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. Emperor
    Okeniyi has a strong presence that conveys a genuine moral authority.
  2. The Crimes That Bind
    Roth is never less than a treat as a woman whose veil of class and privilege is being slowly lifted to reveal her misplaced loyalties. The Crimes That Bind might feel leaden, but Alicia’s transformation feels lighter than air.
  3. Eternal Beauty
    For the first half-hour or so of Eternal Beauty, Roberts and Hawkins take an unusual and intermittently illuminating approach to depicting mental illness. . . . But the movie doesn’t keep up its good work.
  4. Rising Phoenix
    By avoiding complexity, Rising Phoenix preserves its inspiring mood, but offers only a platform for champions who already dominate the arena.
  5. Road to Singapore
    The Road to Singapore is cobbled with good intentions, is blessed intermittently with smooth-running strips of amiable nonsense, but is altogether too uneven for regular use.
  6. Chuck Berry: The Original King of Rock ‘n’ Roll
    Leaving aside its cheesy, colorized dramatizations, Jon Brewer’s movie offers a strangely bifurcated portrait.
  7. Jack Frost
    Jack Frost is so sugarcoated that it makes other recent efforts in this genre look blisteringly honest. On the other hand, it's just cheerful and bogus enough to keep children reasonably entertained.
  8. Rent-A-Pal
    Eventually the movie paints itself into a corner then sinks into grisly sludge. Stevenson’s technical skill can’t save him from a trite worldview.
  9. Black Boys
    When does the eye of the documentarian obscure the sight? The Peacock film Black Boys examines the beauty of Black boys but suffers from a failure to police its own gaze.
  10. Red, White & Wasted
    Distracted by Confederate flags and twerking women, the directors, Andrei Bowden Schwartz and Sam Jones, make only a halfhearted attempt to illuminate a disappearing subculture.
  11. Freaky
    Vaughn and Newton prove remarkably effective at selling the benefits of their alternate packaging. Their efforts, however, are too often diluted by the film’s lazy plotting and Millie’s hackneyed emotional baggage.
  12. Written on the Wind
    The trouble with this romantic picture—among other minor things, including Mr. Stack's absurd performance and another even more so by Miss Malone—is that nothing really happens, the complications within the characters are never clear and the sloppy, self-pitying fellow at the center of the whole thing is a bore.
  13. Sun Children
    Majid Majidi’s latest feature doesn’t lack in style or charm, using a child’s perspective — a staple in Iranian cinema — to locate beauty and hope in a cynical world. As is often the case with the director’s work, however, precious visuals come at the cost of narrative complexity.
  14. Children of Heaven
    In Children of Heaven, life is sweet despite countless hardships, and no reality beyond the economic intrudes upon a fairy tale atmosphere. Only through heavy-handed emphasis does the quest for new sneakers take on any greater meaning.
  15. Apples
    The movie never manages to hit above a dim emotional pitch, and a final-act awakening lands with a shrug.
  16. Penguin Bloom
    Gamely navigating a script that ushers her from seaside despair to hilltop elation, Watts gives a touching and blessedly understated performance, assisted by Sam Chiplin’s warmly expansive cinematography. As for the bundle of scene-stealing magpies (patiently trained by Paul Mander) who collectively bring Penguin to life, they’re a delight.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Beau Geste
    The only thing really wrong with this tame little film, based on a prize-winning children's novel by Joseph Krumgold, is that nothing happens.
  18. The Last Shift
    So far, so good, in the mismatched maybe-eventual-buddy-comedy department. But the movie, written and directed by Andrew Cohn, wants a deeper dimension, and in pursuing that, goes wrong.
  19. Misbehaviour
    Like most commercial movies about feminist history, though, it also has a toothless vision of protest and empowerment that’s doomed to fail its subject because its makers don’t (can’t) risk making the audience uncomfortable.
  20. Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story
    While the documentary successfully champions stunt women’s dignity in the workplace, it lacks finesse — failing to showcase their talents in a way that would be exciting for an audience outside the industry.
  21. The Artist's Wife
    The best, perhaps the only reason to see The Artist’s Wife is Lena Olin, an actor incapable of giving a so-so performance.
  22. Over the Moon
    Over the Moon deserves credit for launching an unflinching lesson about grief. If only it had taken a different flight path.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ain't Misbehavin'
    The music is tired and the dances are flaccid repetitions of hundreds of other movie dances. But when the summer nights afflict you like wet wool, and the theatres beckon with their super-cooled zephyrs, Ain't Misbehavin' will fill the double bill. At worst it's a soporific.
  24. Myth of a Colorblind France
    This is a huge subject, and the film, which favors anecdotes over a macro treatment, doesn’t have much structure to speak of. It consists of one brief profile after another — a strategy that is efficient for delivering information, but that leaves Myth of a Colorblind France dry and disarrayed as filmmaking.
  25. The True Adventures of Wolfboy
    No one could accuse these adventures of being conventional.
  26. The Curse of Frankenstein
    This one should be cold-cuts for old-timers who remember Boris Karloff as the get of Frankenstein, but it may tittilate the blissful youngsters.
  27. The Great American Lie
    The documentary fares better when it cuts the interviews and simply follows working class people in their daily lives.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Horror of Dracula
    Perhaps the constant hunt for hemoglobin is slowing our villain down, for this time there are strong indications that the once gory plot is showing definite signs of anemia.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Mummy
    For a superior version of a nearly identical horror yarn, with a little style and imagination, catch the 1932 Boris Karloff version of The Mummy now floating around on television. The new one just lumbers.
  30. Siempre, Luis
    The HBO documentary Siempre, Luis wants to be about a political lion of a father, but it ends up more enamored with his charmed son.
  31. Aggie
    However great Gund’s influence on other collectors and philanthropists has been, and however progressive and righteous her advocacy for racial justice, Aggie doesn’t match her originality with an accordingly innovative approach.
  32. Triggered
    Melding “Saw” with “The Hunger Games,” Triggered wins no points for originality or distinctiveness, not least of its cookie-cutter characters. But its relentlessness, and the gusto with which it embraces its mandate to make a mess, is tough to resist.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bug
    Bug is decidedly poisonous. It is not simply a scary picture, nor simply a violent one. It is a cruel picture.
  34. Pink Skies Ahead
    It is not without tender or enjoyable moments — that’s the beauty of a formula — but there’s a tonal imbalance of comedy and drama. The two constantly deflate each other.
  35. The Hidden
    The movie is mostly a series of automobile chases through Los Angeles, but there is also some humor.
  36. Black Beauty
    Avis loses the novel’s sincerity by watering down Sewell’s animal welfare plea. In this update, the humans are not as villainous. Beauty is not as prominent. And the novel’s mustang spirit diminishes into a ho-hum horse movie.
  37. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
    The elaborate ruses of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm left me neither entertained nor enraged, but simply resigned.
  38. Mosul
    Instant death lurks around every corner, and the movie doesn’t shy from killing off major characters. But it does play like an odd match of form and content: a story of single-minded humanitarianism framed as a relentless action spectacular.
  39. Some Came Running
    It is all very complex and confused. Indeed, it is so oddly garbled that John Patrick and Arthur Sheekman, who did the script, have to go for a melodramatic shooting to bring it all to a tolerable end.
  40. The Night
    The repetition of the visions and the film’s deliberate pace gives the audience too much time to guess which betrayals haunt Babak and Neda, and this lack of emotional suspense hampers the horror.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
    The movie's main problem is that the protagonist - the dead head - is a bore.
  42. Funny Boy
    Mehta’s elaborate long takes contribute to the general sense of tumult, but the film never fully shakes the sense of stating the obvious.
  43. The White Tiger
    The characters don’t quite come to life. They aren’t trapped by prescribed social roles so much as by the programmatic design of the narrative, which insists it is showing things as they really are. If it wasn’t so insistent, it might be more convincing.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Harry and Tonto
    The narrative of this sympathetic movie wobbles on the edge of sentimentality, though there are only a few sticky moments. But—unlike the novel, which moved swiftly—it has been directed at far too slow a pace, which means that the comic possibilities and the social comment have been diminished.
  45. The Endless Trench
    It’s fertile thematic ground, but as in most survival movies, showy feats of filmmaking take precedence over insight or revelation.
  46. The United States vs. Billie Holiday
    Like nearly everything else in this feverish, frustrating movie, the political themes are handled with maximal melodrama and minimal clarity.
  47. Supervixens
    It's full of the old Meyer preoccupations — insatiable women, impotent men, lonely desert landscapes in which the promise of sex is the only reliable compass. Yet something has been lost. Could it be innocence?
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Killer Elite
    Mr. Peckinpah is mannered and inventive, and these qualities both give the film its strengths and undermine it horrendously. Cleverness, for one thing, gets in the way of comprehensibility.
  49. Monsoon
    The ambience doesn’t register with full force, or do the heavy lifting entrusted to it. Monsoon finally tips over the line that separates minimalism from a not-fully-developed movie.
  50. The Princess Switch: Switched Again
    Yes, The Princess Switch: Switched Again is syrupy, and no, beyond its central gimmick, there is little substance to be found. But the same could be said for many a beloved romance film or holiday movie.
  51. Dolly Parton’s Christmas On the Square
    It’s bad, the sort of bad that knows what it is — campy rather than camp. “Campy” is camp with a diploma and a martini. And “Christmas on the Square” is a drunk.
  52. Transhood
    With so much ground to cover, the scenes’ shortness can feel unsatisfying and even occasionally facile. Though conversations between parents and their children are designed to be emotional beats, there’s a peculiar staginess that comes off as jarring at times.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Red Tent
    Despite the false bid for suspense in its framing device and its several ritual claims to excitement, it finally lacks even the interest of its own events. For this, I think the director is very much at fault.
  54. White Christmas
    Everyone works hard at the business of singing, dancing and cracking jokes, but the stuff that they work with is minor.
  55. A Cops and Robbers Story
    The repetition of verbal and visual storytelling points to the limited scope of this film. A Cops and Robbers Story explores Pegues’s split loyalties, but the talking head interviews tend to isolate characters whose very intimacy is the subject of the film.
  56. Soros
    Even as hagiography, Soros is unfocused.
  57. 69: The Saga of Danny Hernandez
    Gandhi’s insights into Tekashi69’s psyche are limited, and some of his conclusions about the disgraced rapper’s character are bizarre.
  58. Family Business
    The three stars are good actors, but they have nothing much to work with. Their biggest challenge is to make the audience believe they are blood relatives, a question that would be quickly dismissed if the script were more compelling.
  59. Five Days One Summer
    Most of the movie is simply about mountain climbing, something that is undoubtedly more thrilling to attempt than it is to watch.
  60. Boss Level
    Roy grows as a killer over the course of the movie, which involves an increasingly tedious amount of repetitive violence played for laughs — he’s like Wile E. Coyote, brushing himself off after falling off a cliff or being blown up.
  61. Disco
    By the time it is over, Disco has crossed the line that separates being productively ambiguous from being simply cryptic.
  62. Reminiscence
    Highfalutin, lightly enjoyable mush, Reminiscence is one of those speculative fictions that are at once undernourished and overcooked. It makes no sense (despite all the explaining), but it draws you in with genre beats, pretty people and the professional polish of its machined parts.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    On Moonlight Bay
    Although it strives to develop a genuine nostalgic mood, all that On Moonlight Bay seems to create, sadly enough, is the feeling that this film format is old hat.
  64. Just Cause
    Just Cause has been directed so antiseptically that it lacks all sense of lifelike detail. Despite good looks and some ostentatious technical polish, it offers a textbook example of direction (by Arne Glimcher) that's utterly out of sync with its subject matter.
  65. The Other
    Thomas Tryon, the actor (The Cardinal), wrote the screen adaptation of his best-selling novel, which is in almost every way more precise, more complex and less ambiguous than the "Summer of '35" sort of movie Robert Mulligan has made from it.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Twins of Evil
    The rest of the costumed crew, led by that veteran horror hand, Peter Cushing, as the twins' witchhunting uncle, who chases the fanged Count and his retinue, hardly give Twins of Evil a good name.
  67. Cahill U.S. Marshal
    Cahill, United States Marshal was directed by Andrew V. McLaglen and written by Harry Julian Fink and Rita M. Fink. Perhaps recognizing the new limitations of their star, they spend a good deal of time trying to turn a conventional Western into a children-in-peril movie.
  68. Crisis
    The film is well-paced but often strains credulity.
  69. Blizzard of Souls
    “Blizzard” is almost immaculately shot and edited, but its good-taste approach to warfare, along with its treacly music score by Lolita Ritmanis, underscores what seems its main reason for being: a relentless “Go, Latvia!” agenda — which has extended to its marketing here.
  70. Indian Summer
    A decently acted, extremely mild romantic comedy that you may think you've seen before, although you haven't.
  71. Babylon
    There isn’t much going on other than the spectacle of its busily spinning parts, which might be tolerable if the first two hours weren’t so unrelievedly unmodulated, with everything synced to the same monotonous, accelerated pace. This hyperventilated quality initially serves the story and Chazelle’s concept of the era’s delirious excess, but the lack of modulation rapidly becomes enervating. After a while, it feels punishing.
  72. Finding 'Ohana
    A Gen Z crusade, hyper-aware of its Indiana Jonesian influences, is an entertaining conceit. But the plodding pace of Jude Weng’s film, along with its shabby dialogue, distracts from the more emotionally intricate subplot of the mother returning home to her father after her husband’s death.
  73. Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man
    Mr. Rourke and Mr. Johnson handle their roles with more ease and humor than can be accommodated by a movie so stuffed with mindless fistfights, gunfights, helicopter chases, explosions and leaps from tall buildings.
  74. Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy
    Racial injustice, economic inequities, police corruption, media ethics and foreign-policy scandals are all crammed — a bit too cursorily — into Stanley Nelson’s brisk primer on the 1980s crack epidemic.
  75. The Map of Tiny Perfect Things
    Last year, “Palm Springs” proved that the time-loop conceit from “Groundhog Day” still had some laughs in it. The Map of Tiny Perfect Things shows it’s a perfectly fine pretext for teenage treacle.
  76. Killing Zoe
    Mr. Avary's debut feature, fiercely ambitious but way out of control, is an orgiastically violent exercise in hand-me-down nihilism, much more firmly rooted in cinematic posturing than in real pain.
  77. M.C. Escher: Journey To Infinity
    Whether anyone else, including Escher, would have done a more engaging job is debatable, but this movie, directed by Robin Lutz, offers an only intermittently satisfying look at his interests and methods. Don’t call it art; Escher felt his output hovered between art and mathematics.
  78. Dead Pigs
    It’s a tonal wild ride with eccentric characters, neon-lit settings and elaborately absurd detours. Unfortunately, the ripped-from-the-headlines meat of Dead Pigs gets lost in these affectations.
  79. Nightmare Alley
    Del Toro is a world builder, but he can have a tough time bringing his creations to life, which is the case here despite the hard work of his fine cast. The carnival is diverting, and del Toro’s fondness for its denizens helps put a human face on these purported freaks. But once he’s finished with the preliminaries, he struggles to make the many striking parts cohere into a living, breathing whole.
  80. Dr. Giggles
    The screenplay is stitched together from variations on cliches used by or about the medical community.
  81. Look Who's Talking Now
    Like an over-dressed Christmas tree, Look Who's Talking Now is a movie so eager to shine that it arrives draped in several layers of sentimental tinsel and cutesy-pie decorations.
  82. Son of the South
    Accepted on its terms, the film does a reasonably absorbing job of dramatizing how Zellner’s convictions strengthened, pulling him away from the security of inaction.
  83. The Reunited States
    Topical in broad strokes yet frustratingly allergic to particulars
  84. Softie
    Soko gets credit for not softening Mwangi’s landing, and the outcome of the election is dropped as nearly an afterthought to his valiant efforts. But the on-the-ground campaigning and complex history could use a better shape than the film’s fits and starts.
  85. Censor
    A homage of sorts to the low-budget trash of the period — and a mordantly humorous jab at its excesses — Censor gazes on movie history with style and commitment, but little apparent purpose beyond simulation.
  86. Prisoners of the Ghostland
    Sono’s visuals, sizzlingly realized by the cinematographer Sohei Tanikawa, lack neither brio nor imagination. But the ludicrousness of the plot severs any emotional connection to a story whose apocalyptic stylings (the Ghostland of the title is a nuclear wasteland) gesture toward Japan and America’s painful history.
  87. Alive
    Alive remains remarkably colorless, despite its difficult subject and the harrowing adventure it describes.
  88. Memphis Belle
    The direction by Michael Caton-Jones, the Englishman whose first theatrical feature was Scandal, is undistinguished here, but the material is not great.
  89. Fatal Instinct
    Carl Reiner's hit-or-miss film noir parody, a collection of gags that vary much too wildly in terms of timing and wit. All that hold this comedy together are a playful outlook and a conviction that detective stories are intrinsically funny, especially if the detective is as much of a blockhead as Ned Ravine.
  90. Nowhere to Run
    Though Mr. Van Damme's collaborators have become more upscale and mainstream, Nowhere to Run remains your basic exercise in kick-him-in-the-groin, stab-him-with-a-pitchfork cinema politics.
  91. Another Stakeout
    Another Stakeout is made for the kind of person whom television drives out of the house to the movies but who doesn't want surprises when he arrives at the theater. It's big-screen television fare.
  92. Army of the Dead
    With its sticky pacing and divinely unsubtle soundtrack (though The Cranberries’ “Zombie” is always excusable), Army of the Dead is an ungainly, yet weirdly mesmeric lump of splatter-pop filmmaking.
  93. Kid 90
    If the unremarkableness of the moments captured in Moon Frye’s footage is refreshing, it also makes for a somewhat insipid film.
  94. Language Lessons
    The twists in the story are meant to raise the emotional stakes, but they have the opposite effect, undermining the credibility of the premise. The harder the movie leans into its own cleverness, the more it exposes itself as a diverting but ultimately unconvincing exercise.
  95. To Olivia
    How parents mourn a child’s death together — or apart — is among life’s aching mysteries. The director John Hay plumbs the poignancy well but avoids any tussling with Dahl’s legacy, tarnished by antisemitic statements.
  96. Creation Stories
    “Stories” does have a handful of funny and affecting scenes. But it’s most interesting when McGee, after sobering up, makes an ill-advised alliance with Tony Blair.
  97. Metro
    But long before the last car has been flipped, this flurry of flying metal has lost its edge. The vehicular pirouettes and ski jumps are so exaggerated that they correspond neither to the urban geography nor to the laws of physics. And the jiggling camera can't blur the careless mechanical stitching in a sequence that tries to make up for in length what it lacks in inventiveness.
  98. Gustav Stickley: American Craftsman
    The movie itself, directed by Herb Stratford, is so dull and unimaginative in its presentation — talking heads, an overused score that might as well have been downloaded from a free database — that it makes for an unfortunate match of subject matter and form.
  99. The Grass Is Greener
    Miss Kerr and Miss Simmons look attractive and Mr. Grant and Mr. Mitchum try hard to create the illusion of being moved by love and passion. But they both appear mechanical and bored. [24 Dec 1960, p.8]
    • The New York Times
  100. Six Minutes to Midnight
    The double-crosses are depicted by the director Andy Goddard with better-than-average craft, but the more the movie leans into old suspense conventions the more interest it loses, alas.
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