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. Clerks III
    Three words characterize the first third or so of the picture: not funny enough.
  2. Pinocchio
    Boy oh real boy, is the script by Zemeckis and Chris Weitz a lifeless chunk of wood.
  3. This Land
    The narratives in This Land are compelling, even if each of them would benefit from more screen time. (The Covid-19 pandemic affected the shooting schedule, and it shows.) On the whole, the film is best seen as a collage, rather than a definitive report, of the array of opinions brought on by the Trump-Biden race.
  4. We Are As Gods
    We Are as Gods is a mildly interesting documentary about a very interesting man.
  5. The Book of Delights
    If this erotic drama doesn’t break new cinematic ground, it also doesn’t cede its conviction in portraying relationships as a matter of serious consideration.
  6. Our American Family
    Addiction is a complex, challenging topic, and Our American Family, in its sharp specificity, handles it with grace.
  7. The Cathedral
    What distinguishes Jesse’s story is the striking way that the writer-director Ricky D’Ambrose tells it — its ellipses, voice-over, visual precision and an emotional reserve that can feel like clinical detachment but is more rightly described as an aesthetic.
  8. Loving Highsmith
    Most of her exes’ memories stop short of being psychologically insightful. Strung together, however, these tender confidences shape an outline of a woman who never trusted anyone with her heart.
  9. Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.
    Regina Hall is a wonder as the woman who stands by her man for a mash-up of reasons, not least being the elevated position the title first lady confers.
  10. Saloum
    Punctuated by Gregory Corandi’s gliding, God’s-eye shots of meringue-colored desert and placid shoreline, Saloum has the extravagance of fable and folklore. The plot is ludicrously jam-packed, but the pace is fleet and the dialogue has wit and a carefree bounce.
  11. Burial
    The story is invented, and not particularly exciting as such.
  12. McEnroe
    There’s a lot more here for tennis fans than you get in average sports documentaries.
  13. Kaepernick & America
    The verbal analysis here isn’t always profound — one interviewee trots out the banal phrase “the conversation we should be having” — but the narrative as presented in archival footage (Kaepernick did not sit for an interview for this film) is exemplary.
  14. Peter von Kant
    Fassbinder’s work finds a kind of truth in the artifice of emotionally plumped-up dramas, but Ozon’s often tedious tragicomedy never hits such a stride, trusting that the material will automatically confer greatness; instead, “Peter” comes off like top-shelf fan-fiction.
  15. Gigi & Nate
    Rather than offer insight into the difficult choices facing disabled people, Gigi & Nate opts for mawkish wish fulfillment, undercutting the film’s powerful emotional core.
  16. Waiting for Bojangles
    The infectious brio at the heart of “Bojangles” is a testament to the performances of the ensemble cast, but especially Duris and Efira, whose chemistry is magnetic.
  17. The Invitation
    Had the movie emerged as a friskier game of eat the rich, it might have had a fighting chance of survival. Instead, it’s middling, morbid pap.
  18. Me Time
    There is a flatness that feels apparent in every shot — and not just because the movie is filmed in bright, low contrast lighting. The film’s experienced cast punches their lines in search of jokes that never materialize, leaving the comedy to nosedive.
  19. Seoul Vibe
    The caper, directed by Moon Hyun-sung, isn’t as fun as it insists it is, playing up the crew and its exploits à la “The Fast and the Furious” and “Baby Driver” but never hitting its stride.
  20. Three Thousand Years of Longing
    Despite Miller’s talent and feverish enthusiasm, and the gravitational pull of his stars, the movie’s colorful parts just whir and stop, a pinwheel in unsteady wind.
  21. Funny Pages
    There’s nothing remotely cool about Robert or, really, Funny Pages. That’s because cool is entirely beside the point. What matters is a sensibility, a worldview — what matters is art.
  22. Samaritan
    Bragi F. Schut’s script mumbles its potentially intriguing themes.
  23. Adieu Godard
    It’s a film-school pastiche of the French director’s style, with none of the forward-thinking intellectual curiosity of his movies.
  24. Private Desert
    Muritiba understands that any portrait of masculinity that fixates too intensely on the cruelties and self-denials of machista culture are futile. Instead, he finds grace in stolen moments of tenderness.
  25. Adopting Audrey
    The one bright spot of Adopting Audrey is the acting from Malone and Hunger-Bühler, who imbue their characters with more pathos than they probably deserve.
  26. Alienoid
    The movie is bursting at the seams, as if Choi, in his first outing since the 2015 historical action drama “Assassination,” was drunk on pure filmmaking pleasure and threw every cinematic genre into a gigantic blender.
  27. Breaking
    It depicts in stomach-churning detail how the contemporary militarization of law enforcement creates an atmosphere in which violence is near inevitable. This conscientious attention balances out the movie’s occasional lapses into sentimentality.
  28. The Good Boss
    The Good Boss provides prime material for Bardem, who has to maintain a polished veneer even as his character’s mendacity and troubles mount. As satire, though, the movie is facile.
  29. Out of the Blue
    Like most of LaBute’s work, Out of the Blue is talky, sparsely staged and presented with his signature detachment. The two leads are fine.
  30. Katrina Babies
    Katrina Babies is deeply personal and thoughtfully political.
  31. El Tiempo Perdido
    You couldn’t ask for richer reading material, even if the film doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its premise.
  32. Orphan: First Kill
    The sheer derangement of its plot and a bizarre casting gambit make it more interesting than standard straight-to-streaming schlock.
  33. Spin Me Round
    Although Plaza’s character makes it clear this is a story about complicity and manipulation, Baena keeps the tone silly, barely striving for scares even when creepy masks slink into view. He’s content to let the music take over — and so are we with its sly needle-drops that pull from heady italo disco and giallo horror scores.
  34. The Immaculate Room
    The film focuses more on one character’s moral defects than the sketchy project overall, leading to a conclusion that feels unsatisfying at best and pompous at worst.
  35. The Legend of Molly Johnson
    It’s an earnest film, one that glows with pride at Aboriginal resilience. But the impression it leaves is didactic, a saints and demons fable that meanders to foregone conclusions.
  36. Delia's Gone
    One watches this movie with a persistent “this is just … wrong” feeling. It’s not just the superficial depiction of Louis’s condition, or the facile depiction of racial dynamics, although those factors don’t help. Maybe it’s the pervasive self-seriousness in pursuit of what turns out to be nothing much at all.
  37. Beast
    It has a few scattered laughs, some apparently intentional. But this is thin, unimaginative hack work, and it lacks the deranged seriousness and commitment that distinguishes a pleasurable misfire from bland dreck like this. It is, I am sorry to say, no “Gods of Egypt.”
  38. The Territory
    To see the villagers take matters into their own hands, capturing proof of the encroachment on their land that the government chooses to ignore, is a special kind of thrill.
  39. Three Minutes: A Lengthening
    “Three Minutes” is more than a documentary about the Holocaust — it is an investigative drama, a meditation on the ethics of moving images and a ghost story about people who might be forgotten should we take those images for granted.
  40. Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero
    The “Dragon Ball” formula is repetitive and predictable. But it’s difficult to overstate how exquisitely gratifying that formula can be.
  41. Learn to Swim
    Learn to Swim is lovely to behold, but the sullen artist at the center feels too often like he’s drowning in melancholia and might take us down with him.
  42. Look Both Ways
    Never mind that Look Both Ways seems to posit that, for women, child rearing and a career are in relative opposition — when Natalie comes to a fork in the road, the movie hardly lets her look both ways. It bulldozes her down one path, and then the other.
  43. Free Puppies!
    The film achieves its goal in raising awareness for these volunteer efforts, casting a spotlight on a chronically overlooked crisis.
  44. Rogue Agent
    The real account of Robert Freegard might have been unbelievable. Its dramatization, however, is preposterous.
  45. Laal Singh Chaddha
    The movie’s charms are limited by what comes to feel like a coddling conceit.
  46. We Are Living Things
    Antonio Tibaldi’s cool and atmospheric We Are Living Things posits in original if not always fully formed ways: Refugee life is often a choice between competing probabilities, a state of permanent ambiguity.
  47. Stay on Board: The Leo Baker Story
    This is a candid look at one person’s experience with coming out, a humane document that shows the bravery and resilience of queer people who seek relief from the categories that are imposed on them.
  48. Free Chol Soo Lee
    Free Chol Soo Lee is somewhat dry and, as criminal-justice documentaries go, sadly familiar when it strays from Lee’s unique and grim perspective, which includes details of his struggles with prison life and depression.
  49. 13: The Musical
    While every image is as bright and colorful as a new box of crayons, the kids themselves never come across as artificial, thanks in part to Jamal Sims’ naturalistic but crisp choreography, which emphasizes stomps and leans and long-legged strides.
  50. The Princess
    This is a harrowing movie that depends on our collective hindsight to underscore its manifold and particular ironies.
  51. Emergency Declaration
    Emergency Declaration, a piercing thriller from the South Korean writer-director Han Jae-rim, manages to deliver excitement and melodrama out of a ludicrous story line.
  52. Inu-oh
    Even as Yuasa’s approach changes from section to section — as he plays with texture, volume and hue and gently shifts the balance between the figurative and the abstract — his extraordinary touch remains evident in each line and in every eye-popping swirl.
  53. Secret Headquarters
    When the kids are just doing kid stuff . . . Secret Headquarters has the playful, mischievous air of something like “The Goonies.” When the kids acquire some of the Guard’s superpowers and start flying around and fighting baddies, it has the air of … well, of just another superhero movie.
  54. Mack & Rita
    Directed with some unexpected beats by Katie Aselton, the comedy captures a bit of the esprit de girlfriends of HBO’s “Insecure,” but borrows too giddily from the Nancy Meyers rom-com catalog of upscale homes.
  55. Girl Picture
    Haapasalo blesses her trio with a pop soundtrack that crescendos at the peak of a kiss, and climactic crises that are a mite too readily resolved, adamantly gracing this awkward stage of girlhood with forgiveness — not hectoring lessons.
  56. Day Shift
    Jamie Foxx might have top billing, but right there beside him are the professional contortionists whose eye-popping moves are more commonly seen in Las Vegas showrooms than on movie screens.
  57. Bliss
    We tend to look at the sex lives of sex workers as endlessly fascinating, but in Bliss the line of work is instead part of a larger take on the hurdles of modern romance.
  58. Easter Sunday
    Easter Sunday is at its strongest when it stays close to the Valencia family, which is made for TV.
  59. The Magician
    Spectacularly uninteresting...this dreary Antipodean curiosity is a yob-filled slog of hard-man posturing, all of it bathed in an oppressive testosterone funk. And I haven’t even mentioned the hairy buttocks.
  60. Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie
    All in all, “Rise” is as dependable as a Manhattan slice: not mind-blowing in the slightest, but just delightfully cheesy enough to keep kids and adults alike satisfied.
  61. Faith
    Pedicini structures the movie as an oblique narrative rather than an exposé. And Faith is all the more disturbing for that. Clearly this distinctive filmmaker was just getting started.
  62. Claydream
    Evans has made a lively and illuminating tribute, and not always an unduly flattering one.
  63. Mija
    An immersive, deeply empathetic look at what it means for first-generation Americans like Doris and Jacks to reclaim the right to pursue unpredictable dreams.
  64. They/Them
    Logan, who also wrote the screenplay, feels so averse to engaging with the thorny political implications inherent in this material — of having to negotiate a cast of gay, transgender and nonbinary characters in a horror context — that the whole thing winds up seeming rather tame.
  65. Wedding Season
    Wedding Season is mostly flavorless, but its interest in capitalistic success inspires a pucker of bad taste.
  66. Luck
    Luck offers fresh ideas; its only misfortune is to present its gifts in recycled wrapping.
  67. Bullet Train
    It’s watchable — it stars Brad Pitt — jokey, sometimes funny and predictably stupid.
  68. Bodies Bodies Bodies
    It’s not that “Bodies Bodies Bodies” is bad. It’s visually appealing and nicely acted. But this film is not special, and like its shallow characters, it is persistently unaware of its own inanity.
  69. Prey
    Despite a female-empowerment theme and an adversary fairly bristling with fancy weaponry, Prey never builds a head of steam.
  70. Gone in the Night
    Twists galore follow, the torque of which surprises again and again.
  71. Thirteen Lives
    This is a pragmatic recounting of a nigh-impossible mission: first, to find the trapped boys, and harder still, to swim them out.
  72. Memory Box
    The relationship between mother and daughter is rather thinly etched — there’s a little too much going on in this ambitious, intergenerational film — but Hadjithomas and Joreige deftly use Maia’s archive to weave together past and present.
  73. I Love My Dad
    Since the audience is in on the scheme from the start, what we get is excruciating, uncut. But not too excruciating, because Franklin is such a drab cipher it’s hard to work up much empathy for him.
  74. Shalom Taiwan
    It’s hard to argue with that message, but one doesn’t have to accept the ho-hum experience of watching this movie.
  75. Exposing Muybridge
    While starchy in presentation, Exposing Muybridge makes clear that its subject’s images still have a lot to show us.
  76. Purple Hearts
    The film wallows in contrived plots and subplots, made worse by the dearth of chemistry between the two leads.
  77. Blue Island
    The past-present parallelism is provocative, but it also seems faintly superficial — a way of eliding distinctions and streamlining history.
  78. Medusa
    Though dressed in shock-value clothing, Medusa is also a straightforward character study, tackling issues like the scourge of Western beauty standards and the difficulties of leaving an abusive relationship along the way
  79. Honor Society
    A twist whipsaws the movie into a darker place, one in the vicinity of Patricia Highsmith. But no murder takes place, and the movie’s resolution confirms what one may have suspected all along: Its dominant room tone is kinda-sorta that of “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.”
  80. Not Okay
    As satires go, this one by the writer and director Quinn Shephard is hardly subtle — but though it lacks narrative finesse, Not Okay is brimming with provocative in-jokes for the extremely online.
  81. A Balance
    Takiuchi’s Yuko, in turns motherly and mercenary, is bewitchingly enigmatic: What drives her? Why does she still live with her father? Mercifully, we receive little back story; it’s enough that she is an ambitious woman, choked by ruthless double standards surrounding sex and autonomy.
  82. Hansan: Rising Dragon
    The film’s dramas are ornately costumed but often stilted and lacking the verve of the battle staging. Even the glories of war can turn stultifying when you’re shown one too many thousand-yard-stare reaction shots by military leaders.
  83. Ali & Ava
    The onscreen chemistry between them feels forced and flat, and the decidedly tame portrayals of physical intimacy only accentuate this absence.
  84. Paradise Highway
    If only the film had taken a broader view, filling in more details about the lives and motivations of the truck drivers as well as the sex traffickers.
  85. Resurrection
    While Resurrection harbors more than one theme — empty-nest anxieties, toxic men and the long tail of their manipulations — the movie feels more like an unhinged test of how far into the loonyverse the audience can be persuaded to venture.
  86. How to Please a Woman
    This hook piques curiosity — at least enough for a coy eyebrow raise. Light intrigue is often not enough, though, and in this case, the movie strains to sustain charm.
  87. Hypochondriac
    Its armchair psychology makes for queasy viewing, a conflation of diagnosis and damnation.
  88. A Love Song
    Slow, sweet and subdued, A Love Song, Max Walker-Silverman’s lovely first feature, is about late-life longing and needs that never completely go away.
  89. Sharp Stick
    An uneven, uneasy fable of desire.
  90. Vengeance
    Vengeance, while earnest, thoughtful and quite funny in spots, demonstrates just how difficult it can be to turn political polarization and culture-war hostility into a credible narrative. Its efforts shouldn’t be dismissed, even though it’s ultimately too clever for its own good, and maybe not quite as smart as it thinks it is.
  91. DC League of Super-Pets
    This brand of arch, inside-baseball riffing is a scourge on modern family films, present in almost every animated movie with an all-star cast. But it’s especially grating delivered by Johnson and Hart, who, despite the vocal talent they have shown in the past, give two of the least inspired voice performances in recent memory.
  92. We Met in Virtual Reality
    Hunting’s documentary catches up with where many people are finding their dreams realized, and understands that sometimes the dream is simply to be yourself.
  93. Skies of Lebanon
    The movie’s openheartedness eventually wins the day.
  94. The Wheel
    The story ends with an ambitiously staged sequence that reaches for another level of feeling, but it’s hard for anything to match the bruising depiction of Albee and Walker’s rough road to that point.
  95. The Reverend
    Canfield’s debut feature is infused with its own measure of that gentling spirit. It is also blessedly low on piousness.
  96. Art of Love
    It’s a tired and male-serving narrative one wishes might be retired.
  97. My Old School
    Its fascination with Brandon becomes a kind of credulity, a willingness to accept uncritically the mystifications of a proven liar.
  98. Anything's Possible
    Unlike its lead characters, Anything’s Possible never quite figures out if it wants to be distinctive or just another kid at school.
  99. Alone Together
    Its simplicity and lack of cinematic fancy strikes a tone of surprising relief.
  100. The Gray Man
    The caffeinated cuts and pacing never allow the audience to find its footing in the film’s large, expensive set pieces, which prevents the action from becoming truly thrilling.
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