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. Rye Lane
    It’s not a spoiler to say that at its conclusion, Rye Lane comes together as only the best rom-coms can, with one of those classic payoffs that’s designed to have you cheering at the movie screen. How Allen-Miller chooses to balance those moments with the unconventional is one of the film’s greatest strengths.
  2. The Serengeti Rules
    In mirroring the gaze of his professorial subjects, Brown rewards audiences with a film that happily weds the scientific and the cinematic.
  3. The Lady Bird Diaries
    Many of the archival images Porter so fluidly employs will be familiar, but they gain fresh energy and timely urgency from Johnson’s absorbing narration and her often stirring observations about Lyndon Johnson, their political partnership, the environment and the two events she so presciently knew would shape us for decades to come: the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.
  4. To Catch a Thief
    To Catch a Thief does nothing but give out a good, exciting time.
  5. The Lobster
    Cruelty and humor are nestled like spoons in a drawer. Mr. Lanthimos’s method is to elicit an appreciative chuckle followed by a gasp of shock, and to deliver violence and whimsy in the same even tone. “The Lobster” is often startlingly funny in the way it proposes its surreal conceits, and then upsettingly grim in the way it follows through on them.
  6. Forrest Gump
    Has the elements of an emotionally gripping story. Yet is feels less like a romance than like a coffee-table book celebrating the magic of special effect. [6 July 1994, p. C9]
  7. The Nightmare Before Christmas
    The Nightmare Before Christmas is a major step forward for both stop-motion animation, which is stunningly well used, and for Mr. Burton himself. He now moves from the level of extremely talented eccentric to that of Disney-style household word.
  8. Paris Is Burning
    Miss Livingston's interviews reveal a way of living that is both highly structured and self-protective.
  9. Black Ice
    Davis, a Canadian documentarian, zeros in on how hockey has been a vital part of his country’s identity, and what it has felt like for Canadian players of color who love the game to be told, from very young ages, that they do not belong.
  10. Breaking the Waves
    A narrative path leading from the sincere to the ludicrous, and culminating in a final image of flabbergasting transcendance, gives Breaking the Waves its surprising power.
  11. The Squid and the Whale
    Both sharply comical and piercingly sad. Mr. Baumbach surveys the members of the flawed, collapsing Berkman family with sympathy but without mercy, noting their individual and collective failures and imperfections with relentless precision.
  12. Winged Migration
    It may sound facetious, but Winged Migration provides such an intense vicarious experience of being a flapping airborne creature with the wind in its ears that you leave the theater feeling like an honorary member of another species.
  13. Rebels of the Neon God
    Mr. Tsai typically uses narrative as a tool for exploring the moods and meanings that link his characters with one another and with the city that awakens, contains and frustrates their desires. They seem very much stuck in their world, but because that world is the creation of a wildly original artist coming into his own, it also feels alive with possibility.
  14. School of Rock
    A very funny for-kids-of-all-ages delight that should catapult Mr. Black straight to the top of the A-list of Hollywood funnymen.
  15. Life and Nothing More
    A portrait of lives that can’t be reduced to statistics.
  16. The Girl with the Needle
    The Girl With the Needle is most intriguing when it lingers in its disturbing fictions, which come to life with exceptional style.
  17. Star Trek
    Isn't just a pleasurable rethink of your geek uncle's favorite science-fiction series. It's also a testament to television's power as mythmaker, as a source for some of the fundamental stories we tell about ourselves, who we are and where we came from.
  18. They Live by Night
    They Live by Night has the failing of waxing sentimental over crime, but it manages to generate interest with its crisp dramatic movement and clear-cut types.
  19. The Unknown Country
    The film’s gentle detours into the real-life stories remind us that it is the people met on the road that so often make the trip memorable.
  20. A Quiet Place
    In its convincing portrayal of a situation where a rusty nail is as lethal as an unexploded bomb, and the few remaining inhabitants seem — much like the audience — more likely to die of stress than anything else, the movie rocks. You may go in jaded, but you’ll leave elated or I’ll eat my words.
  21. Riefenstahl
    Veiel’s documentary is a welcome addition to the historically grounded rebukes to Riefenstahl and her apologists, including bad feminists.
  22. Carmine Street Guitars
    In a film full of pleasant harmonies, a note of dread comes in.
  23. The Teachers' Lounge
    Taking on the uneasy complexity of a progressive modern society, and the friction produced when pluralism and an insistence on order and obedience collide, is a bold move, and The Teachers’ Lounge pulls it off with a sense of tension that makes the whole thing play like a thriller.
  24. The Namesake
    The Namesake, adapted from Jhumpa Lahiri’s popular novel, conveys a palpable sense of people as living, breathing creatures who are far more complex than their words might indicate.
  25. Frances Ha
    With its swift, jaunty rhythms and sharp, off-kilter jokes, Frances Ha is frequently delightful. Ms. Gerwig and Mr. Baumbach are nonetheless defiant partisans in the revolt against the tyranny of likability in popular culture.
  26. Socrates
    Socrates isn’t simply about being gay, or poor, or even devastatingly unloved: It’s about honoring a resilience that most of us will thankfully never have to summon.
  27. C'mon C'mon
    C’mon C’mon is a nice movie about characters who are so nice that I almost feel bad for not being nicely disposed toward them or this movie, even with Joaquin Phoenix as the guy and Gaby Hoffmann as the sister.
  28. Hunger
    The brutality in the film is pervasive and often stomach turningly graphic, but what is perhaps most unnerving is the tact, patience and care with which Mr. McQueen depicts its causes and effects.
  29. Howl's Moving Castle
    Sophie, in both her incarnations, joins an impressive sisterhood of Miyazaki heroines, whose version of girl power presents a potent alternative to the mini-machismo that dominates American juvenile entertainment. Not that children are the only viewers likely to be haunted and beguiled by Howl's Moving Castle - all that is needed are open eyes and an open heart.
  30. Cold Comfort Farm
    Mr. Schlesinger draws lively performances out of his cast and surprising variety out of the film's secondary sights, which range from a gala soiree to a heap of steaming dung.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    In the Family
    Mr. Wang's slow-reveal psychological drama isn't just a showcase for his excellent ensemble cast. Beautifully modulated and stylistically sui generis, In the Family is also one of the most accomplished and undersold directorial debuts this year.
  32. Burn
    For all the alarming statistics cited in the film, Burn is not a depressing movie. The firefighters interviewed are remarkably resilient men who talk enthusiastically about the adrenaline rush of their work. And the film makes you thankful for members of this macho breed, who relish risking their lives to save others.
  33. A Hijacking
    In A Hijacking, his assured, intense second feature, the Danish director Tobias Lindholm turns tedium and frustration into agonizing suspense.
  34. Nocturnes
    The moths remain a puzzle of data that awaits analysis. Dutta and Srinivasan’s understated approach shows research and nature in action without pretending to make a forest give up its secrets.
  35. Black Box Diaries
    The movie’s intimacy is appealing; on occasion, it can be claustrophobic. Black Box Diaries is, at heart, a first-person account, and while it’s successful on those terms, it’s finally more emotionally engaging than intellectually satisfying.
  36. Crimson Gold
    The occasional obviousness of the film's themes is more than balanced by the subtlety of its methods and by the stolid, irreducible individuality of its protagonist, Hussein.
  37. Small Things Like These
    Murphy, fresh off his “Oppenheimer” Oscar win, is both producer and star of this film. His performance is unsurprisingly searing and nuanced, especially since Bill is not much of a talker.
  38. Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
    It is impossible not to be fired up by Kurt Kuenne's incendiary cri de coeur, Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father.
  39. Anvil! The Story of Anvil
    Mr. Reiner and Mr. Kudlow may not quite merit full-metal glory, but they don't deserve oblivion either, and Anvil! The Story of Anvil makes both a case and a place for their band.
  40. The Trip
    As in many road movies, the trip becomes an occasion for philosophizing, a journey inward and out as the men joust and parry, improvising and entertaining each other, at times by imitating, hilariously, someone else (Michael Caine, Sean Connery).
  41. Marty
    Marty makes a warm and winning film, full of the sort of candid comment on plain, drab people that seldom reaches the screen.
  42. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
    This film may disappoint some dogmatic Old Hogwartsians: a few plot points have been sacrificed, and Mr. Cuarón does not seem to care much for Quidditch. But it more than compensates for these lapses with its emotional force and visual panache.
  43. Being a Human Person
    The revelation of Andersson’s method, his painstaking use of trompe l’oeil both painterly and cinematic, is fascinating enough. But the chronicle takes an unexpected turn.
  44. La Promesse (The Promise)
    The integrity of the film, whose directorial team has collaborated on numerous Belgian documentaries, extends to its sad final moments, in which nothing is left neat and tidy.
  45. Michael Clayton
    Mr. Gilroy hasn’t reinvented the legal thriller here, but I doubt that was his intention; at its best and most ambitious, the film plays less like a variation on a Hollywood standard than a reappraisal. It’s a modest reappraisal, adult, sincere, intelligent, absorbing; it entertains without shame.
  46. Levitated Mass
    [A] sneakily compelling documentary.
  47. Downfall
    It is fascinating without being especially illuminating, and it holds your attention for its very long running time without delivering much dramatic or emotional satisfaction in the end.
  48. Knives Out
    Johnson’s own sleight of hand is estimable, even if his effort to add politics into the crowded mix rings hollow. The machine is what matters here, and he has clearly had such a good time engineering it that it’s hard not to feel bad when you don’t laugh along with him.
  49. The Spectacular Now
    Mr. Ponsoldt ably charts a journey through the high stakes of adolescence, with both Sutter and Mr. Teller showing great promise.
  50. My Man Godfrey
    An exuberantly funny picture.
  51. Apocalypse in the Tropics
    It is very precisely not about American politics. Yet the temptation for a segment of viewers to see it as being about that will, I suspect, be insurmountable. But Costa is here to tell a bigger story.
  52. Face/Off
    Before we go numb from such prefab excitement, here comes a mega-movie that actually delivers what mega-movies promise: strong characters, smart plotting, breathless action and a gimmick that hasn't been seen before.
  53. Angels Are Made of Light
    The director finds beauty everywhere — in a cloud of dust, a traffic jam, the raucous din of children at play. And wherever such beauty exists, we imagine, hope can never be entirely absent.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Endless Summer
    Happily, the viewer is not asked to ponder profundities very often—just to have fun.
  55. Let the Right One In
    There is a remarkable stillness to many of the film's most indelible images, particularly the exteriors, which are so carefully photographed, and without the usual tiresome camera jiggling, as to look almost frozen.
  56. Rams
    Despite its affection for the quirks of its characters and their milieu, the film is most memorable for its gravity, for the almost tragic nobility it finds in sad and silly circumstances.
  57. 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.
  58. Certified Copy
    The Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami's delicious brain tickler, Certified Copy, is an endless hall of mirrors whose reflections multiply as its story of a middle-aged couple driving through Tuscany carries them into a metaphysical labyrinth.
  59. Hold Me Tight
    For all the intensity of Krieps’s performance and the power of the piano repertoire, Hold Me Tight proceeds through the mourning process with a strange detachment, using Clarisse’s agony as scaffolding for ideas about memory and storytelling that seem more imposed on life than pulled from it.
  60. Night Moves
    An elegant conundrum, a private‐eye film that has its full share of duplicity, violence and bizarre revelation, but whose mind keeps straying from questions of pure narrative to those of the hero's psyche.
  61. The Celebration
    Though it dedicates itself to avoiding directorial egotism, in accordance with strict rules of the Danish filmmakers' collective known as Dogma 95, Thomas Vinterberg's Celebration is still a virtuoso feat.
  62. The Waldheim Waltz
    Beckermann wants not so much to contextualize as to invoke — with the hope, perhaps, that placing us in the middle of this debate will create its own context.
  63. The Super 8 Years
    Memory is also, I think, one reason we watch movies like this, which with its lapidary narration and melancholic images — with its laughing children, its difficult smiles and its ghosts — movingly pairs you with Ernaux and with the world that she has so brilliantly made.
  64. Broadway Danny Rose
    Broadway Danny Rose proceeds so sweetly and so illogically that it seems to have been spun, not constructed. Mr. Allen works with such speed and confidence these days that a brief, swift film like this one can have all the texture and substance of his more complicated work.
  65. Taxi to the Dark Side
    If recent American history is ever going to be discussed with the necessary clarity and ethical rigor, this film will be essential.
  66. A Stray
    The substantial pleasures of the movie are supplemented by the gratification of seeing an emerging talent with concerns far outside the conventional indie realm asserting himself with such authority.
  67. Mirror (1975)
    Mr. Tarkovsky appears so absorbed in grappling with his own demons that universality suffers. [17 Aug 1983, p.C14]
    • The New York Times
  68. Nuts!
    The movie culminates in a cinematic coup de grâce bold enough to spin your head — one that gives the movie an entirely new dimension.
  69. Repo Man
    The real thing. It's a sneakily rude, truly zany farce that treats its lunatic characters with a solemnity that perfectly matches the way in which they see themselves.
  70. Challengers
    One of the other pleasures of Challengers is that despite some tears, tightened jaws and its fussy chronology, the movie isn’t trying to say anything important, which is a relief. It wants to engage and entertain you, and it does that very nicely.
  71. Pig
    Pig, Michael Sarnoski’s stunningly controlled first feature, is a mournful fable of loss and withdrawal, art and ambition.
  72. Give Me Liberty
    Give Me Liberty is a jolt of a movie, at once kinetic and controlled. It’s an anarchic deadpan comedy that evolves into a romance just around the time the story explodes. It has moments of unembellished realism as well as a fictional story line that runs through the bedlam.
  73. Marjorie Prime
    There’s more going on in this movie’s 90-plus minutes than in many summer blockbusters nearly twice its length.
  74. Once Upon a Time in the West (re-release)
    The biggest, longest, most expensive Leone Western to date, and, in many ways, the most absurd... Granting the fact that it is quite bad, Once Upon the Time in the West is almost always interesting, wobbling, as it does, between being an epic lampoon and a serious hommage to the men who created the dreams of Leone's childhood. (Review of Original Release)
  75. Sorry We Missed You
    There’s no way for Loach to have gone smaller. When the movie’s over, you have, indeed, witnessed a tragedy, just not the usual kind. Nobody dies. No one goes to prison (there is one police-station visit unlike any I’ve seen). But life: that’s the tragedy, what it takes to get by, what it takes be just a little bit happy — for one lousy meal.
  76. Sisters with Transistors
    This film is informative and often fascinating.
  77. Lost Course
    [A] sobering, sprawling documentary.
  78. Steve Jobs
    Steve Jobs is a rich and potent document of the times, an expression of both the awe that attends sophisticated new consumer goods and the unease that trails in the wake of their arrival.... Mostly, though, it is a formally audacious, intellectually energized entertainment, a powerful challenge to the lazy conventions of Hollywood storytelling and a feast for connoisseurs of contemporary screen acting.
  79. Marley
    Marley is a detailed, finely edited character study whose theme - Marley's bid to reconcile his divided racial legacy - defined his music and his life.
  80. The Agronomist
    It seems almost unthinkable that such a charismatic, generous and lively man could be gone. It also makes you understand what it means for a country like Haiti to lose a citizen like Jean Dominique.
  81. Touching the Void
    This is compelling stuff, but there is something deeply distracting in the use of recreated material.
  82. Le Havre
    A stylized and sentimental fairy tale about the way the world might be, grounded in a frank recognition of the way it is.
  83. The Holdovers
    There’s a sharpness to the comedy, some attitude and freshness, some wisdom. That maybe comes, in part, from the kids looking a little older than their characters are. It also comes from Payne’s emotional finesse.
  84. From Ground Zero
    The most moving entry might be Etimad Washah’s Taxi Wanissa.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    To Be Heard
    Check your cynicism at the ticket booth. To Be Heard is one of the best documentaries of the year.
  86. Araby
    Thanks to Mr. de Sousa’s superb performance, the movie often convincingly portrays not just the exploited condition of laborers such as Cristiano, but the nagging sadness of life itself.
  87. Sound of Metal
    Propelled by a distinctive style and a potent lead performance, Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal builds a singular tension between silence and noise.
  88. The Sundowners
    A sense of outdoor living and a tingle of open-air adventure are the breath of life in this film.
  89. Embrace of the Serpent
    Viewed largely through the aggrieved eyes of a shaman whose tribe is on the verge of extinction at the hands of Colombian rubber barons in the 19th and 20th centuries, Embrace of the Serpent, a fantastical mixture of myth and historical reality, shatters lingering illusions of first-world culture as more advanced than any other, except technologically.
  90. Under African Skies
    The film skillfully interweaves several strands to tell a true story with a happy ending.
  91. Exhibiting Forgiveness
    Forgiveness may not be about making nice. Filling in a painful gap may not lead to tidy reconciliation. Still, something true will appear. Kaphar may be new to feature filmmaking, but that’s some grown wisdom.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
    This is an impressive study in anticlimax, more distinguished than the usually quoted classic example of "For God, for country and for Yale." The picture has a very, very excellent begining, a mediocre middle and a most deplorable ending.
  93. Great Absence
    In the end, Great Absence contains the grace that arises from a great struggle.
  94. Da 5 Bloods
    In its anger, its humor and its exuberance — in the emotional richness of the central performances and of Terence Blanchard’s score — this is unmistakably a Spike Lee Joint. It’s also an argument with and through the history of film.
  95. Side by Side
    For a film geek this movie is absolute heaven, a dream symposium in which directors, cinematographers, editors and a few actors gather to opine on the details of their craft. It is worth a year of film school and at least 1,000 hours of DVD bonus commentary.
  96. The Last Black Man in San Francisco
    Mostly, the movie has a cascade of images and ideas, reference points and glimpses of everyday beauty that flow and swirl and, over time, gather tremendous force.
  97. Days of Glory
    It is a chronicle of courage and sacrifice, of danger and solidarity, of heroism and futility, told with power, grace and feeling and brought alive by first-rate acting. A damn good war movie.
  98. My Summer of Love
    The film is a triumph of mood and implication.
  99. Isle of Dogs
    Time and again, Mr. Anderson pulls you hard into Isle of Dogs. His use of film space, which he playfully flattens and deepens, is one of his stylistic signatures; he likes symmetry and, in contrast to most directors these days, does a lot inside the frame. He’s especially inventive in this movie, and I could watch hours of its noble dogs hanging out, sniffing the air.
  100. Burma VJ: Reporter i et lukket land
    A rich, thought-provoking film.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »