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. Bombay Rose
    The movie is lovely, but airless and bolted with scraps that barely hold together.
  2. Final Analysis
    Phil Joanou's Final Analysis is an entertaining exercise in psychological suspense up to a point. Then the ghost that has been pleasurably haunting it, that of Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo," turns out to be an illusion, and the real villain is revealed as that implacably clear-eyed monster, demon logic.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Terror Train
    The intention here was to make a thriller, a suspense movie about some people trapped on a train, waiting for an unknown killer to strike. The problem is that they don't do very much else except wait.
  4. Damage
    Not even a film maker of Mr. Malle's intelligence and taste can make this stilted story add up. The only ingredient that can make sense of "Damage" is the obvious one: outright eroticism, of the sort that presumably got the film its original NC-17 rating.
  5. The Power
    The film stumbles in delivering a cohesive vision.
  6. Gladiator
    Only the film's resolution has any spirit or novelty, and even that goes all the way back to the Roman Colosseum. Quicker than you can say "Spartacus," two fighters figure out that their real enemy is outside the ring.
  7. WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn
    On why what now looks like a tenuous, bluster-based business model would appeal to Wall Street, the director, Jed Rothstein, spends less time than he should.
  8. The Tunnel
    The human dimension is painfully cliché, and Oie’s clunky orchestration of intersecting individual stories flattens the film’s overall momentum. It does, however, manage to eke out moments of genuine suspense and harrowing claustrophobia with its straightforward premise and contained, small-scale action.
  9. LUZ
    The film’s writer and director, Jon Garcia, treats the physicality of their romance in a frank way, staging realistic love scenes that show the attraction between the characters. But Garcia is less adept at finding passion in between scenes of sex.
  10. Women Is Losers
    It’s arguable that Celina’s emotional distance is a true reflection of how working class women manage their feelings in order to cope. But it could be dissatisfying to a viewer craving to see women’s interior lives; their pain rather than their resilience.
  11. Violet
    Crowding the screen with jarring sounds and disturbing visuals, Bateman experiments with so many cinematic frills and fancies that Munn’s touching work is too often obscured.
  12. The Legend of Molly Johnson
    It’s an earnest film, one that glows with pride at Aboriginal resilience. But the impression it leaves is didactic, a saints and demons fable that meanders to foregone conclusions.
  13. I Confess
    Even though moments in the picture do have some tension and power, and the whole thing is scrupulously acted by a tightly professional cast, the consequence is an entertainment that tends to drag, sag and generally grow dull. It is not the sort of entertaiment that one hopefully expects of "Hitch."
  14. Seaspiracy
    Even the film’s notable points seem to emerge only briefly before sinking beneath the surface, lost in a sea of murky conspiratorial thinking.
  15. Lassiter
    Even by the standards of escapist entertainment, little of Lassiter seems to matter.
  16. The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard
    The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is loud, lazy, profane and well nigh incoherent. It’s also at times quite funny, with a goofy vulgarity that made me giggle.
  17. A Shock to the System
    Andrew Klavan's screenplay, adapted from a novel by Simon Brett, comes up with funny lines now and then, but it never has any clear idea whether it is a black comedy, a satire or maybe even a psychological study of a serial killer.
  18. Percy Vs Goliath
    Sentimental and a little corny in parts, “Percy” is protected from bathos by Walken’s proudly minimalist performance as an intensely private man reluctantly drawn into an uncomfortably public fight.
  19. The Banishing
    The Banishing never finds its groove.
  20. White Sands
    Roger Donaldson's White Sands is set entirely in the vast painterly landscapes of the American Southwest, but it means to be a suspense thriller reflecting the scaled-down undercover realities of the post-cold-war era. In fact, it's almost as difficult to follow as the politics of the federation that replaced the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and as difficult to remember as that federation's official name.
  21. Monster
    Based upon a 1999 young-adult novel by Walter Dean Myers, Monster conveys the ache for all that its protagonist could lose, but it can’t escape the dramatic ruts of its own creation.
  22. Bride of Re-Animator
    Bride of Re-Animator is less a sequel to the critically praised 1985 horror film Re-Animator than a rehash based on the same H. P. Lovecraft stories.
  23. Looking for a Lady with Fangs and a Moustache
    At least for the uninitiated, the drift of the filmmaking seemed to fall short of the transcendence envisioned by its story.
  24. HouseSitter
    Too much of the film seems unfinished. Almost every four scenes could be condensed into one. The comedy doesn't build to any climax. It just rolls on, with Ms. Hawn doggedly working to create some sense of oddball fun. The characters, as written, are as flimsy as Newton's dream house, which, even though based on a House Beautiful award-winning design, looks less habitable than a billboard. Even its brand-new furnishings are tacky.
  25. Ride or Die
    The movie gracefully captures the rhythms of intimacy, how it deepens quicker in stolen time. But even as they develop a kinship, the women themselves remain ciphers.
  26. Seance
    Seance meanders for most of its running time, wavering between tones and styles. It’s both self-aware and overly serious. It tries to be a murder mystery, a slasher, a coming-of-age tale and a haunted house flick all at once.
  27. Domino: Battle of the Bones
    With its deep ensemble, the movie doesn’t want for colorful characters, and Davis keeps his cast loose, unvarnished and unleashed. But the movie lacks focus when it moves between its larger-than-life plotlines.
  28. My Wonderful Wanda
    The film, written by Oberli and Cooky Ziesche, satirizes class divides and xenophobia (“the Pole” constantly carries a derogatory connotation here), but never takes the satire far enough to be memorable, challenging or anything beyond whimsical.
  29. Shotgun Wedding
    Much of the dialogue feels canned and phony in the style of a badly written sitcom. But coming out of J. Lo’s mouth, I believed it.
  30. Lucy The Human Chimp
    By turns alarming and poignant, Alex Parkinson’s infuriatingly deferential film recounts how Carter — passionately attached to Lucy and admittedly clueless about how to facilitate her adjustment — abandoned her life to live with Lucy on a remote island. Her devotion is extraordinary, but her obliviousness is shocking.
  31. Queen Bees
    Each of these stalwarts bring more than charisma to their roles, and when the writing itself displays some snap (which admittedly isn’t that often) the performers bite right into it.
  32. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris
    Despite its gleeful showcasing of beautiful clothes and vibrant midcentury Parisian sights, the film is caught between its fantasies and its principles, landing somewhere more annoyingly clueless — and dull — than it ought to be.
  33. Jagame Thandhiram
    Some moments feel fresh, but the movie’s patterns are familiar: scheme, slaughter, repeat.
  34. America: The Motion Picture
    A raunchy, aggressively inane cartoon that flips the bird — both onscreen and thematically — to a strain of patriotism that insists that men who profited from slavery were sober-minded heroes whose vision of democracy remains flawless, bro.
  35. Sweet Girl
    For this action film, the director Brian Andrew Mendoza favors a utilitarian style. His color palette leans toward grays, blues and browns. His fight scenes are not flashy, or even particularly memorable, but they are clear, effectively conveying the necessary information about whose fist has connected with whose face.
  36. Enfant Terrible
    The film feels both hermetic and declarative, and it’s folly to constantly remind a viewer of Fassbinder’s impossible-to-replicate alchemy of color, lighting, angles and passion.
  37. Romeo Is Bleeding
    Ms. Olin looks great, and she's a lot more fiery in this hit-woman's role than she has been when trying, in tamer films, to be nice. But otherwise, "Romeo Is Bleeding" adds up to much less than the sum of its parts. Mr. Medak fared better in the service of true, wrenching stories than he does under the spell of this material's desperate fancifulness. The joke isn't much of a joke to begin with, and it wears thin.
  38. The Night We Never Met
    The Night We Never Met is never lifelike enough to evoke the madly romantic New York atmosphere it seems to be after. The actors try hard, but they are hamstrung by too many broad strokes and silly inconsistencies.
  39. A Taste of Hunger
    The effect is a movie that resembles nothing so much as the centerpiece of the Malus menu — a hot dog made with elevated ingredients.
  40. City of Ali
    The nuances of Ali’s relationship with Louisville — where Ali faced discrimination as a Black American and controversy for his refusal to be drafted — tend to get lost in the celebration of civic pride.
  41. Five Years North
    There’s much to unpack here, from the preponderance of Latino agents in ICE to the mental health effects of immigration, evident in Luis’s panic attacks. But the film, frustratingly, stays on the surface, settling for easy emotional moments.
  42. Mr. Jones
    But the screenplay, by Eric Roth and Michael Cristofer, can sound pat enough to diminish the characters.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Brannigan
    Unfortunately, Mr. Wayne's first film trip to London doesn't appear to have been necessary. He and his busy company only serve to make Brannigan a commonplace crime caper.
  44. Flag Day
    Penn gives him a vivid, wheedling desperation that’s weirdly moving, and the younger Penn has clearly inherited the emotional expressiveness of her mother, Robin Wright. Maybe that’s why Flag Day feels as much a love letter from Penn to his own daughter as the story of someone else’s.
  45. Red Rocket
    It’s funny and abrasive, but also coy and, in the end, a bit tedious.
  46. Mothering Sunday
    Mothering Sunday never conveys the intensity of erotic passion, the ardor of creative ambition or the agony of grief. Even though it is ostensibly about all of those feelings, it handles them with a tastefulness that is hard to distinguish from complacency.
  47. Asia
    Asia and Vika struggle to emerge as full-fleshed characters from the movie’s dull, blue-grey frames, while the script rushes through provocative plot turns in its bleak procession toward a wrenching conclusion.
  48. Electric Dreams
    In the failure of Electric Dreams to blend and balance its ingredients properly, plot elements are lost (the brick), credibility is overtaxed (the lovelorn computer), and what remains is high tech without being high art.
  49. Rebel Hearts
    The onslaught of information certainly impresses by illuminating a rich and not-often-discussed slice of feminist history, but the execution is distractingly flashy and gratingly unfocused.
  50. Jurassic World Dominion
    This is a very crowded movie — so many species of dinosaur, and I’m so bad at keeping track of them that my 8-year-old-self is no longer speaking to me. They are variously menacing, ravenous, bizarre and kind of cute, but the frenzied live-action and digital special effects rarely produce moments of Spielbergian awe.
  51. The Viewing Booth
    Though moderately compelling to bear witness to one individual’s objections in real time, The Viewing Booth touches on gloomy truths about spectatorship in the digital era that might have felt novel a decade ago.
  52. We Need to Do Something
    Despite some nifty freak-outs, the movie’s buildup can lack a certain snap.
  53. From Beyond
    The symbolism here is dream-book basic.
  54. My Name Is Bulger
    The “nothing to see here” focus gives the homey-feeling film the whiff of a sanctioned production.
  55. My Stepmother Is an Alien
    Unlike the screenwriters, who often cross the thin line between wit and silliness as they outline Celeste's neo-I Love Lucy-isms, Miss Basinger reveals unfailingly sound instincts for comedy.
  56. Casanova, Last Love
    Though Jacquot throws into question our presumptions about figures like Casanova, as well as vilified women like La Charpillon, he leaves it at that, leaving us wondering what exactly it was all for.
  57. The Addams Family 2
    Where it could lean into the typically bone-dry Addams family humor, this film more often relies on poop jokes, explosions and the musical talents of Snoop Dogg. It’s sure to entertain little ones, but parents may find themselves itching for something more impish.
  58. Yellowbeard
    What Yellowbeard establishes is that for even the funniest of performers, a good script may be as essential as pitching is to baseball.
  59. Last Man Standing: Suge Knight and the Murders of Biggie & Tupac
    The new movie is less cohesive than “Biggie and Tupac,” and Broomfield is not suited to documentaries with willing subjects.
  60. Last Summer
    For all the beauty of its dazzling vacation setting, Last Summer coasts, but not toward any satisfying destination.
  61. Narrow Margin
    Though the story evokes old movie formulas - from Strangers on a Train to the 1952 film The Narrow Margin, which inspired it - this film does not reinvent them. It dully echos their conventions.
  62. As Tears Go By (1988)
    Easily summarized, the plot is entirely secondhand.
  63. Toofaan
    In Toofaan, the Bollywood director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra attempts — with some success — to deepen the standard-issue sports drama with sociopolitical strife ripped from Indian headlines.
  64. The Restless
    Lafosse’s empathy as a director is admirable, but The Restless falls short of putting a compelling story to film.
  65. Ali & Ava
    The onscreen chemistry between them feels forced and flat, and the decidedly tame portrayals of physical intimacy only accentuate this absence.
  66. Between Two Worlds
    Carrère — known primarily in Europe as a writer of nonfiction books with a literary twist — applies a mood of cool journalistic sobriety to Marianne’s scandalous discoveries. . . Less compelling is the sentimental crisis that plays out because of Marianne’s deception.
  67. Plaza Suite
    In the case of Plaza Suite, I don't have the feeling that anything much has been lost, but rather that nothing much was ever there.
  68. Stuntman
    There’s something morbid about a world where a brave man is more scared of financial, than physical, risk. But that’s a leap this doc can’t take.
  69. My Little Pony: A New Generation
    However generic (just this year, “Raya and the Last Dragon” depicted a similar treasure hunt geared toward bringing together diverse groups), the film’s messaging about unity and the need for a new generation to band together against misinformation and rabble rousing isn’t the worst thing.
  70. Birds of Paradise
    Structured around a countdown to the ultimate prize, the story is a soapy slog of sabotage and betrayal. Sex and drugs are as prevalent as pliés, the absence of a likable character as irksome as the constant conniving.
  71. The Baby-Sitters Club
    The movie The Baby-Sitters Club offers the same comfort factor as the books, but suffers from a definite lack of excitement.
  72. Hard Luck Love Song
    Corsbie has filmmaking energy to spare but also makes many undergrad errors.
  73. Hinterland
    If only the story of Hinterland felt as engrossing and alive as its setting.
  74. Huda's Salon
    Where Abu-Assad falters is in turning Huda into a didactic mouthpiece for the very themes that Reem’s tribulations, filmed up-close with a jerky camera, convey effortlessly.
  75. The Dark Backward
    Mr. Rifkin's direction does display, in addition to an appreciation of Mr. Lynch and perhaps John Waters, a promising eye for design and a taste for the unusual. With less noxious material and a less patronizing manner, those talents would amount to a lot more.
  76. The Transformers: The Movie
    These robots transform in a flash; the colors are shocking pinks and electric greens; the film is packed with one-to-one combat, large-scale battles and exploding planets. Despite these improvements, though, the movie is not for anyone too grown-up.
  77. Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed
    The melancholy result is that the painter with the spectacularly lulling voice, the hallmark ’fro and the liberating kindness remains a mystery; not the brand that’s made millions but the guy who touched millions.
  78. The Last Thing Mary Saw
    The Last Thing Mary Saw is as surprising as it is frustrating.
  79. Small Engine Repair
    The film, which Pollono also directs, provides more depth than the original but still flounders in the translation from stage to screen.
  80. Clean
    Clean has some real craft, but doesn’t quite satisfy as it toggles between bloodbaths and bathos.
  81. Sundown
    Sundown lands more like a one-note thought exercise than a fully fleshed out story.
  82. Dogs
    One can imagine how the particularities of the Romanian bush might yield novel dynamics. Instead, Dogs underplays these elements and commits to the beats of the slow burn thriller in mostly generic form.
  83. Oscar Peterson: Black + White
    “Black + White” does feature plenty of Peterson’s music, including several cover renditions performed in tribute for the film by a contemporary ensemble. But at almost every opportunity, Avrich undermines these numbers by cutting to one of an endless lineup of talking heads, usually to repeat predictable platitudes about Peterson’s brilliance.
  84. Don't Worry Darling
    Wilde does some fine work here, despite hammering the same notes early and often . . . But she isn’t a strong enough filmmaker at this point to navigate around the story’s weaknesses, much less transcend them. That’s especially tough on the actors.
  85. Charlotte
    In the end, Charlotte is bereft of the spirit of the artist who made the uncanny “Life? or Theatre?” What an even better tribute the movie would have been had it also taken heated energy from Salomon’s art.
  86. The Good House
    The trouble with this cinematic Trojan horse is that the superficial blandness dominates the frame. It’s hard to feel the story’s stakes when the images are always indicating no danger ahead.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Wrong Man
    Frighteningly authentic, the story generates only a modicum of drama.
  88. Zero Contact
    There’s a vicarious pleasure to be found in watching Hopkins, the octogenarian actor, getting the hang of technology that allows him to film himself without the usual hovering crew.
  89. The Real Charlie Chaplin
    The tell-all promise of the film’s title dwindles away into predictable perspectives from members of his family. But this introduction to Chaplin shines whenever he performs, displaying his comic genius for doing everything wrong to absolute perfection.
  90. The Trip
    The Trip is occasionally fun, but other films have handled gleeful gore and psychological torture with a far more skillful touch.
  91. The Spine of Night
    Alas, all the world-building filmmakers may contrive doesn’t count for much if they don’t put it across visually. And this heavily rotoscoped vision does not get where it needs to be to achieve genuine trippiness.
  92. Goodbye, Mr. Chips
    Should it survive—and I suspect it will — it will be largely because of the restrained, affectingly comic performance of Peter O'Toole in the title role. Everything else in this British public-school romance is either out of symmetry or out of date.
  93. Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone
    When the material is condensed, nearly everything that made the first two-thirds of the television series distinctive _ — the deliberate pace, the wry humor, the subtle (for anime) characterizations — is lost. “Evangelion” becomes just another giant-robot story.
  94. After Blue (Dirty Paradise)
    It’s unclear what Mandico is trying to say, if anything, and the film overstays its welcome — even the wildest visuals lose their power to stun after a while — but “After Blue” certainly is sui generis.
  95. She Paradise
    Though Nestor’s understated performance is powerful at times, one leaves the film not fully satisfied, wanting for a stronger arc.
  96. Mayor Pete
    Showing Buttigieg at one public appearance after another, “Mayor Pete” more often plays like outtakes from the trail than an inside glimpse.
  97. Being the Ricardos
    The Lucy in Being the Ricardos is scarcely interested in messy politics. Mainly she plays the role of the jealous, suspicious wife and harridan star who everyone really does love even if she’s a bitch. That shortchanges and flattens Ball, despite Kidman’s efforts.
  98. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
    This is a bland, no-fault Frankenstein for the 90's, short on villainy but loaded with the tragically misunderstood.
  99. No Future
    In flattening everything into a single shade of funereal gray, “No Future” has none of the ineffable, multifaceted complexity of life.
  100. Hypnotic
    The twists in Hypnotic may not be brilliant, but they are abundant, making for the sort of straight-to-streaming treat best enjoyed on a couch, with company who will laugh with you and let you yell at the screen.
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