The New York Times' Scores

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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
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  1. Shook
    Shook is done in by its final reveal, which manages to be simultaneously improbable and conventional. For engagement, we’ll have to look somewhere else.
  2. Aspen Extreme
    Patrick Hasburgh, who makes his feature-film debut as the writer and director of Aspen Extreme, is a ski enthusiast and former instructor who still knows more about skiing than about movies. Even though it runs close to two hours, "Aspen Extreme" remains sort of stretched out and dramatically undeveloped.
  3. Little Big Women
    A gentle panning camera and a bland score milk every scene for emotion, and at more than two hours, the women’s journeys drag. By the time it is over, Little Big Women has lost any sense of restorative power — all that registers is tedium.
  4. Little Nikita
    Richard Benjamin's strategy in directing Little Nikita seems to have been to paper over the holes in the plot with routine moves from spy shows past, in hopes of making the improbable passable.
  5. Boiling Point
    Boiling Point is a barely tepid police story co-starring Wesley Snipes and Dennis Hopper, cast respectively as a hard-boiled detective and a wily con man. Since the material (written and directed by James B. Harris, from a novel by Gerald Petievich) offers not one shred of surprise, it's understandable that neither actor seems to believe anything he has to say.
  6. Dennis the Menace
    Mason Gamble, the 7-year-old who plays the title role, won't be any competition for Macaulay Culkin of "Home Alone." He's a handsome boy, but he displays none of the spontaneity that initially made Mr. Culkin so refreshing. He seems to follow direction well, if in a somewhat robotic way.
  7. Henry & June
    The characters' sexual abandon is so complete that it robs the story of any shape.
  8. Ladybugs
    Even when the material is feeble, as it is here, Mr. Dangerfield can sometimes be funny, a gravelly-voiced comic confusion of emotional insecurities laced with aggressive tendencies.
  9. Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects
    The screenplay, by Harold Nebenzal, leaves one end of this story conspicuously untied, but it does its best to titillate the audience with a mixture of teen-age porn and trademark Bronson spitefulness.
  10. Into the Darkness
    While the plot is absorbing, the movie continually has characters voice their motivations, leaving little to subtext.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    We're No Angels
    Generally a slow, talky affair of elephantine roguishness and a few genuine chuckles.
  12. Every Breath You Take
    With only a few fleeting moments of nail-biting thrills, Every Breath You Take remains mostly tepid and frustrating.
  13. Tokyo Decadence
    Tokyo Decadence is much better at evoking a creepy urban sophistication than at revealing character or telling a story.
  14. Long Live Rock: Celebrate the Chaos
    Long Live Rock feels, at best, like a passionate but elementary essay. More often than not, it feels like a table of contents. The hot-topic buttons are touched upon, but McHugh doesn’t forge far enough into the mosh pit.
  15. He's All That
    Hot people pretending to be homely is par for the course in makeover movies; the real thrill lies in watching opposites attract. But the catfights, confessions, and dance-offs in He’s All That lack the sting of real romantic conflict, and there’s nary a spark between Rae and Buchanan.
  16. Dutch
    Dutch is never more than glancingly comic, and rarely even that.
  17. Amundsen: The Greatest Expedition
    Woefully short on excitement and long on — well, just long — “Amundsen,” away from the blizzards and chattering teeth, is a pompous parade of stiff collars and stuffy rooms.
  18. Dad
    Instead of moving the audience, Mr. Goldberg achieves the kind of effect that Jack Benny got when he played his violin. The flesh crawls.
  19. We Broke Up
    The overwhelming impression is that of shrillness. It’s a tone that might be familiar to those who have experienced a broken heart, but this shallow exercise offers meager opportunity for discomfort to transform into either entertainment or contemplation.
  20. Lily Topples the World
    No arguments, frustrations or consequential disappointments mar the film’s unvaryingly upbeat tone. This leaves us with a movie that feels more like a marketing tool for her self-designed brand of dominoes than a nuanced portrait of an unusual talent.
  21. Stowaway
    For all the empathy it expects of its viewers — every character cries onscreen at least once — the film is troublingly removed from human reality.
  22. Senior Moment
    This is the kind of movie that is usually defended with one word: “harmless.”
  23. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City
    The only surprise is that Roberts shuns cheap jump scare surprises in favor of well-crafted suspense scenes that play out like a game of three card monte. There’s delight in cinematographer Maxime Alexandre and editor Dev Singh’s slow-building visual gags.
  24. Things Heard & Seen
    Rather than interweaving domestic drama, supernatural mumbo-jumbo and campus naughtiness, Pulcini and Berman lurch from one scene to the next, squandering scares and undermining the momentum of the story.
  25. Spirit Untamed
    With its saucer-eyed, bobblehead-like characters, it’s a version barely distinguishable from the majority of animated children’s movies these days — more like Spirit domesticated.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Skin Game
    Mr. Galsworthy's narrative is bound to enlist one's attention, but Mr. Hitchcock, who is responsible for the adaptation as well as the direction, cannot be said to have accomplished either task in a fashion the subject deserves, for in undergoing the studio operation the original work has been sapped of its persuasive drama.
  27. The Old Man and the Sea
    Whatever allegorical intimations there may be in it are not conveyed to any sensible degree in a voice narration that breaks in occasionally or in the mumblings of the old man.
  28. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit
    The film strains to inject even a modicum of drama.
  29. The Protégé
    Kudos to Q, though, for a performance anchored in classy disdain for the baloney around her.
  30. Betsy's Wedding
    Julie Bovasso as Mr. Alda's Italian mother and Joe Pesci as his sleazy brother-in-law infuse their roles with as much life as possible, but they can't overcome the dullness of Mr. Alda's wedding.
  31. The Space Between
    This is one of those movies that never quite sinks to the risible depths you kind of wish it would.
  32. Beate
    The director Samad Zarmadili cobbles together this underdog story like a slapdash sitcom episode.
  33. Mr. Destiny
    While Mr. Destiny is not technically a remake of anything, it's hard to find a glimmer of originality, much less wit or emotion.
  34. Queen Marie
    Romania has delivered some of the most bracing filmmaking of the past 20 years (“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”), but Queen Marie shows that its cinematic output also extends to stiff, exposition-clotted biopics.
  35. Berlin Alexanderplatz
    Reinhold exerts a Svengali-like hold on Franz and the women they know, though the character’s questionable magnetism makes this dynamic increasingly baffling.
  36. Cinderella
    Among the countless iterations the story has weathered through the ages, this Cinderella (streaming on Amazon), starring Camila Cabello as the orphaned maiden, is forgettable. It is oddly transfixing, though, as a study in the semiotics of the modernized fairy tale.
  37. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
    Though this “Guardians” is certainly less fun than the others, there are still glints of joy in the more mundane and ancillary quibbles among the found family of misfits.
  38. Spaced Invaders
    Spaced Invaders should have been funnier than it is. It rambles and has too many poorly defined characters. Also, because most of it takes place at night, it's not easy to tell what is going on sometimes, which will confuse the audience for which it is intended.
  39. Gunpowder Milkshake
    Papushado’s flamboyance feels cocky and indiscriminate, as if he’s simply trying really hard to make every image seem cool.
  40. Wish Dragon
    Wish Dragon is a transporting experience, but it’s far from a whole new world.
  41. Resort to Love
    In Resort to Love, the lack of discernible chemistry between the characters makes it hard to believe they belong together.
  42. Beckett
    Washington is a likable actor and easy on the eyes, but the character is unproductively one-dimensional and so is the performance, which remains reactive and opaque. Here, at least, he can’t turn an underconceptualized character into one whom you either care about or want to watch gasping and grimacing for several hours.
  43. False Positive
    Despite its vaguely unsettling clinical ambience, very little about the film as it makes its way to an ultimately flat and predictable final twist, manages to feel tense or thrilling. Or even funny for that matter.
  44. Heart and Souls
    When the film announces, halfway through, that it will be devoting the rest of its running time to tying up these loose ends, the audience may as well give up the ghost.
  45. Stop Filming Us
    Postema’s interlocutors respond with candid critiques, but the director’s self-flagellation feels increasingly empty — less a reckoning with neocolonialism than a toothless display of white guilt. His critical insights are thin, too.
  46. Broken Harts
    With a bolder and broader framework, Broken Harts might have been more than fast food for true-crime obsessives.
  47. a-ha: the Movie
    There’s a slight wonky interest in seeing the grind of recording sessions and fan service. But the film feels promotional enough that it won’t lean into the potential humor of their situation.
  48. This Town
    White squanders the opportunity for true satire, speeding past the many topical issues kicked up by the script — police corruption, mental health, gun crime — into a feel-good conclusion that leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
  49. Samaritan
    Bragi F. Schut’s script mumbles its potentially intriguing themes.
  50. The Kissing Booth 3
    Like a scoop of vanilla ice cream atop scoops of chocolate and strawberry, The Kissing Booth 3 rounds out the sugary teen trilogy with a fitting, if bland, finale.
  51. Wolfgang
    A fairly vapid and shallow affair, even by the low standards of the celebrity bio-doc subgenre, Wolfgang provides copious archival montages of “the first celebrity chef” (Julia Child apparently didn’t count), but precious little understanding of what actually makes him tick.
  52. Long Story Short
    Spall summons a kind of early Ryan Reynolds haplessness, talking a mile a minute while catching up. But a sheepish pall steadily creeps over the whole endeavor.
  53. Dog Gone Trouble
    That the movie can be summed up in a silly, simple dog rap indicates there wasn’t much of a story here to begin with.
  54. 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.
  55. The Year of the Everlasting Storm
    The omnibus film The Year of the Everlasting Storm assembles pandemic-made shorts from around the globe. But with just two decent segments out of seven, this anthology uncannily replicates the sensation of feeling trapped.
  56. France
    While France remains interesting, thanks to Seydoux’s tough and resourceful performance, “France” loses its emotional force and its intellectual focus. A potentially insightful exploration of the loss of self in a media-saturated world amounts, in the end, to a series of shallow images.
  57. Sugar Hill
    Mr. Ichaso's slow, deliberate direction of Barry Michael Cooper's windy screenplay is painfully slack. If this film doesn't resort to much vicious gunplay until its later sections, that may be because the characters are always in danger of talking one another to death.
  58. Revolution Rent
    Despite the intriguing premise of the film, its cursory and lopsided narrative approach dilutes its salient themes and messages.
  59. Running Against the Wind
    The film is, at the very least, never boring. It’s also, despite a potentially compelling conceit, pretty ridiculous.
  60. Help!
    The boys themselves are exuberant and uninhibited in their own genial way. They just become awfully redundant and—dare I say it?—dull.
  61. Jolt
    The plot, stretched thin even at just 90 minutes, is extremely predictable, and therefore boring, and the film doesn’t do enough with its high-concept shock-therapy conceit to feel fresh or novel.
  62. The Boys in Red Hats
    Between a bro-friendly voice-over and “TMZ Live”-style bull sessions with his producer, Schroder’s exploratory pose comes to feel exasperatingly clueless. Yet the film also assembles soothingly sharp commentators who lay bare the power and race dynamics and aggression at play in the Lincoln Memorial encounter.
  63. Triumph
    Mitte, who played the son in “Breaking Bad” and himself has cerebral palsy, sells Mike’s tenacity, but the contrivances around him let him down.
  64. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
    The plot is a bust. Five credited screenwriters and not one compelling stake.
  65. Ride the Eagle
    "Where do these people get their money,” I wrote in my notes as Leif and his dog set out for a long drive at the film’s fade-out. Doesn’t matter. Nor do the multiple clichés. In Ride the Eagle, the laid-back vibe is all.
  66. Jane by Charlotte
    Clearly a pet project for Gainsbourg (whose own electronic pop songs feature prominently in the soundtrack, clashing against her mother’s classic tunes), the documentary is defiantly insular and lacking in context.
  67. The Beast Within
    Philippe Mora is the director, but the only name really worth noting is that of Tom Burman, who did the frequently grotesque special effects.
  68. The Colony
    Though it centers on one woman, anything we might stand to learn about her own developing values is quickly swallowed by overcomplicated narratives about secondary characters, corrupt colonizers and family secrets.
  69. The East
    The details may be novel — even eye-opening for some — but this story of white guilt and brutality feels mighty old.
  70. Clerks III
    Three words characterize the first third or so of the picture: not funny enough.
  71. Army of Thieves
    A winking attitude doesn’t make the extremely tired formula any less rote or tiresome. Despite the in-jokes and references (including nods to “Point Break” and “Heat”), the movie can’t transcend its own clichés.
  72. Deep Cover
    Deep Cover eventually degenerates into so much gratuitous violence that "kill" sounds like the most-used verb in the screenplay's last stages. The screenplay's frequent emphasis on homophobic insults is another unfortunate touch.
  73. Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon
    The movie, more often than not, has the look and feel of an edgy music video, which wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if it weren’t also oddly boring.
  74. House of Gucci
    For all that abundance, something is missing. A lot of things, really, but mostly a strong idea and a credible reason for existing.
  75. Together
    That it’s bearable at all is entirely because of the superlative acting skills of James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan as an unnamed couple forced to endure an extended London lockdown.
  76. Stanleyville
    The contest intentionally lacks meaningful rewards, an obvious metaphor for life’s arbitrary stakes. But as cinema, the lack of purpose becomes a test of patience.
  77. The Smartest Kids in the World
    The Smartest Kids in the World aspires to offer a study of teaching methods worldwide, but the documentary (on Discovery+) contains little rigor. It’s a dippy lecture in motion.
  78. Love Hard
    In presenting a female character who is attractive, but bereft of substance, the movie subverts its own premise.
  79. The Unforgivable
    The screenplay, adapted by Peter Craig, Hillary Seitz and Courtenay Miles from a British mini-series, gifts Bullock a few big screaming scenes but mostly has her slouching around silently while it dithers over whether or not to root for Ruth to rebuild her life.
  80. There's Someone Inside Your House
    In trying to have it both ways, Brice has created a messy, overstuffed parody of moral policing that squanders the promise of its cleverly executed opening.
  81. Night Teeth
    A strangely listless vampire tale that unspools with some style and precious little sense.
  82. Under Fire
    Under Fire, which was written by Ron Shelton and Clayton Frohman, from a story by Mr. Frohman, means well but it is fatally confused.
  83. A Castle for Christmas
    Likeable stars with little frisson, Elwes and Shields are also saddled with a formulaic script.
  84. Single All the Way
    The supporting cast compensates with piquancy in the side dishes, but the main course is a flavorless misfire.
  85. Mayday
    For a film about misandrist revolutionaries, Mayday lacks the courage of its convictions — it sets up boogeymen as targets only to shoot them point blank, in broad daylight.
  86. Stop and Go
    Everton and Call are charming enough, and Everton is a particularly magnetic physical performer, but their high jinks . . . are hit-and-miss. But mostly miss.
  87. Encounter
    After setting up a potentially powerful study of damage and delusion, Pearce (whose 2018 feature debut, “Beast,” signaled an unusual talent) remains torn between science fiction and psychological fact.
  88. Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World
    It’s a movie with its heart in the right place and its sense of drama nowhere in sight.
  89. South of Heaven
    The execution is at once laconic and nonsensical.
  90. Silent Night
    The characters, despite their histrionic representation of the wealthy class, are not compelling enough to carry the movie, nor are the horrors of the outside world fleshed out enough to frighten.
  91. Cross of Iron
    Cross of Iron is Mr. Peckinpah's least interesting, least personal film in years, a hysterically elaborate, made-in-Yugoslavia war spectacle, the work of international financiers and a multinational cast, most of whom are supposed to be Germans although they sound like delegates to an international PEN convention.
  92. Justin Bieber: Our World
    Alternating like clockwork between live numbers and soft insight dulls the film’s rhythm, diminishing the excitement it’s going for as it counts down the days to showtime.
  93. American Underdog
    Warner’s story is inspirational but intricate, and this wan film struggles to balance simple storytelling with the complexities of the sport.
  94. Falling for Figaro
    [A] thoroughly generic and often monotonous romance.
  95. 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.
  96. Dear Mother
    Adapted by Lafitte from a 2013 play by Sébastien Thiery, Dear Mother is the kind of screwball comedy whose absurd premise and speedy pacing very nearly allow you to overlook the fact that it’s not exceedingly bright or witty.
  97. The Haunting of Julia
    Based on a novel by Peter Straub, The Haunting of Julia manages to draw on every horror movie cliche imaginable and still make very little sense.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Scream Blacula Scream
    Despite all its blood-letting, Scream Blacula Scream fails for lack of incident, weakness of invention, insufficient story.
  99. My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission
    “World Heroes’ Mission” has little to offer veteran fans of the series or new viewers, who won’t find any of what makes the series great in what’s essentially a filler arc.
  100. Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh
    Fortunately, Candyman isn't powerful enough to do much harm. The credits are more intriguing than the film.
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