The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,271 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: 9,377 out of 20271
  2. Mixed: 8,430 out of 20271
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20271
20271 movie reviews
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  1. Blissfully Yours
    Marks the emergence of one of the more original and promising new voices to hit the international cinema scene in recent years.
  2. Read My Lips
    Like so many European pictures these days, Read My Lips seems destined to be remade in Hollywood, and it is unlikely to be improved by the addition of vainer actors, a simpler screenplay and flashier direction.
  3. The Return
    At once highly naturalistic and dreamily abstract, playing out its mythic themes through vibrantly detailed characterizations (and remarkable performances by the entire cast). The Return announces the arrival of a major new talent.
  4. Mademoiselle Chambon
    This small, nearly perfect film is a reminder that personal upheavals are as consequential in people's lives as shattering world events.
  5. Mysteries of Lisbon
    Made for European television and originally divided into six one-hour episodes, the movie now runs an absorbing, astonishingly fast four and a quarter hours.
  6. Archipelago
    In most movies, something happens; in Archipelago, many things happen, quietly yet meaningfully.
  7. Flamenco, Flamenco
    When a final shot takes us outdoors to the real world, it’s possible to wonder whether a certain spontaneity, or a different kind of energy, has been missing from Mr. Saura’s immaculately vibrant film.
  8. Approaching the Elephant
    Ms. Wilder, in her debut feature, riskily opts to leave much of the children’s educational activity fairly vague. Which gives it one more thing in common with school: You need to pay attention.
  9. Certain Women
    The subtlety of the film is both an accomplishment and a limitation. It’s hard not to want more for these women, and to wish you could see more of them.
  10. Mountain
    For those terrified of heights, Mountain will be a nonstop nightmare. Yet big scares are a small price for the awe-inspiring footage you’ll see. As for what you’ll hear, that takes a little explaining.
  11. My Life as a Dog
    The trouble with My Life as a Dog is that too often it imposes an alien sensibility upon the boy, requiring that he behave in a way that adults can too easily identify as charming. My Life as a Dog is a movie with a split point of view.
  12. Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself
    In & Of Itself reframes familiar tropes like card tricks, vanishing objects and stupendous feats of mentalism to new ends. It is not often that a magic show makes you ponder not just the how, but the why.
  13. Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
    Hints, whose grandmother introduced her to the smoke-sauna ritual, uses the documentary to speak volumes about what it means to be a woman, even as the focus remains fixed on a single location: a cramped sauna-cabin located in a forest.
  14. The Story of Louis Pasteur
    Pasteur's life is warm and vital, of itself. It has lost none of that warmth through Mr. Muni's sensitive characterization, through the gifted direction of William Dieterle and the talents of a perfect cast.
  15. Frozen River
    Ms. Hunt's eye for detail has the precision of a short story writer's. She misses nothing.
  16. Superman
    Superman is good, clean, simple-minded fun, though it's a movie whose limited appeal is built in.
  17. Drugstore Cowboy
    Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant Jr.'s glum, absorbing film about a clan of heroin addicts who travel around the Pacific Northwest Looting pharmacies of their supplies the way Bonnie and Clyde cleaned out banks, gives Matt Dillon the role of his career.
  18. Little Amélie or the Character of Rain
    The movie is an imperfect gem — some of its ambitions toward grand emotional sweep are not without seams and it can at times feel like an overextended animated short. But it’s hard not to be charmed by its warm existentialism (in a children’s film, no less) and its belief that the greatest wisdoms can be found in the way a child sees and learns.
  19. Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché
    More than a journeyman rockumentary, “Poly Styrene” is a thoughtfully finessed filial reckoning: a daughter’s journey toward understanding her mother as a young artist and as a young woman of color.
  20. Heal the Living
    It’s all just empty calories; what this movie desperately needs is conflict.
  21. Love Is Strange
    By the time the movie is over, you feel as if the people in it were friends you know well enough to tire of, and to miss terribly when they go away.
  22. Navalny
    This documentary, directed by the Canadian filmmaker Daniel Roher (“Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band”), plays like a crowd-pleaser, a profile of a politician with the unflagging courage to swim against a rising totalitarian tide. It helps that Navalny has a movie star’s charisma and wit.
  23. The Girl Without Hands
    The result is a dazzlingly imaginative movie about survival.
  24. La Ronde
    The performers are as seductive as the script. It's quite an affaire.
  25. Blow-Up
    This is a fascinating picture, which has something real to say about the matter of personal involvement and emotional commitment in a jazzed-up, media-hooked-in world so cluttered with synthetic stimulations that natural feelings are overwhelmed.
  26. Tess
    A lovely, lyrical, unexpectedly delicate movie. [12 Dec 1980, p.C8]
    • The New York Times
  27. The Assassin
    The film is intriguing, but ultimately opaque, a lovely, inert object that offers, in the name of movie love, an escape from so much that is vital and interesting about movies.
  28. 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.
  29. The Life and Mind of Mark DeFriest
    The indomitable personality and talents of the serial prison escapee Mark DeFriest outshine the weaknesses of this documentary that bears his name.
  30. Dream of Light
    The purity and breadth of this meticulous study are all the more gratifying in view of its unprepossessing style.
  31. Late Marriage
    Powerful and very bitter comedy.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    One Day in September
    Given the power of its story, One Day in September seems at times to be pushing too hard.
  33. Concert for George
    The sweet, solemn music of George Harrison, who died two years ago, has rarely sounded more majestic than in the sweeping performances of the enlarged star-studded band that gathered in London at Royal Albert Hall on Nov. 29 to commemorate his legacy.
  34. Dazed and Confused
    Dazed and Confused has an enjoyably playful spirit, one that amply compensates for its lack of structure.
  35. The Twilight Samurai
    Mr. Yamada is confident that by taking his time and relishing the leathery arrogance that is the perquisite of a director in his 70's, his audience will follow his whims.
  36. Madeline's Madeline
    if Madeline’s Madeline is sometimes unconvincing and frequently unnerving, it is never uninteresting. In its final moments it ascends into heady, almost visionary territory, like a balloon caught in a sudden updraft, and becomes a singular and strange experience.
  37. Requiem
    Requiem is a moving study of a tortured young woman more at peace with medieval ritual than with modern medicine.
  38. Secret Mall Apartment
    Secret Mall Apartment makes a compelling case that the project reverberates through the lives of the artists, and maybe even the city, to this day. Art doesn’t have to be in a museum to be valuable; it doesn’t have to be own-able, repeatable or even make sense to everyone. If it changes a few lives, then it’s changed the world.
  39. Captain Phillips
    Captain Phillips, a movie that insistently closes the distance between us and them, has a vital moral immediacy.
  40. 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.
  41. The Climb
    Rather than ascending to new heights of bromance, The Climb coasts down into the barren flatlands of masculine self-pity.
  42. A Hero
    Nothing in this stressful, intricately plotted fable of modern life is as simple as we or the characters might wish.
  43. Three Kings
    It isn't nearly as successful a showcase for this filmmaker's extraordinary talents.
  44. The Northman
    What’s perhaps most impressive about The Northman is that it hurtles through 136 minutes of musclebound, shaggy-maned mayhem without a whisper of camp or a wink of irony. Nobody is doing this for fun. Even if, in the end — thank goodness — that’s mostly what it amounts to.
  45. The Killer
    The scenes of gore and destruction are even more spectacular than Hong Kong's fog-shrouded skyline. The director repeatedly places the viewer at the center of the crossfire and turns the gyrating camera into the next best thing to a lethal weapon.
  46. Intregalde
    Watching it again recently, I now saw a movie that, with humor, tenderness and flashes of filmmaking brilliance, looks at what happens when kindness is tested, masks are dropped and self-interest runs free. It’s all a mess and so are we, which I think is very much to Muntean’s point.
  47. Vulcanizadora
    Spasmodically funny, though hardly a comedy, Vulcanizadora is raw, moving and, briefly, horrifying.
  48. Neruda
    Mr. Larraín invites us to believe that history is on the side of the poets and the humanists, and that art will make fools of politicians and policemen. But he is also aware, as Pablo Neruda was, that history sometimes has other plans.
  49. Blancanieves
    It communicates the delights of pastiche rather than the thrill of original creation, a secondhand movie love that is seductive but not entirely satisfying.
  50. All Shall Be Well
    The film’s most extraordinary trick is how Pat’s presence hovers over the film. It is a feat of filmmaking and performance that a character only onscreen for a few scenes can feel truly missed by the audience. The home Pat and Angie built together aches with her absence, and so does the film.
  51. Ernest Cole: Lost and Found
    The result is an elegantly wrought documentary that pulls off the trick of leaving viewers sated yet also craving more.
  52. Deaf President Now!
    Deaf President Now! skillfully draws the lines for all viewers. It’s not just a story about a moment in history: It’s also about the ways the movement for deaf education led to the broader disability rights arguments, and how everyone’s rights depend on everyone else’s.
  53. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
    A metaphysical road movie about life, death and the limits of knowledge, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia has arrived just in time to cure the adult filmgoer blues.
  54. John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection
    Mr. Faraut’s impressionistic conflation of humor, wonder, horror and sympathy whisks this movie to the deluxe suite of the pleasure palace.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Walk to Beautiful
    A complex and quietly devastating indictment of chauvinist societies that see women as lovers, mothers and servants, and treat anyone who can’t fulfill those roles as a nonperson.
  56. 3 Godfathers
    It is Mr. Ford's wonderful style in picturing a frontier fable that has the classic mould. His unsurpassed talent for bringing upon the motion-picture screen the nature and the drama of the great West is in itself an art.
  57. Art Talent Show
    Art Talent Show is itself provocative but also hilarious, both a sendup and a tribute to the complexity of contemporary art.
  58. Stranger by the Lake
    Stranger by the Lake is seductive and fascinating, but it is also a bit trapped in its own conceit, and in its carefully maintained emotional detachment.
  59. Ten Canoes
    There is nothing more enthralling than a good yarn, and Ten Canoes interweaves two versions of the same story, one filmed in black and white and set a thousand years ago, and an even older one, filmed in color and set in a mythic, prehistoric past.
  60. The Stranger
    Existential ennui is not exactly fun to watch (or, one assumes, easy to perform), yet a meaningless life has rarely looked this beautiful.
  61. Gilles' Wife
    Has an appealing surface beauty, largely due to the talented cinematographer Virginie Saint Martin, and an equally shallow mystery.
  62. Oliver Sacks: His Own Life
    While the movie steers around the details of how post-fame Sacks became something of a brand, it beautifully presents a portrait of his compassion and bravery.
  63. The Maid
    It takes Mr. Silva a while to finish his story, but the ending of The Maid is so intelligently handled and so generously and honestly conceived, it proves well worth the wait.
  64. The Filth and the Fury
    Electrifying.
  65. Cowards Bend the Knee or The Blue Hands
    There is also something rather splendid about this extended-play peep show, as if Mr. Maddin had stumbled across a hitherto lost archive of cinema's less-than-innocent past. What makes all this nostalgia for a movie history that never happened is that, as is always the case with Mr. Maddin's work, it's executed with more love than irony and not a whit of derision.
  66. Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist
    The most powerful and disturbing personal documentary since Crumb, Sick examines the life of the performance artist Bob Flanagan, who died of cystic fibrosis. [14 Nov 1997, p.E24]
    • The New York Times
  67. Jezebel
    It is still an interesting film, though, in spite of our sniffs at its climax; colorful, generally well-performed and admirably directed by William Wyler.
  68. Hold Your Fire
    The film’s intention may have been to highlight the negotiator’s achievement, but it appears that it was public pressure, as much as his influence, that prevented more bloodshed.
  69. Sicario
    Mr. Villeneuve, aided by Taylor Sheridan’s lean script, Roger Deakins’s parched cinematography and Johann Johannsson’s slow-moving heart attack of a score, respects the imperatives of genre while trying to avoid the usual clichés. It’s not easy, and he doesn’t entirely succeed.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Change Nothing (Ne Change Rien)
    Ne Change Rien is about the work, the mix of inspiration and hard labor that performers draw on from moment to moment, an alchemical event that cinema rarely shows.
  71. The Long Good Friday
    The Long Good Friday charts a perilous course through a world of powerful people, ghastly acts of vengeance and ominously shifting fortunes.
  72. Bacurau
    In this sensational genre whatsit, a town finds itself fighting for its very existence. (Good thing Sônia Braga lives there.)
  73. Hamlet
    The filmed Hamlet of Laurence Olivier gives absolute proof that these classics are magnificently suited to the screen.
  74. George Washington
    This dream of a movie is set in such a place; with its delicate shifts of tone, it could be a fairy tale by Faulkner
  75. Our Time Will Come
    It’s Fang’s transformation, embodied by Ms. Zhou’s lean, cool authority, that carries the most weight, lending the proceedings an unforced feminist dimension, and reaffirming Ms. Hui’s status as one of China’s cinematic treasures.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Honeymoon Killers
    Within the limits of its type it is one of the best and, curiously, most beautiful American movies in recent years.
  77. Stranded: I've Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains
    Gonzalo Arijón’s documentary offers an incontrovertible argument for the necessity of team spirit in the face of catastrophe.
  78. No Home Movie
    If you let it, No Home Movie invites you in first with its intimacy and then its deep feeling.
  79. Another Year
    Splendidly rich and wise.
  80. Make Up
    It’s an intriguing interpretation of adolescent discovery, one that uses horror to suggest the dread that comes with finding a sense of self.
  81. At Berkeley
    A documentary necessarily conveys a point of view, and although Mr. Wiseman, as is his wont, is neither seen nor heard in a film that proceeds without commentary or subtitles, his spirit is palpable. Without overtly editorializing, the film quietly and steadfastly champions state-funded public education available to all.
  82. Blade Runner 2049
    Mr. Villeneuve’s film, by contrast, is a carefully engineered narrative puzzle, and its power dissipates as the pieces snap into place. As sumptuous and surprising as it is from one scene to the next, it lacks the creative excess, the intriguing opacity and the haunting residue of its predecessor.
  83. Step
    The film’s success is directly dependent on the personalities — and achievements — of the young women highlighted. Despite the narrative gaps, Ms. Lipitz excels at putting across those personalities.
  84. 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.
  85. Eden
    Restrained but never tentative, remote yet enormously affecting, the movie’s evocation of artistic compulsion is accomplished with confidence and verve.
  86. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
    As these tumultuous events play out in the film... they generate the suspense of a smaller-scale "Seven Days in May."
  87. Short Cuts
    It raises the spirits not by phony sentimentality but by the amplitude of its art. From time to time, it is also roaringly funny... A terrific movie. [1 Oct 1993, p.C1]
    • The New York Times
  88. A Mighty Wind
    Mr. Guest and Mr. Levy's jokes are sometimes so subtle as to seem imperceptible, until you realize that they are everywhere, from the broadest gestures to the tiniest details of dress and décor.
  89. Angkor Awakens: A Portrait of Cambodia
    The graphic evidence here, in testimony on camera and in period photographs, is absolutely harrowing.
  90. The Damned United
    The rare sports movie that deals with -- indeed positively relishes -- humiliation and disappointment.
  91. Georgia
    The result is a film as maddening and unpredictable as the character herself, held together by a fierce, risk-taking performance and flashes of overwhelming honesty.
  92. The Woman Who Ran
    The Woman Who Ran is a cinematic sketch, and also the work of a master.
  93. Duel
    Mr. Spielberg's 1971 television film Duel took advantage of the very narrowness of its premise, building excitement from the most minimal ingredients and the simplest of situations.
  94. Mass
    The movie lacks the gut punch of live theater, the thrill or discomfort of watching people show their feelings in real time. But as cinema, it demonstrates the effectiveness of simplicity. A well-written script and an exemplary cast can still produce a movie worth watching.
  95. Art for Everybody
    Art for Everybody — which is well structured, meticulously researched and revealing, even for a Kinkade-jaded viewer like me — manages to complicate the narrative, thanks in part to sensitive interviews with family and friends, including his wife, Nanette, and their four daughters.
  96. Western
    Western is as precise as a dropped pin on a GPS map, which makes its sense of mystery all the more powerful.
  97. Wadjda
    With impressive agility, Wadjda finds room to maneuver between harsh realism and a more hopeful kind of storytelling.
  98. 13th
    Powerful, infuriating and at times overwhelming, Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13TH will get your blood boiling and tear ducts leaking.
  99. Fresh
    Fresh features delicate and sympathetic work from both Mr. Esposito and Mr. Jackson, whose fine characterizations say a lot about the originality of this film's vision.
  100. Sobibór, 14 Octobre 1943, 16 heures
    The feelings that this simple, deeply intelligent movie produces -- of horror, admiration, hope and grief -- are as hard to name as they are to dispel.
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