The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,271 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 20271
  2. Mixed: 8,430 out of 20271
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20271
20271 movie reviews
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  1. Lost Illusions
    Giannoli illuminates the dank frenzy of the 19th-century attention economy with an eye on our own post-truth era. Lost Illusions is sensational. Nobody paid me to say that. Well, actually, The New York Times did, but you should believe me anyway.
  2. Menashe
    For sure, this funny and tender film prompts cheerful smiles, but sometimes they turn melancholy.
  3. District 9
    In the best B-movie tradition, the filmmakers embed their ideas in an ingenious, propulsive and suspenseful genre entertainment, one that respects your intelligence even as it makes your eyes pop (and, once in a while, your stomach turn).
  4. The World
    Loosely constructed, The World drifts along pleasantly for much of its two-and-a-half-hour running time. Mr. Jia has a terrific eye and an almost sculptural sense of film space (especially in close quarters), and he brings texture and density to even the most nondescript rooms.
  5. Picnic at Hanging Rock
    The result is a movie that is both spooky and sexy.
  6. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
    The fluidity and convenience of digital moviemaking tools explain some of its freshness, as does Ms. Klayman's history as a budding documentarian. It's clear from watching both the feature and its earlier iterations that, while she was learning about Mr. Ai, she was also learning how to tell a visual story. It's easy to think that hanging around Mr. Ai, a brilliant Conceptual artist and an equally great mass-media interpolater, played a part in her education.
  7. Nitram
    The killings themselves may remain off-camera, but the movie is still an uncomfortable watch. In Jones’s smoldering performance, we see a man stretched beyond his limits, a rubber band just waiting to snap back.
  8. 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.
  9. The Night of the 12th
    This is a refreshingly grounded, deceptively plain picture of crime-fighting as a grind of false leads, workplace fatigue and no closure.
  10. The Nest
    If Durkin’s writing doesn’t always match his formal flair, The Nest has a bracing economy, cramming a lot into tight quarters.
  11. 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.
  12. Right Now, Wrong Then
    Contemplating both tales in succession can induce a far from unpleasant sense of vertigo, a feeling of standing at the edge of an abyss of wide-open philosophical questions and deep psychological mysteries.
  13. For They Know Not What They Do
    Its success comes from interrogating the cultural assumption that there is no space for a range of sexual orientations and gender identities within religious communities.
  14. Sabbath Queen
    [A] fascinating look at the act of questioning yourself and your family, your surroundings and your decisions.
  15. Ford v Ferrari
    Ford v Ferrari is no masterpiece, but it is — to invoke a currently simmering debate — real cinema, the kind of solid, satisfying, nonpandering movie that can seem endangered nowadays.
  16. Bad Education
    Bad Education is a voluptuous experience that invites you to gorge on its beauty and vitality, although it has perhaps the darkest ending of any of the films by the Spanish writer and director.
  17. The Voice of Hind Rajab
    As wrenching as The Voice of Hind Rajab is, there is something uneasy-making about turning a child’s harrowing cries for help into a pretext for metacinematic flourishes. Hind’s story does not need that kind of intellectualized gimmickry, in which recordings of authentic terror serve as proof of the staging’s verisimilitude.
  18. The Mitchells vs. The Machines
    The Mitchells vs. the Machines not only has laughably eccentric characters but also a script packed with bonkers, fast-paced action — with elaborate, wild visuals to match.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bullitt
    A terrific movie, just right for Steve McQueen—fast, well acted, written the way people talk.
  20. The Chambermaid
    The film’s style is austere — there are few camera movements and no musical score — but its visual wit and emotional sensitivity lift it above the minimalist miserablism that drags down so many well-meaning films about modern workers. After you’ve seen it, the world looks different.
  21. Silver Linings Playbook
    For all its high-flying zaniness the movie has the sting of life, and its humor feels dredged up from the same dark, boggy place from which Samuel Beckett extracted his yuks.
  22. 12 Days
    [A] lucid, focused and adamant documentary.
  23. A Self-Made Hero
    But this miracle of self-invention has more virtue in the abstract than it does on screen.
  24. Mistress Dispeller
    Lo’s construction of each person’s story grants them dignity and compassion. And their agreement at the end speaks volumes about what they saw in the film, too.
  25. Buena Vista Social Club
    The concert scenes find the stage awash in such intense joy, camaraderie and nationalist pride that you become convinced that making music is a key to longevity and spiritual well-being.
  26. Norte, the End of History
    It is the work of a director as fascinated by decency as by ugliness, and able to present the chaos of life in a series of pictures that are at once luminously clear and endlessly mysterious.
  27. Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
    On a deeper level, Shoot Me is an unflinchingly honest examination of a woman who is aware that the end is approaching.
  28. Huesera: The Bone Woman
    "Huesera" is the type of staggering supernatural nightmare that is as transfixing as it is terrifying.
  29. Waiting for 'Superman'
    By showing how fiercely dedicated idealists are making a difference, it is a call to arms.
  30. Rimini
    We know there’s great tragedy and ugliness behind the smoke and mirrors, but we watch in amusement nonetheless. Sinisterly, Seidl reminds us how easy it is to turn people into objects for the taking.
  31. Ray & Liz
    Performed with absolute commitment by its cast (Justin Salinger and Ella Smith play the younger versions of the title characters), Ray & Liz is a quietly harrowing movie. Billingham risks tedium, though, in withholding anything like an inner life for any of its characters until the movie’s very end.
  32. A Thousand and One
    In A Thousand and One, [Rockwell] packs a great deal into her filmmaking, which bristles with looks, gestures, bodies in breakneck motion and expressionistic jolts of color that — like Gary Gunn’s gorgeous score — complicate and deepen the outwardly simple story.
  33. 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.
  34. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
    DaCosta’s talents as a director are a terrific, confident match for this material.
  35. Encounters at the End of the World
    Like many of Mr. Herzog's movies, fiction and nonfiction, Encounters at the End of the World itself has the quality of a dream: it's at once vivid and vague, easy to grasp and somehow beyond reach.
  36. The Turin Horse
    The movie is too beautiful to be described as an ordeal, but it is sufficiently intense and unyielding that when it is over, you may feel, along with awe, a measure of relief. Which may sound like a reason to stay away, but is exactly the opposite.
  37. The King of Escape
    The King of Escape is more loosely put together than “Stranger,” and, considering what happens, it’s relatively underplayed.
  38. The Proposal
    Detailing at once an art project and a rescue mission, a love triangle and an elaborate, outlandish bargain, the movie has a surface serenity that belies its fuming emotions.
  39. Unrest
    It powerfully insists on giving a voice to victims whose greatest challenge, apart from their symptoms, is surmounting a world of indifference.
  40. Western Stars
    The energy here is controlled, the mood reflective. These character-driven songs are populated by the washed-up and the run-down — an aging actor, a hitchhiker — and the shared themes are remembrance and regret.
  41. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire
    A respectful portrait of General Dallaire, now retired, who comes across as a thoughtful, resolute but profoundly shaken man, more philosopher than warrior.
  42. When I Walk
    Astonishingly, this is neither as depressing nor as arm-twistingly uplifting as you might expect. Mr. DaSilva’s experience behind a camera shows in his brisk pacing, clear narrative structure and the awareness that a story of sickness needs lighthearted distractions.
  43. Waves
    All of Shults’s stylistic brio and formal inventiveness is finally in the service of a story about love, its mutability and fragility.
  44. The Martian
    Mr. Damon’s Everyman quality (he’s our Jimmy Stewart) helps scale the story down, but what makes this epic personal is Mr. Scott’s filmmaking, in which every soaring aerial shot of the red planet is answered by the intimate landscape of a face.
  45. The Last Temptation of Christ
    despite such maladroit moments, The Last Temptation of Christ finally exerts enormous power. What emerges most memorably is its sense of absolute conviction, never more palpable than in the final fantasy sequence that removes Jesus from the cross and creates for him the life of an ordinary man.
  46. Neon Bull
    Neon Bull is a profound reflection on the intersection of the human and bestial.
  47. Nowhere Special
    The mostly low-key mode of Nowhere Special is the right one. Norton is spectacular, but little Lamont delivers one of those uncanny performances that doesn’t seem like acting, and makes you feel for the kid almost as much as his onscreen parent does.
  48. Preparation for the Next Life
    Preparation for the Next Life is all the more potent for choosing naturalism over melodrama and sensitivity over sentiment.
  49. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
    What really makes Wake Up Dead Man work is that Father Jud and Benoit Blanc are two peas in a pod, when it comes right down to brass tacks.
  50. Tom Dowd & the Language of Music
    The man who emerges is a likable, unpretentious musical enthusiast and roll-up-your-sleeves problem-solver who apparently led a charmed life.
  51. Ridicule
    As written by Remi Waterhouse, who draws on real historical detail here, Ridicule satirizes this world of absurd protocol while it proves that skewering fatuousness and snobbery, however obviously, is never out of style.
  52. Wendy and Lucy
    What will happen to her? The strength of this short, simple, perfect story of a young woman and her dog is that this does not seem, by the end, to be an idle or trivial question. What happens to Wendy -- and to Lucy -- matters a lot, which is to say that Wendy and Lucy, for all its modesty, matters a lot too.
  53. Young Mothers
    Because of the ensemble structure, each tale is interrupted by another, so “Young Mothers” lacks some of the suspense that powers many of the Dardennes’ other films. Yet that slower pace allows a tenderness to develop, and the tension between the girls’ youth and newfound maternal instincts to emerge.
  54. The Testament of Ann Lee
    That it may not be to everyone’s taste, or to yours, feels almost besides the point. When an artist takes a swing this colossal and stays true to their vision in every way, the resulting work deserves respect, and is always worth seeing.
  55. Salesman
    It’s such a fine, pure picture of a small section of American life that I can’t imagine its ever seeming irrelevant, either as a social document or as one of the best examples of what’s called cinema verite or direct cinema.
  56. X
    X is a clever and exuberant throwback to a less innocent time, when movies could be naughty, disreputable and idiosyncratic.
  57. The Sparks Brothers
    The Sparks Brothers, an energetic documentary directed by Edgar Wright, explains their appeal in part by emphasizing how it cannot be explained.
  58. Uppercase Print
    The film, a rousing, form-bending new feature by the Romanian auteur Radu Jude, rails at the tyrannical potential of language — particularly when backed by government power — to suffocate people’s freedoms.
  59. Little Girl
    [A] disarmingly sensitive documentary.
  60. The Wrestler
    Like its hero, the movie has a blunt, exuberant honesty, pulling off even its false moves with conviction and flair.
  61. The Hours
    Ms. Kidman, in a performance of astounding bravery, evokes the savage inner war waged by a brilliant mind against a system of faulty wiring that transmits a searing, crazy static into her brain.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sounder
    And if Sounder, an intelligent enough movie, avoids all the major pitfalls of its type, it also lacks the excitement that may have come from plumbing greater depths and discovering a few tougher, less accessible insights.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Bang the Drum Slowly
    A simply marvelous cinematic experience.
  64. The Roaring Twenties
    With a commentator's voice interpolating ultra-dramatic commonplaces as the film unreels, their melodrama has taken on an annoying pretentiousness which neither the theme nor its treatment can justify.
  65. Knock Down the House
    Exuberant.
  66. The Train
    It is a vivid melodrama through which Mr. Lancaster bolts with all that straight, strong, American sporting instinct and physical agility for which he is famous.
  67. Junebug
    Junebug envelops us in texture of a world the movies rarely visit.
  68. Dinner in America
    There is, perhaps, an argument to be made for representing a time and place truthfully, but because the film does not critically engage with the uglier elements of the society it portrays, these become a distraction. And a viewer might find it difficult to get sucked into the love and music story at its center.
  69. Café Lumière
    Café Lumière stands in relation to "Tokyo Story" as a faint, diminished echo. It is nonetheless a fascinating curiosity, a chance to witness one major filmmaker paying tribute to another in the form of a rigorously minor film.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Footlight Parade
    It is not until Footlight Parade has been struggling through its plot for more than an hour that the fragments of song, costumed nymphs and technical virtuosity are finally integrated in a complete performance.
  71. Coup 53
    Is Coup 53 trustworthy in every respect? Perhaps not. Both as a detective story and as a deep dive into a world event whose consequences linger, it is bracing, absorbing filmmaking.
  72. 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.
  73. Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles
    Some shows deserve reverential treatment. And the love letter is, to use a word so associated with this show it influences the way many say it, tradition.
  74. Bad Press
    Landsberry-Baker and Peeler could linger more on details about the people involved instead of the horse-race suspense of vote counts. But who can blame them when freedom is in the balance, and as local media outlets dwindle nationally.
  75. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
    The self-reflexiveness of the entire enterprise only breaks the spell that Slate and Camp work hard to maintain — one which Rossellini effortlessly keeps intact with intelligence, beautifully controlled phrasing and a soft, melodious warmth that feels like a tender caress.
  76. Promises
    Demonstrates the unusual power of thoughtful, subjective filmmaking.
  77. The Secret in Their Eyes
    An attractive, messy drama riddled with violence and edged with comedy that comes with a hint of Grand Guignol, a suggestion of politics and three resonant, deeply appealing performances.
  78. King Coal
    In this melancholic, thoughtfully attuned cinematic essay, no mountain is more important than the people who are still confined to the claustrophobic tunnels of the past.
  79. Good Time
    Sometimes it flaunts its clichés...and other times it cloaks them in rough visual textures and jumpy, bumpy camera movements, so that a rickety genre thrill ride feels like something daring and new. It isn’t. It’s stale, empty and cold.
  80. Food, Inc.
    Time and again the movie stops short before it really gets started, as with the debates over the big business of organic food.
  81. Tony Takitani
    A delicate wisp of a film with a surprisingly sharp sting.
  82. Everlasting Moments
    The result is an experience that, even as it feels a bit familiar, is nonetheless engrossing and satisfying.
  83. The Secret World of Arrietty
    What the studio does, brilliantly, is preserve a hand-drawn look and feel in its work, as in the exteriors in The Secret World, where the characters pop against a painterly meadow.
  84. Forbidden Planet
    If you've got an ounce of taste for crazy humor, you'll have a barrel of fun.
  85. The Mastermind
    Like the overall movie, the character opens up incrementally to quiet, meaningful effect.
  86. We Come as Friends
    With an eye for landscapes stunning and hellish, [Mr. Sauper] is the rare documentary filmmaker who not only takes on tough subjects but also explores them with a vivid visual and aural approach.
  87. The Wound
    Mr. Trengove shoots the film in intimate wide-screen, getting in close to the performers as their characters tamp down explosive feelings, often letting the spectacular landscapes behind them break down into soft-focus abstractions. His direction is perfectly judged up to and including the shudder-inducing ending.
  88. Prince of the City
    Prince of the City begins with the strength and confidence of a great film, and ends merely as a good one. The achievement isn't what it first promises to be, but it's exciting and impressive all the same.
  89. Perfect Days
    Pay attention to the shadows in Perfect Days. Pay attention also to the trees, to the ways Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) looks at them. They’re as much a character in the story as he is.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Gay Divorcee
    Like the carefree team of Rogers and Astaire, The Gay Divorcee is gay in its mood and smart in its approach.
  91. Four Daughters
    The re-enactments map out the family’s tension and lay bare their wounds, but the lost daughters remain cyphers — the appeal of radicalization frustratingly murky through the end.
  92. Central Station
    There's plenty of room for sentimentality here, but the wonder of Salles' film is all in the telling.
  93. The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till
    Because federal indictments for conspiracy to murder have yet to be handed down, the documentary is necessarily discreet about naming names and detailing its evidence. A sequel would go a long way toward solving the documentary's many unanswered questions.
  94. Household Saints
    Household Saints, a warmhearted fable spiced with magic realism and zesty performances, may be the most endearing of multigenerational Italian American family sagas and is likely the most mystical.
  95. Passages
    The misery unfurls in a straight timeline of dramatic scenes that leap over the lived-in moments that make up a relationship.
  96. The Queen of Versailles
    Schadenfreude and disgust may be unavoidable, but to withhold all sympathy from the Siegels is to deny their humanity and shortchange your own. Marvel at the ornate frame, mock the vulgarity of the images if you want, but let's not kid ourselves. If this film is a portrait, it is also a mirror.
  97. Theeb
    In Jacir Eid’s extraordinary performance, Theeb exhibits the composure, bravery and cunning of a little savage driven by animal instinct.
  98. Incendies
    Mr. Villeneuve tells Nawal's story in a way that is both subtle and emphatic, and Ms. Azabal, portraying Nawal from hopeful youth to despairing middle age, gives a performance that is all the more powerful for the restrained, unshakeable sense of dignity she brings to it.
  99. The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
    In Ms. Irving's affectionate film, Mr. Bittner is more of a sage than a deadbeat.
  100. The Color of Paradise
    Leans a bit too much toward the lachrymose and has a wrong-note final image.
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