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. Only the Animals
    The multiple viewpoints are just a clever, self-satisfied device to deliver stale goods and familiar ugliness with a soupçon of glib class politics.
  2. Cicada
    Ben and Sam’s blossoming romance does a lot of telling and little showing. While there’s the occasional amusingly idiosyncratic section of dialogue that sounds like a series of stagily poetic non-sequiturs, much of the couple’s bonding feels straightforward and unremarkable.
  3. Love and a .45
    In any case, Love and a .45 is too mean-spirited to be funny, and it winds up nastily derivative rather than clever.
  4. National Champions
    The movie dilutes its impact with lackluster direction of samey scenes — people in hotel rooms speechifying — and a distracting nighttime soap subplot.
  5. Street Fighter
    As Mr. Van Damme fumbles through his part, you are likely to find yourself staring at the big lump on the right side of his forehead and wondering how it got there.
  6. Juice WRLD: Into the Abyss
    “Into the Abyss,” which mixes material from Juice WRLD’s tour stops with interviews and hangout and recording vignettes, isn’t particularly focused.
  7. Where the Boys Are
    Inspired by the novel of Glendon Swarthout, which one reviewer described as "a highly carbonated elixir of sex, sun-shine and beer," it has been patterned into a movie by the glib script writer, George Wells, so that it looks and sounds like a chummy dramatization of the Kinsey reports.
  8. Munich: The Edge of War
    A plodding bureaucratic procedural that features many, many characters strategizing in various spaces with furrowed brows and clenched jaws, mostly in relentless medium close-up.
  9. Belly
    Belly is a film that begs for a pat on the head for its virtue while catering to cinematic tastes more interested in crotch shots, topless dancers, wall-sized television screens, ganja galore and, wherever possible, crime without punishment, all to the accompaniment of a high-octane soundtrack.
  10. The Lady of Heaven
    The film runs through plot points in appropriately spectacular, if mechanical, fashion. A shoddy script and an overwhelming reliance on clichés, however, make this would-be blockbuster feel incredibly cheap.
  11. Blue Beetle
    This unremarkable story, along with cheap-looking visual effects and Soto’s colorless direction, is a prime example of somnambulist filmmaking that lulls the audience into a mindless stupor. At least the Reyes family is a force to be reckoned with; their chaotic ensemble scenes are the most delightful, and truly unexpected, of the movie.
  12. Bigbug
    Despite some snappy ideas (an aggressive advertising drone pushing products as answers to the family’s every problem), Bigbug is overdressed, overlong and diminishingly amusing
  13. See for Me
    This uninvolving thriller is as lacking in tension as credibility.
  14. Donkeyhead
    Despite her minor rebellions, Mona remains a frustratingly opaque character; a stereotypically troubled woman whose eventual awakening merits a shrug at most.
  15. Lucy and Desi
    Here is a documentary that invites us to delight in the unexpected pairing of a famed funny lady and a hunky musician — but without analysis or nuance. Better to flip on a few “I Love Lucy” reruns instead.
  16. Why Is We Americans?
    It’s a story that spans past and present, arts and politics, and kin and country — and the movie, with its haphazard editing, struggles to contain it all.
  17. Brazen
    Brazen occasionally scratches the same itch as does a cop procedural, or a Lifetime drama so formulaic you foresee every beat.
  18. Against the Ice
    It’s perfectly formulaic.
  19. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
    In David Blue Garcia’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre the blade is more active than ever. But while Leatherface, the homicidal head case who fashions masks from the skin of his victims, might be busier, his ability to scare has waned considerably.
  20. The Tiger Rising
    The metaphors are so obvious that the film becomes trapped in its own cage of archetypes and clichés, and unlike the tiger, there is no champion to open the gates to a more original cinematic world.
  21. Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
    It’s evident that the filmmakers wanted to create a different, tougher and putatively more serious Pinocchio than the Disney version that has been lodged in the popular imagination for decades. But the movie’s decontextualized and disturbingly ill-considered use of Fascism is reductive and finally grotesque.
  22. Dual
    There is something insincere in this movie’s manner, an aloofness that masquerades as satire but repels inquiry or emotion. “Dual” takes a worthy idea and throws a smoke bomb in its middle, leaving the audience to squint through the haze.
  23. Alice
    Ver Linden wants us to view Alice as an empowered freedom fighter. Instead she lands as a caricature of one, as the film never really metabolizes or unpacks its conceit: the bonkers time-traveling predicament of its protagonist.
  24. Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power
    Limited to a mere pointing out of which kinds of images are empowering to women and which aren’t, the documentary ultimately does a disservice to the art form, feminist or otherwise.
  25. Windfall
    Windfall is dramatically flat and logically wanting.
  26. Dark Glasses
    The best moments of the film involve Diana’s unsentimental alliance with Chin, the orphan who offers her more protection than she’s able to afford him. Their quirkily endearing relationship allows the horror legend to dabble in a genre that’s wholly new to him: the odd couple comedy.
  27. Fistful of Vengeance
    Without tactical, philosophical or emotional grounding, the battle scenes don’t land with any cinematic force.
  28. Nightride
    The one-take gimmick — much easier to achieve now thanks to digital cameras —has become common enough that it barely qualifies as novel.
  29. The Bubble
    Elements that have the potential to become running gags . . . either languish or are dropped, as if Apatow simply cut together what he felt were inspired improvisations without regard for flow (or the uncharacteristically cheap-looking visuals).
    • 73 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
    Clearly, the director was awash in his fantasies about lesbianism.
  31. I Love My Dad
    Since the audience is in on the scheme from the start, what we get is excruciating, uncut. But not too excruciating, because Franklin is such a drab cipher it’s hard to work up much empathy for him.
  32. Bodies Bodies Bodies
    It’s not that “Bodies Bodies Bodies” is bad. It’s visually appealing and nicely acted. But this film is not special, and like its shallow characters, it is persistently unaware of its own inanity.
  33. The Unbreakable Boy
    Mainly the story, set in Oklahoma, dispenses its lessons in gratitude, self-forgiveness and sobriety with straightforward sincerity. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it lands with a thud.
  34. Ticket to Paradise
    Roberts and Clooney wear their stature like sweatpants, rousing themselves to do little more than spit insults like competitive siblings. They’re selling their own comfortable rapport, not their characters’ romantic tension.
  35. The Sea Beast
    This script’s greatest sin is its steadfast predictability.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Children of the Damned
    A dull, pretentious successor to that marvelous little chiller of several seasons ago, "Village of the Damned." What a comedown.
  37. Return to Space
    Glowing with grandiose pronouncements and uplifting sentiment, Return to Space, a draggy documentary about America’s first manned spaceflight since 2011, could be easily repurposed as promotional material for Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
  38. White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch
    While the movie provides encouraging evidence of how much societal sensibilities have changed, it is fundamentally dressing up well-worn material.
  39. Senior Year
    The film’s early snark turns as cloying and insincere as the cultural doublespeak that it parodies. By the final act, its dialogue is so burdened by inspirational maxims about personal authenticity that it feels as though the script has been hijacked by yearbook quotes.
  40. Trapped in Paradise
    Since Trapped in Paradise assembles three actors as amusing as Nicolas Cage, Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz, it's a minor holiday miracle that this homey comedy barely elicits even a chuckle.
  41. Choose or Die
    If any creativity went into Choose or Die, a by-turns creepy and hacky feature debut from Toby Meakins, it appears to have been directed solely toward nastiness.
  42. Amos & Andrew
    Mr. Frye's initial conceits are good ones, but the film's humor somehow gets sopped up by the spongy writing and direction. The characters are fuzzily realized. The dialogue is lame and the continuity so shaky that one entire subplot sinks in confusion.
  43. Sweet Bird of Youth
    Sweet Bird of Youth, for all its graphics and the vigorous performance of its top roles, has the taint of an engineered soap opera, wherein the soap is simply made of lye, that's all.
  44. The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes
    Mostly the film presents a banal rehash of established facts and well-circulated rumors about Monroe’s life.
  45. Drifting Home
    Though Drifting Home delivers a great visual concept . . . it doesn’t deliver on the action. The pacing lags and the beats are predictable; the film’s go-to antic is having children repeatedly topple overboard.
  46. Firebird
    Each line and image feels predetermined, as if Rebane and his characters had already decided this love story was a losing battle. There is loss, but little sense of risk.
  47. Interceptor
    The fun is not always contagious, even for someone like me who grew up reading Tom Clancy’s wonky Cold War fantasias.
  48. Persuasion
    The story’s heroine, its dialogue and even its themes of regret and loneliness seem to be swallowed up by the need to maintain an appearance of contemporary cheek.
  49. The Big Sleep
    The Big Sleep is one of those pictures in which so many cryptic things occur amid so much involved and devious plotting that the mind becomes utterly confused. And, to make it more aggravating, the brilliant detective in the case is continuously making shrewd deductions which he stubbornly keeps to himself.
  50. Mr. Malcolm's List
    A tepid Regency-era romance.
  51. Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams
    If Guadagnino sought to reflect the romance of Ferragamo’s red carpet creations, his storytelling is at once more conventional and more awkward in construction. Forget feet; defter hands might have helped.
  52. Holy Spider
    Abbasi seems enamored by the contradictions of Hanaei, who was at once an upstanding Muslim, a family man, a pervert and a ruthless killer. But anyone who reads the news, anywhere in the world, will respond to these rote hypocrisies of misogyny with little other than jadedness.
  53. Hunt
    A convoluted conclusion, begot by an unconvincing change of heart, obliterates any chance of “Hunt” offering the clarity it needs to be entertaining. Instead, Lee’s directorial effort wanders toward something unmemorable.
  54. Rubikon
    However thoughtful and well-intentioned, this debut feature is too airless and long-winded to excite.
  55. Maika: The Girl from Another Galaxy
    "Maika” stands out for its moments of weird eccentricity. Bad guys get slapped by gobs of kimchi and Hung and Maika float around in a bubble, zooming past airplanes. Sure, it’s all very loud and cartoonish, but at least we’re not stuck in the suburbs.
  56. La Cage aux Folles
    La Cage aux Folles is naughty in the way of comedies that pretend to be sophisticated but actually serve to reinforce the most popular conventions and most witless stereotypes.
  57. Pinocchio
    Boy oh real boy, is the script by Zemeckis and Chris Weitz a lifeless chunk of wood.
  58. The School for Good and Evil
    The film doesn’t have the space to expand all of its ideas and gracefully unfold its plot, which is full of so many narrative twists and reversals that The School for Good and Evil equates to a whole TV season untidily packed into a feature film.
  59. Next Exit
    The actors’ chemistry feels brittle, and like many road movies it has trouble mining drama out of disparate episodes.
  60. My Policeman
    These are characters who are frustrated in love, prevented by law and by their own emotional repression from asking for what they want in their relationships. The stately treatment of their plight leads to a film that buckles under the weight of purgatorial disappointment.
  61. Fourth of July
    As a director, Louis C.K. puts several feet wrong.
  62. Love & Gelato
    It’s the kind of film that is more interested in the appeal of a good Italian accent than it is in finding novel, or even particularly beautiful, ways to shoot and see Rome. The conscious callowness is agreeable, but it lacks freshness, like a midnight pasta reheated in the microwave.
  63. 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.
  64. Hypochondriac
    Its armchair psychology makes for queasy viewing, a conflation of diagnosis and damnation.
  65. Paradise Highway
    If only the film had taken a broader view, filling in more details about the lives and motivations of the truck drivers as well as the sex traffickers.
  66. Rogue Agent
    The real account of Robert Freegard might have been unbelievable. Its dramatization, however, is preposterous.
  67. 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.
  68. Laal Singh Chaddha
    The movie’s charms are limited by what comes to feel like a coddling conceit.
  69. Medieval
    On land and underwater, the verisimilitude of the violence is numbing.
  70. Joyride
    Joyride, a grievously schematic blend of odd-couple comedy and life-affirming road movie, traverses the Irish countryside with a small degree of charm and a boatload of blarney.
  71. Burial
    The story is invented, and not particularly exciting as such.
  72. My Mother's Wedding
    We’re wondering why these accomplished women could be so uniformly stunted by their delusions of paternal grandeur — which could maybe make for a funny setup. In this overly mannered, weirdly flat dramedy, it’s not.
  73. Hansan: Rising Dragon
    The film’s dramas are ornately costumed but often stilted and lacking the verve of the battle staging. Even the glories of war can turn stultifying when you’re shown one too many thousand-yard-stare reaction shots by military leaders.
  74. Daylight
    It will seem suspenseful only to those who wonder whether Mr. Stallone can get the dog out alive.
  75. Country Gold
    This movie gets better the more it strays from its real-life models and into hazy hallucinatory American weirdness. But the snotty dismissiveness with which it treats country music ultimately overwhelms its intriguing qualities.
  76. Gigi & Nate
    Rather than offer insight into the difficult choices facing disabled people, Gigi & Nate opts for mawkish wish fulfillment, undercutting the film’s powerful emotional core.
  77. House of Darkness
    Here is House of Darkness anyway, a talky, allegorical horror film that delivers plenty of LaBute’s typically sharp irony and observations but little raison d’être. It is sometimes insightful, just not about women, who outnumber the men three to one.
  78. Adopting Audrey
    The one bright spot of Adopting Audrey is the acting from Malone and Hunger-Bühler, who imbue their characters with more pathos than they probably deserve.
  79. The Whale
    As an exploration of — and argument for — the power of human sympathy, The Whale is undone by simplistic psychologizing and intellectual fuzziness.
  80. Raymond & Ray
    Only the efforts of Ewan McGregor and, especially, Ethan Hawke, as the estranged half brothers of the title, save this doleful drama from sinking entirely into bathos.
  81. The Visitor
    Filmed in and around New Orleans, “The Visitor” isn’t a terrible movie, just a tired one.
  82. The Anthrax Attacks
    Many documentaries have dealt with real-life ambiguity by making it part of their structure and argument. This one treats it as an afterthought.
  83. Cat People
    The Cat People is a labored and obvious attempt to induce shock. And Miss Simone's cuddly little tabby would barely frighten a mouse under a chair.
  84. The Curse of Bridge Hollow
    Wadlow, a good horror director, seems hamstrung by the family-friendly context and struggles to develop tension in the absence of a plausible threat of violence.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Christmas in Connecticut
    Peter Godfrey, the director, has a good deal to learn about the art of telling a boudoir joke in the parlor and getting away with it.
  86. 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.
  87. God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty
    While Falwell Jr. may indeed be a charlatan, ridiculing his sexual predilections seems like a pretty dubious way to prove it.
  88. The Other Tom
    The film, directed by Laura Santullo and Rodrigo Plá, ultimately falls flat, with unconvincing dialogue and a strained delivery by the actors.
  89. The Same Storm
    It’s a well-intentioned gesture of solidarity that tries so desperately to be relatable, it feels alienating.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Mephisto Waltz
    This shrill, heavy-handed exercise only makes us appreciate "Rosemary's Baby" all over again.
  91. A Man Called Otto
    A Man Called Otto is not only more bloated than the Swedish film, it’s more outré, in a way that’s hard to pin down.
  92. The Barefoot Contessa
    The story that's told against this background is a curiously empty tabloid tale, and the title performer, Ava Gardner, fails to give it plausibility or appeal.
  93. Memories of My Father
    Perhaps Colombian audiences don’t need the history lesson, but skimping on the context in this case also makes the film’s mawkish impulses more glaring and grating, especially as Trueba shifts his observant domestic drama into something of a political rallying cry — a tepid one, at that.
  94. In Her Hands
    The film is so enamored with Ghafari’s status as an exceptional symbol — a powerful woman in a man’s world — that her actual work as a politician gets short shrift.
  95. Paradise City
    The movie’s generic quality is spruced up by eccentric plots points (go-go dancers who also serve as undercover eco-activists, a nice Andy Sidaris-like touch) and kooky dialogue.
  96. The Almond and the Seahorse
    Only when Sarah and Toni meet for the first time, an hour in, does the film allow a genuine conversation — and, gratefully, a moment of recognition.
  97. Framing Agnes
    The documentary reminds its audience that it’s impossible to truly know people based on their responses to medical interviews. But this approach unfortunately prevents the film from achieving either catharsis or understanding.
  98. Wide Awake
    Wide Awake imagines it's a seriocomic "coming of age" film radiating waves of healing sweetness and light. But beneath its suffocating, smug sentimentality, you have to look hard to uncover a single moment of truth and genuine feeling.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Night Digger
    It begs for empathy for its tortured principals, but despite the clearly dedicated contributions of Patricia Neal, Roald Dahl, her scenarist-husband; Pamela Brown and a young newcomer, Nicholas Clay, the strain on credibility is a good deal more notable than the impact on the emotions.
  100. 36 Hours
    What is annoying about this picture is that the set-up for pulling off the plot is just too slick and artificial, too patly and elaborately contrived.
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