The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,271 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 20271
  2. Mixed: 8,430 out of 20271
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20271
20271 movie reviews
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  1. 20th Century Women
    20th Century Women is a memory movie, one in which people are conjured up to bump against the larger world, exuberantly and uneasily.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    My Name Is Albert Ayler
    Named after one of his albums and built around snippets of audio interviews with Mr. Ayler, it attempts and often achieves a fresh, playful style that’s equally informed by jazz traditions and Mr. Ayler’s urge to shatter them.
  3. Love
    The director Dag Johan Haugerud’s gently humanistic drama is one of those films that feels akin to a prism, refracting its theme into the array of colors it contains.
  4. Klondike
    The director favors absurdist tableaus . . . placid camera moves counterpointed by brutality and shots held so long that it almost seems as if the filmmaker is the one being cruel. It’s a grimly effective strategy for a harsh but powerful movie.
  5. Wuthering Heights
    It is Goldwyn at his best, and better still, Emily Brontë at hers. Out of her strange tale of a tortured romance Mr. Goldwyn and his troupe have fashioned a strong and somber film, poetically written as the novel not always was, sinister and wild as it was meant to be, far more compact dramatically than Miss Brontë had made it.
  6. Pina
    The cumulative effect is exhilarating and also a bit frustrating, since so many dances are included and woven together the audience does not have the chance to experience any single work in its entirety. But the power and intelligence of Bausch's approach, which at times seems more cerebral than sensual, is communicated.
  7. Animal Kingdom
    The film's depiction of the raw fear lurking below the brothers' braggadocio is the most pronounced emotion in a movie whose focus on the personalities of its criminals suggests an Australian answer to "Goodfellas," minus the wise-guy humor.
  8. La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus
    Mark Kendall’s quietly moving documentary, La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus, is as modest and farsighted as its cast of Guatemalans who make a living resurrecting discarded American school buses.
  9. Rosie
    [A] moving drama ... With its quiet realism and almost unbearably intimate hand-held camera work ... "Rosie" holds our hands to a flame of desperation.
  10. A Room with a View
    As Lucy Honeychurch, Miss Bonham Carter gives a remarkably complex performance of a young woman who is simultaneously reasonable and romantic, generous and selfish, and timid right up to the point where she takes a heedless plunge into the unknown.
  11. Hugo
    Waves of melancholy wash over the story and keep the treacle at bay, as do the spasms of broad comedy, much of it nimbly executed by Mr. Baron Cohen.
  12. Wild Reeds
    [A] delicate, lovingly photographed, strongly acted coming-of-age story.
  13. The LEGO Movie
    The visual environment created by the filmmakers (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller of “21 Jump Street” wrote and directed; the animation is by Animal Logic) hums with wit and imagination... The story is a busy, slapdash contraption designed above all to satisfy the imperatives of big-budget family entertainment.
  14. Ladybird Ladybird
    Ladybird, Ladybird is a tough, utterly absorbing film even at moments when it seems to skirt some of the fine points of Maggie's difficulties.
  15. Gloria
    The great accomplishment of Gloria, the Chilean writer-director Sebastián Lelio’s astute, unpretentious and thrillingly humane new film, is that it acknowledges both sides of its heroine’s temperament without judgment or sentimentality.
  16. Drag Me to Hell
    Drag Me to Hell has a tonic playfulness that’s unabashedly retro, an indulgent return to Mr. Raimi’s goofy, gooey roots.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
    The movie’s “Rocky” formula proves irresistible anyway; unsurprisingly, New Line has commissioned Mr. Gordon to remake this story with actors.
  18. Taxidermia
    Belongs to a school of Central European surrealism that marries nightmarish horror with formal beauty.
  19. Spider
    Brilliantly realized but bone-chillingly bleak.
  20. Hadewijch
    If Hadewijch is Mr. Dumont's most overtly religious film, it is not pro-faith in any specific way, although the director clearly respects the religious impulse.
  21. The Day He Arrives
    The Day He Arrives has real force and its experimentation is in the service of a moving story about a man who, as he says at the start, has nowhere to go. And so he returns to a bar, a woman and situations that are always the same and yet always different - snow falls during one kiss but not another - playing a director whose life resembles a movie he keeps remaking.
  22. The Selfish Giant
    Intent on showing that Arbor and Swifty live in a world of radically limited possibilities, barely sustained by their families and failed by the state, Ms. Barnard locks them into a narrative prison. Their fates seem predetermined less by their circumstances than by the iron will and limited imagination of their creator.
  23. A.K.A. Doc Pomus
    This static documentary portrait relies on the usual panning over photos and tag-team interviews, but the format, like the radio length of a song, doesn’t get in the way of its subject’s heart.
  24. Sol LeWitt
    The on-camera absence of its subject and its overall indifference to matters of biography make Sol LeWitt a welcome departure from most documentaries about artists, as well as a fitting and serious tribute to his art.
  25. Ixcanul
    More than a fable about the clash of tradition and modernity, Ixcanul is finally a painful illustration of the ease with which those who have can prey on those who don’t.
  26. The Future Perfect
    There is gentle comedy here, and a real rooting interest deriving from Ms. Zhang’s committed, never-a-false-note performance. The film’s unusual perspective makes it a distinctive and potentially enriching experience.
  27. Wobble Palace
    Every moment is as cringe-worthy and creative as Eugene’s floating toupee. Movies about the millennial moment are multitudinous, but Wobble Palace is special: a sendup of broke-artist types that shimmers with abashed affection.
  28. Come from Away
    This amiable production’s temperature never rises above lukewarm: good sentiments are, unfortunately, difficult to dramatize, an issue compounded by a score that can feel like aural wallpaper.
  29. Evil Does Not Exist
    It’s far rarer when a movie, as this one does, speaks to everyday life and to the beauty of a world that we neglect even in the face of its calamitous loss.
  30. Crossing
    In this town, in this movie, you feel absolutely certain each face has its own fascinating story to tell.
  31. Seymour: An Introduction
    So effective does it close the distance between you and Mr. Bernstein that afterward you may find yourself scanning the streets, hoping to catch sight of him, as if for an old friend.
  32. Merci Pour Le Chocolat
    Mr. Chabrol's droll assault on petit-bourgeois security feels like a satire of "Ordinary People" directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
  33. 56 Up
    Life rushes by so fast, it flickers today and is gone tomorrow. In 56 Up - the latest installment in Michael Apted's remarkable documentary project that has followed a group of Britons since 1964, starting when they were 7 - entire lifetimes race by with a few edits.
  34. Triad Election
    More elegantly plotted and streamlined than the first film.
  35. Serpico
    It is galvanizing because of Al Pacino's splendid performance in the title role and because of the tremendous intensity that Mr. Lumet brings to this sort of subject. (Review of Original Release)
  36. Up in the Air
    One of the pleasures of Up in the Air is that its actresses share the frame with Mr. Clooney as equals, not props
  37. Milk
    Harvey Milk was an intriguing, inspiring figure. Milk is a marvel.
  38. Roll Red Roll
    A tough but essential watch, Roll Red Roll documents how a sexual assault in a declining Appalachian town became an international cause célèbre. Shots of near-empty streets and an abandoned steel mill provide a melancholy frame for behavior that seems horrifyingly incomprehensible.
  39. Lilya 4-Ever
    The most remarkable achievement of the film is its presentation of Lilya's story as both an archetypal case study and a personal drama whose spunky central character you come to care about so deeply that you want to cry out a warning at each step toward her ruination.
  40. From Russia with Love
    There's no point in trying to tell you all the mad, naughty things that take place — the meetings with mysterious people, the encounters with beautiful girls, the bomb explosions, the chases, the violent encounter of Bond with a helicopter, a motor boat race. Nor is there any point in trying to locate the various characters in the plot, all of whom are deliciously fantastic and delightfully well played.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Grey Gardens
    There is no doubt about the artistr and devotion that the Maysles have used in recording the life in Grey Gardens." There is no reason to doubt them when they say they love and admire the Beales. But the moviegoer will still feel like an exploiter. To watch Grey Gardens is to take part in a kind of carnival of attention with two willing but vulnerable people who had established themselves, for better or worse, in the habit of not being looked at. And what happens when the carnival moves on?
  42. Burning Bush
    Ms. Holland, working from a script by Stepan Hulik, a Czech screenwriter born in 1984, turns a sprawling story into a tight and suspenseful ethical thriller.
  43. Who We Are Now
    Superbly acted and confidently shot, Who We Are Now delivers substantial dramatic pleasures while posing pertinent questions.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Enter the Dragon
    The picture is expertly made and well‐meshed; it moves like lightning and brims with color.
  45. Equinox Flower
    Equinox Flower—a particularly inscrutable title even for this great Japanese director—is one of Ozu's least dark comedies, which is not to say that it's carefree, but, rather, that it's gentle and amused in the way that it acknowledges time's passage, the changing of values and the adjustments that must be made between generations.
  46. Cutie and the Boxer
    Mr. Heinzerling is an artist too. The window he has opened onto the lives of his subjects is a powerful and beautiful visual artifact in its own right.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    U2 3D
    Not merely a technical landmark -- shot entirely in digital 3D -- but also an aesthetic one, in that it’s the first Imax movie that deserves to be called a work of art.
  48. One Night in Miami
    Malcolm’s manner can be didactic, but One Night in Miami is anything but. Instead of a group biopic or a ready-made costume drama, it’s an intellectual thriller, crackling with the energy of ideas and emotions as they happen.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Naked Kiss
    Between his stylish handling of sensational nonsense and Mr. Marton's turgid floundering around a serious theme, Mr. Fuller's wild little movie has a decided edge.
  50. Who Will Write Our History
    Using newsreels, voice-overs and re-enactments, Roberta Grossman, the documentary’s director, paints a comprehensive portrait of the times and of the risks taken by Ringelblum and his group. The staged scenes are well acted, while readings from diaries and letters are heartbreaking.
  51. The Reason I Jump
    The portraits are moving and informative. . . . As an aesthetic endeavor, though, The Reason I Jump is questionable, regardless of how much sensitivity the filmmakers took in their approach.
  52. Belle
    Colors and hearts explode in Belle, and your head might too while watching this gorgeous anime.
  53. Babe
    The movie maintains a refreshingly light touch in spinning a fable about individualism and conformity.
  54. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
    The most voluptuous comic-book movie ever made.
  55. Vera Drake
    The English director Mike Leigh's best work in a decade.
  56. Private Life
    Though it is poignant and funny in nearly equal measure, the most remarkable aspect of Private Life may be its lack of noticeable exaggeration. Ms. Jenkins is working at the scale of life, with the confidence that the ordinary, if viewed from the right angle, will provide enough drama and humor to sustain our interest.
  57. Moonage Daydream
    It’s less a biography than a séance.
  58. Meeting with Pol Pot
    Panh powerfully interweaves real footage of starvation and mass death — sometimes projecting it behind the characters or matching it to Paul’s eyeline. He also brings back the main conceit of “The Missing Picture,” which used clay figurines to depict certain events.
  59. BlacKkKlansman
    BlacKkKlansman is a furious, funny, blunt and brilliant confrontation with the truth. It’s an alarm clock ringing in the midst of a historical nightmare, and also a symphony, the rare piece of political popular art that works in all three dimensions.
  60. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
    While I don’t remember seeing any fingerprints dotting their forms this time around, the tender care that went into fashioning each of Wallace’s toothy expressions and Gromit’s quizzically raised brow remains palpable. The love, well, that you feel, too.
  61. Janet Planet
    Janet Planet is a tiny masterpiece, and it’s so carefully constructed, so loaded with details and emotions and gentle comedy, that it’s impossible to shake once it gets under your skin.
  62. Johnny Guitar (re-release)
    A goofy and remarkable film.
  63. The Novelist's Film
    A Chekhovian study in small moments and chance encounters, which is to say it is a study of human beings as they really live: ambiguously and without exposition, spontaneously and without tidy motives or resolution.
  64. Lake of Fire
    One lesson of Lake of Fire is the galvanizing power of the visual image. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and sometimes pictures are not enough.
  65. Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds
    The film’s many whimsies don’t detract from the resonant themes at the fable’s core, about the transformative qualities of grief and the indelible bond between sisters.
  66. Under the Skin
    The movie’s eerie, climactic image challenges our conventional notions of human identity and leaves us reflecting on the possibility that every being in the universe is an alien in disguise.
  67. Red Army
    Good sports movies are always about more than sports... Red Army touches on themes of friendship and perseverance, and also offers a compact and vivid summary of recent Russian history.
  68. The Miracle Worker
    The absolutely tremendous and unforgettable display of physically powerful acting that Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke put on in William Gibson's stage play The Miracle Worker is repeated by them in the film made from it by the same producer, Fred Coe, and the same director, Arthur Penn.
  69. Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd
    It’s as comprehensive and coherent an account of Barrett’s counterculture tragedy as one could hope for. And while the film, co-directed by Roddy Bogawa, illuminates Barrett to a greater degree than any other account I’ve come across, it maintains the artist’s enigma.
  70. Porco Rosso
    Muting adult concerns — like the jackboots of fascism and the ubiquity of male violence — with marshmallow clouds and subtly shifting light, Mr. Miyazaki smooshes fantasy and history into a pastel-pretty yarn as irresistible as his feminism.
  71. The Post
    As a filmmaker, Mr. Spielberg invariably comes down on the side of optimism; here, that hopefulness feels right. It also feels like a rallying cry.
  72. The Flat
    A film that begins as a family quest but evolves into a gripping study of know-don't-tell reticence and the umbilical tie of a lost homeland.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cunningham
    What the film doesn’t give is an accurate sense of Cunningham time. In a Cunningham dance, the mind can wander, experience different rates of change, be baffled, engrossed, astonished, bored. The price of Kovgan’s efficiency is impatience, always cutting away and moving on.
  74. Fireworks
    The filmmaker's equal fondness for bright floral paintings and exploding blood bags is sure to keep an audience on its toes, even if some of the effects are as blunt as (quite literally) chopsticks in the eye.
  75. Blind
    Blind evokes a dreamy, dour fusion of Charlie Kaufman and Ingmar Bergman. Its few flashes of wry humor are outweighed by mystically beautiful images.
  76. The Magdalene Sisters
    The Magdalene Sisters would be too painful to watch if it didn't have a silver lining. Suffice it to say that it is possible to fly over this religious cuckoo's nest and remain free. All it takes is courage and the timely kindness of strangers.
  77. Geographies of Solitude
    It is to the great credit of “Geographies of Solitude” that it never feels expository: It turns an ecology lesson, and an account of a noble, steadfast, single-minded pursuit, into art.
  78. Superman II
    A marvelous toy. It's funny, it's full of tricks and it manages to be royally entertaining, which is really all it aims for.
  79. Tyson
    Mr. Toback's film, partly because it restricts itself to Mr. Tyson's point of view, offers a rare and vivid study in the complexity of a single suffering, raging soul. It is not an entirely trustworthy movie, but it does feel profoundly honest.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    101 Dalmatians
    A generally cozy and sentimental little yarn about a nice young English couple, their brood of dogs and a lady dognapper who collects Dalmatians to make coats. It's a rather clever idea, if a bit unsettling.
  81. Henry V
    Mr. Branagh has made a fine, rousing new English film adaptation of Shakespeare's ''Henry V,'' a movie that need not apologize to Laurence Olivier's 1944 classic.
  82. The Day the Earth Stood Still
    It is comforting, of course, to have it made plain that our planetary neighbors are much wiser and more peaceful than are we, but this makes for a tepid entertainment in what is anamolously labeled the science-fiction field.
  83. The Sting
    A lot of the other period details aren't too firmly anchored in time, but the film is so good-natured, so obviously aware of everything it's up to, even its own picturesque frauds, that I opt to go along with it. One forgives its unrelenting efforts to charm, if only because The Sting itself is a kind of con game, devoid of the poetic aspirations that weighed down "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."
  84. Eastern Promises
    The rigor of Mr. Cronenberg’s direction sometimes seems at odds with the humanism of Mr. Knight’s script, but more often the director’s ruthless formal command rescues the story from its maudlin impulses. Mr. Knight aims earnestly for your heartstrings, but Mr. Cronenberg insists on getting under your skin. The result is a movie whose images and implications are likely to stay in your head for a long time.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shanghai Express
    It is by all odds the best picture Josef von Sternberg has directed.
  86. Footnote
    It is a truism that academic arguments are so passionate because the stakes are so small. Footnote, a wonderful new film from the American-born Israeli director Joseph Cedar, at once affirms this conventional wisdom and calls it into question.
  87. Being 17
    The movie is not really about deciding whether you’re gay or straight — those terms are never spoken. It’s about the chemistry of two people at a moment in time.
  88. The White Diamond
    The film, which includes some breathtakingly beautiful images of the green, wet Guyanese jungle and a monumental waterfall that cuts through it, is driven less by narrative than by ideas and impressions.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Luther: Never Too Much
    The fulcrum of the film is heartbreak — ours, not his — that someone responsible for shaping the universal feeling of falling in love never experienced it himself.
  90. Free Solo
    Despite a somewhat soft middle section, Free Solo is an engaging study of a perfect match between passion and personality.
  91. Trouble the Water
    They have created an ingeniously fluid narrative structure that, when combined with Ms. Roberts’s visuals, news material and their own original 16-millimeter film footage, ebbs and flows like great drama.
  92. Saint Maud
    Folding sexual arousal and religious ecstasy into a single, gasping sensation, Saint Maud, the feature debut of the director Rose Glass, burrows into the mind of a lonely young woman and finds psycho-horror gold.
  93. Misericordia
    Misericordia is film noir with the lights turned on. Even when its characters are working your nerves, it tickles. Guiraudie is playing those nerves like a harp.
  94. Mustang
    The ensemble of young actresses is a constantly restless and real presence, the perspective filtered mostly through the cheeky Lale but also through the group as a loving crew.
  95. Breaking Point: The War for Democracy in Ukraine
    The filmmakers supply terrifying footage: At civilian rallies, we see nightstick beatings and bloody riots. During military battles, bullets whiz by and explosions shake the cameras. Nerve-racking scenes follow Ukraine’s extraordinarily bold volunteer soldiers.
  96. Palm Springs
    Pain is a necessary ingredient in any successful comedy. The trick, which Barbakow and Siara seem to have mastered on their very first try, is to find the misery of the right kind and intensity, to imply tears that match the laughter.
  97. James White
    Its abrasive portrait of contemporary New York as a place of noise and nerve-rattling turmoil captures the mood of the city more accurately than any recent film I can think of. And the jagged camera work exacerbates the film’s jarring sense of immediacy.
  98. It Follows
    It Follows recycles familiar teenage horror tropes — a girl alone in a house, evil forces banging on a door — but its mood is dreamy. Seldom do you feel manipulated by exploitative formulas. The violence, when it comes, is sudden, and the camera doesn’t linger over the gore.
  99. Is That Black Enough for You?!?
    An occasionally static work if also an unequivocally important and gloriously comprehensive one.
  100. Driveways
    Slow and sweet and unassuming, Driveways, the second feature from the Korean-American director Andrew Ahn, tackles major themes in a minor key.
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