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. Running with Scissors
    Ms. Bening's precise, pitiless tracing of her character's decline from feisty defiance to pathetic, overmedicated self-delusion gives the film an emotional weight it might not otherwise have.
  2. Central Intelligence
    An odd-couple caper of staggering dopeyness that makes you long for the snap and sizzle of the buddy movies of the 1980s.
  3. School Daze
    Neither this anger nor Mr. Lee's daring is ever given free rein. Instead of a sharp satire or even an "Animal House" variation (since fraternity life is central to its story), School Daze is a collection of musical numbers, dramatic episodes, attempts at parody and cinematic wild cards, bound together only loosely by Mr. Lee's prevailing sense of outrage.
  4. Amelia's Children
    A hilariously awful collision of soap opera and horror movie, Amelia’s Children teeters so precariously on the cliff top of comedy that one wishes the director, Gabriel Abrantes, had dared to kick it over the edge.
  5. Over Your Dead Body
    Intentionally juvenile humor can have a way of breaking down even the stoniest viewer with the right levels of sincerity and self-awareness, but the film (a remake of the Norwegian thriller “The Trip”) is too slick and giddy about its own crudity to nurture these elements.
  6. Silent Night
    The characters, despite their histrionic representation of the wealthy class, are not compelling enough to carry the movie, nor are the horrors of the outside world fleshed out enough to frighten.
  7. Last Holiday
    As witless as it is formulaic.
  8. Insidious
    The strongest analogue for the second half of Insidious is one that the filmmakers probably weren't trying for: it feels like a less poetic version of an M. Night Shyamalan fairy tale.
  9. The Last Voyage of the Demeter
    The script does find time for a feeble feminist gesture — the story’s sole woman can cock a rifle — and a monologue about racism. These efforts to update the tale are about as successful as those of the sorry crew, whose fates were written over a century ago.
  10. The Sun Is Also a Star
    The story and its trappings feel a little generic, the dialogue studiously bland and the characters and their problems curiously weightless, in spite of gestures in the direction of real-world issues.
  11. Wasteland
    To borrow from a term for the gritty, working-class British dramas that this film also nods to, it’s a kitchen-sink caper.
  12. Alone in Berlin
    Adapted from Hans Fallada’s 1947 novel (and based on a true story), Alone in Berlin is dour and flavorless.
  13. Grease 2
    Less a sequel than a retread...Dizzy and slight, with an even more negligible plot than its predecessor had. This time the story can't even masquerade as an excuse for stringing the songs together.
  14. Chasing Madoff
    The film is frustratingly uneven in its presentation.
  15. The Iron Lady
    You are left with the impression of an old woman who can't quite remember who she used to be and of a movie that is not so sure either.
  16. Once in the Life
    (Fishburne's) performance here, witty and profane, vulnerable and strutting, nearly holds the movie together.
  17. The Princess Diaries
    This is "Pretty Woman" for children.
  18. Turkey Bowl
    A quirky offering by Kyle Smith that does nothing more or less than show a touch-football game among friends. "It's sort of interesting," you might find yourself saying, "but is it a film?"
  19. My Piece of the Pie
    Paints an alluring picture of a pan-European cosmopolitan culture whose characters hopscotch from one country to another with hardly a second thought in a lighthearted floating party.
  20. Madame Bovary
    What wildness there is in this Madame Bovary belongs to Ms. Wasikowska, an actress who is frequently more interesting than her material.
  21. How He Fell in Love
    We bend over backward to find joy in this movie, but, like eager yogis striving to achieve an impossible asana, we just can’t do it.
  22. An Ordinary Man
    A head-scratcher that ends with a shoulder-shrug, An Ordinary Man feels like a scene-study exercise in which two actors invest full measures in a script that’s only half finished.
  23. Sudden Impact
    The screenplay is ridiculous, and Mr. Eastwood's direction of it primitive, which is surprising because he has shown himself capable in such films as ''The Outlaw Josey Wales'' and ''The Gauntlet.''
  24. Materna
    As it stands, the glue uniting these women of different ethnicities and backgrounds reads like a failed attempt to carve a more ambitious meaning out of individual stories already brimming with possibility.
  25. After the Hunt
    After the Hunt seems wildly desperate to be seen as provocative about things like cancel culture and the “feminist generation gap.” But my overriding sense was that some earlier, better version of the script exists, and all the political stuff was stapled on later to make it feel more “relevant.”
  26. Under Siege 2: Dark Territory
    Although Under Siege 2 isn't credible for a single moment, its director, Geoff Murphy, has done a smoothly efficient job of coordinating the action sequences.
  27. The Longshots
    What makes this one different? Absolutely nothing. (Sure, it's based on a true story, but I mean come on, whatever.)
  28. A Girl Missing
    As he proved in his 2017 drama, “Harmonium,” Fukada excels at unfurling near-hysterical narratives in restrained, sometimes icily sterile scenes. But while the earlier film pulled us in, this one repels, its cloudy colors and depressing mood making us long for a single moment of joy.
  29. Sister Aimee
    A weird, erratic and occasionally insightful experiment that, unlike its indefatigable star, never quite finds its zing.
  30. Exodus: Gods and Kings
    Exodus is ludicrous only by accident, which isn’t much fun and is the surest sign of what we might call a New Testament sensibility at work. But the movie isn’t successfully serious, either... To be fair, there is some good stuff here, too. Mr. Scott is a sinewy storyteller and a connoisseur of big effects.
  31. No Man's Land
    Peter Werner, who has directed some stylish television shows (''Moonlighting'' episodes and the mini-series ''L.B.J.: The Early Years'') is competent but dull here. The endless car chases through parking garages and close-ups of the two friends talking seem conceived for a television-size scale and budget, then blown up to fill a larger screen.
  32. Heleno
    Though powerfully acted and dazzlingly shot (by Walter Carvalho) in heavenly black and white, Heleno is a feverish opera that, like its doomed antihero, loses vitality much too soon.
  33. The Contractor
    Pine and Foster sync up flawlessly, even when the dialogue fails them. This isn’t the reunion they deserve, but it’s nevertheless welcome. In silence and in action, they show you the unfathomable loss that the rest of movie never coherently expresses.
  34. Starship Troopers
    Pretty actors, grisly critters, brains sucked out of skulls, buckets of green slime and a plot that is half beach blanket bingo, half Iwo Jima.
  35. The Paranoids
    Just like its main character, this smart, slyly witty movie with few laughs undersells itself.
  36. The Devil's Double
    As the film moves through his world of blood and sex and curdled machismo, The Devil's Double inhales some of his toxic, shallow energy. At times you feel as if you were stuck in "Grand Theft Auto: Baghdad City," which, while entertaining enough, can also become a bit wearying.
  37. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
    It’s an embarrassment of riches, and it’s suffocating.
  38. Hacia la oscuridad
    Antonio Negret's sloppily executed film plays like a car commercial and a military-recruitment promo.
  39. Brotherhood
    The script, by Mr. Canon and Doug Simon, eventually strains credulity - even frat boys aren't this dumb - but Mr. Canon, in his first feature, shows a great knack for keeping things moving. The gathering implausibility is dispelled by a nice ending twist.
  40. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2
    Despite the slow start Mr. Condon closes the series in fine, smooth style. He gives fans all the lovely flowers, conditioned hair and lightly erotic, dreamy kisses they deserve.
  41. 80 for Brady
    We’re so pleasantly pummeled by silliness that the film comes to feel like a massage.
  42. Wildflower
    Shipka ably handles the responsibility of leading the story, but the director Matt Smukler has a harder time balancing the charming and empathetic ensemble performances with the script’s constantly judgmental tone.
  43. Players
    It’s as much a story of love among friends as it is of any couple, and a handful of good gags and great performances keep the whole thing steaming along.
  44. Breathless
    Breathless has a lot of mindless drive, but it's also funny. It's full of knowing quotes from other movies and from literature - William Faulkner in addition to Marvel Comics. It's less a film maker's journey of discovery than the film maker's testimony to his awareness of ''cinema,'' and sometimes it's just too much.
  45. National Champions
    The movie dilutes its impact with lackluster direction of samey scenes — people in hotel rooms speechifying — and a distracting nighttime soap subplot.
  46. We Are the Giant
    We Are the Giant builds up quite a rhetorical head of steam, but it doesn’t try to analyze the conflicts it observes or to fill in the history, except in the broadest sense of placing these uprisings on a list of rebellions that stretch back through millenniums.
  47. The Black Hole
    The Black Hole is attractively unpretentious and at times quite snappy.
  48. Waiting for the Barbarians
    Guerra aestheticizes everything to an extreme.
  49. A Working Man
    It’s a satisfying cast all the way down.
  50. The Last Boy Scout
    Mr. Scott directs the film as if he were trying to win a prize for demolishing a building in record time. The opening is good: stylish video images of a night football game played in a torrential rain, climaxed by the only scene in the film that has legitimate shock. After that, the brutality and the pace don't slacken, but interest does.
  51. The Spy Who Dumped Me
    Ms. McKinnon is too inventive to make the character a standard, zany rom-com sidekick. There is no real precedent for her highly disciplined comic anarchy, but Ms. McKinnon reminds me a little of Peter Sellers in her command of voice, face and body and her ability to turn every scene into a popcorn popper of verbal and physical surprise.
  52. Nicky's Family
    An enthralling documentary.
  53. The Sea
    The film's flamboyant portrayals of characters you love to hate have a malicious comic edge. If ever there were a movie to gladden the hearts of misanthropes, this is it.
  54. Atlantis: The Lost Empire
    A monumental treat as well as a crafty assemblage of mythologies.
  55. Dopamine
    A wan, wistful Generation Y romance.
  56. Secondhand Lions
    May be pure hokum, but at least it knows how to spin a yarn.
  57. A Horrible Way to Die
    Viewed simply as a horror movie, A Horrible Way to Die is diverting; viewed as commentary on our willingness to tune out evil for the sake of emotional connection, it's devastating.
  58. The Tall Man
    Ultimately his story draws more energy from class than from criminality: awash in sludgy browns and rotting greens - the colors of poverty and decomposition - this unpredictable oddity is a little bonkers but a lot original.
  59. Tai Chi Zero
    Fast and mostly fun, the movie also seems compulsively too much, throwing everything it can think of at you, lest it fail to entertain.
  60. A Fierce Green Fire
    This distillation of Philip Shabecoff’s book doesn’t really capture the urgency and militancy promised in the title.
  61. Ping Pong Summer
    This gentle comedy, while entirely unmemorable, releases a genuine warmth that deflects harsh judgment. It doesn’t, however, excuse characters that are little more than props for embarrassing fashion or delivery systems for dated slang.
  62. The Young Kieslowski
    This small, observant movie, directed and written by Kerem Sanga, is the better for not going in predictable directions. A story that you half-expect to turn into a melodrama stays true to the sensibilities of its immature, painfully sincere characters, who are faced with life-changing decisions.
  63. Justin Bieber: Never Say Never
    Everyone involved in "Never Say Never" is working overtime to prove that he is, as one of them puts it, "just a regular kid who had a dream," while everything about the movie screams the opposite.
  64. The Watcher in the Woods
    A peculiar sort of Disney movie in that it's likely to scare the daylights out of the very young while reducing their usually sober-sided elders to unfortunate giggles. The audience in-between may well enjoy the standard spook-movie effects, but I challenge even the most indulgent fan to give a coherent translation of what passes for an explanation at the end.
  65. Be Kind Rewind
    In its sweet, lackadaisical way, Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind illuminates the pleasures and paradoxes of movie love.
  66. Fallen
    With the warmly engaging presence of Mr. Washington to keep it at least half-credible, and with a brooding and literate noir screenplay by Nicholas Kazan, ''Fallen'' was directed by Gregory Hoblit with the same dark intensity of his earlier feature ''Primal Fear.''
  67. Jamaica Inn
    Jamaica Inn will not be remembered as a Hitchcock picture, but as a Charles Laughton picture.
  68. Slow Learners
    Only a few scenes fail to draw laughs in a movie that’s unexpectedly smart and consistently amusing.
  69. Wild at Heart
    This time, though, Mr. Lynch's conceits are less often pleasurably disorienting than out of focus.
  70. Every Day
    The director is Michael Sucsy, who is not always up to the challenges of the knotty material — we live in a world of mainstream movies with clumsy edits, but this one has more conspicuously bad cuts than most.
  71. Casa de mi Padre
    A quick-sketch routine stretched - amusingly, absurdly, thinly - to feature length.
  72. Hook
    Hook is overwhelmed by a screenplay heavy with complicated exposition, by what are, in effect, big busy nonsinging, nondancing production numbers and some contemporary cant about rearing children and the high price paid for success.
  73. 300
    Another movie -- Matt Stone and Trey Parker's "Team America," whose wooden puppets were more compelling actors than most of the cast of 300 -- calculated the cost [of freedom] at $1.05. I would happily pay a nickel less, in quarters or arcade tokens, for a vigorous 10-minute session with the video game that 300 aspires to become.
  74. Race to Witch Mountain
    Modest and diverting, rough and bland, with some good (if not quite Bette Davis caliber) actors and so-so special effects.
  75. Any Given Sunday
    For much of the movie, the kinetic furor of the game sequences helps camouflage the weaknesses of a screenplay that is a mechanically contrived series of power struggles.
  76. Off the Hook
    Poverty, capable of stunting lives, can also blight films. A case in point is the earnest and heartfelt but undernourished and plodding Off the Hook.
  77. Life of a King
    Mr. Gooding’s performance and his complex charisma are fascinating to watch throughout.
  78. Irreconcilable Differences
    Mr. Shyer has no idea how to frame this material, let alone make it funny. Most of Irreconcilable Differences is terribly flat; the camerawork is dim and unflattering, the sets are bare even when they're supposed to look lived in and some of the dialogue is simply beyond the actors.
  79. Eiffel
    One can’t help but wonder if Eiffel is merely a lame fantasy or a particularly spineless form of mythmaking, whittling down as it does one nation’s politically loaded event to the equivalent of an Eiffel Tower key chain with an inscription reading “city of love.”
  80. Mother of Tears
    The Mother of Tears is silly, awkward, vulgar, outlandish, hysterical, inventive, revolting, flamboyant, titillating, ridiculous, mischievous, uproarious, cheap, priceless, tasteless and sublime.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Goya's Ghosts
    An unwieldy mix of political satire and lavish period soap opera.
  82. The Cowboys
    So flecked with minor dishonesties that you come to recognize it as a sort of Formica Western, something that amounts to a parody of the real thing.
  83. She's One of Us
    Handsome but empty film.
  84. Five Wives, Three Secretaries and Me
    Oddly charming.
  85. Splendor
    Almost a textbook example of what can go wrong when an artistic bad boy decides to be good.
  86. Little Secrets
    Sunny, pleasant, squeaky-clean family film in which nothing surprising happens, and that is the point. Ms. Wood has a poise and wistfulness beyond her years, and she seems likely to follow the path of the child star Diane Lane into more nuanced adult roles.
  87. The King Is Alive
    The cast, working in conditions that appear to have been only slightly less dire than those portrayed in the film, work together in a grim, convincing improvisatory rhythm.
  88. Valentin
    The film feels authentic only during the scenes between Valentín and his selfish, angry father.
  89. Scream 4
    The central conceit of the characters' fates being determined by the "rules" of horror movies feels irredeemably tired; a clever idea that was worth one movie.
  90. Water for Elephants
    Short-circuits the novel's quirky charms and period atmosphere by its squeamish attitude toward gritty circus life and smothers the drama under James Newton Howard's insufferable wall-to-wall musical soup.
  91. Dead Man's Shoes
    The always fantastic Paddy Considine evokes both sensitivity and explosiveness.
  92. Miss Lovely
    Though not pretentious, his film feels a tad overthought, held back somehow by a stubborn, dour obscurity clouding its freshly realized, lurid milieu.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Nickelodeon
    Nickelodeon is two hours and two minutes of impersonations.Some of them are very good impersonations—deft and funny—but they lack a life to string them together.
  94. Carrie Pilby
    In 2015, Bel Powley stole Sundance with her performance in “The Diary of a Teenage Girl.” Carrie Pilby poses a tougher test. Might she single-handedly redeem 90 minutes of contrived nonsense?
  95. X-Men: Apocalypse
    For every lively moment, there’s a reminder that the franchise is tiring.
  96. Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder
    As big a bouquet as the film is to Mr. Ferlinghetti, it is also a mash note to City Lights, a cultural touchstone and North Beach landmark.
  97. Mirzya
    Sure, the filmmakers overdo their work. But it’s all in the service of love, and somehow that makes it O.K.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Gus
    This is a decently average Disney film, with a few funny parts and other parts where you would agree to smile if you could.
  99. Despicable Me 4
    There’s still occasional fun to be had and a budget that’s clearly put to use, but we’re mostly here, it seems, to keep the Minion cash cow chugging along.
  100. The Ticket
    The script is incapable of penetrating the moral thicket that the actors and the cinematographer, Zachary Galler, have so carefully woven.
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