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. Waves
    All of Shults’s stylistic brio and formal inventiveness is finally in the service of a story about love, its mutability and fragility.
  2. King of New York
    Mr. Walken, as Frank, does a memorable job of taking a fanciful projection of corruption, greed and complacency, giving it intelligence, and making it flesh and blood.
  3. Chained for Life
    Schimberg’s film is odd, darkly funny and — when it means to be — a little frightening.
  4. The Magician
    This picture is full of extraordinary thrills that flow and collide on several levels of emotion and intellect. And it swarms with sufficient melodrama of the blood-chilling, flesh-creeping sort to tingle the hide of the least brainy addict of out-right monster films.
  5. The Cave
    Entering theaters at a timely moment, The Cave is a frightening immersion in life under siege in Syria that, as difficult as it often is to watch, can’t come close to replicating how harrowing it must have been to film.
  6. Synchronic
    Moorhead and Benson don’t overlook the more amusing aspects of the scenario . . . . And the duo deliver shocks, scares and a resonant payoff.
  7. The Hottest August
    This collection of interactions with ordinary people is a cinematic gift both simple and multilayered, an intellectual challenge and an emotional adventure.
  8. In My Room
    Abetted by Patrick Orth’s careful, almost obsessively calm camerawork, Köhler has concocted an uncommonly subtle and deliberately ambiguous work, one that’s delicately rewarding, if you meet it halfway.
  9. Tom Jones
    One of the wildest, bawdiest and funniest comedies that a refreshingly agile filmmaker has ever brought to the screen.
  10. Matewan
    There's not a weak performance in the film, but I especially admired the work of Mr. Cooper, Mr. Tighe, Miss McDonnell, Miss Mette, Mr. Gunton, Mr. Strathairn and Mr. Mostel. They may be playing Social-Realist icons, but each manages to make something personal and idiosyncratic out of the material, without destroying the ballad-like style.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Incredible Journey
    About as gentle, warm and lovely a color movie as any pet owner could wish at least, for the kids.
  12. 63 Up
    There’s great pleasure in revisiting this series, seeing who turned out just fine and sometimes better than you might have expected or hoped.
  13. Redoubt
    Redoubt reaches for intimations and apprehensions of the cosmic.
  14. Miracle on 34th Street
    The freshest little picture in a long time, and maybe even the best comedy of this year.
  15. Gigi
    Charming entertainment.
  16. The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open
    Filmed almost entirely in real time, and using a series of long, intimate takes, “The Body Remembers” is about privilege and its lack, motherhood and its absence, race and its legacy.
  17. Pom Poko
    The best film by Isao Takahata, who started the studio with Mr. Miyazaki, this is a comic allegory about battling packs of tanuki (Japanese raccoon dogs) joining forces to fight human real estate developers. It’s earthy and rollicking in a way that his co-founder’s films aren’t.
  18. Let Him Go
    With uncommon stealth, Let Him Go morphs from a drama about loss and grief into a terrifying thriller.
  19. Acasă, My Home
    It’s both intimate and analytical, a sensitive portrait of real people undergoing enormous change and a meditation on what that change might mean. It taps into something primal in the human condition, a basic conflict between the desire for freedom and the tendency toward organization — an argument, finally, about the meaning of home.
  20. Sylvie's Love
    Ashe is using a familiar, long-derided film genre both affectionately and critically to explore the gleaming surfaces of life as well as the anguish that lies beneath.
  21. Young Sherlock Holmes
    Not only the best movie to feature an Egyptian blowgun in several years, but also one of the few really stylish and entertaining American movies of 1985.
  22. I Wish I Knew
    In effect, with I Wish I Knew, Jia is building not just a portrait of a city, but of a fragmented people — one story and memory at a time. He is finding meaning in collective remembrance and revealing a world, to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin, “under the gaze of the melancholy man.”
  23. West Side Story
    It’s a dazzling display of filmmaking craft that also feels raw, unsettled and alive.
  24. Possessor Uncut
    Possessor is a shocking work that moves from disquieting to stressful with ruthless dispatch.
  25. Kajillionaire
    Wrapping damage and poverty in bubbles and sunshine, Kajillionaire is about intimacy and neglect, brainwashing and independence.
  26. Minari
    Minari is modest, specific and thrifty, like the lives it surveys. There’s nothing small about it, though, because it operates at the true scale of life.
  27. Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution
    Newnham and LeBrecht deftly juggle a large cast of characters past and present, accomplishing the not-so-easy task of making all the personalities distinct, and a build a fair amount of suspense in their nearly day-by-day account of the sit-in.
  28. Premature
    Every moment rings true, the vividly textured locations and knockabout relationships more visited than created.
  29. 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.
  30. Welcome to Chechnya
    Welcome to Chechnya is a moving and vital indictment of mass persecution.
  31. Relic
    Relic deftly merges the familiar bumps and groans of the haunted-house movie with a potent allegory for the devastation of dementia.
  32. To the Ends of the Earth
    Kurosawa’s command of film form gives the movie an embracing magnetism despite its seeming thinness of plot.
  33. King Richard
    This is a fundamentally — and I would say marvelously — old-fashioned entertainment, a sports drama that is also an appealing, socially alert story of perseverance and the up-by-the-bootstraps pursuit of excellence.
  34. A White, White Day
    The result is an emotionally wringing film, equally effective in the narrative and tone-poem departments.
  35. Hope and Glory
    Hope and Glory has an invitingly nostalgic spirit and a fine eye for the magical details that a little boy might notice.
  36. Happiest Season
    The movie practically vibrates with its own meta tension.
  37. Da 5 Bloods
    In its anger, its humor and its exuberance — in the emotional richness of the central performances and of Terence Blanchard’s score — this is unmistakably a Spike Lee Joint. It’s also an argument with and through the history of film.
  38. i'm thinking of ending things
    This is Kaufman’s most assured and daring work so far as a director.
  39. On the Rocks
    In the past, Coppola’s embrace of ambiguity could feel like a dodge, a way of evading meaning. But in On the Rocks, a wistful and lovely story about finally coming of age, there’s nothing ambiguous about how she makes us see a woman too long lost in life’s shadow.
  40. Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes
    Greystoke is one of the most thoroughly enjoyable films of its kind I've ever seen.
  41. Rebecca
    An altogether brilliant film, haunting, suspenseful, handsome and handsomely played.
  42. A Passage to India
    Mr. Lean's Passage to India, which he wrote and directed, is by far his best work since The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia and perhaps his most humane and moving film since Brief Encounter.
  43. My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising
    This is canny, passionate filmmaking, a reminder of the power of two-dimensional animation. First, it humanizes, then it astounds.
  44. The Mitchells vs. The Machines
    The Mitchells vs. the Machines not only has laughably eccentric characters but also a script packed with bonkers, fast-paced action — with elaborate, wild visuals to match.
  45. The Boys Next Door
    A very well made, disorienting movie about inarticulated despair and utter hopelessness. It reminds me a lot of ''Over the Edge,'' Jonathan Kaplan's bleak, bitter picture of teen-age life in an architecturally perfect, California housing development. Unlike ''Over the Edge,'' however, The Boys Next Door is less interested in causes than in effects, which Penelope Spheeris, the director, turns into the photographic record of a grim, vivid, joyless ride to hell.
  46. My Little Sister
    Distinguished by a modestly discreet directing style that allows the actors to shine, My Little Sister offers neither false uplift nor dreary realism.
  47. The Woman Who Ran
    The Woman Who Ran is a cinematic sketch, and also the work of a master.
  48. Undine
    Undine is ultimately more enigmatic than most of Petzold’s work. It is also, like its title character, eerily beautiful. While it could well serve as a high-end date movie, it’s also something more.
  49. Days
    Tsai’s motives for stretching his shots become clear after a while, and the film builds an uncanny mood.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Invaders from Mars
    The director, Tobe Hooper, who honed his scary craft on such films as ''The Texas Chain Saw Massacre'' and ''Poltergeist,'' knows how to construct a horror film so it builds to a screaming pitch. He shoots many of his images from below, to give the view a child might have, and deftly manipulates the audience to feel the growing menace. He is helped by an excellent cast.
  51. She Dies Tomorrow
    Dazed but far from confused, “She Dies Tomorrow” tugs at you, nagging to be viewed more than once. Eerie and at times impenetrable, the movie (which was completed pre-pandemic) presents a rapidly spreading psychological contagion that feels uncomfortably timely.
  52. Brighton Beach Memoirs
    Neil Simon is hardly Norman Rockwell, but his Brighton Beach Memoirs has a warmly nostalgic quality, something that has traveled very nicely to the screen...A film of surprisingly gentle charms. Mr. Simon's humor is much in evidence, but it is not the film's strongest selling point. Even more effective are the sense of a place and a way of life long vanished and the care and affection with which they have been summoned up.
  53. The Half of It
    With tenderness, humor and beauty, The Half of It comprehends the chasm between wanting and being.
  54. Pride and Prejudice
    Hunt Stromberg and his associates have managed to turn out a film which catches the spirit and humor of Miss Austen's novel down to the last impudent flounce of a petticoat, the last contented sigh of a conquering coquette.
  55. The Lady Eve
    With The Lady Eve, which arrived yesterday at the Paramount, Mr. Sturges is indisputably established as one of the top one or two writers and directors of comedy working in Hollywood today. A more charming or distinguished gem of nonsense has not occurred since It Happened One Night.
  56. Beyond The Visible: Hilma af Klint
    Beyond the Visible bristles with the excitement of discovery and also with the impatience that recognition has taken so long. It refreshes the eyes and the mind.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Invisible Man
    The story makes such superb cinematic material that one wonders that Hollywood did not film it sooner. Now that it has been done, it is a remarkable achievement.
  58. For Whom the Bell Tolls
    In spite of its almost interminable and physically exhausting length—it takes two hours and fifty minutes to cover less than four days in a group of people's lives—and in spite of some basic detruncations of the novel's two leading characters, it vibrates throughout with vitality and is topped off with a climax that's a whiz.
  59. 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.
  60. Hamilton
    The close-ups and camera movements in this version enhance the charisma of the performers, adding a dimension of intimacy that compensates for the lost electricity of the live theatrical experience.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Faces
    A really important movie about the American class, generation and marriage abyss.
  62. Wise Blood
    One of John Huston's most original, most stunning movies. It is so eccentric, so funny, so surprising and so haunting that it is difficult to believe it is not the first film of some enfant terrible instead of the 33d feature by a man who is now in his 70's and whose career has had more highs and lows than a decade of weather maps.
  63. The Pollinators
    Here is a movie that presents an intelligent vision of nature. What’s pleasing to the eye is pleasing to the earth — a sentiment the film rigorously supports with science.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    42nd Street
    The liveliest and one of the most tuneful screen musical comedies that has come out of Hollywood.
  65. Under the Volcano
    A film that is especially impressive for the courage, intelligence and restraint with which it tackles an impossible task...What it can do, and does to such a surprising degree, is to bring the characters to life and offer fleeting glimpses into the heart of Mr. Lowry's tragedy.
  66. Babette's Feast
    All of this is by way of being the prelude to the film's extended, funny and moving final sequence, a spectacular feast, the preparation and execution of which reveal Babette's secret and the nature of her sustaining glory.
  67. Circumstantial Pleasures
    No matter how distinct the elements — and how differently arranged — they are of a feverish, profoundly uneasy piece.
  68. The War Room
    A revealing film and an invaluable document.
  69. My Brilliant Career
    My Brilliant Career doesn't need to trumpet either its or its heroine's originality this loudly. The facts speak for themselves — and so does the radiance with which Miss Armstrong and Miss Davis invest so many memorable moments.
  70. Hill of Freedom
    The ingenuity of the movie’s structure is stimulating and delightful, but there’s one aspect of “Hill” that some may find a trifle exasperating: Even more than any of the sad-sack men who populate the director’s other movies, Mori is kind of a stiff.
  71. The Nun's Story
    From Kathryn Hulme's novel The Nun's Story, which gives an amazing account of a young Belgian woman's experiences in becoming and being a nursing nun, screen writer Robert Anderson and director Fred Zinnemann have derived an equally amazing motion picture of an extraordinary dedicated life.
  72. Salesman
    It’s such a fine, pure picture of a small section of American life that I can’t imagine its ever seeming irrelevant, either as a social document or as one of the best examples of what’s called cinema verite or direct cinema.
  73. Brief Encounter
    An uncommonly good little picture.
  74. Of Mice and Men
    Lewis Milestone, who directed it; Eugene Solow, who adapted it, and Burgess Meredith, Lon Chaney Jr., Betty Field and the others who have performed it, have done more than well in simply realizing the drama's established values.
  75. Lost Bullet
    This impressively lean French thriller wastes nothing in its quest to deliver the goods.
    • The New York Times
      • Posted Jun 25, 2020
  76. Shanghai Triad
    However endlessly film makers around the world have told that story, Mr. Zhang reimagines it with immense grace and turns it into a deeply felt tragedy.
  77. Hamlet
    The filmed Hamlet of Laurence Olivier gives absolute proof that these classics are magnificently suited to the screen.
  78. Bungalow (2002)
    Unspooling over the course of a few lazy summer days, the film offers an enigmatic examination of youthful alienation, its plot irresolute and unpredictable.
  79. The Bishop's Wife
    It is as cheerful and respectful an invasion of the realm of conscience that we have seen. And it comes very close to being the most enchanting picture of the year.
  80. Richard III
    Of all Olivier's Shakespearean films, Richard III is, to my way of thinking, the most satisfying, the most surprising and - it has to be said - the funniest. [24 Apr 1981, p.C6]
    • The New York Times
  81. Widow of Silence
    Breathtakingly photographed by Mohammad Reza Jahanpanah, Widow of Silence is a movie with a cool head and a sharp eye — one that sees greater hope in the flamboyantly jeweled tones of a carmine head scarf than in the entrenched absurdities of a broken bureaucracy.
  82. The Card Counter
    The solitary man returns in The Card Counter, a haunting, moving story of spirit and flesh, sin and redemption, love and death about another lonely soul, William Tell, who, with pen to paper, grapples with his present and his unspeakable past.
  83. The Candidate
    One of the few good, truly funny American political comedies ever made.
  84. The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle
    A beautifully told story, with sincere and vigorous performances, and with a solid and richly atmospheric production to lend its interest and fascination.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Flying Leathernecks
    With Mr. Wayne, Mr. Ryan and their charges in the cockpits against the crackling magnificence of Mr. Ray's battletorn sky, the picture is all it should be.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Roberta
    The work is a model for urbanity in the musical films and Mr. Astaire, the debonair master of light comedy and the dance, is its chief ornament.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Top Hat
    When Top Hat is letting Mr. Astaire perform his incomparable magic or teaming him with the increasingly dexterous Miss Rogers it is providing the most urbane fun that you will find anywhere on the screen.
  88. F for Fake
    A charming, witty meditation upon fakery, forgery, swindling and art, a movie that may itself be its own Exhibit A.
  89. Sunless Shadows
    Mehrdad Oskouei’s latest documentary, Sunless Shadows, is a startling, raw confrontation with Iran’s patriarchy.
  90. Judas and the Black Messiah
    Judas and the Black Messiah represents a disciplined, impassioned effort to bring clarity to a volatile moment, to dispense with the sentimentality and revisionism that too often cloud movies about the ’60s and about the politics of race. It’s fascinating in its own right, and even more so when looked at alongside other recent movies.
  91. Destry Rides Again
    A bit of the old West with a good bit of the old Dietrich in it; a tightly written, capitally directed show, with perfectly grand supporting performances.
  92. Son of the White Mare
    Son of the White Mare isn’t just old hat; the simultaneously geometric and fluid animation renders each mythic trope totally new.
  93. Ghost Tropic
    Beguiles and fascinates on several levels.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Life with Father
    All that the fabulous play had to offer in the way of charm, comedy, humor and gentle pathos is beautifully realized in the handsomely Technicolored picture.
  95. Honeymoon in Vegas
    Honeymoon in Vegas is a virtually nonstop scream of benign delirium, pop entertainment as revivifying as anything you're likely to see this year. It's a romantic farce in which the explosion of the epically earnest and funny central situation creates shock waves that leave no person or thing untouched. Even the film's bit players and extras are funny.
  96. Isadora's Children
    Isadora’s Children is made with such unusual delicacy that it may elude the grasp of audiences who demand things such as, well, plot. But its sensitivity is rare and valuable.
  97. Buoyancy
    There is evil and it helps keep the world running, our clothes and food coming. This is the greatest, most difficult, most unspeakable violence laid bare in Rathjen’s measured, insistently political movie.
  98. Notturno
    The past two decades of documentary film have produced many anatomies of history that attempt to summarize several millenniums, but Rosi’s borderless tableaus bring out another kind of truth in faces, places and pure feeling.
  99. Gather
    Rawal covers a substantial amount of ground and deftly balances the dense material without losing sight of the mission driving the bigger story: Healing from generational trauma sometimes starts with just one person.
  100. Residue
    Gerima’s challenging, engrossing filmmaking style is measured, simultaneously realistic and impressionistic. What’s out of the frame is often as important, if not more important, than what’s in the frame.
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