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. Clock
    Clock is a psychological thriller, or perhaps even a satire, in horror clothing, tantalizing us with thought-provoking ideas, only to abandon them: nature versus nurture, the influence of the wellness-industrial complex over minds and bodies, the oppressive expectations placed on women — including by themselves.
  2. You Can Live Forever
    You Can Live Forever sticks to a fairly common coming-of-age trajectory.
  3. Honorable Men
    Honorable Men: The Rise and Fall of Ehud Olmert is a rare instance of a two-hour documentary that should have been an eight- or 10-hour mini-series, because it would take that long to clarify all the issues it raises, then present persuasive evidence.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Quo Vadis
    Within and around these visual triumphs and rich imagistic displays is tediously twined a hackneyed romance that threatens to set your teeth on edge.
  5. Gran Turismo
    The movie doesn’t need to achieve the same levels of sensation as a wildly popular racing simulator, but it should convey excitement and dynamism in its own cinematic way. When the novelty of watching a gamer become a driver wears off, we’re left with an adequate racing drama in a medium built for so much more.
  6. Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain
    The frustrating thing is that Marshall, Herlihy and especially Higgins really are funny, and the film has some huge laughs. That’s enough for a sketch show. It’s not quite enough for a film.
  7. They Might Be Giants
    A mushy movie with occasional, isolated moments of legitimate comedy, all provided by Mr. Scott with an assist by Mr. Goldman, whose sense of humor seems to surface in peripheral incidents only.
  8. Anxious Nation
    When it comes to the causes of this mental health crisis or the precise ways in which it manifests, the documentary falters, unable to distill its empirical material into insights.
  9. Calamity Jane
    In Technicolor, it looks good enough to eat. But the voracity with which Miss Day has at it and wolfs it down is unnerving to see. David Butler, who directed, has wound her up tight and let her go. She does everything but hit the ceiling in lashing all over the screen.This is not altogether entrancing.
  10. Four Quartets
    Fiennes brings the fire, yet the air around him remains unmoved, even by his embers.
  11. Wynonna Judd: Between Hell and Hallelujah
    The film plays like a country song with more chorus than verse.
  12. Centurion: The Dancing Stallion
    A formulaic family melodrama . . . which stars a stable of equine and human performers gamely mounting a Nicholas Sparks-like story line complete with romance across social classes, a conniving antagonist and grave health crises.
  13. Outlaw Johnny Black
    Outlaw Johnny Black struggles to establish a consistent comedic rhythm.
  14. 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.
  15. Happiness for Beginners
    Happiness for Beginners is inoffensive to a fault.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Broadway Melody
    The story was written by Edmund Goulding, and it is one that has not taxed his imagination severely, for it merely concerns the shattered illusions and hopes of two small-time dancing and singing girls who, having been successful in their sphere, decide to give Broadway the benefit of their talents.
  17. Poor Things
    It isn’t long into Poor Things that you start to feel as if you were being bullied into admiring a movie that’s so deeply self-satisfied there really isn’t room for the two of you.
  18. Unfinished Business
    It’s hard to begrudge Unfinished Business for emphasizing empowerment and sisterhood, but these women deserved more. They can take it.
  19. How to Have Sex
    Manning Walker sets the scene and stakes well enough, though after the millionth drink and shriek, whatever contact high you have is obliterated by a contact hangover. The largest problem, though, is that Manning Walker seems weirdly insensitive toward Tara, who endures a trauma that’s meant to say something about something — sex, consent, friendship — but mostly just gives the story some queasy heft.
  20. The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed
    Arnow’s sophisticated point — the one referenced in the film’s unwieldy title — is what drives interest until our own spirits snap.
  21. Cobweb
    Cobweb, directed by Kim Jee-woon, mines the comically absurd reality that is filmmaking, at times with bouncy cinematic verve, at others somewhat aimlessly and a little too indulgently.
  22. Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.
    Just Another Girl on the IRT means to be instructive about teen-age pregnancies, but what it's saying is none too coherent.
  23. Rotting in the Sun
    Rotting in the Sun is sharpest when exploring the two men’s love-loathe connection because Silva threads a provocatively fuzzy line between fascination for and irritation with Jordan and, by extension, Firstman himself.
  24. The Amateur
    It felt a bit like the life was draining away from the movie the longer it went on — as if this was more of an imitation of a good movie than an actually good movie. (The technical name for this among critics is a “nothingburger.”)
  25. 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.
  26. Wild Style
    Wild Style lacks a lot of the style of the people in it, but it never neutralizes their vitality.
  27. 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.
  28. Hour of the Gun
    The wonder is that John Sturges, a top director, has made such an obvious, slow film with this cast, and that Mr. Garner should be such a nobody as the legendary Mr. Earp.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Girl Happy
    The saving grace is the steady stream of tunes, as rhythmical as they are unoriginal, belted out by the star and the other youngsters.
  30. Anthem
    Where the film’s archival footage demonstrates the limits of respectability politics, Anthem ends up being overly respectable — and inevitably reductive.
  31. Millie Lies Low
    In the end, the movie far too easily waves away the potential interpersonal damage Millie has caused.
  32. The Beekeeper
    Statham excels as a straight-faced goof. Between his glower and the movie’s high-quality production values, this brain cell-destroying schlock resembles an earnest drama.
  33. Bleeding Love
    Sincere and grindingly predictable, this particular journey mixes tears and reams of dialogue, accusations and confessions with the usual roadside attractions, including a convenience store, a quirky motel and some lightly offbeat American types.
  34. Mutt
    These features of city life feed a sense of realism, as does the film’s warmly-lit and intimately framed cinematography. But that realism here is exhausting, even if it is well-intentioned — by the film’s end, even Feña seems ready to escape from the trial of his packed plotlines.
  35. Mayhem!
    A mood board of mashing, slashing, snapping and splintering, this feature, directed by Xavier Gens, is revenge-movie cliché ground down to the studs.
  36. Miguel Wants to Fight
    There are some laughs and the cast is talented, but the movie ultimately falls flat, missing an opportunity to delve into the insecurity, teen bravado and anger that leads to physical fighting in the first place.
  37. Billion Dollar Heist
    Billion Dollar Heist is not totally bankrupt, but in mining its central cybercrime for tidbits while smoothing over its complexities, the film erodes its power both as seminar and spectacle.
  38. Joyce Carol Oates: A Body in the Service of Mind
    Directed by Stig Björkman and narrated by Laura Dern, this documentary is so fixated on enshrining Oates within the canon of American literary giants that it skirts around the peculiarity and provocation of her ideas.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Till the End of Time
    Only intermittently compelling as an entertainment, notwithstanding the freshness and urgency of its subject.
  40. Foe
    To their great credit, the Irish stars, often loosely clothed and soaked in sweat from the lack of air conditioning, have such presence and chemistry that it’s possible to believe in their intimacy — the pull and tangle of their bodies, their paroxysms of anguish — and even to pretend in the moment that they have full-fledged characters to play.
  41. Migration
    In the end, Migration moves along at jet speed while often feeling labored.
  42. Satanic Hispanics
    The problem is that the films, which are in Spanish and English, rely on typical horror movie stuff — a haunted house, angry ghosts, shape shifters, tableaus of corpses — to lift scripts that are across the board mediocre. The result is eye-popping but half-formed, more sketches than fully considered short takes.
  43. Totally Killer
    The fun premise can make for a passively enjoyable watch during a Halloween binge, but the film mostly feels like it’s just going through the motions.
  44. Love and Bullets
    Mr. Bronson grows ever more coolly dependable with each new film, but Love and Bullets is too clumsy to show him off to much advantage.
  45. Sunburn
    As for comedy, Mr. Grodin's deadpan manner supplies a fair amount of that until the adventure-mystery aspects become overpowering.
  46. The Mirror Crack'd
    That The Mirror Crack'd never builds up much momentum has less to do with Guy Hamilton's direction and the performances than with the screenplay by Jonathan Hales and Barry Sandler, which promises more sophistication than it ever delivers.
  47. The Brink's Job
    As in his last film, "Sorcerer," Mr. Friedkin seems bent on supplying us with more sociological information than is entirely necessary, whereas more information about the heist itself would have been welcome.
  48. Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver
    A delirious, pulpy mishmash of knockoffs, The Scargiver isn’t good, but it sure is something.
  49. AGGRO DR1FT
    Korine achieves what he set out to do, which is locate a strange liminal zone between avant-garde filmmaking and searing viewers’ faces with a frying pan.
  50. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
    The best stretches involve Kong lumbering through the landscape, Godzilla stomping around crushing things, and of course the inevitable final confrontation, which has a few surprises up its proverbial sleeves.
  51. Radical Wolfe
    Richard Dewey’s staid, by-the-book documentary can hardly match the flair with which Wolfe lived and wrote.
  52. Driving Madeleine
    It’s a heart-warmer about respecting your elders.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Eight on the Lam
    The latest Hope vehicle, Eight on the Lam, gallops frenetically all the way back to Mack Sennett, shedding goodwill and about every tired family television cliché you can think of.
  54. Scout's Honor: The Secret Files of the Boy Scouts of America
    Knappenberger does, thankfully, make space for survivors to share their own accounts, and their vulnerability lends authority to an otherwise anonymous film.
  55. One Life
    In trying to capture this almost stoic modesty, the film, directed by James Hawes, falls into a dramaturgical trap.
  56. The Universal Theory
    Though visually handsome, the film leaves the audience with the sense that, like a grad student, it is still working out its big ideas.
  57. The End We Start From
    It’s as much a movie about the hazy struggles of early motherhood as it is about survival in a destroyed world — and it’s best when it leans into the former, with characters’ discussing why anyone has a baby at all.
  58. PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie
    The film has no shame in being formulaic in plot or execution. Skye’s zero-to-hero plot arc is predictable as they come, though it’s easy to see why younger audiences may find it relatable.
  59. The Critic
    Visually, The Critic is polished enough, despite some splashes of apparent digital lacquer. But Marber hasn’t supplied an incontrovertible motive to bind Nina to Jimmy. And there is something arguably troubling about the way McKellen’s character has been conceived.
  60. Typhoon Club
    The narrative unfolds in a series of short, sometimes enigmatic scenes that have the effect of a series of simple declarative sentences. They describe the action without ever interpreting it. After a while, one realizes that there really isn't an awful lot to interpret.
  61. The Inventor
    The Inventor is rife with somewhat didactic lessons — about power, innovation, curiosity — yet a presumably unintended one might be that lessons themselves, however insightful, are not always captivating.
  62. The Peasants
    As the story’s melodrama grows repetitive, so do the visuals.
  63. The Monk and the Gun
    However sincere and justified, the digs are so innocuous that their main purpose seems to flatter Western viewers who will nod along as they coo at the landscapes and chuckle knowingly about ugly truths they think have nothing to do with them, but do.
  64. Widow Clicquot
    Ambitious as it is in scope, the film is also somewhat charmless and dour, caught between wanting to deliver the passion audiences expect from a period romance and constructing a suspenseful underdog tale. It’s too bad it never finds a winning balance.
  65. Queen of the Deuce
    The style is stilted, the look rudimentary, with Abhilasha Dewan’s cheeky animation supplying an occasional visual lift. Yet as Wilson’s former errand boy guides us around her onetime fiefdom — conjuring an area fizzing with smut until doused by Giuliani — we may sense the milieu, but its matriarch remains stubbornly indistinct.
  66. Daddio
    Somehow, Penn never allows Clark’s inappropriateness to become predatory, and Johnson’s marvelously expressive features reveal details the dialogue declines to provide. Yet if there’s a finer point to any of this — beyond yes, talking to strangers is sometimes beneficial — it eluded me.
  67. Paul Robeson: ‘I’m a Negro. I’m an American.’
    The movie sticks to the shallow end.
  68. Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1
    It’s easy to smirk at these and other miscues; Costner also has a weakness for speeches, like many filmmakers. But he has a feel for the western and the landscapes of the West, and among the good scenes mixed in with the groaners is a beautifully filmed chase set against a midnight-blue sky that finds two riders galloping after a third, who changes horses mid-chase.
  69. Reality Winner
    The film is clear in showing how the media put her into boxes: a traitor, a terrorist, a progressive, an innocent, a lost cause. But who is Reality Winner? This documentary doesn’t dig deeper than her patently well-meaning exterior.
  70. The Road Dance
    Shifting between stagy sincerity and startling realism (the labor scene is particularly colorful), The Road Dance is a vividly rendered, if ultimately schematic portrait of feminine resilience.
  71. The Boys in the Boat
    The script is as subtle as a bonk on the nose, and the editing repeats every beat twice-over in broad pantomime and meaningful looks.
  72. Waiting for the Light to Change
    In her feature debut, Tran is intermittently successful at capturing the listlessness that defines that liminal space between adolescence and adulthood; as “Waiting” progresses, malaise envelops her characters like the gray fog over the shoreline.
  73. Lisa Frankenstein
    Cody gets a little subversive with it all — Lisa’s stepsister, Taffy, for instance, is not at all what this kind of movie usually serves up, and that feels refreshing. But the rest is pretty predictable from the start, and so it starts to wear a little thin after a while, a title in search of a story.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Alphabet Murders
    Unfortunately, neither Mr. Randall's Poirot nor the gags, chases and red herrings offered are inventive, comical or charming enough to make this more than a routine run through of clichés and clues.
  75. Albert Brooks: Defending My Life
    While Brooks deserves acclaim, he deserves it in a format as compelling and dynamic as he is. “Defending My Life” is simply too flat.
  76. Elio
    Before long, the fleetingly liberated child and the filmmakers’ imaginative playfulness are boxed up, and the whole thing turns into yet another superhero adventure.
  77. Wingwomen
    The Frenchwomen twist on the supersquad action movie has its charms, but it’s not enough to eclipse the script’s uninspired angles.
  78. Terrifier 3
    Leone’s new “Terrifier” film sags under its predecessors’ trappings: a bloated running time, an unfocused script, uneven pacing
  79. Ultraman: Rising
    If Ultraman wants to conquer the world, he’ll have to try something livelier than a cartoon that looks like a kids movie but lurches about like a saccharine family drama.
  80. Imaginary
    Fans typically expect well-executed jump scares, fun plot twists and the occasional rubbery monster. What they probably don’t expect is the sophisticated allegory that Imaginary appears to be flirting with — and comes close to pulling off — before losing its nerve.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Bullet for Pretty Boy
    The film looks a little as if they had taken the members of the cast of, say, "Beach Blanket Bingo" and put them in costume and given them old cars to drive and told them to play it for real. For real it isn't.
  82. IF
    This is a film that spells out its intentions for an audience still learning its ABCs, a film where Michael Giacchino’s misty violins never stop insisting how to feel, where Krasinski’s goofy dad literally wears a heart on his chest.
  83. Night Swim
    The problem with Night Swim is that it’s trying to say a little too much, which isn’t a complete pleasure-killer, but can get distracting.
  84. Land of Bad
    Land of Bad, directed by William Eubank from a script he wrote with David Frigerio, is commendable in the abstract for depicting the realities of 21st-century warfare both narratively and thematically.
  85. Holland
    The film’s unusual backdrop, unresolved subplots and dream-sequence fakeouts are ultimately all distractions from a story that doesn’t make much sense.
  86. Fitting In
    Its revelations about gender, sexuality and identity tend toward the obvious, and sometimes veer into the facile.
  87. This Is Me…Now: A Love Story
    The sad news is that nothing in “This Is Me … Now” is as fun — or funny — as those commercials. This project doesn’t seem to have brought Lopez any closer to serenity or levity. It’s an occasion for even more toil.
  88. Winner
    A sweeping biopic that presents her as something like an American Girl doll for the “I’m not like other girls” set.
  89. Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest
    While the interviewees speak of Sherpa with sincerity and affection, “Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest” never locates a satisfying big-picture idea or formal approach that would make it more than a straightforward tribute.
  90. Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero
    The scenes are assembled like the wall collage of pop stars that we see in his otherwise empty bedroom, resulting in frustrating interview segments that are both broad and cursory.
  91. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
    The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is not a good movie nor a terribly enjoyable one, if you’re paying attention to it. But as background noise, it’s diverting and intermittently amusing.
  92. Shirley
    King is magnetic onscreen, nailing Chisholm’s accent and her steely persona. But there is little for her to do other than trade quips with the other characters, in a drama that is too content with telling rather than showing.
  93. Babes
    There’s substance here, and talent in spades, but it needed a little more time to gestate.
  94. Mother, Couch
    Burstyn’s character, which the actor plays with her customary expertise, is so utterly disagreeable that viewing the picture is a mostly anxious experience with not much of a reward at the end, which shifts to magic realist mode for lack of anywhere better to go.
  95. French Girl
    French Girl is a love triangle farce that’s mostly set in Quebec City but takes place on Planet Rom-com where bipedal characters act out in ways that rarely resemble human behavior.
  96. La Cocina
    The film’s epic finale feels stagy — while these real-life frustrations are anything but.
  97. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba - To the Hashira Training
    The combination of finale and premiere inevitably feels lopsided.
  98. Glitter & Doom
    This is not a deep movie. A lot of it isn’t even good. The images and story are chaotically assembled. The arrangements bring the music too naggingly close to the rounded, boppy, angsty gleam of certain 21st-century stage musicals . . . Even so, the people who’ve made this thing understand what the Indigo Girls are all about.
  99. Seven Veils
    In short, Seven Veils offers plenty to think about. But fans who mourn that Egoyan’s dramatic instincts have slipped in recent years won’t quite be getting a return to form.
  100. The Watchers
    The film is a little bit frightening and a big bit comically grandiose.
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