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. Samba
    Mr. Toledano and Mr. Nakache, who wrote the scattered screenplay, have a well-honed touch for comic beats and a feel for workaday details. That comes in handy when their points about French identity miss the mark, or when the main characters share special moments without really acquiring depth.
  2. K'na, the Dreamweaver
    This static movie digs no deeper, but it is important in that it preserves a sliver of civilization and language (with native speakers in small roles) that might not otherwise get global exposure.
  3. Mad Women
    This film overstays its welcome and has pacing problems. But its eclectic characters certainly linger.
  4. Closer to God
    Having painted Victor as a transgressive offender, Mr. Senese backpedals furiously with a coda asserting the potential rewards of genetic manipulation. It isn’t convincing.
  5. I Am Chris Farley
    The story of dependence and excess is sadly familiar — and as with most of its material, I Am Chris Farley doesn’t find a fresh way to tell it.
  6. Return to Sender
    For most of the way, Return to Sender merges creepy and sexy to good effect, thanks to a close-to-the-vest performance by Rosamund Pike.
  7. Call Me Lucky
    The movie strains to drum up mystery as to the sources of Mr. Crimmins’s rage. When it finally spills the beans, you feel unnecessarily manipulated.
  8. The Boy
    The Boy, despite remarkable performances and gorgeous imagery, does not sufficiently flesh out its subject.
  9. Only You
    Only You is served very well by Ms. Tang (a star of Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution”). Whether playing elated, sorrowful, coy or petulant, she consistently provides the spark the movie could use more of.
  10. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
    “Fallen Kingdom,” directed by J. A. Bayona, is in most respects a dumber, less ambitious movie than its immediate predecessor, and also, for just that reason, a little bit more fun. Some of its high jinks have a hokey, silly, old-fashioned mad-scientist feeling to them, especially when the dinosaurs are chasing people or vice versa. Which is reasonably often.
  11. Contracted: Phase II
    Mr. Mercer’s character doesn’t attract sympathy comparable to that for Ms. Townsend’s (Ms. Lore’s Harper fares better), but there is no holding back on the worms, dermatologic nightmares, venereal-disease metaphors and hints of future sequels. Start stocking up now on the Pepto-Bismol.
  12. The Dressmaker
    Unfortunately, and despite its promising start, The Dressmaker doesn’t move much beyond the level of well-costumed playacting.
  13. Sneakerheadz
    Rapid editing leaves little time to absorb vocabulary (such as “deadstock,” a new shoe that has never been worn) or intricacies of design.
  14. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
    The performances by Mr. Johnson, Mr. Hart and Mr. Black seem informed by the conviction that if they amuse themselves, they will also amuse others. They are not entirely wrong, but they are also not sufficiently right.
  15. Bad Boys for Life
    Lawrence’s riffs almost always land. They especially need to in the final quarter, when the movie sets the bar high for this year’s Dopiest Movie Plot Twist competition.
  16. Prince
    At times tender and at others unflinchingly brutal, this small drama of innocence and temptation could have aimed much higher.
  17. Shanghai
    The spectacular international cast... bring a lot of life to the movie’s uncooperative story material.
  18. Tab Hunter Confidential
    Jeffrey Schwarz’s documentary portrait Tab Hunter Confidential is as mild-mannered and blandly likable as its subject.
  19. Memories of the Sword
    Though rich in period detail, the movie grows tiresome with solemn, protracted soap-operatic encounters laden with glowering stares and tearful outbursts.
  20. Tokyo Tribe
    "The Warriors” and the “Mad Max” films will come to mind as you watch Tokyo Tribe, and from scene to scene Mr. Sono’s visual inventiveness and sure hand with action stand up to the comparison. The cumulative effect, however, is numbing.
  21. High-Rise
    The retro-futurist production design is gorgeously awful, the cast is awfully gorgeous, and the dystopian setting is explored with an appropriately Ballardian blend of suavity and aggression. But onscreen, High-Rise is curiously inert. The themes don’t resonate, and the story lags and lumbers.
  22. Lost in Hong Kong
    Perhaps because it tries too hard to be too many things, the movie loses its punch.
  23. Into the Forest
    Ms. Rozema tries to build tension and sustain interest by thickening the atmosphere and layering on details rather than big incidents. Yet while she creates intimacy as well as interiority by visually closing in on each sister...the movie lacks urgency.
  24. Remember
    Christopher Plummer puts on a master class in acting, and his director, Atom Egoyan, delivers one in audience manipulation in Remember.
  25. Flowers of Shanghai
    Lavish in its depiction of surfaces -- clothing, furniture, lighting fixtures -- Flowers of Shanghai proves deficient in its revelation of inner lives.
  26. The Forest
    A decently executed creeper built around a convincing performance by Natalie Dormer.
  27. Therapy for a Vampire
    It has little bite and not nearly enough laughs or thought.
  28. Submerged
    There’s claustrophobia to burn in Steven C. Miller’s Submerged, a modest thriller offering glints of talent amid predictable plot threads.
  29. Dixieland
    This is well-worn territory, and though the two leads are very good, the romance that is supposed to drive the story isn’t particularly well delineated.
  30. Keith Richards: Under the Influence
    You certainly feel as if you were getting to know the man as he really is, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re gaining much insight.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Magnificent Seven
    A gifted director like Mr. Sturges (who also produced) can't be held entirely responsible for this endless dawdling prologue, since William Roberts' scenario increasingly flattens the action with philosophical talk on all sides and some easy clichés.
  32. Bridget Jones's Baby
    Despite an abundance of mostly tepid jokes that keeps the comedic tone at a quiet simmer, Bridget Jones’s Baby doesn’t jell. Ms. Zellweger floats through the picture, charming but strangely detached from her suitors.
  33. The Looking Glass
    The fact that the film’s most resonant and likable portions are those in which nothing actually happens almost too nicely encapsulates why The Looking Glass falls sadly flat throughout much of its running time.
  34. Kingsman: The Golden Circle
    In a movie as happy to resurrect characters as rub them out, nothing is of consequence, and the glibness grows numbing.
  35. The Space Between Us
    The movie is consistently tougher to resist than it might seem.
  36. The Daughter
    The characters don’t have conversations so much as helpfully recite their back stories, and the long-buried secret is soon so obvious that the movie’s last-act hysteria feels forced and a little ridiculous.
  37. Rock in the Red Zone
    Rock in the Red Zone has its best moments when it explores the anxiety of Sderot’s residents and their endurance. It’s the strongest topic here, and the one you’re most sorry to see interrupted when the film inevitably switches over to something else.
  38. Snatched
    Though this movie ostensibly celebrates the spirit of adventure and openness to experience, it takes no risks and blazes no trails. It’s ultimately as complacent, self-absorbed and clueless as its heroine, and not always in an especially amusing way.
  39. Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong
    The two stars are attractive, and Emily Ting, who wrote and directed, makes the city look great, but during their endless strolling Ruby and Josh never get much beyond shallow banter.
  40. Hyena Road
    Refreshingly free of jingoism, that detachment unfortunately winds up working against the movie, which doesn’t engage emotionally.
  41. Sweet Micky for President
    One of the decade’s odder political stories is revisited, without much illumination, in Sweet Micky for President.
  42. Ip Man 3
    Despite Mr. Yen’s impressive physical virtuosity, his stoic, often humorless presence tends to neutralize the emotional temperature.
  43. Yosemite
    Ms. Demeestere’s direction winds up frustratingly splitting the difference between thoughtfully detached and just plain vague.
  44. Lamb
    Mr. Partridge never figures out how to complicate his version and its voices, or maybe doesn’t want to. He softens Lamb and Tommie with tears, safe hugs and averted looks and, once they land in the countryside, mires them in sentimentality.
  45. A Journey Through Time with Anthony
    Offers mild youthful rebellion and even milder youthful ardor.
  46. Rolling Papers
    It’s full of discussion points but lets them go by undiscussed.
  47. My Friend Victoria
    As drifting and dreamy as its searching heroine, My Friend Victoria takes a graceful but unsatisfying stroll through the life and longings of a young black woman in contemporary Paris.
  48. Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker
    The Rise of Skywalker — Episode IX, in case you’ve lost count — is one of the best. Also one of the worst. Perfectly middling. It all amounts to the same thing.
  49. Sky
    This expressionistic portrait of the American West is an oddity that only a director from another country could have conjured.
  50. Sing
    The aggregate effect is like aesthetic insulin shock, albeit from an artificial sweetener.
  51. The Fencer
    The director, Klaus Haro, films the proceedings involvingly enough.... But the movie is almost relentlessly predictable and formulaic — a story of one man’s refusal to conform that dutifully hits all its marks.
  52. Compadres
    Compadres tries to be a lighthearted cross-border buddy film, and sometimes it succeeds. But consistency is a problem — it doesn’t hit those humorous high notes often enough, and when it’s not in the comedic groove, it’s muddy.
  53. Bajirao Mastani
    There’s plenty of story here, but Bajirao Mastani has more visual pop than narrative traction.
  54. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
    It’s an embarrassment of riches, and it’s suffocating.
  55. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
    As written by the TV veteran Robert Carlock, Kim’s rise-and-fade arc is sympathetically rendered, with humor and the urgency of an underhand pitch.
  56. Monster Hunt
    Some of this recalls Stephen Chow’s “Journey to the West,” minus the brilliance.
  57. The Himalayas
    It finds a few moments of sweep and suspense in between grand speeches and reprises of a swollen score.
  58. Keanu
    As the genre machinery chugs along, the bang-bang begins to overwhelm the movie, and the underlying critique gives way to a what-me-worry shrug.
  59. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
    Arthur and Vortigern mix it up amid a lot of shenanigans, detours and filler, some bad, some good and all of it disposable.
  60. Henry Gamble's Birthday Party
    Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party feels sincere but not accomplished, empathetic but not deep.
  61. Bad Hurt
    Throughout, the filmmakers live up to the movie’s title. But as the story comes to a close, they opt to wrap it in comforting cliché, and they turn a miserable but credible viewing experience into a confounding one.
  62. Elvis & Nixon
    Despite Mr. Shannon and Mr. Spacey, who appear to be having a fine time working off each other, the meeting is anticlimactic.
  63. JeruZalem
    The more desperate the characters’ flight becomes, the less interesting the movie grows. It does end with a witty flourish, though — one that makes good use of those glasses.
  64. Saala Khadoos
    Ms. Kongara seems to know the clichés of fighter movies and is mostly unembarrassed to embrace them. That keeps the film humming along, as does Mr. Madhavan, who grows in stature along with Adi.
  65. Complete Unknown
    Complete Unknown is a curious hybrid, teetering between a thriller and a romance only to land in a nebulous spot that is neither.
  66. Frank & Lola
    Frank & Lola proves more about him than her. That’s partly because of the story, partly because the writer-director Matthew Ross doesn’t have a full handle on it or his actors.
  67. The Free World
    The heavy-handed man-beast comparison is one of several grossly overstated themes in a movie that abruptly changes direction as it goes along while taking shortcuts that leave its characters underdeveloped and crucial plot elements barely fleshed out.
  68. Southside with You
    Mr. Tanne has clearly made a close study of his real-life inspirations, yet his movie is soon hostage to the couple’s history. His characters feel on loan and, despite his actors, eventually make for dull company because too many lines and details serve the great-man-to-be story rather than the romance.
  69. Transformers: The Last Knight
    The fifth Transformers movie, The Last Knight, is far from the worst in this continuing experiment in noisy nonsense based on Hasbro toys. That is thanks largely to two words: Anthony Hopkins.
  70. Born in Flames
    Born in Flames, while inventive, is also much too diffuse and overcrowded. Only those who already share Miss Borden's ideas are apt to find her film persuasive.
  71. Jack of the Red Hearts
    Jack of the Red Hearts is so good-hearted it doesn’t want to leave audiences without a glimmer a hope.
  72. Hands of Stone
    Hands of Stone...is absolutely a boxing movie. A corny and sometimes clumsy one, it scatters pleasures here and there, Mr. De Niro’s alert performance among them.
  73. Marinoni: The Fire in the Frame
    A chronicle of obsession ought to provide some insights.
  74. Babe: Pig in the City
    As directed once again by George Miller, Babe remains a cute little porker, but his fanciful new backdrops are less beguiling.
  75. Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life
    The find here is Alexa Nisenson as Georgia, Rafe’s know-it-all little sister, who takes cars out for a spin. She is blessed with the best lines, comic and dramatic, and appears delightfully cognizant of the fact. If only the movie had more of her.
  76. About Scout
    About Scout is another entry in the “charming road movie” genre, one that banks a little too heavily on charm and not enough on story.
  77. Boo! A Madea Halloween
    The whole thing eventually devolves into the maelstrom of reactionary moralizing that is Mr. Perry’s specialty, not that any informed viewer would have reason to expect otherwise
  78. In a Valley of Violence
    Mr. West retains his signature restraint and slow-burn approach to brutality. Missing, however, is his typically skillful manipulation of tension, partly because his tone veers so often from jokey to reverential, from winking at the western to making a sacrament of it.
  79. Thank You for Playing
    If nothing else, it’s evidence that the digital age has opened up new ways to work through grief.
  80. Papa: Hemingway in Cuba
    Bob Yari’s Papa: Hemingway in Cuba is more artifact than art.
  81. Boris Without Béatrice
    Denis Côté’s Boris Without Beatrice appears to have something to say about the hubris of the modern business tycoon, but it never coalesces into more than a self-amused goof.
  82. Life
    As the astronauts contend with airlocks, busted equipment and escape pods, it becomes increasingly difficult to pretend that this isn’t territory where more inventive screenwriters...and stronger visual stylists have gone before.
  83. Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story)
    Bang Gang goes out of its way to avoid stereotyping. Where a Hollywood equivalent would almost certainly punish George, “Bang Gang” refuses to designate clear-cut heroes and villains.
  84. High Strung
    The dialogue may be dire, but the dancing is delightful.
  85. Mad Tiger
    The movie is obviously heartfelt, but the directors, Jonathan Yi and Michael Haertlein, never turn this motley crew into compelling characters.
  86. Puerto Ricans in Paris
    The longtime friends Mr. Guzmán and Mr. Garcia have an unforced chemistry. But the effective jokes land too rarely. You’ll be ready to leave when the trip is over.
  87. Sworn Virgin
    Although Ms. Rohrwacher captures Mark’s uncertain, shifting physicality, the movie doesn’t always succeed in getting inside the character’s head.
  88. Streit's: Matzo and the American Dream
    Despite much talk of diversity and tradition, Mr. Levine has little fresh to say about gentrification issues or documentary storytelling.
  89. Love Thy Nature
    Even when it could be specific, Love Thy Nature isn’t.
  90. Pali Road
    A lot of the weight of selling the story falls on Ms. Chen, and she’s not entirely up to the challenge, but Mr. Lim is able to build suspense anyway.
  91. Viktoria
    As more and more perfect shots drift by, the reality of the characters and their relationships dissipates, and we’re left with just picturesque moods.
  92. Phantom of the Theatre
    By the end, the accelerating plot twists and turns — love, obsession, family obligations, personal honor — become tangled and knotted; a few threads are simply ignored or discarded.
  93. Almost Holy
    A good example of how a charismatic figure doesn’t automatically generate a deep or compelling documentary.
  94. Gurukulam
    While the beauty of the setting is nourishing, without a narrative structure, the disjointed scenes raise questions.
  95. The Land
    As if to personify the movie’s whiplash-inducing split between gloss and grit, the singer Erykah Badu appears as a prostitute — and also contributes a duet with Nas, one of the executive producers, to the soundtrack.
  96. Nerve
    For all its hints at imminent catastrophe, Nerve feels surprisingly tame.
  97. The Shack
    A bit more editing to remove some of the airiness would have made for a better film.
  98. Phantom Boy
    Instead of maintaining an effervescent fizzle, Phantom Boy too frequently sputters piffle.
  99. Life, Animated
    Belaboring the cartoon connection, the director leaves the family struggles that enrich Mr. Suskind’s 2014 book of the same title stubbornly veiled.
  100. Denial
    The absence of an emotional catharsis in the film, efficiently directed by Mick Jackson (“The Bodyguard,” “Temple Grandin”) from a screenplay by the British playwright David Hare, leaves a frustrating emptiness at its center.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »