The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,278 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: 9,380 out of 20278
  2. Mixed: 8,434 out of 20278
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20278
20278 movie reviews
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  1. Manuscripts Don't Burn
    Its violence is low-tech... and its look is old-school, but its message could not possibly be more momentous.
  2. Violette
    [A] handsome, intelligently absorbing and stirring biographical portrait.
  3. Code Black
    Slicing through the fat of policy debates to the visceral rush of critical care, the narrative combines existential worries... and blood-and-guts immediacy with a seamlessness that made me want to high-five the editor, Joshua Altman.
  4. Down and Out in Beverly Hills
    As a comedy of manners it has a dependably keen aim, with its most wicked barbs leavened by Mr. Mazursky's obvious fondness for his characters.
  5. Starman
    Starman provides him with a role that, played by anyone else, might seem preposterous. In Mr. Bridges' hands it becomes the occasion for a sweetly affecting characterization - a fine showcase for the actor's blend of grace, precision and seemingly offhanded charm.
  6. Burning Bush
    Ms. Holland, working from a script by Stepan Hulik, a Czech screenwriter born in 1984, turns a sprawling story into a tight and suspenseful ethical thriller.
  7. A Summer's Tale
    A Summer’s Tale has room to focus on Rohmer’s brilliance at revealing human nature through articulate, multidimensional characters, perfectly cast, who in some ways seem to exist outside of time.
  8. Me and You
    [A] small, beautifully made film.
  9. Unrelated
    This is civilized human behavior captured with a clinical precision and accuracy.
  10. A Letter to Momo
    Enveloped in a sweetness that buffers the depths of its emotions, Hiroyuki Okiura’s A Letter to Momo explores the stains of loss and regret on a personality too young to articulate them.
  11. Keep On Keepin' On
    Like other stories of musical tutelage, Keep On Keepin’ On is ultimately an examination of the pursuit of greatness. It is a grueling and demanding endeavor, for sure, but also, for Mr. Terry and anyone lucky enough to enter his orbit, a source of unending joy.
  12. Pride
    It is the kind of hearty, blunt-force drama with softened edges that leaves audiences applauding and teary-eyed.
  13. Wetlands
    The tone is breezy, bright and brash, vividly illuminated by Ms. Juri’s extraordinarily unprotected and utterly fearless performance.
  14. Last Days in Vietnam
    The story is full of emotion and danger, heroism and treachery, but it is told in a mood of rueful retrospect rather than simmering partisan rage.
  15. Rocks in My Pockets
    The bravery of Ms. Baumane’s own coping methods (which some may disagree with) brings her tough-minded film to a cleareyed, forward-looking conclusion that doesn’t lose sight of her demons.
  16. Good Kill
    Mr. Hawke’s anguished performance gives Good Kill a hot emotional center.
  17. John Wick
    Harboring few ambitions beyond knock-your-socks-off action sequences, this crafty revenge thriller delivers with so much style — and even some wit — that the lack of substance takes longer than it should to become problematic.
  18. Love & Mercy
    Love & Mercy doesn’t claim to solve the mystery of Brian Wilson, but it succeeds beyond all expectation in making you hear where he was coming from.
  19. Pasolini
    The blend of pornography and humor, obnoxiousness and elegance, sweetness and cruelty reminds you that this is, above all, an Abel Ferrara movie. And the splendor of Pasolini lies in its essentially collaborative nature.
  20. Red Army
    Good sports movies are always about more than sports... Red Army touches on themes of friendship and perseverance, and also offers a compact and vivid summary of recent Russian history.
  21. Botso
    With enough tragic-restorative plot twists for a 12-hour mini-series, Botso is an enchanting film for two reasons: Mr. Korisheli’s humanity is magnetic, and no more beautiful case could be made for the psychological healing power of making music.
  22. Revenge of the Mekons
    The film is both a generous primer on the band, which grew out of the punk movement in Leeds, England, in 1977, and a celebration of its longevity.
  23. Ex Machina
    [Mr. Garland] plays with visual contrasts — Mr. Isaac’s compact, muscled body and Mr. Gleeson’s long, drooping one, picture windows that look out onto an expansively lush landscape and windowless rooms that register as upmarket prison cells — that dovetail with the narrative’s multiple, amusingly deployed dualities: confinement and liberation, agency and submission, mind and body.
  24. Black Panther
    It wouldn’t be a Marvel production without manly skirmishes and digital avatars. Yet in its emphasis on black imagination, creation and liberation, the movie becomes an emblem of a past that was denied and a future that feels very present. And in doing so opens up its world, and yours, beautifully.
  25. Zootopia
    Funny, smart, thought-provoking — and musical, too.
  26. Bad Hair
    Bad Hair is an uncomfortably accurate depiction of a poignant mother-son power struggle in a fatherless family in which each knows how to get under the other’s skin.
  27. Little Hope Was Arson
    The filmmaker, Theo Love, presents the people in the story as they are, without passing judgment and without apology, whether they are investigators or pastors or just ordinary folks caught up in the inexplicable. It’s Americana unvarnished and, because of that, as absorbing as it is respectful.
  28. Little White Lie
    Few moments in recent nonfiction cinema are as piercing as the one in which Ms. Schwartz asks her mother if she might have settled down with Mr. Parker had he not been black.
  29. Horse Money
    The puzzle-box narrative only grows more hypnotic with repeat viewings. The movie insists on having the audience, like Ventura, pass through madness to reach catharsis.
  30. Uzumasa Limelight
    Directing with an old-fashioned tenderness toward his unassuming star, Ken Ochiai conjures a swan song to a waning art form and those who practice it.
  31. Something, Anything
    Examining a more generalized discontent through the lens of one woman’s pain, the writer and director, Paul Harrill, concentrates instead on the ordinary details that constitute a life and the way small choices nudge us toward larger ones.
  32. Valley of Saints
    Valley of Saints finds a poignant humanity in this chaste romance, which awakens in Gulzar a wondrous sense of possibility, along with a new awareness of the world’s complexity.
  33. La Última Película
    The movie revels in multiple film stocks (with hairs or threads often on the camera lens) and self-conscious “Last Movie” flourishes (long intervals between credits, “scene missing” title cards, a version of “Me and Bobby McGee”) while maintaining its blithe humor.
  34. Testament of Youth
    Testament of Youth, James Kent’s stately screen adaptation of the British author Vera Brittain’s 1933 World War I memoir, evokes the march of history with a balance and restraint exhibited by few movies with such grand ambitions.
  35. Play
    It is provocative simply in showing how trust is gained and kept, even after the swindled kids have understood their robbers’ motives.
  36. Hard to Be a God
    Mr. German was just as stubborn in sticking to his personal vision (and revisions) as he was innovative in his storytelling, and he’s left behind a final opus that is hard to shake.
  37. The Witch
    With a gentle rap-rapping, Mr. Eggers intensifies the shivers with art-film moves, genre shocks and an excellent cast that includes a progressively rowdy menagerie.
  38. Mississippi Grind
    Mississippi Grind itself may be a bit of a throwback to the lived-in, character-driven, landscape-besotted films of the 1970s, but it’s less a pastiche or a homage than the cinematic equivalent of a classic song, expertly covered.
  39. Mistress America
    Far from romanticizing creativity and the artistic process, Mr. Baumbach’s films portray the world of painters, filmmakers and literati as an overcrowded, amoral jungle of viperish entitled narcissists stealing from one another for fame and profit.
  40. Results
    The triumph of Results is that it pretends to be loose, lazy and lived-in when it’s actually disciplined, hard-working and in almost perfect shape.
  41. Christmas, Again
    This is a Christmas movie in which magic exists largely on the periphery, and that is just the right mix of chilly and sweet.
  42. City of Gold
    City of Gold transcends its modest methods, largely because it connects Mr. Gold’s appealing personality with a passionate argument about the civic culture of Los Angeles and the place of food within it.
  43. Entertainment
    Mr. Alverson jacks up the tension with exquisite restraint.
  44. Finders Keepers
    Revealing its humanity slowly and a little tardily, Finders Keepers finally does justice to its dueling antiheroes.
  45. How to Change the World
    This absorbing account is hardly definitive, but it teaches movement building without denying the high costs paid by true believers.
  46. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon
    Focusing on the magazine and not its offshoots, the film is uproarious, not for what its many talking heads say but for its astonishing procession of brilliant, boundary-breaching illustrations and captions (augmented by some animation), many of which are as explosively funny today as they were when first published.
  47. Brooklyn
    Brooklyn endows its characters with desires and aspirations, but not with foresight, and it examines the past with open-minded curiosity rather than with sentimentality or easy judgment.
  48. Love & Friendship
    At times, most often when Mr. Bennett is onscreen, Love & Friendship is howlingly funny, and as a whole it feels less like a romance than like a caper, an unabashedly contrived and effortlessly inventive heist movie with a pretty good payoff.
  49. 45 Years
    [A] sensitive and devastating portrait of a long, happy marriage in sudden crisis.
  50. Victoria
    Victoria is a sensational cinematic stunt.
  51. Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi
    Yes, the latest “Star Wars” installment is here, and, lo, it is a satisfying, at times transporting entertainment. Remarkably, it has visual wit and a human touch, no small achievement for a seemingly indestructible machine that revved up 40 years ago and shows no signs of sputtering out (ever).
  52. Iris
    What is clear is that while there are several stories folded into Iris — a marriage tale, an ode to multiculturalism and a fashion spectacular — it is also about the insistent rejection of monocultural conformity.
  53. Please Be Normal
    A tiny, piercing study of dawning desperation that’s all the more remarkable for being virtually silent.
  54. Experimenter
    Mr. Almereyda takes Milgram, his work and ideas seriously but doesn’t suffocate them: Despite the story’s freight, the laboratory shocks and Milgram’s insistent melancholia, Experimenter is a nimble, low-frequency high.
  55. The Gift
    Underneath it all, The Gift is a merciless critique of an amoral corporate culture in which the ends justify the means, and lying and cheating are O.K., as long as they’re not found out.
  56. Racing Extinction
    It’s the film’s sounds that really wrench. If you’ve ever wondered what a breaking heart sounds like, it’s right here in the futile warble of the last male of a species of songbird, singing for a mate that will never come.
  57. Mia Madre
    Love, death, cinema — they’re all there in Mia Madre, bumping up against one another beautifully.
  58. Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll
    Mr. Pirozzi’s film is an unsparing and meticulous reckoning of the effects of tyranny on ordinary Cambodians. It is also a rich and defiant effort at recovery, showing that even the most murderous totalitarianism cannot fully erase the human drive for pleasure and self-expression.
  59. 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.
  60. La La Land
    La La Land succeeds both as a fizzy fantasy and a hard-headed fable, a romantic comedy and a showbiz melodrama, a work of sublime artifice and touching authenticity.
  61. Amy
    With Amy, Mr. Kapadia isn’t simply revisiting Ms. Winehouse’s life and death, but also — by pulling you in close to her, first pleasantly and then unpleasantly — telling the story of contemporary celebrity and, crucially, fandom’s cost.
  62. Hitchcock/Truffaut
    Curating a selection of the original interview recordings (whose sound quality is damn near pristine), Mr. Jones fashions an unfaltering encomium that’s entirely free of the highfalutin monologues that might deter noncinephiles.
  63. Mountains May Depart
    Mr. Jia’s approach means that you have to do a certain amount of interpretive work, though mostly you just have to pay attention and be a little patient. If you do, you will notice that Mountains May Depart is a movie of threes: its main characters, moments in time, narrative sections, historical symbols and even aspect ratio come in triplicate.
  64. Our Little Sister
    Seeming to wander through small incidents and mundane busyness, it acquires momentum and dramatic weight through a brilliant kind of narrative stealth. You are shaken, by the end, at how much you care about these women and how sorry you are to leave their company.
  65. Dheepan
    [Mr. Audiard] makes popcorn movies disguised as art films, and vice versa. Dheepan is a bit like a Liam Neeson revenge-dad action thriller directed by the Dardenne brothers. I mean that in the best possible way.
  66. Guidelines
    Communicating much with very little, Guidelines (“La Marche à Suivre”) presents a profoundly hopeful view of education as a civilizing force and a haven for transformation. There have been many more eventful high school movies, but rarely one that’s more absorbed in the forming of adults and the shaping of citizens.
  67. Chronic
    Chronic ends with a sudden, terrible slap in the face that is a final blow to your equilibrium. It is left up to the viewer to decide whether it is a cheap stunt or an ultimate moment of truth. I vote for the latter.
  68. The New Girlfriend
    The New Girlfriend never pretends to be more than what it is, a delicious and frothy fantasia with a teasing erotic frisson.
  69. A Hard Day
    A kinetically visceral, enjoyable nasty joy ride, “A Hard Day” is pretty much as advertised.
  70. The Kindergarten Teacher
    The Kindergarten Teacher — the film as well as the character — yearns for different values, for intensity, beauty and meaning. Its sobering lesson is that the search for those things is most likely to end in madness, confusion and violence.
  71. Chi-Raq
    The laughs in Spike Lee’s corrosive Chi-Raq burn like acid. Urgent, surreal, furious, funny and wildly messy, the movie sounds like an invitation to defeat, but it’s an improbable triumph that finds Mr. Lee doing his best work in years.
  72. We Come as Friends
    With an eye for landscapes stunning and hellish, [Mr. Sauper] is the rare documentary filmmaker who not only takes on tough subjects but also explores them with a vivid visual and aural approach.
  73. Everybody Wants Some!!
    Everybody Wants Some!! is more than just nostalgic. It’s downright utopian, a hormonal pastoral endowed with the innocent charm of a children’s book. There are plenty of movies about lust-addled youth, but it’s unusual to find one that feels truly wholesome.
  74. The Iron Ministry
    The Iron Ministry is neither boring nor confining, which is just to say that it’s not a long trip through a faraway country. It’s a work of art — vivid and mysterious and full of life.
  75. Youth
    The kidnapping and ensuing complications make for a harrowing spectacle of cruelty and bumbling from which the camera doesn’t shrink.
  76. Guidance
    Mr. Mills (drawing on his own experiences and doing triple duty as the director and screenwriter) gives a performance of rancid single-mindedness. It’s a fearlessly unsympathetic role that provides plenty of space for train-wreck humor but almost no wiggle room for redemption.
  77. Heart of a Dog
    Heart of a Dog is about telling and remembering and forgetting, and how we put together the fragments that make up our lives — their flotsam and jetsam, highs and lows, meaningful and slight details, shrieking and weeping headline news.
  78. In My Father's House
    The story’s seemingly clear notions of guilt on one side and grievance on the other are gradually nudged in unexpected directions.
  79. My Voice, My Life
    There are few feelings as glorious as spreading your wings onstage for the first time. Ruby Yang captures that rare electricity in her documentary My Voice, My Life, about Hong Kong teenagers who put on a show.
  80. The Golden Dream
    Buoyed by the wonderfully natural performances of its young leads, La Jaula de Oro is a compelling social-realist drama that owes much to the style of the British social-realist filmmaker Ken Loach.
  81. Eye in the Sky
    A grim, suspenseful farce in which unpredictable human behavior repeatedly threatens an operation of astounding technological sophistication.
  82. The Fool
    The Fool is a hard movie to shake.
  83. Uncle John
    It’s tantalizing, sublimely creepy stuff that keeps you guessing even after the credits roll.
  84. Office
    The songs in Office aren’t especially memorable. But it’s hard to care too much when you have a director who knows how to create tension by moving the camera and characters even while he’s delivering a nimble political softshoe with filmmaking dazzle.
  85. Sherpa
    An exceptionally absorbing documentary.
  86. In Jackson Heights
    Over time, as the movie returns to specific spaces, touching on human rights and gentrification along the way, it develops into a deeply stirring ode to the immigrant experience and American identity.
  87. Janis: Little Girl Blue
    Although Ms. Berg’s enthralling film tells a story somewhat similar to “Amy,” Asif Kapadia’s recent documentary portrait of Amy Winehouse (who also died at 27), the demons that devoured Winehouse came from outside as much from within. Not so with Joplin.
  88. Sunset Song
    Like most of Mr. Davies’s films, Sunset Song makes you see the world through his sorrowful eyes. He is a die-hard romantic, whose acute sensitivity to the passage of time conveys a bittersweet awareness of the fragility of beauty, which, for him, is synonymous with melancholy.
  89. Microbe and Gasoline
    Time and again, Microbe and Gasoline risks cuteness without going overboard. Too easily taken for granted, its accomplishment is its ability to gaze steadily with warmth but minimal sentimentality at the world through unjaded 14-year-old eyes.
  90. The Pearl Button
    A master of voice-over and metaphor (the title alone has an amazing payoff), [Mr. Guzmán] sifts through essential truths and draws links between Chile’s past and present inhabitants.
  91. Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom
    What Winter on Fire lacks in journalistic detachment it more than makes up for in fidelity to the feelings and motives of the participants. It’s more than just a portrait of terror, anger, desperation and resolve; it communicates those emotions directly, into the bloodstream and nervous system of the audience.
  92. Mediterranea
    This calm, hardheaded film never sacrifices its toughness for a swooning, misty-eyed moment of hope.
  93. Orion: The Man Who Would Be King
    It’s a curious, bittersweet story, flecked with dashes of bombast and overstatement that Presley himself would have admired.
  94. Incredibles 2
    The family that fights together remains the steadily throbbing, unbreakable heart of Incredibles 2, even when Bob and Helen swap traditional roles.
  95. Miles Ahead
    Does it matter that stretches of Miles Ahead — a gun-rattling, squealing-tire car chase included — came out of the filmmakers’ imagination rather than Davis’s life? (Mr. Cheadle shares script credit with Steven Baigelman.) Purists may howl, but they’ll also miss the pleasure and point of this playfully impressionistic movie.
  96. Kill Your Friends
    A richly satisfying poison-pen letter to the music industry.
  97. The Price We Pay
    The ideas in this densely packed but enlightening film can be challenging, but must be heard.
  98. Of Men and War
    This devastatingly raw documentary shows that for some the fighting may stop, but the suffering continues.
  99. Sand Dollars
    Ms. Chaplin, in one of her most touching screen performances, imbues Anne with a world-weary melancholy that makes your heart sink.
  100. Out 1: Noli Me Tangere (1971)
    What plays out is a cinematic experience of life as performance, performance as life, reality as a construction and reality as someone else’s construction impinging on your own. The pace, which picks up and slows down throughout, is not some kind of perverse challenge to the audience. It is intrinsic to the inescapable atmosphere of the work.
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