slows down or wanders into an interesting tangent.
  21. Redlegs
    The film is a riveting portrait of young men in shock and in mourning as the tragedy stirs feelings that have long lain dormant.
  22. Lifeguard
    As a film, Lifeguard is romantic twaddle, but as sociology it's a spontaneous assault on a very American way of life.
  23. Tough Guys
    The director, Jeff Kanew, does not have as steady a hand as the old-timers. What he does have is sense enough to let our memories of all those Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas movies work on us.
  24. Educating Rita
    The essentially two-character play has been opened up to the point that it includes a variety of settings and subordinate figures, but it never approaches anything lifelike.
  25. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
    Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day is the latest example of a wonderful children’s book turned into a mediocre movie.
  26. The Exterminating Angels
    One of Mr. Brisseau's subjects is the volatility of desire, the way the path of erotic curiosity can swerve from satisfaction into recrimination and confusion. A porno-philosopher in the venerable French tradition, he blends a frank appeal to the audience's nether regions with some teasing attention to its mind.
  27. Portraits chinois
    The characters...are well cast, well directed and skillfully acted, if not a particularly admirable lot.
  28. Freeze Me
    The violent scenes veer vertiginously between slapstick, soft-core pornography and raw documentary, leaving you repelled and confused, as well as fascinated.
  29. Warriors of Heaven and Earth
    The best case for Warriors is its cinematic time travels and its peek into the natural wildness of a long-closed countryside.
  30. Malèna
    What begins as a blushing, priapic opera buffa about coming of age turns into a verismo shocker, before softening into something mellower.
  31. Fackham Hall
    Sending up costumey, upstairs-downstairs tropes, the movie seldom lets five seconds pass without a wisecrack, pratfall or sight gag, sometimes all three stacked on top of each other.
  32. A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child
    Though the film hints at psychological intrigue, it never moves beyond the limits of its genre.
  33. An Adolescent
    The film, at least 20 minutes too long, has too many competing story lines to succeed as more than an oddball mood piece.
  34. Paper Heart
    Your enjoyment of Paper Heart will hinge almost entirely on your receptiveness to Ms. Yi and the extreme iteration of social awkwardness she represents.
  35. Dare
    As it develops, Dare lays out some interesting psychological puzzles, though the filmmakers lack the technique to explore them as thoroughly as you might wish.
  36. Big Wednesday
    The movie often seems even more uneventful than material like this need make it, and Mr. Milius's attention to his actors focuses more closely on their pectorals than on their performances.
  37. My Son
    An endorsement of milquetoast vigilantism that’s not nearly as knotty as it presumes to be, the French thriller “My Son” is so reserved in its storytelling and vague in its details that all it elicits is a yawn.
  38. How to Please a Woman
    This hook piques curiosity — at least enough for a coy eyebrow raise. Light intrigue is often not enough, though, and in this case, the movie strains to sustain charm.
  39. The Cuban
    Complications culminate in epiphanies and brief triumphs, as is customary. But this genial, well-intentioned movie never quite lands a real emotional punch.
  40. U Turn
    However simply he approaches this familiar milieu, Mr. Stone winds up treating his story's sin-soaked connivers the way Francis Ford Coppola treated vampires. Neither of them is really capable of anything plain.
  41. Oblivion
    Oblivion never transcends its inspirations to become anything other than a thin copy.
  42. The Girl
    What at first came across as a tale of dawning conscience increasingly starts to feel rigged.
  43. Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between
    For those viewers aged out of the movie’s intended demographic, that quandary isn’t as compelling as the evidence of its lead actors’ talents, as well as that of the nimble actors who play their besties, Stella (Ayo Edebiri) and Scotty (Nico Hiraga).
  44. Outlaw Johnny Black
    Outlaw Johnny Black struggles to establish a consistent comedic rhythm.
  45. The Boys in the Boat
    The script is as subtle as a bonk on the nose, and the editing repeats every beat twice-over in broad pantomime and meaningful looks.
  46. Spies in Disguise
    The lessons are so treacly, and their delivery method so single-minded, that the Valley Girl phrase “gag me with a spoon” springs to mind. But you have to give the movie credit for sticking to its lack of guns.
  47. Spellbound
    It isn’t fair to say that “Spellbound” lacks musical or visual invention. Zegler can belt out a song, and the evil storm that transmogrified the royals is pleasingly lo-fi. (It looks like a scribble-scrabble twister.) But the magic feels distinctly, almost insultingly poached.
  48. The House of Yes
    The House of Yes was adapted from a play by Wendy MacLeod. And the movie, with its brittle, outrageous dialogue has a shrill stagy feel. That would be fine, if the dialogue sustained the stylish crackle of a drawing-room comedy gone berserk, but there are many gaping holes between the funny moments.
  49. Greta
    The point, and the fun, is the wild mischief of Huppert’s performance, which grows lighter and more joyful as Greta’s behavior slides from menacing to murderous.
  50. The Berlin File
    As soon as The Berlin File takes flight with its exhilarating action set pieces, memories of any muddles evaporate amid the tension and vivid engagement with settings, from courtyards to fields.
  51. The ROMEOWS
    There’s nothing flashy about The Romeows the film or the Romeows the men, but what they’ve created — their life’s art — matters.
  52. Rock in the Red Zone
    Rock in the Red Zone has its best moments when it explores the anxiety of Sderot’s residents and their endurance. It’s the strongest topic here, and the one you’re most sorry to see interrupted when the film inevitably switches over to something else.
  53. The Skyjacker's Tale
    The Skyjacker’s Tale could stand to lose its gimmicky re-enactments. Why supplement a story this crazy?
  54. The Craft: Legacy
    Zoe Lister-Jones’s The Craft: Legacy, produced by Blumhouse (“Get Out”), is a disappointing distillation of the original that’s mostly devoid of personality.
  55. Orphan: First Kill
    The sheer derangement of its plot and a bizarre casting gambit make it more interesting than standard straight-to-streaming schlock.
  56. A Little Help
    Though the enjoyable prickliness of the film's early scenes soon dissolves into cozy solutions, a sturdy supporting cast - even Ron Leibman's scenery-chewing turn as Laura's blowhard father is more amusing than annoying - balances the scales.
  57. Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters
    Strictly for cultists, and even they might find less than 90 bongless minutes hard to sit through.
  58. Draft Day
    I don’t really buy Draft Day — it’s a shallow and evasive movie, built more around corporate wish fulfillment than around reality — but I have to say that it sells itself beautifully.
  59. Camp X-Ray
    Despite the movie’s gripping performances and the verisimilitude of many elements, I simply don’t believe the story.
  60. Why Did I Get Married?
    More than anything, a Tyler Perry movie is an interactive experience, and Why Did I Get Married? is no exception. At the screening I attended, it was often difficult to hear the dialogue between bouts of enthusiastic applause and shouts of “You go, girl!”
  61. Downtown 81
    It's as a documentary that Downtown 81 is most successful, particularly at those moments when the somewhat unfocused filmmaking allows us to look past the foreground characters and catch glimpses of a vanished cityscape.
  62. War Machine
    Such blunt messaging reduces the onscreen carnage, which relentlessly occurs via this mute machine’s searing lasers, barrage of bombs and kaiju breath, to little more than the human toll required for this particular military man to feel again. Worse yet, the film concludes with hawkish intensity, fashioning itself into a tasteless recruitment video.
  63. American Made Movie
    American Made Movie ends up feeling as if it were built from well-known facts and wishful thinking.
  64. Dance Party, USA
    Directed with extraordinary empathy by Aaron Katz (who also wrote the story), Dance Party, USA is an admittedly slight movie, but one that is given heft by a yearning tone and a camera fascinated by the emotional shifts and shadows on a young person's face.
  65. Michael Moore in TrumpLand
    Mr. Moore has basically made an earnest but not very entertaining pro-Clinton campaign film, occasionally funny, momentarily heartfelt when he takes up the subject of universal health care and the lives lost for lack of it. Against the rest of his work (“Bowling for Columbine,” “Roger & Me”) it’s fairly tepid stuff.
  66. You've Been Trumped Too
    As a filmmaker, Mr. Baxter often tends toward needless force-feeding.
  67. Blue Steel
    It isn't necessary to believe Blue Steel fully to find it gripping all the way through, and to be both fascinated and frightened by its icy, gleaming vision of urban life. For the audience, it's both a sobering and invigorating experience. For Ms. Bigelow, it's a breakthrough.
  68. Boogie
    It’s a competent movie, but it doesn’t quite make it to the big leagues.
  69. Music of the Heart
    An affirmation of the power of music to provide beauty, pleasure and a sense of accomplishment.
  70. Gerry
    With all its quirks, Gerry seeps into your pores like the wind-whipped sand that stings the faces of these disoriented hikers.
  71. Freak Show
    Mr. Lawther is sympathetic and appealing as Billy, but Ms. Styler seems to mistake broad strokes for stylistic daring, and her colorful but diffuse movie never jells.
  72. Family Business
    The three stars are good actors, but they have nothing much to work with. Their biggest challenge is to make the audience believe they are blood relatives, a question that would be quickly dismissed if the script were more compelling.
  73. Cocaine Bear
    For an audience desperately looking for a good time, they’ll find it. More discerning fans of junk might see an opportunity missed.
  74. For Your Eyes Only
    Most of the time, though, For Your Eyes Only is a slick entertainment...not the spaced-out fun that "Moonraker" was, but its tone is consistently comic even when the material is not.
  75. 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.
  76. Observe and Report
    If you thought Abu Ghraib was a laugh riot then you might love Observe and Report, a potentially brilliant conceptual comedy that fizzles because its writer and director, Jody Hill, doesn't have the guts to go with his spleen.
  77. Evil Eye
    Choudhury is excellent here as a fraught matriarch — as good as she was as a young rebel three decades back. And Maskati’s performance is a slippery mix of suave and menacing, which helps sell the farthest-fetched elements of this story.
  78. Herbie Hancock: Possibilities
    Mr. Hancock, a longtime practitioner of Buddhism who encourages his adoring colleagues to journey beyond their "comfort zones," resulting in some interactions and freestyle jamming that are truly infectious.
  79. Until the Light Takes Us
    Absorbing, low-key documentary.
  80. Wah Do Dem
    Horizons are expanded and exoticism explored in Wah Do Dem, a shaggy road movie about relinquishing your comforts to find your bliss.
  81. The Freebie
    A smart seriocomic playlet with some emotionally harsh moments, although it refrains from plumbing its subject in agonizing depth.
  82. The Magnificent Seven
    The new movie is as moth-eaten as the serapes strewn through the 1960 film, but there’s no denying the appeal of the image of Mr. Washington riding a horse, shooting a Colt and leading a posse of vigilantes to save a mostly white Western town.
  83. The Taste of Money
    Even as The Taste of Money swerves toward a frantic climax and a sentimental denouement, it remains intriguing. It feeds an insatiable curiosity about how the other half - or, in current parlance, the 1 percent - lives, and what it shows us is gorgeous, grotesque and disconcertingly human.
  84. Echo Valley
    Battling downpours and an abundance of nighttime shadows, the cinematographer Benjamin Kracun adds a classy, coppery richness where he can. But “Echo Valley,” directed by Michael Pearce (whose 2018 feature debut, “Beast,” mingled equally dissonant themes with far greater dexterity), is ultimately undone by Brad Ingelsby’s distracted script.
  85. With Friends Like These...
    Originally released seven years ago on home video, is only now surfacing as a theatrical release. Although it's no classic, it's a cut or two smarter than the average Hollywood comedy. At its best, it plays like a less acerbic, less Jewish triple episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." (review of re-release)
  86. Elizabeth Harvest
    Mr. Gutierrez keeps the viewer in the same state of confusion as Elizabeth, but each surprise, paradoxically, makes the movie less and less surprising as a whole.
  87. Small Time
    Small Time is agreeably sentimental meat-and-potatoes fare with strong dashes of humor, executed with a sincerity that’s hard to resist.
  88. Eddie Murphy: Raw
    This feature-length concert film is hilarious, putting Mr. Murphy on a par with Mr. Pryor at his best.
  89. My Wonderful Wanda
    The film, written by Oberli and Cooky Ziesche, satirizes class divides and xenophobia (“the Pole” constantly carries a derogatory connotation here), but never takes the satire far enough to be memorable, challenging or anything beyond whimsical.
  90. Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story
    The story is told in faux-documentary style, echoing the films of Christopher Guest, and if the cast never quite matches Mr. Guest's ensemble in comic inventiveness, they nonetheless manage to invest a very slight story line with a loose, scruffy charm.
  91. 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.
  92. The Little Things
    Thanks to Hancock’s craft and the discipline of the actors, it’s more than watchable, but you are unlikely to be haunted, disturbed or even surprised. You haven’t exactly seen this before. It just feels that way.
  93. Railway Children
    Decency prevails in a somewhat ludicrous finale involving an army of children and a train containing a high-ranking officer. It’s an ending so tidy as to undercut the effort to broach a shameful side to the American war effort.
  94. Bran Nue Dae
    The bits of Aboriginal lore imparted along the way by Tadpole add flavoring to a sugar-coated romp that has the craft of a high school revue.
  95. White Bird
    One could argue that Forster and company calibrate their anodyne effects to make a Holocaust narrative that’s palatable for younger viewers. But what mostly resonates is a particularly lachrymose brand of show-business hedging.
  96. Bee Movie
    The real fun is the insect shtick.
  97. Rock Star
    Represents the usual victory of simplistic screenwriting conventions over the rich, gamy ambiguities of the subject. But while its slide into perfunctory storytelling dilutes the raw, silly spectacle of sex and noise, the movie still has enough wit and insight to make it worth watching.
  98. Mrs. Doubtfire
    The movie's biggest challenge, one that it does not exactly meet, is to persuade the audience that this husband and father's escapade is somehow an act of love.
  99. What We Do Is Secret
    The movie offers too little of Crash's justly revered lyricism and too much of his self-mutilation and manufactured chaos.
  100. Illegal
    One problem is that while Mr. Masset-Depasse frames Tania's status in vague political terms, he doesn't make an argument. Instead he creates heroes and villains in what is, by turns, a prison flick, a psychological thriller and a maternal melodrama.
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