The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,269 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: 9,377 out of 20269
  2. Mixed: 8,428 out of 20269
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20269
20269 movie reviews
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  1. Yellow Door: '90s Lo-fi Film Club
    The doc mostly amounts to a sweet nostalgia trip about a niche group of obsessive young people. It’s also an ode to young adulthood itself: For most of the group, latching on to cinema was simply a means of finding a community, and themselves.
  2. Deep Rising
    The optimism here resides in the filmmaker’s trusting his audience to grapple with the entwined fates of the seafloor, its inhabitants and humankind.
  3. Pain Hustlers
    The movie is constrained by its own conscience.
  4. Four Daughters
    The re-enactments map out the family’s tension and lay bare their wounds, but the lost daughters remain cyphers — the appeal of radicalization frustratingly murky through the end.
  5. Inspector Sun
    While sometimes grating, the film is always appealing, with pleasing details, down to its Art Deco end titles.
  6. The Holdovers
    There’s a sharpness to the comedy, some attitude and freshness, some wisdom. That maybe comes, in part, from the kids looking a little older than their characters are. It also comes from Payne’s emotional finesse.
  7. Priscilla
    Die-hard Elvis fans will no doubt call some of the characterization in Priscilla slander, but part of the achievement here is that Elvis is not simply a monster. Fame has merely given him the superpower of not having to pay attention to anyone else.
  8. Milli Vanilli
    The performers Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus earn your empathy in the documentary Milli Vanilli, a jolting, eye-opening investigation on how fame destroyed them. The war-of-words film, directed by Luke Korem, unfolds like a whodunit.
  9. 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.
  10. To Kill a Tiger
    Kiran and her family are heroes, but this isn’t a simple tale of heroism. The film lays bare the uneasy and inadequate avenues available to survivors seeking justice.
  11. The Delinquents
    The Delinquents wants to live modestly. It’s less concerned with satisfying the expectations of its genre than in finding waggish ways to deviate from them. To the film’s thinking, narrative is only a construct.
  12. In My Mother's Skin
    True to classic folklore, this is a story that delivers fantasy and queasiness in equal measure.
  13. Divinity
    A misbegotten blend of the futuristic and the antiquated, “Divinity” is an unintentionally comical sci-fi diatribe obsessed with beautiful bodies, bickering brothers and biblical symbolism.
  14. Waiting for the Light to Change
    In her feature debut, Tran is intermittently successful at capturing the listlessness that defines that liminal space between adolescence and adulthood; as “Waiting” progresses, malaise envelops her characters like the gray fog over the shoreline.
  15. Silver Dollar Road
    Amid the looming threats to a cherished home, Peck’s accomplishment is to let the Reels family own their emotional space.
  16. Another Body
    Another Body is most persuasive when experts weigh in on the reality-upending aspects of deepfake technology and image-based sex abuse.
  17. The Persian Version
    The result is a personal film that feels oddly impersonal. The tonal clutter overwhelms Keshavarz’s genuinely interesting story.
  18. The Pigeon Tunnel
    Intellectually rich and cinematically disciplined (brief movie clips, another perfectly aligned Philip Glass score), The Pigeon Tunnel is a cautious, playful portrait of an expert manipulator.
  19. Butcher's Crossing
    It’s a mostly well-crafted film with decent visual scope. The film’s greatest flaws are in Cage’s shakily written character.
  20. 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.
  21. The Mill
    The film lacks any well-executed surprises to help it push past one-dimensional satire, and Howery is not strong enough of a dramatic actor to keep a single-setting, single-character film like this consistently engaging.
  22. Reality Winner
    The film is clear in showing how the media put her into boxes: a traitor, a terrorist, a progressive, an innocent, a lost cause. But who is Reality Winner? This documentary doesn’t dig deeper than her patently well-meaning exterior.
  23. Plan C
    At times, all of the secrecy and legal caution can make it hard to understand the complex logistics of getting a legal abortion in the United States. But the risks involved are bracingly apparent, and the documentary benefits from its attempts to capture Plan C’s high-stakes operation in progress.
  24. The Mission
    The most barbed aspect of the movie, a National Geographic release, is its acknowledgment of the role that National Geographic itself has played in exoticizing groups like the North Sentinelese.
  25. The Burial
    Directed by Maggie Betts from a script she wrote with Doug Wright, The Burial develops into a lively courtroom drama with wide-ranging pertinence. Of course its two lead actors give the bravura performances you’d expect from them, but they don’t eat the scenery — they take the material seriously and invest in it with welcome nuance.
  26. Anatomy of a Fall
    In a sense, Triet has mapped a path to nowhere. You can respect her choice intellectually and still walk away grumbling in frustration.
  27. More Than Ever
    Directed by Emily Atif, this middlebrow drama showcases Krieps’s captivating blend of melancholic fragility and spiky tenacity, riding on the strength of its performers, including the Gaspard Ulliel in his final live-action role before his accidental death in 2022.
  28. My Love Affair with Marriage
    The result evokes an adult puppet show crossed with a graphic novel, and like the budding female identity the film untangles, the whole thing takes a little time getting used to. Once you do, it is remarkably beautiful.
  29. Foe
    To their great credit, the Irish stars, often loosely clothed and soaked in sweat from the lack of air conditioning, have such presence and chemistry that it’s possible to believe in their intimacy — the pull and tangle of their bodies, their paroxysms of anguish — and even to pretend in the moment that they have full-fledged characters to play.
  30. The Royal Hotel
    Inspired by Pete Gleeson’s 2016 documentary about two Finnish backpackers, “Hotel Coolgardie,” The Royal Hotel is after something more subtle than pure horror.
  31. She Came to Me
    Amid the roiling neuroses of the adults, the young beloveds provide the film with a surprising emotional ballast.
  32. Totally Killer
    The fun premise can make for a passively enjoyable watch during a Halloween binge, but the film mostly feels like it’s just going through the motions.
  33. When Evil Lurks
    This is a dark and timely parable about what happens when trust — among community members, within families, between a government and its people — disintegrates.
  34. Dicks: The Musical
    Its only point is highly self-aware pseudo-gonzo provocation, peaking in a denouement that feels both surprising and inevitable, and looks as if it had been engineered to deliberately unsettle some viewers.
  35. The Exorcist: Believer
    Measured against the often mediocre standards of today’s glut of reboots and reimaginings, “Believer” is slickly professional, its young performers more than up to the task. It’s also disappointingly, if unsurprisingly, cautious, gesturing only wanly toward the original’s potent weave of puberty, religion and corporeal abuse.
  36. Fire Through Dry Grass
    The combination of firsthand footage with poetry makes for an intimate and raw film that gives a real sense of the confinement faced by the residents, some of whom compared the experience to previous jail stints.
  37. Nowhere
    It’s hard to care about Mía’s efforts to survive when coincidence drives the plot, and the production looks and feels cheap.
  38. Carlos
    This controlled documentary captivates as a soulful personal history, even if it doesn’t exactly transcend.
  39. The Kill Room
    While the supporting cast is replete with performers we like to see — Debi Mazar, Larry Pine, and Thurman’s daughter, Maya Hawke, as a feminist artist — the script, in the end, does little to support them.
  40. Story Ave
    Story Ave is marred by late revelations that appear designed, in a studio-notes sort of way, to clarify motivations. What’s unspoken — and what’s seen — does enough.
  41. Mami Wata
    It’s a tightly controlled vision that, like many parables, induces a sense of the suddenly, viscerally new — in the look of a figure against the ocean, or the words of a mother telling her child to run — in what we’ve seen before and have always known.
  42. Saw X
    The traps are disgusting; the plot, so self-serious its absurd (and knowingly so). And unlike the sundry sequels before it (by the third “Saw,” any pretense of ingenuity had been hacked off), this one manages to make you feel something beyond gross-out adrenaline — assuming you have affection for the franchise’s mainstays.
  43. Dancing in the Dust
    Dancing in the Dust shows Farhadi’s early confidence with using framing and cutting to create tension and parallels — skills that would serve him later.
  44. PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie
    The film has no shame in being formulaic in plot or execution. Skye’s zero-to-hero plot arc is predictable as they come, though it’s easy to see why younger audiences may find it relatable.
  45. Reptile
    The trouble with Reptile is that this impressive moment-to-moment control does not extend to the contours of the broader story, which the writers overstuff with clumsy twists and contrived devices.
  46. Flora and Son
    This is Carney’s saltiest ode to creative expression — and, peculiarly, his most relatable.
  47. The Creator
    Despite the impressively sweeping C.G.I. running battles in Thai fields or seaside settlements, or the gritty “Blade Runner”-lite interludes in crowded metropolises, the story’s engine produces the straightforward momentum of your average action blockbuster — one thing happens, then the next thing, complete with punchy (sometimes tin-eared) one-liners.
  48. Paul Robeson: ‘I’m a Negro. I’m an American.’
    The movie sticks to the shallow end.
  49. Lady Killer (Gueule d’Amour)
    Like other love stories of the period, Gueule d'Amour has a melodramatic surface, yet it hits a nerve in anyone who has ever spent too much time thinking about the wrong person.
  50. The First Year (1972)
    Guzmán’s documentary is a people’s microhistory of a nation in transition.
  51. The Origin of Evil
    Abounding with nasty women, The Origin of Evil could have easily been flattened by the weight of a feminist objective. Untethered from such neat messaging, this decadent murder-movie takes the online credo, “be gay, do crimes,” and runs with it — to delicious results.
  52. Expend4bles
    This all-star mercenary squadron composed of ’80s-to-aughts brutes is the cinematic equivalent to Slash’s Snakepit, a supergroup throwback to an era when men were meatheads and we in the audience merrily cheered them on.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fear and Desire
    In essaying a dissection of the minds of men under the stress of war, Stanley Kubrick, 24-year-old, producer-director-photographer, and his equally young and unheralded scenarist and cast, have succeeded in turning out a moody, often visually powerful study of subdued excitements.
  54. Still Film
    Writer-director James N. Kienitz Wilkins’s “Still Film” is a stunning, acute critique of the regressive artistic sensibilities that plague contemporary Hollywood.
  55. 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.
  56. 26.2 to Life
    Yoo was granted exceptional access to San Quentin, and when she depicts the mundane qualities of life there — inmates working odd jobs, writing letters, passing the time alone in their cells — the movie gains some of the penetrating clarity of one of Frederick Wiseman’s films.
  57. Something You Said Last Night
    One can only watch Renata, and this film, do so little for so long before yearning for more than naturalism and tenderness to drive the slice-of-life story.
  58. It Lives Inside
    It’s a promising debut from Dutta, who offers a fresh premise that proves a natural fit for the genre.
  59. Cassandro
    Williams, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, is an expert orchestrator of naturalism. The trouble is that lucha libre, built on glitz, is anything but naturalistic. The self-assured freedom Saúl channels in bed never makes its way into scenes in the ring, which tend to tire when they should dazzle.
  60. Neither Confirm Nor Deny
    The story assembles before our eyes like an illustration in a manual for superspies.
  61. 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.
  62. The Trial (El Juicio)
    Crafted entirely out of the televised 1985 trial of Argentina’s military junta, The Trial lays bare horrific crimes while showing the courage of victims, survivors and their families.
  63. The Saint of Second Chances
    The movie was directed by Morgan Neville (“20 Feet From Stardom”) and Jeff Malmberg (“Marwencol”), and is a tad more fanciful than their prior work. But fancy is a good fit for the Veecks, it turns out.
  64. Superpower
    Penn scores a coup by getting an on-camera interview with Zelensky on the first day of Russia’s invasion, and he films him on two additional occasions, in a video interview and in person on a later visit.
  65. Rebel
    At best, this drama picks apart the Islamic State’s nefarious recruitment tactics, taking on the fresh perspective of a Muslim family in Europe. These dynamics are rich, and the consequences agonizing — so it’s too bad the filmmakers seem to think that the bigger the spectacle, the more powerfully communicated this whirlwind of politics and emotions. The opposite is the case.
  66. Radical Wolfe
    Richard Dewey’s staid, by-the-book documentary can hardly match the flair with which Wolfe lived and wrote.
  67. Outlaw Johnny Black
    Outlaw Johnny Black struggles to establish a consistent comedic rhythm.
  68. 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.
  69. 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.
  70. Lift
    Petersen’s bare-bones, on-the-ground production works well for a story like this, highlighting how vital these small workshops in homeless shelters and community centers can be.
  71. The Inventor
    The Inventor is rife with somewhat didactic lessons — about power, innovation, curiosity — yet a presumably unintended one might be that lessons themselves, however insightful, are not always captivating.
  72. Invisible Beauty
    At times, the film is hampered by the sheer amount of information there is to condense from across a 50-year career, but Hardison is never less than a fascinating subject — an artist whose medium is industrial disruption.
  73. 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.
  74. Dumb Money
    An energetic, ingratiating dramatization of the GameStop stock craze of 2021.
  75. Love at First Sight
    What are the odds that a premise as unimaginative as this one should emerge as a sturdy little romantic drama?
  76. A Haunting in Venice
    In straddling genres, “Haunting” can get stuck in the middle. But there’s fun to be had there. What’s consistent is the elegant visuals — striking cinematography by Haris Zambarloukos — which mark this movie’s real genre as lavish old-fashioned Hollywood entertainment.
  77. The Nun II
    The pacing of the film, set in the 1950s and directed by Michael Chaves, is too neat: It runs like haunted clockwork, shoving characters down dark alleyways or abandoned chapels every five minutes with little justification.
  78. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3
    The ancient Greeks wrote tragedy after tragedy warning against hubris. Yet, Vardalos’s flailing crowd-pleaser needs a shot of self-confidence and logic.
  79. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
    A less sentimental, wish-fulfilling approach to Mexican American identity, gay self-discovery and Reagan-era Texas will wait for another day. Until then, fans of “Heartstopper”-style slow-burn romance will eat up this tender film’s subtle charms.
  80. Hello Dankness
    Hello Dankness belongs to a venerable underground-film tradition of treating refracted entertainment as a mirror for society. No fan of Ken Jacobs’s “Star Spangled to Death,” Richard Kelly’s “Southland Tales” or Joe Dante’s “The Movie Orgy” could help but smile.
  81. Rotting in the Sun
    Rotting in the Sun is sharpest when exploring the two men’s love-loathe connection because Silva threads a provocatively fuzzy line between fascination for and irritation with Jordan and, by extension, Firstman himself.
  82. Amerikatsi
    It’s an intriguing scenario, though not always played out skillfully. For better and worse, we feel Charlie’s confinement fully, as he watches another’s life go by and yearns for a proper home of his own.
  83. Joyce Carol Oates: A Body in the Service of Mind
    Directed by Stig Björkman and narrated by Laura Dern, this documentary is so fixated on enshrining Oates within the canon of American literary giants that it skirts around the peculiarity and provocation of her ideas.
  84. Portrait of the Queen
    Elements that could have made for a somewhat intriguing documentary get lost in what amounts to a tedious piece of agitprop that ultimately regurgitates the dutifully respectful picture of Elizabeth we’ve seen time and time again.
  85. Scout's Honor: The Secret Files of the Boy Scouts of America
    Knappenberger does, thankfully, make space for survivors to share their own accounts, and their vulnerability lends authority to an otherwise anonymous film.
  86. Office Race
    Office Race, a ribald comedy from Jared Lapidus about an inveterate deadbeat reluctantly training for a marathon, understands one of the great unspoken truths about running: that it is a miserable, arduous, soul-destroying pastime, and also deeply, profoundly rewarding.
  87. The Equalizer 3
    Washington is unsurprisingly the primary reason to watch “Equalizer 3,” which is basically a showcase for him to smolder, swagger and light up the screen as he wanders a tiny, wildly beautiful town on the Amalfi coast.
  88. The Mountain
    Some might see the final act as body horror. To the director, it’s a metaphysical sacrament — and all along, his camera has hinted that mankind must commit to the planet before it’s too late.
  89. Choose Love
    Predictability aside, Choose Love resembles less of a comforting rom-com than it does the forgone conclusion to streaming’s algorithm-powered media: a series of disconnected, shallow interactions, each leading to a different predetermined cliché.
  90. Fremont
    Jalali maintains a mysterious ambiguity, but Wali Zada conveys what matters.
  91. We Kill for Love
    There’s something tough to resist about how “We Kill for Love” rescues works from the shadows.
  92. Ernest and Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia
    In a film whose moral emphasizes the necessity of artistic freedom, there is a deceptive simplicity to this aesthetic style that makes it all the more special.
  93. Vacation Friends 2
    As the harried friends careen across the resort through a series of comical mishaps, the movie has the feel of a TV rerun. More compelling are the too-rare moments of plotless leisure.
  94. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!
    The young cast proves deft with the film’s clever script, by Alison Peck (based on the 2005 novel by Fiona Rosenbloom), and the director Sammi Cohen indulges the virgin-mojito passions of preteens while avoiding nostalgia, thankfully.
  95. Blue Box
    The familial and personal tensions give it something extra, elevating it beyond the standard historical documentary.
  96. Before, Now & Then
    It’s a pity for both Salma and Basuki, whose expressive faces convey depths of feeling that the script and direction cannot quite match.
  97. Golda
    Extreme costuming often feels gimmicky, but here, it humanizes the director Guy Nattiv’s terse accounting of guilt.
  98. Perpetrator
    Screwy and strange, Perpetrator is gleefully unsubtle, but its ensanguinated excess is part of the fun.
  99. Our Father, the Devil
    In the assured hands of the writer-director Ellie Foumbi, Marie’s unraveling yields not only an absorbing psychological thriller, but a profound meditation on the ethics of immigration.
  100. Scrapper
    Scrapper is tender without falling into sappiness.
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