The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Speer Goes to Hollywood
    “Speer” is an intriguing document, highlighting the ease with which the most reprehensible figures are able to whitewash their legacies. But once you settle into its wavelength, the documentary begins to feel simplistic, like a one-track excuse to roll out rare film clips and testimony.
  2. Isolation
    Though there are a few standout creations, the anthology is mostly muddled, privileging a heightened version of 2020 over a reality that was plenty scary on its own.
  3. Love Is Love Is Love
    The cumulative effect of so much enlightened sitting around is that the movie doesn’t move. There is a lack of action, both visually and emotionally.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Nightmare Alley
    Despite some fine and intense acting by Mr. Power and others, this film traverses distateful dramatic ground and only rarely does it achieve any substance as entertainment.
  5. They Say Nothing Stays the Same
    The landscape can go only so far in expressing Toichi’s mind-set, and the movie turns hokey when it dramatizes Toichi’s inner thoughts.
  6. Prey
    Despite a female-empowerment theme and an adversary fairly bristling with fancy weaponry, Prey never builds a head of steam.
  7. Sneakerella
    If this spin on the tale is not quite diverting enough to justify its existence, the movie, directed by Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum, is at least not a soulless exercise.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jailhouse Rock
    Presley fans may not like the idea of his being a churlish, egotistical wonder boy of television and the screen for a good half of the picture.
  9. Aulcie
    There is a contagious thrill to the movie’s portrait of its subject’s achievements, especially his whirlwind romance with the Israeli supermodel Tami Ben Ami. But when it comes to Perry’s moments of struggle, Aulcie trips up.
  10. Cadence
    Cadence, which is the first feature Martin Sheen has directed, allows the director and his son Charlie ample opportunity to grapple with one another, as well as with questions of racial harmony and with another of Mr. Sheen's sons, Ramon Estevez. The result is well meaning and at times even gently likable.
  11. Keep Sweet
    While the ethical issues of the property situation add complexity, the film’s efforts to balance the arguments on both sides aren’t convincing.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Let's Scare Jessica to Death
    Although a disappointment generally, there are several things going for it; among them, the pleasantly aggressive title, which has, as is proper, only the most casual relation to the movie.
  13. The Advent Calendar
    It is bizarre and dizzying and oddly beautiful in its fervor, as fantastical props and effects distract from the nonsensical plot. But this script also clumsily insists that its protagonist, a woman named Eva (Eugénie Derouand) who uses a wheelchair, is murderously obsessed with overcoming her disability.
  14. Bedazzled
    Maybe the brand of British banter and buffoonery that Peter Cook and Dudley Moore bombard us with in Stanley Donen's Bedazzled would be very funny if it came in small bursts at not too frequent intervals in an expansive musical comedy or revue. But fired at you exclusively and endlessly for more than an hour and a half in this pretentiously metaphorical picture...it becomes awfully precious and monotonous.
  15. A Shot Through the Wall
    Though attentive to calls for police accountability, and the media’s role in reducing complex issues into simple narratives, Long’s schematic script ramps up theatrics at the expense of more challenging insights.
  16. The Lost City
    While “Raiders” transcends its inspirations with wit and Steven Spielberg’s filmmaking and “Romancing” tries hard to do the same, The Lost City remains a copy of a copy.
  17. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
    Some intelligent, sophisticated people have knocked themselves out to transform bland into bland, and they have succeeded to the extent that anyone who fondly remembers the comic strip, or the old movie serial with Buster Crabbe, probably will not feel cheated.
  18. Blacklight
    At least Williams displays a bit of inventive flair with novel booby traps and a chase scene that features a lurching garbage truck.
  19. Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes
    While there is much to admire in this scrappy, micro-budgeted debut feature, its sci-fi shenanigans are too convoluted and its visuals too claustrophobic to sustain interest.
  20. Peter von Kant
    Fassbinder’s work finds a kind of truth in the artifice of emotionally plumped-up dramas, but Ozon’s often tedious tragicomedy never hits such a stride, trusting that the material will automatically confer greatness; instead, “Peter” comes off like top-shelf fan-fiction.
  21. No Exit
    No Exit drops an arsenal of twists and rug-pulls at a machine gun’s pace, though Power, the director, doesn’t quite know how to milk the tension, and the perfunctory script (written by Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari) tries and fails to give the events a greater resonance.
  22. When You Finish Saving the World
    Eisenberg has already proven himself a smart wordsmith and a knowing performer of emotional unease, but this “World” is a disappointingly shallow tale of narcissism and negligence.
  23. Sharp Stick
    An uneven, uneasy fable of desire.
  24. Studio 666
    No one tries for anything mightier than put-on dumbness because that’s the outer limit of where the acting, writing (by Jeff Buhler and Rebecca Hughes) and directing (by BJ McDonnell) can take this premise. It’s fun, nonetheless, to catalog everybody’s imperviousness to embarrassment.
  25. Palm Trees and Power Lines
    Dack takes obvious care to make sure that the filmmaking and camerawork don’t further exploit the character. Yet it’s a bummer that the ethical and political thoughtfulness that she extends during Lea’s most harrowingly vulnerable moments doesn’t extend to the rest of the movie.
  26. Breaking Bread
    A lot of the observations in “Breaking Bread” — the repeatedly offered notions that food is a common language or that politics has no place in the kitchen — seem trite and perhaps overly optimistic. The movie would ideally be shown with an accompanying tasting menu.
  27. Somewhere with No Bridges
    Even as Frank keeps questioning and exploring, Madeiras and the full sweep of his life remain as out of focus as this documentary, an essay without a coherent thesis.
  28. Both Sides of the Blade
    How strange that a filmmaker as idiosyncratic and fearless as Denis has made such a generic, tentative film.
  29. Before, Now & Then
    It’s a pity for both Salma and Basuki, whose expressive faces convey depths of feeling that the script and direction cannot quite match.
  30. 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.
  31. House Party
    Like any rager gone south, the buzz is fun early on, until it’s suddenly too much, the house is overrun, and the room starts spinning.
  32. The Burning Sea
    We get little more than a bland romance, smoothly professional special effects and a story that’s finally too predictable to raise the heart rate.
  33. Ultrasound
    There are some promising glints here and there, flashes of mordant wit and obvious ambition. But like too many movies, Ultrasound is better at setting up its story than delivering on its promise, as if the filmmakers were still pitching ideas in the elevator.
  34. Butter
    For all its ache and churning emotions, “Butter” winds up being little more than a meager “Afterschool Special.”
  35. Offseason
    Despite a wonderfully eerie atmosphere, this moody examination of guilt and mourning is too generic to scare and too predictable to surprise.
  36. Wonka
    The movie is overly busy, as these kinds of eager-to-please diversions tend to be, and at two hours it overstays its welcome.
  37. Not Okay
    As satires go, this one by the writer and director Quinn Shephard is hardly subtle — but though it lacks narrative finesse, Not Okay is brimming with provocative in-jokes for the extremely online.
  38. Love After Love
    What could make for a captivating story involving a transgressive love triangle is, even on a micro level, ineffective.
  39. Soft & Quiet
    The brutal possibilities of the white supremacist mind-set are nothing to shy away from. Still, the film’s admittedly jarring cruelty does little beyond press down on old bruises, turning the realities of racialized violence into an immersive spectacle with the kind of real-world sadistic allure one might find in a serial-killer movie.
  40. Atlantide
    Had Atlantide granted deeper access to Daniele and Maila, these images might have lent a moody complement to the characters and their struggles. As is, any sense of meaning is cast adrift in a sea of pretty pictures.
  41. Secret Headquarters
    When the kids are just doing kid stuff . . . Secret Headquarters has the playful, mischievous air of something like “The Goonies.” When the kids acquire some of the Guard’s superpowers and start flying around and fighting baddies, it has the air of … well, of just another superhero movie.
  42. Spellbound
    It isn’t fair to say that “Spellbound” lacks musical or visual invention. Zegler can belt out a song, and the evil storm that transmogrified the royals is pleasingly lo-fi. (It looks like a scribble-scrabble twister.) But the magic feels distinctly, almost insultingly poached.
  43. Bad Axe
    This is a hermetic story, but one wishes that Siev had balanced its coziness with acuity.
  44. King Otto
    Somewhat gratingly, King Otto treats its story as a tale of national stereotypes colliding head-to-head.
  45. Crush
    It is clear from the offset which sibling will win both Paige’s affection and the obligatory climactic smooch. The journey there can drag. More fresh is the movie’s sex-positive empathy.
  46. Operation Mincemeat
    Operation Mincemeat is overall light on remorse and far more interested in intrigue, both political and romantic.
  47. Meat the Future
    If you’re not well-versed in bioengineering or food regulation, it’s a bit of a slog.
  48. Boys' Night Out
    Michael Gordon's direction is not as nimble as it was on "Pillow Talk."
  49. Father Stu
    Stu’s travails feed into his salty homilies about getting closer to God, delivered with Wahlberg’s usual bluffness. That doesn’t automatically translate into a religious experience, and watching the movie can feel like a two-hour hearty handshake.
  50. Halftime
    In Halftime, she is seen in top J. Lo form, an empowering Hollywood icon with an inspirational story to share. Is that reason enough to watch this scattershot portrait? It depends on if she had your love to begin with.
  51. Somewhere in Queens
    Here, Romano sticks to the outer-borough Italian American milieu of his series. The results are mixed.
  52. The Equalizer 3
    Washington is unsurprisingly the primary reason to watch “Equalizer 3,” which is basically a showcase for him to smolder, swagger and light up the screen as he wanders a tiny, wildly beautiful town on the Amalfi coast.
  53. Marvelous and the Black Hole
    Cech is believable as a troubled teenager, and it’s refreshing to see an Asian American girl as a protagonist, but the film has a limited emotional range, jumping among several plot elements without fully fleshing them out.
  54. A Perfect Pairing
    It’s all so anodyne that the also-obligatory girl-gets-mad-at-hunk plot turn before the love-conquers-all finale feels like being shaken awake during a dream of drowning in butterscotch sunsets.
  55. Bad Roads
    The four wartime stories in “Bad Roads” fall short on delivering any meaningful insight into the nature of conflict, relying instead on moments of lackluster tension and shock value that greatly overstay their welcome.
  56. Brian and Charles
    Too soon, however, this intriguing psychological study turns into a programmatic geeks-vs-bullies story that relies on pushing the easiest emotional buttons.
  57. Jerry and Marge Go Large
    While the movie sustains levity, its lack of subtlety — and a lack of stakes, save for sweepstakes — make for an altogether bland bonanza.
  58. Dangerous Liaisons
    The director Rachel Suissa runs Laclos’s story through a heavy Instagram filter in this outlandish, flimsy adaptation.
  59. Spiderhead
    Kosinski can’t make the inane philosophizing about free will sound profound or new, and the hectic, hasty finale, lacking the nerve or chilly interiority of the original story, plays like something that blew up in the lab.
  60. Human Factors
    The tone is too rigidly intellectual for the movie to succeed as a tense thriller. But the actors are up to the challenge of not so much sharing scenes as coexisting within them, particularly Timoteo as the embittered wife who roils like a teakettle that has been welded shut.
  61. Three Thousand Years of Longing
    Despite Miller’s talent and feverish enthusiasm, and the gravitational pull of his stars, the movie’s colorful parts just whir and stop, a pinwheel in unsteady wind.
  62. Double Team
    Rodman, awkward but definitely lively, is the occasion for har-har hair jokes ("Who does your hair, Siegfried or Roy?") and gives the film some much-needed comic relief. Rourke, as a villain named Stavros, is scary. And for once, he's supposed to be.
  63. Rodeo
    The guarded Julia certainly intrigues, but too often the film sinks into the clichés of a rugged character study — no wonder she prefers to accelerate.
  64. They/Them
    Logan, who also wrote the screenplay, feels so averse to engaging with the thorny political implications inherent in this material — of having to negotiate a cast of gay, transgender and nonbinary characters in a horror context — that the whole thing winds up seeming rather tame.
  65. Disenchanted
    Adams doesn’t gain much by returning for Disenchanted, a cluttered and noisy sequel directed by Adam Shankman from a screenplay by Brigitte Hales. Neither does the original film’s fan base.
  66. Mondocane
    At its grungy heart, Alessandro Celli’s Mondocane is about the dissolution of a friendship. Yet this cynical, near-future crime thriller, with its Hunger Games morality and Mad Max aesthetic, is too busy glamorizing cruelty to allow its central relationship to resonate.
  67. Torn Hearts
    Unfortunately, the script is too disjointed to keep its own complex characters afloat. Little is revealed as the plot bounces from one climax to another, making any eventual bloodshed feel exhausting and unearned.
  68. Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet Horror
    What could have been an urgent inquiry into the systems enabling sex criminals becomes something more pedestrian — a stylized replay of a game of cat and mouse.
  69. Hollywood Stargirl
    Hollywood Stargirl could be seen as a filmmaking exercise. How do you build a story around a character who was auxiliary by design? Hart’s solutions are manifold, but her most effective one is to quash the grating altruism that drove Stargirl in the first movie.
  70. Zombies 3
    This is not your mother’s Disney Channel, and thank god. All of the “Zombies” movies are brimming with camp delights, as though the crew watched “But I’m a Cheerleader” while dropping acid. This is particularly true for Zombies 3.
  71. Paulie Go!
    Directed by Andrew Nackman in his feature debut, Paulie Go! unabashedly aspires to the sentimental whimsy that once swamped film festivals, and certain moments — including a self-consciously awkward dance scene — seem near quotations of dozens of offbeat movies that came before.
  72. My Old School
    Its fascination with Brandon becomes a kind of credulity, a willingness to accept uncritically the mystifications of a proven liar.
  73. 18½
    The film’s referential pleasures feel insubstantial, diminished by the direct comparison to more meaningful works of the period.
  74. A Goofy Movie
    A Goofy Movie is engaging in its mild-mannered way, but the story is too rambling and emotionally diffuse for the title character to come fully alive.
  75. Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko
    Although she is buoyant and cheerful, Nikuko is cast as oafish and uncouth, and she is always ultimately the butt of the joke. It’s a puerile, mean-spirited tendency that altogether spoils the otherwise exquisite imagery.
  76. Freakscene: The Story of Dinosaur Jr.
    The movie is nothing if not relentlessly focused on Dinosaur Jr. itself. The band is a noteworthy one. But this treatment feels skimpy.
  77. Endangered
    Covered in isolation, any of these interview subjects, or any of the problems facing journalists raised — online harassment, police intimidation, hedge fund ownership of newspapers, news deserts — might have made for a more detailed and compelling film.
  78. The Policeman's Lineage
    The director, Lee Kyu-man, makes the camera hover tensely over scenes, but only a couple of action sequences pack much oomph. There’s more sinister tension in brief scenes with elder statesmen of the criminal world, who are chillingly self-assured.
  79. Spoiler Alert
    The film is strongest when it falls silent, allowing the actors to communicate their thoughts with a look.
  80. Yanks
    Yanks never succeeds, however, in making these three stories urgent or especially moving.
  81. Trevor: The Musical
    One wonders if this generation’s more attuned and sensitive kids will find this staging of “Trevor” quaint, kitschy — or perhaps still universal.
  82. Honor Society
    A twist whipsaws the movie into a darker place, one in the vicinity of Patricia Highsmith. But no murder takes place, and the movie’s resolution confirms what one may have suspected all along: Its dominant room tone is kinda-sorta that of “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.”
  83. The Art of Making It
    Edwards’s generic approach — heavy on talking heads and explanatory title cards — often yields fuzzy results, with a haphazard rush of information overwhelming the rare moments the documentary settles into a more defined and compelling point of view.
  84. God's Time
    The three principal actors, particularly Sierra, are appealing. But the story is thin, and the jokes are more cute than funny.
  85. Athena
    Gavras’s filmmaking is technically impressive. He pulls the camera through complex, kinetic tableaus in long, breathless takes. Some of these sequences are thrilling, but after a while they become repetitive, and Athena feels more like a video game background than an actual place. There’s no modulation.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jason and the Argonauts
    This absurd, unwieldy adventure — if that's the word—is no worse, but certainly no better, than most of its kind.
  87. The Killer
    While the nimble Jang holds together the robust action sequences — bloody freakouts often captured in slow motion — no one else grounds any of the scenes with any emotion. Consequently, The Killer fails to land a real knockout blow.
  88. On the Come Up
    The predictable narrative arc, the happenstance lighting from scene-to-scene and Lathan’s minimalist take on the material all adds up to something you might watch once and promptly forget about.
  89. Railway Children
    Decency prevails in a somewhat ludicrous finale involving an army of children and a train containing a high-ranking officer. It’s an ending so tidy as to undercut the effort to broach a shameful side to the American war effort.
  90. How to Please a Woman
    This hook piques curiosity — at least enough for a coy eyebrow raise. Light intrigue is often not enough, though, and in this case, the movie strains to sustain charm.
  91. The Good Boss
    The Good Boss provides prime material for Bardem, who has to maintain a polished veneer even as his character’s mendacity and troubles mount. As satire, though, the movie is facile.
  92. The Phantom
    The pleasures are familiar, but not the least bit inspired.
  93. Multiplicity
    Multiplicity weaves such an uninteresting plot around its bland, generic principals that it rarely reaches the absurdist heights its premise demands.
  94. Out of the Blue
    Like most of LaBute’s work, Out of the Blue is talky, sparsely staged and presented with his signature detachment. The two leads are fine.
  95. City Hall
    But this knotty investigative thriller has trouble achieving the rock-solid credibility to hold an audience in thrall.
  96. The Greatest Beer Run Ever
    Depth comes from Efron’s visible difficulty maintaining a smile as he comes to sense that he’s crossed the ocean only to discover a permanent gulf between him and his childhood friends. They’ve endured agonies he’ll never understand — and a barfly like him can’t deliver a cheers that will set things right.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Blood of a Poet
    While the various imaginery episodes shown on the screen, to the accompaniment of microphone comment by M. Cocteau himself, reinforced by English titles for those unfamiliar with French, have a certain fascination, especially for persons interested in film technique, they are hardly calculated to set the Hudson River on fire.
  98. Causeway
    Causeway is both thin and heavy-handed, its plot overly diagramed and its characters inadequately fleshed out. The burden of making it credible falls disproportionately on Henry and Lawrence, superb actors who do what they can to bring the script’s static and fuzzy ideas about pain, alienation and the need for connection to something that almost resembles life.
  99. Seoul Vibe
    The caper, directed by Moon Hyun-sung, isn’t as fun as it insists it is, playing up the crew and its exploits à la “The Fast and the Furious” and “Baby Driver” but never hitting its stride.
  100. Heat
    The setting is Las Vegas, where Mex wins and loses a lot of money in blackjack without getting too excited about it, and things work up tepidly to the big battle in a factory handily stocked with murderous devices.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »