The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,269 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 20269
  2. Mixed: 8,428 out of 20269
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20269
20269 movie reviews
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  1. Ella McCay
    Ella McCay is a bizarre movie that would have worked better if it went all-in as an homage to another era. Since we won’t get to see that version, you’ll just have to buckle up and enjoy the very strange ride.
  2. The King of Color
    We don’t need to hear about Herbert’s party years after his first marriage faltered. But he still had a cool idea, and his explanations of printing technology and color chemistry are almost enough to carry the film.
  3. Resurrection
    Strange describes the world of “Resurrection,” as does entrancing, tender, surprising, mournful and, at times, mystifying; it too is a labyrinth of a kind, one that Bi has filled with abrupt turns, elusive figures and shattering moments.
  4. Silent Night, Deadly Night
    Nelson may be throwing too much at the wall, but he does manage to make you feel something beyond just gross-out thrills.
  5. WTO/99
    It’s clear that the movie has a point of view; what’s most interesting, though, is the raw materials it employs.
  6. 100 Nights of Hero
    There’s just enough style and slyness to momentarily whisk one away.
  7. The Chronology of Water
    Imogen Poots’s fantastically expressive performance as the adult Lidia transforms this movie (the feature directing debut of Kristen Stewart) from punishing to mesmerizing.
  8. Endless Cookie
    In Endless Cookie, Seth and Pete Scriver’s kooky, grotesquely animated documentary, a rich oral history poetically blended with oddball comedy invites surprising political revelations.
  9. Happy Holidays
    The movie favors an unflashy presentation that allows its themes to emerge organically. But the interlocking structure, which owes more to the early work of Alejandro González Iñárritu than “Rashomon,” undermines sustained tension, and the dramatic architecture is slightly wobbly.
  10. Jay Kelly
    Inevitably, the results do not quite cohere narratively or tonally. But the film still has a strange, old-fashioned charm. You can’t really imagine anyone other than Clooney playing Jay, but Sandler is equally good; he brings a pathos to Ron, a man who has perhaps loved not wisely but too well.
  11. Little Trouble Girls
    Djukic has a fine eye and is a talent to look out for, even if here, like Ana-Maria, she chose the wrong girl.
  12. Rosemead
    In its march toward resolution, “Rosemead” never falters in its compassion, and asks the same of us.
  13. La Grazia
    It’s enjoyable to be back in Sorrentino’s richly detailed and stylized universe, with all its enchantments and individualized, warm-blooded characters.
  14. Five Nights at Freddy's 2
    With its jacked-up production budget, “Freddy’s 2,” at the very least, delivers more intricate set pieces that allow for a spatter of solid kill scenes — the rest is as tame and creaky as its signature animatronic teddies.
  15. Merrily We Roll Along
    Merrily We Roll Along is an OK movie of a good production of a great musical: on balance, another worthy addition to the Stephen Sondheim canon, which can always stand to be expanded.
  16. Fackham Hall
    Sending up costumey, upstairs-downstairs tropes, the movie seldom lets five seconds pass without a wisecrack, pratfall or sight gag, sometimes all three stacked on top of each other.
  17. Left-Handed Girl
    Expressive visuals and evocative scenes, including one involving an overactive meerkat, make Left-Handed Girl a memorable family affair. It’s only when the film introduces one too many social realist tropes . . . that the melodrama grows unwieldy.
  18. The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Photo
    Frankly, this hunt isn’t particularly thrilling, despite the premise’s potential to create intriguing parallels between Nghe’s erasure and the exploitation of the Vietnamese people by U.S. forces during the war.
  19. The Thing with Feathers
    Cumberbatch gives himself fully to the task of abjection, plunging us into the shadows and chaos of Dad’s life. But the movie neglects to make Mum’s presence palpable — and that is a loss.
  20. You Got Gold: A Celebration of John Prine
    As concert films go, “You Got Gold” is pretty straightforward. It doesn’t need to be anything more than that. Prine’s songs are full of wisdom, drama, laughs and heartache.
  21. The Tale of Silyan
    Some scenes are remarkably intimate — Nikola in his house on a stormy night drying off the stork, who falls asleep on his shoulder — and some are sweeping, which makes it an amazing portrait of a place on many scales.
  22. The Merchants of Joy
    The director Celia Aniskovich, using Owen Long’s 2022 New York Magazine article “Secrets of the Christmas Tree Trade” as a starting point, has at her subject with commendable verve.
  23. Sorry, Baby
    In its intimacy and naked truth-telling, Sorry, Baby is the kind of independent movie that can seem like a gift.
  24. BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions
    I don’t think for a second that Joseph is interested in answering questions, one reason that “BLKNWS” can feel like an invitation. He wants to open your mind and maybe blow it (he succeeds on both counts) in a work that, among many other things, interrogates memory, history and the archive.
  25. Good Fortune
    This is a movie that wants to have it both way.
  26. 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.
  27. Eternity
    Sappy and silly, Eternity made me thank heaven for Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early as the quick-witted coordinators tasked with guiding our threesome to perpetual bliss. They’re a comic delight, and they aerate a movie that’s most touching when it’s least frantic.
  28. Hamnet
    Buckley’s performance is ferocious and astounding, starting off strong and somehow picking up power as the movie goes along.
  29. Teenage Wasteland
    This crowd-pleasing documentary, directed by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss (“Boys State” and “Girls State”), caters to multiple niches of moviegoer who enjoy rooting for the underdog. Even archivally minded cinephiles — the kind who get nostalgia pangs from watching long-shelved VHS tapes played anew — will find an itch scratched.
  30. Zootopia 2
    If Zootopia introduced us to an original animal world, this one believes in building out a universe. It can be thrilling, even if it gets lost in its own creation.
  31. The Secret Agent
    For his latest knockout, The Secret Agent, the Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho embraces a freewheeling sensibility, and finds laughter amid the terror.
  32. Zodiac Killer Project
    The truth is that Shackleton isn’t settling for one mode; he’s working in a bunch of them at once, mixing affection and critique. Just like any true fan would.
  33. Cutting Through Rocks
    Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni, who directed and edited the documentary, with Eyni also serving as cinematographer, have made a film that pulses with so much hopefulness that when Shahverdi’s story takes a shocking turn, it’s a punch to the solar plexus.
  34. Stop the Insanity: Finding Susan Powter
    Curtis shows up late in the picture, and her grounded presence helps Powter’s hard-luck story resonate more sympathetically. The documentary ends not with the promise of a comeback, but with a resolution to restore some, well, sanity to Powter’s life.
  35. Cactus Pears
    While the film centers on the comfort Anand finds with Balya and vice versa, it is also an elegantly reserved study of Anand’s grief, finding a rhythm in its scenes of ritual that allows us to ache alongside.
  36. 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.
  37. Rental Family
    A movie that’s at once disappointingly superficial and utterly charming.
  38. Sisu: Road to Revenge
    It’s gloriously, audaciously silly, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a good time.
  39. Train Dreams
    It’s hard to imagine anyone but Edgerton in this role. Though he’s a prolific actor, he’s still underestimated; he’s at his most superb when his manner is gentle, and he’s capable of doing so much with so little.
  40. Wicked: For Good
    Despite its unsettling political resonance, “Wicked” is finally most convincing as a story of an intense, soulfully nurturing female friendship.
  41. The Family Plan 2
    The director Simon Cellan Jones and the writer David Coggeshall return for this better executed, equally goofball follow-up.
  42. Selena y Los Dinos
    It’s an accessible presentation for fans. Others may find it too insider-focused, even as it renders Selena’s symbolic self more human.
  43. A Very Jonas Christmas Movie
    While the vanilla songs lack magic, the dad jokes and brotherly roasting feel like their own kind of delightfully unserious gift.
  44. Come See Me in the Good Light
    Nonfiction films often grapple with mortality and the meaning of existence, and usually those center on grief. This one wraps its arms around the full range of feeling that follows a terminal diagnosis: fear, love, desire, anger, wonder, hope, despair, even joy.
  45. The Running Man
    There’s nothing wrong (or incorrect!) about either Wright’s desire to please or the righteousness, and at times you can sense a bit of anger wafting off the screen, even if Wright and Powell mostly seem to be having a very good time.
  46. Nouvelle Vague
    Watching it again, I recognized that Linklater’s film is itself an expression of a certain approach — a consciousness — toward cinema’s pleasures and possibilities, one that at once embraces the art’s past and insists on its future.
  47. Being Eddie
    Being Eddie is a great time. Murphy is good company, and he’s hilarious as ever.
  48. Arco
    Like a cross between a Studio Ghibli joint and “Interstellar,” Arco, by the French comic-book artist turned filmmaker Ugo Bienvenu, strikes a lovely balance between fantastical kid-friendly wholesomeness and real-world bleakness.
  49. Bunny
    Bunny is a New York movie that eschews realism but still brims with authentic affection, and in doing so, bursts with life.
  50. 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.
  51. King Ivory
    While this slick film wants to use their stories to put faces to the fentanyl epidemic, Swab’s genre instincts get the better of him.
  52. Now You See Me: Now You Don't
    It’s all jocular and surface-level, but it’s also not trying to be anything more than old-fashioned blockbuster entertainment — neither overly serious nor, on occasion, allergic to a bit of sentimentality.
  53. Rebuilding
    One could surmise that it takes a village of women to save a stubbornly reticent man. But the lesson of Rebuilding is gentler, broader and timelier: Accepting help is a necessary step toward offering it to others in lasting ways.
  54. The Things You Kill
    Debts to Luis Buñuel and David Lynch are obvious, but The Things You Kill has its own way of getting inside its protagonist’s head space — and yours.
  55. Keeper
    If some of the cabin’s lore is on the silly side, Maslany sells Liz’s terror so convincingly that the urge to giggle is dampened. Her lock on the film’s tone is absolute.
  56. Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk
    Put Your Hand on Your Soul and Walk is not just a document of a life and a hope extinguished. It is also the best way to hear from Hassouna. And it’s a film about crossing borders; we get to see just a little of what she saw.
  57. 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.
  58. Sentimental Value
    Trier’s lightness of touch makes a striking contrast to the film’s emotional weightiness. Death haunts this movie, as it does other of Trier’s features, and while “Sentimental Value” has bursts of pure comedy (it can be very funny), it’s steeped in melancholy.
  59. Belén
    The film weaves a surprising amount of history into a procedural framework. It’s eye-opening, even though it’s hitting the same old beats.
  60. Caterpillar
    Some of what Mandelup captures is the result of sharp observation, and some of it is incredible chance.
  61. Modi - Three Days on the Wing of Madness
    The energetic and arguably strenuous performance by the lead actor, Riccardo Scamarcio, is something of a flex, to be sure.
  62. Christy
    This fierce contest of genres — in this corner, sports-saga triumph; in this corner, too-real female endangerment — is the director David Michôd’s point.
  63. Nuremberg
    Evidently, as this muddled movie tells it, the climactic lesson of the Nuremberg trials was that America had a friend, too.
  64. Peter Hujar's Day
    The result is a charming experiment that should delight those who like their pleasures both nostalgic and voyeuristic.
  65. Predator: Badlands
    In the end, what is most surprising about Predator: Badlands is also the most obvious, which is that filmmaking matters even to formulaic, apparently indestructible franchises.
  66. Die My Love
    Submerged in Grace’s overheated, claustrophobic, tedious, maddening reality, we are drowning, just like her. It is full-body immersion cinema.
  67. Fire of Wind
    The film’s intriguing symbolism diminishes over time, but remaining is an elegant portrait of solidarity; a vision of workers enmeshed in the land that sustains them.
  68. The White House Effect
    Of course, you could argue that any documentary tells its story as much with what it omits as with what it includes. But by letting the news footage, speech clips and documents “speak,” the transformation of the rhetoric is undeniable, as are some of the causes. The tale is not flattering, but it is illuminating.
  69. Auction
    Bonitzer evinces an appreciable warmth toward his creations that you feel even from the analytic distance he establishes.
  70. Love+War
    Love + War chooses to go wide rather than deep, resulting in a movie that, while pleasingly dynamic, offers less psychological insight than the photographs she has gambled everything to take. And perhaps that’s as it should be.
  71. Dracula
    Jude is an interesting, admirably unorthodox filmmaker who likes to push his viewers. Here, he simply punishes us.
  72. Hedda
    While DaCosta’s intelligence as a writer and director makes Hedda a standout film, her penchant for play makes it a delightful one.
  73. Little Amélie or the Character of Rain
    The movie is an imperfect gem — some of its ambitions toward grand emotional sweep are not without seams and it can at times feel like an overextended animated short. But it’s hard not to be charmed by its warm existentialism (in a children’s film, no less) and its belief that the greatest wisdoms can be found in the way a child sees and learns.
  74. Baahubali: The Epic
    The battle scenes and one-on-one combat roar with energy, blending Rajamouli’s C.G.I. artistry, staging and inventive showmanship. The militarized kingdom of Mahishmati has the grandeur of silent-screen epics, and although romantic sequences with the rebel warrior Avanthika are scaled back, the film’s flying-ship song set piece is a candy-coated delight.
  75. Coexistence, My Ass!
    The film leaves the impression that, sadly, comedy may be one of the only paths to peace left in the region.
  76. Ballad of a Small Player
    Ballad of a Small Player contains a great story, but it’s bogged down by its trappings. Perhaps it just got a little too greedy.
  77. 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.
  78. Bugonia
    Really, though, the reason to watch Bugonia is its leads.
  79. Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc
    As Denji and his adversaries converge on and above city streets, it’s possible to enjoy the combat on the level of pure sensation. Here, the rapturous ability of anime to isolate and prolong movement and emotion within a frame is on full display.
  80. Dream Eater
    Less, here, would have really frightened more.
  81. Last Days
    Last Days manages to be thoroughly disquieting without overtly judging its subject.
  82. Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost
    At least two ideas running through “Nothing Is Lost,” which is streaming on Apple TV, and which takes its title from a line in a play that Anne wrote, give it a complexity that usually eludes profile-of-an-artist documentaries.
  83. Queens of the Dead
    It’s all meant to be viewed through the lens of camp, that increasingly diluted and all-too-broad category that here feels more like an excuse for the film’s flat construction than an aesthetic approach. Though you’ll get a few laughs out of its cast.
  84. Shelby Oaks
    A derivative and dogged horror movie that reverts to rote with wearying regularity.
  85. Regretting You
    It’s formulaic and predictable, with goofy writing and clumsy editing. The saving grace is the actors, who manage to perform even the most ridiculous lines with a straight face.
  86. Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
    The great surprise of Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere — a solid, very likable, very affecting drama about an anguished period in the life of the young Bruce Springsteen — is that it doesn’t shy away from soul-deep pain.
  87. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
    While De Mornay was chilling as a woman haunted by a miscarriage and her husband’s suicide, Monroe is merely chilly, lumbering like a mopey teenager stuck with reciting unintentionally funny lines that aim for sexy but kill the mood.
  88. The Mastermind
    Like the overall movie, the character opens up incrementally to quiet, meaningful effect.
  89. Blue Moon
    The way to enjoy Blue Moon — and I think it’s terrifically enjoyable, despite the bright thread of melancholy running down the middle — is to settle into the theatricality, especially Hawke’s performance.
  90. Frankenstein
    Lush, melodramatic, sweepingly romantic and achingly emotional, it is a tale of fathers and sons, of lovers and outcasts, of men as the true monsters.
  91. Black Phone 2
    Derrickson has crafted a sequel that is remarkably different from the original — up in the frosty mountains, this is more of an ax-murderer ghost chase than a trip to a serial killer’s horrific basement — and with that comes a ratcheting up of grisly theatrics.
  92. Köln 75
    A movie that’s a little too eager to be liked. But it’s also tough to resist.
  93. Truth & Treason
    No matter its flaws, Truth & Treason is very well acted.
  94. It Was Just an Accident
    It’s a cry from the heart, a comic howl in the dark and one of the year’s essential movies.
  95. The Woman in Cabin 10
    A body isn’t the only thing that goes overboard here.
  96. Soul on Fire
    In terms of dramatic oomph, the problem isn’t that everyone behaves with decency and compassion, but that everyone unfailingly says what they mean, robbing the movie of moment-to-moment friction, dimension and subtext, even as its lessons in gratitude and self-forgiveness hit the mark.
  97. Mr. K
    Naturally, the guests are weirdos, though none are very memorable. And since Glover himself is the ultimate weirdo, it all feels a bit much.
  98. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
    Wrenching and at times suffocating, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a howl of maternal desperation spiked with jagged humor.
  99. Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989
    There is no single takeaway from Olsson’s film, which — apart from the musical score’s intermittent mood-setting — presents the footage straightforwardly, inviting viewers to reflect on what is in and out of frame. It’s great TV and an excellent documentary.
  100. Kiss of the Spider Woman
    For the most part, though, the X factor of elegance, sensuality and verve that made MGM musicals so memorable is missing here. You want to give an encouraging grade for effort, but effort is also the last thing you want to see in a musical.
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