The New York Times' Scores

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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
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  1. Sr.
    The details of how the father cleaned up, became a caregiver to his terminally ill second wife and tried to help his son are terribly moving.
  2. Tantura
    The emerging film is not simply a persuasive augmentation of Katz’s argument, but also a disturbing portrait of how very human impulses — passivity, rationalization, social pressures — can shape the writing of history.
  3. Spoiler Alert
    The film is strongest when it falls silent, allowing the actors to communicate their thoughts with a look.
  4. 2nd Chance
    Bahrani’s film (which he narrates) beetles along without fully exploiting Davis’s ample entertainment value, which is counterbalanced by accounts of his dubious actions and sometimes unseemly opinions.
  5. Scrooge: A Christmas Carol
    This update has its moments of aplomb, but too many of Dickens’s most incisive lines are no more, which invites the not entirely charitable, two-word retort Scrooge made famous.
  6. Lady Chatterley's Lover
    Magee and Clermont-Tonnerre’s adaptation emphasizes the romance of Lawrence’s book over the radicalism of his vision. This Lady Chatterley’s Lover is faithful to the novel, while also revealing how safe, how domesticated, it has become.
  7. Darby and the Dead
    As familiar as this tale of female transformation feels, there is an authentic sweetness to Darby and Capri’s fledgling friendship. Their bond resuscitates a movie that might otherwise have been dead on arrival.
  8. Four Samosas
    Unlike so many new movies that seem to be algorithmically manufactured to appeal to diverse audiences and tick the boxes of representation, Four Samosas feels organic and true as a slice of Indian American life — even if it’s all fun and games and movie magic.
  9. Return to Seoul
    Return to Seoul is a startling and uneasy wonder, a film that feels like a beautiful sketch of a tornado headed directly toward your house.
  10. Violent Night
    Adding insult to bodily injury, the director, Tommy Wirkola (“The Trip,” “Dead Snow”), and the screenwriters, Pat Casey and Josh Miller, can’t even muster any decent set pieces. Instead, the movie unfurls as a tedious series of bloody deaths and witless dialogue.
  11. The Noel Diary
    The director Charles Shyer brings a journeyman’s ease to the screenplay (based on Richard Paul Evans’s novel by the same name): embracing holiday movie expectations here, gently deflecting them there.
  12. The Corridors of Power
    As edited, Moreh’s interviews prize policy analysis and haunting candor over gotcha moments or grandstanding.
  13. The Son
    Despite its contemporary New York City setting, The Son seems to have appropriated a midcentury understanding of mental illness, and the emotion on display feels even more artificial than the rooftop vista erected outside the windows of Peter’s industrial-chic Manhattan loft.
  14. White Noise
    There is something detached about the film, a succession of moods and notions that are often quite interesting but that never entirely cohere. White Noise is an expression of sincere and admirable faith. I just wish I could believe in it.
  15. The Sound of Christmas
    The relationship between Montana and the kids is a highlight, as are some of the other secondary relationships. And though the film is as predictable and saccharine as one might expect of holiday fare, viewers who grew up in the Black church may enjoy seeing a relatable and chaste romantic story on-screen.
  16. Fantasy Football
    Hardwick and Martin have decent chemistry, but the film lacks a true charisma that would make it a children’s classic worth revisiting.
  17. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
    The movie’s bifurcated shape isn’t novel, but Poitras’s marshaling of all this information is exceptionally graceful. She has an abundance of fantastic material at her disposal — including a generous selection of Goldin’s artwork — but what makes the movie work so well is how Poitras seamlessly uses the different sections of Goldin’s life to weave a coherent portrait of the artist.
  18. Nanny
    Jusu draws fluidly from different genres and modes in “Nanny” — from scene to scene, the movie plays like an immigration drama, a lonely woman melodrama and a cruel labor farce — but at one point you realize that what you are watching looks, sounds and feels like a horror movie.
  19. The Swimmers
    The Swimmers tells this story as an inspirational (but rarely sugarcoated) crowd-pleaser. Within those terms, it hits its marks.
  20. Leonor Will Never Die
    The effect is by turns comical, maddening and endearing as Escobar reaches for more ambitious ideas about the political appeal of the authoritarian hero; but “Leonor” is finally too mired in its film-within-the-film frolics for more serious themes to gain traction.
  21. Strange World
    The takeaway is the difficulty of collaboration in the face of entrenched beliefs and ways of navigating the world that, ultimately, must be questioned — if not entirely dismantled — if any one of us expects to stick around.
  22. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
    “Glass Onion” is completely silly, but it’s not only silly. Explicitly set during the worst months of the Covid pandemic — the spring of 2020 — “Glass Onion” leans into recent history without succumbing to gloom, bitterness or howling rage, which is no small accomplishment. One way to interpret the title is that a glass onion may be sharp, and may have a lot of layers, but it won’t make you cry.
  23. Disenchanted
    Adams doesn’t gain much by returning for Disenchanted, a cluttered and noisy sequel directed by Adam Shankman from a screenplay by Brigitte Hales. Neither does the original film’s fan base.
  24. Actual People
    The low-budget nature tends to expose the film’s amateurish qualities — the attempt at a vérité feel can fall flat, particularly through the acting.
  25. The People We Hate at the Wedding
    Underneath the plentiful high jinks in its physical-comedy-heavy scenes, The People We Hate at the Wedding ends up being a poignant enough good time that celebrates imperfect yet endearing familial love.
  26. Slumberland
    Overall this remarkably glum, logy, convoluted and unengaging movie has only a vestigial relation to McCay’s work. McCay fans should beware. So should everyone else.
  27. The Wonder
    Anchored by Lelio’s intelligent filmmaking — and by Pugh’s beautifully calibrated mix of physical vigor and temperamental astringency — Lib embodies the story’s arguments, themes and power with vivid clarity. There’s no denying her or her ravenous hunger for life.
  28. EO
    No movie that I’ve seen this year has moved me as deeply, made me feel as optimistic about cinema or engaged me with such intellectual vigor as “EO,” whose octogenarian genius auteur and all the donkeys who play EO — Hola, Tako, Marietta, Ettore, Rocco and Mela — deserve all the love and the carrots, too.
  29. Master of Light
    The thesis of the movie — that art can be restorative and help overcome cyclical, systemic failures — might seem trite. But Morton’s devotion to his painting and his loved ones makes it difficult not to be moved.
  30. Bantú Mama
    It’s a quiet film that stays close to the central characters, but it could have benefited from broadening its view, giving context to some of the issues presented in the film — in particular how Blackness is perceived and experienced on the island.
  31. Mickey: The Story of a Mouse
    It’s boosterish and jam-packed, like many pop-culture documentaries (not just ones produced by Disney about Disney).
  32. Blue's Big City Adventure
    That winsome charm and gusto is infectious, as in a Central Park-set dance number with some of the Technicolor verve of an old Hollywood musical, and it manages to sustain this unflagging exuberance across its fleet 72-minute running time.
  33. Bad Axe
    This is a hermetic story, but one wishes that Siev had balanced its coziness with acuity.
  34. There There
    The writer-director, Andrew Bujalski, zeros in on the delicate dances and negotiations between the people in these two-handers, which percolate with sly humor, decency, curiosity and sheer nerve.
  35. Christmas with You
    Weather seems to exert an only intermittent influence in this insipid holiday love story, directed by Gabriela Tagliavini and set in the run-up to Christmas — at least in theory.
  36. The Inspection
    The metamorphosis that Bratton explores, and that Pope embodies — the way Ellis both changes and remains ever faithful to himself — is subtle, bittersweet and beautiful.
  37. A Christmas Story Christmas
    Mostly it made me want to watch the original, which, as always, remains well worth revisiting.
  38. The Menu
    In service to a gleefully malicious tone, Mark Mylod’s direction is cool, tight and clipped, the actors slotting neatly into characters so unsympathetic we become willing accessories to their suffering.
  39. Bones and All
    Bones and All is a ragged hybrid of genres and styles, an elevated exploitation movie, a succession of moods — anxious, horny, dreamy, sad — in search of a metaphor. Or maybe the metaphor is obvious.
  40. 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.
  41. 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.
  42. Stutz
    A film that skillfully navigates vulnerability, brainy insights and artistry.
  43. Is That Black Enough for You?!?
    An occasionally static work if also an unequivocally important and gloriously comprehensive one.
  44. Being Thunder
    The film ‌is‌ gentle ‌yet indistinct, l‌‌eaving us to discern figures through a fog.
  45. The Box
    The Venezuelan director Lorenzo Vigas’s The Box weaves some of the greatest horrors of modern Mexican life into an unsettlingly cryptic thriller.
  46. Nothing Lasts Forever
    That marketing campaigns are built on fallacies isn’t exactly revelatory, but in pairing his excavation of the diamond myth with new inquiries into how the industry is evolving (and how it’s stagnating), Kohn strikes on something valuable.
  47. The First Noelle
    It’s hard to become immersed in this aspirational alternate reality because of the movie’s pun-filled and often unbelievable dialogue, as well as lackluster performances delivered by the lead actors.
  48. Sam & Kate
    Twists of fate lose their magic when they’re obvious as clumsy script contrivances.
  49. 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.
  50. Retrograde
    The shrewdly observant film sticks with one Afghan general, Sami Sadat, to tell an emotional story that feels as significant as any analysis of troop numbers.
  51. My Father's Dragon
    It’s one part doom cloud, one part squirting prank flower — an uneasy balance that’s united only by stunning visuals which sweep the audience along even when the gags stumble.
  52. A Couple
    Even at 63 minutes, A Couple is not an easy sit. It took me three viewings before I was able to become absorbed in it — to settle into the rhythms of Boutefeu’s performance, to find the monologues less monotonous, to admire the beauty of the garden that Wiseman uses so calmingly to counterpoint the anger of Sophia’s words.
  53. The Fabelmans
    The Fabelmans is, as the title says, somewhat of a fable and wonderful in both large and small ways, even if Spielberg can’t help but soften the rougher, potentially lacerating edges. It’s what he does; it’s also what the audience expects of him, and he’s nothing if not obliging.
  54. Spirited
    The combination of this fine-tuned spectacle with the ineffectual vocals of the main duo — and distractingly uncanny visuals and special effects — transforms Spirited into a disjointed movie musical with all the superficial trappings of a Broadway flop.
  55. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
    A Marvel movie, for sure. But a pretty interesting one, partly because it’s also a Ryan Coogler film, with the director’s signature interplay of genre touchstones, vivid emotions (emphasized by Ludwig Goransson’s occasionally tooth-rattling score) and allegorical implications.
  56. Falling for Christmas
    If this is the standard we’re dealing with, I’d rather have amnesia.
  57. Incredible But True
    Coming in at a tight and talky 74 minutes, Incredible but True is a sweetly absurd time-travel comedy that coats its lunacy in a touching poignancy.
  58. The Estate
    This is a comedy that takes a vicious, over-the-top look at family greed, and fortunately, the cast members are game to play their characters’ attempts at flattery in the most unflattering manner possible.
  59. Nocebo
    This movie has plenty going for it: excellent actors (Fonacier has a knack for coiled tension), stylish camerawork by the director Lorcan Finnegan and a point to make about economic exploitation. What’s missing is any sense of surprise.
  60. Next Exit
    The actors’ chemistry feels brittle, and like many road movies it has trouble mining drama out of disparate episodes.
  61. Good Night Oppy
    By the end of Good Night Oppy, Opportunity and Spirit have become no less lovable as characters than R2-D2 or Wall-E. It’s tough not to feel for their loss.
  62. Meet Me in the Bathroom
    There are revealing glimpses into the early work of artists who would morph into entities that were slicker and ostensibly cooler.
  63. You Resemble Me
    The film needs more facts and fewer flourishes, but its closing turn to documentary footage, comprising brief snippets of interviews with Hasna’s family, is too little, too late.
  64. Soft & Quiet
    The brutal possibilities of the white supremacist mind-set are nothing to shy away from. Still, the film’s admittedly jarring cruelty does little beyond press down on old bruises, turning the realities of racialized violence into an immersive spectacle with the kind of real-world sadistic allure one might find in a serial-killer movie.
  65. 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.
  66. Causeway
    Causeway is both thin and heavy-handed, its plot overly diagramed and its characters inadequately fleshed out. The burden of making it credible falls disproportionately on Henry and Lawrence, superb actors who do what they can to bring the script’s static and fuzzy ideas about pain, alienation and the need for connection to something that almost resembles life.
  67. Utama
    While climate change shadows every anxious discussion here, it also remains at a safe remove, a vague threat embedded in an aesthetically soothing package and gently salted with tears.
  68. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
    Radcliffe is winningly guileless in his performance, twitching his costume-y eyebrows and mustache like gentle bunny ears even as he lip-syncs “Another One Rides the Bus” with such commitment that his neck veins nearly pop.
  69. Something in the Dirt
    Overlong and overwritten, “Dirt” nevertheless unfolds with an enjoyably comic quirkiness, a tale of two doofuses who sought meaning in symbols and found comfort in friendship.
  70. 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.
  71. Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me
    An honest portrait study of stardom and mental illness, the film offers a hopeful catharsis: How, when we reveal our hardest truths, we can heal together.
  72. Enola Holmes 2
    This time around, the director Harry Bradbeer and the screenwriter Jack Thorne forgo prolonged dialogue when Enola breaks the fourth wall, making more room for Brown’s intense looks and physical gestures to resonate.
  73. The Lair
    Lively, noisy, dark and daft, this gloopy creature feature from the British director Neil Marshall plays like a loose, if vastly inferior callback to his two best films, “Dog Soldiers” (2002) and “The Descent” (2006).
  74. Peaceful
    The film frequently dips into unintentional absurdity, yes, but it also captivates, thanks to the powers of the Gallic film-world heavyweights Benoît Magimel (playing Benjamin) and Catherine Deneuve.
  75. A Chance Encounter
    After Hal and Josie’s meet-cute, they see sights blandly, philosophize blandly, blandly tiptoe around the notion of romance, and criticize each other — yes, blandly, but with an occasional touch of “salty” language.
  76. Wendell & Wild
    The story lines feel far-flung and disconnected, and the limits and rules of this world’s magical logic are at turns underdeveloped and inconsistent. Though the movie has a delightfully raucous rock ’n’ roll sensibility, the dialogue lacks the wit and punch to match.
  77. 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.
  78. Please Baby Please
    The film’s ironic tone largely defangs the transgressive films it parodies, but Kramer does broaden the scope of the queer leather canon.
  79. Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues
    The film is a trove of Armstrong’s love of music and his labor. And because so many of those who lend their insights are now departed, it has the feel of a mausoleum worthy of a humble yet celebratory “Saints Go Marching In” second line.
  80. Call Jane
    Nagy tries to push the story beyond its cautious framing, but it’s tough going.
  81. The Novelist's Film
    A Chekhovian study in small moments and chance encounters, which is to say it is a study of human beings as they really live: ambiguously and without exposition, spontaneously and without tidy motives or resolution.
  82. Run Sweetheart Run
    Bursts of experimental style feel at odds with the movie’s core: a simplistic parable of pervasive sexism.
  83. Armageddon Time
    It is — astutely, uncomfortably and in the end tragically — about privilege.
  84. All Quiet on the Western Front
    Berger has more tools at his disposal than Milestone did with the challenges of the early sound era, yet those advantages somehow make this update less impressive: The magnification in scale and dexterity lends itself to showing off. Still, the movie aims to pummel you with ceaseless brutality, and it’s hard not to be rattled by that.
  85. The Good Nurse
    In the judgment of the film, Cullen is just a side effect of an institutional cancer.
  86. The Pez Outlaw
    Like Pez, the film is charming and colorful — and perhaps too sweet.
  87. Voodoo Macbeth
    With such a gross misinterpretation of the source material (why invent Welles onstage in blackface?) it’s fitting that the most engaging part of “Voodoo Macbeth” turns out to be the archival footage of the real-life production that plays alongside the credits.
  88. The Fire that Took Her
    In interviews, the director Patricia E. Gillespie has said that while pitching the film, people often asked whether she could cover or blur Judy’s face to shield audiences from her burns. Gillespie refused, and her resolve to train her camera on Judy gives the film an unflinching quality.
  89. 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.
  90. All That Breathes
    Neither a nature documentary nor a political lecture, All That Breathes is a subtle, haunting reflection on the meaning of humanity — on the breathtaking kindness and heartbreaking cruelty that define our wounded, intrepid, predatory species.
  91. The Banshees of Inisherin
    The Banshees of Inisherin might feel a little thin if you hold it to conventional standards of comedy or drama. It’s better thought of as a piece of village gossip, given a bit of literary polish and a handsome pastoral finish.
  92. Descendant
    If you’ve ever wondered what “holding space” looks like in practice, the director Margaret Brown’s deeply attentive documentary Descendant provides moving examples.
  93. Mama's Boy
    That the screenwriter’s mother was changed by her empathy for people different than her is an admirable value to have. But the film takes a somewhat myopic approach to Black’s reach-across-the-aisle activism philosophy, focusing primarily on his work toward marriage equality.
  94. Year One: A Political Odyssey
    The film’s skimping on economic and social issues echoes one description of Biden’s own messaging by some pundits: low-key to the point of obscuring the full picture of his efforts.
  95. 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.
  96. 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.
  97. V/H/S/99
    These revenge stories move methodically from the familiar to the monstrous. They lean into gore, excess and, critically, smirking humor. A commitment to its staticky, period-appropriate aesthetic is the only thing its artists take deadly seriously.
  98. The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile
    The movie interweaves the contemporary sessions with a very selective — and, while not wholly sanitized, certainly discreet — account of her tumultuous past. Overall it’s a better-than-competent piece of fan service and a not unpersuasive bid for an auxiliary youth audience.
  99. Matriarch
    Matriarch opens by watching a nude figure descend into a pond of black muck, but the slog that follows in this derivative, tar-flow-paced thriller from Britain is strictly for the viewer.
  100. 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.
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