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. Lila Lila
    The actors — the deft Mr. Brühl and the charming Ms. Herzsprung — add what levity they can.
  2. Walking with the Enemy
    Visually, Walking With the Enemy resembles a TV mini-series, a sense enhanced by the director Mark Schmidt’s habit of cutting away from bloodshed. Constant title cards introducing historical figures suggest the work of a completist rather than a filmmaker who has focused the material.
  3. R100
    Mr. Matsumoto, as if realizing that viewers might need to wake up, stuffs a ball gag in a child’s mouth and throws in some reflexive nonsense involving an old director and some critics who seem to be watching the same movie you are. They think it’s terrible and finally it’s hard to disagree.
  4. Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F
    While this installment isn’t nearly as woeful as Beverly Hills Cop III, it doesn’t have the charm or energy of the first two films either. It’s a limp, desperate action comedy with few memorable moments.
  5. DamNation
    If the film is less persuasive for its lack of balance, it’s at least heartening to learn that undesirable dams can be destroyed and their rivers restored to their old ways and means.
  6. The Rescuers
    While the documentary marshals an impressive array of survivors and visits several international locations, it grindingly adheres to an unwieldy tour-style presentation, with more than a few rough spots and, at times, an unpolished look.
  7. Grand Départ
    Although the subject is potent, the film, directed with a seemingly effortless commercial acumen, doesn’t burrow deeply.
  8. Citizen Koch
    It’s a hodgepodge that Michael Moore (whose movies Ms. Lessin and Mr. Deal have produced) and his editors might snappily dice together, but here the construction falls short.
  9. Chances Are
    Romantic comedies, of which Chances Are is nominally one, are better off making their characters appear glamorous and attractive than making them look like ineffectual, long-suffering nincompoops, which is the case here.
  10. La Bare
    La Bare takes its title from the club it chronicles, a male strip joint in Dallas. The name proves unfortunately apt for a rambling, superficial documentary that straddles the line between exposé and infomercial.
  11. The Fatal Encounter
    For all its spectacle, The Fatal Encounter is wanting for profundity.
  12. The Moment
    Disorientation is a double-edged sword, especially when the ostensible reorientation is as unsatisfying as it is here.
  13. Burt's Buzz
    The film, by Jody Shapiro, seems so hagiographic that when it finally gets around to its 20 minutes’ worth of interesting stuff, you’re not sure whether to trust it.
  14. Life's a Breeze
    Life’s a Breeze is ultimately about as cutting and memorable as its title.
  15. The Letters
    Though speechifying and mawkishness are thankfully scarce, the bland script gives her few chances to go beyond the expected formula.
  16. Affluenza
    Straining to find a correlation, even metaphorical, between teenage hedonism and economic collapse, Affluenza never coheres.
  17. Bagdad Cafe
    Bagdad Cafe is too slow-paced to work as a comedy, and its screenplay manages simultaneously to be both shapeless and pat.
  18. Weird Science
    Most of Weird Science, for all its repetitive vulgarity and its wide array of gimmicks, is essentially much too calculating and cautious. Even 14-year-old boys may find it heavy sledding.
  19. Love, Rosie
    Whether the material is “Much Ado About Nothing” or “When Harry Met Sally,” if your story requires keeping true loves apart, it is often polite to pass the time with a steady flow of comedy.
  20. Police Academy
    The movie plows through one outrageous sequence to the next with the momentum of a freight train.
  21. Tremors
    Tremors wants to be funny, but it spends too much time winking at the audience. More than anything else, it looks like the sort of movie that might have been put together so that tourists visiting Universal Studios could see a movie being made.
  22. After
    After turns out to be working territory that, while emotionally fraught, has already been pretty thoroughly mined.
  23. The Liberator
    Perhaps most impressive are the resources deployed in shooting this production. As if the film’s ostentatious aerial vistas, merely functional scene-writing and score weren’t distracting enough, Mr. Sexton’s dialogue freezes dead any simulation of the period with tone-deaf lines amid Bolívar’s impassioned rhetoric.
  24. 4 Minute Mile
    Most of the movie is a losing proposition.
  25. Video Games: The Movie
    Unfocused and repetitive, this feature-length commercial by Jeremy Snead uses a muddled timeline and bargain basement graphics to produce a horn-tooting, “Aren’t games awesome?” tone.
  26. About Alex
    The insight that social media fosters false intimacy is old news. The film shows only a half-formed sense of how careers have changed in 30 years.
  27. Premature
    Premature bops along with a wiseacre self-awareness and a nimble cast... But Mr. Beers and his fellow screenwriter, Mathew Harawitz, also have a numbing Seth MacFarlane-esque weakness for purely attention-getting crudeness and unfunny stereotypes.
  28. Aftermath
    Essentially, we’re watching dead people refuse to lie down, yet the acting isn’t terrible, and Scott Winig’s photography is satisfyingly bleak and grimy.
  29. Hector and the Search for Happiness
    Mr. Pegg, normally a live wire, makes an affable hero, but the movie often forces him into blandly earnest mugging.
  30. A Five Star Life
    Narratively and emotionally, this weirdly becalmed trifle by Maria Sole Tognazzi ends up almost exactly where it started.
  31. Last Weekend
    Mostly, Last Weekend is an elegiac ode to affluence.
  32. The Young Messiah
    For all the healing here — the revived include a bird, an ailing uncle and a blind man — The Young Messiah performs no miracles.
  33. Rabindranath Tagore: The Poet of Eternity
    The movie is so eager to convince us of Tagore’s greatness as a universal soul (it was Tagore, by the way, who gave Gandhi the name “mahatma,” or great soul) that it fails to give us the man or a clear sense of context.
  34. Clifford the Big Red Dog
    Genuine sweetness can be found in Emily’s fidelity to her rowdy new best friend. Still, naturalism is hard to fake, and it’s difficult to divorce Clifford from the lines of code that animate him.
  35. Paper Towns
    In the end, what makes Q such a deceptively tricky literary creation — his averageness — is the very thing the filmmakers struggle with, partly because movies of this commercial scale and bottom-line ambition rarely know what to do with ordinary life.
  36. The Word
    The Word is never boring, though that has as much to do with the mounting absurdities and ripe acting as it does with the resourceful use of crosscutting by the director, Gregory W. Friedle.
  37. The Transporter Refueled
    The Transporter Refueled is crass and nonsensical, but it is hard to hate a movie in which a medical anesthetic is administered with a nightclub fog machine, the weapons include a ringed life preserver, an escape from a moving plane continues by car onto a jetway and the touch-screen banking software appears expressly designed for double-crossing.
  38. Coldwater
    Proceeding in a tone of unrelieved misery, Coldwater is a punishing, predictable drama that’s almost rescued by strong acting and good intentions.
  39. The Admiral: Roaring Currents
    A turgid, foursquare naval epic.
  40. Saban's Power Rangers
    When the Rangers engage in “Transformers”-lite mayhem, an intriguing group portrait collapses into generic pyrotechnics.
  41. A Merry Friggin' Christmas
    It’s a testament to Williams’s energy that even in an unfortunate part as Virgil, an angry, alcoholic dad, he comes across as the most vivid member of the cast.
  42. Ben-Hur
    Overseen by a director not known for his human touch and lacking a name star, except for Mr. Freeman, Ben-Hur feels like a film made on the cheap, although it looks costly.
  43. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows
    This movie is, it happens, easier to sit through than the 2014 film. The 3-D action, overseen by the director Dave Green, is not wholly incoherent. The production values (showcasing new mutants and many gear-heavy extra-dimensional machines undreamed of in any actual engineering philosophy) are ultrashiny. And there are even a couple of amusing, albeit unmemorable, sight gags and one-liners.
  44. Winter in the Blood
    The journey from page to screen may have battered Mr. Welch’s novel, but its lamenting heart beats loud and clear.
  45. Krampus
    Occasionally funny, intermittently scary, but mostly hectic and sloppy, Krampus tries very hard to be a different kind of Christmas movie.
  46. Autómata
    There are interesting ideas here, but they are swallowed up in dull, poorly choreographed shootouts and other action nonsense.
  47. The Damned
    Playing characters with no real substance, the actors struggle to develop a sense of shared peril.
  48. Shadows from My Past
    The issue of national atonement is a sprawling topic, one ill served by the film’s unfocused and amateurish presentation. At times, the movie seems less like a full-fledged documentary than like a pitch session.
  49. Triple 9
    Mr. Hillcoat wears his nihilism easily and persuasively (his films include “The Road”), so his weird bids at mordant comedy feel as forced as they are ill-considered.
  50. Naked Opera
    Mr. Rollinger, a protagonist of a curiously circumscribed life, proves to have an opaque appeal.
  51. Gringo Trails
    The only urgent message in Gringo Trails would seem to be the screamingly obvious one: Visitors should behave themselves.
  52. Felony
    the Australian drama Felony proves only that skilled actors and slick photography can tart up even the most problematic script.
  53. The Man on Her Mind
    It is Ms. McAllister who is the brightest light amid the talky, often sentimental exchanges. She lends charm and conviction to a character who might otherwise have proved insufferable.
  54. The Rule
    The Rule, by the married filmmakers Marylou and Jerome Bongiorno, doesn’t show us enough detail about how they’re applied to distinguish St. Benedict’s from countless other parochial schools, private institutions and military academies.
  55. Archaeology of a Woman
    Burdened by a ludicrous script and messy direction, Ms. Kirkland — a headstrong veteran performer who is nothing if not game — has proved that she can play this kind of role in her sleep. If only the movie around it were worthy of her efforts.
  56. Dirty Grandpa
    The screenplay, by John M. Phillips, is the written equivalent of a toddler discovering curse words. Yet some riffs draw chuckles.
  57. Hungry Hearts
    The film’s initial naturalism is warped by overheated film technique and a dead-ending screenplay.
  58. The Pirates
    Neither the action nor the comedy in this action comedy is consistently strong.
  59. Finding Fanny
    Ms. Kapadia, now 57 and a Bollywood star since she made a splash in “Bobby,” at 16, inhabits and enhances her role. So, too, does the younger star Deepika Padukone, who plays her widowed daughter-in-law with an uncloying sweetness. But the men flounder.
  60. The Frontier
    The film means well but feels generic, strained and claustrophobic (despite several scenes at a deserted beach), with tight close-ups and sudden confrontations.
  61. All You Need Is Love
    Only during a brief scene of a man catching a fish outside his flooded house does the movie seem interested in anything more than raising awareness.
  62. Extraterrestrial
    Underlying this overlong and overheated enterprise is a surfeit of ambition. Maybe too much.
  63. Henry & Me
    The animated tale Henry & Me aims to inspire sick children, but it also aims to promote the Yankees and the team’s mythology. The two goals don’t mesh very well.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
    The Scorch Trials adds nothing new to the unkillable dystopian genre, but it’s at least less ponderous than its predecessor. The many chases and ludicrous narrow escapes offer respectable doses of adrenaline.
  65. The Houses October Built
    If you’re relatively easily scared or are in a theater full of people who are, the film might be good for a few screams. But only if you’re the patient sort. It takes almost an hour to get to the good stuff.
  66. It Was You Charlie
    The film is at once overly eccentric and underdeveloped. It starts as an exercise in bleak absurdism and ends as a Frank Capra Christmas special, with little originality in between.
  67. Catch Hell
    A certain curiosity value arises out of Mr. Phillippe’s coincidental occupation here as a professional actor and a director.
  68. Eternity: The Movie
    There’s much more dead air than laughs, despite a certain anything-goes enthusiasm from the leads.
  69. Bang Bang!
    It’s all high-end flash, but less romantic than wearying.
  70. Jem and the Holograms
    There are a few sweet moments early in Jem and the Holograms.... But then the movie’s lumbering, overstuffed, unfocused plot shows up, and whatever high hopes we might have had for this latest exploitation of 1980s nostalgia are slowly ground away.
  71. 23 Blast
    Although the film has moments when it’s serious about exploring the challenges that someone in Travis’s situation faces, it ultimately prefers to be just another football movie with a hokey big-game ending.
  72. Viktor
    In a way, the occasionally lugubrious undertones and casual cruelties suit the setting, but the tragic heft Mr. Martinez seems to be pushing for doesn’t materialize.
  73. Justice League
    The story is a confusion of noise, visual clutter and murderous digital gnats, but every so often a glimmer of life flickers through.
  74. Aquaman
    It’s just two and a half years of — sorry, two and a half hours — of oceanic screen savers and hair that won’t stop undulating so we know when we’re underwater.
  75. Blood Ransom
    It’s all very solemn, convoluted and a bit bloody, but not engrossing, despite impressive cinematography by Jasmin Kuhn and Mr. dela Torre and the best efforts of a hard-working cast.
  76. Hit by Lightning
    Even with a few late twists, concept exceeds execution.
  77. On Any Sunday: The Next Chapter
    Motorbikes careening round corners just millimeters off the track still quicken the pulse, but “The Next Chapter” also demonstrates the padding that documentaries in general have picked up in recent years.
  78. The Lookalike
    Nonstop scheming and some grimy New Orleans locations prevent The Lookalike from being boring. But the movie, instead of embracing its budgetary limitations, gives off a distracting sense of trying to punch above its weight class.
  79. Before I Disappear
    Throughout the movie, you have the feeling of being dragged along on an impromptu journey by a filmmaker who is traveling without the benefit of a GPS device.
  80. Mechanic: Resurrection
    If not for Mr. Jones, “Resurrection,” while competently edited, would be devoid of humor, an area where Mr. Statham has shown promise in the past.
  81. The DUFF
    Even in this would-be subversive comedy. Success means getting the guy. Getting good grades (as Bianca does) is not enough, nor is writing the front-page article in the school paper.
  82. Son of a Gun
    Son of a Gun adds to the mystique that Australian crime films are meaner, nastier and more brutish than their American counterparts. But it changes style roughly every half-hour. And behind its macho preening is a preposterous, routinely executed story.
  83. The Color of Time
    The film is too sincere an expression of admiration for this poet’s work to feel pretentious, but it’s like a music video for the poems, often literal in its biographical readings.
  84. Danny Collins
    What authenticity Mr. Cannavale and Ms. Bening bring to their roles is the sense of groundedness and integrity for one-note characters in a movie whose screenplay is little more than an efficiently executed outline.
  85. The World Made Straight
    The finale, in which blood rivalries are redressed in an absurdly literal manner, fatally strains credulity.
  86. Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
    Like one of those machines that can inhale a car and spit out a tidy cube of squashed components, Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles is a near-indigestible lump of clips and quips and snipped opinions.
  87. Touch the Wall
    What Touch the Wall lacks is an inventive or compelling presentation. Heavy with platitudes about goals and attitude, it could easily be a short special on ESPN.
  88. Women Who Flirt
    The film is exaggerated, ludicrous and simplistic. It shows a towering disdain for both men and women. But Angie and Marco have a certain good-natured charm, and there are some nice shots of Shanghai.
  89. Unfinished Business
    A “EuroTrip” with balance sheets, the slick, innocuous comedy Unfinished Business fails to seal the deal.
  90. Ungli
    While Mr. D’Silva’s basic structure and pacing are fairly fluid, his movie suffers from Bollywood’s typical kitchen-sink approach to filmmaking.
  91. Monkey Kingdom
    It’s hard to imagine what message children will take away from this film other than that monkeys are just like characters in a fictional Disney movie, which they are not.
  92. Inside the Mind of Leonardo
    The movie starts by noting Leonardo’s intent to leave a memory of himself in the minds of others. That’s a benchmark Inside the Mind of Leonardo won’t meet.
  93. Strange Magic
    At once disarming and calculated, Strange Magic is a film of commodified feelings, evoking memories of other experiences — whether of Shakespeare, the original songs or authentic enchantment.
  94. Woman in Gold
    Apart from Ms. Mirren’s performance, Woman in Gold smugly and shamelessly pushes familiar buttons.
  95. Tip Top
    The humor of this situation — or of any of the movie’s strained wackiness — doesn’t particularly translate. It also does little to illuminate the more serious commentary on immigration, the legacy of colonialism and the tensions within the country’s Algerian communities.
  96. We'll Never Have Paris
    This derivative comedy, in addition to not being particularly funny, gives off a sense of telling us more than we needed to know.
  97. The Great Wall
    The Great Wall flirts with romance and bleats out a little propagandistic blather about the benefits of bilateral action, but the focus throughout remains on multitudes of shifting, surging bodies — human and beast, digital and not — that, as they ebb and flow, resemble a Chinese military pageant and a lavish Busby Berkeley number.
  98. Barbecue
    Mr. Wilson’s Antoine is too much of a pill to root for, and the voice-over and wispy songs dribbling over scenes only underline the forgettable filmmaking.
  99. Preservation
    Like his ill-fated hunting party, Mr. Denham’s plans for his thriller don’t turn out quite the way he’d hoped.
  100. The Greatest Showman
    An amusement park version of P.T. Barnum is fine, as far as that goes, but if you are going to aim for family-friendly fun, you need to get the fun part right.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »