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. Wreck-It Ralph
    Manages to be touching as well as silly, thrilling and just a bit exhausting. The secret to its success is a genuine enthusiasm for the creative potential of games, a willingness to take them seriously without descending into nerdy pomposity. I am delighted to surrender my cynicism, at least until I've used up today's supply of quarters.
  2. Thunder Soul
    By introducing funky licks, fancy footwork and many of his own compositions to the band's stodgy set list of jazz standards, this indomitable leader (whose declining health adds a poignant twang to the film's final scenes) instilled racial pride alongside musical competency.
  3. The Artist
    This is not a work of film history but rather a generous, touching and slightly daffy expression of unbridled movie love.
  4. Tuesday, After Christmas
    The strength of Tuesday, After Christmas, Mr. Muntean's fourth feature, lies in its rigorous, artful and humane fidelity to quotidian circumstance.
  5. Django Unchained
    Like "Inglourious Basterds," Django Unchained is crazily entertaining, brazenly irresponsible and also ethically serious in a way that is entirely consistent with its playfulness.
  6. Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness
    It is a rich, beautifully organized and illustrated modern history of Eastern European Jewry examined through the life and work of the author, born Sholem Rabinovich in Pereyaslav (near Kiev) in 1859.
  7. We Were Here
    Throughout We Were Here there is not a hint of mawkishness, self-pity or self-congratulation. The humility, wisdom and cumulative sorrow expressed lend the film a glow of spirituality and infuse it with grace.
  8. The Last Circus
    Brilliant, bizarre, dazzling and utterly demented, The Last Circus views Franco-era Spain through the crazed eyes of two clowns doing battle for the love of one magnificent woman.
  9. Miss Bala
    A first-rate art-house thriller, Miss Bala tells the strange, seemingly impossible story of a Mexican beauty queen who becomes the accidental pawn of a drug cartel. It's an adventure story that could be called a contemporary picaresque if it weren't so deadly serious.
  10. Anna Karenina
    Mr. Wright's Anna Karenina is different. It is risky and ambitious enough to count as an act of artistic hubris, and confident enough to triumph on its own slightly - wonderfully - crazy terms.
  11. Argo
    It's a doozy of a story and so borderline ridiculous that it sounds - ta-da! - like something that could have been cooked up only by Hollywood.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    To Be Heard
    Check your cynicism at the ticket booth. To Be Heard is one of the best documentaries of the year.
  13. Inside Llewyn Davis
    This is not a biopic, it’s a Coen brothers movie, which is to say a brilliant magpie’s nest of surrealism, period detail and pop-culture scholarship. To put it another way, it’s a folk tale.
  14. 12 Years a Slave
    The genius of 12 Years a Slave is its insistence on banal evil, and on terror, that seeped into souls, bound bodies and reaped an enduring, terrible price.
  15. 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.
  16. Zero Dark Thirty
    Ms. Bigelow's direction here is unexpectedly stunning, at once bold and intimate: she has a genius for infusing even large-scale action set pieces with the human element.
  17. Captain Phillips
    Captain Phillips, a movie that insistently closes the distance between us and them, has a vital moral immediacy.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Gold Rush (1925)
    Here is a comedy with streaks of poetry, pathos, tenderness, linked with brusqueness and boisterousness. It is the outstanding gem of all Chaplin's pictures, as it has more thought and originality than even such masterpieces of mirth as "The Kid" and "Shoulder Arms."
  19. Inside Out
    Inside Out is an absolute delight — funny and charming, fast-moving and full of surprises. It is also a defense of sorrow, an argument for the necessity of melancholy dressed in the bright colors of entertainment.
  20. The Kid with a Bike
    A quietly rapturous film about love and redemption.
  21. 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.
  22. Beasts of the Southern Wild
    This movie is a blast of sheer, improbable joy, a boisterous, thrilling action movie with a protagonist who can hold her own alongside Katniss Everdeen, Princess Merida and the other brave young heroines of 2012.
  23. This Is Not a Film
    How did Mr. Panahi do this? I'm at a bit of a loss to explain, to tell you the truth, since my job is to review movies, and this, obviously, is something different: a masterpiece in a form that does not yet exist.
  24. The Master
    It is a movie about the lure and folly of greatness that comes as close as anything I've seen recently to being a great movie. There will be skeptics, but the cult is already forming. Count me in.
  25. Elena
    Post-Soviet Russia in Andrei Zvyagintsev's somber, gripping film Elena is a moral vacuum where money rules, the haves are contemptuous of the have-nots, and class resentment simmers. The movie, which shuttles between the center of Moscow and its outskirts, is grim enough to suggest that even if you were rich, you wouldn't want to live there.
  26. The Waiting Room
    Scrupulously apolitical, The Waiting Room is the opposite of a polemic like Michael Moore's "Sicko." But by removing any editorial screen, it confronts you head-on with human suffering that a more humane and equitable system might help alleviate.
  27. Lincoln
    Go see this movie. Take your children, even though they may occasionally be confused or fidgety. Boredom and confusion are also part of democracy, after all. Lincoln is a rough and noble democratic masterpiece - an omen, perhaps, that movies for the people shall not perish from the earth.
  28. All Is Lost
    The ancient Greeks believed that character should be revealed through action. I can’t think of another film that has upheld this notion so thoroughly and thrillingly. There is certainly no other actor who can command our attention — our empathy, our loyalty, our love — with such efficiency.
  29. Side by Side
    For a film geek this movie is absolute heaven, a dream symposium in which directors, cinematographers, editors and a few actors gather to opine on the details of their craft. It is worth a year of film school and at least 1,000 hours of DVD bonus commentary.
  30. 3, 2, 1... Frankie Go Boom
    A vibrantly vulgar comedy that never hangs around to admire its own cleverness.
  31. Amour
    A masterpiece about life, death and everything in between.
  32. Citizen Kane
    In spite of some disconcerting lapses and strange ambiguities in the creation of the principal character, Citizen Kane is far and away the most surprising and cinematically exciting motion picture to be seen here in many a moon. As a matter of fact, it comes close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood.
  33. Vertigo
    Brilliantly schematic, endlessly fascinating...this prescient 1958 spellbinder can now be admired as the deepest, darkest masterpiece of Hitchcock's career. [Restored version]
  34. Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters
    With marvelous discipline, Mr. Shapiro crams a wealth of material into a tight 77 minutes, smoothly communicating the group effort required to achieve the perfect shot.
  35. A Man Vanishes (1967)
    Seemingly banal in its conceit, wildly startling in its execution, it tracks a film crew that, like a detective squad, investigates what became of an ordinary man.
  36. Elza (Le bonheur d'Elza)
    Bathed in the flamingo colors and Caribbean rhythms of its location, this deeply personal debut from the writer and director Mariette Monpierre develops with a lingering attention to sensation and sound.
  37. Frances Ha
    With its swift, jaunty rhythms and sharp, off-kilter jokes, Frances Ha is frequently delightful. Ms. Gerwig and Mr. Baumbach are nonetheless defiant partisans in the revolt against the tyranny of likability in popular culture.
  38. Much Ado About Nothing
    From its very first scenes, Mr. Whedon’s film crackles with a busy, slightly wayward energy that recalls the classic romantic sparring of the studio era.
  39. Like Someone in Love
    Every shot — everything you see, and everything you don’t — imparts a disturbing and thrilling sense of discovery.
  40. Consuming Spirits
    It is a work of obsessive artisanal discipline and unfettered artistic vision. You have never seen anything like it.
  41. Barbara
    Barbara is a film about the old Germany from one of the best directors working in the new: Christian Petzold. For more than a decade Mr. Petzold has been making his mark on the international cinema scene with smart, tense films that resemble psychological thrillers, but are distinguished by their strange story turns, moral thorns, visual beauty and filmmaking intelligence.
  42. Before Midnight
    Before Midnight is a wonderful paradox: a movie passionately committed to the ideal of imperfection that is itself very close to perfect.
  43. Spring Breakers
    In Spring Breakers [Mr. Korine] bores into a contested, deeply American topic — the pursuit of happiness taken to nihilistic extremes — but turns his exploration into such a gonzo, outrageously funny party that it takes a while to appreciate that this is more of a horror film than a comedy.
  44. The Counselor
    Mr. Scott’s seriousness isn’t always well served by the scripts he films, but in Mr. McCarthy he has found a partner with convictions about good and evil rather than canned formula.
  45. Lee Daniels' The Butler
    A brilliantly truthful film on a subject that is usually shrouded in wishful thinking, mythmongering and outright denial.
  46. Room 237
    Like “The Shining” and its maze within a maze, Mr. Ascher’s movie is something of a labyrinth. Puzzling your way through its compilation of vaguely lucid and crackpot ideas is pleasurable though, for avid movie lovers, it may also feel like a warning.
  47. Blue Jasmine
    [Allen's] most sustained, satisfying and resonant film since “Match Point.”
  48. Ordinary People
    A moving, intelligent and funny film about disasters that are commonplace to everyone except the people who experience them. Not since Robert Benton's "Kramer vs. Kramer" has there been a movie that so effectively catches the look, sound and temper of a particular kind of American existence.
  49. Sweetgrass
    In Sweetgrass, a graceful and often moving meditation on a disappearing way of life, there is little here that is objective and much that is magnificent.
  50. Beyond the Hills
    Even as Mr. Mungiu maintains a detached, objective point of view, allowing the details of the story to speak for themselves, he also allows you to glimpse the complex and volatile inner lives of his characters.
  51. Badlands
    One may legitimately debate the validity of Malick's vision, but not, I think, his immense talent. Badlands is a most important and exciting film.
  52. Stories We Tell
    Stories We Tell has a number of transparent virtues, including its humor and formal design, although its most admirable quality is the deep sense of personal ethics that frames Ms. Polley’s filmmaking choices.
  53. What Maisie Knew
    What Maisie Knew lays waste to the comforting dogma that children are naturally resilient, and that our casual, unthinking cruelty to them can be answered by guilty and belated displays of affection. It accomplishes this not by means of melodrama, but by a mixture of understatement and thriller-worthy suspense.
  54. American Hustle
    Mr. Bale, like some other stars who embrace playing ugly, feels as if he’d been liberated by all the pounds he’s packed on and by his character’s molting looks, an emancipation that’s most evident in his delicately intimate, moving moments with Ms. Adams and Ms. Lawrence.
  55. The Act of Killing
    The horror of The Act of Killing does not dissipate easily or yield to anything like clarity.
  56. An Oversimplification of Her Beauty
    Mr. Nance turns his thought into a performance of vulnerability that’s all too relatable in its indulgences. It has heart without becoming cloying.
  57. Pieta
    Morally cunning and with a tone as black as pitch, Pieta, the 18th film from the South Korean director Kim Ki-duk, is a deeply unnerving revenge movie in which redemption is dangled like a cat toy before a cougar.
  58. Post Tenebras Lux
    Life and death, nature and culture, sex and money, man and beast, God and the Devil — Post Tenebras Lux embraces the world even if it doesn’t open itself up to ready interpretation.
  59. Fill the Void
    What the film makes clear, with unfailing sensitivity and wry humor, is that for Shira and her family the ordinary arrangements of living are freighted with moral and spiritual significance.
  60. Cutie and the Boxer
    Mr. Heinzerling is an artist too. The window he has opened onto the lives of his subjects is a powerful and beautiful visual artifact in its own right.
  61. Drinking Buddies
    Drinking Buddies, Joe Swanberg’s nimble, knowing and altogether excellent new film, refuses to dance to the usual tune.
  62. In a World...
    Ms. Bell, who plays Carol with a perfect blend of diffidence, goofiness and charm, has written and directed an insightful comedy that is much more complex and ambitious than it sometimes seems.
  63. What Richard Did
    Every detail of What Richard Did rings true.
  64. Voyage to Italy (re-release)
    In its time, this film represented the arrival of something new, and even now it can feel like a bulletin from the future.
  65. Three Sisters
    Three Sisters documents extreme poverty in rural China with the compassionate eye and inexhaustible patience of a director whose curiosity about his country’s unfortunates never seems to wane.
  66. The Girls in the Band
    The Girls in the Band is everything a worthwhile documentary should be, and then some: engaging, informative, thorough and brimming with delightful characters.
  67. Augustine
    Everything depends on the subtlety of the direction and the charisma of the performances. Augustine is intellectually satisfying partly because it communicates its ideas at the level of feeling, through the uncanny power of Soko’s face and body.
  68. Hannah Arendt
    Hannah Arendt conveys the glamour, charisma and difficulty of a certain kind of German thought.... The movie turns ideas into the best kind of entertainment.
  69. Valentino's Ghost
    You may not agree with every observation in Michael Singh’s documentary Valentino’s Ghost. But this engrossing examination of American perceptions of Arabs and the Arab world gets you thinking.
  70. In the Fog
    Mr. Loznitsa doesn’t lighten the mood with any familiar filmmaking tricks: there are, for instance, no musical cues to guide you over the troubling or ambiguous passages. Like the characters, you work through each surprising turn.
  71. Her
    At once a brilliant conceptual gag and a deeply sincere romance, Her is the unlikely yet completely plausible love story about a man, who sometimes resembles a machine, and an operating system, who very much suggests a living woman.
  72. The Great Beauty
    A deliriously alive movie, The Great Beauty is the story of a man, a city, a country and a cinema, though not necessarily in that order.
  73. A Touch of Sin
    A blistering fictionalized tale straight out of China, A Touch of Sin is at once monumental and human scale.
  74. Blue Is the Warmest Color
    Mr. Kechiche’s style is dizzy, obsessive, inspired and relentless, words that also describe Adèle and Emma and the fearless women who embody them. Many more words can — and will — be spent on “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” but for now I’ll settle for just one: glorious.
  75. La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus
    Mark Kendall’s quietly moving documentary, La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus, is as modest and farsighted as its cast of Guatemalans who make a living resurrecting discarded American school buses.
  76. Museum Hours
    This movie is rigorously and intensely lifelike, which is to say that it’s also a strange and moving work of art.
  77. Big Men
    Dropping us into a perfect storm of avarice, this cool and incisive snapshot of global capitalism at work is as remarkable for its access as for its refusal to judge.
  78. Gideon's Army
    Gideon’s Army is a bare film with no narrator and a minimal soundtrack. That’s all it needs to grab you by the throat.
  79. Wild Reeds
    [A] delicate, lovingly photographed, strongly acted coming-of-age story.
  80. Enough Said
    Line for line, scene for scene, it is one of the best-written American film comedies in recent memory and an implicit rebuke to the raunchy, sloppy spectacles of immaturity that have dominated the genre in recent years.
  81. Best Kept Secret
    Best Kept Secret is an exemplary documentary: It spotlights an important issue yet never seeks to squeeze the truth into an easily digestible narrative frame. Instead it expands its storytelling to the boundaries of messy, joyful and painful reality.
  82. Jajouka, Something Good Comes to You
    The film’s strange mixture of primitive and poetic images becomes etched into memory. Weaving observation and a shared dream state, this is an intuitive and intricate exploration into the feeling of sound.
  83. Out of the Clear Blue Sky
    A fascinating study of a man, and a firm, deeply changed by catastrophe.
  84. The Dirties
    Remarkable as much for its insights as for its audacity, The Dirties approaches school violence with a comic veneer that slowly shades into deep darkness.
  85. We Are the Best!
    There is hardly a shortage of movies about rock ’n’ roll, but there are few as perfect — which is to say as ragged, as silly, as touching or as true — as We Are the Best!.
  86. Under the Skin
    The movie’s eerie, climactic image challenges our conventional notions of human identity and leaves us reflecting on the possibility that every being in the universe is an alien in disguise.
  87. The Square
    Even though The Square depicts widely covered recent events, it still feels like a revelation. This is partly because of the immediacy of Ms. Noujaim’s approach, which often puts the viewer in the midst of chaos as it unfolds.
  88. At Berkeley
    A documentary necessarily conveys a point of view, and although Mr. Wiseman, as is his wont, is neither seen nor heard in a film that proceeds without commentary or subtitles, his spirit is palpable. Without overtly editorializing, the film quietly and steadfastly champions state-funded public education available to all.
  89. 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.
  90. The Missing Picture
    The audacity of The Missing Picture — a brilliant documentary about a child who held on to life in Cambodia’s killing fields — is equaled only by its soulfulness.
  91. These Birds Walk
    The filmmakers record the flash of youth’s headlong energies, its bumps and bruises, and its melancholies and brilliant chaos.
  92. Gloria
    The great accomplishment of Gloria, the Chilean writer-director Sebastián Lelio’s astute, unpretentious and thrillingly humane new film, is that it acknowledges both sides of its heroine’s temperament without judgment or sentimentality.
  93. The Grand Budapest Hotel
    The Grand Budapest Hotel, Mr. Anderson’s eighth feature, will delight his fans, but even those inclined to grumble that it’s just more of the same patented whimsy might want to look again. As a sometime grumbler and longtime fan, I found myself not only charmed and touched but also moved to a new level of respect.
  94. Caucus
    The film is a testament to the power of observational documentary to tenderly present hypocrisy and to show eccentricity peeking out from behind social masks.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    City Lights
    It was a joyous evening. Mr. Chaplin's shadow has grown no less.
  96. Mad Max: Fury Road
    Even in the most chaotic fights and collisions, everything makes sense. This is not a matter of realism — come on, now — but of imaginative discipline. And Mr. Miller demonstrates that great action filmmaking is not only a matter of physics but of ethics as well. There is cause and effect; there are choices and consequences.
  97. Mary Poppins
    And a most wonderful, cheering movie it is, with Julie Andrews, the original Eliza of My Fair Lady, playing the title role and with its splices and seams fairly splitting with Poppins marvels turned out by the Walt Disney studio.
  98. Inherent Vice
    Mr. Phoenix’s note-perfect performance flows on the story’s currents of comedy that occasionally turn into rapids, as the funny ha-ha, funny strange back-and-forth abruptly gives way to Three Stooges slapstick.
  99. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
    The camerawork in Birdman is an astonishment, and an argument that everything flows together, which in this movie means the cinematography, the story, the people, even time and space.
  100. Boyhood
    In Boyhood, Mr. Linklater’s masterpiece, he both captures moments in time and relinquishes them as he moves from year to year. He isn’t fighting time but embracing it in all its glorious and agonizingly fleeting beauty.
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