The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Dumplin'
    Kristin Hahn’s script gives Will sassy lines and too many tears, but the filmmakers never give this character a real, searching, complex inner life. They give her problems to solve, hurdles to clear. They turn emotional complexity into affirmations and a potentially transformational character into a you-go-girl cliché.
  2. Paradise Alley
    A phony, attitudinizing, self-indulgent mess, a multimillion-dollar B (for boring) picture with the ear of a cauliflower, the heart of a hustler and the soul of a used-car salesman.
  3. Corvette Summer
    The central portion of Corvette Summmer, set in Las Vegas with an Alice in Wonderland air, has a visual zaniness that meshes effectively with the script. But for the most part, the movie takes a slender, boyish conceit — of the sort that is suddenly so popular among Hollywood's current batch of boy wonders — and invests it with silliness rather than whimsy.
  4. The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane
    Nicolas Gessner's direction has a correspondingly comfortable feel, but this type of story is as old as the hills—no, older—and Mr. Gessner doesn't do much to make it plausible.
  5. Space Dogs
    Space Dogs commits to its art-house pretensions. The result isn’t pleasant, but it does effectively provoke.
  6. Bad Shabbos
    This is, after all, a situational comedy, in which the laughs spring from reaction shots and line deliveries. Luckily, the actors prove up to the task.
  7. Mousehunt
    As the family film least insulting to its audience's intelligence this season, Mouse Hunt has its share of grown-up appeal along with mouse mischief guaranteed to have children giggling.
  8. Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey
    This one-note documentary from Ramona S. Diaz is as hostile to conflict as the group’s songs themselves.
  9. Alita: Battle Angel
    A pileup of clichés in service to technological whiz-bangery, “Alita” is one more story of the not quite human brought to life with hubris and bleeding-edge science.
  10. The Book Thief
    The Book Thief is a shameless piece of Oscar-seeking Holocaust kitsch.
  11. Delicacy
    It's a lightweight romance that occasionally shows a sense of humor but seems afraid to turn it loose.
  12. Person to Person
    While Mr. Defa’s dialogue mostly flows naturally from Mr. Coopersmith, it can seem too self-aware and precious in the other characters’ mouths.
  13. In the Mouth of Madness
    In the Mouth of Madness has enough menace and novelty to please fans of Mr. Carpenter's horror films (among them The Fog, Christine and Halloween) without the wider interest of an enchanting parable like Starman, which he also directed. Still, this is a film with the temerity to think big, if only for the magnitude of the wickedness it invokes.
  14. Nancy Drew
    As it is, Nancy Drew stands as an example of how to take a foolproof, time-tested formula -- a young detective using smarts and determination to solve a case -- and mess it up with superficial cleverness and pandering hackwork. How this happened is hardly a mystery; botched adaptations are as common as BlackBerries in Hollywood. But it is nonetheless something of a crime.
  15. Aline
    The movie’s passion is incredible — but, boy, is it embodied in something awkward.
  16. Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F
    While this installment isn’t nearly as woeful as Beverly Hills Cop III, it doesn’t have the charm or energy of the first two films either. It’s a limp, desperate action comedy with few memorable moments.
  17. The Siege
    Edward Zwick's ultimately sedate thriller starts out with crisply efficient style and the potential for a much more involving story.
  18. Maya Dardel
    For all the linguistic gymnastics, the film is hamstrung by its directors’ lack of visual imagination.
  19. Knight of Cups
    In Knight of Cups, as in “To the Wonder,” the deployment of beauty strikes me as more evasive than evocative.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    30 Days of Night
    The performers have little to do besides spill and drink blood in this tedious, inconsequential B picture. The sun doesn’t rise nearly fast enough.
  21. The Immortalists
    This sly documentary rises above its speculative hook by shifting to show the very human, and very mortal, sides of these would-be warriors of eternity.
  22. Irrational Man
    The horror of where rationalism can lead (the death camps, for one) hangs over Irrational Man and helps hold you as does Mr. Phoenix, even with some bad writing and Mr. Allen’s narrative laxity and lack of interest in how real people live.
  23. My Art
    My Art invests far too much in the conceit. (The re-creations look like unfunny “Airplane!” parodies.) Part of the problem is that Ms. Simmons has surrounded herself with more interesting actors, including a scene-stealing Parker Posey.
  24. Shaolin
    If the movie feels old-school (with new-school production values), consider its pedigree. It's no wonder: Shaolin is a reimagining of the 1982 "Shaolin Temple," in which Jet Li made his debut.
  25. Baby Boom
    Baby Boom isn't much more than a glorified sitcom, but it's funny, and it's liable to hit home. The reason: a devilishly good performance by Diane Keaton.
  26. Kika
    Kika" is actually one of this film maker's more buoyant recent efforts, a sly, rambunctious satire that moves along merrily until it collapses -- as many Almodovar films finally do -- under the weight of its own clutter.
  27. Sex and the City
    I wish Ms. Parker had let that bee in her bonnet go silent, because the movie that she and Mr. King have come up with is the pits, a vulgar, shrill, deeply shallow -- and, at 2 hours and 22 turgid minutes, overlong -- addendum to a show that had, over the years, evolved and expanded in surprising ways.
  28. Goal! The Dream Begins
    As the clichés mount, Danny Cannon directs as if he's the one on trial, teasing tension out of every pass and dribble. Most irritating of all is his determination to paint British soccer as a gentleman's game, a notion United's real fans would no doubt treat with the scorn it deserves.
  29. Inside
    It’s disruptive, and then cathartic, to watch Dafoe’s primal performance dominate this museum/mausoleum and force us to side with humanity. He’s perfectly cast in a part that calls for quietly whirring intelligence.
  30. The Promise
    The Promise occupies a curious landscape somewhere between opera and cartoon.
  31. Mysteries of Egypt
    Young viewers seduced by the trashy flash of "The Mummy" and "The Mummy Returns" will be able to glimpse a vanished reality richer, stranger and bigger than all of the special effects in Hollywood.
  32. The Basket
    Avoids succumbing to the preachiness that is the bane of so many family films, and for a movie like this, that's no small feat.
  33. Diario di una siciliana ribelle
    Loaded down with rhetorical devices -- writer and director, Marco Amenta, drowns it in a flood of sentimental effusions.
  34. Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker
    The Rise of Skywalker — Episode IX, in case you’ve lost count — is one of the best. Also one of the worst. Perfectly middling. It all amounts to the same thing.
  35. The Art of the Steal
    Matt Dillon and Kurt Russell may not make the most convincing half-brothers, but The Art of the Steal is a fairly amusing heist film with some sibling tension helping the story along.
  36. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
    Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is closer to a curiosity than to a triumph, though its conception is certainly ambitious.
  37. Honour
    Mr. Khan displays a strong visual sense that makes pivotal scenes pop. The unlikely ending strains credulity, but what this confident debut lacks in subtlety, it more than makes up in execution.
  38. The Handmaid's Tale
    With its devilish attention to polite little touches, its abundant bitchiness, its decrying of the Handmaids' oppression along with its tacit celebration of their fecundity, The Handmaid's Tale is a shrewd if preposterous cautionary tale that strikes a wide range of resonant chords.
  39. After the Apocalypse
    Despite its spasms of brutality and a swerve into the macabre, After the Apocalypse is, by comparison with more recent films of this type (the "Mad Max" series), gentle at heart and terribly sincere.
  40. Yau doh lung fu bong
    Throwdown milks its emotion from a soap-opera score and the appealingly decadent performances of Mr. Koo and Ms. Ying.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story
    Were it not for a masterly production coup - an extensive interview with the camera-shy Mr. Koufax - this slight and unambitious work would be wholly indistinguishable from basic-cable filler.
  42. Some Days Are Better Than Others
    As a meditation Some Days has its virtues - if you're in the market for a picture-postcard bummer - but it will leave your mellowed mind pretty quickly.
  43. Pray for Japan
    If making a decent movie required only good intentions, then Pray for Japan would be off and running. As it is, though, this muddled collage of random impressions and personal histories, emerging from last year's destruction of the Tohoku coastline by the earthquake and tsunami, doesn't document a tragedy so much as repeat a mantra.
  44. The Color Wheel
    A singularly unpleasant movie: full of obnoxious characters in scenes that seem overwritten and under-rehearsed, oblivious to the most basic standards of tonal consistency, narrative coherence or visual decorum. But it is also sly, daring, genuinely original and at times perversely brilliant.
  45. You Don't Need Feet to Dance
    A film plunked somewhat unfortunately between the inspirational and the ordinary.
  46. Men at Lunch
    The film feels meandering. Not only does it offer a jumble of ideas that aren’t followed through, but it’s also structured oddly.
  47. Big Ass Spider!
    The director, Mike Mendez, shows no signs of knowing how to make campy horror work the way that the creators of similar movies on Syfy do. It has to be either subtle or over the top. This is neither.
  48. Revolution
    Trying to gather too much into his net, Mr. Stewart gets a little lost, but his bottom line could not be clearer: When the oceans die, so do we.
  49. Getting to the Nutcracker
    This is a sympathetic, even sweet, account, but it’s too soft.
  50. My Friend Victoria
    As drifting and dreamy as its searching heroine, My Friend Victoria takes a graceful but unsatisfying stroll through the life and longings of a young black woman in contemporary Paris.
  51. Balloon
    There is nothing objectionable about Michael Bully Herbig’s glossy political thriller, Balloon, but there’s nothing particularly exciting about it, either.
  52. Warning
    Together, these tales feel like the hangover at a wake for mankind. The film’s dusky pastel color palette recalls dying flowers on a grave. Yet, even as the synth score mutters anxiously in the background, Alexander takes a prankish delight in her own doom and gloom.
  53. Playlist
    There are no particularly moving insights, and it falls short of a proper character study, but “Playlist” does intrigue with its droll individual parts — if not the sum of them.
  54. The Killer
    While the nimble Jang holds together the robust action sequences — bloody freakouts often captured in slow motion — no one else grounds any of the scenes with any emotion. Consequently, The Killer fails to land a real knockout blow.
  55. Night Patrol
    The lumbersome conspiracy-building in the front half, paired with flashy visuals and some performances fitting for a crude stoner comedy, make this a bleary experience overall.
  56. Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
    Front-loaded with inspired gags, and the first half-hour is both sneakily and explosively funny, raising expectations that are never quite met.
  57. Generation Wealth
    Darting from micro to macro and back again, squashing obscene consumption against child beauty pageants and ruinous debt, its structure makes for an unfocused thesis. The through line, though, works, as Ms. Greenfield repeatedly turns her camera on her own family and career choices.
  58. Quarantine
    The template is familiar, but Quarantine delivers the heebie-jeebies with solid acting and perfectly calibrated shocks.
  59. Being Flynn
    There is honest feeling, genuine humanity and real intelligence in this movie, but there is also a sense of caution, of indecisiveness, that undermines its potential power. Being Flynn is an honorably ambivalent film, finally unsure of what to do with the two strong, complicated characters at its center.
  60. Lucky Number Slevin
    From its sly, amused performances to its surreal comic book gloss to its artfully nervous camerawork, Lucky Number Slevin sustains the blasé tone and look of a smart-aleck thriller that buries its heart under layers of attitude.
  61. Rounders
    Mischievously entertaining...Dahl's film has character in oversupply even if its actual characters are sometimes thin. Poker fever makes up for whatever the story lacks in everyday emotions.
  62. Unmade in China
    Slack storytelling (including snippets from a post-film Q. and A. session) and patchy filmmaking seal the unappealing deal.
  63. Unfriended: Dark Web
    What’s striking in this movie, apart from an ostentatiously glitchy screen distortion that occurs whenever a denizen of the “dark web” appears on one of the screens within screens, is how credibly its extreme trolling plays.
  64. Shooter
    This maximalist approach can tax the nerves, though it has the benefit of keeping you on alert. It’s also pretty enjoyable. Mr. Fuqua, who happens to be surprisingly good with actors, does have a knack for chaos.
  65. Killing Kasztner
    The film leaves you with a sense that Kastner’s name is a casualty of rhetorical crossfire.
  66. Only
    The writer-director Takashi Doscher forgoes apocalyptic spectacle to focus on the pandemic’s effects on Will and Eva’s romance. Too bad. Most of the scenes could have been lifted from a generic relationship drama, and it is only the couple’s conversation, not their visually desaturated world, that distinguishes them.
  67. Donkeyhead
    Despite her minor rebellions, Mona remains a frustratingly opaque character; a stereotypically troubled woman whose eventual awakening merits a shrug at most.
  68. Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story)
    Bang Gang goes out of its way to avoid stereotyping. Where a Hollywood equivalent would almost certainly punish George, “Bang Gang” refuses to designate clear-cut heroes and villains.
  69. Burning Man
    Burning Man benefits from the highly watchable Mr. Goode and able players like Rachel Griffiths and Kerry Fox.
  70. Brother Nature
    Every new generation has to learn the lesson: Comedy success on the small screen doesn’t guarantee the same on the big screen. If anything, it guarantees the opposite.
  71. Annabelle Comes Home
    Burdened neither by fresh ideas nor common sense, Gary Dauberman’s lethargic screenplay (he also directed, an inauspicious debut) takes so long to get moving that Annabelle herself should demand a do-over.
  72. Robin Hood
    If only the story were leaner and more nimble -- but then again this is a Ridley Scott film, so you go in expecting bombast and bloat in the service of leaden themes.
  73. The Emperor's New Clothes
    The Emperor’s New Clothes is moderately effective agitprop.
  74. Highway Courtesans
    Nine years in the making and timeless in its observations, Highway Courtesans is an intimate look at some of the youngest practitioners of the world’s oldest profession.
  75. Donnybrook
    Ear-shredding to listen to (the soundtrack, between chunks of a comically portentous score, is mostly thrash metal) and soul-destroying to watch, the movie trembles with tragedy. Yet because almost everyone and everything — dialogue, image, setting — is presented in such broad, symbolic strokes, we feel absolutely nothing.
  76. The Fluffer
    Moves nimbly from behind-the-scenes comedy to melodrama, with occasional stumbles into pop psychology and film-noir violence.
  77. The Tigger Movie
    An adequate piece of children's entertainment, though it seems better suited for home viewing...than for the big screen.
  78. Leela
    Veers between the light naturalism of American television and the pulsing melodrama of Bollywood entertainment.
  79. Group
    It is all a contrivance; the cast and filmmakers were under the delusion that putting unhappy women in a room would lead to drama.
  80. A Castle for Christmas
    Likeable stars with little frisson, Elwes and Shields are also saddled with a formulaic script.
  81. The YouTube Effect
    The internet moves quickly, perhaps too quickly for an overview this unfocused.
  82. Flightplan
    To watch Ms. Foster storm through a phony airplane for an entire movie has its very minor pleasures - given the numerous close-ups, you can study her lovely face at your leisure - but there is nothing here to feed the head or fray the nerves.
  83. RocknRolla
    Like the filmmaking itself, the violence has no passion, no oomph, no sense of real or even feigned purpose.
  84. Crash
    The Crash characters sleepwalk through this story in a state of futuristic numbness, seeking extreme forms of sensation because familiar feelings have long since failed them. It's a chilling, ghastly possibility that manages to exert a grim fascination.
  85. In Too Deep
    Treats its characters seriously and doesn't resort to the obvious very often.
  86. Grumpy Old Men
    Grumpy Old Men is the kind of holiday movie a lot of people are searching for. It's cheerful, it's well under two hours and it doesn't concern any major social blights, unless you think Jack Lemmon tossing a dead fish into Walter Matthau's car is cause for alarm.
  87. The Mauritanian
    Trapped for the most part in featureless rooms, a stellar cast — including Jodie Foster, Benedict Cumberbatch and Shailene Woodley — deliver dull speeches and sift through redacted documents, brows furrowed and lips compressed.
  88. Imaginary Heroes
    Piles too many small disasters on top of the initial tragedy, including a drunken car accident, a drug bust and a cancer scare. It also swerves unsteadily into farce.
  89. Richard Garriott: Man on a Mission
    The most expensive home movie ever made, is one man's genial account of his trip into outer space.
  90. Multiplicity
    Multiplicity weaves such an uninteresting plot around its bland, generic principals that it rarely reaches the absurdist heights its premise demands.
  91. Logan's Run
    Logan's Run is less interested in logic than in gadgets and spectacle, but these are sometimes jazzily effective and even poetic. Had more attention been paid to the screenplay, the movie might have been a stunner.
  92. Broken
    At a certain point, Mr. Norris forsakes realism for theatricalized fantasy, and Broken ultimately loses its stylistic cohesion, if not its humanity.
  93. 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.
  94. Aladdin
    The movie itself, while not entirely terrible — a lot of craft has been purchased, and even a little art — is pointless in a particularly aggressive way.
  95. Keeping Mum
    It’s refreshing to see Dame Maggie in a lighter mode than usual. The role of a genteel psychopath is a piece of lemon tea cake she consumes in one delicate bite.
  96. Piranha 3-D
    The entertainment formula behind this short and nasty movie - devised according to someone's idea of what teenage boys with the guile, the facial hair or the "guardian" to gain admission to an R-rated movie are likely to enjoy - is sloppy and simple.
  97. A Regular Woman
    A film that feels exploitative, not enlightened.
  98. John Dies at the End
    It lays waste to linear narration, thematic coherence, psychological plausibility and just about everything else you might expect to encounter. It zigs, zags and trips over its own feet and on its own home-brewed hallucinogens. It's a ridiculous, preposterous, sometimes maddening experience, but also kind of a blast.
  99. Allah Made Me Funny: Live in Concert
    The title doesn't lie. These guys know how to tell a joke, often at the expense of their customs, religious holidays, families and themselves.
  100. The Forever Purge
    Words like “colonialism” and “the American dream” are thrown around, to little avail. This movie ultimately cares more about monotonous shootouts than making points about border relations
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »