The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Knock at the Cabin
    For all its skill and cunning, Knock at the Cabin is an overwrought quasi-theological melodrama that also manages to be a half-baked thought experiment. It’s a thrill ride in a toy trolley.
  2. 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.
  3. A Lot of Nothing
    In his feature debut, the director Mo McRae displays a nice way with actors and a gift for visual tension, but in aiming for absurdist humor, he lands on something more vexing. It’s the script — by McRae and Sarah Kelly Kaplan — that’s the problem.
  4. The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic
    The camera stays close to Jaakko, always at his eye level, blurring everything around him. But the script struggles to channel the character’s wonderfully playful, acerbic spirit.
  5. Baby Ruby
    As moody and messy as its eponym, Baby Ruby aspires to demonstrate how postpartum psychosis can feel like a horror movie. It just fails to make the condition feel like a particularly convincing or cohesive horror movie.
  6. Let It Be Morning
    Despite flashes of droll humor, the film builds up an undercurrent of suspense, with the prospect of violence always near. Kolirin (the movie version of “The Band’s Visit”) orchestrates the proceedings with confidence and significant subtlety, never letting political diagnoses overwhelm character.
  7. Body Parts
    Ironically, the film mirrors the callow cinematic dynamics it critiques: It titillates, even as it scolds.
  8. The Locksmith
    Most of the movie is told with big, rudimentary handwriting and slathered in clichés.
  9. Dionne Warwick: Don't Make Me Over
    Overall, “Don’t Make Me Over” gets the job done, albeit in a formulaic, straightforward fashion. But there’s pure joy in just seeing Warwick radiate the kind of charisma and grit you’d hope for from a living legend who has always stayed true to herself.
  10. Pathaan
    Pathaan is in some ways a save-the-world superhero movie without suits, and while less self-serious, the hefty length can lag. More is not always better — though the gusto of Padukone speedskating to the rescue at one point goes a long way.
  11. The Amazing Maurice
    What should be a cute story about a mischievous orange tabby cat instead becomes an ironic, even vaguely smug movie in the vein of something like “Deadpool.”
  12. Full Time
    The film is a portrait of modern labor that moves with the breathless tension of a Safdie brothers’ joint. But instead of gangsters and cocaine, it finds a flurried momentum in one ordinary woman’s everyday obligations.
  13. 80 for Brady
    We’re so pleasantly pummeled by silliness that the film comes to feel like a massage.
  14. Pamela, a love story
    The collision of her good-faith lack of inhibition with institutionalized misogyny makes this Canadian’s biography a very disquieting American story.
  15. Filmmakers for the Prosecution
    It’s all a reminder of the labor and risks that go into creating and preserving essential imagery of the past, even for the most notorious events in history.
  16. Remember This
    Remember This is, quite literally, a filmed play, and Goldman and Hutchens don’t make any attempts to define or elevate itself outside the confines of the stage.
  17. The Mission
    One hopes that such access would yield new insights into the church. But as the events unspool, the film struggles to crystallize more than a handful of compelling points.
  18. Cairo Conspiracy
    Cairo Conspiracy is a measured but unsparing portrait of corruption perpetrated by people who, across the board, are utterly confident of their own rectitude. Its denouement offers some mercy, but zero hope that the rot depicted can be corrected.
  19. The Man in the Basement
    Somewhere in “The Man in the Basement” there is a smart psychodrama sharpened by political urgency, but what we get is a middling think piece that too quickly loses momentum — and peters out by the end.
  20. Kompromat
    Salle’s approach leaves the physical details of Mathieu’s escape foggy. It’s not always clear how long Mathieu spends in hiding, or how he acquires the tools needed to sustain his flight.
  21. Infinity Pool
    Surreal, sophisticated and sometimes sickening, Infinity Pool suggests that while the elder Cronenberg might be fixated on the disintegration of our bodies, his son is more concerned with the destruction of our souls.
  22. Life Upside Down
    It’s a shallow look at shallow people.
  23. Shotgun Wedding
    Much of the dialogue feels canned and phony in the style of a badly written sitcom. But coming out of J. Lo’s mouth, I believed it.
  24. Maybe I Do
    A romantic comedy starring Diane Keaton, Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon and William H. Macy would kill as a Nancy Meyers movie. Unfortunately, the rom-com Maybe I Do was written and directed by the television veteran Michael Jacobs.
  25. Nostalgia
    Martone’s depiction of crime is at once expressive and economic, a world of danger boiled down to pregnant pauses and minute gestures.
  26. You People
    Hill and London build on a nice vibe. Their characters are playful and frisky, in sync with their eye rolling and mouthing of apologies from across a room.
  27. 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.
  28. The Wandering Earth II
    Losing all of the glee of its predecessor, the movie instead offers nearly three hours of convoluted story lines, undercooked themes and a tangle of confused, glaringly state-approved political subtext.
  29. The Seven Faces of Jane
    The consistency limits the ability of the directors to lean into their own style, leading to a movie that feels narratively scattered and stylistically inhibited.
  30. Only in Theaters
    Ultimately the movie is as scattershot as it is enthusiastic. . . . But the narrative about the theaters’ present-day fight for survival is undeniably compelling.
  31. The Last Autumn
    By the time we get to the film’s closing scenes . . . this modest documentary becomes something epic — a microcosm of the eternal cycles of life.
  32. All Eyes Off Me
    Within this framework, Avishag’s wants and needs are not quite legible enough to trace a satisfying arc, but unspooling under the film’s stylish, judgment-free gaze, her interactions are alluring nonetheless.
  33. New Gods: Yang Jian
    Even for fans of this animated universe, New Gods: Yang Jian can’t turn its viewers into believers.
  34. 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.
  35. When You Finish Saving the World
    Eisenberg has already proven himself a smart wordsmith and a knowing performer of emotional unease, but this “World” is a disappointingly shallow tale of narcissism and negligence.
  36. In from the Side
    Though Carter is competent at making the chaos of a rainy match or the ecstasy of a clandestine tryst watchable, his characters feel like sketches with barely any idiosyncrasies. What’s the point of watching the game if you don’t care about the players?
  37. Alice, Darling
    The larger problem is that there’s not enough here — in story terms or in the filmmaking — to sustain even the movie’s 90 minutes.
  38. Missing
    Missing captures the constant distractions of the modern age. Pop-up windows continually tug at June’s attention. However, the film’s more engaging moments tap into the older cyber nostalgia of text-based adventure games from the 1970s, where problems are solved by typing the right command.
  39. Back to the Wharf
    This film from Li Xiaofeng turns a crime soap opera into an allegory about the moral costs of rapacious expansion — to middling effect.
  40. Virtually Heroes
    Between its old-hat story, flagrantly distasteful humor and lousy visual effects, Virtually Heroes feels as if it’s been sitting on a shelf for a lot longer than 10 years. It probably should have remained there.
  41. House Party
    Like any rager gone south, the buzz is fun early on, until it’s suddenly too much, the house is overrun, and the room starts spinning.
  42. Dog Gone
    Even viewers with a tolerance for this kind of saccharine cinema — oversaturated green grass, slow-motion sprinting, kindly biker gangs, and a fleeting bar squabble in which the nastiest insult is “Idiot!” — will likely say their favorite part is the end credits.
  43. Saint Omer
    An intellectually charged, emotionally wrenching story about the inability of storytelling — literary, legal or cinematic — to do justice to the violence and strangeness of human experience.
  44. Skinamarink
    Ingeniously evoking a child’s response to the inexplicable, Skinamarink sways on the border between dreaming and wakefulness, a movie as difficult to penetrate as it is to forget
  45. The Offering
    A serviceable slab of possession horror.
  46. Kitchen Brigade
    Kitchen Brigade is a white-savior story par excellence, though at least it’s not difficult to swallow — the young people are lovely, and so is the food.
  47. Beautiful Beings
    It doesn’t add up to much, despite the appealing young cast and the handsome cinematography that brings texture and visual interest to every grubby corner.
  48. Plane
    Plane” sinks (or rises, depending on your perspective) to “hell yeah” ridiculousness only at the end, delivering a punchline that lands at the right time.
  49. What Remains
    Even as a Lifetime-esque soap, What Remains sputters, lacking any of the sensational twists to allow itself to sink into enjoyable pulp. The film ultimately hopes to position itself above such a story, aiming instead for a meditation on faith and forgiveness, but its writing and direction lacks the emotional substance to produce anything legitimately affecting.
  50. January 6th
    The film does not offer any particularly new insights, but witnessing the events of Jan. 6 this way — as a matter-of-fact, two-and-a-half-hour montage that seems to occur at once in slow motion and with shocking speed — creates a terror that is perhaps newly visceral and sustained.
  51. Mars One
    Dreams are incubators for dissatisfaction, Martins seems to sigh.
  52. The Old Way
    While it’s true that a certain tepid aspect is common to most B westerns, those of the ’30s and ’40s were made with a baseline competence that The Old Way is woefully lacking.
  53. Candy Land
    Written and directed by John Swab, Candy Land is standard grindhouse fare — more serious and less conceptually adventurous than its recent counterparts, Ti West’s “X” and “Pearl” — though not without its fair share of pleasurable nastiness.
  54. Alcarràs
    The film’s striking images — a girl’s made-up face, sullen amid a crowd of colorful revelers; solar panels gleaming sinisterly below a full moon — leave an indelible trail.
  55. Last Resort
    This endeavor might have tried the alternative title “Die Hard on a Budget,” except even that would have been hopelessly optimistic.
  56. M3GAN
    The director Gerard Johnstone doesn’t go for elaborate suspense sequences or truly intense scares. He wants to please, not rattle. And while there are some hints at social commentary on how modern mothers and fathers use technology to outsource parenting, this movie is smart enough to never take itself too seriously.
  57. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
    If The Subtle Art of Not Giving a #@%! helps people, its deficiencies as a movie don’t matter much.
  58. Broadway Rising
    It can’t fail to trigger shudders of recognition as well as feelings of release, but the filmmaking lacks a certain drama.
  59. 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.
  60. 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.
  61. Wildcat
    In shaping this narrative, though, Lesh and Frost have left out details that would have deepened and broadened Wildcat.
  62. Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power
    The power of the collective, more so than any individuals, is the focus here. The film is anchored with the arresting faces of Lowndes locals and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizers, who recall a range of stirring details — from setting up camp in a house with no running water to internal debates over the term “Black power.”
  63. Living
    As in a David Lean movie, passion mingles elegantly with repression, and Williams emerges as a kind of romantic figure, a man shocked, then delighted, by the thrill of finding himself.
  64. Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody
    Ackie doesn’t much resemble the superstar, although her carriage is correct: eyes closed, head flung back, arms pushing away the air as if to make room for that mezzo-soprano. That the film sticks to Houston’s surfaces is half excusable.
  65. The Eternal Daughter
    Hogg’s greatest stroke in The Eternal Daughter is her casting of Swinton in both lead roles. Swinton is a wonderful chameleon and while she can go as big and showy as any Oscar contender, she is also a brilliant miniaturist.
  66. Broker
    Kore-Eda, remarkably, doesn’t counterfeit a happy ending, but he also refuses despair. He’s an honest broker of heartbreak.
  67. Roald Dahl's Matilda The Musical
    For a film that takes this much glee in cruelty — Matilda is called “a brat,” “a bore,” “a lousy little worm” and “a nasty, little troublemaking goblin” in her first three minutes onscreen — it also includes scenes of genuine loveliness.
  68. Corsage
    Making Elisabeth interestingly human proves more than enough, a feat that Kreutzer and Krieps accomplish to dazzling effect.
  69. Babylon
    There isn’t much going on other than the spectacle of its busily spinning parts, which might be tolerable if the first two hours weren’t so unrelievedly unmodulated, with everything synced to the same monotonous, accelerated pace. This hyperventilated quality initially serves the story and Chazelle’s concept of the era’s delirious excess, but the lack of modulation rapidly becomes enervating. After a while, it feels punishing.
  70. Women Talking
    The root of Protestantism, after all, is protest — against arbitrary and unaccountable authority in the name of a higher truth. Women Talking reawakens that idea and applies it, with precision and passion, to our own time and circumstances. The women don’t want pity or revenge. They want a better world. Why not listen?
  71. 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.
  72. No Bears
    Panahi, whose courage and honesty are beyond doubt, has made a movie that calls those very qualities into question, a movie about its own ethical limits and aesthetic contradictions.
  73. The Pale Blue Eye
    Continuing his fascination with tormented manhood, Cooper, in this third collaboration with Bale after “Out of the Furnace” (2013) and “Hostiles” (2017), works with a solemnity that stifles the fun.
  74. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
    It contains amusing jokes and has an old-fashioned impulse to tug at heart strings.
  75. Idina Menzel: Which Way to the Stage?
    We already know that Menzel can belt to the back row; a richer profile would have coaxed out a more intimate voice.
  76. It's a Wonderful Binge
    The stirring pratfalls and well-placed dirty jokes make It’s a Wonderful Binge a keenly subversive Christmas movie.
  77. Children of the Mist
    The filmmaker Ha Le Diem shot Children of the Mist over the course of three years, integrating herself into Di’s life in a way that complicates the documentary’s otherwise unobtrusive, observational approach.
  78. The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari
    Once the ash settles, we long for insight, but only the trauma lingers on.
  79. 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.
  80. The Apology
    A play-like trudge through seesawing power dynamics, bursts of violence, perpetual gloom and a ludicrously attenuated finale, The Apology could have doubled its tension by halving its running time.
  81. Jurassic Punk
    Directed by Scott Leberecht, Jurassic Punk tells the very juicy story of pioneers, naysayers and professional hierarchies that made Williams both the Necessary Man and an eventual outcast.
  82. Nelly & Nadine
    The film is moving for the intimacy it depicts, an archive as unlikely as the love story itself.
  83. The Super 8 Years
    Memory is also, I think, one reason we watch movies like this, which with its lapidary narration and melancholic images — with its laughing children, its difficult smiles and its ghosts — movingly pairs you with Ernaux and with the world that she has so brilliantly made.
  84. The Quiet Girl
    Although The Quiet Girl — Ireland’s entry for the best international feature Oscar — is not holiday fare, there may not be a movie more expressive of the season’s benevolent ethos than this hushed work about kith and kindness.
  85. Avatar: The Way of Water
    I’m curious, and inclined — as I was in 2009 — to give this grand, muddled project the benefit of the doubt. Cameron’s ambitions are as sincere as they are self-contradictory. He wants to conquer the world in the name of the underdog, to celebrate nature by means of the most extravagant artifice, and to make everything new feel old again.
  86. Pelosi in the House
    So what does this long-gestating, obviously affectionate, obviously politically simpatico account of Nancy Pelosi’s career, including her rise to and tenures as the first female House speaker, have to offer? For a start, it provides an unusual opportunity to watch Pelosi negotiate legislation and rally votes.
  87. 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.
  88. The Whale
    As an exploration of — and argument for — the power of human sympathy, The Whale is undone by simplistic psychologizing and intellectual fuzziness.
  89. Blanquita
    Unfolding like a David Fincheresque procedural and doused in gloomy grays and blues, the film, by the writer and director Fernando Guzzoni, may seem provocative to some in the context of #MeToo and its popular mantra to “believe women.”
  90. To the End
    Lears clearly feels earnest sympathy for her subjects and passion for their cause, but the film often replicates for viewers the same atmosphere of hopelessness that makes climate activism a hard sell for voters.
  91. Nr. 10
    What the film ultimately becomes — a sci-fi mystery, a smirking satire of religion — doesn’t possess enough actual narrative meat, formal style, or wit to justify its structural gambit.
  92. Empire of Light
    A film that had seemed interested in the lives and feelings of its characters, and in an unlikely but touching relationship between two people at odds with the world around them, turns into a movie with Something to Say.
  93. One Fine Morning
    The story’s ellipses and graceful structure are certainly admirable, but what elevates One Fine Morning is the texture of Sandra’s emotions, the revelation of her character, the hunger of her embrace, the wildness of her mouth, the stillness of her sated body, and the love that she gives and will movingly embrace once more.
  94. Loudmouth
    As straightforward as it appears, Loudmouth also invites an engaged but necessarily judicious scrutiny.
  95. Something from Tiffany's
    It’s a winning setup, and the director, Daryl Wein, escalates the action shrewdly, with clever rom-com engineering.
  96. 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.
  97. Emancipation
    Part of this movie’s power comes from its insistence that you look at the near-unbearable, that you confront slavery as a crime against humanity rather than the perverse myth of the so-called Lost Cause enshrined in countless paintings, books, films and statues.
  98. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules
    It’s the sort of bland, innocuous trifle that will swiftly recede into the oblivion of a streaming service menu — a comedy without laughs and a family movie without heart, lacking any of the wit or charm of Kinney’s original stories.
  99. Devotion
    As an intellectual dismantling of white savior narratives, Devotion is smartly done; as an enjoyable heartwarmer to watch with your uncle, it’s stiff when it should soar.
  100. 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.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »