The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,278 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: 9,380 out of 20278
  2. Mixed: 8,434 out of 20278
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20278
20278 movie reviews
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  1. Stranger Things
    Something unexpectedly profound emerges from the flimsiest of stories in Stranger Things, a drama so modest and trusting of its two leads that any directing flourishes might have shattered its spell.
  2. Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner
    An indelible, gripping documentary portrait.
  3. Finding Dory
    What “Dory” lacks in dazzling originality it more than makes up for in warmth, charm and good humor.
  4. This Ain't California
    Smartly incorporating Sasa Zivkovic’s sweet and simple animation, as well as an exhilarating, punk-infused soundtrack, Mr. Persiel extends the film’s appeal beyond hard-core skaters.
  5. Far Out Isn't Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story
    A record of a man’s tormented youth, his broad artistic impulses and the price he paid for following them.
  6. Shadow Dancer
    The movie takes no political positions. With an icy detachment, it peers through the fog of war and examines the slippery military intelligence on both sides to portray a world steeped in secrecy, deception and paranoia.
  7. Laurence Anyways
    A big, beautiful, rambling immersion in a passion whose heat is fueled primarily by its impossibility.
  8. Sun Don't Shine
    This confident first feature from the actor Amy Seimetz is much more invested in atmosphere than in plot.
  9. Computer Chess
    Peculiar and sneakily brilliant.
  10. Nebraska
    This is a comedy, with plenty of acutely funny lines, a handful of sharp sight gags and a few minutes of pure, perfect madcap. But a grim, unmistakable shadow falls across its wintry landscape.
  11. Memories Look at Me
    A slight yet profound exploration of generational choices and our fear of living our parents’ lives.
  12. Europa Report
    Banishing showy effects and cheap scares, the Ecuadorean director Sebastián Cordero has meticulously shaped a number of sci-fi clichés — from the botched spacewalk to the communications breakdown — into a wondering contemplation of our place in the universe.
  13. Nancy, Please
    It’s a brutally unsympathetic portrait of situational anxiety that withholds comfort from Paul and viewer alike, and Mr. Semans refuses to relent.
  14. Bastards
    The story grips you entirely even if Ms. Denis’s worldview here finally feels like a tomb: terrifying, pitiless, inevitable.
  15. Borgman
    That Borgman restrains itself from turning into a full-scale horror movie makes it all the more unsettling, although it has its bumpy moments.
  16. The Immigrant
    The film is earnestly and unabashedly melodramatic to an extent that may baffle audiences accustomed to clever, knowing historical fictions. But it also has a depth and purity of feeling that makes other movies feel timid and small by comparison.
  17. American Mary
    This film — the second from the Soskas, and shot in their hometown, Vancouver, British Columbia — combines gore, quiet dread, feminist conviction and a visual classicism, often using a red palette, with impressive, unbelabored dexterity.
  18. Call Me Kuchu
    This is a scary but inspiring film with real heroes and villains.
  19. Dirty Wars
    [A] pessimistic, grimly outraged and utterly riveting documentary.
  20. You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet
    You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet is a sly, elegant meditation on the relationship between reality and artifice. But it is a thought-experiment driven above all by emotion.
  21. Life Is Sweet
    Life Is Sweet, a title that should not be taken as irony, demands that the audience accept its meandering manner without expectations of the big dramatic event or the boffo laugh. It is very funny, but without splitting the sides.
  22. Blackfish
    Unapologetically designed both to inform and affect, Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s delicately lacerating documentary, Blackfish, uses the tragic tale of a single whale and his human victims as the backbone of a hypercritical investigation into the marine-park giant SeaWorld Entertainment.
  23. Fame High
    Fame High, a timely plug for arts education, does what its subjects hope to do: it opens our hearts and entertains with truth.
  24. Kill Your Darlings
    Mr. Krokidas deftly shows how the ambition to write is entangled with other impulses.
  25. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
    Steven Spielberg's giant, spectacular Close Encounters of the Third Kind...is the best—the most elaborate—1950's science fiction movie ever made, a work that borrows its narrative shape and its concerns from those earlier films, but enhances them with what looks like the latest developments in movie and space technology.
  26. Into the Woods
    Into the Woods, the splendid Disney screen adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical, infuses new vitality into the tired marketing concept of entertainment for “children of all ages.” That usually translates to mean only children and their doting parents. But with Into the Woods, you grow up with the characters, young and old, in a lifelong process of self-discovery.
  27. Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction
    Matching her subject’s lackadaisical rhythms, Ms. Huber has shaped an unusually poetic biopic.
  28. The Crash Reel
    An engrossing, unsettling documentary.
  29. Still Mine
    The film’s vision of a long-married couple keeping each other going with mutual love and support, and a shared resistance to outside interference, is more vital than a thousand movies populated by hot, squirming teenagers.
  30. Terms and Conditions May Apply
    The title of Terms and Conditions May Apply is unlikely to excite, but the content of this quietly blistering documentary should rile even the most passive viewer.
  31. Big Words
    Big Words is an engrossing, coming-of-middle-age drama that shows how disappointment can fester and derail a life. By the end, hope and change seem possible but far from guaranteed.
  32. The Servant
    Its account of patrician degradation will cause you to blink your eyes. Although it is only fiction, it wafts a thick and acrid air of smoldering truth.
  33. Colossus
    A mindblower of a mockumentary, Colossus will leave you reeling in the best of ways, dizzy from a rock ’n’ roll Tilt-A-Whirl that swirls with duplicity and hilarity.
  34. Snowpiercer
    Though the movie is playfully postmodern in its pastiche of styles and its mingling of sincerity and self-consciousness, there is also something solidly old-fashioned about the way it tells its story.
  35. Our Children
    Much like the Dardennes, Mr. Joachim holds to the truth that the personal is political, which is why this isn’t simply a movie about a woman and an unspeakable crime, but also an exploration of the power and cruelty that brought her to that very dark place.
  36. 99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film
    The variety of physical perspectives lends a vivid you-are-there aspect to this record of the Zuccotti Park protest in New York in 2011.
  37. Mother of George
    This is not a fable of assimilation or alienation, but rather the keenly observed story of two people seeking guidance in painful and complicated circumstances.
  38. Foxcatcher
    Mr. Miller does his finest work with his three superb leads.
  39. Il Futuro
    Ms. Scherson’s style — backed wholeheartedly by the cool cinematography of Ricardo de Angelis — may value mood over information, but it’s the perfect vehicle for a portrait of two damaged souls grasping for a security they no longer possess.
  40. Get On Up
    Like its gyrating, spasmodic staccato beats, Get On Up refuses to stand still. It whirls and does splits and jumps, with leaps around in time and changes in tempo that are jarring and abrupt and that usually feel just right.
  41. All Is Bright
    A sardonic, smart screwball comedy.
  42. Palo Alto
    What tethers the movie and especially April and Teddy is how Ms. Coppola captures that exquisitely tender, moving moment between fragile, self-interested youth and tentatively more outwardly aware adulthood, a coming into consciousness that she expresses through their broken sentences, diverted glances and abrupt turns.
  43. Philomena
    Even through improbable moments and abrupt changes of pace and tone, Ms. Dench and Mr. Coogan hold the movie together.
  44. The Unknown Known
    The film is a cat-and-mouse game in which each player thinks he’s the cat, making it both thrilling and disconcerting to watch. It is also a nature documentary about behavior at the very top of the imperial food chain and a detective story about the search for a mystery that is hidden in plain sight.
  45. Bridegroom
    What Bridegroom celebrates is not simply gay rights; it’s the human spirit.
  46. Let the Fire Burn
    Let the Fire Burn relentlessly sustains its tragic momentum.
  47. A River Changes Course
    This human story is profound enough to stand on its own.
  48. Symphony of the Soil
    Infused with an infectious love for its subject, Symphony of the Soil presents a wondrous world of critters and bacteria, mulch and manure.
  49. Blood Brother
    A stirring documentary directed with narrative depth and unguarded heart.
  50. When I Walk
    Astonishingly, this is neither as depressing nor as arm-twistingly uplifting as you might expect. Mr. DaSilva’s experience behind a camera shows in his brisk pacing, clear narrative structure and the awareness that a story of sickness needs lighthearted distractions.
  51. Musicwood
    Merging the sustainability worries of guitar enthusiasts and environmentalists with the hard-cash concerns of logging corporations and Native American land developers, Maxine Trump’s thoughtful documentary wrests clarity from complexity.
  52. Sweet Dreams
    The sibling directors Lisa and Rob Fruchtman have made a nuanced and deftly edited film about a complex issue.
  53. Faust
    The movie expands in its frame, surpassing simple comprehension and continuing to grow in your mind — and perhaps to blow it — long after it’s over.
  54. Paradise: Hope
    Instead of being contemptuous and sardonic, the portrait of inchoate adolescent longing in Paradise: Hope is poignant.
  55. Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
    Mr. Abrams may be as worshipful as any Star Wars obsessive, but in The Force Awakens he’s made a movie that goes for old-fashioned escapism even as it presents a futuristic vision of a pluralistic world that his audience already lives in. He hasn’t made a film only for true believers; he has made a film for everyone (well, almost).
  56. Assault on Precinct 13
    Assault on Precinct 13 is a much more complex film than Mr. Carpenter's Halloween, though it's not really about anything more complicated than a scare down the spine. A lot of its eerie power comes from the kind of unexplained, almost supernatural events one expects to find in a horror movie but not in a melodrama of this sort.
  57. The Last of the Unjust
    “Shoah” remains a heroic reckoning with the limits of collective understanding, but The Last of the Unjust is something smaller, stranger and more paradoxical: the portrait of an individual whose actions still defy comprehension, and the self-portrait of an artist consumed by the past.
  58. Ernest & Célestine
    Mostly, Ernest & Celestine is an ode to the happiness that comes from being with those different from us.
  59. Beyond the Lights
    Beyond the Lights may be a fantasy — movies about love, like songs about love, tend to fall into that category — but it is an uncommonly smart and honest fantasy.
  60. Visitors
    Time slows to a near-standstill as the film peers into humanity’s troubled soul, glimpsed through the individual faces, which sometimes appear to be studying us as intently as we are studying them.
  61. Trainwreck
    What’s energizing and exciting about Amy, especially when compared with the sexless cuties populating rom-coms, in which female pleasure is often expressed through shopping, is that her erotic appetites aren’t problems that she needs to narratively solve and vanquish.
  62. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
    What makes the material still feel personal — other than the yearslong investment and love that transform entertainments into fan communities — is the combination of Katniss and Ms. Lawrence, who have become a perfect fit.
  63. Clouds of Sils Maria
    The three women in Clouds of Sils Maria love, talk and move, move, move, sharing lives, trading roles and performing parts. The lives they lead are messy and indeterminate, but each woman’s life belongs to her.
  64. Eden
    Restrained but never tentative, remote yet enormously affecting, the movie’s evocation of artistic compulsion is accomplished with confidence and verve.
  65. Dear White People
    You want to see this movie, and you will want to talk about it afterward, even if the conversation feels a little awkward. If it doesn’t, you’re doing it wrong. There is great enjoyment to be found here, and very little comfort.
  66. Happy Christmas
    More than in any of his previous films, Mr. Swanberg and his cast have refined a seemingly effortless style of semi-improvised storytelling so natural that it barely seems scripted. Life just happens.
  67. Whiplash
    It may get a few things wrong, but it aims at, and finally achieves, an authenticity at once more exalted and more primal than mere verisimilitude.
  68. The Guest
    Mr. Stevens’s watchful restraint gives the early scenes a slow burn and a sinister glaze.
  69. Papirosen
    But instead of a dignified stroll down genealogy lane, Mr. Solnicki has made a sparking, gossipy soap opera that’s riddled with emotion and stuffed with strong characters.
  70. Kids for Cash
    Carefully assembled and soberly presented, Robert May’s Kids for Cash takes a lacerating look at America’s juvenile justice system.
  71. In the Heat of the Night
    But here Norman Jewison has taken a hard, outspoken script, prepared by Stirling Silliphant from an undistinguished novel by John Ball, and, with stinging performances contributed by Rod Steiger as the chief of police and Sidney Poitier as the detective, he has turned it into a film that has the look and sound of actuality and the pounding pulse of truth.
  72. The Overnighters
    A blue-collar meditation on the meaning of community and the imperative of compassion, one that endures even as an unexpectedly prurient drama unfolds at its center.
  73. Blind
    Blind evokes a dreamy, dour fusion of Charlie Kaufman and Ingmar Bergman. Its few flashes of wry humor are outweighed by mystically beautiful images.
  74. Starred Up
    Though it is, finally, an affecting story of two damaged men bound by blood and something like love (and also a thrillerish catalog of double crosses and shifting allegiances), it is, above all, a study in the patterns of chaos that govern penitentiary life.
  75. '71
    Mr. Demange makes his feature directing debut with ’71, but he already knows how to move bodies through space and the complex choreography that he’s worked out in this movie is a thing of joy.
  76. Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
    On a deeper level, Shoot Me is an unflinchingly honest examination of a woman who is aware that the end is approaching.
  77. Mistaken for Strangers
    A tale of two brothers, one band and a boatload of psychological baggage, Mistaken for Strangers is, like its maker, scruffy, undisciplined and eager to be loved. The big surprise is how easy it is to comply.
  78. It Felt Like Love
    A mood poem to summer loving and sexual awakening, It Felt Like Love powerfully evokes a time when flesh is paramount, and peer behavior is the standard by which we judge our own.
  79. Tess
    A lovely, lyrical, unexpectedly delicate movie. [12 Dec 1980, p.C8]
    • The New York Times
  80. Fatal Assistance
    A potent, persuasive and quietly furious documentary.
  81. Buzzard
    With its casual deadpan attitude, Buzzard offers a nightmare portrait of arrested development and anomie for the age of inequality.
  82. Anita
    Anita is an important historical document about an event that prompted a larger cultural conversation about sexual harassment. But, perhaps more important, it conveys Ms. Hill’s journey from an accuser alone to an activist who shares with, and listens to, others.
  83. The Peanuts Movie
    The Peanuts Movie may be simultaneously the most charming and the most daring experiment in human genetics ever conducted. At issue is whether the character summaries and back stories of fictional pop-culture figures can be passed from one generation to the next solely through DNA.
  84. Hide Your Smiling Faces
    As the local boys (there are no girls) explore the natural world in summer, this gorgeously photographed movie bombards you with imagined scents of ripeness and decay.
  85. Tom at the Farm
    Wildly entertaining, sexy and beautifully shot in the Canadian heartland.
  86. Ape
    A biting, sometimes droll look at the allure of humiliation, Ape appears simple, but its underlying machinery is joltingly clever.
  87. Withnail and I
    Bracing...Withnail and I isn't social history. It's about growing up, almost as if by accident. It's also genuinely funny.
  88. The Walk
    Almost magically, The Walk transforms itself into a beguiling caper movie, full of comic energy and nimble ingenuity.
  89. Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia
    Heavily seasoned with epigrams worthy of Oscar Wilde, this entertaining documentary portrays Vidal as a pessimistic political prophet with streaks of paranoia and misanthropy, but a truth teller nonetheless.
  90. Wild
    In its thrilling disregard for the conventions of commercial cinematic storytelling, Wild reveals what some of us have long suspected: that plot is the enemy of truth, and that images and emotions can carry meaning more effectively than neatly packaged scenes or carefully scripted character arcs.
  91. Goodbye to Language 3D
    It is baffling and beautiful, a flurry of musical and literary snippets arrayed in counterpoint to a series of brilliantly colored and hauntingly evocative pictures.
  92. It Follows
    It Follows recycles familiar teenage horror tropes — a girl alone in a house, evil forces banging on a door — but its mood is dreamy. Seldom do you feel manipulated by exploitative formulas. The violence, when it comes, is sudden, and the camera doesn’t linger over the gore.
  93. Girlhood
    Even as she stops at familiar stations on the road to maturity — problems at home and school, new friendships and first love — Ms. Sciamma revels in the risky, reckless exuberance of adolescence and in the sheer joy of filming it.
  94. The Blue Room
    Mr. Amalric, who directed this dark, delectable, shivery tale, adapting it from the Georges Simenon novel, sets its uneasy, dank mood with energetic economy.
  95. The Pawnbroker
    Remarkable...[a] most uncommon film, which projects a disagreeable subject with power and cogency.
  96. Jauja
    The rounded-off corners of the almost-square frames evoke early movies and antique photographs, and there is wit and mischief in the way Mr. Alonso plays with the relationship between what we see, what we don’t see and what we expect to see.
  97. Hoop Dreams
    Hoop Dreams affirms the role of film as a medium for exploring social issues. And like any important documentary, this one raises crucial questions beyond what is on screen.
  98. Wrinkles
    Unfolding in simple yet wonderfully expressive hand-drawn frames, the film’s unsparingly observant plot depicts the slide into senility with empathy and imagination.
  99. White God
    In classic narrative fashion, Mr. Mundruczo works the setup like a burlesque fan dancer, teasing out the reveal bit by bit.
  100. 2 Autumns, 3 Winters
    The wistful, overarching theme is the passing of time in the lives of young adults, aware of growing older, who seek to ground themselves in relationships and work, but relationships most of all. The movie reminds you with a series of gentle nudges that whether you want it to or not, the future happens.
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