The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,311 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: 9,399 out of 20311
  2. Mixed: 8,446 out of 20311
  3. Negative: 2,466 out of 20311
20311 movie reviews
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  1. The Underdoggs
    The kids in the film are simply too young to make an impact, and Snoop, who is fine enough as an actor, ultimately doesn’t possess the charisma necessary to elevate a lazy script.
  2. Saltburn
    Saltburn is the sort of embarrassment you’ll put up with for 75 minutes. But not for 127. It’s too desperate, too confused, too pleased with its petty shocks to rile anything you’d recognize as genuine excitement.
  3. Unsung Hero
    Viewer beware: Between the uplift and the cringe, this movie may cause whiplash.
  4. Roller Boogie
    103 minutes is an awfully long time to watch people whiz along the boardwalk. The novelty wears off in a hurry.
  5. Rebel
    At best, this drama picks apart the Islamic State’s nefarious recruitment tactics, taking on the fresh perspective of a Muslim family in Europe. These dynamics are rich, and the consequences agonizing — so it’s too bad the filmmakers seem to think that the bigger the spectacle, the more powerfully communicated this whirlwind of politics and emotions. The opposite is the case.
  6. My Neighbor Adolf
    While the lead actors are clearly committed, the movie gives them little to do besides exchange verbal invective.
  7. Choose Love
    Predictability aside, Choose Love resembles less of a comforting rom-com than it does the forgone conclusion to streaming’s algorithm-powered media: a series of disconnected, shallow interactions, each leading to a different predetermined cliché.
  8. Portrait of the Queen
    Elements that could have made for a somewhat intriguing documentary get lost in what amounts to a tedious piece of agitprop that ultimately regurgitates the dutifully respectful picture of Elizabeth we’ve seen time and time again.
  9. Cabrini
    It’s inspiring stuff, rendered stodgy and repetitive.
  10. Boy Kills World
    The only point of this ridiculousness is to watch Skarsgard flex his sculpted arms and take a great deal of brutal punishment so that he can dole out more. Rinse, repeat.
  11. Journey to Bethlehem
    The magic of movies does depend on a certain suspension of disbelief, but “Journey” tests the viewer beyond rational credulity, even as it persists in asserting the reality of its existence.
  12. Divinity
    A misbegotten blend of the futuristic and the antiquated, “Divinity” is an unintentionally comical sci-fi diatribe obsessed with beautiful bodies, bickering brothers and biblical symbolism.
  13. High & Low: John Galliano
    The director Kevin Macdonald asks Galliano questions in “High & Low,” but the answers are largely self-serving and unsatisfying in a movie that, for the most part, plays like yet another installment in a highly publicized redemption narrative.
  14. After Death
    Whether you believe these phenomena are spiritual journeys or visions created by the human mind (or both), the film loses its sense of epiphany in the lackluster jumble of its moviemaking.
  15. The Devil on Trial
    Instead of challenging assumptions, exploring implications or discussing the difficult questions here, Holt merely mines the material for superficial shock value and lurid titillation.
  16. Family Switch
    The real nail in the coffin is the film’s messaging about the power of family, which is about as tacked-on and stilted as they come — hardly a shock in light of the rest of the Netflix holiday movie lineup.
  17. Genie
    The holiday themes feel arbitrary and tacked on; one guesses the script was rescued from Curtis’s bottom drawer and spruced up with some Christmas fairy dust. The story, finally, is only about a man who learns the true meaning of punctuality.
  18. Miller's Girl
    A work of glaring artifice, Miller’s Girl, written and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett, is being touted as a psychological thriller, but it’s too vapid and silly to do much besides titillate.
  19. He Went That Way
    Few things in this laboriously quirky picture mesh at all.
  20. Spaceman
    Spaceman is neither particularly astute about human nature nor discernibly interested in the politics embedded in it, and it is not even meme-ably bad, which is a shame. So much wasted potential.
  21. The Strangers: Chapter 1
    The hapless script — written by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland and based on the original — offers nothing fresh in a tiring 91 minutes, and nothing daring to justify a new “Strangers” film, let alone a new series, especially when Bertino’s formidable film is streaming on Max.
  22. The Strangers: Chapter 2
    With little furtherance of the plot beyond confusing flashbacks to a creepy childhood triad, “Chapter 2” is hackneyed and silly, relying heavily on Petsch’s sneakily resilient scream queen.
  23. Joker: Folie à Deux
    Joker: Folie à Deux is such a dour, unpleasant slog that it is hard to know why it was made or for whom.
  24. It's What's Inside
    Even the twists feel obvious and not all that interesting, more the fulfillment of plot points seeded early on rather than startling turns of fortune.
  25. Mother of the Bride
    Mother of the Bride is directed by Mark Waters (“Mean Girls”) with an apparent allergy to verisimilitude.
  26. The Union
    The gimmick is that The Union, in addition to being an action film, is also a sort of comedy of remarriage for Roxanne and Mike, except that the screenwriters, Joe Barton and David Guggenheim, haven’t brought much in the way of levity to the relationship. Nor have they applied much ingenuity to the big set pieces.
  27. Incoming
    Its story of high school freshmen navigating a libertine house party follows exactly the trajectory you would expect, with few laughs and even fewer surprises.
  28. Lonely Planet
    For this to work, the relationship needs a certain element of inevitability and comfort. Theirs is stilted.
  29. Meet Me Next Christmas
    In recent years Netflix has become a factory for B-rate Christmas movies, with the occasional cheap comfort to be found in its manufactured holiday romances. This bizarre concoction, not so much.
  30. Uglies
    McG has concocted a fantastical, glossily repellent digital landscape that glows with neon and constant fireworks, causing the film to feel at once too sincere and too artificial.
  31. Michael
    Here, what we are left with is a string of musical set pieces, like a greatest hits album, performed ably by the stars — in his debut role, Jaafar Jackson dances like he is possessed by his uncle’s talent — but strung together in repetitive false-note ways that are insulting both to audience and subject.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Finian's Rainbow
    The cast is full of children who act as artificially and insincerely as the whole enterprise, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, would suggest.
  33. Becoming King
    Becoming King exhibits the kind of self-importance that ultimately diminishes the subject, be it Dr. King or Oyelowo.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    He Knows You're Alone
    He Knows You're Alone is the latest in a ghouls' parade of cheaply made horror movies by young and unknown film makers. It is the first theatrical film for the 30-year-old director, Armand Mastroianni, who is said to be a cousin of the film star, and it shows in uncertain pacing, halting performances and innumerable technical flaws. [26 Sep 1980, p.6]
    • The New York Times
  35. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
    There’s a flat empty nothingness to The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, even more than its flat empty predecessor, and that’s a huge bummer.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Boston Strangler
    THE BOSTON STRANGLER represents an incredible collapse of taste, judgment, decency, prose, insight, journalism and movie technique, and yet—through certain prurient options that it does not take—it is not quite the popular exploitation film that one might think. It is as though someone had gone out to do a serious piece of reporting and come up with 4,000 clippings from a sensationalist tabloid.
  37. Love Hurts
    At 83 minutes, Love Hurts falls somewhere between making a virtue of brevity and wheezing its way to the finish line.
  38. Savage Hunt of King Stakh
    The story it tells, of 19th-century ghosts and scoundrels in Byelorussia, is potentially of some interest. But the tale is presented in a drab and confusing fashion by film makers with only the faintest command of their craft.
  39. Car 54, Where Are You?
    Though it has a potentially funny cast, this sprawling comedy has been made in a near-total wit vacuum.
  40. Mackenna's Gold
    The structure of the movie is so loose that a narrator (Victor Jory) must be employed from time to time to explain the plot, as if it were a serial. Most surprising in a movie that obviously cost a good deal of money is the sloppy matching of exterior and studio photography with miniature work for special effects.
  41. The Tarnished Angels
    Mr. Faulkner's faded story does have some flavor of the old barnstorming tours of the early air-circus fliers, but there is precious little of it in this film, which was badly, cheaply written by George Zuckerman and is abominably played by a hand-picked cast.
  42. The Ritual
    Topping it all off is a deliberately shaky and agitated shooting and cutting style that heightens nothing. Just watch “The Exorcist” again.
  43. Flight Risk
    Where Flight Risk fails as a film is not really Gibson’s fault. He knows how to shoot action sequences. The screenplay is instead all over the place, in a way that feels tired and halfhearted.
  44. Longing
    Plausibility complaints always feel cheap, but Longing strains credulity well past the breaking point.
  45. Inheritance
    It’s underbaked and baffling to watch, with little tension or interest to pull us through.
  46. Last Breath
    Last Breath is disappointingly shallow and fatally lethargic.
  47. 1992
    The look is drab, the action is barely coherent.
  48. Shelby Oaks
    A derivative and dogged horror movie that reverts to rote with wearying regularity.
  49. The Food of the Gods
    There's very little excitement, but quite a few laughs, all provided by the dialogue contributed by Bert I. Gordon, who wrote the screenplay and then produced and directed it.
  50. Rabbit Test
    Miss Rivers's jokes mostly have to do with racial stereotypes and the essential revoltingness of pregnancy, but a few of them are funny just the same. However, as a director, Miss Rivers is forever sandbagging her own scenes, throwing away a good chuckle in a sequence that desperately needs a punch line, or wasting something fairly subtle right after a broad, dopey joke about a urine sample.
  51. The Greatest Surf Movie in the Universe
    A spectacularly inane comedy.
  52. Riff Raff
    Harris and Murray are such reliably engaging screen presences that they provide a few glimmers of entertainment, provided you’re able to set aside the movie’s practically all-encompassing repulsiveness.
  53. The Egg and I
    The nearest this watered-down rewrite gets to the solid soil is the dirt on the farm sets constructed on a studio soundstage. And the nearest it comes to realizing any of the diary's observation and wit is in a few farcified re-creations of some of its milder episodes.
  54. Killer Heat
    The twists and pedestrian dramatics are a stiff slog to get to, and Gordon-Levitt’s once innate charisma has vanished altogether here.
  55. The Man in the White Van
    While Wolfe is an engaging screen presence, the movie is too clumsy and clichéd to conjure tension.
  56. Hippo
    Like a stubborn toddler zipping his mouth shut while stomping his feet, “Hippo” manages to be noisily aggravating while saying nothing at all.
  57. Heart Eyes
    It’s hard to discern who the film is for when it feels as if it’s been passed around genre writing classes in search of an identity.
  58. In the Lost Lands
    This lackluster script struggles to build a captivating story to match the allure of its expansive desert setting.
  59. Homestead
    Less a self-contained movie than a pilot for a show that already exists. The quality of the acting can only improve.
  60. Old Guy
    Beyond the stale plot and groaners that make up the dialogue, “Old Guy” suffers from haphazard pacing, as if every third scene was cut out in postproduction. Watching, one wonders who this movie is for — even within the target demographic stated in the title.
  61. Don't Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever
    This too-chummy documentary, promoted on Johnson’s website, offers the more familiar reverse sensation of having 90 minutes of your life taken from you. By the time it’s over, you will be older, a progression that if anything the movie feels like it hastens.
  62. Alarum
    Given that the finale of Michael Polish’s spies-on-the-lam thriller, Alarum, teases the unwelcome possibility of a sequel, please consider this review a mercy killing.
  63. Kinda Pregnant
    Most egregiously, the world of Kinda Pregnant is filled with dopey men and despairing women whose torments, parental or otherwise, make for a land mine of comedy duds.
  64. Scary Movie
    The only welcome and consistent source of delight is whenever Hall gets to pop up onscreen, to squeal or beam in a way that is always funny, and enough to briefly take you out of the bit she’s trapped in.
  65. Mercy
    A witless, thrill-free hodgepodge of shinily packaged action-thriller clichés.
  66. The Picture of Dorian Gray
    The whole thing... makes little or no intelligible sense.
  67. The Last Time I Saw Paris
    What is to be said of such a picture? The story is trite. The motivations are thin. The writing is glossy and pedestrian. The acting is pretty much forced.
  68. Lilly
    With a cringey inspirational tone, the movie weaves in Ledbetter’s advocacy work and court case with moments from her personal life.
  69. The Parenting
    The cast is game — especially Cox, who gets to do some over-the-top Linda Blair mugging — but the script, by a “Saturday Night Live” writer, Kent Sublette, is puerile and abrasive, lacking the wit of “Evil Dead” (an obvious influence) and the brio of “Scary Movie.”
  70. Dangerous Beauty
    No amount of gorgeous costumes and painterly chiaroscuro can endow this terminally silly film with even a patina of class.
  71. The Senior
    You can simply surrender yourself to the bland moral lessons of the movie, but even then, it’s hard not to feel like this was best left as a quirky human interest segment on a slow news day.
  72. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
    Instead of an auteur upgrading his sensibilities with a studio paycheck, “Beautiful Journey” mostly reads as a for-hire job doomed with jumbled writing.
  73. The Age of Disclosure
    Question the film and you’re a chump, it implies. But anyone who sits through its nearly two hours of unprovable claims is a chump of a different sort.
  74. This Ain't No Heartland
    In the filmmaker's nightmarish view, the heartland is a decaying citadel of ignorance, boorishness and xenophobia, smugly rotting away in the twilight of the American empire.
  75. Bride Hard
    A smorgasbord of unconvincing danger and semi-schmaltzy lessons in friendship, Bride Hard is rarely as funny as it could be.
  76. The SpongeBob Movie: Search for Squarepants
    All of its head-spinning action has a stultifying effect. At all times, the film seems afraid that it’ll lose its audience’s attention, barraging us with the mindlessly zany to hold our engagement.
  77. Goodbye Charlie
    George Axelrod's play, "Goodbye, Charlie," was bad enough on the stage. On the screen, it is a bleak conglomeration of outrageous whimsies and stupidities.
  78. Ebony & Ivory
    Ebony & Ivory, in its unrelenting aggression, is particularly exhausting, though I suppose you have to admire the integrity of its vision. Irritating as Hosking’s humor is, you can’t deny his commitment to the bit.
  79. Sarah's Oil
    A David and Goliath story with big feelings, edifying speeches and a swelling score, Sarah’s Oil is a movie that will surprise nobody. Viewers might even make out a regressive strain reinforcing the feel-good mood.
  80. Play Dirty
    Play Dirty is a misanthropic work. Which isn’t inherently a deal breaker, but a stiff Wahlberg lacks the moxie to make the brutal barrage of death amusing or worthwhile.
  81. The Carpenter's Son
    To graft the story of Jesus onto the template of a genre film is, if blasphemous to the faithful, and mainly just silly to everyone else.
  82. Gabby's Dollhouse: The Movie
    What comes next is a case of sensory overload without substance, complete with nondescript pop songs and an array of outfits — each purchasable online! — for Gabby and the gang. Even Wiig, giving it her all as a modern clone of Cruella de Vil, appears somewhat shipwrecked amid the sugary material.
  83. Return to Silent Hill
    “Return” cranks the chaos factor up several gears. Maybe that’s a logical shift for a franchise about a creepy New England town that jostles its visitors around multiple planes of reality. Though, here, it’s not as fun as that sounds.
  84. Melania
    Much like the dress that Mr. Pierre designed for her — a white number whose bold black zigzag obscures all of its seams — Mrs. Trump seems exceptionally good at keeping hidden how everything, her marriage and family included, fits together.
  85. Outcome
    A slapdash satire of modern celebrity culture that is awkward where it wants to be acerbic and clumsily maudlin where it wants to be meaningful.
  86. Conversation Piece
    Conversation Piece is a disaster, the kind that prompts giggles from victims in the audience who, willingly, sit through it all feeling as if they were drowning in three inches of water.
  87. War Machine
    Such blunt messaging reduces the onscreen carnage, which relentlessly occurs via this mute machine’s searing lasers, barrage of bombs and kaiju breath, to little more than the human toll required for this particular military man to feel again. Worse yet, the film concludes with hawkish intensity, fashioning itself into a tasteless recruitment video.
  88. Slanted
    It is no fun for a viewer to scoff at a film that purports to speak to pain that is real for many. But “Slanted” doesn’t actually have any interest in contending with those experiences seriously, instead using its palely observed traumas as a launchpad for a pastiche of other punchier genre films.
  89. The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson
    The Truth and Tragedy of Moriah Wilson is the latest product off the crime documentary assembly line to raise the question of why it exists and what it ever hoped to achieve.
  90. Magic Hour
    A crafty reveal does not a clever film make, and even at a merciful 80 minutes, the device eventually feels more tired than the sullen Erin, who soldiers on through her suffering.
  91. One Spoon of Chocolate
    An empty muddle of social commentary with little intensity.
  92. Human Highway
    Mr. Young’s slapdash style, which suggests a Roger Corman movie crossed with dinner theater, extends to the clanking sound effects and flagrantly fake backdrops.
  93. O Horizon
    Sometimes it’s clear why a bad movie didn’t work: half-baked premise, poorly cast actors, janky editing, insufficient budget. Sometimes it’s less clear what happened. O Horizon is the second kind of bad movie, with a bonus element: Its existence gets more baffling as you realize what it really is.
  94. Shutter Island
    Something TERRIBLE is afoot. Sadly, that something turns out to be the movie itself.
  95. Valentine's Day
    This might not be the Titanic of romantic comedies (it’s tugboat size), but it’s a disaster: cynically made, barely directed, terribly written. But quick: there’s still time to escape!
  96. Transylmania
    Transylmania, a vampire-hunter, college road trip sex comedy, has a problem: someone has drained all the laughs out of it.
  97. Saint John of Las Vegas
    This disjointed, desperately whimsical film is simply not funny: not for a minute.
  98. All About Steve
    The concept of an intelligent woman is apparently so exotic to Ms. Bullock and her director, Phil Traill, that they frantically kook the character up, as if female smarts were a kind of disability. This being a contemporary big-studio release, I suppose it is.
  99. Amelia
    Alas, excesses of any pleasurable kind are absent from this exasperatingly dull production.
  100. Babylon A.D.
    Our judgments, in any case, may be superfluous, since the director, Mathieu Kassovitz, has already publicly described it as "pure violence and stupidity."
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