The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Blue Sun Palace
    It’s often said that New York is a city of neighborhoods, little galaxies contained within themselves, but the truth is more granular: We walk by a dozen massage parlors like the one in Blue Sun Palace every day, and never dream the whole cosmos of human emotion is inside.
  2. Don't Think Twice
    Don’t Think Twice, which has a warm heart, could have been a much nastier movie. Yet its disappointed show-business hopefuls dreading their expiration dates make no bones about their insecurities.
  3. The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki
    The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki deepens quietly. This is Mr. Kuosmanen’s first feature (he has directed a few shorts), and if he had any rookie jitters you wouldn’t know it.
  4. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
    Something close to a masterpiece, a work of extreme -- I am tempted to say evil -- genius.
  5. Charade
    There's a lot to be said for it as a fast-moving, urbane entertainment in the comedy-mystery vein.
  6. Sweet Dreams
    The sibling directors Lisa and Rob Fruchtman have made a nuanced and deftly edited film about a complex issue.
  7. Intervista
    A magical mixture of recollection, parody, memoir, satire, self-examination and joyous fantasy.
  8. Souleymane's Story
    Boris Lojkine’s Souleymane’s Story, an affecting film about struggle set over two days in Paris, is the rare character study that does not only build empathy with its hero’s pain but channels its sensation.
  9. Holy Cow
    The low-key charms of the coming-of-age story Holy Cow emerge gradually but steadily.
  10. Sanjuro
    This is a mischievous, sly, good-humored presentation of a crusty old samurai caught between two groups of plain incompetents, with a playful satiric point.
  11. In the Summers
    Lacorazza’s deftness with actors, feel for the setting and aesthetic decisions — shooting in the snapshot-like 1.66-to-1 aspect ratio, or leaving the characters’ Spanish without subtitles — help the drama ring true.
  12. Court
    [A] quiet, devastating critique of the antiquated Indian legal system.
  13. Winchester '73
    It is far from the mature outdoor drama that might be brilliantly filmed around a gun. It's just a frisky, fast-moving, funny Western in which a rifle is the apple of a cowboy's eye.
  14. Locke
    Mr. Knight keeps a fairly steady distance from Ivan — underscoring certain tense passages with tighter close-ups — but moment by moment, with a twitch, a shudder, a look, it’s Mr. Hardy who movingly draws you in, turning a stranger’s face into a life.
  15. 20,000 Days on Earth
    It is as intimate and honest a portrait of a rock artist’s creative roots as any film has attempted.
  16. The Woman Who Left
    The film makes uncompromising demands on your attention and your empathy. But it is also illuminating and, in its downbeat, deliberate way, exhilarating.
  17. Inshallah a Boy
    Hawa, a Palestinian actress, is commanding as a woman whose future and faith are buffeted by her narrowing options.
  18. Knife in the Water
    Using his naturalistic camera as though it were an outsized microscope set up to observe the odd behavior of three people completely isolated for 24 hours aboard a weekend pleasure boat, Mr. Polanski evolves a cryptic drama that has wry humor, a thread of suspense, a dash of ugly and corruscating evil — and also a measure of tedium because of the purposeful monotony of its pace.
  19. Neptune Frost
    This isn’t a tight, tidy allegory of capitalism and colonialism so much as a collage of vivid images, sounds and words that punch the movie’s themes like hashtags. Williams and Uzeyman marry anarchist politics with anarchist aesthetics, making something that feels both handmade and high-tech, digital and analog, poetic and punk rock.
  20. The Apostle
    Duvall's unobtrusive direction moves the film at a leisurely pace that lets many scenes build the gentle, pleasing rhythms of small-town Southern life. A rare display of spiritual light on screen.
  21. RRR
    Rajamouli shoots the film’s action with hallucinogenic fervor, supercharging scenes with a shimmering brand of extended slow-motion and C.G.I. that feels less “generated” than unleashed.
  22. Election
    Election is a deft dark comedy with a resemblance to "Rushmore." It's smart no matter what.
  23. Memento
    A brilliant feat of rug-pulling, sure to delight fans of movies like "The Usual Suspects" and "Pi."
  24. Dos Estaciones
    At once specific and expansive, Dos Estaciones can be described several ways: as a drama, a character study, a meditative exploration of the ravages of globalization. At the same time, part of the movie’s pleasure is how it avoids facile categorization.
  25. Creed
    Creed is a dandy piece of entertainment, soothingly old-fashioned and bracingly up-to-date.
  26. Memories of Murder
    What distinguishes Memories of Murder, setting it apart from rank-and-file thrillers, is its singular mix of gallows humor and unnerving solemnity.
  27. Pride & Prejudice
    Gathers you up on its white horse and gallops off into the sunset. Along the way, it serves a continuing banquet of high-end comfort food perfectly cooked and seasoned to Anglophilic tastes.
  28. Cuba and the Cameraman
    In part because of its political blind spots, Cuba and the Cameraman is captivating. (Whatever you think of Mr. Alpert’s perspective, it’s interesting.) But it’s mostly worth watching because of human stories like these.
  29. Sunrise at Campobello
    A well-done, moving biographical film.
  30. Bad Axe
    This is a hermetic story, but one wishes that Siev had balanced its coziness with acuity.
  31. Monsieur Lazhar
    Like no other film about middle school life that I can recall Monsieur Lazhar conveys the intensity and the fragility of these classroom bonds and the mutual trust they require.
  32. Leaving Las Vegas
    Mr. Cage digs deep to find his character's inner demons while also capturing the riotous energy of his outward charm.
  33. Gigi
    Charming entertainment.
  34. Transit
    By turns intimate and expansive, Transit is a thrilling, at times harrowing labyrinth of a movie.
  35. Venus
    Since the movie is about desire -- not so much for sex as for the vitality and surprise that sex can provide -- it is also about power. Few writers can match Mr. Kureishi's knowing wit on this subject, or his skill at dissecting the shifting dynamics of longing and domination.
  36. The Academy of Muses
    While eavesdropping on these academics, you may be captivated by their exchanges while frustrated by their stasis while curious about their lives. Indeed, there are several ways to look at these scenes. But all you really have to do is listen.
  37. Found
    While the young women harbor overlapping questions, Found makes it clear they also have yearnings unique to them.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shoeshine
    Not a pretty picture to contemplate nor is it by any means a well-made picture. But "Shoe-Shine" mirrors the anguished soul of a starving, disorganized and demoralized nation with such uncompromising realism that the roughness of its composition is overshadowed by its driving, emotional force.
  39. The Love Witch
    Ms. Biller’s movie, like its heroine, presents a fascinating, perfectly composed, brightly colored surface. What’s underneath is marvelously dark, like love itself.
  40. Diner
    Diner isn't lavish or long, but it's the sort of small, honest, entertaining movie that should never go out of style, even in an age of sequels and extravaganzas.
  41. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am
    It’s less a biography than an extended essay, which is entirely a good thing. If you want a thorough documentation of everything Morrison has done and everyone she knows, there’s always Wikipedia. But if you’d prefer an argument for her importance and a sense of her presence, then you won’t be disappointed.
  42. 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.
  43. Peter Hujar's Day
    The result is a charming experiment that should delight those who like their pleasures both nostalgic and voyeuristic.
  44. Night of the Kings
    Lacôte crosses the open-ended energy of griot traditions with the surging tensions of the prison’s close quarters.
  45. Billy Liar (re-release)
    One of the great movies of the 1960's, but it has been, in this country at least, maddeningly elusive. In spite of its bitter edge, Billy Liar is pure Ambrosia.
  46. Flirting with Disaster
    Mr. Russell's wonderfully mad odyssey of a movie, in which a man sets out to find his biological parents and winds up meeting more weirdos than Alice found down the rabbit hole.
  47. Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time
    As the film's images accumulate, the movie becomes a sustained and ultimately refreshing meditation on surrender to the idea of temporality.
  48. These Birds Walk
    The filmmakers record the flash of youth’s headlong energies, its bumps and bruises, and its melancholies and brilliant chaos.
  49. The Second Mother
    The Second Mother goes soft toward the end, defusing its conflicts too easily and inconsequentially.
  50. Nowhere to Hide
    The look is rough, the emotions always hovering near the surface. Yet, buoyed by Mr. Sharif’s cheery personality, these can sometimes be defiantly upbeat.
  51. Window Horses
    At first, Rosie’s simplicity is jarring. But as the character learns more about her personal and poetic origins, her minimalist frame absorbs the weight of a rich, complex history. That transformation is the great pleasure of watching this small film.
  52. Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground
    An informative and overdue documentary.
  53. Three Times
    Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's hypnotically beautiful cinematic trilogy Three Times doesn't just illuminate faces and objects; it seems to fill them up, as if they were lighted from within.
  54. Anselm
    A film like Anselm is another level of preservation as well as a contemplative experience, in which the past and the future meet, in a way we can feel as much as see.
  55. Hit Man
    It’s radiant and loose and confident, the kind of movie that you can just tell was a blast to make, which makes it a blast to watch. As our overstuffed big-budget era starts to falter, let’s hope they start making movies like this again.
  56. Ghostlight
    It’s a gentle story, full of tender moments, and knowing that the parents and daughter in the main cast are a family in real life increases the warmth.
  57. Afire
    The German filmmaker Christian Petzold’s spiky and at times mordantly funny Afire is a tonic for moviegoers tired of nice, squishable, likable, relatable dull and dull characters.
  58. Ajami
    One of the pleasures of Ajami, a tough and in many ways unsparing movie, is its deep immersion in the beats and melodies of everyday life in Jaffa and beyond.
  59. Wrestle
    Wrestle isn’t slick or impartial, and doesn’t claim to be, yet the movie has a raw honesty that disdains forced uplift.
  60. Viola
    The mischievous paradox of Matías Piñeiro’s Viola is that it is at once devilishly complicated and perfectly simple.
  61. The Cathedral
    What distinguishes Jesse’s story is the striking way that the writer-director Ricky D’Ambrose tells it — its ellipses, voice-over, visual precision and an emotional reserve that can feel like clinical detachment but is more rightly described as an aesthetic.
  62. 127 Hours
    Mr. Boyle has a knack for tackling painful, violent or unpleasant subjects with unremitting verve and unstoppable joie de vivre.
  63. Twilight
    It’s a style so minimalist, it approaches maximalism — and this combination of pulp and precision creates an arresting and unique work of film noir.
  64. Tell No One
    Beautifully written and acted, Tell No One is a labyrinth in which to get deliriously lost.
  65. The Illusionist
    The Illusionist is both a modest homage to its writer and a melancholy look at a lost world.
  66. Riotsville, U.S.A.
    This is not an objective film. It is a polemic, a work of activism, a challenge to the viewer.
  67. Mars One
    Dreams are incubators for dissatisfaction, Martins seems to sigh.
  68. Paying for It
    Paying for It keeps its narrative tight, perhaps overly simple. There’s space to savor the retro intimacy, amplified by the film’s striking primary colors and lo-fi rock soundtrack. Lee — while only gesturing toward the complexities of open arrangements — captures Chester and Sonny in a fleeting time that feels soft, but not shy.
  69. The Deep Blue Sea
    To put the matter perhaps more abstractly than such a sensual film deserves, it is about the fate of untameable, irrational desire in a world that does not seem to have a place for it.
  70. The End of the Tour
    It’s ultimately a movie — one of the most rigorous and thoughtful I’ve seen — about the ethical and existential traps our fame-crazed culture sets for the talented and the mediocre alike.
  71. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
    A tight, fascinating chronicle of arrogance and greed.
  72. The Shawshank Redemption
    There are times when The Shawshank Redemption comes dangerously close to sounding one of those "triumph of the spirit" notes. But most of it is eloquently restrained.
  73. Vortex
    Among the comforts Vortex refuses is the bittersweet balm of nostalgia. It’s a blunt reckoning with the inevitability of loss, including the loss of memory. We dream for a while, and then we sleep.
  74. There Is No Evil
    To make a movie that ponders the moral rot of an unjust system while under the gun of that unjust system is courageous and artistically potent.
  75. Thieves Like Us
    Thieves Like Us is such an engaging, sharply observed account of a long-lost time, and of some of the people who briefly inhabited it, that I hope it doesn't get confused with other films that seem, superficially anyway, to have covered the same territory.
  76. Acasă, My Home
    It’s both intimate and analytical, a sensitive portrait of real people undergoing enormous change and a meditation on what that change might mean. It taps into something primal in the human condition, a basic conflict between the desire for freedom and the tendency toward organization — an argument, finally, about the meaning of home.
  77. Safe Conduct
    The movie is full of juices that give it a healthy, pungent flow.
  78. El Velador
    Natalia Almada's eloquent documentary portrait of a sprawling graveyard in Culiacán, Mexico, in the northwestern state of Sinaloa. The rapidly expanding cemetery has become the burial ground of choice for the country's slain drug lords.
  79. Maiden
    A sleek, exhilarating documentary.
  80. War for the Planet of the Apes
    There is a scene toward the end of War for the Planet of the Apes that is as vivid and haunting as anything I’ve seen in a Hollywood blockbuster in ages, a moment of rousing and dreadful cinematic clarity that I don’t expect to shake off any time soon.
  81. Duma
    A soulful, piercingly beautiful story.
  82. The Constant Gardener
    This is a supremely well-executed piece of popular entertainment that is likely to linger in your mind and may even trouble your conscience.
  83. You Won't Be Alone
    You Won’t Be Alone, the ravishing, wildly original first feature from Goran Stolevski, moves so hypnotically between dream and nightmare, horror and fairy tale that, once bound by its spell, you won’t want to be freed.
  84. Grand Tour
    Beauty is pleasurable, but the film’s use of evocative visuals to focus on storytelling more broadly is what makes it a quiet knockout.
  85. Short Term 12
    Even as the gathering melodramatic storms threaten to swamp this pungent slice of life, Mr. Cretton manages to earn your tears honestly.
  86. Parenthood
    Ron Howard's bittersweet adult comedy, Parenthood, lays out an entire catalogue of psychological stresses afflicting family life in white middle-class America, then asks if the rewards of being a parent are worth all the agony.
  87. Two of Us
    Through the use of symbolic peepholes, eavesdropping and dark rooms that provide cover for whispered assurances of devotion, Two of Us succeeds as a stealthy depiction of lesbian erotics, one that mirrors the inhibitions of a generation.
  88. Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street
    Even those resistant to easy nostalgia will find plenty to think about.
  89. Residue
    Gerima’s challenging, engrossing filmmaking style is measured, simultaneously realistic and impressionistic. What’s out of the frame is often as important, if not more important, than what’s in the frame.
  90. House of Hummingbird
    Kim works like a pointillist with lots of short scenes and daubs of textured nuance that build the portrait incrementally.
  91. What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?
    Pleasing, exasperating, poignant and coy, “What Do We See” is a loose, exceedingly leisurely meander through a series of momentous and banal moments that take place during an amble through the Georgian city of Kutaisi.
  92. A History of Violence
    A masterpiece of indirection and pure visceral thrills, David Cronenberg's latest mindblower, A History of Violence, is the feel-good, feel-bad movie of the year.
  93. Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back
    The Empire Strikes Back is not a truly terrible movie. It's a nice movie. It's not, by any means, as nice as "Star Wars." It's not as fresh and funny and surprising and witty, but it is nice and inoffensive and, in a way that no one associated with it need be ashamed of, it's also silly.
  94. Our Beloved Month of August
    The whole turns out to be less than the sum of its elegantly constructed and cleverly uncategorizable parts.
  95. Grand Theft Hamlet
    It’s surprisingly moving, more a testament to the human drive toward community and connection in even the most unexpected of spaces.
  96. Joyland
    Outrage works in the movie’s favor; this polite weepie needs the added spice. While about an unconventional affair, the movie is more interested in suppression and restraint.
  97. Sugar
    It is both sad and hopeful, but the film's sorrow and its optimism arise from its rarest and most thrilling quality, which is its deep and humane honesty.
  98. Marwencol
    Four years in the making, Marwencol emerges as a number of things: an absorbing portrait of an outsider artist; a fascinating journey from near-death to active life; a meditation on the brain's ability to forge new pathways when old ones have been destroyed.
  99. The Wind That Shakes the Barley
    The history presented in The Wind That Shakes the Barley hardly feels like a closed book or a museum display. It is as alive and as troubling as anything on the evening news, though far more thoughtful and beautiful.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »