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. Voyagers
    This dull dig into human nature owes more to the aesthetics of Calvin Klein than the terrors of outer space.
  2. Desperate Hours
    What has been lost is more than Bogart's gritty presence.
  3. Baggio: The Divine Ponytail
    It’s possible that Baggio: The Divine Ponytail will resonate with soccer fans. But the protagonist’s reputed greatness has not made it to the screen.
  4. Freejack
    The film's frequently dark, grimy look and such digressions as a demonstration of how to eat river rat will appeal chiefly to those who like their science fiction on the squalid side.
  5. Fat Man and Little Boy
    Fat Man and Little Boy is so confused, so stunningly ineffective, that General Groves's hawkish statements are more persuasive than the dove-ish apprehensions expressed by the scientists. Even the sight of a scientist dying horribly of radiation poisoning fails to be moving.
  6. The Unholy
    Playing the evil entity with convulsive movements and a killer manicure, the contortionist Marina Mazepa turns in the movie’s most entertaining performance. That’s if you don’t count Morgan looking genuinely baffled as to what he’s doing here at all.
  7. Split Second
    Within the genre of supernatural thrillers, Split Second is fairly dull. Mr. Hauer's Stone is an expressionless, unsympathetic lug who grunts his lines in a near monotone that sometimes becomes unintelligble in the movie's muffled soundtrack. The film is so desperate to create tingles that poor Miss Cattrall has to endure two protracted nude scenes -- one in a shower, the other in a bathtub -- in which she is menaced. Neither is especially spine-tingling.
  8. Moby Doc
    What Moby leaves out of his account is as revealing as the tales of homelessness and addiction he puts in.
  9. Why Did You Kill Me?
    Just because a crime is true doesn’t mean it’s interesting. And as Why Did You Kill Me? makes clear, without substance, a dash of style won’t do.
  10. Under the Stadium Lights
    Some sports movies build to inspirational speeches; Under the Stadium Lights treats platitudes as the main event.
  11. Naked Singularity
    This convoluted clash of competing interests, though, is so poorly explained it’s as arduous to untangle as it is to enjoy.
  12. 12 Mighty Orphans
    12 Mighty Orphans is a plodding football drama in which the characters talk to one another like folksy social workers.
  13. Fire Birds
    Fire Birds has one director (David Green), two writers (Nick Thiel and Paul F. Edwards) and many laughs, all of them unintentional.
  14. Taking Care of Business
    This is the old, old trading places gag, and while a good idea can always be reinvented, invention is precisely what Taking Care of Business lacks.
  15. Edge of the World
    Edge of the World plugs its narrative gaps with corn and cliché.
  16. Blue Miracle
    Gratingly sentimental and simplistic, Julio Quintana’s Blue Miracle, set in Cabo San Lucas in 2014, turns a potentially compelling underdog tale into a sermon. But if you’re in the mood to see Dennis Quaid learning and growing — and engaging in sappy conversations about fatherhood — then step right up.
  17. The Ice Road
    As any Neeson watcher will tell you, you don’t mess with his action characters once their dander is up. Sadly, Neeson’s dander is no match for a hackneyed plot, poorly visualized stunts and characters whose behavior can defy common sense.
  18. Harry & Son
    A big-screen blowup of the sort of "I love you, Pop" television play that littered the small screen 25 years ago.
  19. The God Committee
    A natural ham, Grammer only amplifies what is grandiose and bogus in this material.
  20. The Misfits
    For the first 20 minutes or so — a blitz of eye candy and ear worms — its breezy action and the performers’ good cheer are enough to entertain. Too soon, though, the movie drifts into narrative doldrums that derail its momentum and drain the cast’s energy.
  21. Don't Breathe 2
    Don’t Breathe 2 is plenty lively, full of violence and action, but a rancid narrative (and some seriously terrible dialogue) overpowers the script.
  22. Megaforce
    Mr. Needham's secret weapon is Mr. Reynolds, and Mr. Reynolds isn't here. Without his overriding friendliness and humor on hand, there is too much opportunity to notice the weak spots in Mr. Needham's direction.
  23. Lansky
    The heart of this movie, directed by Eytan Rockaway, is the relationship between the writer and his subject. So it’s dismaying when Lansky turns out to include flashbacks, with John Magaro (“First Cow”) playing a much flatter version of the mobster as a young man.
  24. Chasing Wonders
    In spite of its tidy running time, Chasing Wonders is diffuse and often limp.
  25. Kate
    The movie presents an eye-catching fantasy of a candy-colored Japanese underworld. But the exoticism feels as cheap as a whiff of a green tea and musk cologne called Tokyo wafting over a department store counter. Even Winstead, stoic in her fashionably boyish haircut, looks bored.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Two-Minute Warning
    The movie is a blank, in other words, until the end. And then, suddenly, a lot of people are killed very gorily; and there is a mass stampede, and the football crowd becomes a panicked, murderous mob. And even the panic lacks emotion. It has momentum—lots of feet stepping on faces—and viciousness. Nothing more.
  27. La Dosis
    La Dosis harms itself by refusing lucidity. What should be a razor’s edge rivalry plays more like a hamstrung thriller.
  28. Mama Weed
    The list of charges against this watery café au lait of a crime caper is extensive — wearisome ethnic stereotypes, cop-movie clichés, awkward pacing, a labored plot — but the chief transgression is that it wastes the time and talent of one of the supreme screen actors of our time.
  29. Die in a Gunfight
    It’s a shame that it’s all so wincingly contrived. The film tries so hard to be slick, but its efforts are both unoriginal and painfully amateurish.
  30. Settlers
    Settlers purports to challenge violence against women and colonialism. Instead, the female protagonist wallows in powerlessness for most of the movie, and a boxy robot is ultimately presented as more sympathetic than a displaced brown man.
  31. Fin
    There is little here that was not already tackled in Rob Stewart’s 2007 documentary “Sharkwater,” nor in the more recent, less artful “Seaspiracy.” Though where Stewart painstakingly explained the beauty, intelligence and importance of sharks, Roth would rather that we love these animals simply because he does.
  32. Queenpins
    Queenpins might have been a snappy little comedy had it lost 20 minutes and found a point beyond glorifying grand larceny. Erasing the lead character’s smug-perky narration wouldn’t have hurt, either.
  33. Escape from Mogadishu
    With little interest in elucidating the conflict at hand, much less in distinguishing between the various Somali parties in play, “Escape” is a wildly inadequate history lesson — it’s a silly blockbuster after all. More offensive is the film’s eagerness to whittle one nation’s traumatic episode into a setting for confectionary escapades.
  34. My Name Is Pauli Murray
    Indeed, Murray’s story is a remarkable — and extensive — one that the filmmakers stuff into an hour and a half that feels like a dull and disorganized PowerPoint lecture.
  35. The Outsider
    What’s especially peculiar about the focus on Shulan is that, in other respects, The Outsider is an ensemble piece, distributing screen time among a half a dozen people planning for the museum’s opening.
  36. Yakuza Princess
    The cynical pro forma luridness Yakuza Princess grinds out suggests that sensationalist cinema, or at least its most ostensibly mainstream iteration, is currently depleted of resources.
  37. Intrusion
    It’s an exercise in watching someone have the world’s slowest revelation.
  38. No One Gets Out Alive
    The movie has not bothered to connect its ideas.
  39. Moonfall
    This off-world adventure flirts with the transcendently goofy, but Emmerich spoils it by crosscutting to a useless narrative thread on Earth.
  40. A Mouthful of Air
    Directed by Amy Koppelman and based on her novel of the same name, A Mouthful of Air aspires to show how depression can sully even the loveliest of scenes. The scenes the movie chooses, however, play like a parody of white privilege.
  41. Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile
    "Lyle” has a brisk, whimsical momentum that is utterly infectious in the early going. Then it stops dead.
  42. Harold and the Purple Crayon
    The movie plods around awkwardly, trying to leech whatever charm it can from the remaining elements of the original.
  43. Suzanna Andler
    It’s a test of patience to watch these glass figurines discuss their romantic entanglements, the doll house on the Riviera that they will maybe rent, the bourgeois marriages they will maybe leave. Even the camera seems bored, as if it might wander off.
  44. Needle in a Timestack
    [A] sluggish, blandly slick time-travel romance.
  45. Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin
    Absent formal rigor, the “Paranormal Activity” concept doesn’t offer much else.
  46. Snakehead
    Wu plays Dai Mah with a no-frills abandon that often makes her feel like the film’s protagonist, but even her performance can’t overcome the narrative missteps.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Duelle (1976)
    The mortal defect of Jacques Rivette's Duelle is not its slow pace or mannered style or even its obscurities. It is its failure—deliberate, apparently—to cross over to its audience at any point or to inveigle its audience across to it.
  48. How to Beat the High Cost of Living
    How to Beat the High Cost of Living is a feeble house-fly of a comedy that unsuccessfully attempts to make fun of one of the more dismaying problems of our time: inflation.
  49. Agnes
    There is a clear through line of faithlessness in the script by Reece and John Selvidge, but it is otherwise so aimless and underdeveloped as to turn this 93-minute film into a plodding slog.
  50. Sooryavanshi
    Sooryavanshi is both overstuffed and paper-thin.
  51. Mr. Saturday Night
    Maggio ends his story in the early 1980s, even though Stigwood lived until 2016. He is thinking small about a man who used to dream big.
  52. The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild
    Of all the movie’s sins, [Scrat's] omission is unforgivable.
  53. Fortress
    As a distraction, Bressack and the screenwriter Alan Horsnail surround their indifferent lead with tinsel.
  54. Book of Love
    When, and in which picturesque city, Henry and María will acknowledge their mutual affection is the burning question of this romantic comedy trifle, which offers a few laughs and many more exasperated groans.
  55. Red Pill
    The main issue is the film’s trite commentary on America’s political and racial divides (see also: last year’s “The Hunt”), which is neither funny, frightening, nor provocative. Just numbing.
  56. The Royal Treatment
    The movie comes across as a deliberately, almost defensively, inane trifle; a cupcake whose icing reads, “Enjoy the tooth decay.”
    • 60 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Watermelon Man
    Watermelon Man demands complete surrender and gives absolutely nothing in return except embarrassment.
  58. Alone with You
    Unfortunately, its lesbian representation is so shoddy that its scares also suffer.
  59. Last Looks
    Kirkby does keep up a jaunty pace. But he also seems preoccupied with impressing his inner hipster, as with an attitude toward race that dares you to call it cavalier. And his again edgy music choices.
  60. Tall Girl 2
    The plot is scattershot; the drama ant-size.
  61. Tyler Perry's A Madea Homecoming
    The script has plot twists so cuckoo they make soap operas look cowardly.
  62. La Soga: Salvation
    Perez is a flimsy leading man, and the film around him — a modest production that doesn’t exactly hide its budgetary shortcomings — is at best a borderline campy B-movie with bursts of bloody action. At worst, it’s a completely self-serious slog.
  63. Big Gold Brick
    The title of this perfectly well-appointed production is apt: Big Gold Brick looks all right but it truly just sits there.
  64. Firestarter
    This movie brushes aside a lot of things — the most shocking thing about it is how soggily noncommittal it is.
  65. My Best Friend Anne Frank
    Clinging to Hannah’s naïve viewpoint and the cherished ideal of her friendship with Anne results in some hard truths being hidden away or oddly sanitized.
  66. Worst to First: The True Story of Z100 New York
    The movie’s prefab on-screen graphics are just one reason “Worst to First” has such a limp tone overall.
  67. Family Camp
    Dad humor abounds in Family Camp, a vanishingly mild comedy that resembles other films about parents and kids bumbling in the wilderness
  68. Barbarians
    “Antichrist” may have been chauvinistic in its own right, but at least was interesting to watch. Barbarians doesn’t provide much excitement at all.
  69. Gold
    The movie’s mood is unrelentingly miserable. Its cinematography, by Ross Giardina, is bleached-bone bright; its soundscape features more buzzing flies than music.
  70. Panama
    It’s mostly a lot of manic editing and caffeinated camerawork, each trying and failing to juice some excitement out of Hauser’s dull performance.
  71. On a Wing and a Prayer
    The images portray a weightless crisis, and the film’s emotional narrative feels similarly insincere, with the balance of fate seeming to sway on the placement of a well-timed prayer.
  72. White Bird
    One could argue that Forster and company calibrate their anodyne effects to make a Holocaust narrative that’s palatable for younger viewers. But what mostly resonates is a particularly lachrymose brand of show-business hedging.
  73. 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.
  74. Along for the Ride
    Such a breezy, Instagram-friendly adaptation feels like a betrayal to Dessen’s original, neurotic protagonist, who has a more difficult journey from self-induced solitude to romance.
  75. The Devil You Know
    The soft-spoken Epps is frustratingly miscast. The editing by Geofrey Hildrew and Scott Pellet limps lifelessly along, and the direction lacks the necessary pulse for a story line with more twists than a low-budget soap opera.
  76. Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King
    This sensational documentary feels bankrupt at its core.
  77. The Last Dragon
    Berry Gordy's The Last Dragon is a multimedia movie of sorts, designed for those who can't bear the monotony of only one thought or sound or activity at a time.
  78. Black Gold
    Phil Karlson's direction is clumsy. The Cine-color, in which the film is shown, is dull. And, altogether, this work from Allied Artists is as much to be pitied as panned.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Boy in Blue
    The film is a witless, tedious contrivance based on the life of the Canadian rower Ned Hanlan, who lived a century ago.
  80. The Takedown
    Even the sight of the two frenemies wiping out racist goons is not enough to make up for the desperately frantic action scenes (hope you like interminable car chases), joyless jokes and hackneyed clichés.
  81. Eiffel
    One can’t help but wonder if Eiffel is merely a lame fantasy or a particularly spineless form of mythmaking, whittling down as it does one nation’s politically loaded event to the equivalent of an Eiffel Tower key chain with an inscription reading “city of love.”
  82. Winter Meeting
    Catherine Turney, who assembled this rhetoric from a novel by Ethel Vance, should be made to sit through Winter Meeting about twenty-five or thirty times—which is the number of times you are likely to feel you've sat through it when you've seen it once.
  83. Madame Web
    The only real bummer about Madame Web, the latest installment in the Spider-Man chronicles, isn’t that it’s bad, but that it never achieves memorably terrible status. The story is absurd, the dialogue snort-out-loud risible, the fights uninspired. Even so, there are glimmers of wit and competency. And then there’s its star, Dakota Johnson, who has a fascinating, seemingly natural ability to appear wholly detached from the nonsense swirling around her.
  84. Y cómo es él?
    Though Winograd questions the film’s gender biases in the conclusion, he does so unconvincingly. At a quick 95 minutes, at least the whole thing zips by, however brainlessly.
  85. The Super Mario Bros. Movie
    While the details are meticulous, the attitude is all wrong, trading the simple, unaffected charm that has served the character so well since his introduction in 1981 for a snarky and fatuous air that leans hard on winking humor and bland, hackneyed irony.
  86. Me Time
    There is a flatness that feels apparent in every shot — and not just because the movie is filmed in bright, low contrast lighting. The film’s experienced cast punches their lines in search of jokes that never materialize, leaving the comedy to nosedive.
  87. Purple Hearts
    The film wallows in contrived plots and subplots, made worse by the dearth of chemistry between the two leads.
  88. The Invitation
    Had the movie emerged as a friskier game of eat the rich, it might have had a fighting chance of survival. Instead, it’s middling, morbid pap.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Stereo (Tile 3B of a CAEE Educational Mosaic)
    Stereo mainly proves that you can't successfully spoof psychology merely by making it dull.
  90. Triangle of Sadness
    This, in the end, is a very bad movie, executed with enough visual polish and surface cleverness to fool the Cannes jurors, something Ostlund has done twice. Shame on them! But maybe we shouldn’t be surprised.
  91. Foxhole
    The three-part scope is ambitious, but Foxhole is a film made on a very small scale.
  92. 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.
  93. Steel
    A tepid vat of cinematic sludge...O'Neal will doubtless survive this latest misadventure, as he did last year's outing as a genie in "Kazaam," but only the most devoted of his admirers will want to watch him lumber through "Steel."
  94. Ninja Badass
    The result is a 103-minute vanity project I found utterly exhausting.
  95. Final Cut
    Final Cut puts its predecessor’s ingredients through an unflattering Instagram filter. The shoot’s intentional shoddiness — authentically kitschy in the original — rings false, with Hazanavicius spelling out the crew’s missteps in such a way that flattens the humor and kills the momentum.
  96. The Last Voyage of the Demeter
    The script does find time for a feeble feminist gesture — the story’s sole woman can cock a rifle — and a monologue about racism. These efforts to update the tale are about as successful as those of the sorry crew, whose fates were written over a century ago.
  97. There Are No Saints
    The director, Ulloa, tries to mask the derivative story by embellishing the violence, cutting to closeups of flesh wounds and bullet holes as a distraction from the routine plot and hardboiled dialogue — he seems to be aiming for stark and gritty, but his tough-talking assassins, crime lords and arms dealers bring the whole thing closer to unintentional camp.
  98. My Dead Dad
    The gear-grinding tedium of the movie’s taking-responsibility scenario is occasionally broken up by not-quite-lyrical sequences of Los Angeles sunsets seen from car windows.
  99. The Walk
    The topic is, of course, timely. (When is racism not?) Yet The Walk feels dated.
  100. Cop Secret
    Familiarity might be the point, but a screenplay this coarse leaves the actors little wiggle room, reducing them to mouthpieces for recycled jokes.
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