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. One More Time with Feeling
    Even in the throes of grief, Mr. Cave retains his mystique as a rock shaman.
  2. The Wizard of Oz
    A delightful piece of wonder-working which had the youngsters' eyes shining and brought a quietly amused gleam to the wiser ones of the oldsters.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Ride the High Country
    Take two cornbelt veterans like Mr. McCrea and Mr. Scott, give them a taut, tangy script (by N. B. Stone Jr.) a trim supporting cast and a good director (Sam Peckinpah), and you have the most disarming little horse opera in months.
  4. Memoria
    Every scene unfolds with quiet, meticulous clarity, but Weerasethakul’s luminous precision only deepens the mystery.
  5. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
    In his memoir Mr. Bauby performed a heroic feat of alchemy, turning horror into wisdom, and Mr. Schnabel, following his example and paying tribute to his accomplishment, has turned pity into joy.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Invasion of the Body Snatchers
    Almost 40 years later, Don Siegel's film about the pod people hasn't lost its chill. [02 Dec 1994, p.D18]
    • The New York Times
  7. Close-Up
    It is Mr. Sabzian's poignancy that makes "Close-Up" much more than a clever reflection on film-versus-life as an endless hall of mirrors.
  8. The Class
    Here Mr. Cantet -- whose earlier features include "Human Resources" and "Time Out," two other dramas about systems of power -- has done that rarest of things in movies about children: He has allowed them to talk.
  9. Platoon
    Possibly the best work of any kind about the Vietnam War since Michael Herr's vigorous and hallucinatory book "Dispatches."
  10. No Country for Old Men
    No Country for Old Men is purgatory for the squeamish and the easily spooked. For formalists -- those moviegoers sent into raptures by tight editing, nimble camera work and faultless sound design -- it’s pure heaven.
  11. Chinatown
    Mr. Polanski and Mr. Towne attempted nothing so witty and entertaining, being content instead to make a competently stylish, more or less thirites-ish movie that continually made me wish I were back seeing "The Maltese Falcon" or "The Big Sleep." Others may not be as finicky. [21 June 1974]
    • The New York Times
  12. Here
    In this painstakingly muted, luminously photographed testimony to connection, nothing much and everything happens — or could.
  13. 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.
  14. 35 Shots of Rum
    In its modest scope and mellow tone, 35 Shots of Rum resembles Olivier Assayas’s "Summer Hours," another recent film by a French director who has sometimes trafficked in provocation and extremity. Both movies embed extraordinary thematic richness within a simple, almost anecdotal narrative framework, and both achieve a rare eloquence about the state of the world by means of tact and reticence.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    King Kong
    A fantastic film.
  16. Secrets & Lies
    Unfolds beautifully, with a rueful, knowing intelligence that rises above easy assumptions. [27 September 1996, p.C1]
  17. The Florida Project
    This movie accomplishes something almost miraculous — two things, actually. It casts a spell and tells the truth.
  18. Timbuktu
    Timbuktu is an act of resistance and revenge because it asserts the power of secularism not as an ideology but rather as a stubborn fact of life.
  19. Frenzy
    Watching Frenzy is like riding a roller coaster in total darkness. You can never be quite sure when you're going to start a terrifying new descent or take a sudden turn to the left or right. The agony is exquisite.
  20. Days
    Tsai’s motives for stretching his shots become clear after a while, and the film builds an uncanny mood.
  21. Brief Encounter
    An uncommonly good little picture.
  22. Almayer's Folly
    Almayer's Folly is not friendly terrain to traverse; like some sinister version of Proust, it is a prolonged fever dream that ultimately yields madness.
  23. Cool Hand Luke
    Mr. Newman is excellent, at the top of his sometime erratic form, in the role of this warped and alienated loner whose destiny it is to lose. George Kennedy is powerfully obsessive as the top-dog who handles things his way as effectively and finally as destructively as does the warden or the guards.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Little Women
    The film begins in a gentle fashion and slips away smoothly without any forced attempt to help the finish to linger in the minds of the audience. Little Women is just as honest in its story as Jo's nature.
  25. The Act of Killing
    The horror of The Act of Killing does not dissipate easily or yield to anything like clarity.
  26. De Humani Corporis Fabrica
    The film’s sometimes brusque transitions and decentered perspectives are just as transgressive as any of the graphic imagery.
  27. Maborosi
    A pictorial tone poem of astonishing visual intensity and emotional depth.
  28. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
    "E.T." is as contemporary as laser-beam technology, but it's full of the timeless longings expressed in children's literature of all eras.
  29. Apocalypse Now Redux
    In spite of its limited perspective on Vietnam, its churning, term-paperish exploration of Conrad and the near incoherence of its ending, (it) is a great movie. It grows richer and stranger with each viewing, and the restoration of scenes left in the cutting room two decades ago has only added to its sublimity.
  30. Never Rarely Sometimes Always
    In “Never Rarely,” the hurdles to an abortion are as legion as they are maddening and pedestrian, a blunt political truism that Hittman brilliantly connects to women’s fight for emancipation.
  31. Annie Hall
    There will be discussion about what points in the film coincide with the lives of its two stars, but this, I think, is to detract from and trivialize the achievement of the film, which, at last, puts Woody in the league with the best directors we have.
  32. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
    The playful spookiness of Mr. Jackson's direction provides a lively, light touch, a gesture that doesn't normally come to mind when Tolkien's name is mentioned.
  33. Out of the Clear Blue Sky
    A fascinating study of a man, and a firm, deeply changed by catastrophe.
  34. The Zone of Interest
    All that is clear from what’s onscreen is Glazer has made a hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise set in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.
  35. Let It Fall: L.A. 1982-1992
    Teeming with acts both heroic and reprehensible, John Ridley’s wrenchingly humane documentary, Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992, reveals the Los Angeles riots as the almost inevitable culmination of a decade of heightening racial tensions.
  36. Threads
    Clearly, Threads is not a balanced discussion about the pros and cons of nuclear armaments. It is a candidly biased warning. And it is, as calculated, unsettlingly powerful. [12 Feb 1985, p.42]
    • The New York Times
  37. Quiz Show
    A supremely elegant and thoughtful parable.
  38. Leviathan
    The director, Andrey Zvyagintsev, has a heavenly eye but a leaden hand, and his movie is as heavy as it is transporting, filled with stirring shots of the natural world and deep dives into a human realm flooded with tears and vodka.
  39. Le Cercle Rouge (1970)
    Offers the kind of experience that makes you glad movies exist.
  40. Toy Story 3
    As sweet, as touching, as humane a movie as you are likely to see this summer.
  41. The Souvenir
    The Souvenir feels like a whispered confidence, an intimate disclosure that shouldn’t be betrayed because it isn’t really yours.
  42. This Is Spinal Tap
    ''It's such a fine line between stupid and . . . '' ''And clever,'' muse the band members collectively. It certainly is- and the delightful This Is Spinal Tap stays on the right side of that line.
  43. 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.
  44. Alphaville
    What it comes to is simply that the dazzle of Mr. Godard's cinematic style is not matched by the hackneyed idea of a robot society that is expounded in the script.
  45. The Look of Silence
    A painful, profoundly empathetic work of moral reckoning.
  46. Tower
    Using a limited frame, Mr. Maitland does his own commemorating, inherently raising questions about terror, the nature of heroism and what it means to really survive. He also does something even more necessary: He turns names on a plaque into people.
  47. 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.
  48. Burning
    While each event expands the narrative — filling in the larger picture with nods at sexual relations, class divisions and a riven people — they don’t necessarily explain what happens or answer the fundamental question that burns through this brilliant movie.
  49. Drive My Car
    Hamaguchi’s touch — delicate, precise, restrained, gentle — overwhelms in increments. His reserve is essential to his visual and narrative approach but also feels like a worldview.
  50. Moolaadé
    To skip Moolaade would be to miss an opportunity to experience the embracing, affirming, world-changing potential of humanist cinema at its finest.
  51. 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.
  52. A Summer's Tale
    A Summer’s Tale has room to focus on Rohmer’s brilliance at revealing human nature through articulate, multidimensional characters, perfectly cast, who in some ways seem to exist outside of time.
  53. Saint Omer
    An intellectually charged, emotionally wrenching story about the inability of storytelling — literary, legal or cinematic — to do justice to the violence and strangeness of human experience.
  54. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
    Not merely an interesting document from a far-off place; it is a masterpiece.
  55. L.A. Confidential
    A tough, gorgeous, vastly entertaining throwback to the Hollywood that did things right. As such, it enthusiastically breaks most rules of studio filmmaking today.
  56. Three Colors: White
    Throughout, White is filled with exquisite scenes that don't press too hard...and those moments are all the richer for their understatement.
  57. Time
    Substantive and stunning, the documentary Time delivers on the title’s promise of the monumental as well as the personal.
  58. Gavagai
    This is a high-minded and carefully composed film about, among other things, the inability of words in any language to satisfactorily communicate states of being. There are pleasures and intellectual provocations to be had here. But its attempted effects fall flat a little too often.
  59. A Bread Factory Part Two: Walk With Me a While
    The focus on the workings of an American institution may remind some of the expansive comedies of Robert Altman or the documentaries of Frederick Wiseman. But also, the blurring of the line between performance and reality, the embrace of an intimate theatricality, recalls the work of Jacques Rivette. These are cinematic giants, and this director may be on his way to joining them.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Killing
    Though The Killing is composed of familiar ingredients and it calls for fuller explanations, it evolves as a fairly diverting melodrama.
  61. Swing Time
    The plot is never permitted to weigh upon the shoulders of the cast; of comedy there is a generous portion; of romance the lightest sprinkling; of dancing, in solo, duet and ensemble, a brisk and debonair allotment.
  62. Lost in Translation
    Here he (Murray) supplies the kind of performance that seems so fully realized and effortless that it can easily be mistaken for not acting at all.
  63. Breaking Away
    The cast is unknown, the director has a spotty history, and the basic premise falls into this year's most hackneyed category (unknown boxer/ bowler/jogger hopes to become sports hero). Even so, the finished product is wonderful. Here is a movie so fresh and funny it didn't even need a big budget or a pedigree.
  64. Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus
    For the fan, it’s an intensely moving experience. But even for the viewer without much knowledge of Sakamoto’s work, “Opus” holds its own as the rare cinematic space for contemplation.
  65. After Life
    After Life becomes a quiet, extraordinarily moving and sometimes funny meditation on the meaning and value of life. It intimates that whatever happiness we may find in life comes from within and is self-created.
  66. Son of Saul
    Mr. Nemes orchestrates a tour de force of suspense, a swift symphony of collisions, coincidences and reversals that is almost unbearably exciting. His skill is undeniable, but also troubling. The movie offers less insight than sensation, an emotional experience that sits too comfortably within the norms of entertainment. This is not entirely the director’s fault. The Holocaust, once forbidden territory, is now safe and familiar ground.
  67. Love Affair
    Mr. McCarey has balanced his ingredients skillfully and has merged them, as is clear in retrospect, into a glowing and memorable picture.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Frankenstein
    It is naturally a morbid, gruesome affair, but it is something to keep the spectator awake, for during its most spine-chilling periods it exacts attention.
  69. 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.
  70. Little Women
    Like any good novelist and every great filmmaker, Gerwig isn’t afraid to let her audience work a little. She trusts our intelligence and our curiosity, and also her own command of the medium.
  71. The African Queen
    A slick job of movie hoodwinking with a thoroughly implausible romance, set in a frame of wild adventure that is as whopping as its tale of off-beat love. And the main tone and character of it are in the area of the well-disguised spoof...Mr. Huston merits credit for putting this fantastic tale on a level of sly, polite kidding and generally keeping it there, while going about the happy business of engineering excitement and visual thrills.
  72. Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat
    In making Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, the director Johan Grimonprez used every instrument cinema affords. His documentary is rhythmic and propulsive, with reverberating sound and images juxtaposed against one another to lend more meaning. The result, in a word, is marvelous.
  73. Ghost Tropic
    Beguiles and fascinates on several levels.
  74. The Triplets of Belleville
    May be the oddest movie of the year, by turns sweet and sinister, insouciant and grotesque, invitingly funny and forbiddingly dark. It may also be one of the best, a tour de force of ink-washed, crosshatched mischief and unlikely sublimity.
  75. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
    Monty Python and the Holy Grail...is a marvelously particular kind of lunatic endeavor.
  76. The Man Who Would Be King
    The movie, which was shot in Morocco, looks lovely and remote (how did we ever once settle for those black-and-white Hollywood hills?) and has just enough romantic nonsense in it to enchant the child in each of us.
  77. Flee
    Less a sociological case study than a psychological portrait, the film is both probing and tactful.
  78. All Quiet on the Western Front
    Lewis Milestone's unsparing direction of the senseless slaughter more than makes up for the soft spots and does justice to Erich Maria Remarque's novel of a generation destroyed by war.
  79. EX LIBRIS: The New York Public Library
    In “Ex Libris,” democracy is alive and in the hands of a forceful advocate and brilliant filmmaker, which helps make this one of the greatest movies of Mr. Wiseman’s extraordinary career and one of his most thrilling.
  80. Repulsion (re-release)
    An absolute knockout of a movie in the psychological horror line has been accomplished by Roman Polanski in his first English-language film. (Review of Original Release)
  81. Children of Tokyo
    That it is more -- a small masterpiece, perfect in design and execution -- almost goes without saying, but the film’s profundity and its charm go hand in hand.
  82. A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
    It is a crowded, complex crime story that is also a tale of sexual awakening and an understated exercise in kitchen-sink realism. In short - or rather at mesmerizing, necessary length - this film has everything, and is well worth a day of your life.
  83. Young Mr. Lincoln
    Not merely a natural and straightforward biography, but a film which indisputably has the right to be called Americana. Henry Fonda's characterization is one of those once-in-a-blue-moon things: a crossroads meeting of nature, art, and a smart casting director.
  84. The Ladykillers
    Perhaps it is slightly labored. Perhaps it does have the air of an initially brilliant inspiration that has not worked out as easily as it seemed it should. Still and all, Mr. Rose's nimble writing and Alexander Mackendrick's directing skill have managed to assure The Ladykillers of a distinct and fetching comic quality.
  85. Graves Without a Name
    The accretion of detail — narrative, visual and verbal — gives the movie an unusual density. The depiction of human cruelty is appalling, but the way “Graves” makes the viewer feel the necessity of its filmmaker’s calling is profoundly moving.
  86. Tótem
    Totem is a coming into consciousness story about a child navigating realms — human and animal, spiritual and material — that exist around her like overlapping concentric circles. Yet even as the story’s focus sharpens, what matters here are the characters: their emotions and worried words, how they hold it together and fall apart, their individual habits and shared habitat.
  87. Lady Killer (Gueule d’Amour)
    Like other love stories of the period, Gueule d'Amour has a melodramatic surface, yet it hits a nerve in anyone who has ever spent too much time thinking about the wrong person.
  88. 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.
  89. Nickel Boys
    Part of what makes Nickel Boys striking is how Ross stays true to the novel but with his own voice, his own narrative and visual style, and how he uses moments in time and freighted images — faces, hands, flashing police lights, an alligator in a class, a mule in a hall — to build the story.
  90. A Bread Factory Part One: For the Sake of Gold
    Patrick Wang’s A Bread Factory has an immense cast, a deliberate pace and thematic ambition to spare — but it also has a ground-level, plain-spoken modesty that renders it hypnotic.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    On the Waterfront
    Moviemaking of a rare and high order. (Review of Original Release)
  92. Jafar Panahi's Taxi
    Like Mr. Panahi’s cab, his film is equipped with both windows and mirrors. It’s reflective and revealing, intimate and wide-ranging, compact and moving.
  93. Ida
    There is an implicit argument here between faith and materialism, one that is resolved with wit, conviction and generosity of spirit. Mr. Pawlikowski has made one of the finest European films (and one of most insightful films about Europe, past and present) in recent memory.
  94. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
    The movie’s bifurcated shape isn’t novel, but Poitras’s marshaling of all this information is exceptionally graceful. She has an abundance of fantastic material at her disposal — including a generous selection of Goldin’s artwork — but what makes the movie work so well is how Poitras seamlessly uses the different sections of Goldin’s life to weave a coherent portrait of the artist.
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