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. Muscle Shoals
    At once overstuffed with interviews and intellectually underdeveloped, the movie charts the area’s music industry and what is lyrically if elusively called the Muscle Shoals sound.
  2. Vampire Academy
    What is surprising is that while the patchwork whole creaks terribly in places, the parts also show signs of life.
  3. Dark Tourist
    Suri Krishnamma’s Dark Tourist takes an effectively unpleasant trip down the lost highway of a morbid mind before its bad choices start catching up with it.
  4. Abigail Harm
    Abigail and her Asian friend’s own “forest” is filled with overburdened metaphors and quivering emotions, quirks and tics and even regulation Malick-like twirling. Some of this is pretty; none of it sticks.
  5. Satyagraha
    It hits its themes too squarely on the nose and hits them for about an hour too long.
  6. La Maison de la Radio
    As Mr. Philibert continues to pop in and out of different studios, in and out of the building, flitting from one face to the other, it feels as if he were searching for a story that never emerges.
  7. American Milkshake
    The burlesque take on high school has some fine, ridiculous moments and lets the movie get away with more than a serious drama might.
  8. The Short Game
    [Mr. Greenbaum] is observant of tears and laughter alike, but he might have made fewer sacrifices in the name of a tidy package.
  9. Flu
    The romance may be risible, but the scenes of mass panic and political desperation are slickly disturbing.
  10. Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve
    The film doesn’t really live up to its subtitle. There is little sense of what kinds of debates take place at board meetings or how pressure is applied behind closed doors.
  11. Generation Iron
    For a documentary about extreme discipline, the filmmakers lack restraint: the movie, about 20 minutes too long, undercuts much of its own momentum.
  12. Newlyweeds
    Newlyweeds, for all its freshness, never really lands. It remains suspended in a haze of secondhand smoke.
  13. Begin Again
    Compared with “Once,” Begin Again is a bit like the disappointing, overly produced follow-up to a new band’s breakthrough album.
  14. Devil's Knot
    In the opening images of Devil’s Knot, the camera sets a menacing, Hitchcockian mood by stealthily creeping into the woods where the murders took place. But the movie settles into being a police procedural with the tone of a superior episode of “Law & Order: SVU.”
  15. Fading Gigolo
    Mr. Turturro’s musical choices in Fading Gigolo tend to feel, like so much here, generically applied instead of meaningfully coaxed from some essential, lived-in truth.
  16. My Lucky Star
    My Lucky Star, a spy-caper romance from China, is sweet and harmless, but it’s also a little disorienting.
  17. Are You Here
    [An] endearing muddle, which flails in search of an identity.
  18. The Green Inferno
    The film reawakens long-repudiated notions of white supremacy and such, but Mr. Roth is surely not trying to peddle them. He’s merely seeing if he can replicate the formula of the subgenre. And he does, fairly slickly, in fact.
  19. The Last Days on Mars
    The Last Days on Mars ultimately can’t transcend its pulpy roots.
  20. Great Expectations
    Containing enough characters and subplots for three movies, the novel has been nearly suffocated by Mr. Newell (“Four Weddings and a Funeral”) and his screenwriter, David Nicholls, in an effort to get everything in.
  21. Shepard & Dark
    The film points toward a rich and complicated story that only partly makes it onto the screen.
  22. Zero Charisma
    Has plenty of humor but no satirical bite.
  23. Cinderella
    Mr. Branagh’s ascension into big-budget studio directing largely remains a mystery, and there’s little in Cinderella beyond its faces and gowns that captures the eye or the imagination.
  24. In the Heart of the Sea
    As the movie lurches along by fits and starts, toggling between the little Nantucket room and the great watery world, it becomes apparent that the filmmakers have no idea how to reconcile not just two parallel stories but also the past and our contemporary age.
  25. Sunlight Jr.
    Despite the intensity of their performances, Ms. Watts and Mr. Dillon are only fleetingly convincing as these desperate young Americans trying to maintain a foothold.
  26. In Secret
    Ms. Olsen and the more persuasive Mr. Isaac may generate heat, but their performances and the filmmaking lack the frenzy that might explain how these two crazy kids turned into murderous fiends.
  27. The Institute
    The Institute stumbles between documentary and exploratory simulation, at once confusing and pedantic.
  28. Warcraft
    Probably the best way to experience Warcraft, a generally amusing and sometimes visually arresting absurdity, is stoned. If watching the big screen through a cannabis cloud isn’t your idea of a good movie time, though, I suggest that you do what I did and just go with the incoherent flow.
  29. Spinning Plates
    This dully structured film makes its points early and often, treading water before a purposely delayed big finish.
  30. The Last Sentence
    Although its black-and-white visuals catch the eye, The Last Sentence soon loosens its hold on your attention by flooding the story with mind-numbing, uninteresting details while real history slips through the cracks.
  31. Cassadaga
    This eager film piles on common fears: evil puppetry, haunted homes and overly generous hosts. So despite a sloppy and humorless execution, it is scary by association.
  32. The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers
    A bit overstuffed with history and tales of perseverance, the film doesn’t have room for balanced political analysis or even exposition at times. It’s an omission that feels like a missed opportunity, but maybe that will be resolved in the next installment.
  33. Victor Frankenstein
    Thin as a halfpenny, Victor Frankenstein has nothing to offer on science and the mysteries of creation, but it does reaffirm the grip that Shelley’s story retains on the imagination, no matter how far afield it’s taken.
  34. 12-12-12
    12-12-12 is not really a concert movie so much as it is a densely compacted scrapbook of moments onstage and off.
  35. One Chance
    The appealing Mr. Corden manages the not insignificant task of maintaining interest in a story whose climax has already been passed around on YouTube.
  36. Cut to Black
    A mildly engaging lowlife odyssey that struggles not to choke on its own style.
  37. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones
    The changes — goodbye, white suburbia; hello, gritty diversity — recharge the batteries somewhat. But there’s no escaping that the found-footage phenomenon has gone from fresh and original to just plain annoying.
  38. Aftermath
    Delivers its Holocaust-related story with the clunking force of a blunt instrument slammed into the skull.
  39. Beyond Outrage
    The strategy and strategizing of Beyond Outrage still feel like overkill (if you’ll pardon the expression).
  40. The Quiet Ones
    There are nice touches... Yet many of the movie’s more nominally horrific elements are too familiar.
  41. Finding Mr. Right
    Finding Mr. Right (even the title is generic) has a top-to-bottom capable cast, a nice sense of place and a few honest epiphanies that are given time to land. But neither the comedy nor the romance exists beyond the level of idea.
  42. Go for Sisters
    As long as Go for Sisters is focused on its characters, it remains on firm ground. But the flimsy detective story draped over them is underdeveloped and too sluggishly paced to take hold.
  43. Paris Countdown
    Mr. Marie, making his debut as a director, swathes their tale in a thick coat of style that teeters between cool and mannered.
  44. Some Velvet Morning
    While there’s much to admire in how Mr. Tucci and Ms. Eve perform Mr. LaBute’s artful, apocalyptic duet, this is one seriously out-of-date tune.
  45. Live by Night
    Live by Night is a messy, unfocused movie about ambition, lost ideals, corrupt men and a thief whose idea of life on his own terms means pulling the trigger.
  46. Body Bags
    The plots are fairly basic, but the direction by John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper is droll, the effects are all a fan could ask for, and the playing is appropriately agitated. [06 Aug 1993, p.D15]
    • The New York Times
  47. This Is Where We Live
    Though the developing bond between the two men — one of whom is virtually nonverbal — is credible and even touching, the storytelling is too oblique to reel you in.
  48. Cuban Fury
    Not that some of this isn’t amusing, but you feel the considerable improvisational skills of the cast going to waste.
  49. Paul Verhoeven's Tricked
    As ever, the paradox of Mr. Verhoeven’s style is that it seems to wallow in tastelessness and transgression even as he remains one of the most classical movie craftsmen.
  50. Dhoom 3
    “Dhoom 3” is very much the Aamir Khan show.
  51. Die Narbe (The Scar)
    Comes across as more of an extravagant gesture than a fully realized artistic conceit.
  52. 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.
  53. Veronica Mars
    A likable, unmemorable, feature-length footnote to the admired television series.
  54. Self/less
    [An] entirely preposterous, not entirely unenjoyable movie.
  55. Friend 2: The Legacy
    In addition to the copious flashbacks, there is an overly generous heaping of styles on display.
  56. Step Up: All In
    Step Up All In, directed by the dancer and choreographer Trish Sie, signals a slight retreat from the bonkers, protest-themed “Step Up Revolution."
  57. Child 44
    The most floridly enjoyable voices belong to Tom Hardy and Noomi Rapace, last seen together speaking Brooklynese in “The Drop.” In that film, Mr. Hardy dropped his r’s like a champ. Here he lands heavily on the aitches and contracts the words “it is” into the letter Z. “Zimpossible,” he says. “Zdifficult.” As for Child 44: Znot too terrible, but znothing great, either.
  58. 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.
  59. Everest
    Though it assembles a first-rate cast in a story taken from reality, Everest feels icebound and strangely abstract, lacking the gravity of genuine tragedy or the swagger of first-rate adventure.
  60. Masterminds
    The full-on goofiness is not reliably buoyant; this is an intermittently enjoyable but often choppy comic ride.
  61. For No Good Reason
    For No Good Reason is less revealing than a standard hourlong television tribute might have been... But there is enough of the man and artist here to rekindle interest and appreciation in his often disturbing pictures and an understanding of what motivated them.
  62. Mercedes Sosa: The Voice of Latin America
    Despite the glorious singing heard in archival footage from various periods of her career, the film is frustratingly sketchy.
  63. God Help the Girl
    Belle and Sebastian fans will be fully sated; everyone else might feel as if they’d consumed a meal consisting entirely of meringue.
  64. The Interview
    The Interview is pretty much what everyone thought it would be before all the trouble started: a goofy, strenuously naughty, hit-and-miss farce, propelled not by any particular political ideas but by the usual spectacle of male sexual, emotional and existential confusion.
  65. Knight of Cups
    In Knight of Cups, as in “To the Wonder,” the deployment of beauty strikes me as more evasive than evocative.
  66. Aloha
    Aloha has too much story and yet not quite enough, and its rhythms are rushed and pokey. It skips like a record playing in the bed of a pickup truck.
  67. They Came Together
    Mr. Wain, who made a delightful comedy with “Role Models” and a cult favorite with “Wet Hot American Summer,” has opted to deliver a series of hit-and-miss sketch-comedy bits rather than a fully realized movie that might have gutted contemporary rom-com clichés rather than just weakly aping them.
  68. Generation War
    As television drama, Generation War is unquestionably effective. As dramatized history, it is pretty questionable.
  69. Life After Beth
    Written and directed by Jeff Baena, this first feature feels sloppily plotted and uncertain of its destination. Seasoned actors are left to yell pointlessly at one another, while Beth and the zombie angle slowly decompose.
  70. The Killing Fields
    Unfortunately, the most moving aspect of The Killing Fields is not the friendship, which should be the film's core, but the fact that the friendship never becomes as inspiriting as the one Mr. Schanberg recalled in his own searching, unhackneyed prose.
  71. The Pretty One
    The Pretty One is intermittently charming, occasionally touching and entirely lacking in credibility.
  72. Band of Sisters
    A sweeping but disorganized and sometimes monotonous exploration.
  73. Hellion
    Writer and director Kat Candler struggles to shape an undercooked story into compelling drama.
  74. HairBrained
    Unfortunately, the movie lacks strong enough players to fill in subtext to Mr. Kent’s formulaic setups, and the story flounders once Ms. Posey is out of the picture.
  75. Odd Thomas
    At once comic, tragic and goofily romantic, and resting too often on Odd’s clarifying narration, this young-adult lark breaches the nonsense barrier with some regularity.
  76. Repentance
    A movie of modest means that nevertheless offers a fairly cohesive story and at least one standout performance. It may underplay an idea laden with potential, but at least that notion is present.
  77. Rob the Mob
    Vividly painting Queens in the early 1990s as a landscape of crack and graffiti, the filmmakers go on to smother any menace with a swoony-upbeat soundtrack and an “oh, those kooky kids” tone.
  78. 13 Sins
    13 Sins is occasionally inventive but mostly uninvolving.
  79. Life is Strange
    [A] useful, if slightly redundant, oral history.
  80. Better Living Through Chemistry
    Better Living Through Chemistry never becomes a full-fledged film noir. It reads as an unabashedly positive infomercial for gorging on the apparently risk-free, liberating products of Big Pharma.
  81. Alive Inside
    Neither the value of music nor the deficiencies of certain nursing homes are tough to debate. But a documentary that never leaves any doubt about what comes next, while single-mindedly stumping for a cause presented as unique, is also not terribly interesting as a film.
  82. Cooties
    Though Cooties has a reasonable amount of laughs and frights, and though real teachers may find it an apt allegory for the zombielike charges in their classrooms, it’s not really funny enough to achieve grown-up cachet, and it’s too ugly and violent for younger viewers.
  83. Hank: 5 Years from the Brink
    It’s informative but not enlightening, and Mr. Berlinger packs in chattering news clips and a score that’s audible under the interview.
  84. The Fault in Our Stars
    Though it is a tragic love story, it is also a perfect and irresistible fantasy.
  85. Hot Tub Time Machine 2
    Whether something did or didn’t happen, and the comic confusion as the future bumps into the past: those are the smart parts of a movie that is not as idiotic as it pretends to be.
  86. The Postman Always Rings Twice
    Miss Lange is not a bad actress, but her miscasting is fatal to the picture and exemplifies its tiresomely genteel artfulness.
  87. Alphaville
    What it comes to is simply that the dazzle of Mr. Godard's cinematic style is not matched by the hackneyed idea of a robot society that is expounded in the script.
  88. The Attorney
    Mr. Song puts his usual big heart into the character, though there aren’t many layers or nuances to the drama. Every scene does its job, tears flowing on cue.
  89. Bad Johnson
    A sometimes amusing sex farce.
  90. Yves Saint Laurent
    Mr. Lespert and his screenwriters tend to telegraph what’s happening next with on-the-nose dialogue, leaving behind an orderly but not vividly realized biography (or necessarily a complete one).
  91. Black Out
    Taking a credibility-straining premise and running with it, the Dutch director Arne Toonen gives Black Out way more energy than sense. Luckily, his antihero, Jos (Raymond Thiry), lacks neither.
  92. Angels in Stardust
    Angels in Stardust ends up being too tidy to be a great coming-of-age movie, but it’s a decent one.
  93. The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part
    The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part isn’t as distractingly fun, shiny and bright as the more satisfying franchise installments. It drags and sometimes bores, which makes it easier for your mind to drift elsewhere.
  94. Goosebumps
    More often than not, Mr. Letterman uses his movie as a toy chest of characters more than as a medium, the muggy Mr. Black included.
  95. Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return
    All in all, the beloved kingdom of Oz is not well served, though there’s just enough detectable affection to keep it from feeling like a pure cashing-in.
  96. The Signal
    William Eubank’s The Signal demonstrates the fine line between paranoid science-fiction fantasy and demo reel.
  97. Ride Along 2
    This franchise is lucky to have Kevin Hart in that role, and his manic comic energy is enough to make the sequel something other than a complete waste of time. But the genre is also stubbornly innovation-proof, and there’s not much new to see here.
  98. Hotel Transylvania 2
    Some jokes actually work (a GPS-voice gag induced unforced laughter), and the whole thing is amiable and colorful and surprisingly low on body-function gags. It may not kill you to take your kids.
  99. Bewakoofiyaan
    This tale of a yuppie couple (played by Ayushmann Khurrana and Sonam Kapoor) flirts with intriguing notions of recessionary struggle, though strained, contrived humor bogs it down.
  100. Space Station 76
    Not that Dr. Bot and the oblivious self-righteousness won’t delight certain fans, but this remains a protracted, scattershot comedy sketch that never quite nails its tone.
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