The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,278 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: 9,380 out of 20278
  2. Mixed: 8,434 out of 20278
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20278
20278 movie reviews
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  1. I.T.
    John Moore, the director, and Dan Kay and William Wisher, the screenwriters, don’t have anything new to add to that familiar dynamic.
  2. Brother Nature
    Every new generation has to learn the lesson: Comedy success on the small screen doesn’t guarantee the same on the big screen. If anything, it guarantees the opposite.
  3. A Dog's Purpose
    You don’t need an animal-rights group’s boycott to give you permission to avoid A Dog’s Purpose. You can skip it just because it’s clumsily manipulative dreck.
  4. My Dead Boyfriend
    My Dead Boyfriend desperately tries to look and sound like a quirky indie hit, but that’s not an achievable goal when you have an unlikable lead character indifferently rendered by a name star.
  5. Come and Find Me
    The writer-director Zack Whedon toggles his plot between “Out of the Past” and “Three Days of the Condor” with highly mixed results before letting loose with a hilariously unconvincing climactic reveal.
  6. The Duelist
    The clichéd story line pursues turgidity with a relentless determination.
  7. Bad Kids of Crestview Academy
    Bad Kids of Crestview Academy traffics in exploitation movie flourishes.
  8. Robin Hood
    The plot is twisty in a perfunctory way, the action predictably explosive, the sought-after exhilaration nonexistent.
  9. The Belko Experiment
    The Belko Experiment is a grisly, sick-making exercise in sadism that tries to camouflage its base venality in a thought-experiment plot.
  10. Youth in Oregon
    A depressing slog that could have been so much more.
  11. Blind
    The film, directed by Michael Mailer, wanted to be a steamy romance, but it ended up leaden and occasionally laughable.
  12. A Bad Moms Christmas
    Add the magnificent Christine Baranski to the mix and A Bad Moms Christmas, while still a slog of base sight gags and lazy profanity, becomes marginally more bearable. Only marginally, given that this pitiful follow-up to last year’s “Bad Moms” is even less able to distinguish between crass and comedic.
  13. The House That Jack Built
    Something feels off with von Trier’s sense of artistry now. Something feels stuck, like his head’s wound up lodged in his rear, which brings the movie closer to “The Human Centipede” than I would have thought. But this isn’t cinematic horror. It’s proctology.
  14. The Ottoman Lieutenant
    The Ottoman Lieutenant is an overwrought nurse romance merged with a history lesson, a combination that is hard to take as seriously as the film wants to be taken.
  15. Midnight Sun
    Under the limp direction of Scott Speer, Midnight Sun suffocates its sentimental script, portraying passion without wonder, sacrifice without ecstasy.
  16. One Piece Film: Gold
    If you’re a boy between, say, 8 and 12 and wired to the hilt on Coca-Cola, the shrill, exhausting “Gold” might be for you. But only if.
  17. Paris Can Wait
    By the time the final meal is devoured, you’ll be wanting nothing so much as an antacid.
  18. Bright
    You’ll find beatings, shootouts, car crashes, awkward analogies and a measure of buddy badinage in “Bright,” but true enchantment is in short supply.
  19. Like Me
    With little more than the superficial psychology of shallow characters to guide the movie’s squeamish images, Like Me irritates, but it proves unable to provoke more than mild gut reactions.
  20. The Girl in the Spider's Web
    Alvarez tries to pep things up with chases, near escapes, dramatic rescues, fetish wear and female nudity. But the whole thing is a bummer, at times risible.
  21. Hot Summer Nights
    Perhaps this picture’s higher function is to be a calling card. But I don’t know what a calling-card project that demonstrates that its maker can semi-successfully mimic artistically vital but uncommercial directors is supposed to prove. For me, it mostly proved a waste of time.
  22. Mary Magdalene
    Unfortunately, it’s a confused and frequently enervating effort.
  23. Dolittle
    The charm of this fantasy has always been dubious and will presumably fade as the natural world continues to disappear and more and more species become extinct.
  24. i hate myself :)
    It takes an especially robust sense of self to so openly invite ridicule, rendering the film’s title somewhat less than credible.
  25. Home Again
    For her directorial debut, Home Again, Hallie Meyers-Shyer, Nancy Meyers’s daughter, has made a shabby copy of a Nancy Meyers romantic comedy.
  26. Whisky Galore!
    Gone is the original’s joyful sense of mischief; what’s left is an inoffensive piece of twaddle that never fully appreciates the ineluctable bond between community spirit and a drop of the hard stuff.
  27. Goodbye Christopher Robin
    Erratically paced and with a pitch-black heart, the movie manipulates at every turn.
  28. Once Upon a Time in Venice
    The movie tries for propulsive Tarantino grit but ends up being just another annoying example of Hollywood’s addiction to stories in which graying white men bed beautiful young women and beat up men much more youthful and fit than they are.
  29. Overdrive
    Overdrive has all the features of a potentially entertaining action B-movie for overgrown boys: gorgeous near-mint vintage cars, rugged male performers, seductive female performers, ravishing European locations. What it doesn’t have is a lot of cinematic adrenaline.
  30. Bohemian Rhapsody
    A baroque blend of gibberish, mysticism and melodrama, the film seems engineered to be as unmemorable as possible, with the exception of the prosthetic teeth worn by the lead actor, Rami Malek, who plays Freddie Mercury, Queen’s lead singer.
  31. Aardvark
    Mr. Shoaf wastes an excellent cast (and one cute aardvark — you knew there’d be one) in a movie of astonishing vacancy.
  32. Woodshock
    Unlike their spring 2018 fashion collection, Kate and Laura Mulleavy’s first foray into moviemaking, “Woodshock,” is depressingly dull and terminally inarticulate.
  33. Winchester
    Despite the typically elevating presence of Helen Mirren, this super-silly feature (the fifth from the Australian brothers Peter and Michael Spierig) stubbornly resists being classed up.
  34. The Beach Bum
    What The Beach Bum celebrates as transgression is pure tedium. What it takes for divine lunacy is frat house doggerel. The booze flows freely. The women are topless and ornamental. The cars and boats are fast and expensive. There’s nothing much worth writing about.
  35. Forever My Girl
    The director, Bethany Ashton Wolf, who adapted the screenplay from, yes, a romance novel by Heidi McLaughlin, can concoct some Hallmark-greeting-card-quality shots, but has little flair for piecing them together. The lead actors are very pretty.
  36. The Boy Downstairs
    How, and in whose apartment, Diana and Ben will confess their emotions is the subject of Ms. Brooks’s pallid dramedy, which leaves its actors looking somewhat stranded, as if waiting for Neil Simon zingers that were never written.
  37. Charlie's Angels
    Banks wants to fight a righteous fight. But she is selling stale goods in which adult women spout girl-power clichés and conform to norms that make it very clear what kind of heroines still get to fly high: young, thin, beautiful, perfectly coifed, impeccably manicured and profoundly unthreatening.
  38. The Boss Baby: Family Business
    A baby in a suit? Always cute. Recycled gags? Not so much — this “Boss Baby” just didn’t get the memo.
  39. Breathe
    Offering no hint of the backbreaking drudgery and mental strain of their predicament, this gauzy picture (produced by the couple’s son, Jonathan Cavendish, and directed by his friend, the actor Andy Serkis) is a closed loop of rose-tinted memories.
  40. Legend
    Mr. Cruise goes through all this nonsense gamely, as if it were an initiation into a fraternity he wants very much to join.
  41. The Thing
    The Thing is too phony looking to be disgusting. It qualifies only as instant junk.
  42. Spies Like Us
    There are seeds of something funny in the film's beginning and in its premise, but they are soon dissipated by so little sustained wit, and so much scenery.
  43. Killing Ground
    Certainly, the senselessness of bloodshed may be Mr. Power’s point. But with this setup, such a message is all but muted.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Maximum Overdrive
    For the most part, [King] has taken a promising notion - our dependence on our machines - and turned it into one long car-crunch movie, wheezing from setups to crackups.
  45. The Night Flier
    A thuddingly blunt contemporary morality tale devoid of wit and only minimally suspenseful.
  46. Needful Things
    Though this is by no means the grisliest or most witless film made from one of Mr. King's horrific fantasies, it can lay claim to being the most unpleasant. Why? Because when you strip away the suspenseful buildup to a King story, you're often left with mechanical moralizing and crude, sophomoric small talk. Needful Things has more of both than any film could ever need.
  47. The Presidio
    It doesn't help that the mystery plot seems half-baked in the end, or that none of the actors appear entirely comfortable with their roles. Miss Ryan looks edgy and spends a lot of time tossing her hair. Mr. Harmon is easygoing and attractive, but his nice-guy manner belies his character's steely talk.
  48. The Only Living Boy in New York
    Allan Loeb’s script is glib and grating.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Cobra
    A disturbing movie from many points of view: disturbing for the violence it portrays, the ideas it represents and the large number of people who will undoubtedly go to see it and cheer on its dangerous hero.
  50. Gotcha!
    Gotcha is about as devoid of personality as it's possible for a narrative movie to be.
  51. I Do... Until I Don't
    A movie that has neither a coherent point nor an authentic character.
  52. The 'Burbs
    So little goes on that it might be argued that The Burbs means to be a comment on the vacuity of popular entertainment in the television age, though it's much more an example of it. The film does nothing for the reputation of anyone connected with it, including Mr. Hanks, who deserves the Oscar nomination he has just received for his work in Big. This time he's attempting to act a role in a screenplay whose pages are blank.
  53. Darkness Rising
    There are almost too many references to other movies for this one to become its own monster.
  54. Gemini Man
    The idea of confronting an unknown second self is full of rich, uncanny potential — there’s a literary tradition going back at least to Edgar Allan Poe — but Gemini Man squanders it, along with what might have been two interesting performances.
  55. False Confessions
    There is little to recommend here, even for Huppert completists who follow her anywhere.
  56. True to the Game
    The direction, by Preston A. Whitmore II, seems hampered by either a lack of resources or a lack of interest.
  57. Armed Response
    The possibilities are intriguing, but the characters are underdrawn, and the pacing lags.
  58. Lemon
    Reviewing Lemon feels like taking a sucker’s bet, treating the film with a reverence it never even asks for.
  59. Bushwick
    The filmmakers feign boldness in tackling national politics, but revert to coyness and caricature when it comes to local matters, gesturing toward a multiculturalism that isn’t even skin deep and sweeping gentrification under the rug.
  60. The Black Prince
    A dramatic life does not necessarily a dramatic film make.
  61. Season of the Witch
    Hungry Wives has the seedy look of a porn film but without any pornographic action. Everything in it, from the actors to the props, looks borrowed and badly used. [12 Dec 1980, p.8]
    • The New York Times
  62. Action Point
    True, Johnny Knoxville gets power-hosed down a slide and catapulted into a barn for our amusement, but the inventive, stake-raising, borderline surrealist gags of the old “Jackass” are gone.
  63. Chronically Metropolitan
    One longs to praise Mr. Manrique for attempting a serious-minded story in this, his first feature. But there needs to be a real reason to embrace it, rather than what’s on this screen.
  64. Rememory
    A hodgepodge of pseudoscientific twaddle and variously shifty murder suspects, Rememory satisfies neither as science fiction nor as psychological drama.
  65. 6 Days
    With a barrage of title-card identifications, 6 Days can feel closer to a re-enactment than a thriller. To the extent that the movie has a political angle, it’s perhaps gratuitously jingoistic.
  66. Do It Like An Hombre
    The movie flouts its intolerance in an attempt at provocative humor. Unless you laugh at fossils, I have no idea why you should buy a ticket to gawk at this dinosaur.
  67. Jaws: The Revenge
    Lorraine Gary has some affecting moments as Ellen, but Jaws the Revenge is mild and predictable, the very things an adventure movie should never be.
  68. Crash Pad
    The movie’s premise isn’t as bad as the forced, unnatural dialogue. Even the reliable Ms. Applegate and Mr. Church can’t salvage the screenwriter Jeremy Catalino’s clumsy lines.
  69. Class
    The movie can't make up its mind whether it's a lighthearted comedy, set in what appears to be a posh New England-style prep school just outside Chicago, or a romantic drama about a teen-age boy who has a torrid affair with his roommate's mother. Either way it's pretty awful.
  70. Mom and Dad
    Mr. Taylor offers up nothing but glitchy editing and bad vibes.
  71. Submergence
    The movie feints in the direction of confronting horrific geopolitical realities, but there’s a specter of sentimentality hovering above the proceedings, waiting to smother everything in sight.
  72. Alina
    Although the internet and cellphones exist in the movie, there’s a dated quality to the premise.
  73. Stroker Ace
    The must-miss movie of the summer. It's a witless retread of the earlier, far funnier road-movie collaborations of Mr. Needham and Mr. Reynolds.
  74. The Amityville Horror
    So many horror-movie clichés have been assembled under the roof of a single haunted house that the effect is sometimes mind-bogglingly messy. There is apparently very little to which the director, Stuart Rosenberg, will not resort. Scary things do happen in the movie, but they're always telegraphed in advance and make too little sense to have a cumulative effect.
  75. Euphoria
    Notwithstanding a lively turn from Charles Dance as a chatty brain-tumor sufferer and a perfect Charlotte Rampling as a tranquil guide to oblivion, Euphoria gives up the ghost well before either of its unhappy heroines.
  76. Heroes
    Heroes, co-starring Henry (The Fonz) Winkler and Sally (The Flying Nun) Field, brings to the motion-picture theater all of the magic of commercial television except canned laughter. Well, no truly rotten movie is perfect. Harrison Ford, who may be one of the most-seen movie actors of the day because of his role in Star Wars, is effective in a supporting role too small to make the picture worth seeing.
  77. Born American
    Comprised of so many derivative bits and pieces that it's not surprising the movie has too little narrative coherence or momentum to keep us going, and no characters we care about enough to root for.
  78. Tommy Boy
    Their best moments are some throwaway routines; they weep in the car as they sing along to the Carpenters' "Superstar." More often, the movie goes for stale, obvious sight gags like Tommy's slow destruction of Richard's precious car. As mismatched-buddy teams go, Felix and Oscar have nothing to worry about here.
  79. Hangman
    Hangman is riddled with holes — blank spaces, if you will.
  80. Cutthroat Island
    Cutthroat Island proves too stupidly smutty for children, too cartoonish for sane adults and not racy enough for anyone who regards Ms. Davis in a tight-laced bodice as its main attraction. The only serious incentive for seeing this spectacle is a fascination with extravagance, since Cutthroat Island is indeed scenic, hectic and big.
  81. Blame
    Blame is earnest but underdeveloped. At the same time, it’s overdetermined and often overplayed.
  82. Elliot: The Littlest Reindeer
    New evidence for the case that computer animation is homogenizing children’s movies, robbing them of visual interest, this harmless, charmless movie plods along well-trodden turf.
  83. Down Periscope
    If Down Periscope, directed by David S. Ward, has the ingredients for a lively spoof of everything from Mutiny on the Bounty to Crimson Tide, they are slapped together so crudely that nothing gels, including any sense of a coherent ensemble. The tone of the acting, which is set by Mr. Grammer's blandly laid-back performance, is all wrong for a genre that demands over-the-top hamming.
  84. Wet Woman in the Wind
    Genre homage or not, trashy, assault-coddling sexism is a turn off — and worse. Perhaps the “roman porno” reboot project should have rebooted its sexual politics before calling “action!”
  85. The Dancer
    This movie, which stars Stéphanie Sokolinski, the French musician known as Soko, in the role of Fuller, only comes alive during the dance sequences.
  86. Abe & Phil's Last Poker Game
    The medical tidbits, however awkwardly presented, are the most distinctive aspects of the script. The flat direction, alas, is not the work of a filmmaker.
  87. Rosa Chumbe
    The women’s missteps seem to come straight out of a cautionary morality play. And the movie’s dismal outlook even extends to the dimly-lit cinematography. It doesn’t need a miracle to see the light. It needs a full pardon.
  88. Dark Meridian
    Chases, shootouts and showy camera moves are executed deftly enough, but given the frugal trappings, they play as overambitious — an attempt to make a storage tank of lemonade from one lemon.
  89. The Goldfinch
    It looks and sounds like a movie without quite being one. It’s more like a Pinterest page or a piece of fan art, the record of an enthusiasm that is, to the outside observer, indistinguishable from confusion.
  90. PCU
    P.C.U. turns out to be a surprisingly lame and unfocused campus comedy, one that pays remarkably little attention to its own comic possibilities.
  91. Heaven's Gate
    Nothing in the movie works properly. For all of the time and money that went into it, it's jerry-built, a ship that slides straight to the bottom at its christening. Heaven's Gate is something quite rare in movies these days - an unqualified disaster.
  92. Alita: Battle Angel
    A pileup of clichés in service to technological whiz-bangery, “Alita” is one more story of the not quite human brought to life with hubris and bleeding-edge science.
  93. Three Men and a Cradle
    Three Men and a Cradle is almost totally charmless. It's funny in the way of someone who, in attempting to explain a joke, thoroughly destroys the humor, which, I assume, is mostly the fault of Coline Serreau, who wrote and directed it.
  94. The Miracle Season
    That The Miracle Season is based on a true story makes it tough to endure and to review, because it’s no pleasure to report that filmmakers have turned real-life tragedy and tenacity into a manipulative weepie.
  95. Blumhouse's Truth or Dare
    Truth or Dare is a wearying slog through crushed feelings and mangled bodies.
  96. The Vanishing Of Sidney Hall
    Handsome cinematography and a highly competent supporting cast — including Michelle Monaghan, Nathan Lane and Alex Karpovsky — can’t save The Vanishing of Sidney Hall, a tortured mystery dripping with pretentiousness.
  97. The Music of Silence
    This blah trudge from cradle to stage will be catnip to his fans and Ambien to everyone else.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Gumball Rally
    After they all start off, and once you get used to the rather handsome speeding-car effects, which is soon, the movie seems to be nothing but one long exhaust pipe. There is only so much that can be done with scenes of cars passing each other.
  99. Arizona
    As the movie wears on, one suspects that the writer Luke Del Tredici and the director Jonathan Watson aren’t crafting an indictment of toxic masculinity, but an invitation to take some sadistic enjoyment in it, without consequences.
  100. Ernest Goes to Camp
    There have been worse ideas for innocuous summer films, but not many worse executions. The slapstick is tame and predictable. The characters and their inspirational message are served up as neatly - there's no avoiding this - as if they were in commercials.
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