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. Santa & Andrés
    Santa & Andrés begins as a film about separation and pain, but becomes a movie about reconciliation and healing.
  2. A Quiet Place
    In its convincing portrayal of a situation where a rusty nail is as lethal as an unexploded bomb, and the few remaining inhabitants seem — much like the audience — more likely to die of stress than anything else, the movie rocks. You may go in jaded, but you’ll leave elated or I’ll eat my words.
  3. Soufra
    Crisply directed by Thomas Morgan, the film depicts a succession of challenges facing Ms. Shaar, a smart, understated and tenacious entrepreneur.
  4. Missing
    Missing is Mr. Costa-Gavras's most beautifully achieved political melodrama to date, a suspense-thriller of real cinematic style, acted with immense authority by Jack Lemmon, as Charles Horman's father, Ed Horman, and Sissy Spacek as Charles's wife, Beth.
  5. All the President's Men
    The manners and methods of big-city newspapering, beautifully detailed, contribute as much to the momentum of the film as the mystery that's being uncovered. Maybe even more, since the real excitement of All The President's Men is in watching two comparatively inexperienced reporters stumble onto the story of their lives and develop it triumphantly, against all odds.
  6. Pale Rider
    This veteran movie icon handles both jobs with such intelligence and facility I'm just now beginning to realize that, though Mr. Eastwood may have been improving over the years, it's also taken all these years for most of us to recognize his very consistent grace and wit as a film maker.
  7. Nobody's Fool
    If Nobody's Fool is often heartbreaking in its sense of loss, it is also hopeful in the strength of its emotions and the sheer beauty of its performances.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Aristocats
    As funny, warm and sweet an animated, cartoon, package as ever gave a movie marquee a Christmas glow.
  9. Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood
    It’s a western, for Pete’s sake. Politics are wound into its DNA, and Tarantino knows the genome better than anyone else. Which is just to say that like other classics of the genre, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” is not going anywhere. It will stand as a source of debate — and delight — for as long as we care about movies. And it wants us to care.
  10. Searching for Bobby Fischer
    Even though this film may do for chess what "The Red Shoes" did for ballet, it works movingly and most effectively as a family drama.
  11. Broadway Danny Rose
    Broadway Danny Rose proceeds so sweetly and so illogically that it seems to have been spun, not constructed. Mr. Allen works with such speed and confidence these days that a brief, swift film like this one can have all the texture and substance of his more complicated work.
  12. Living in Oblivion
    Wonderfully funny behind-the-scenes look at the perils of film making, no-budget style.
  13. Alice
    Woody Allen's marvelous new comedy, Alice, confirms Mr. Allen's safe arrival on a whole new plateau of film-making.
  14. Prototype
    The film is relentlessly eye- and ear-filling, sometimes to the point of irritation. It’s a puzzle of strange pleasures, a nerve-racking way of recalibrating how to look at the screen and the world outside the screen. Go if you’re feeling super adventurous.
  15. Creed II
    Creed II is a terrific movie, a boxing picture full of inspired sweetness and shrewd science that honors the cherished traditions of the genre while feeling like something new and exciting in the world.
  16. Like Water for Chocolate
    Food and passion create a sublime alchemy in Like Water for Chocolate, a Mexican film whose characters experience life so intensely that they sometimes literally smolder.
  17. Won't You Be My Neighbor?
    It is that emphasis — the earnest, critical attention to the public Mister Rogers and his legacy — that makes Won’t You Be My Neighbor? feel like such a gift.
  18. The African Queen
    A slick job of movie hoodwinking with a thoroughly implausible romance, set in a frame of wild adventure that is as whopping as its tale of off-beat love. And the main tone and character of it are in the area of the well-disguised spoof...Mr. Huston merits credit for putting this fantastic tale on a level of sly, polite kidding and generally keeping it there, while going about the happy business of engineering excitement and visual thrills.
  19. The Madness of King George
    The Madness of King George mixes the ebullience of Tom Jones with a pop-theatrical royal back-stabbing that is reminiscent of films like The Lion in Winter. That makes it a deft, mischievous, beautifully acted historical drama with exceptionally broad appeal.
  20. Tall: The American Skyscraper and Louis Sullivan
    The film is useful in part because it is so frankly argumentative. The critical appreciation of art is always advanced more effectively by partisanship than by neutrality.
  21. The Kindergarten Teacher
    Fluidly capturing the trajectory of a ruinous obsession, the writer and director, Sara Colangelo, skillfully fudges the line between mentoring and manipulation, and between nurturing talent and appropriating it. Suffusing each scene with an insinuating, prickly tension, she remains ruthlessly committed to her screw-tightening tone, offering the viewer no comforting moral escape hatch.
  22. Sorry to Bother You
    Mr. Riley isn’t constructing yet another postmodern playhouse out of borrowings and allusions. He’s building a raft, and steering it straight into the foaming rapids of racism, economic injustice and cultural conflict.
  23. Clara's Ghost
    As is perhaps appropriate, given the comic occupations of the Reynolds (and the Elliott) family, this unusual, unsettling and terrific little film presents itself not as a domestic opera, but as a family comedy.
  24. Brother's Keeper
    It's a rich slice of Americana that would seem to belong to an earlier, pre-television era, except that television comes to play a large part in Delbert's story. It's also about an aspect of life in rural America that's seldom seen by people who drive through it, and seldom if ever glimpsed in movies.
  25. The Last Family
    The tragedies in this family’s life are nearly constant, but Mr. Matuszynski approaches them with a tone that’s matter-of-fact while also partaking in the particular wry irony that has been a hallmark of Polish cinema since the early 1960s.
  26. Shot in the Dark
    This director isn’t afraid of silence, and he’s prepared to let a quiet moment speak for itself. Attentive viewing is required, and rewarded.
  27. Shirkers
    Like a photograph slowly developing before our eyes, Shirkers (which was also the title of the original picture) is both mystery and manhunt, a captivating account of shattered friendship and betrayed trust. The skill of the editing (by Tan and two colleagues), though, is key.
  28. The Guilty
    Unfolding in real time, this immediately involving story bends and turns in surprising, sometimes horrifying ways. Enriched by Oskar Skriver’s marvelous sound editing, which takes us from a speeding van to a bloodcurdling crime scene with equal authenticity, the movie smoothly blends police procedural with character study.
  29. Mandy
    The movie’s imagery is consistently unearthly; its pacing has a magisterial weight. Call it pulp Tarkovsky, maybe.
  30. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
    Satire and outrage are easier approaches than the tact and empathy Ms. Akhavan deploys. The Miseducation of Cameron Post, confident in its beliefs and curious about what makes its characters tick, is more interested in listening than in preaching.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    North by Northwest
    The lines and the expert manipulation of the principals are tributes to the outstanding talents of Messrs. Lehman and Hitchcock.
  32. Blaze
    The usual sequence of ballad-of-a-tormented-artist verses plays out: early promise; success and betrayal; redemption and death. What pulls against the relentless momentum of biography is the sweet inertia of life, a lot of which is spent drunk, in bed, on the road, hanging out with friends or all of the above.
  33. Rear Window
    Mr. Stewart does a first-class job, playing the whole thing from a wheel chair and making points with his expressions and eyes. His handling of a lens-hound's paraphernalia in scanning the action across the way is very important to the color and fascination of the film.
  34. The Peacemaker
    The movie is a fascinating portrait that is if anything too brief.
  35. Angels Wear White
    The moral rot and callous corruption depicted in Angels Wear White has a particularly bracing effect in part because, cultural specifics aside, the inhumanity on display is hardly alien.
  36. I Kill Giants
    Magical, subtle, sensitive and touching, I Kill Giants is everything the bombastic “A Wrinkle in Time” is not.
  37. Threads
    Clearly, Threads is not a balanced discussion about the pros and cons of nuclear armaments. It is a candidly biased warning. And it is, as calculated, unsettlingly powerful. [12 Feb 1985, p.42]
    • The New York Times
  38. The Accused
    A consistently engrossing melodrama, modest in its aims and as effective for the cliches it avoids as for the clear eye through which it sees its working-class American lives.
  39. El Mar La Mar
    The result is simultaneously elusive and concrete: abstract cinema that packs a punch.
  40. To Be or Not to Be
    Smashingly funny...This To Be or Not to Be scarcely misses a comic beat right from the opening sequence.
  41. Daughter of Mine
    Ardent and primal, Daughter of Mine addresses complicated ideas with head-clearing simplicity.
  42. Infinite Football
    While the movie has allegorical resonances with the political and human rights disasters of 20th-century Romania, by the end, its surfaces, while remaining superficially unimpressive, open up as the film moves from epistemological speculation onto a plane of mysticism. This relatively short film contains worlds.
  43. Throw Momma from the Train
    As Owen, Mr. DeVito is such an odd combination of the childlike and the diabolical that he remains a captivating figure throughout the story. Mr. DeVito's comic timing is particularly enjoyable, since he has such a slow, steady, deliberate way of building up to outrageous behavior.
  44. Stakeout
    Delivers excitement, humor and good nature. The director uses the conventions of the action-comedy in so adroit a way that you may even forget the hundred other films you've seen lately about a couple of cops kidding around with each other in between battling the bad guys.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Workshop
    It’s a measure of this film’s stealthy brilliance that it blurs the line between empathy and exploitation.
  46. 1985
    Cory Michael Smith’s performance as Adrian is a quiet marvel in a movie that’s superbly acted all around. The film’s intimate consideration of still-enormous issues is intelligent, surprising and emotionally resonant.
  47. Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami
    The relief of Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami is that it seeks to square the person with the provocateuse. The documentary is a feat of portraiture and a restoration of humanity. It’s got the uncanny, the sublime, and, in many spots, a combination of both.
  48. Ava
    Lurching relentlessly from one conflict to another, the movie distills its emotions — and maintains its momentum — in conversations of remarkably controlled intensity.
  49. Personal Problems (1980)
    This is a work that looks as if it were evolving even as portions of it were completed. That’s entirely appropriate. For all its rough edges, Personal Problems retains a vitality and an integrity that practically bounds off the screen.
  50. The Electric Horseman
    Invigorating.
  51. Reality Bites
    It takes a spectacular cast to pull off this kind of meandering romantic comedy, and Reality Bites couldn't have done better.
  52. Dog Day Afternoon
    Dog Day Afternoon is a melodrama, based on fact, about a disastrously illplanned Brooklyn bank robbery, and it's beautifully acted by performers who appear to have grown up on the city's sidewalks in the heat and hopelessness of an endless midsummer.
  53. Black Mother
    In its poetic, elliptical, concise way, this film makes a grand statement: The black mother is the mother of life itself. And the gaze directed at the black faces and bodies in “Black Mother” is not a male gaze, or a documentarian’s gaze. It is a gaze of love.
  54. Sollers Point
    Mr. Porterfield’s evenhanded direction doesn’t try to pull the viewer’s sympathies one way or another. Within his realistic mode he crafts some startling effects — a strip-club brawl that spills out into broad, embarrassing daylight is eye-opening.
  55. Cold Water (1994)
    Mr. Assayas succeeded in making a young person’s film when he was on the cusp of turning 40. He has said that he wanted Cold Water to feel like a movie from 1972. It doesn’t really, but, perhaps more remarkably, it’s so fresh it could have been made now.
  56. The Escape
    Subtle and slow and wrenchingly empathetic, The Escape is about gradually realizing that the life you have may not be the one you want.
  57. The Elephant Man
    What we eventually see underneath this shell is not the study in dignity that Ashley Montagu wrote about, but something far more poignant, a study in genteelness that somehow supressed all rage. That is the quality that illuminates this film and makes it far more fascinating than it would be were it merely a portrait of a dignified freak. [03 Oct 1980, p.C8]
    • The New York Times
  58. Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat
    While, in many respects, it is conventional in form, alternating archival footage from the late 1970s and early ’80s with newly shot interviews, the movie has a momentum (aided by an exemplary soundtrack of songs from the era) and a rare interrogatory spirit.
  59. Under the Tree
    Maintaining an unrelentingly gleeful grip on the film’s tone, Mr. Sigurdsson skillfully whips absurdist comedy and chilling tragedy into a froth of surging hostilities.
  60. The Bleeding Edge
    The surgery scenes in The Bleeding Edge are squirm-in-your-seat uncomfortable. But it’s the interviews — watching patients recount agonies they’ve suffered from poorly researched and regulated medical devices — that are hardest to sit through.
  61. 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.
  62. Porco Rosso
    This homage to vintage Howard Hawks-style aerial thrills is as beautifully drawn and colored as anything he’s done. And it’s tremendous fun.
  63. Ray Meets Helen
    Ray Meets Helen has a wistful, whimsical sophistication that has all but disappeared from movies. Filled with imaginative visuals populated by the ghosts of the gone and hopes for the future, the movie is wonderfully, magically humane.
  64. Good Manners
    Swerving from predictable to confounding, dreamy to demented, artful to awkward, this genre-twisting hybrid from Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra links art house and slaughterhouse with unexpected success.
  65. Wrestle
    Wrestle isn’t slick or impartial, and doesn’t claim to be, yet the movie has a raw honesty that disdains forced uplift.
  66. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
    Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is an American comedy of the sort of vitality that dazzles European film critics and we take for granted. It's full of attachments and associations to very particular times and places, even in the various regional accents of its characters. It's beautifully written (by Robert Getchell) and acted, but it's not especially neatly tailored. [29 Jan 1975]
  67. Cold War
    The movie is filled with ordinary and surprising beauty, with gleaming and richly textured surfaces, and the kind of velvety black chiaroscuro you can get lost in. Its greatest strengths, though, are its two knockout leads, who give the story its heat, its flesh and its heartbreak.
  68. The King of Comedy
    It would be difficult to describe Martin Scorsese's fine new film, The King of Comedy, as an absolute joy. It's very funny, and it ends on a high note that was, for me, both a total surprise and completely satisfying. Yet it's also bristly, sometimes manic to the edge of lunacy and, along the way, terrifying.
  69. To Live and Die in L.A.
    To Live and Die in L.A. is Mr. Friedkin at his glossiest, a great-looking, riveting movie without an iota of warmth or soul. On its own terms, it's a considerable success, though it's a film that sacrifices everything in the interests of style.
  70. 3 Faces
    An immersive, pleasurably intelligent movie, one that weds documentary naturalism and melodramatic excess with formalist rigor.
  71. Ash Is Purest White
    Enthralling.
  72. Asako I & II
    Asako proceeds from a premise that flirts with the mystic, but Hamaguchi executes it with elegantly rendered realism. (It is adapted from a 2010 novel by Tomoka Shibasaki.) The result is a picture that is simultaneously engaging and disconcerting.
  73. Donbass
    Donbass, at once brutally satirical and grimly compassionate, focuses on the subtleties and grotesqueries of human behavior. Loznitsa paints sprawling tableaus of cruelty, corruption, vulgarity and lies through a series of intimate vignettes.
  74. The Image Book
    I found it haunting, thrilling and confounding in equal measure. It is a work of ecstatic despair, an argument for the futility of human effort that almost refutes itself through the application of a grumpy and tenacious artistic will.
  75. Sorry Angel
    It took a while for this digressive movie to get its hooks in me, but once it did, Sorry Angel didn’t let go.
  76. Woman at War
    Approaching weighty themes with a very light touch, Benedikt Erlingsson’s Woman at War is an environmental drama wrapped in whimsical comedy and tied with a bow of midlife soul-searching.
  77. Diamantino
    There are moments in which this film, written and directed by Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt, feels like an early Adam Sandler comedy remixed by Pier Paolo Pasolini.
  78. Who We Are Now
    Superbly acted and confidently shot, Who We Are Now delivers substantial dramatic pleasures while posing pertinent questions.
  79. The Last Picture Show
    Peter Bogdanovich's fine second film, The Last Picture Show, adapted from Larry McMurtry's novel by McMurtry and Bogdanovich, has the effect of a lovely, leisurely, horizontal pan-shot across the life of Anarene, Tex., a small, shabby town on a plain so flat that to raise the eye even 10 degrees would be to see only an endless sky.
  80. The Sisters Brothers
    Despite Mr. Audiard’s embrace of contemporary norms that would have been out of place in a Wayne western — the amusingly deployed coarse language, the shots to the head and sprays of blood — he isn’t attempting to rewrite genre in The Sisters Brothers, which is one of this movie’s virtues, along with its terrific actors and his sensitive direction of them.
  81. On Golden Pond
    Mr. Fonda gives one of the great performances of his long, truly distinguished career. Here is film acting of the highest order, the kind that is not discovered overnight in the laboratory, but seems to be the distillation of hundreds of performances.
  82. Sunday's Illness
    The often-tense mother-daughter dance of recrimination and forgiveness is spectacularly acted.
  83. We the Animals
    Fragile yet resilient, We the Animals has an elemental quality that’s hugely endearing, using air and water and the deep, damp earth to fashion a dreamworld where big changes occur in small, sometimes symbolic ways.
  84. A Perfect World
    A deeply felt, deceptively simple film that marks the high point of Mr. Eastwood's directing career thus far.
  85. In the Heights
    It’s a piece of mainstream American entertainment in the best sense — an assertion of impatience and faith, a celebration of communal ties and individual gumption, a testimony to the power of art to turn struggles into the stuff of dreams.
  86. A Star Is Born
    The original beauty. Not as glittery as Garland-Mason but in some ways even more golden.
  87. Peterloo
    Leigh’s narrative is touched by the literary spirit of the later 19th century. Peterloo has the sweep of Tolstoy and the bustle of Dickens.
  88. Bisbee '17
    Even though Bisbee ’17 depicts a wholesome and harmonious community undertaking, it is a profoundly haunted and haunting film. What we are witnessing is not the commemoration of a past disaster but its reanimation. Every important thing this movie is about is still alive.
  89. Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda
    The creative process is notoriously difficult to capture on camera, but by the end of this documentary, you will feel as if you not only understand Mr. Sakamoto intellectually, but also share a sense of the excitement he feels when discovering just the right match of sounds.
  90. The Citizen
    The film, directed by Roland Vranik from a script by Mr. Vranik and Ivan Szabo, is a careful, compassionate and beautifully acted character drama with a social conscience.
  91. The Other Side of Everything
    Engrossing despite its daunting scope and tangled politics, The Other Side of Everything offers an uncommon opportunity to view the shifting borders and identities of an entire region through the eyes of the Eastern European intellectuals caught in the turmoil.
  92. Mirai
    Fluctuating between the minor daily occurrences of Kun’s life and his touching sojourns into the past and the future, Hosoda’s film privileges moments of emotion over belabored story mechanics. Thus, it gathers complexity without sacrificing any of its guileless modesty.
  93. A Crooked Somebody
    Often uncomfortable and all the better for it, A Crooked Somebody doesn’t mind watching its characters squirm a little. That’s tough for them but good for us in this highly enjoyable thriller.
  94. The Verdict
    A solidly old-fashioned courtroom drama such as The Verdict could have gotten by with a serious, measured performance from its leading man, or it could have worked well with a dazzling movie-star turn. The fact that Paul Newman delivers both makes a clever, suspenseful, entertaining movie even better.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Touch of Evil
    Mr. Welles' is an obvious but brilliant bag of tricks. Using a superlative camera (manned by Russell Metty) like a black-snake whip, he lashes the action right into the spectator's eye. [22 May 1958, p.25]
  96. Sicilian Ghost Story
    This beautifully realized movie casts a sensitive, secretive spell.
  97. Vox Lux
    Vox Lux is an audacious story about a survivor who becomes a star, and a deeply satisfying, narratively ambitious jolt of a movie.
  98. Monrovia, Indiana
    While there’s no reason to suppose that this is Wiseman’s last movie, it doesn’t seem impossible that, at 88, he is aware of lengthening shadows and autumnal tints, of the fragility of perception and the finite nature of consciousness. Monrovia, Indiana is not precisely about any of those things, but it carries intimations of them, elegiac strains amid the doggerel of daily life.
  99. The Fabulous Baker Boys
    It's a film specializing in smoky, down-at-the-heels glamour, and in the kind of smart, slangy dialogue that sounds right without necessarily having much to say.
  100. A Private War
    Anchored by Rosamund Pike’s powerhouse lead performance, this restive, raw movie slowly accumulates the heft to render its flaws irrelevant.
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