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. Geostorm
    Geostorm uses digital technology to lay waste to a bunch of cities and hacky screenwriting to assault the dignity of several fine actors.
  2. Lullaby
    Lullaby, the directorial debut of Andrew Levitas, a jack of all artistic trades, is the kind of manipulative, cliché-infested hokum that alienates moviegoers by its insistence on hogging all the tears.
  3. The Possession of Michael King
    Dim in wits and lighting, The Possession of Michael King strains our eyes, spits on our intelligence and saps our generosity of spirit. Relatively untaxed, however, is the part of the brain that processes new experiences: There’s scarcely a shot or an idea in this first feature from David Jung that we haven’t seen many times before.
  4. Teen Wolf
    For a film that's so innocuous, Teen Wolf is aggressively boring.
  5. Teen Wolf Too
    No one expects realism from a movie called Teen Wolf Too... still, the film makers could pretend to know what college is like, might try to liven up the kindly werewolf formula.
  6. The Best of Me
    The screenplay is so haphazardly constructed that when the movie seems to be ending, it refuels with preposterous new developments.
  7. Breakthrough Weekend
    This New York shaggy-dog story from Sujewa Ekanayake is an example of extreme-makeshift filmmaking — but not, unfortunately, a successful one.
  8. Among Ravens
    Among Ravens claws itself to death with sophomoric symbolism.
  9. Humshakals
    During its 159 minutes, this movie bombards you with eager-to-please but clueless shtick.
  10. Come Back to Me
    Come Back to Me has seamier goals, employing a quasi-religious conceit to justify its shocks of gore and sexual assault. In that regard, at least, it is grotesquely predictable.
  11. Kite
    Nasty for nastiness’s sake, Kite drags to achieve its brief running time; you wonder whether the slow motion is an artistic device or a stalling tactic.
  12. Jake Squared
    Jake Squared combines the most grating tendencies of meta navel-gazing with the sexism of reality television — pushing the limit of viewer tolerance to zero.
  13. But Always
    Watching it means waiting for the other shoe to drop: anticipating the moment when this already tacky weepie will resolve itself in horrific, exploitative fashion.
  14. The Pyramid
    The answers aren’t satisfying, and The Pyramid, despite an unpretentious matinee vibe, is mostly interesting in seeing how little light can be on screen before a bare minimum of suspense and coherence dissipates. There is, truly, not much to see in this movie.
  15. Playing It Cool
    Proceeding with a strained quirkiness that infects much more than the names of its main characters, this first feature by Justin Reardon is a paean to the kind of narcissism that sucks the air out of every scene.
  16. Brush with Danger
    Although the characters repeatedly express their worship of “original art” in gilded frames, the script consists of singularly unoriginal dialogue.
  17. Wolves
    Silly beyond words, Wolves is indifferently acted and unconvincingly realized.
  18. Reach Me
    [A] preposterous ensemble piece.
  19. Taken 3
    Mr. Megaton’s direction of action sequences borders on atrocious. Ragged camerawork and editing ruin freeway car chases and hand-to-hand combat alike.
  20. Hitman: Agent 47
    Dumb as dirt and just as generic, Hitman: Agent 47 trades brains for bullets and characters for windup toys.
  21. The Last Witch Hunter
    A smorgasbord of empty calories, the Vin Diesel vehicle The Last Witch Hunter, for all its overstuffed visuals, leaves you hungry. But not for more.
  22. Little Boy
    The steady performances of Tom Wilkinson, playing a kindly priest, and Emily Watson, an angelic mother, in Alejandro Monteverde’s Little Boy do little to offset the cloying sweetness of a movie that has the haranguing inspirational tone of a marathon Sunday-school lesson.
  23. Kill Me Three Times
    It’s of course unfair to blame Quentin Tarantino for all the terrible movies he has inspired, but enough already!
  24. Americons
    Mr. Avgerinos’s glossy, overripe take on high-flying, unscrupulous lenders — the wolves of Main Street — deteriorates into a hot mess of montages, trailer-ready one-liners and thudding drama.
  25. Nightlight
    A spare trifle carried largely by its leading actress.
  26. The Face of an Angel
    Rambling, frustrating and wholly uninvolving, The Face of an Angel (based on Barbie Latza Nadeau’s nonfiction account of the murder) swarms with ideas that have no place to land.
  27. Shut In
    In this achingly inept thriller, you will see Naomi Watts do what she can to sell a plot of such preposterousness that the derisory laughter around me began barely 20 minutes in.
  28. Just Before I Go
    Just Before I Go, the directorial debut of Courteney Cox, lurches along a wobbly line between salacious comic nastiness and nauseating sentimentality. The two strains are so poorly integrated that the screenplay (by David Flebotte) feels like pieces from two different projects mashed together with little oversight.
  29. Fifty Shades Darker
    A professional with real credits, so I assume that [Mr. Foley's] not finally responsible for the ineptitude of Fifty Shades Darker, which ranges from continuity issues to unsurprisingly risible writing. There are also abrupt swings in tone, dead-end detours and flatline performances, including from Ms. Johnson.
  30. Fifty Shades Freed
    As popular as this window-fogging franchise has become, its flaccid finale is likely critic proof. But if I can persuade just one of you to bypass its milquetoast masochism and watch the stratospherically superior “9 1/2 Weeks” instead, then I will have done my job.
  31. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2
    The comedy is forced, the drama nonexistent and the actors melt into a yapping clan that seems to go everywhere en masse — a gesticulating blob of upraised shoulders and upturned palms.
  32. Dark Awakening
    Overabundant diffuse lighting and wide-angle perspectives only compound this horror movie’s deficiencies in plot and dialogue.
  33. Daddy's Home
    Daddy’s Home is an ugly psychological cockfight posing as a family-friendly comedy. Laugh-free — except for some farcical, life-threatening stunts at the expense of Will Ferrell’s character, Brad — it is best avoided unless a movie that has the attitude and mind-set of a schoolyard bully happens to be your thing.
  34. 90 Minutes in Heaven
    Rendering a miraculous premise dull, the film seems relatively uninterested in doing more than preaching to the choir.
  35. Underworld: Blood Wars
    This film is so heavy with exposition that you would think that the director, Anna Foerster, and the screenwriter, Cory Goodman, had set out to complete a dissertation instead of a sequel.
  36. Fathers and Daughters
    The spectacle of actors of the quality of Russell Crowe, Aaron Paul, Janet McTeer, Octavia Spencer and Jane Fonda earnestly struggling to wring eye moisture from hammy, flat-footed dialogue (credited to Brad Desch, an unknown), while maintaining some dignity, is depressing proof that an actor is only as good as his or her material.
  37. The Book of Henry
    A weepie, a thriller, a tragedy, a sub-Spielbergian pastiche, The Book of Henry is mostly a tedious mess.
  38. Ratchet & Clank
    It has little story to tell and few ideas to offer. Just a great deal of product to sell.
  39. Other People's Children
    Other People’s Children desperately wants to take a deep dive into a young woman’s pain and the solace of artistic expression. For that to happen, though, would require much better actors and a much smarter script.
  40. The Pack
    A dreary Australian movie, directed by Nick Robertson, that has more dogs than “Cujo” but noticeably less plot.
  41. Intruders
    Ms. Riesgraf, who at times recalls the young Teri Garr, is gutsy and committed, but not even Meryl Streep could make this hokum credible.
  42. When the Bough Breaks
    There’s not an ounce of suspense in any of this, because you’ve seen it all before, and the director, Jon Cassar, seems uninterested in veering from the well-established formula.
  43. The Offering
    The Offering, a muddled horror film, falls over itself incorporating as many genre elements as possible. The result is the cinematic equivalent of combining every paint color on a canvas: a murky mess.
  44. Careful What You Wish For
    A film that tries to be both titillating and suspenseful but is neither.
  45. All Eyez on Me
    All Eyez on Me, a fictionalized film biography of Shakur, directed by Benny Boom and starring Demetrius Shipp Jr., is not only a clumsy and often bland account of his life and work, but it also gives little genuine insight into his thought, talent or personality.
  46. Antibirth
    In his director’s statement, Mr. Perez, who also wrote the script, says he sought to fashion a story “that would confuse and bludgeon the audience.” My comrade and I will sip, silently nod and, with a strange kind of awe, agree: This filmmaker succeeded.
  47. Nocturama
    Without a real-world correlative for the actions it depicts, Bertrand Bonello’s new film would merely be tedious and pretentious rather than repellent.
  48. Sleepless
    Sleepless, directed by Baran bo Odar, sets a low bar for itself, and then trips over it.
  49. Life on the Line
    Underappreciated occupations deserve better than the cliché-clogged, utterly predictable Life on the Line, a terrible movie about the workers who keep the electrical grid functioning.
  50. Man Down
    Mr. Montiel may have had honorable intentions in creating this movie. But what he made is neither a viable work of art nor an effective call to action. It’s a sadistic and ghoulish spectacle.
  51. Magnus
    [An] insipid and uninformative portrait of singularity and obsession.
  52. Just Getting Started
    In spite of the charm and discipline of the stars, the jokes misfire and the scenes creak and stumble.
  53. Daddy's Home 2
    If “Daddy’s Home” (2015) played like a distant, wayward cousin of “Step Brothers,” Daddy’s Home 2, again directed by Sean Anders, is the sort of relative you might disown.
  54. How Heavy This Hammer
    Whatever investigation it’s attempting, the movie is leaden in its pacing — the first 15 minutes feel like an hour — and its constricted shooting style, practically all hand-held almost close-ups, is transparent in its contrivance of realism.
  55. Ed
    One thing you can say for Ed, a chimpanzee whose baseball-playing expertise propels the Rockets, a minor-league team, to glory: his behavior is a lot more human than any of the other characters in this flimsy, laugh-free family comedy
  56. Mile 22
    A testosterone cocktail of reactionary sound bites and incoherent action that even Michael Bay might have rejected as too amped, Peter Berg’s Mile 22 makes for an appalling referendum on the state of commercial cinema in 2018
  57. UglyDolls
    Every aspect of this computer-animated movie directed by Kelly Asbury seems equally overdetermined and tossed-off, as if it were a caffeinated weekend project for everyone involved.
  58. Rampage
    You know what might make an intriguing, revealing movie? The story of how, over 30 years after its debut, a relatively innocent arcade game starring a giant ape and other oversize beasts underwent a corporate transmogrification and became a turgid, logy sci-fi/action blockbuster.
  59. Kill Switch
    The plot, unlike its execution, is not terrible.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    One Crazy Summer
    The film is so successful at turning your brain into something resembling mashed potatoes that it is not clear when you'll be able to respond to intelligible stimuli again.
  61. Death Wish
    An imbecilic misfire.
  62. Silver Bullet
    It's also not easy convincing the audience. The werewolf, when it finally comes onto the screen, looks less like a wolf than Smokey Bear with a terrible hangover.
  63. The Layover
    The movie’s notion of fun comes to involve an unclean rest stop, slipped pills and an eminently foreseeable conclusion.
  64. Fletch Lives
    Fletch Lives looks less like ''Fletch 2,'' which it is, numerically speaking, than ''Fletch 7,'' the bitter end of a worn-out series.
  65. Cook Off!
    The movie tries to do for amateur cooking contests what “Best in Show” did for dog competitions, but the strained folksiness and tired stereotypes couldn’t be further from the snap and wit of prime Christopher Guest.
  66. Prison
    Prison has a generic, low-budget name, and for once you can judge a movie by its title. This prison-drama-meets-ghost-story turns out to be an object lesson in how cheaply and badly a film can be made.
  67. Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday
    A largely incoherent movie that generates little suspense and relies for the majority of its thrills on close-up gore.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    My Bloody Valentine
    My Bloody Valentine probably won't make you shiver with fright, but it's almost certain to make you squirm, first with irritation and then with revulsion.
  69. Hellboy
    Marshall, a world away from the dank dread and crawling terror of his 2006 spelunking stunner, “The Descent,” directs like a dog at a squirrel convention, charging gleefully from one witlessly violent encounter to the next. Ian McShane, as Hellboy’s adoptive father, does what he can to calm the chaos, but the movie left me alternately baffled and battered.
  70. Pokémon Detective Pikachu
    This is 1 hour and 44 minutes of Pikachu short-circuiting your brain.
  71. Slender Man
    The most perfunctory horror picture I’ve seen in some time.
  72. Death Wish II
    Even more foolish, more tacky and more self righteously inhumane than the 1974 melodrama off which it has been spun by the none-too-nimble fingers of Michael Winner, who directed the original film.
  73. Death Wish V: The Face of Death
    Even though its characters tote cellular phones and live in ultramodern high-rise apartments, the film still has a sleazy 1970's ambiance. And while Mr. Bronson goes through the motions of revenge with his characteristic deliberation, he looks puffy and sounds terminally bored.
    • 12 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    10 to Midnight
    The suspense generated in this most cheaply sensational recounting set in Los Angeles is episodic, rising at the time of the kill and receding into boredom at other times. The actors, directed by J. Lee Thompson, seem a reasonably competent crew, although in this raunchy, bloodstained, moralizing account there is not much opportunity to demonstrate. [13 Mar 1983, p.62]
    • The New York Times
  75. The Great Outdoors
    Though the film never becomes actively unfunny, neither does it do much more than tread water. The raccoons have a better time than the audience will.
  76. Armed and Dangerous
    If the very sight of John Candy, the outsized comedian, strikes you as a hoot, then perhaps Armed and Dangerous is for you. It is difficult to imagine who else this latest movie about a pair of bumblers could be for.
  77. Moving Violations
    An especially weak teen- age comedy even by today's none-too- high standards. Everything about it is either second best or second hand.
  78. Red Notice
    Uninterested in world building or creating any sense of stakes, Red Notice is merely an expensive brandishing of star power — only the stars haven’t got it in them.
  79. Terminal
    Featuring more twists than a 1960s dance marathon, Terminal is a flashy, hyperstylized bore.
  80. Peppermint
    Peppermint is a belabored exercise in lazily constructed déjà vu, without the grit or stylized ham of predecessors it so baldly steals from.
  81. Reprisal
    Even those inclined to sympathize with that premise politically may feel insulted by the plot hole-a-palooza offered here to support it.
  82. Red Sonja
    Mr. Fleischer brings absolutely no playfulness to what might, at least, have been enjoyably light. And he brings out the worst in a cast that was ill-chosen to begin with. The most memorable thing about the film is the costume/production design by Danilo Donati, which is genuinely demented. Even the horses wear too much junk jewelry.
  83. Highlander: The Final Dimension
    An incoherent mess.
  84. Friday the 13th: A New Beginning
    This one, set in a bucolic halfway house for disturbed children, is not entirely without Grand Guignol humor, but almost. It appears to have been paced by a metronome - a joke followed by a murder followed by a joke followed by a murder, until all but one of the featured played have been exterminated...It's worth recognizing only as an artifact of our culture.
  85. Mr. Magoo
    Poor old Mr. Magoo should have been allowed to rest in piece. This film suggests that when you loot a crypt, you're likely to find a corpse.
  86. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan
    But (Jason) will never change and never die, not while cheap, dull ax-murder movies can yield one witty, misleading, probably lucrative commercial.
  87. King Kong vs. Godzilla
    The one mild surprise of this cheap reprise of earlier Hollywood and Japanese horror films is the ineptitude of its fakery.
  88. Hellraiser: Bloodline
    As cinematic Armageddons go, this one is a real bust...Although it succeeds in crudely outlining the fable of a magic toy box and the demonic secrets carried down in the bloodline of its inventor, it is otherwise incoherent and (except for Mr. Bradley's Pinhead) wretchedly acted. Farewell, Pinhead and company. You won't be missed.
  89. Write When You Get Work
    Neither remotely credible nor more than minimally entertaining, Stacy Cochran’s New York City romance, Write When You Get Work, presents rich folk as gullible idiots and blue-collar crooks as heroes.
  90. The Kitchen
    An offense against feminism, narrative logic and Fleetwood Mac, The Kitchen is a terrible, witless mess.
  91. I Hate Kids
    The single achievement of I Hate Kids, a new comedy directed by John Asher, is that it is simultaneously tepid and offensive.
  92. Outlaws
    Oppressively mirthless, Outlaws can nevertheless be enjoyed, after a fashion, as a surreal tapestry of macho garbling.
  93. The Bride
    Miss Beals's performance sinks this already muddled mess of a movie like a stone.
  94. The Gandhi Murder
    The conspiracy thriller The Gandhi Murder begins with a claim to be “based on verified facts.” Given the overall shoddiness of the production, including distractingly inapt casting and matte work that makes a Ganges River scene look fake, those facts are probably worth reverifying.
  95. Corporate Animals
    If what you’re looking for are vulgar cartoons based on facile social stereotypes being awful to each other, Corporate Animals will fill the bill.
  96. Child's Play
    In trying to build a smarter Chucky, the filmmakers have assembled something unfathomably dumb.
  97. Poms
    An uncomfortable blend of sickness and silliness, this dancing-past-the-graveyard comedy suggests that the many travails of aging can be endured if you only gather enough friends and surrender enough dignity.
  98. Lucy in the Sky
    It’s a dispiriting mess and waste of talent, sunk by a lack of focus, misguided choices and insistently unproductive, at times incoherent clashing tones.
  99. Valley of the Dolls
    It's an unbelievably hackneyed and mawkish mish-mash of backstage plots and Peyton Place adumbrations in which five women are involved with their assorted egotistical aspirations, love affairs and Seconal pills.
  100. The Silence
    The Silence posits a grand evolutionary struggle between mankind and its winged tormentors, but every moment feels like regression.
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