The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,269 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 20269
  2. Mixed: 8,428 out of 20269
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20269
20269 movie reviews
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  1. A Thousand and One
    In A Thousand and One, [Rockwell] packs a great deal into her filmmaking, which bristles with looks, gestures, bodies in breakneck motion and expressionistic jolts of color that — like Gary Gunn’s gorgeous score — complicate and deepen the outwardly simple story.
  2. Kill Boksoon
    Beneath the gore that ensues is a story about understanding.
  3. Rye Lane
    It’s not a spoiler to say that at its conclusion, Rye Lane comes together as only the best rom-coms can, with one of those classic payoffs that’s designed to have you cheering at the movie screen. How Allen-Miller chooses to balance those moments with the unconventional is one of the film’s greatest strengths.
  4. Kubrick by Kubrick
    Most of Kubrick’s 13 features have been analyzed exhaustively already, and Kubrick by Kubrick doesn’t offer much that will surprise even mild obsessives. Still, it is interesting to hear Kubrick express ideas that run counter to conventional wisdom.
  5. Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game
    The movie strives for a knowing, amiable tone. It achieves a cutesy, slight one instead.
  6. Money Shot: The Pornhub Story
    Here is a documentary that casts a clear eye on the offenses of an industry driven by capitalism while never losing sight of the workers whose safety and success should be that profession’s number one priority.
  7. The Worst Ones
    Luminously photographed and nimbly edited, The Worst Ones — which won the Un Certain Regard competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022 — offers a provocative critique of filmmaking practices. It also presents a subtle defense of the onscreen miracles revealed by the young and the raw.
  8. Tori and Lokita
    The precarity of the lives that the Dardennes explore give the stories feeling and tension while their directorial choices — including where they put the camera and how they situate characters in the world — give their work its characteristic ethical politics.
  9. Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV
    Paik is undeniable, creating despite lean times (and slowing after a 1996 stroke).
  10. Petite Solange
    As Solange’s teenage woes bubble up and then cool to a simmer, Ropert reveals a knack for calibrating emotion. It can be agony to accept one’s parents as people with needs and faults all their own, and Ropert observes Solange’s coming-of-age lucidly and without judgment.
  11. The Five Devils
    Smell is perhaps the most opaque of the five human senses; the one that’s hardest to put into words. No wonder it’s key to the uncanny intrigues of the film, part queer love story, part supernatural psychodrama, by the French director Léa Mysius.
  12. What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?
    The film frames them as having been somehow embroiled in a political situation, rather than actively, knowingly engaged in it — and its attempts to remain apolitical and focus on the music are as naïve as the band’s.
  13. The Lost King
    Though raising serious questions about the way history is written, and by whom, The Lost King isn’t a polemic, or even a biopic. It’s a quietly droll detective story, a warm portrait of a woman who lost her health and found her purpose, exhuming her self-respect along with Richard’s bones.
  14. A Good Person
    Braff is going for something broader than indie naturalism, so perhaps the film calls for less subtle brushstrokes. But the result is something that rings with far less thoughtfulness than he’s clearly capable of (particularly in light of the opioid crisis that the film mentions), despite Pugh’s remarkable attempts to ground the story.
  15. Walk Up
    A conversation falters. Another bottle is opened. Three people share drinks and their universe is completely reordered.
  16. Ithaka
    The documentary repeats three monotonous points: Journalists lie. Regardless, Assange is a journalist who deserves protection. Also, his family misses him a heck of a lot.
  17. Reggie
    Even as this movie goes deep on still vital topics, it doesn’t skimp on baseball dish.
  18. John Wick: Chapter 4
    There is simply and once again Reeves, the axis who centers this franchise with his grave sincerity, beatific glow and mesmerizing, rooted fighting style, with its heavy-footed solidity and surprising suppleness. No matter what happens, nothing ever feels as poignantly at stake here as Reeves’s own ravaged, beautiful, aging body.
  19. Full River Red
    At times, particularly in its overwrought closing act, the film feels as if it’s going to collapse under the weight of its relentless, convoluted twists. But the lighthearted tone poking through keeps it afloat, and suspends the viewer in mostly carefree entertainment for its two-and-a-half-hour running time.
  20. Are You Lonesome Tonight?
    Part exploration of the ravages of guilt, part homage to the stylish Hong Kong gangster flicks of the 1990s, “Lonesome” (written by Wen with Noé Dodson, Wang Yinuo and Zhao Binghao) wears its influences on its sleeve but is a cool and sophisticated debut feature.
  21. The Innocent
    The entertainment value of The Innocent lies not in the actual heist — which amounts to little more than a shipment of caviar at a truck stop — but in its lighthearted comedy, its by-the-numbers romance plot and its relatable family drama grafted onto an absurd premise.
  22. Rodeo
    The guarded Julia certainly intrigues, but too often the film sinks into the clichés of a rugged character study — no wonder she prefers to accelerate.
  23. Wildflower
    Shipka ably handles the responsibility of leading the story, but the director Matt Smukler has a harder time balancing the charming and empathetic ensemble performances with the script’s constantly judgmental tone.
  24. The Magician's Elephant
    In jazzing up the tale for the screen, Rogers sands down the somberness — Baltese is all fuzzy blues and pinks, with nary a trace of postwar grit — while turning up the silliness for gimmicky thrills.
  25. Shazam! Fury of the Gods
    Sandberg started his career in small horror films, and doesn’t seem to have much ambition to scale up. Most of the sequences are cut from medium shots strung together without much style — they may as well be a "Saturday Night Live” sketch.
  26. Inside
    It’s disruptive, and then cathartic, to watch Dafoe’s primal performance dominate this museum/mausoleum and force us to side with humanity. He’s perfectly cast in a part that calls for quietly whirring intelligence.
  27. Moving On
    Something else is missing here — a farcical energy or satirical audacity that might shock the premise to unsettling life, or else a deeper, darker core of feeling. Moving On takes refuge in pleasantness, and in the easy charm of its stars.
  28. Rimini
    We know there’s great tragedy and ugliness behind the smoke and mirrors, but we watch in amusement nonetheless. Sinisterly, Seidl reminds us how easy it is to turn people into objects for the taking.
  29. Boston Strangler
    Washed in an unappetizing sludge of grayish green, the movie aims for serious and settles on bilious. The real McLaughlin was a fascinating, pioneering newshound; you’re unlikely to find her here.
  30. Chang Can Dunk
    A funny and thoughtful high school comedy.
  31. The Holly
    It’s all a heady brew that leaves one wanting to know even more about Roberts, who is now running for mayor in Denver. The movie resists encapsulating him, or perhaps he escapes its director’s full understanding.
  32. Stonewalling
    Few movies capture the surreal comedy and engulfing horror of the money-driven world as piercingly as “Stonewalling.”
  33. Scream VI
    It’s tricky business balancing disturbing terror and jokey film criticism, and while this sequel occasionally pulls it off, the weight of obligations to the dictates of the franchise ultimately drags it down.
  34. 65
    Like Mills’s emotional back story, the special effects seem to have been pulled out of a box of secondhand ideas. Nor is the execution all that impressive. There’s little in the way of awe, suspense or surprise.
  35. Rewind & Play
    The film is not merely playback or payback on behalf of one Black artist by another. Rewind & Play dazzles because it is and will remain a wonder to witness Monk seemingly discovering his compositions again and again, his fingers conjuring, his right foot etching rhythms.
  36. Punch
    Flowing and keenly observant of its characters and setting, Punch swings above its weight class.
  37. 99 Moons
    Gassmann clearly wants to explore the state of love and sexuality in the 2020s — there are more than a few passing parallels to Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World” — but he succeeds only in conveying the pathologies of two people who can’t figure out what they want from each other.
  38. Champions
    The dispiriting experience of watching Champions is slowly realizing that, notwithstanding an off-color line here or there (a player with Down syndrome introduces himself as “your homie with an extra chromie”), it’s exactly the sort of formulaic crowd-pleaser that just about anybody might have directed.
  39. Luther: The Fallen Sun
    Lacking dialogue to deepen the characters or reinforce their motivations, Luther: The Fallen Sun whooshes past in a rush of serial-killer clichés: an underground lair, a torture room, a masked maniac
  40. The Magic Flute
    In a way it’s kind of neat. In another way it’s kind of dopey. The movie toggles between those two states throughout.
  41. Unicorn Wars
    Unicorn Wars is forcefully provocative, trying too hard to push buttons at the cost of more nuanced explorations of masculinity and power. For Vázquez, a pile of cartoon corpses makes enough of a point.
  42. Therapy Dogs
    Watching its sequences, you can feel both the immediacy of each moment and the nostalgia that’s already seeping in — each snippet of life becoming, by the minute, just a flicker in the teenagers’ minds, like the flashes in the film’s montages, immortalizing their youth before it’s lost to time’s grasp.
  43. Film, the Living Record of our Memory
    For a documentary largely about archives, it should be better organized, but its breathless profusion of information underscores the scale of the task at hand.
  44. Split at the Root
    Split at the Root is a powerful lens into the emotional plight of the thousands of immigrants who cross the border into the United States, the danger they are fleeing and the people trying to help them.
  45. La Civil
    Its rigor is impressive, but also something of a narrative trap. Once the futility of Cielo’s situation, and her persistence in the face of it, are definitively established, a feeling of paralysis sets in.
  46. The Forger
    Peren is clever to favor mischief against a backdrop of gloom, but in doing so she draws a frustrating distance between her subject and the audience.
  47. Gods of Mexico
    This nominal portrait of people isn’t interested in what they have to say.
  48. Creed III
    As entertaining as it is predictable, Creed III does exactly what you expect, delivering nicely balanced helpings of intimacy and spectacle, grit and glamour.
  49. What We Do Next
    The result doesn’t make the best use of the medium’s powers, but the chatty ride does make for good food for thought.
  50. Palm Trees and Power Lines
    Dack takes obvious care to make sure that the filmmaking and camerawork don’t further exploit the character. Yet it’s a bummer that the ethical and political thoughtfulness that she extends during Lea’s most harrowingly vulnerable moments doesn’t extend to the rest of the movie.
  51. The Year Between
    This lived-in quality to the filmmaking supports equally relaxed performances from both veteran and emerging actors, making for an even-keeled and easy viewing experience.
  52. Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre
    The silly premise is one that a better Ritchie film could, with some charm, style and wit, have turned into a workable romp. But everything here is stuck on autopilot.
  53. Blueback
    It’s a mournful, stodgy, girl-meets-fish drama about the emotional cost of protecting the planet from its most rapacious predator: the land developer.
  54. Sansón and Me
    The film is an unusually layered look at how the combination of privation, misplaced familial loyalty and just plain rotten luck can make the immigrant experience in America a nightmare.
  55. A Little White Lie
    Hobbled by a lack of visual oomph or verbal sparkle, A Little White Lie pokes feebly at impostor syndrome and writerly insecurity.
  56. Cocaine Bear
    For an audience desperately looking for a good time, they’ll find it. More discerning fans of junk might see an opportunity missed.
  57. The First Fallen
    A gay man of a younger generation, de Oliveira mourns the vulnerability of these characters’ bodies while paying tribute to their flourishes and fears.
  58. We Have a Ghost
    The film grasps onto anything that will amuse itself for a scene.
  59. God's Time
    The three principal actors, particularly Sierra, are appealing. But the story is thin, and the jokes are more cute than funny.
  60. Dancing the Twist in Bamako
    The plot of “Dancing the Twist” is busy, the emotions big, and the screen sometimes as crowded with character and incident as a page of Dickens.
  61. Yanagawa
    It’s a quiet, elemental nourishment of the senses.
  62. Linoleum
    Just when we’re wondering where all this is going, West executes a final act as devilish as it is emotionally potent.
  63. My Happy Ending
    The labored screen adaptation shows regrettably few signs of personal fire, and many signs of a work that has been sapped of the intimacy of live theater.
  64. Bruiser
    arren uses an assured hand in treating the family melodrama with the tenderness of a tone poem. For most of the film, he avoids painting in broad strokes while ratcheting up the conflict between Porter, a tattooed veteran living on a boat, and the bespectacled, seemingly upright Malcolm.
  65. Juniper
    Predictably, their relationship softens up, but the film nevertheless maintains some of its prickly charm, in no small part because of the feisty Rampling, whose ice-queen persona here straddles bone-dry humor and withering tragedy.
  66. A House Made of Splinters
    A House Made of Splinters is made with such aching sensitivity that it’s a marvel a camera was used and not some form of mind-meld.
  67. Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey
    It’s not funny enough to have anything clever to say about its gag, and it’s not exciting enough to be a competent horror movie.
  68. Emily
    Building on a series of oppositions — nature and culture, realism and romance, duty and freedom — O’Connor brings Emily the myth to vibrant life, persuasively suggesting that this ostensibly strange and cloistered genius came into being not despite her contradictions but through them.
  69. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
    Pfeiffer, Majors and Douglas (as Hope’s equally big-brained dad) are the truer stars of this show, and each brings something valuable to the mix.
  70. Unlocked
    In a cinematic landscape where the anxiety of surveillance has been sufficiently explored — with movies like “The Conversation,” “Enemy of the State” and “Kimi” — this simplistically dreary offering doesn’t crack a new code.
  71. Lonesome
    Lonesome demonstrates a mature use of sex in cinema, a treatment that communicates narrative purpose without diminishing sex’s animalistic, physical side.
  72. The First Step
    At once a story of legislative struggle and an admiring profile of a crusader, The First Step sometimes gets bogged down in bromides about community and common ground rather than unpacking the specifics of Jones’s approach and how it differs from his detractors’.
  73. A Radiant Girl
    At points, the contrast between Irene’s joy and the encroaching horrors is jarring and eerie, but A Radiant Girl seldom hits these notes — the rest is deflating and awkward.
  74. 88
    The result is dramatically wonky — and eccentrically thought-provoking.
  75. Sharper
    The film’s biggest trick might be casting Moore, Stan and the positively glowing Middleton and still never quite catching fire.
  76. Devil's Peak
    The movie doesn’t have enough of a narrative engine to compensate for its lack of world building.
  77. Pacifiction
    It suggests John le Carré by way of David Lynch — a feverish and haunting but also wry and meditative rumination on power, secrecy and the color of clouds over water at sunset.
  78. Hidden Blade
    However crisp and stylishly executed, the parts don’t quite add up to a satisfying whole.
  79. Jethica
    At once dryly funny and surprisingly poignant, Jethica uses the paranormal as a metaphor for abusive male behavior. The film’s deadpan perspective and unhurried pacing can diffuse its surprises, but Ohs has an offbeat style that’s fresh and fun.
  80. Last Night in New York
    The movie can’t help but function as an apologia for the ruling class.
  81. Marlowe
    The cast is large and the costume and set designers have been kept busy with period details, but “Marlowe” neither dutifully copies nor cleverly updates detective-movie tropes. The dialogue is spiced with profanities and anachronisms, and the plot moves ponderously through a thicket of complications.
  82. At Midnight
    Barbaro and Boneta’s charm offensive never amounts to much, though. The eagerness this film has to please could never match how pleased Feingold clearly is to be making a movie like it.
  83. Your Place or Mine
    No one in this movie is playing anything near a human being, although Kutcher occasionally resembles one when he lowers his head, crinkles his eyes and chuckles.
  84. They Wait in the Dark
    More tingly than terrifying (and more than a smidge off-the-wall), “Dark” has a cheeky boldness. Rea, a prolific independent filmmaker, deploys the gore judiciously and his actors are above reproach.
  85. Mixtape Trilogy: Stories of the Power of Music
    This film, relatively modest in scale but broad in ambition, offers three stories of music makers and devotees. It’s a mixed bag, alternating conventional homily with genuine, substantial analysis.
  86. The Civil Dead
    Gently discursive and virtually plotless, The Civil Dead is a walking-and-talking movie that finds uncommon humor in Whit’s need to be seen and Clay’s extreme discomfort with that responsibility.
  87. Sweetheart
    To the film’s credit, the central relationship remains realistically drawn — a teenage courtship that’s marked by misunderstandings and mood swings. The characters aren’t always sweet, but they never feel phony.
  88. Attachment
    The ticktock horror plotting muffles the romantic spark that brought Maja and Leah together in the first place — the thrill replaced by a lukewarm chill.
  89. The Blue Caftan
    Touzani’s film becomes an ode to the many kinds of love that persist, even in an unforgiving world.
  90. Cinema Sabaya
    Rotem’s organic approach steers clear of icky idealism, but its conclusions nevertheless feel worn out. Talking helps, sure, but getting people in the same room is too often the stuff of fiction.
  91. Consecration
    The plot, as a result, can’t quite find its momentum; it doesn’t help that most of the film’s scares fall flat on a visual and technical level.
  92. Of an Age
    The movie’s greater, intractable problem, though, is that Stolevski has burdened his characters with such obvious narrative instrumentality — Kol is the sensitive naïf while Adam is the appealing, gentle exemplar of an authentic life — that the two simply never come to life as people, either as individuals or as a couple.
  93. Hannah Ha Ha
    Jordan Tetewsky and Joshua Pikovsky, the filmmaking duo who wrote and directed the movie, are natives of the semirural townships southwest of Boston, and their familiarity with the region and its people is what makes “Hannah Ha Ha” transcend — or, in many cases, take full advantage of — its shoestring budget.
  94. The Outwaters
    The Outwaters conjures a swoony, dreamlike atmosphere that heightens the shocks to come.
  95. Magic Mike's Last Dance
    Hayek Pinault and Tatum have a tantalizing chemistry, but the script doesn’t always help them activate it.
  96. Huesera: The Bone Woman
    "Huesera" is the type of staggering supernatural nightmare that is as transfixing as it is terrifying.
  97. Somebody I Used to Know
    The film lacks the indelible details and authentic feeling necessary to encode it in long-term memory. Indeed, soon after finishing the movie, it already feels far away.
  98. Una Vita Difficile
    It also stands by itself as an exuberant bad time, a pity party that has no business being so much fun.
  99. True Spirit
    The message of manifesting your goals reigns supreme, which is great, but it’s worth mentioning that Watson’s willpower benefits from the privileges of financial security, family support and a curmudgeonly-turned-selfless coach.
  100. Love in the Time of Fentanyl
    Though at times the film’s narrative momentum and focus on its subjects is lacking, it shows that drug users, to whom the drug crisis is more than an abstract idea, are perhaps the most capable of creating solutions to the overdose epidemic.
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