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. Five Fingers For Marseilles
    In stylish and entertaining fashion, Five Fingers for Marseilles looks over the South African countryside and finds fresh vistas for the western genre.
  2. The Man Who Knew Too Much
    Even in mammoth VistaVision, the old Hitchcock thriller-stuff has punch.
  3. Tea with the Dames
    I would not have minded a bit if the dames were given twice the amount of time this trim film allowed.
  4. Lifeboat
    That old master of screen melodrama, Alfred Hitchcock, and Writer John Steinbeck have combined their distinctive talents in a tremendously provocative film—indeed, a surprisingly unique one—titled Lifeboat.
  5. Dead Souls
    Despite its intense running time and disturbing subject matter, Dead Souls does not seek a complete accounting. In fact, it’s partly about the inability to convey the full horror of these experiences.
  6. Charlie Says
    It’s a tough, difficult story that, anchored by Guinevere Turner’s script, Harron recounts with lucid calm, compassion and intelligent interpretive license.
  7. The Fall of the American Empire
    With its galloping pace and strange criminal bedfellows, this funny and engrossing film sometimes feels like the droll capers of the Ealing studio (maker of “The Lavender Hill Mob” among other small classics). But Arcand packs in a lot of pointed social and political commentary.
  8. Gloria Bell
    As a performer, Moore can go big, and a terrible yowl here pierces the heart. But she’s a virtuoso of restraint. She shows you the rush of emotions just before they break the surface, so the hurt and confusion flicker on her face like minute shifts of light.
  9. Wes Craven's New Nightmare
    An ingenious, cathartic exercise in illusion and fear.
  10. High Flying Bird
    The intellectual virtuosity on display is somehow both ostentatious and casual. The performances — Holland’s in particular, full of sadness, guile and audacity — feel the same way.
  11. Maria by Callas
    The movie is to Callas what last year’s “Jane” was to Jane Goodall: A documentary that revitalizes history through primary sources, to illuminating, at times enthralling effect.
  12. Her Smell
    Moss strips away every shred of her charm to reveal her charisma in its rawest state, implicating Perry and the audience in a voyeurism that can feel almost holy.
  13. Teen Spirit
    Teen Spirit, Max Minghella’s sweet and touching directing debut, is both proudly clichéd and refreshingly different.
  14. Trees Lounge
    Trees Lounge is not much more than a jumble of beautifully acted sketches that introduce the characters in Tommy's world.
  15. The Wild Bunch
    Very beautiful and the first truly interesting, American-made western in years.
  16. Becoming Astrid
    Erik Molberg Hansen’s relaxed camera movements and fuzzy-soft compositions are quite beautiful, and the performances — including the superb Trine Dyrholm as the baby’s Danish foster mother — are pitch-perfect. Best of all is the magnetic August, whose open, mobile features can slide from plain to lovely with just a shift in the light and whose embrace of the character is a joy to watch.
  17. Tyrel
    The stranger Tyrel gets, the more accurate it feels. The ecosystem of behaviors and attitudes on display is so unnervingly sharp that some of us may well find ourselves wincing in recognition.
  18. Over the Limit
    Reports of excessively punitive training of female gymnasts surface with some regularity, so in that sense Over the Limit is not unexpected. But the Polish director Marta Prus, brilliantly constructing a very particular look at a sport in which the arch of an eyebrow is as important as that of a spine, remains coolly impassive.
    • 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
  20. Wajib
    Ms. Jacir is a thrifty filmmaker; there’s nothing frilly in this movie. But she is also a sensitive and imaginative and resourceful one.
  21. Wobble Palace
    Every moment is as cringe-worthy and creative as Eugene’s floating toupee. Movies about the millennial moment are multitudinous, but Wobble Palace is special: a sendup of broke-artist types that shimmers with abashed affection.
  22. On Her Shoulders
    Alexandria Bombach’s direction and editing are exceptional; she captures images that are both subtle and formidable. Her film is, first and foremost, a profile of Murad and her mission. Yet it’s also a comment on the media and on government aid.
  23. Classical Period
    Classical Period is often very funny, but it’s also poignant, imagining a milieu — part heaven, part purgatory — in which daily lives can be devoted to pondering the aggregated wisdom of the past.
  24. Watergate
    Ferguson’s narrative is so dense and complicated, and at the same time so dramatic, suspenseful and clear, that it absorbs all of your attention.
  25. 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.
  26. 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.
  27. The Grief of Others
    It’s an artful portrait of a world that refuses the order we try to impose on it when we close ourselves off to heartache, doubt and pain.
  28. Searching for Ingmar Bergman
    Enthusing over an effect Bergman used in his great 1983 “Fanny and Alexander,” the director Olivier Assayas concludes, “Art defines truth.” Just about every minute of this movie shows how that’s true.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bambi
    In his search for perfection Mr. Disney has come perilously close to tossing away his whole world of cartoon fantasy. Meanwhile, of course, Bambi is going to please a great many people, for all our churlish exceptions.
  30. Invisible Hands
    Rich in information and dense with quiet outrage, Shraysi Tandon’s debut feature, the investigative documentary Invisible Hands, jumps into the murky and shameful world of child trafficking and forced labor.
  31. The Charmer
    It’s impressive that Alami can put all this across — romance, suspense and, in the moving final act, a kind of tragedy — and maintain the movie’s nimbleness. But he’s a natural storyteller.
  32. Socrates
    Socrates isn’t simply about being gay, or poor, or even devastatingly unloved: It’s about honoring a resilience that most of us will thankfully never have to summon.
  33. Funan
    Do’s tale is resolutely earthbound. He uses animation as an interrogation into the practice of fictional depiction derived from actual atrocities.
  34. Who Will Write Our History
    Using newsreels, voice-overs and re-enactments, Roberta Grossman, the documentary’s director, paints a comprehensive portrait of the times and of the risks taken by Ringelblum and his group. The staged scenes are well acted, while readings from diaries and letters are heartbreaking.
  35. Velvet Buzzsaw
    The confident storytelling and the bravura acting — Daveed Diggs, Toni Collette and John Malkovich contribute compelling caricatures — carry “Buzzsaw” all the way home.
  36. An Elephant Sitting Still
    Unsparing as Hu’s anatomy of moral drift may be, there is something graceful in his sympathetic attention to lives defined almost entirely by disappointment and diminished hope. Unlike the titular elephant, the film never stops moving, and by the end, instead of feeling beaten down, the viewer is likely to feel moved as well.
  37. One Cut of the Dead
    Ueda’s wonderfully tight script is divided into three acts, with the second and third parts casting the opener in an entirely new light — so much so that I rewatched it as soon as the movie ended.
  38. Apollo 11
    Although we know how the mission turns out, the movie generates and maintains suspense. And it rekindles a crazy sense of wonder at, among other things, what one can do practically with trigonometry.
  39. Knock Down the House
    Exuberant.
  40. Luce
    To say that it unfolds like a play is both accurate and undersells how gorgeously it has been rendered for the screen.
  41. The Brink
    Fast-moving, tightly packed, at times unnervingly entertaining.
  42. One Million American Dreams
    This documentary makes a powerful case that the city’s lost dead are due more honor than what Hart Island currently extends.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Winning
    Probably the best-rounded and most appealing personalized film of this kind ever made.
  44. American Pop
    American Pop is a dazzling display of talent, nerve, ideas (old and new), passion and a marvelously free sensibility. The man may well be a genius, though that sort of pronouncement will have to wait on time.
  45. The Plagiarists
    The Plagiarists does skewer its characters, but where it goes from there is more genuinely bleak than what mere finger-pointing can achieve.
  46. My Fair Lady
    All things considered, it is the brilliance of Miss Hepburn as the Cockney waif who is transformed by Prof. Henry Higgins into an elegant female facade that gives an extra touch of subtle magic and individuality to the film.
  47. Babylon
    All of that observation in Babylon amounts to something that still feels new. You’re looking at people who, in 1980 England, were, at last, being properly, seriously seen.
  48. Booksmart
    The rapid-fire, note-perfect dialogue is punctuated with moments of brilliant conceptual whimsy: animated and underwater sequences; horror-movie jump scares; immersive theater.
  49. For Sama
    The activists of this film, including al-Kateab herself, don’t speak in the language of philosophers or politicians. Their quotidian aspirations — to build a garden, to send their children safely to school — demonstrate the brutality of the government’s response, but they also invite viewers to picture themselves in the shoes of these modest political dissidents.
  50. Lady J (Mademoiselle de Joncquières)
    Mouret manipulates our sympathies effortlessly as the story zigzags its way from there to its ultimately surprising and quite satisfying resolution.
  51. The Juniper Tree
    In watching a newly restored version, I was struck not only by Björk’s distinctive charisma at 24 years old but also by the talent of the film’s writer, director and editor, Nietzchka Keene.
  52. The Eyes of Orson Welles
    The movie intersperses observations and speculations on Welles’s life and work with long looks at his graphic pieces. These are fascinating.
  53. Buddy
    The movie is warm, observant, mildly philosophical and deeply curious about the daily and inner lives of both the people and their four-legged assistants.
  54. Roll Red Roll
    A tough but essential watch, Roll Red Roll documents how a sexual assault in a declining Appalachian town became an international cause célèbre. Shots of near-empty streets and an abandoned steel mill provide a melancholy frame for behavior that seems horrifyingly incomprehensible.
  55. Blow-Up
    This is a fascinating picture, which has something real to say about the matter of personal involvement and emotional commitment in a jazzed-up, media-hooked-in world so cluttered with synthetic stimulations that natural feelings are overwhelmed.
  56. Medium Cool
    A film of tremendous visual impact, a kind of cinematic Guernica, a picture of America in the process of exploding into fragmented bits of hostility, suspicion, fear and violence.
  57. Satan & Adam
    The blues seep into every scene of Satan & Adam, a gritty yet lovely documentary. And even after the songs stop, the music’s bittersweet emotions linger.
  58. If the Dancer Dances
    As Wechsler allows rehearsal scenes to play out at length, the perfectionism of dancer-to-dancer lessons becomes improbably poignant.
  59. Hesburgh
    Hesburgh is consistently smart about its subject. It makes a convincing case that the priest was one of a handful of whites in the civil rights movement who understood the systemic nature of racism in the United States.
  60. Burning Cane
    Burning Cane is short and difficult. It does not aspire to entertain. Its realism is shot through with a constant dull ache.
  61. The River and the Wall
    The River and the Wall” comes on as innocent and glossy as a travelogue, but its scenic delights are the sugar coating on a passionate and spectacularly photographed political message.
  62. Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice
    The political intelligence and matter-of-fact feminism that emerge in this portrait are among its most intriguing aspects. Her cleareyed, down-to-earth thoughts on her profession, her family and American culture (musical and otherwise) make her someone you want to know better.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
    In its forthright dealing with the play, this becomes one of the most scathingly honest American films ever made.
  64. The Proposal
    Detailing at once an art project and a rescue mission, a love triangle and an elaborate, outlandish bargain, the movie has a surface serenity that belies its fuming emotions.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Birdman of Alcatraz
    A thoughtful yet powerful portrait that cleaves to the heart and mind despite its omissions.
  66. The Wild Child
    Unlike any other film Truffaut has ever made, yet only Truffaut could have made it. It is a lovely, pure film. And it may be a classic.
  67. Atlantics
    It testifies to the variety and vitality of politically alert genre filmmaking. It’s a suspenseful, sensual, exciting movie, and therefore a deeply haunting one as well.
  68. Les Misérables
    Ly shows command of staging and shooting throughout, simulating documentary form while maintaining a tight grip on narrative coherence.
  69. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
    This is less a chronicle of forbidden desire than an examination of how desire works. Like a lost work of 18th-century literature, it is at once ardent and rigorous, passionate and philosophical.
  70. Sorry We Missed You
    There’s no way for Loach to have gone smaller. When the movie’s over, you have, indeed, witnessed a tragedy, just not the usual kind. Nobody dies. No one goes to prison (there is one police-station visit unlike any I’ve seen). But life: that’s the tragedy, what it takes to get by, what it takes be just a little bit happy — for one lousy meal.
  71. The Traitor
    Bellocchio’s approach to the story is at once coolly objective — the movie is part biopic, part courtroom procedural — and almost feverishly intense. He has a historian’s analytical detachment, a novelist’s compassion for his characters and a citizen’s outrage at the cruelty and corruption that have festered in his country for so long.
  72. The Wild Goose Lake
    The movie exhilarates.
  73. Invisible Life
    There’s such a disconcerting rush of lush imagery and action in the first 40 minutes or so of “Invisible Life” that one is apt to wonder whether there’s any kind of focused narrative. But the casual misdirection is setting the viewer up for an emotional kill.
  74. Nina Wu
    This startlingly evocative, complex and confrontational new film is not interested in justice or didacticism.
  75. Papicha
    Marked by a fierce vitality and vivid emotional authenticity, Papicha thrives on the heat of Nedjma’s anger and the glorious bond among the mostly young female performers.
  76. Zombi Child
    The movie’s inconclusiveness is the source of its appeal; Zombi Child is fueled by insinuation and fascination.
  77. First Love
    Miike’s seemingly offhand inventiveness is evident in almost every shot and cut.
  78. The Cordillera of Dreams
    The Cordillera of Dreams is a beautiful film about nightmares that have yet to end.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Samurai Rebellion
    Amazing: stirring, subversive and, beneath their dauntingly severe surfaces, sneakily lyrical.
  80. The Longest Day
    It is hard to think of a picture, aimed and constructed as this one was, doing any more or any better or leaving one feeling any more exposed to the horror of war than this one does.
  81. Giant
    Thanks to Mr. Stevens' brilliant structure and handling of images, every scene and every moment is a pleasure. He makes "picture" the essence of his film.
  82. Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love
    While Broomfield’s films often take a sardonic, close-to-cynical tone, “Marianne & Leonard” is admiring, affectionate and a little awe-struck.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    A Place in the Sun
    Despite the fact that this version of Dreiser's tragedy may be criticized—academically, we think—for its length or deviations from the author's pattern, A Place in the Sun is a distinguished work, a tribute, above all, to its producer-director and an effort now placed among the ranks of the finest films to have come from Hollywood in several years.
  84. An Easy Girl
    Sultry, but never sleazy, observant yet nonjudgmental, An Easy Girl is more than just a tale of innocence and experience. Taking a nuanced look at sexual awakening and, to a lesser extent, class distinction, the movie has a charming flightiness that builds to an unexpectedly touching climax.
  85. The Edge of Democracy
    Though she is a scrupulous and dogged digger-up of hidden facts and a thoughtful interpreter of public events, Costa hasn’t produced a work of objective journalism or detached historical scholarship so much as a personal reckoning with her nation’s past and present.
  86. The Raft
    By setting Genovés’s words in counterpoint with the recollections of seven of the participants who are still alive, [Lindeen] reinterprets the experiment, finding meanings that the scientist missed.
  87. 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.
  88. Jawline
    A “Grey Gardens” for Generation Z, Jawline underscores the contrast between Austyn’s optimism and his drab surroundings.
  89. The Yearling
    A cheerful and inspiring film about the coming to manhood of a youngster.
  90. El Cid
    It is hard to remember a picture in which the sheer pictorial punch was greater than it is in this three-hour exhibition of kings and warriors in medieval Spain.
  91. Soul
    It’s a small, delicate movie that doesn’t hit every note perfectly, but its combination of skill, feeling and inspiration is summed up in the title.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    All Quiet on the Western Front
    Often the scenes are of such excellence that if they were not audible one might believe that they were actual motion pictures of activities behind the lines, in the trenches and in No Man's Land.
  93. The Ground Beneath My Feet
    This is crafty, first-rank filmmaking.
  94. Aquarela
    The movie, like the elemental forces we continue to exacerbate, never explains itself. Surrender to it, though, and a narrative - of spectacle, conflict and retaliation - will eventually become clear.
  95. The Killer
    The scenes of gore and destruction are even more spectacular than Hong Kong's fog-shrouded skyline. The director repeatedly places the viewer at the center of the crossfire and turns the gyrating camera into the next best thing to a lethal weapon.
  96. Wasp Network
    There are times in which Wasp Network feels like a John le Carré tale drenched in Miami sun, or even a serious-minded “Top Gun” variant. But it’s also a provocative demonstration of how strange life can get when the political and the personal intertwine like roots of a mammoth tree.
  97. Face to Face
    Bergman creates a stunning picture not only of personal anxiety but also of the fury that may exist just below the surface of any perfect state.
  98. A Man for All Seasons
    A Man for All Seasons is a picture that inspires admiration, courage and thought.
  99. The Freshman
    The visual style of The Freshman isn't always up to its verbal wit, but then the writing sets an exceptional standard.
  100. Inherit the Wind
    One of the most intelligent, respectable and entertaining motion pictures of this year.
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