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. Allied
    It’s not so much a work of art as a triumph of craft, and therefore a reminder of the deep pleasures of old-fashioned technique and long experience.
  2. Touched With Fire
    Touched With Fire is an actor’s field day, and both Mr. Kirby and Ms. Holmes boldly meet the challenge of playing bright, high-strung artists struggling with depression.
  3. Boy and the World
    It’s both the best children’s animated film this year since “Inside Out” — you might call it “Outside In” — and, unexpectedly, a more stirring depiction of the deadening modern megalopolis than most heal-the-world documentaries.
  4. Bikes vs Cars
    Breezy, intelligent, diffuse but uncluttered, Fredrik Gertten’s documentary Bikes vs Cars could be called a tale of congestion-plagued cities.
  5. Dementia
    It’s an assured, deftly acted movie that builds its creepiness slowly and keeps its secrets well hidden till the end.
  6. Only Yesterday (1991)
    Mr. Takahata’s psychologically acute film, which was based on a manga, seems to grow in impact, too, as the adult Takao comes to a richer understanding of what she wants and how she wants to live.
  7. The Winding Stream
    Rhythmically blending vintage recordings and live performances, The Winding Stream exudes a quirky warmth that counters its PBS-pledge-drive aura.
  8. Sully
    The movie is economical and solid, and generally low-key when it’s not freaking you out. That it unnerves you as much as it does may seem surprising, given that going in, we know how this story ends. But Mr. Eastwood is also very good at his job, a talent that gives the movie its tension along with an autobiographical sheen.
  9. No Home Movie
    If you let it, No Home Movie invites you in first with its intimacy and then its deep feeling.
  10. Closet Monster
    Connor Jessup wonderfully inhabits the teenage Oscar, who observes others while trying to find himself.
  11. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
    Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse contains a vital element that has been missing from too many recent superhero movies: fun.
  12. Early Man
    The genius of Early Man is that it cannot possibly be spoiled. The animation is foolproof in its combination of ingenuity and obviousness, and the script obliterates the difference between a laugher and a groaner.
  13. King Jack
    For everyone who ever had a close call as an adolescent and kept it from the grown-ups, King Jack will hit you where you live. The same for everyone who’s been pummeled by a bully or been left vulnerable by releasing a graphic selfie into the textosphere.
  14. Trapped
    Trapped is not a balanced analysis of the abortion debate; it makes its sympathies clear. But it is a powerful and persuasive rendering of a corner of women’s health care under siege.
  15. Manchester by the Sea
    Mr. Affleck, in one of the most fiercely disciplined screen performances in recent memory, conveys both Lee’s inner avalanche of feeling and the numb decorum that holds it back.
  16. Indignation
    Indignation might be dismissed as a small, exquisite period piece, but it is so precisely rendered that it gets deeply under your skin.
  17. Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words
    It’s a fantastic collage that the filmmaker, Thorsten Schütte, uses to illuminate not only Zappa (who died of cancer in 1993), but also the cultural upheavals that defined his time.
  18. Morris from America
    There is plenty of drama in a teenager’s everyday life — no need to sensationalize — and Morris From America feels true to both the pleasures and the frustrations of its title character.
  19. Operation Avalanche
    There’s a headlong temerity to Mr. Johnson’s style that places the dippy thrill of moviemaking front and center, revealing a director (and a character) so high on his power to misrepresent reality that a future in politics seems all but assured.
  20. Weiner
    Infuriating and depressing but rivetingly watchable.
  21. Lovesong
    [An] exquisite, beautifully shot meditation on love clouded by fear and doubt.
  22. Equity
    Equity pulls off a difficult balancing act with an elegance that should not be underestimated. It turns its unflappable gaze on a maddeningly complex reality and transforms it into a swift, clear and exciting story.
  23. Fort Buchanan
    If, at barely more than an hour, the movie initially seems slight, its inconsequentiality might be better viewed as polemical.
  24. Things to Come
    Ms. Hansen-Love surveys the territory with clear eyes, but also with an unmistakable shading of pity and with ideas, in particular about Nathalie’s sexuality and the political compromises of her generation, that seem more like assumptions than insights.
  25. One False Move
    Mr. Franklin delivers the kind of symmetry, surprise and detail that easily transcend the limits of the genre.
  26. White Girl
    We’re all familiar with the term contact high, but not with its antithesis. Because it is so believable, White Girl is a contact bummer that’s hard to shake.
  27. The Handmaiden
    A rebus, a romance, a gothic thriller and a woozy comedy, The Handmaiden is finally and most significantly a liberation story.
  28. A Quiet Passion
    Mr. Davies, whose work often blends public history and private memory, possesses a poetic sensibility perfectly suited to his subject and a deep, idiosyncratic intuition about what might have made her tick.
  29. Sweet Bean
    The movie, beautifully shot and acted, earns its ultimate sense of hope by confronting real heartbreak head-on, and with compassion.
  30. After the Storm
    Mr. Kore-eda, whose most noteworthy family dramas include “Still Walking” (2009) and “Like Father, Like Son” (2014), works in a quiet cinematic register, and the slightest error in tone could upend the whole enterprise. Slow-paced, sad, rueful and sometimes warmly funny, After the Storm is one of his sturdiest, and most sensitive, constructions.
  31. To Kill a Mockingbird
    Their charming enactments of a father and his children in that close relationship that can occur at only one brief period are worth all the footage of the film.
  32. White Lies
    Quiet, graceful, stately and infused with slow tension, Dana Rotberg’s White Lies unfolds with inexorable weight.
  33. Everything Is Copy
    Digging into the psychological space between her wildly public life and intensely private death, Everything Is Copy is a pickle slathered in whipped cream. Just like its subject.
  34. Afternoon
    Obviously, this is not a film for viewers unfamiliar with Mr. Tsai’s work. But its insistently austere format does suggest a purpose beyond its immediate context.
  35. Our Last Tango
    German Kral’s documentary Our Last Tango is a combination of things, all fascinating.
  36. Queen of Katwe
    In Ms. Nair’s hands, Phiona’s story has a richness and unpredictability that separates it from other, superficially similar movies. It also has the buoyant, cleareyed feel for the particulars of culture and place that is among this director’s great gifts.
  37. Time to Choose
    Charles Ferguson’s latest documentary, Time to Choose, is a sobering polemic about global warming that balances familiar predictions of planetary doom with a survey of innovations in renewable energy technology that hold out some hope for the future.
  38. Paths of the Soul
    The movie so upends the traditions of documentary and narrative filmmaking that “dramatizes” may be inaccurate — the filmmakers followed the real pilgrims for a full year, after all. But the movie is so well made and engaging that such distinctions will make little difference to the viewer.
  39. Don't Blink - Robert Frank
    You leave with a vivid sense of the man’s living presence and a reasonably thorough account of his life, work and associations. Given the sheer volume and variety of the work in question, this is an impressive achievement.
  40. The Innocents
    Blistering.
  41. Graduation
    Graduation is long and intense, a rigorously naturalistic film that at times feels as claustrophobic and suspenseful as a horror movie. Like Mr. Mungiu’s other work, it is a thriller of sorts, built around an excruciating ethical problem. He is unstinting in his sympathy and unsparing in his judgment.
  42. The Unknown Girl
    The Unknown Girl is as tense as a police procedural, and as mysterious as a religious parable.
  43. Loving
    Mr. Nichols’s most distinct aesthetic choice is the movie’s quietness and the hush that envelops its first scene and that eventually defines the Lovings as much as their accents, gestures, manners and battles.
  44. Paterson
    With visual precision and emotional restraint — and aided by Mr. Driver’s tamped-down, sober and gently endearing performance — Mr. Jarmusch creates that rarest portrait of the artist: the one who’s happy being hard at work.
  45. Personal Shopper
    Personal Shopper is sleek and spooky, seductive and suspenseful. It flirts with silliness, as ghost stories do. And also with heartbreak.
  46. Raw
    Raw, Julia Ducournau’s jangly opera of sexual and dietary awakening, is an exceptionally classy-looking movie about deeply horrifying behavior.
  47. Rules Don't Apply
    The wonder of the movie, which Mr. Beatty wrote and directed from a story he wrote with Bo Goldman, is that it is so good-humored. Fools and idiots abound, but demonic, systemic evil does not.
  48. Zero Days
    Zero Days has a similarly balanced outlook along with a critical political viewpoint that avoids hysteria and demagogy. Its strongest protest is against what Mr. Gibney sees as the dangers of excessive American secrecy.
  49. The Thoughts That Once We Had
    Even if you don’t recognize the majority of the unidentified clips assembled here, or the quotations that divide and guide them, the fascination they exert is all their own.
  50. Princess
    Thanks to Ms. Haas’s truly remarkable lead performance (she was 16 at the time of filming) and Ms. Shalom-Ezer’s nuanced dialogue, Adar’s journey finally feels more like one of empowerment than victimization.
  51. Les Cowboys
    Unfolding with a reticence that’s occasionally confusing, Les Cowboys presents a suggestive, almost abstract take on terror and the generational toxicity of bigotry.
  52. Anthropoid
    It takes Sean Ellis’s World War II thriller Anthropoid a while to build steam, but once it does, hang on.
  53. The Girl Without Hands
    The result is a dazzlingly imaginative movie about survival.
  54. My Love, Don't Cross That River
    Many of the passages in this gentle film may be universal, but the love here is extraordinary.
  55. The Blackcoat's Daughter
    The movie is so perfectly acted and gorgeously filmed (the cinematographer is Julie Kirkwood) that we don’t mind its coyness; the twanging notes of trepidation make us almost grateful for the leisurely build.
  56. In Order of Disappearance
    Revenge is the theme and cheeky is the tone of In Order of Disappearance, a delicious Norwegian film full of icy landscapes and icier hearts.
  57. Ralph Breaks the Internet
    Somewhere amid the film’s ornate imagery and deliriously irreverent humor, we might begin to realize that we’re watching a terrifying, incisive satire about the ways that a life lived online makes monsters of us all.
  58. Demon
    Mr. Wrona is very good at thickening the air with mystery, and right from the start he slips in enigmatic details and figures — the prowling bulldozer, a keening woman, a scowling man — that disturb the ordinary scene. Like pebbles dropped in water, these disturbances create concentric circles that spread, disrupting everything.
  59. Command and Control
    The film effectively recreates the sense of confusion over how to try to contain the leak and what might happen if the fuel ignited.
  60. Notes on Blindness
    The tone of the narration is so wrenchingly honest that the film never lapses into self-pity or relies on mystical platitudes.
  61. London Road
    The artifice of the form works something wondrous with the material, highlighting the generic nature of our response to extreme violence.
  62. 13th
    Powerful, infuriating and at times overwhelming, Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13TH will get your blood boiling and tear ducts leaking.
  63. Barry Lyndon
    Barry Lyndon is another fascinating challenge from one of our most remarkable, independent-minded directors.
  64. Homo Sapiens
    Each individual shot creates a frisson of desolation that resonates far beyond the facile irony suggested by the movie’s title.
  65. Spa Night
    The film is a contemplation of the loneliness, tension and anxiety of outsiders pursuing a piece of the American dream.
  66. The Bad Batch
    It is a fluent and knowing pastiche of genres and styles with a brazen and vigorous wit of its own.
  67. The Lost City of Z
    There’s much to love in this film, but what lingers are those lapidary details that often go missing in stories about great men, as if they had built the world alone and no child had ever raced down a road waving goodbye as a father disappeared into history.
  68. Being 17
    The movie is not really about deciding whether you’re gay or straight — those terms are never spoken. It’s about the chemistry of two people at a moment in time.
  69. Ben-Hur
    The artistic quality and taste of Mr. Wyler have prevailed to make this a rich and glowing drama that far transcends the bounds of spectacle. His big scenes are brilliant and dramatic—that is unquestionable. There has seldom been anything in movies to compare with this picture's chariot race.
  70. Miss Hokusai
    While it’s not entirely kid-friendly, this portrait of an artist is both enchanting and thought provoking.
  71. Fences
    Even as it properly foregrounds Wilson’s dialogue — few playwrights have approached his genius for turning workaday vernacular into poetry — Fences is much more than a filmed reading. Mr. Washington has wisely resisted the temptation to force a lot of unnecessary cinema on the play.
  72. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
    It’s less that Mr. Cedar blends realism with absurdity than that he refuses to acknowledge any distinction between them.
  73. Peter and the Farm
    It is the film’s cosmic dimension that makes it so special.
  74. 20th Century Women
    20th Century Women is a memory movie, one in which people are conjured up to bump against the larger world, exuberantly and uneasily.
  75. Amanda Knox
    The directors, Brian McGinn and Rod Blackhurst, have produced a tightly edited, coherently structured and ultimately moving reassessment that burrows beneath the lurid in search of the illuminating.
  76. Scarred Hearts
    It’s the rare page-to-screen adaptation in which the camera becomes an essential character. The action often unfolds in long shot, with crowded compositions in which the principals are obscured by door frames. Over time, the withholding of conventional editing patterns and the sensitization to subtle changes in camera placement become an analogue for Emanuel’s entrapment.
  77. We Are X
    [A] fascinating and assured documentary.
  78. Jackie
    The film has the requisite surface fidelity.... But it also has moments of lightness and strangeness, as well as kinks and sour notes, which strengthen the sense that these are people, not figurines in a dutiful, paint-by-numbers biopic.
  79. Prevenge
    Prevenge is a brilliantly conceived meditation on prepartum anxiety and extreme grief.
  80. A Woman's Life
    Its images and scenes are suffused by an intensity that seems almost to be a quality of the light and air as they play across Ms. Chemla’s watchful, sometimes inscrutable features.
  81. Baden Baden
    It’s very fresh and often very funny stuff, communicated in a direct, unforced style.
  82. Chicken People
    Will fluffy, poodlelike chickens replace cats on the internet? Maybe not, but these chicken people, with deep connections to their birds, make for a fun and at times astonishing film.
  83. The Jazz Loft According to W. Eugene Smith
    The bohemian paradise of this environment had a dark side, and the movie doesn’t give it short shrift. Nevertheless, a genuine exhilaration holds throughout.
  84. Get Out
    Part of what makes Get Out both exciting and genuinely unsettling is how real life keeps asserting itself, scene after scene.
  85. Network
    Network can be faulted both for going too far and not far enough, but it's also something that very few commercial films are these days. It's alive. This, I suspect, is the Lumet drive. It's also the wit of performers like Mr. Finch, Mr. Holden, and Miss Dunaway.
  86. Theo Who Lived
    This is a potent, vital film.
  87. Yourself and Yours
    Hong’s formal confidence yields a movie that’s very simply constructed and utterly engrossing.
  88. A Stray
    The substantial pleasures of the movie are supplemented by the gratification of seeing an emerging talent with concerns far outside the conventional indie realm asserting himself with such authority.
  89. Always Shine
    Always Shine is a deft, assured movie with a sly self-reflexive undercurrent containing commentary on sexism and self-idealization that’s provocative, and sometimes disturbing.
  90. Behemoth
    Behemoth proceeds placidly, making it easy to become lulled. Its haunting power grows in retrospect — as if you’ve returned from a journey and can’t believe what you’ve seen.
  91. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
    Ms. Story’s unconventional approach provokes responses that a traditional facts-and-figures discussion might not. Yet the film’s formal abstraction, far from creating emotional distance, is unexpectedly moving.
  92. L'Argent
    It goes beyond the impartiality of journalism. It has the manner of an official report on the spiritual state of a civilization for which there is no hope.
  93. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    There’s a whole lot of everything in the Mission: Impossible — Fallout, an entertainment machine par excellence that skitters around the world and has something to do with nuclear bombs, mysterious threats and dangerous beauties. Mostly, it has to do with that hyper-human Tom Cruise, who runs, drives, dives, shoots, flies, falls and repeatedly teeters on the edge of disaster, clinging to one after another cliffhanger.
  94. A Star Is Born
    This latest and fourth version is a gorgeous heartbreaker (bring tissues). Like its finest antecedents, it wrings tears from its romance and thrills from a steadfast belief in old-fashioned, big-feeling cinema. That it’s also a perverse fantasy about men, women, love and sacrifice makes it all the better.
  95. Best and Most Beautiful Things
    Ms. Smith does not fit easily into any box, and neither does this thought-provoking film.
  96. Dear Zindagi
    This is a movie that drops quotations from Faulkner and Einstein, but it rarely feels pedantic or platitudinous, thanks to the breezy, assured delivery of Mr. Khan.
  97. Lost and Beautiful
    Mr. Marcello tells a simple, touching tale that seems to contain a whole cosmos of meaning.
  98. Wonder
    Wonder is that rare thing, a family picture that moves and amuses while never overtly pandering.
  99. German Concentration Camps Factual Survey
    This restoration of German Concentration Camps Factual Survey is an extraordinary act of cinematic reclamation and historiography.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Reset
    [A] riveting documentary.
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