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. Nine Queens
    The kind of movie that seduces you into becoming putty in its manipulative card-sharking hands and making you enjoy being taken in by its shameless contrivance.
  2. A Fish Called Wanda
    The dialogue reports funny things instead of showing them. The movie remains in a limbo halfway between the informed anarchy of Monty Python comedy stripped of all social and political satire, and the comparatively genteel comedy of "The Lavender Hill Mob." [15 July 1988, p.C8]
    • The New York Times
  3. Trophy
    The intimacy of the film’s images and the surprising candor of its participants are disarming: Whatever your initial response, be prepared to re-evaluate.
  4. Incredibles 2
    The family that fights together remains the steadily throbbing, unbreakable heart of Incredibles 2, even when Bob and Helen swap traditional roles.
  5. Totally Under Control
    It elevates voices who sounded early alarms about the virus and whose warnings were lost in a din of complacency, incompetence and political calculation. Not all of these interviewees or their messages have broken through to the public consciousness.
  6. She's Beautiful When She's Angry
    As filmmaking, “She’s Beautiful” is meat and potatoes: It gets the job done without frills.
  7. Gleason
    Gleason is incredibly frank about Gleason’s physical suffering and the toll his terrifyingly implacable physical deterioration takes on his marriage.
  8. Casino Royale
    The latest James Bond vehicle -- call him Bond, Bond 6.0 -- finds the British spy leaner, meaner and a whole lot darker.
  9. Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts
    This documentary, directed by Jeffrey Wolf, is a plain, sincere, nourishing account of the artist.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Xala
    It is part fable and part satire, but it is much more: with the greatest fineness and delicacy, Mr. Sembene, the Senegalese writer and director who made this picture, has set out a portrait of the complex and conflicting mesh of traditions, aspirations and frustrations of a culture knocked askew by colonialism and distorting itself anew while climbing out.
  11. Much Ado About Nothing
    He has taken a Shakespearean romantic comedy, the sort of thing that usually turns to mush on the screen, and made a movie that is triumphantly romantic, comic and, most surprising of all, emotionally alive.
  12. Concerning Violence
    The energy here feels more like that of a lecture than of a film; it’s an analytical tonic that’s potent to the point of bitter.
  13. Kokuho
    Even as it periodically languishes, the film comes back around, with some moving flourishes, to stamp its idea: To witness these vicissitudes over a lifetime, is to see the beauty, bloodshed and loneliness of true artistic greatness.
  14. Cane River
    The movie itself, which was lost until a few years ago, is relaxed, reflective and sweet, a romance shadowed by the complexities of history, race and politics that manages to be both modest and ambitious.
  15. Big Night
    The film is loaded with brotherly affection and with warm, funny and poignant evocations of a gentler time.[20 September 1996, p.C12]
  16. Paper & Glue
    In 2017, JR was half of the delightful tag-team of “Faces Places,” the Oscar-nominated documentary he and the groundbreaking director Agnès Varda made in the French countryside. Paper & Glue, while not as tender a romp, is a sequel in spirit. Faces and their places continue to matter.
  17. The Citizen
    The film, directed by Roland Vranik from a script by Mr. Vranik and Ivan Szabo, is a careful, compassionate and beautifully acted character drama with a social conscience.
  18. 3:10 to Yuma
    A good, lively script has been written by Halsted Welles, and sharp, business-like direction has been contributed by Delmer Daves.What's more, the whole thing is neatly acted.
  19. The Strange Little Cat
    Mr. Zürcher has concocted something intimate yet otherworldly with this highly original debut.
  20. Saraband
    Ms. Ullmann, now 65, and Mr. Josephson, 81, have a supreme mastery of the Bergman style. Their performances are spiritual and emotional X-rays.
  21. Ad Astra
    Ad Astra is unambiguously a film of its moment, one about a man’s struggle for personal meaning and a place in the world in a time of fallen fathers.
  22. Brute Force
    Jules Dassin's steel-springed direction keeps the whole thing approriately taut.
  23. On the Beach at Night Alone
    Ms. Kim is simultaneously an ordinary woman and a melodramatic heroine, her performance made more layered and intriguing by the intimation that she may be playing herself.
  24. The Secret of Roan Inish
    What prevents "The Secret of Roan Inish" from evaporating into cuteness or from being smothered in mystical overkill is the director's firmly human perspective.
  25. Nine Lives
    Together, however, they add up to a film that may be the closest movies have come to the cinematic equivalent of a collection of Chekhov short stories.
  26. Charlie: The Life and Art of Charles Chaplin
    Very much a writer's film: Mr. Schickel's elegant, occasionally knotty prose, read by Sidney Pollack, offers a clear, nuanced interpretation of the artist's work in relation to his life.
  27. In the Company of Men
    It exaggerates real, recognizable attitudes in a manner that intends to be disturbing.
  28. A Bronx Tale
    A Bronx Tale offers a warm, vibrant and sometimes troubling portrait of the community it describes. Almost everyone within that community sounds a little bit like Robert De Niro except Mr. De Niro himself.
  29. Love & Mercy
    Love & Mercy doesn’t claim to solve the mystery of Brian Wilson, but it succeeds beyond all expectation in making you hear where he was coming from.
  30. Story of My Death
    Mr. Serra has said his film portrays the eclipse of Enlightenment rationality by the violent forces of Romanticism. It’s a tidy overarching conceit, but the film’s lived-in feel does make for one vivid way of imagining shifts in thought.
  31. Pervert Park
    To be sure, nothing in this film is easy to hear. But that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be said, and learned from.
  32. Nossa Chape
    The movie the directors have made doesn’t have the passion that its subjects do.
  33. Taste of Cherry
    Exquisite.
  34. Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo)
    In his first feature, the writer and director Joel Alfonso Vargas takes a rather unremarkable premise and unspools it with sedulous care.
  35. Natchez
    Maybe telling the whole story doesn’t mean living happily ever after, but at least it can mean being a little wiser.
  36. Bugsy
    Allen Daviau's camera work and Albert Wolsky's costumes help to forge the film's high style, as does Ennio Morricone's score. But much of its elan comes from Mr. Levinson's obvious affection for the time and place that are his film's backdrop, and from the flair with which he stages even minor episodes.
  37. Costa Brava, Lebanon
    If a fuller sense of their humanity is sometimes lost to the ideas they serve, Akl has nonetheless produced a smart and sensitive film.
  38. American Honey
    American Honey, long and messy as it is, is by turns observant and exuberant, and sweet in a way that is both unexpected and organic.
  39. You Hurt My Feelings
    This is a work of discipline and structure. It’s a situation comedy in the best, classical sense: These people’s ethical problems are sometimes ours. I’ve been Beth. I’ve been Don. And I had to watch half of what they’re dealing with through my fingers.
  40. Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues
    The film is a trove of Armstrong’s love of music and his labor. And because so many of those who lend their insights are now departed, it has the feel of a mausoleum worthy of a humble yet celebratory “Saints Go Marching In” second line.
  41. Monrovia, Indiana
    While there’s no reason to suppose that this is Wiseman’s last movie, it doesn’t seem impossible that, at 88, he is aware of lengthening shadows and autumnal tints, of the fragility of perception and the finite nature of consciousness. Monrovia, Indiana is not precisely about any of those things, but it carries intimations of them, elegiac strains amid the doggerel of daily life.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cabaret
    Cabaret is one of those immensely gratifying imperfect works in which from beginning to end you can literally feel a movie coming to life.
  43. Peter and the Farm
    It is the film’s cosmic dimension that makes it so special.
  44. True Grit
    In some ways, much like Charles Laughton's "Night of the Hunter," which the Coens quote both musically and visually, True Grit is a parable about good and evil. Only here, the lines between the two are so blurred as to be indistinguishable, making this a true picture of how the West was won, or - depending on your view - lost.
  45. Mystery Train
    The dialogue sounds as if it had been gathered by means of microphones hidden in diners, buses, waiting rooms, restrooms, motels and park benches. Sometimes it is hilariously banal, with never a word wasted.
  46. A Hidden Life
    Franz Jägerstätter’s defiance of evil is moving and inspiring, and I wish I understood it better.
  47. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
    As is customary in Mr. Baumbach’s pictures, the acting is spectacular.
  48. Hombre
    Hombre seems constantly meaning to have something vital to say, maybe about racial antagonisms, that it can't quite sputter out because it has so much to do. But in the doing of it, all the people are fine in their roles and the whole is tremendously engrossing without being important. Hombre is tough.
  49. Bigger Stronger Faster*
    Bigger, Stronger, Faster* left me convinced that the steroid scandals will abate as the drugs are reluctantly accepted as inevitable products of a continuing revolution in biotechnology. Replaceable body parts, plastic surgery, anti-depressants, Viagra and steroids are just a few of the technological advancements in a never-ending drive to make the species superhuman.
  50. The Blair Witch Project
    A nifty example of how to make something out of nothing. Nothing but imagination, and a game plan so enterprising it should elevate its creators to pinup status at film schools everywhere.
  51. I Wish
    I Wish tends toward the vaporous and not just because of its volcano; but whenever its children are on screen, lighted up with joy or dimmed by hard adult truths, the film burns bright.
  52. What Richard Did
    Every detail of What Richard Did rings true.
  53. Bending the Arc
    The men refused to be deterred by institutional rigidity, political apathy or a skeptical scientific community. Their perseverance is cheering, giving the movie a brightly buoyant tone that belies the suffering at its center and renders the sometimes distracting musical score largely unnecessary.
  54. End of the Century
    The measured ordinariness of its first section has been a sly setup for a poetic film that handles narrative as a kind of scarf dance.
  55. Housekeeping for Beginners
    In its cheerfully disordered way, “Housekeeping” tells us that families, like last-minute meals, must sometimes be created from whatever ingredients are at hand.
  56. Iris
    What is clear is that while there are several stories folded into Iris — a marriage tale, an ode to multiculturalism and a fashion spectacular — it is also about the insistent rejection of monocultural conformity.
  57. Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
    Mr. Abrams may be as worshipful as any Star Wars obsessive, but in The Force Awakens he’s made a movie that goes for old-fashioned escapism even as it presents a futuristic vision of a pluralistic world that his audience already lives in. He hasn’t made a film only for true believers; he has made a film for everyone (well, almost).
  58. White Riot
    One of the many things that White Riot, a documentary about RAR directed by Rubika Shah, brings home is that the world could still use more somethings against racism.
  59. Last Men in Aleppo
    This is an essential film, but it is also a terribly dispiriting one.
  60. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
    This intelligent, revolting, artistically made and entirely empty look at a murderer comes close to a cinema of pure technique. It is profoundly disturbing, even more for the questions it raises about the use of film than for the mutilated bodies that litter the screen.
  61. Rabbit-Proof Fence
    Although the movie, adapted from a book by Doris Pilkington Garimara, pushes emotional buttons and simplifies its true story to give it the clean narrative sweep of an extended folk ballad, it never goes dramatically overboard.
  62. Spellbound
    Enough drama, humor and unfiltered nail-biting suspense to put all the thrill-mongering screenwriters in Hollywood to shame.
  63. Private Property
    This tense and upsetting film has more psychological depth and empathy than the comparable sensationalist fare of its time, and shudder-inducing cinematic style to spare. Private Property qualifies as a genuine rediscovery.
  64. Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound
    Documentaries about film technology, at least those that aspire to reach some portion of a mainstream audience, have to make wonkiness ingratiating. Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound, a cogent and winning picture directed by Midge Costin, does this in a variety of ways.
  65. Union
    Union is as interested in intra-union disputes as it is in the fight writ large. But the external obstacles are clear as well.
  66. Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief
    Mr. Gibney, who enters swinging and keeps on swinging, comes across as less interested in understanding Scientology than in exposing its secrets, which makes for a lively and watchable documentary if not an especially enlightening one.
  67. My Dog Tulip
    One of the most sophisticated dog movies ever created.
  68. White God
    In classic narrative fashion, Mr. Mundruczo works the setup like a burlesque fan dancer, teasing out the reveal bit by bit.
  69. The Century of the Self
    An unusually cerebral filmed essay that demands focus and patience from its audience as it sets about the task of unearthing a secret history of the 20th century. Adam Curtis, the film's director and writer, saves the proceedings from being overly dry with his visual wit and deft touch with archival materials.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Freaks
    Freaks is not a picture to be easily forgotten.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Public Enemy
    It is just another gangster film...weaker than most in its story, stronger than most in its acting, and like most maintaining a certain level of interest through the last burst of machine-gun fire.
  72. Whale Rider
    Wickedly absorbing.
  73. The Mill and the Cross
    In this lush and hypnotic examination of a painter's work and the times in which he lived, Mr. Majewski presents an extended contemplation of the creative process itself.
  74. Lean on Pete
    There’s almost a cosmic dimension to some of the most beautiful passages, as if the world (call it nature or God or sensitive direction) were holding Charley in its embrace.
  75. Sunset Story
    One of the strengths of Sunset Story is that it introduces us to a pair of extraordinary women who have kept their dignity and independence in a world that conspires against them having either. The story of Lucille and Irja may break your heart, but it will also make your day.
  76. Claire's Camera
    Ms. Huppert’s presence — steady, warm, thoughtful but with a casual air — keeps the entire enterprise classically comedic.
  77. Last and First Men
    Johannsson’s stark, uncompromising passion project is always striking to the eye even in moments when the narrative lulls.
  78. Bergman Island
    It’s a movie that isn’t quite sure whether it wants to be one, or which one it wants to be. Which makes it feel like more than just a movie.
  79. Aida's Secrets
    In this time of mass displacement across the globe, it is a stark reminder of how traumatic the refugee experience often is.
  80. Apocalypse '45
    Apocalypse ’45 knows that war is hell for everyone. But it’s difficult to escape the sense that, in this film’s view of history, America is top of mind.
  81. Barbie
    Gerwig does much within the material’s inherently commercial parameters, though it isn’t until the finale — capped by a sharply funny, philosophically expansive last line — that you see the “Barbie” that could have been.
  82. Minority Report
    Though he can still deliver an amazing scare, Mr. Spielberg's interest now leans more toward exposition rather than the anticipatory. He is explaining the fun away.
  83. We the Animals
    Fragile yet resilient, We the Animals has an elemental quality that’s hugely endearing, using air and water and the deep, damp earth to fashion a dreamworld where big changes occur in small, sometimes symbolic ways.
  84. Wild Rose
    First and foremost, the movie, written by Nicole Taylor and directed by Tom Harper, is a superb showcase for Jessie Buckley. Doing her own singing, Buckley is a rich, startling vocalist who if anything seems to under-excite the crowds she performs for.
  85. The Simpsons Movie
    The Simpsons Movie, in the end, is as good as an average episode of "The Simpsons." In other words, I’d be willing to watch it only -- excuse me while I crunch some numbers here -- 20 or 30 more times.
  86. Off the Rails
    An assured and thoughtful debut.
  87. Strange Darling
    Playing out in six, ingeniously scrambled chapters, this headlong thriller transforms a simple cat-and-mouse premise — and maybe even a toxic love story — into an impertinent rebuke to genre clichés and our own preprogrammed assumptions.
  88. Riding Giants
    Because the waves get progressively higher in Riding Giants, Stacy Peralta's historical surfing documentary, some of that thrill is sustained throughout this overlong but entertaining movie.
  89. Jung (War) in the Land of the Mujaheddin
    Essential viewing for anyone who desires a sense of the finer human grain of a war that now commands the attention of the world as never before.
  90. Set Me Free
    Propelled by a captivating, wrenching performance by Karine Vanasse as Hanna, a 13-year-old girl adrift in a sea of powerful emotions in Montreal in 1963.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
    The movie's main problem is that the protagonist - the dead head - is a bore.
  92. Boy and the World
    It’s both the best children’s animated film this year since “Inside Out” — you might call it “Outside In” — and, unexpectedly, a more stirring depiction of the deadening modern megalopolis than most heal-the-world documentaries.
  93. Finders Keepers
    Revealing its humanity slowly and a little tardily, Finders Keepers finally does justice to its dueling antiheroes.
  94. 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.
  95. 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.
  96. The Eternal Daughter
    Hogg’s greatest stroke in The Eternal Daughter is her casting of Swinton in both lead roles. Swinton is a wonderful chameleon and while she can go as big and showy as any Oscar contender, she is also a brilliant miniaturist.
  97. The Settlers
    Gálvez’s work here is by turns blunt and subtle, and very assured.
  98. Personality Crisis: One Night Only
    A first-rate raconteur, Johansen — wearing a pompadour, sunglasses and bespoke suit — brings the funk. The storied Café Carlyle delivers the chic.
  99. The Beast
    This shamelessly ambitious epic is about, among other things, civilizational collapse and existential retribution, yet it is held together by something delicate.
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