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. Goodnight Mommy
    Kyle Warren’s screenplay is potent enough to generate several moments of suspense, and Watts, an exceptional actor sidelined too often by poor choices, is not the problem here. That would be the decision to jettison the children’s most creative cruelties — and consequently much of the movie’s tension — and a director, Matt Sobel, who’s determined to steer the audience toward a specific interpretation of events.
  2. My Best Friend's Exorcism
    The film repeatedly undercuts whatever tension is mustered with its frustrating tendency to crack goofy, juvenile jokes.
  3. 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.
  4. Quest for Camelot
    The movie offers a grab bag of oddball characters who seem unfocused, and its visual rhythms are jerky and spasmodic.
  5. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
    With its pointed, cavernous backgrounds and a Gotham City setting that evokes a 1940's-style futurism, "Mask of the Phantasm" looks splendid. But its story is too complicated and the editing too jerky for the movie to achieve narrative coherence. And the resemblance between the movie's hero and its enigmatic arch-villain is so close that audiences are likely to be confused.
  6. An Affair to Remember
    Mr. McCarey's direction is unpropitiously and unaccountably slow. Could it be, too, that a brand of make-believe that was tolerable eighteen years ago, before color and CinemaScope and other intrusions, is just a little discomforting now?
  7. Lou
    Methodically violent and more than a little silly, “Lou” delivers a kick in the head to ageism.
  8. From the Hood to the Holler
    Though Booker’s story and success are inspiring, the documentary falls flat, feeling more like a political tool than a commentary on the state of politics in Kentucky.
  9. Empire of Light
    A film that had seemed interested in the lives and feelings of its characters, and in an unlikely but touching relationship between two people at odds with the world around them, turns into a movie with Something to Say.
  10. The Nun II
    The pacing of the film, set in the 1950s and directed by Michael Chaves, is too neat: It runs like haunted clockwork, shoving characters down dark alleyways or abandoned chapels every five minutes with little justification.
  11. The Bad and the Beautiful
    It is a crowded and colorful picture, but it is choppy, episodic and vague.
  12. Wendell & Wild
    The story lines feel far-flung and disconnected, and the limits and rules of this world’s magical logic are at turns underdeveloped and inconsistent. Though the movie has a delightfully raucous rock ’n’ roll sensibility, the dialogue lacks the wit and punch to match.
  13. Scrooge: A Christmas Carol
    This update has its moments of aplomb, but too many of Dickens’s most incisive lines are no more, which invites the not entirely charitable, two-word retort Scrooge made famous.
  14. The Pale Blue Eye
    Continuing his fascination with tormented manhood, Cooper, in this third collaboration with Bale after “Out of the Furnace” (2013) and “Hostiles” (2017), works with a solemnity that stifles the fun.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Red Dust
    The atmosphere of this tale is more interesting than its story, especially the glimpses of the men at work.
  16. The Sea Wolf
    At least a good half of the effect in a sea-picture comes from the sea, and when that element is lacking the whole thing seems flat and synthetic. This, we regret to say, is a major fault in The Sea Wolf.
  17. Love Life
    It’s more a grief triangle than a love triangle, and a late revelation alters its symmetry, erasing hard-won sympathy for one character.
  18. A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff
    The movie feels shaggily shapeless, as if Rabins and Rose were unsure what, exactly, they were trying to say, or how to get to the mourning prayer that gives their movie its title — and does, eventually, provide an emotional coda.
  19. Support Your Local Sheriff!
    SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SHERIFF, a Western period farce about a town-taming supersheriff, is something designed for sensibilities shaped by "Petticoat Junction" and "Green Acres."
  20. Peter Pan & Wendy
    These well-meaning choices struggle to cohere into a satisfying picture.
  21. Snow White
    Zegler has enough charm and lung power to hold the center of this busy, overproduced movie with its mix of memorable old and unmemorable new songs.
  22. Gameboys: The Movie
    It leads with a teen soap tone, and despite billing itself as a film, feels structurally more like a string of episodes smashed together.
  23. Alice, Darling
    The larger problem is that there’s not enough here — in story terms or in the filmmaking — to sustain even the movie’s 90 minutes.
  24. Moving On
    Something else is missing here — a farcical energy or satirical audacity that might shock the premise to unsettling life, or else a deeper, darker core of feeling. Moving On takes refuge in pleasantness, and in the easy charm of its stars.
  25. Kraven the Hunter
    If the action in Kraven the Hunter was as well conceived as its villains, it’d be a riot. Unfortunately, the brawls are physically detached from the environment. The choreography lacks punch and design; the compositions are spatially unaware.
  26. The Justice of Bunny King
    A grim social-realist drama from New Zealand that labors to twist its narrative into a redemptive arc, The Justice of Bunny King has an unsteady tone to match its ungainly title.
  27. 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.
  28. Geronimo: An American Legend
    The real flavor of Davis's account, and of the ferocity that earned Geronimo his place in history, is nowhere evident on screen.
  29. Blueback
    It’s a mournful, stodgy, girl-meets-fish drama about the emotional cost of protecting the planet from its most rapacious predator: the land developer.
  30. Battleground
    The documentary is a cookie-cutter presentation intent on showing viewers how leaders of the anti-abortion movement have managed to advance their goals and consolidate power by mobilizing an evangelical minority.
  31. Plan A
    Plan A never quite rises to the challenge posed by this remarkable chapter in history.
  32. Year One: A Political Odyssey
    The film’s skimping on economic and social issues echoes one description of Biden’s own messaging by some pundits: low-key to the point of obscuring the full picture of his efforts.
  33. Of an Age
    The movie’s greater, intractable problem, though, is that Stolevski has burdened his characters with such obvious narrative instrumentality — Kol is the sensitive naïf while Adam is the appealing, gentle exemplar of an authentic life — that the two simply never come to life as people, either as individuals or as a couple.
  34. The Big Country
    For all this film's mighty pretensions, it does not get far beneath the skin of its conventional Western situation and its stock Western characters. It skims across standard complications and ends on a platitude.
  35. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
    It works well as a visual companion for fans of the author’s work, and as a flawed enigma for everyone else.
  36. Nocebo
    This movie has plenty going for it: excellent actors (Fonacier has a knack for coiled tension), stylish camerawork by the director Lorcan Finnegan and a point to make about economic exploitation. What’s missing is any sense of surprise.
  37. You Resemble Me
    The film needs more facts and fewer flourishes, but its closing turn to documentary footage, comprising brief snippets of interviews with Hasna’s family, is too little, too late.
  38. The Day of the Dolphin
    The Day of the Dolphin is not a movie with much personality of its own.
  39. Wildcat
    In shaping this narrative, though, Lesh and Frost have left out details that would have deepened and broadened Wildcat.
  40. Sharper
    The film’s biggest trick might be casting Moore, Stan and the positively glowing Middleton and still never quite catching fire.
  41. Sam & Kate
    Twists of fate lose their magic when they’re obvious as clumsy script contrivances.
  42. The Disappearance
    Mr. Cooper's abrupt, stylized direction can't tease much delicacy or meaning out of the material, though delicacy is all that might recommend it. John Alcott's handsome cinematography is most effective, but the beauty it imparts is skin-deep.
  43. The Watcher in the Woods
    A peculiar sort of Disney movie in that it's likely to scare the daylights out of the very young while reducing their usually sober-sided elders to unfortunate giggles. The audience in-between may well enjoy the standard spook-movie effects, but I challenge even the most indulgent fan to give a coherent translation of what passes for an explanation at the end.
  44. Being Thunder
    The film ‌is‌ gentle ‌yet indistinct, l‌‌eaving us to discern figures through a fog.
  45. Nr. 10
    What the film ultimately becomes — a sci-fi mystery, a smirking satire of religion — doesn’t possess enough actual narrative meat, formal style, or wit to justify its structural gambit.
  46. Broadway Rising
    It can’t fail to trigger shudders of recognition as well as feelings of release, but the filmmaking lacks a certain drama.
  47. Actual People
    The low-budget nature tends to expose the film’s amateurish qualities — the attempt at a vérité feel can fall flat, particularly through the acting.
  48. Fantasy Football
    Hardwick and Martin have decent chemistry, but the film lacks a true charisma that would make it a children’s classic worth revisiting.
  49. Candy Land
    Written and directed by John Swab, Candy Land is standard grindhouse fare — more serious and less conceptually adventurous than its recent counterparts, Ti West’s “X” and “Pearl” — though not without its fair share of pleasurable nastiness.
  50. Last Man Standing
    Last Man Standing comes to life only with rapturous gunfights that add Sam Peckinpah to the film maker's pantheon of heroes, and that are ear-splitting enough to jolt the audience out of its seats. These scenes have their firepower, but they would have larger impact if anyone cared which of the film's gangsters lived or died.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Man with a Movie Camera
    It is a disjointed array of scenes in which the producer, Dziga Vertoff, does not take into consideration the fact that the human eye fixes for a certain space of time that which holds the attention.
  52. Scream VI
    It’s tricky business balancing disturbing terror and jokey film criticism, and while this sequel occasionally pulls it off, the weight of obligations to the dictates of the franchise ultimately drags it down.
  53. The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari
    Once the ash settles, we long for insight, but only the trauma lingers on.
  54. Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?
    We already know that Menzel can belt to the back row; a richer profile would have coaxed out a more intimate voice.
  55. Back to the Wharf
    This film from Li Xiaofeng turns a crime soap opera into an allegory about the moral costs of rapacious expansion — to middling effect.
  56. The Offering
    A serviceable slab of possession horror.
  57. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
    If The Subtle Art of Not Giving a #@%! helps people, its deficiencies as a movie don’t matter much.
  58. Beautiful Beings
    It doesn’t add up to much, despite the appealing young cast and the handsome cinematography that brings texture and visual interest to every grubby corner.
  59. Beau Is Afraid
    Despite these attractions and in spite of Phoenix’s aura and his focus — and how he plays with the character, opening Beau up a wee bit with flickers of yearning and teasingly humanizing fissures — it is tough to care about a mouse who matters so much less to the filmmaker than the shiny mousetrap where he’s imprisoned you both.
  60. True Spirit
    The message of manifesting your goals reigns supreme, which is great, but it’s worth mentioning that Watson’s willpower benefits from the privileges of financial security, family support and a curmudgeonly-turned-selfless coach.
  61. Attachment
    The ticktock horror plotting muffles the romantic spark that brought Maja and Leah together in the first place — the thrill replaced by a lukewarm chill.
  62. Somebody I Used to Know
    The film lacks the indelible details and authentic feeling necessary to encode it in long-term memory. Indeed, soon after finishing the movie, it already feels far away.
  63. The Seven Faces of Jane
    The consistency limits the ability of the directors to lean into their own style, leading to a movie that feels narratively scattered and stylistically inhibited.
  64. Cléo from 5 to 7
    Another French film that fairly glitters with photographic and cinematic "style," yet fails to do more than skim the surface of a cryptic dramatic theme.
  65. New Gods: Yang Jian
    Even for fans of this animated universe, New Gods: Yang Jian can’t turn its viewers into believers.
  66. Magazine Dreams
    Magazine Dreams bludgeons viewers to show off its sensitivity.
  67. 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.
  68. We Have a Ghost
    The film grasps onto anything that will amuse itself for a scene.
  69. Pathaan
    Pathaan is in some ways a save-the-world superhero movie without suits, and while less self-serious, the hefty length can lag. More is not always better — though the gusto of Padukone speedskating to the rescue at one point goes a long way.
  70. Kompromat
    Salle’s approach leaves the physical details of Mathieu’s escape foggy. It’s not always clear how long Mathieu spends in hiding, or how he acquires the tools needed to sustain his flight.
  71. The Man in the Basement
    Somewhere in “The Man in the Basement” there is a smart psychodrama sharpened by political urgency, but what we get is a middling think piece that too quickly loses momentum — and peters out by the end.
  72. Passages
    The misery unfurls in a straight timeline of dramatic scenes that leap over the lived-in moments that make up a relationship.
  73. Radical
    Despite its foundation in reality, Radical is as by the books as it gets.
  74. Landscape with Invisible Hand
    Landscape With Invisible Hand mashes up the teen romantic comedy and alien-invasion horror genres to campy, mixed results.
  75. The Deepest Breath
    We learn precious little about the personal lives of these impressive individuals. When it comes to what drove them, how they associated with others or how they dealt with danger, The Deepest Breath offers only surface-level observations.
  76. The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic
    The camera stays close to Jaakko, always at his eye level, blurring everything around him. But the script struggles to channel the character’s wonderfully playful, acerbic spirit.
  77. A Lot of Nothing
    In his feature debut, the director Mo McRae displays a nice way with actors and a gift for visual tension, but in aiming for absurdist humor, he lands on something more vexing. It’s the script — by McRae and Sarah Kelly Kaplan — that’s the problem.
  78. Mixtape Trilogy: Stories of the Power of Music
    This film, relatively modest in scale but broad in ambition, offers three stories of music makers and devotees. It’s a mixed bag, alternating conventional homily with genuine, substantial analysis.
  79. La Syndicaliste
    Sometimes the best reason to watch a movie is because Isabelle Huppert is in it. That’s pretty much true of La Syndicaliste, a tangled if certainly watchable French true-crime drama about dirty political doings in the nation’s nuclear energy industry.
  80. Leave the World Behind
    After a while, the movie plays like a bulleted list of everything wrong with America — fair enough — but hurled so relentlessly at the audience that you can only assume the goal is for anyone watching the movie to find something they agree with. In the onslaught, the narrative tension dulls into passivity, both for us and for the characters.
  81. A Family Affair
    King is not exactly outclassed by Nicole Kidman, Kathy Bates and Zac Efron. But the movie’s script, by Carrie Solomon, puts her at a disadvantage.
  82. The Killer
    The character is boring and so is this movie, but like the supremely skilled Fincher, who can’t help but make images that hold your gaze even as your mind wanders, Fassbender does keep you watching.
  83. Damsel
    Damsel is evidence that studios still don’t realize that a “strong female lead” is not enough to make a movie good. More is required: a strong set of supporting characters, a strong plot, a strong sense of what makes a movie interesting to an audience.
  84. 99 Moons
    Gassmann clearly wants to explore the state of love and sexuality in the 2020s — there are more than a few passing parallels to Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World” — but he succeeds only in conveying the pathologies of two people who can’t figure out what they want from each other.
  85. Wildflower
    Shipka ably handles the responsibility of leading the story, but the director Matt Smukler has a harder time balancing the charming and empathetic ensemble performances with the script’s constantly judgmental tone.
  86. Gods of Mexico
    This nominal portrait of people isn’t interested in what they have to say.
  87. The Miracle Club
    The filmmakers go for too-easy laughs; the movie doesn’t seem to trust its audience to sit with the pain, much less to find the achy humor in it, as a more assured film might. The actors here are good, but they are not miracle workers.
    • 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.
  89. Jackpot!
    Directed by Paul Feig from a screenplay by Rob Yescombe, the movie sustains an admirably zany energy, though its jokes often feel underwritten. (“You can’t just steal people’s panic rooms. What are you, Jodie Foster?”) Worse, though, it seems intent on mixing its metaphors.
  90. The Forger
    Peren is clever to favor mischief against a backdrop of gloom, but in doing so she draws a frustrating distance between her subject and the audience.
  91. Under Capricorn
    It is an overlong, overlabored essay on the torments of conscience and love which Mr. Hitchcock has beautifully filmed in Technicolor but pointed in glaring blacks and whites.
  92. 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?
  93. 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.
  94. 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.
  95. Self Reliance
    The movie is too juvenile and too timid to acknowledge the real-world chill of its online cabal of murderous social misfits.
  96. Last Stop Larrimah
    The bloat saps the fun and intrigue from the film, which can’t navigate between playing up eccentricity and committing to the notion that hell can be other people (even in a one-time refuge).
  97. Ordinary Angels
    Despite its bona fides, the movies narrative and characterizations practically gorge on clichés.
  98. A Good Person
    Braff is going for something broader than indie naturalism, so perhaps the film calls for less subtle brushstrokes. But the result is something that rings with far less thoughtfulness than he’s clearly capable of (particularly in light of the opioid crisis that the film mentions), despite Pugh’s remarkable attempts to ground the story.
  99. Chantilly Lace
    It is a quirky, ambitious, praiseworthy project that somehow becomes a victim of all the cliches it was invented to avoid.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Safe in Hell
    Safe in Hell is a little reminiscent of "The Unholy Garden," with its tropic sanctuary where rogues of various nationalities live out their days in happy oblivion, safe from the long arm of extradition. The theme is a good deal sadder, a sort of meldodramatization of all those sad songs about the women who will die rapturously for their men.
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