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. Harmontown
    Mr. Harmon is delightfully talented at improvisation, freestyling nonsense lyrics. Mr. Berkeley, on the other hand, proves himself a dismayingly predictable chronicler, making sure that we know exactly what we’re supposed to think and efficiently packaging jokes and revelations.
  2. Into the Storm
    This film is actually less menacing than marveling, though a disturbing opening scene in a storm-tossed van could fit right into Mr. Quale’s earlier work.
  3. Lucky Them
    While Ms. Collette grounds Ellie and her emotions in a tough-minded plausibility, she can only hint at what the script fails to deliver: the complexities of a flawed woman’s midlife crisis.
  4. Half The Road: The Passion, Pitfalls & Power of Women's Professional Cycling
    The message is repeated ad infinitum; this documentary is painfully long for a project of this kind.
  5. Stage Fright
    It’s inspired enough to draw attention to ways that it doesn’t realize its potential.
  6. Pioneer
    Mr. Skjoldbjaerg, who also tapped Norwegian history with his bank robbery re-enactment “Nokas,” doesn’t convey a creeping atmosphere of moral rot so much as an irksome glumness.
  7. Make Your Move
    Mr. Hough, a “Dancing With the Stars” champion, impresses with his footwork and sufficiently fulfills his romantic-lead duties. BoA is cute and appealingly impudent, but a bit more remote. On the floor, however, their chemistry ignites.
  8. A Fragile Trust
    Lightness of touch is missing from the film, which features animated graphics and an ominous score.
  9. Half of a Yellow Sun
    Half of a Yellow Sun, adapted from the 2006 novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, emerges on screen as a well-acted, finely wrought epic that nevertheless struggles to balance the requirements of melodrama with its drive to capture a historical moment.
  10. The Last of Robin Hood
    The story comes to feel mild (and incomplete) in its tempered nostalgia.
  11. The November Man
    There is something to be said for a thriller that rips along with no regard for anything other than its own pace, coasting on Mr. Brosnan’s blunter-than-Bond suavity and Ms. Kurylenko’s beauty.
  12. The Love Punch
    Some wonderful actors add class to the material, which struggles to find a consistent register of cartoonishness.
  13. Coherence
    At some point, though, Mr. Byrkit turns one too many corners (characters, meanwhile, begin bustling in and out of rooms like Marx Brothers extras), and what began as a nifty puzzle feels more like a trap.
  14. Who is Dayani Cristal?
    A movie whose techniques present problems not containable by the noble intentions of its makers.
  15. The Girl and Death
    The movie proves to be a fragile conceit. It’s as likely to fall apart and cause frustration as it is to induce a reverie.
  16. Bright Days Ahead
    Struggling to get out from under the film’s too-cheery surface is a much more serious movie about grown-ups confronting the depredations of old age.
  17. Documented
    His strategy is political — in a meaningful way — but not cinematic.
  18. Bends
    Shot in sleek tones by Christopher Doyle, the film melds class-conscious melodrama with malleable mood piece, but keeps threatening to fade from understatement into stasis.
  19. Sisters
    Sisters is both too careful and too sloppy to take full advantage of the thornier implications of its premise. It’s too awkward — because scenes drag when they should swing and jokes sag when they should pop — and not awkward enough.
  20. Why Don't You Play in Hell?
    Goofball antics and a terrific, raucous finale can’t make up for the essential slackness of its repetitive comedy and punk chest thumping.
  21. Tanzania: A Journey Within
    The documentary “Tanzania: A Journey Within” is two travel diaries woven together. One is somber and moving. The other is distractingly annoying.
  22. X-Men: Apocalypse
    For every lively moment, there’s a reminder that the franchise is tiring.
  23. Where We Started
    Written and directed by Chris Hansen, this romance has its authentic moments. As it happens, Mr. Brumlow and Ms. Vander Broek are married, but their familiarity hurts as much as it helps.
  24. Chapman
    The more Chapman reveals, the less seems to be going on, and the more its quirkier developments... play like independent-film clichés.
  25. Ricki and the Flash
    Ricki’s attitudes, and their place in the family and the society she inhabits, are the most interesting part of the movie, or at least they would be if Ms. Cody and Mr. Demme were not so weirdly conflict-averse.
  26. The Song
    The actors, none of whom have much experience, are quite convincing, but the story — Jed falls, then sees the error of his ways — is an oft-told one.
  27. Point Break
    Nowhere does Mr. Core’s film approach the action-movie chops or psychological smarts of Ms. Bigelow’s original or, truth be told, benefit from actors displaying the same charm as her stars. But for a number of liberating airborne seconds, none of that may matter.
  28. The LEGO Ninjago Movie
    The Lego figures are rendered with playful rigor; their limited movements and expressions generate some amusing sight gags. But the physical world they inhabit is more of a generic digital-cartoon space than a snapped-together environment. And the themes they explore are tired, cynical, sub-Disney bromides about family reconciliation and self-discovery.
  29. Max
    As the intrepid kids and the fearless hound unravel a nefarious weapons-dealing scheme, Max finds its sweet spot, leaving behind its overwrought patriotic swagger and settling into the kind of story that would fill a decent hour of television.
  30. Ivory Tower
    Ivory Tower, a documentary about soaring costs and other problems confronting higher education, can’t seem to decide what points it wants to make and ends up making none.
  31. 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.
  32. Jackpot
    As an absurdist suspense film, Jackpot mostly hits its marks. As a comedy, it’s less successful, stronger on sight gags than on the detective’s sarcasm.
  33. Very Good Girls
    You can only imagine how much stronger the movie might have been had it fleshed out subsidiary dramas whose outlines are barely discernible.
  34. The Big Easy
    The screenplay, by Daniel Petrie Jr. and Jack Baran, has a number of funny lines and situations, but the end result looks fiddled with by people attempting to ''fix'' things.
  35. Desert Dancer
    Desert Dancer explores fascinating aspects of present-day Iran but suffers mightily from simplistic and sentimental tendencies.
  36. Frontera
    Frontera settles into a shallow, unconvincing drama with two heroes.
  37. F/X2
    As long as it is fixated on gadgetry, FX2 is reasonably entertaining. But when the movie focuses on plot and character, it turns quite dotty in an amiable way.
  38. Stir Crazy
    Stir Crazy is an energetic but spiritless shambles.
  39. Uncle Buck
    Sometimes funny and, in the way of small-screen entertainment, so perfectly predictable that one could mail in the laughs.
  40. The Witches of Eastwick
    The Witches of Eastwick does have enough flamboyance to hold the attention, directed as it has been by Mr. Miller in a bright, flashy, exclamatory style. But beneath the surface charm there is too much confusion, and the charm itself is gone long before the film is over.
  41. Beneath
    Sparing with scares and judicious with gore, the director, Ben Ketai (working from a screenplay by Patrick J. Doody and Chris Valenziano), proves better at summoning atmosphere than developing characters.
  42. This Is Not a Ball
    The journey, an exploration of the passion for soccer that evolves into a history of the ball (a sort of film version of the anthropologist John Fox’s 2012 book, “The Ball”), is somewhat illuminating, often indulgent and never wholly satisfying.
  43. The BFG
    There are delights on display, but not many surprises...The BFG is a different kind of movie, and Mr. Rylance’s face and body have been enhanced and distorted by digital sorcery, but his unique blend of gravity and mischief imbues his fanciful character with a dimension of soul that the rest of the movie lacks.
    • The New York Times
      • Posted Jun 30, 2016
  44. Kabbalah Me
    Kabbalah Me, which distinguishes between “narrow consciousness” and “expanded consciousness,” merely walks the middle ground.
  45. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus
    It’s not especially horrifying, or even very thought-provoking. It is touching, however, because it represents one frequently misunderstood, intermittently great filmmaker’s tribute to another.
  46. Marius
    It’s not entirely clear what this faithful, slightly creaky new rendering, adapted and directed by the actor Daniel Auteuil, has to offer.
  47. Fanny
    Mr. Auteuil’s passion project is sincere but not successful, honorable but not alive.
  48. Black Mass
    Mr. Cooper’s direction is skillful, if overly reliant on borrowed Scorseseisms (especially when it comes to music), and the cast is first-rate, but the film is a muddle of secondhand attitudes and half-baked ideas. It feels more like a costume party than a costume drama.
  49. The Kill Team
    Mr. Krauss might have served his material better if he had pulled the curtain back in The Kill Team, if only to explain why a movie that initially seems to be about one thing — as its shocker title suggests — is a partisan portrait of Specialist Winfield and his family.
  50. K Missing Kings
    Despite a generous attempt at a series recap, it’s chaotic for the uninitiated. These characters require several episodes of exposure for us to feel that much is at stake in the ebb and flow of honor, hysteria and eternal friendship. In any case, the animation is often a pure sensual delight.
  51. Annabelle
    Annabelle is less cluttered with creepy bric-a-brac than “The Conjuring.” (The original director, James Wan, produced here.) But Mr. Leonetti embraces the potential of negative space.
  52. The Calling
    Preposterous as it is, The Calling remains stubbornly suspenseful until near the end.
  53. Two Night Stand
    It’s hard not to root for this couple — and, more to the point, these actors — to get together again.
  54. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her
    Although the novelty of this repetition and Mr. Benson’s adjustments pull you in like a new puzzle, his actual ideas — about people, their stories and how to tell those stories — turn out to be fairly straight.
  55. A Fuller Life
    It’s a proud film but average.
  56. Reclaim
    This isn’t activism; it’s by-the-numbers suspense.
  57. A Will for the Woods
    It’s possible to admire the four directors’ unflinching depiction of the dying process, but the film is mostly unilluminating and grim — not least because almost all of the deaths discussed are untimely.
  58. I Am Happiness on Earth
    If you hang on, the slow-paced “I Am Happiness” may teach you how to appreciate its scoreless, flat, dreamlike flow.
  59. Revenge of the Green Dragons
    What initially feels like brash energy peters out until what’s left mainly evokes pretty ordinary gangster movies.
  60. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
    This movie is often pretty slack in matters of story construction and direction.
  61. The Canal
    The film’s writer and director, Ivan Kavanagh, and his team pull off a few enjoyable, decently creepy scares, but over all, the action is too cryptic, and the pedestrian dialogue doesn’t help.
  62. The Age of Adaline
    The director Lee Toland Krieger is good with actors, especially in the expression of a low-key, unforced intimacy.
  63. To Be Takei
    [Ms. Kroot's] banalizing documentary is self-defeating as it tags along with Mr. Takei and his wonky husband, Brad, on their busy daily schedule.
  64. Exists
    Featuring the usual fractured visuals, generic victims and pinballing cameras — both hand-held and mounted on bike helmets — Exists nevertheless has an unusually dreamy opening and a few surprisingly entertaining tweaks.
  65. Men, Women & Children
    Veering between alarmism and cautious reassurance — between technohysteria and shrugging, nothing-new-under-the-sun resignation — Men, Women & Children succumbs to the confusion it tries to illuminate.
  66. Miss Meadows
    The dark comedy (punctuated by the catchphrase “Toodle-oo”) doesn’t always come off, and the filmmaking is more off-kilter than necessary, with capricious camerawork and pacing.
  67. The Identical
    This movie’s earnest infectiousness is tough to deny.
  68. Lilting
    For much of the movie, Junn is a one-dimensional grump who pulls this schematic if unfocused movie down with each frown and harrumph.
  69. Kundo: Age of the Rampant
    For all its gloss, “Kundo” fails to resonate. You appreciate the execution, but the film is hindered by its lack of novelty and metaphorical weight.
  70. At the Devil's Door
    At the Devil’s Door is reasonably absorbing but never scary or satirically sharp (despite references to mortgages and foreclosures). It mostly settles for inducing sensation.
  71. The Naked Room
    While The Naked Room may raise awareness, it often feels voyeuristic in less productive ways.
  72. Ghostbusters
    However good an idea it may have been to unleash Mr. Murray in an ''Exorcist''-like setting, this film hasn't gotten very far past the idea stage. Its jokes, characters and story line are as wispy as the ghosts themselves, and a good deal less substantial.
  73. Plastic
    It’s hard to escape the sense that Plastic is itself a cheap knockoff, but the point is not to look too closely.
  74. Inner Demons
    The main drawback of Inner Demons, no matter how skillful the presentation may be here, is the overriding sense that this has all been done before.
  75. The Pact 2
    The directors, Dallas Hallam and Patrick Horvath, are fluent in the genre’s staples (creaky interiors, slamming doors, yada yada yada), lighting schemes and startling edits. And they draw decent work from their actors, who commit to the wispy, subtext-free material.
  76. Magical Universe
    While Mr. Workman evidently respects Mr. Carbee’s talent, he also frames his movie as a trite narrative about a kind of lovably odd acquaintance who comes out of his shell, without many incisive ideas about shaping or broadening the material.
  77. Falcon Rising
    Mr. Chapman administers some of his (amplified) thwacks and drop kicks with a likable, you-should-know-better air of amusement, recalling a Reagan-era TV cop show.
  78. The Gambler
    Mr. Wyatt’s direction is smooth, although he’s more confident, and the movie more convincing, when he goes for baroque with the story’s excesses.
  79. Faith Connections
    Mr. Nalin applies an on-the-ground approach, mainly looking at holy men and lost boys at the gathering. But he lets the sprawl slacken his overlong film’s grasp and, strangely, underplays the nuances of the event’s spiritual aspects.
  80. Now You See Me 2
    Everything is supersized and preposterous, but Mr. Chu, with two films in the “Step Up” franchise under his belt, is undaunted by crowds and confusion.
  81. Burying the Ex
    The movie’s snap and affection put other recent zombie-related entertainments to shame, and the in-jokes...are a Dante signature. But the freedom of the director’s best work is missing.
  82. Cake
    It’s the sort of well-intentioned independent effort that can make criticism feel like overkill. There’s nothing to hate, nothing to love. The movie’s greatest virtue is that it gives Ms. Aniston a little room to play against the somewhat sardonic tough-cookie type that she deploys in vulgar comedies.
  83. The Keeping Room
    Mr. Barber can work up a fair sense of menace, but he seems to have directed most of the talented cast to speak their lines in a mannered fashion learned from other movies.
  84. A Little Chaos
    Mr. Schoenaerts’s dour André may make conceptual sense, but he leaves a hole in this handsomely mounted costume drama that would have profited from more intrigue and a steamier erotic atmosphere.
  85. Madame Bovary
    What wildness there is in this Madame Bovary belongs to Ms. Wasikowska, an actress who is frequently more interesting than her material.
  86. The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death
    The director, Tom Harper, seems less interested in allegory than in monotonous, conventional goosing, the kind that involves flickering lights and a creaky rocking chair.
  87. Black or White
    Mike Binder’s steady, well-intentioned exploration of the racial tensions affecting two branches of a Southern California family, is notable for what it doesn’t try to do.
  88. Beloved Sisters
    With its dearth of substance and its wandering focus, this is a middlebrow bodice-ripper posing as an epic that hasn’t the foggiest idea of what it wants to say.
  89. Hollidaysburg
    Hollidaysburg is a pleasant if unremarkable coming-of-age film.
  90. Print the Legend
    The movie’s biggest entertainment, however, is not the market-share rivalry between MakerBot Industries, in Brooklyn, and the younger Formlabs, in Boston, but its fearless dive into dweeb-culture head space.
  91. Last Hijack
    This film could have been more surely and deftly put together.
  92. Black Sea
    The story loses credibility as it goes along, as the body count escalates, and Robinson’s solutions to life-and-death crises grow increasingly far-fetched.
  93. Default
    The film is stronger with its moment-to-moment tension than with its cynical, shallow media satire.
  94. Inferno
    Part of the draw of these movies is that they don’t create beauty, but instead borrow the emotions of the beauty they depict. (This, more or less, is one definition of kitsch, courtesy of the philosopher Tomas Kulka.) That makes the movies easy to watch and easy to forget.
  95. The Hacker Wars
    Ms. Weisman offers a deluge of information. But for those not already versed in the lingo or the people involved, the movie plays like a blurry primer to an anarchic, mysterious world.
  96. Algorithms
    The movie is an object lesson in how a remarkable subject can be turned into a less remarkable film.
  97. Life Inside Out
    This low-key drama so insistently resists epiphanies that it verges on bland.
  98. The Night Before
    The emotional moments don’t pay off any better than most of the jokes, which reach for the safest kinds of provocative punch lines having to do with sex, race and religion.
  99. E-Team
    A documentary that purports to chronicle the sober and urgent work of those who ferret out human-rights abuses, but instead plays like a portrait of a rather glamorous marriage.
  100. Viva la Libertà
    Roberto Andò's Viva la Libertà wobbles between being wispily suggestive of finer existential meaning and generational commentary, and being basically a handsomely dressed-up “Dave” for post-Berlusconi Italy.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »