The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
For 20,269 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 20269
  2. Mixed: 8,428 out of 20269
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20269
20269 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. As Far as I Can Walk
    Exceptionally well-crafted and anchored by moving performances from Koma and Mensah-Offei, the film is, in one sense, a great work about that basic human desire to long for something better, and the heartbreak that often comes with it.
  2. Millie Lies Low
    In the end, the movie far too easily waves away the potential interpersonal damage Millie has caused.
  3. Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken
    Not even the matriarchal link at the story’s center feels satisfying, its good intention strangled by the plotty chaos.
  4. Nimona
    Attention has been paid; it’s just not equally distributed. The tone is uneasy teetering on anarchic, veering from giddily moronic one-liners to — more shockingly — a climax with deep empathy and visual awe.
  5. The Passengers of the Night
    It’s an inviting, paradigmatic story of female self-discovery and empowerment, so it’s too bad that the movie’s hold on you proves far less firm than Gainsbourg’s.
  6. Umberto Eco - A Library of the World
    Exploring fictional worlds with Eco for a guide remains a diverting and often enlightening pursuit.
  7. Every Body
    The film benefits from its choice of subjects, as Wall, Gallo and Weigel are all endearing and deeply informed.
  8. Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed
    In the end, with only Hudson to deal with, Kijak gets the big picture.
  9. Run Rabbit Run
    Gloomy and vague, Run Rabbit Run is a moody, noncommittal tease replete with the usual spectral signifiers: clammy dreams, scary drawings, unsettling masks. Snook does everything but rend her garments in a performance that only emphasizes the busy vapidity of Hannah Kent’s script.
  10. In the Company of Rose
    In the Company of Rose is a pleasant portrait of an admittedly rarefied world, but one that doesn’t transcend its vanity-project origins. Perhaps it doesn’t intend to.
  11. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
    That character, or rather Ford, or really the two of them together are the main arguments for seeing “Dial of Destiny,” which is as silly as you expect and not altogether as successful as you may hope.
  12. Anthem
    Where the film’s archival footage demonstrates the limits of respectability politics, Anthem ends up being overly respectable — and inevitably reductive.
  13. Sin La Habana
    Nabatian is sympathetic to all three characters and their lack of easy choices, and his eye for small cultural details and rituals. . . enforces how identity continues to shape their lives even as they’re far from home.
  14. World's Best
    What works is the high energy, kooky cast who fling themselves into the carefree choreography — especially Magnus, a mugging, contagious delight.
  15. Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music
    We do see some of the audience participation, which was an integral part of the show, but we don’t hear from attendees. It’s a loss, because the event was, in essence, about the making of community through the ages but also through one day and night.
  16. Aloners
    Hong’s greatest strength is restraint. At every moment in which she could turn the film into an easier, feel-good story about a woman being taught how to wake up to life, she pulls back.
  17. The Perfect Find
    Good thing Union steers The Perfect Find with such sunny warmth and relatable poise, too, because the director, Numa Perrier, and screenwriter, Leigh Davenport (adapting Tia Williams’s 2016 novel of the same title), are not as assured.
  18. I'll Show You Mine
    It’s a good thing that Jagannathan and Brown have training in the theater: They imbue Priya and Nic’s densely verbal jousts, dodges and truths with compelling chiaroscuro hues.
  19. American Pain
    The utility of an energetic character study of depraved opioid kingpins is questionable. But the documentary unspools with enough style and spark to engage.
  20. Horseplay
    Horseplay is less an acutely mapped-out anthropological study into toxic masculinity and pervasive homophobia and misogyny, and more like having to spend a day chilling with the most annoying guys you know.
  21. All Man: The International Male Story
    Admittedly, the film is more dutiful than artful, ticking one box after another, a tendency that is especially obvious when it ventures to the dark side of paradise (the ravages of AIDS on employees and customers, the lack of diversity among the catalog models).
  22. Sublime
    An innocent gay-indie sweetness courses through this film, especially in the too-short glimpses into Manuel’s romantic cravings and in the final blissful minute, and the young cast’s naturalistic performances make it all feel lived-in and truthful. But Biasin’s script plods.
  23. The Country Club
    These visual flourishes, while derivative, are charming and well-realized. The writing, however, has none of Anderson’s wit, tending instead toward a kind of broad and fatuous slapstick that’s closer to “2 Broke Girls” than “The Royal Tenenbaums.”
  24. Revoir Paris
    Even as Winocour piles on too many complications, she retains an appreciable astringency — call it a sense of emotional realism about what it means to actually survive — that keeps bathos at bay. Together with the superb Efira, she earns your tears honestly.
  25. God Is a Bullet
    The misogyny of the movie’s risibly sadistic villains is only one distasteful thread in this sleazy saga of rescue and revenge.
  26. Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy
    “Desperate Souls” convincingly argues that there’s no other time at which Joe Buck (Jon Voight) and Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) could have become enduring movie characters, let alone have the tenderness between them depicted so subtly.
  27. Here. Is. Better.
    The documentary, directed by Jack Youngelson, is about the slow, difficult work of reaching out, opening up and eventually finding a glimmer of hope, day by day.
  28. The Stroll
    If The Stroll is an indictment and elegy, it is also a remarkable document of the self-determination of the women and workers who learned, in the face of the worst odds, to fend for themselves and each other.
  29. Surrounded
    Wright’s lean, long face is sometimes all hard angles, and she enacts the largely stoic mien of her character with weight. If Surrounded had carried through its overdetermined premise more assuredly, she’d have made a compelling hero/heroine here.
  30. No Hard Feelings
    Lawrence is a consistently incandescent screen presence, and her role lets her run through her greatest performative hits, so to speak. She’s goofily sexy, poignantly wide-eyed and retains a beaming, you-can-deny-her-nothing smile.
  31. Take Care of Maya
    Take Care of Maya is grueling, but it is also oddly deficient, wanting for the precision and perspective essential to deriving insight from profound trauma.
  32. Stan Lee
    It’s disappointing, yet inevitable that the creation story of Lee gives way to the characters he helped create.
  33. Happer's Comet
    Sometimes wearying, sometimes pointlessly cryptic, Happer’s Comet nevertheless has a distinct way of viewing the world.
  34. Cadejo Blanco
    Had the film leaned more intentionally into the interior lives of its characters rather than positioning itself as a thriller, it may have been a more satisfying watch.
  35. Nobody's Hero
    Guiraudie is after something much different here: creating a palpable sense of the connection between fear and desire, which, sure, aren’t the most rational of our human impulses — but neither are love, marriage or jihadist crusading.
  36. Maggie Moore(s)
    Top-heavy with big names (Tina Fey, Jon Hamm) and set in a nondescript small town populated primarily by sad sacks and losers, the movie struggles to get out of second gear.
  37. The Flash
    I liked The Flash well enough while watching it. But thinking and writing about it and everything that has gone down has been dispiriting — real life has a way of insinuating itself into even better-wrought fantasies.
  38. Elemental
    The staggering design ambition balances out the plot’s affecting, relatable ordinariness.
  39. Asteroid City
    It’s comic and often wry, but like some of his other films, it has the soul of a tragedy.
  40. Extraction 2
    Burdened by its bluster, Extraction 2 is merely a loud, blithering mess masquerading as fulfilling escapism.
  41. The Blackening
    The Blackening comes with a horror movie’s requisite skittish and stalking camerawork, its creaks and breath-holding hushes, its gore and payback. But it is the friends’ flee, fight, freeze — or throw under the bus — banter that makes the film provocative fun.
  42. Users
    This negotiation between techno-pessimism and techno-fetishism is at the heart of Users, though Almada’s scattered movie struggles to keep them in balance; her broad, rhetorical voice-over is a poor match for the complexity of the film’s images.
  43. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
    The plot is a bust. Five credited screenwriters and not one compelling stake.
  44. Dalíland
    While Dalíland occasionally edges into caricature, its take on Gala’s role in the marriage, her temperament and feverish attention to money is happily more complicated.
  45. A Woman Escapes
    [Campbell's] Audrey does nothing less than enact a kind of communion through voice and image.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster
    Fixing horror in the Black body is a tricky business, and “The Angry Black Girl” stumbles in the same way its ancestor, “Candyman” (1992), did.
  47. Persian Lessons
    Less kooky and gratingly precious than “Jojo Rabbit” or “Life Is Beautiful,” the film nevertheless also taps history with a movie-magic wand.
  48. Scarlet
    One of the attractions of Scarlet is that it doesn’t fit obvious categorization, which means that you’re not always sure where it’s headed or why. The vibe is by turns sober, warm, melancholic and playful to the point of near-silliness.
  49. Blue Jean
    The film’s most impressive quality is its nuanced understanding of how political circumstances create different spheres of life.
  50. Brooklyn 45
    Brooklyn 45 is overlong, repetitive and at times wearyingly stagy. The actors, though, can’t be faulted, convincingly turning unappetizing characters into broken people trying to move on from a war that keeps pulling them back in.
  51. Flamin' Hot
    Longoria, working from a screenplay by Lewis Colick and Linda Yvette Chávez, sprinkles lessons in self-esteem throughout. (The movie is Longoria’s feature directing debut.) And the women here — including Montañez’s mother and Judy — are more than run-of-the-mill catalysts. Still, should it come as a surprise that a movie this puffed up has a dusting of flavors that might not be real?
  52. Apes Together Strong
    The lessons here are old, and at one point, the filmmakers use the phrase “the house always wins.” But there’s hope, because there’s always hope in such tales
  53. Hollywood Dreams & Nightmares: The Robert Englund Story
    What the directors Gary Smart and Christopher Griffiths made is a documentary in spirit. But it’s really more of an annotated oral history of Englund’s entire, extensive IMDb page — almost film by film, in chronological order, for more than two hours. It’s exhausting.
  54. Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)
    Squaring the Circle is slick and enjoyable enough, but it is also, like the company it chronicles, something of a boutique item, and the reminiscences grow faintly monotonous after a while.
  55. Past Lives
    The movie’s modesty — its intimacy, human scale, humble locations and lack of visual oomph — is one of its strengths.
  56. Falcon Lake
    Death and desire swirl around the film’s charged atmosphere, though Le Bon has trouble meaningfully bringing out these elements in the narrative itself, hastily throwing in ambiguities in the last act to create a weightier sense of drama. The effect falls flat.
  57. Padre Pio
    LaBeouf essays a rather, let’s say, contemporary Pio. And completely sinks the picture.
  58. Rise
    This is a sweet, uncomplicated story relayed with enough entrancing dance breaks to fill an American halftime show.
  59. Concerned Citizen
    Haguel builds this brief but densely structured film in an interestingly modular, rhythmic way, thanks to a percussive score by Zoe Polanski and occasional, abrupt cuts to black following key scenes.
  60. Shooting Stars
    For what it sets out to do, detailing the bond of young boys under surreal circumstances, Shooting Stars is a relatively sturdy retelling.
  61. Reality
    Satter, a veteran theater director, makes a smooth transition into her feature film debut, written with James Paul Dallas. She’s skilled at evoking tension from a minimal set.
  62. The Boogeyman
    The Boogeyman, extrapolated from a minor 1970s short story by Stephen King, might conceivably make sense to viewers with no access to proper lighting or functioning windows. For the rest of us, though, this near-indecipherable movie — as murky in plot and payoff as in setting — demands such a total suspension of rationality that its few scary moments struggle to land.
  63. Lynch/Oz
    As the documentary repetitiously circles its subject and piles on greater numbers of clips — more than 50 movies are dropped into the 20-minute final chapter (“Dig”), hosted by the director David Lowery — whatever points Philippe is trying to make have been hopelessly lost.
  64. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
    Spider-Verse achieves the challenging task of building a sequel that not only replicates the charms of the first film but also expands the multiverse concept, the main characters and the stakes, without overinflating the premise or shamelessly capitalizing on fan service.
  65. The Machine
    Even when the relentlessly salty humor gets fully crass (a dog is thrown out a high window), the product is bland.
  66. We Might As Well Be Dead
    The images are artfully crafted, but the narrative lacks momentum. The film flirts with themes of surveillance and immigrant anxieties, but its allegoric ambitions are continually thwarted by yet another neighborly grievance.
  67. Will-o'-the-Wisp
    Will-o’-the-Wisp, an off-balance provocation from the Portuguese titillater João Pedro Rodrigues, is a prank in fancy dress, a plastic boutonniere that squirts battery acid. The joke is on everyone, particularly the powerful and those holding out hope that the powerful will save the planet.
  68. The Wind & The Reckoning
    The story feels too self-contained and the characters too one-note, which, despite the merits of the subject, makes it hard to feel immersed in their world.
  69. You Hurt My Feelings
    This is a work of discipline and structure. It’s a situation comedy in the best, classical sense: These people’s ethical problems are sometimes ours. I’ve been Beth. I’ve been Don. And I had to watch half of what they’re dealing with through my fingers.
  70. Unclenching the Fists
    Ada’s psychological tumult is captured in intimate close-ups and fluttering camera movements, while the absence of a score complements the film’s uneasy mood of pent-up rage and stifling despair.
  71. White Balls on Walls
    With access to behind-the-scenes processes, the documentary can be instructive about the work of changing legacy institutions, but also wincingly cautionary as Wolfs, his administrators and curators get tangled up in numbers and nomenclature.
  72. The Attachment Diaries
    A trashy treat coated in a high-art gloss, The Attachment Diaries gleefully kneads melodrama, noir, horror and sexual perversion into a pathological romance between two deeply damaged women.
  73. Being Mary Tyler Moore
    The film itself is so smitten by Moore that it skips over the worst of her self-inflected wounds.
  74. Influencer
    Harder has made good and entertaining use of a premise that could have become a simple gimmick, and Naud and Saper prove strong leads as their characters try to read each other between the likes.
  75. The Wrath of Becky
    The subsequent slaughters are inventive, the pacing lively and the cat-and-mouse structure entertaining; but the rodents themselves are — aside from their suave leader, played by Seann William Scott — such misogynistic morons that Becky’s predominance is never in doubt.
  76. Kandahar
    Stupefyingly sluggish.
  77. About My Father
    Alas, in less than an hour and a half of running time (the director Laura Terruso does orchestrate the proceedings with a palpable sense of dispatch), the movie demonstrates how quickly “amiable and inconsequential” can shift to “hackneyed and labored.”
  78. The Little Mermaid
    The new, live-action The Little Mermaid is everything nobody should want in a movie: dutiful and defensive, yet desperate for approval. It reeks of obligation and noble intentions. Joy, fun, mystery, risk, flavor, kink — they’re missing.
  79. Victim/Suspect
    The film, which examines cases in which sexual assault survivors are charged with false reporting, is the rare entry whose revelations feel cogent, earned and memorable.
  80. The Taking
    Had it included more current images of the region and the realities of the Navajo people, it may have been more effective in replacing these myths, going beyond film analysis to altering imagination.
  81. Killers of the Flower Moon
    The story’s romance is warmly inviting, and DiCaprio and Gladstone work beautifully together, their different performance styles — Ernest is physically demonstrative while Mollie is reserved — creating a contrapuntal whole.
  82. Occupied City
    Time is stretched differently in Occupied City and passes far more quickly than you might imagine, despite the running time. Some of this has to do with the fluidity of McQueen’s filmmaking and how the disparate parts build power cumulatively. Much of this, though, has to do with how McQueen approaches the past.
  83. Master Gardener
    Part of the kick of “Master Gardener” is that the writer-director Paul Schrader manages to pull off this improbable movie. It shouldn’t work and, even after seeing it twice, I don’t think that it entirely does, which only makes it more fascinating and strengthens its power.
  84. Unfinished Business
    It’s hard to begrudge Unfinished Business for emphasizing empowerment and sisterhood, but these women deserved more. They can take it.
  85. Museum of the Revolution
    This is an engrossing documentary, and one that raises questions about the ethics of intervening (or not) in the lives of people struggling to get by. That these queries hover unresolved may leave viewers uneasy, but it also positions us alongside the subjects, waiting for a solution that’s yet to arrive.
  86. Butterfly Vision
    The film might aim to deliver an aesthetic and emotional jolt, but it is the mundane, interpersonal moments that linger.
  87. Stay Awake
    Oleff, Argus and Metz succeed in depicting both the frustrations and the compassion associated with caring for relatives who continuously harm themselves.
  88. Fast X
    The best I can say about all of this is that it didn’t bore me.
  89. Moon Garden
    Only after Emma’s circumstances get worse — the poor dear is knocked comatose — do things onscreen improve.
  90. Come Out Fighting
    While it has a blatant shoestring sheen, Come Out Fighting isn’t arch or irony-laden; in fact, the tone is quite serious, albeit also seriously clichéd.
  91. The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future
    The power of Alegría’s feature debut is found not in dialogue or explication, but in the lyrical, magical realist qualities of folklore: disappointed mothers and fathers, sacred animals and cursed rivers, love and forgiveness.
  92. Sanctuary
    The writing (by Micah Bloomberg, a creator of the 2018-20 TV series “Homecoming”) is so sharp, the acting so agile and the cinematography (by Ludovica Isidori) so inventive that what could have been a stuffy experiment in lockdown filmmaking is instead a vividly involving battle of wills.
  93. White Building
    The film’s loose plotting and secondary character development can leave a few too many hanging threads, but its sense of place is so palpable you can almost smell the smoky city markets, the sweat, the hormones.
  94. The Night of the 12th
    This is a refreshingly grounded, deceptively plain picture of crime-fighting as a grind of false leads, workplace fatigue and no closure.
  95. White Men Can't Jump
    This version has little quirk and less spark.
  96. Giving Birth to a Butterfly
    The forced profundity of the “Butterfly” script undermines the film’s enthralling sense of atmosphere, which drips with melancholy, menace and wonder.
  97. Queenmaker: The Making of an It Girl
    The finale is as compassionate as it is sad and unnerving.
  98. Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me
    The solemn excavation of Smith’s life and death — she died at 39 of a drug overdose, in 2007 — ultimately brings the movie, despite Macfarlane’s well-meaning efforts, squarely into the territory of what it’s attempting to condemn: lurid voyeurism.
  99. Hypnotic
    The movie is, if nothing else, ruthlessly efficient enough in delivering its crowd-pleasing bits that truly starving suspense genre hounds, at least, won’t necessarily mind.
  100. Crater
    Most of all, the film is surprisingly nimble at incorporating an emotional core that makes its story more interesting than the adventure itself.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »