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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    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Los Muertos
    Like a slowed-down, more realistic and psychologically penetrating cousin of a Werner Herzog or Terrence Malick film, Los Muertos is primarily concerned with the rhythms and textures of life.
  2. The Inheritors
    His film opens with a lullaby, and while there is indeed something soothing in his images of repetitive, backbreaking toil, the music also serves as a reminder of childhood lost.
  3. Still I Strive
    The innovative fictional narrative, woven throughout, demonstrates that many of these young actors have learned their lessons well.
  4. Notfilm
    A charming, earnest, sometimes ungainly mixture of history, criticism and high-minded gossip, Notfilm testifies to an almost inexhaustible fascination with the pleasures and paradoxes of cinema.
  5. My Twentieth Century
    My 20th Century, a new Hungarian film written and directed by Ildiko Enyedi, is a number of wondrous things. It's a bracing combination of wit, invention, common sense and lunacy. It's a gravely comic meditation on civilization at the turn of this century. It's also about light and shadow and electricity, Thomas Alva Edison, movies and what it's like to be Hungarian in a world where no one is quite sure where Hungary is.
  6. This Much I Know to Be True
    A rather fun Nick Cave movie might not have been on your 2022 bingo card, but here we are.
  7. Arrival
    Arrival isn’t a visionary movie, an intellectual rebus or a head movie; it’s pretty straight in some respects and sometimes fairly corny, with a visual design that’s lovely rather than landmark.
  8. Juno
    Juno respects the idiosyncrasies of its characters rather than exaggerating them or holding them up for ridicule.
  9. Elena
    With its free-floating imagery, Elena unfolds like a cinematic dream whose central image is water, which symbolizes the washing away of grief. But more than that, it represents the stream of life, with beautiful images of women floating through time.
  10. Get Shorty
    The author's sardonic voice has been lost in most films based on his fiction, but this one nicely captures that unruffled Leonard authority. And since Get Shorty is about Hollywood, it invites the sneaky self-mockery that gives this film its comic punch.
  11. Weapons
    Weapons may not be about anything much other than Cregger’s talent, but the guy knows how to slither under your skin — and stay there.
  12. The Fly
    A film that tries to be too many things at once - funny but not campy, sad and scary, a horror story and a human tragedy
  13. Everything Everywhere All at Once
    The movie is a metaphysical multiverse galaxy-brain head trip, but deep down — and also right on the surface — it’s a bittersweet domestic drama, a marital comedy, a story of immigrant striving and a hurt-filled ballad of mother-daughter love.
  14. Blue Valentine
    Cindy and Dean remain, for all their sustained agony and flickering joy, something less than completely realized human beings. Mr. Cianfrance's ingenious chronological gimmick, coupled with his anxious, clumsy plotting, leaves them without enough oxygen to burst into breathing, loving life.
  15. After Love
    The film’s structure may be conventional, and yet its story is unusually rich, and uninterested in easy answers as to why people hurt the ones they love.
  16. Close
    The roteness of the film’s second half — reinforced by Valentin Hadjadj’s over-insistent score — can’t dispel the exquisite insight of its earlier scenes or the heart-rending precision of the performances.
  17. State Funeral
    Composed entirely of footage shot at the time in various parts of the Soviet Union, the film is a haunting amalgam of official pomp and everyday experience, the double image of a totalitarian government and the people in whose name it ruled.
  18. Truman
    This well-made, low-key drama, written by Mr. Gay and Tomàs Aragay, offers some insights into terminal illness.
  19. Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One
    Mr. Gomes has a tendency to revel in his own cleverness and to indulge in self-conscious cinematic jokes. He also has a penchant for obscurantism, a habit of confusing ambiguity with depth.
  20. Chocolat
    Miss Denis's mastery of film-making technology, which is something that can be learned, is equaled by her splendid control of narrative, a more elusive talent. She is astonishing. There are no dark corners in the story. Everything that happens is vivid and clear, though subject to the kind of speculation that tantalizes and rewards.
  21. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
    Stupendously entertaining.
  22. The Trip to Bountiful
    Horton Foote's funny, exquisitely performed film adaptation of his own play, directed for the screen by Peter Masterson. The Trip to Bountiful is almost as unstoppable as Carrie Watts.
  23. Godzilla Minus One
    The heroic arc is creaky, but despite the chintzy clichés about Godzilla movies, this one keeps bringing blockbuster brio to heel with a sometimes heavy heart.
  24. The Secret of Kells
    It is only fitting that a movie concerned with the power and beauty of drawing -- the almost sacred magic of color and line -- should be so gorgeously and intricately drawn.
  25. Top Five
    In setting Andre on his search for self, Mr. Rock has carved out a third way, in the process creating a black character who’s fully human and a comedy that’s wholly a blast.
  26. Pete Seeger: The Power of Song
    As the latest tribute -- Jim Brown’s loving documentary, Pete Seeger: The Power of Song -- makes clear, he’s still busy, still angry, still hopeful, still singing.
  27. A Simple Plan
    When you get the shivers watching this wintry tale unfold, it won't be from the cold.
  28. Closet Monster
    Connor Jessup wonderfully inhabits the teenage Oscar, who observes others while trying to find himself.
  29. Godland
    Godland gestures at several intersecting themes — belief, the struggle to hold onto faith, the impermanence of being — with greater suggestiveness than depth. It’s a sharp, dryly funny, at times cruel exploration of human arrogance and frailty.
  30. Katyn
    The result is a film with a stately, deliberate quality that insulates it against sentimentality and makes it all the more devastating.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Klute
    Pakula, when he is not in dulging in subjective camera, strives to give his film the look of structural geometry, but despite the sharp edges and dramatic spaces and cinema presence out of Citizen Kane, it all suggests a tepid, rather tasteless mush.
  32. Youth (Homecoming)
    We’re drawn into their world, and that’s what makes the “Youth” movies so appealing: the takes are very long, and we get to dwell inside the frame.
  33. Coming Home
    There is terrible pain here, and the main interest of the film is in how the characters respond to it and what their response says about China’s understanding of its recent history.
  34. Living in Oblivion
    Wonderfully funny behind-the-scenes look at the perils of film making, no-budget style.
  35. Coco
    If Coco doesn’t quite reach the highest level of Pixar masterpieces, it plays a time-tested tune with captivating originality and flair, and with roving, playful pop-culture erudition.
  36. My Joy
    The world of My Joy is grim, though the experience of watching it and piecing together its fragmented story strands is anything but. It's suspenseful, mysterious, at times bitterly funny, consistently moving and filled with images of a Russia haunted both by ghosts and the living dead.
  37. Little Richard: I Am Everything
    I Am Everything is content to be a thorough, energetic, largely chronological appraisal, more interested in saluting a musical legend who shook things up than in shaking up conventions itself.
  38. Bridge of Spies
    Like some of Mr. Spielberg’s other recent movies, notably “Lincoln” and “Munich,” this one is a meticulously detailed period piece that revisits the anxieties of the past while also speaking to those of the present. Yet it also feels lighter than those films, less weighted down by accreted history or maybe by a sense of duty to its significance.
  39. Driving Miss Daisy
    Mr. Beresford and Mr. Uhry, working in concert, see to it that the essential spirit of Driving Miss Daisy shines through the sometimes deadening effects of literalism.
  40. Shaun the Sheep Movie
    A charming and clever concoction.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bombshell
    Although there are moments when the comedy is too rambunctious and scenes which are not precisely convincing, it is for the most part a merry, fast-paced diversion.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Theater of Blood
    Douglas Hickox's wry romp spotlights a vengeful Shakespearean ham (Vincent Price) and his helpful daughter (Diana Rigg). It's gory and funny. [14 Apr 1996, p.6]
    • The New York Times
  43. Invisible Life
    There’s such a disconcerting rush of lush imagery and action in the first 40 minutes or so of “Invisible Life” that one is apt to wonder whether there’s any kind of focused narrative. But the casual misdirection is setting the viewer up for an emotional kill.
  44. I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians
    Until its devastating final scenes, the way “I Do Not Care” makes its points is discursive rather than dramatic.
  45. White Material
    Ms. Denis has an extraordinary gift for finding the perfect image that expresses her ideas, the cinematic equivalent of what Flaubert called le mot juste.
    • The New York Times
      • Posted Dec 14, 2010
  46. Master of Light
    The thesis of the movie — that art can be restorative and help overcome cyclical, systemic failures — might seem trite. But Morton’s devotion to his painting and his loved ones makes it difficult not to be moved.
  47. The Station Agent
    The movie's writer and director, Tom McCarthy, has such an appreciation for quiet that it occupies the same space as a character in this film, a delicate, thoughtful and often hilarious take on loneliness.
  48. Foxcatcher
    Mr. Miller does his finest work with his three superb leads.
  49. Bamako
    Bamako is something different: a work of cool intelligence and profound anger, a long, dense, argument that is also a haunting visual poem.
  50. Autumn Tale
    As sublimely warming an experience as the autumn sun that shines benevolently on the vineyard owned by the film's central character.
  51. Beginners
    In wistful tone and mood, Beginners at times hazily evokes the films of Wong Kar-wai, including "Chungking Express," a different kind of memory piece.
  52. Twinsters
    The film has too many fits of uncontrolled laughter and other awkwardness that suggest an unedited home movie, but, in general, Twinsters makes for a heartfelt alternative to a traditional documentary approach.
  53. Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One
    It is worth sticking with it until the end, since the third part is the most powerful.
  54. Dolores
    Peter Bratt, the director, uses an immense amount of historical footage and interviews, arranged with clarity.
  55. United Skates
    This is a passion project in the best sense of the word, a movie in which the ingenuity and dedication of the filmmakers illuminate the same qualities in their subjects.
  56. Paris, Texas
    Paris, Texas begins so beautifully and so laconically that when, about three-quarters of the way through, it begins to talk more and say less, the great temptation is to yell at it to shut up. If it were a hitchhiker, you'd stop the car and tell it to get out.
  57. Captains Courageous
    With its rich production, magnificent marine photography, admirable direction and performances, the film brings vividly to life every page of Kipling's novel and even adds an exciting chapter or two of its own.
  58. Bright Star
    Ms. Campion, with her restless camera movements and off-center close-ups, films history in the present tense, and her wild vitality makes this movie romantic in every possible sense of the word.
  59. MLK/FBI
    The result is at once suspenseful, visually engrossing and intellectually bracing. It also raises urgent, sometimes uncomfortable questions about power, privacy and the ethical challenges of examining the past.
  60. The Headless Woman
    Brilliant, maddeningly enigmatic puzzle of a movie.
  61. Wait Until Dark
    Once this build-up is accomplished—once the sinister plot is launched and the young woman suddenly realizes that she has been duped and is in grave peril—the shock and suspense of the situation hit the audience with almost the same force, I'd imagine, as they evidently hit her. And from here on, the tension is terrific and the melodramatic action is wild as the blind woman uses all her courage and ingenuity to foil her assailants and save her life.
  62. 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.
  63. Tropical Malady
    Shows a young filmmaker pushing at the limits of cinematic narrative with grace and a certain amount of puckish willfulness.
  64. Weekend
    There is also a need for stories that address the complex entanglements of love and sex honestly, without sentiment or cynicism and with the appropriate mixture of humor, sympathy and erotic heat. Weekend, Andrew Haigh's astonishingly self-assured, unassumingly profound second feature, is just such a film.
  65. Happiness
    It has taken only two films, "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and now Happiness, for Todd Solondz to establish his as one of the most lacerating, funny and distinctive voices in American film.
  66. Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb
    “Turn Every Page” is one step away from turning into a Herzogian monument to obsession or plunging into crazed psychodrama. Instead, it is merely a great profile, filled with wit, affection and detailed stories of how the books came to be.
  67. Beginning
    Rarely has a film made me so painfully, viscerally aware of the impotence of spectatorship — of the dubious remove from which we watch suffering.
  68. Raw
    Raw, Julia Ducournau’s jangly opera of sexual and dietary awakening, is an exceptionally classy-looking movie about deeply horrifying behavior.
  69. 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.
  70. Everybody Knows... Elizabeth Murray
    [A] cogent, fascinating portrait of the artist.
  71. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
    If fun does not really fit into Roy Andersson’s frame of reference, there is ample pleasure to be gleaned from his formal discipline and his downbeat wit.
  72. Test Pattern
    Test Pattern achieves a lot with very little: The film’s nonlinear editing and cannily scored silences invite our interpretations, locating in them the entanglements of race and gender. Ford pushes us, if not to definitive answers, then to the right questions.
  73. R.M.N.
    The tame and the wild roam through R.M.N., nipping at its edges, adding visual texture and deepening its themes.
  74. Inherent Vice
    Mr. Phoenix’s note-perfect performance flows on the story’s currents of comedy that occasionally turn into rapids, as the funny ha-ha, funny strange back-and-forth abruptly gives way to Three Stooges slapstick.
  75. Under the Sun
    The movie raises disquieting questions, including a few that Mr. Mansky might not have meant to.
  76. Three Identical Strangers
    Mr. Wardle relates that story smoothly and persuasively, but his telling sometimes provokes more questions than it answers.
  77. Wrinkles
    Unfolding in simple yet wonderfully expressive hand-drawn frames, the film’s unsparingly observant plot depicts the slide into senility with empathy and imagination.
  78. Little Trouble Girls
    Djukic has a fine eye and is a talent to look out for, even if here, like Ana-Maria, she chose the wrong girl.
  79. Revenge
    Revenge leaves a lurid, punchy afterimage, an impression somewhere between righteous delight and quivering revulsion. It’s both a challenge and a calling card, in which Ms. Fargeat at once exposes what’s wrong with her chosen genre and demonstrates her mastery of it.
  80. Tina
    You may believe you know Turner’s tale. And you may be right. It is retold well here, but the most moving portions — and they could bring tears to your eyes — come as Turner, almost 80 at the time of this interview (and as beautiful as she has ever been), wearing a tailored black suit, sits and discusses where she’s at now.
  81. American Fiction
    To make good on his movie’s message, Jefferson is determined to give space to the moments of Monk’s life that don’t hinge on race at all.
  82. Il Divo
    As operatic cinema, it ranks alongside the best of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.
  83. Leviathan
    Leviathan, a product of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, offers not information but immersion: 90 minutes of wind, water, grinding machinery and piscine agony.
  84. Fish Tank
    The contradictions of adolescence have rarely been conveyed with such authenticity and force.
  85. Sweetie
    Sweetie looks like a small movie, and in every measurable way it is, but it possesses remarkable strength and tenacity.
  86. Little Shop of Horrors
    Little Shop of Horrors isn't uniformly entertaining, nor is its score always entirely audible; the musical dubbing is at times very awkward. But its best moments are delightful enough to make the slow stretches unimportant.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Variety Lights
    As a straightforward comedy-drama about the vicissitudes of the principals in a small-time tab show or traveling vaudeville troupe, this is wholesome corn. But it is highly palatable fare, which, in its story line, hews more to the type of films subsequently made by Mr. Lattuada.
  88. The Things You Kill
    Debts to Luis Buñuel and David Lynch are obvious, but The Things You Kill has its own way of getting inside its protagonist’s head space — and yours.
  89. Bring Your Own Brigade
    It’s a tough, smart, impressive movie, and one of its virtues is that Walker, a British transplant to Los Angeles, doesn’t seem to have figured it all out before she started shooting.
  90. No
    Marshall McLuhan called advertising the greatest art form of the 20th century. In No, Pablo Larraín’s sly, smart, fictionalized tale about the art of the sell during a fraught period in Chilean history, advertising isn’t only an art; it’s also a way of life.
  91. Riders of Justice
    In the end, Jensen opts for feel-good fantasy over hardened truths, but his dizzyingly chaotic methods amount to a dynamic, unexpectedly touching ode to the difficulties of baring your vulnerabilities to genuinely overcome them.
  92. Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened
    Because “Merrily” was a musical about the ravages of time on friendship and youthful ideals, the documentary tells parallel stories — one fictional, the other real — of disappointment and disillusion. They give the film a double shot of poignancy.
  93. A River Below
    The truth turns into a tangled mess in A River Below, a bold and urgent documentary whose seemingly straightforward story quickly runs awry.
  94. A Crime on the Bayou
    in covering the repercussions of the branching cases, A Crime on the Bayou shows how superficially straightforward, courageous acts — like refusing to plead guilty unjustly or defending the unjustly accused — are hard.
  95. The China Syndrome
    James Bridges's smashingly effective, very stylish suspense melodrama.
  96. My Architect
    The son's search is one of three strands of a story that the movie weaves into a meticulously structured portrait of a complicated man who remains elusive even after key elements of the puzzle have been pieced together.
  97. In Fabric
    The film spaces out several nasty and effective frights. And as its narrative seems to deliberately devolve into a dissociative dream, even the funny material hits with a choke in the throat.
  98. Hot Fuzz
    Since Mr. Wright and Mr. Pegg are essentially parodying self-parodies, they have also smartly kinked up their conceit by setting most of the film in a sleepy village that might as well be called Ye Old English Towne, thereby wedding one of the most irritating British exports to one of the most absurd American ones. Think of it as "The Full Monty" blown to smithereens.
  99. Police, Adjective
    So much in this meticulous and moving film is between the lines, and almost nothing is by the book.
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