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. Lady Chatterley
    This Lady Chatterley, winner of five César awards in France, feels bracingly fresh, vital and modern.
  2. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
    It’s not only Mister Rogers’s kindness that hovers over “Beautiful Day,” but also his creative spirit. Paying tribute to his skills as a composer, performer and puppeteer, the movie affirms his status as a hero of the imagination.
  3. The Forty-Year-Old Version
    It revels in the pleasure and struggle of creative work. This comes through in the rambunctiousness of Radha’s students, in her belated appreciation of her mother’s paintings, in shots of street murals and sonic scraps of freestyle rhyming — in pretty much every frame of a film that, like its heroine, is grumpy, tender, wistful, funny and combative. Also beautiful.
  4. Take Out
    Take Out is the season’s freshest, most sympathetic movie about making your way in modern-day Manhattan with a little help from your friends.
  5. Compartment No. 6
    Part of what makes Compartment No. 6 engrossing and effective is how Kuosmanen plays with tone.
  6. Lucky
    The accumulation of spot-on performances and long-familiar faces, small-town routines and dusty-worn locations, finally coalesces into a picture that’s greater than the sum of its oft-clichéd parts.
  7. Sleep
    Yu’s direction is confident, and he manages to convey how a little apartment can transform from domestic comfort by day to claustrophobic agony by night. His restraint throughout keeps us guessing.
  8. 7 Prisoners
    Rather than being a simple examination of a social problem, the film excels at excavating the deep-rooted, sprawling violence that affects everyone living under hierarchies of power.
  9. Irma Vep
    A minor but witty entry on the exceptionally strong slate of French films at the New York Film Festival this year.
  10. The Band's Visit
    Mr. Kolirin, it emerges, is wrenching comedy out of intense melancholia.
  11. Anne at 13,000 ft
    The title character is one of those difficult women that the movies just can’t quit and rarely prove as interesting as filmmakers seem to think. Anne obviously has issues — psychological, behavioral, familial — but the movie isn’t big on specifics. It’s a pretty, uninvolving blur.
  12. Ham on Rye
    Taormina purposefully dresses his cast and designs their environment in a way that throws them into a sort of temporal never-never land. He achieves a number of other startling effects in this impressive movie, which sheds its naturalism slowly as it embraces a surrealism that’s both disquieting and poignant.
  13. Dead Man Walking
    Quietly courageous drama .
  14. In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50
    Fripp, an endlessly thoughtful and meticulously articulate guitarist, is the group’s most tireless and paradoxical explainer in the film.
  15. Call Me Kuchu
    This is a scary but inspiring film with real heroes and villains.
  16. Children of a Lesser God
    Watching Children of a Lesser God, the screen adaptation of Mark Medoff's 1980 Broadway play, is like being on a cruise to nowhere aboard a ship with decent service and above-par fast-food. Everything has been carefully programmed so that there are no surprises, no discoveries, nothing to do except to sit -with eyes propped open - and applaud the crew's efficiency.
  17. In the Mirror of Maya Deren
    Rather than a feminist martyr, her film presents an artist with a rich body of work, one who still fascinates and continues to cast a wide influence.
  18. Berberian Sound Studio
    It’s not unlike many of Mr. Strickland’s beloved Italian films, which could be superb exercises in cinematic style and atmosphere while remaining imperfect.
  19. North Dallas Forty
    The central friendship in the movie, beautifully delineated, is the one between Mr. Nolte and Mac Davis, who expertly plays the team's quarterback, a man whose calculating nature and complacency make him all the more likable, somehow.
  20. Tokyo Sonata
    Tokyo Sonata, looks like a family melodrama -- if a distinctly eccentric variant on the typical domestic affair -- there is more than a touch of horror to its story of a salaryman whose downsizing sets off a series of cataclysmic events.
  21. Lorenzo's Oil
    As directed by George Miller, this film has an appealingly brisk, unsentimental style and a rare ability to compress and convey detailed medical data. It also displays tremendous compassion for all three Odones and what they have been through.
  22. Desert One
    Though comprehensive and often stirring, the accounts lack new insight or analytical heft.
  23. Mad God
    Strange and squelchy and all kinds of sick, Mad God comes at you with nauseating energy, its flood of dystopian images both playful and repulsive.
  24. Il Futuro
    Ms. Scherson’s style — backed wholeheartedly by the cool cinematography of Ricardo de Angelis — may value mood over information, but it’s the perfect vehicle for a portrait of two damaged souls grasping for a security they no longer possess.
  25. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
    This is not just a movie-within-a-movie, but a movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie, something that sounds unbearably arch but that is swift, funny and surprisingly unpretentious.
  26. Good Night, and Good Luck.
    He [Clooney] has found a cogent subject, an urgent set of ideas and a formally inventive, absolutely convincing way to make them live on screen.
  27. Human Resources
    The movie's dramatic climax is a father-son confrontation of stunning cruelty. Although the movie stops short of outright tragedy, it is suffused with a grief born of rifts that may never be mended.
  28. The Survivalist
    Impressively lean and rigidly controlled, “The Survivalist” achieves, at times, the primitive allure of a silent movie.
  29. Firecrackers
    This is a movie that, like its characters, is more fluent in feelings than in words.
  30. David Crosby: Remember My Name
    Fans will enjoy the backstage access, the home movies, the snapshots and the reminiscences, but the movie keeps you at a distance, while implying that it may be just as well not to get too close.
  31. 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.
  32. The Pearl Button
    A master of voice-over and metaphor (the title alone has an amazing payoff), [Mr. Guzmán] sifts through essential truths and draws links between Chile’s past and present inhabitants.
  33. Deep Water
    Again and again you want to shout at the screen: “Turn back. All will be forgiven.” This tale of risk, though, ends not with man conquering nature but in calamitous failure.
  34. The Force
    The movie may offer an incriminatory catalog of organizational failure, but it also repeatedly shows people trying to make the system work.
  35. Lorna's Silence
    Lorna's Silence is engrossing and powerful, which may be just another way of saying it's a film by the Dardenne brothers. If it falls a bit short of the standards of their best work, that is only because it is not quite a masterpiece.
  36. California Typewriter
    This quirky, obsessive documentary is about so much more than broken keys and busted type wheels. It’s really about how we create art.
  37. Other People's Children
    Zlotowski is telling a story about a specific woman. She’s also telling a complex, bruising, much larger and quietly self-aware story about both the messiness of life and the fragility of bodies that exist in the real world, not just in fantasies.
  38. Bantú Mama
    It’s a quiet film that stays close to the central characters, but it could have benefited from broadening its view, giving context to some of the issues presented in the film — in particular how Blackness is perceived and experienced on the island.
  39. The Day of the Jackal
    The details are minutely observed and, to me, just a bit boring.
  40. Holiday
    Because Eklof’s approach is formally very clean, showing some genuine, intriguing detachment, I’m apt to prefer it to Seidl’s work. But not by much.
  41. I Am Not a Witch
    The film is perhaps overly repetitive in emphasizing Shula’s inability to escape exploitation, but the story is put across with formal confidence and real originality.
  42. Deliverance
    An action melodrama that doesn't trust its action to speak louder than words.
  43. Cutting Through Rocks
    Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni, who directed and edited the documentary, with Eyni also serving as cinematographer, have made a film that pulses with so much hopefulness that when Shahverdi’s story takes a shocking turn, it’s a punch to the solar plexus.
  44. Clouds of Sils Maria
    The three women in Clouds of Sils Maria love, talk and move, move, move, sharing lives, trading roles and performing parts. The lives they lead are messy and indeterminate, but each woman’s life belongs to her.
  45. Coraline
    Coraline lingers in an atmosphere that is creepy, wonderfully strange and full of feeling.
  46. The Uncondemned
    Most extraordinary are interviews with the women who came forward to provide evidence in court. Their integrity and tenacity, and their loyalty to one another, is enough to bring you to tears.
  47. A Still Small Voice
    It’s human and messy — and it’s divine.
  48. Demon
    Mr. Wrona is very good at thickening the air with mystery, and right from the start he slips in enigmatic details and figures — the prowling bulldozer, a keening woman, a scowling man — that disturb the ordinary scene. Like pebbles dropped in water, these disturbances create concentric circles that spread, disrupting everything.
  49. Gasoline Rainbow
    There’s an uncommon sweetness to this film, which is less about running away from something and more about discovering the road of life is littered with goodness, if you know where to look.
  50. Eternity and a Day
    All things being relative, this is a dreamy, lulling film but also a more concise and straightforward one than the magnificently grandiose Ulysses' Gaze, the Angelopoulos opus that directly preceded it.
  51. The Ice Tower
    The Ice Tower is ultimately too glacial and secretive to fully satisfy. The real magic here lies in Jonathan Ricquebourg’s dazzlingly chilly images, and two leads as compelling as the fantasy that set them in motion.
  52. Light From Light
    Light From Light reveals it’s far more interested in human concerns than metaphysical ones.
  53. Introducing, Selma Blair
    The greatest asset of the film is its ability to simulate the intimacy of disclosure, and Blair’s comfort with the camera — her actress-y will to entertain — makes her a uniquely endearing subject.
  54. Too Late to Die Young
    Too Late to Die Young is above all an achievement in mood and implication. Sotomayor has a way of structuring scenes and composing images that makes everything perfectly clear but not obvious.
  55. Goodbye First Love
    Mr. Urzendowsky, with his dark curls, fine cheekbones and sad eyes, is a very credible first love, while Ms. Créton uncannily captures Camille's resolution as well as her almost willful vulnerability.
  56. Little Miss Sunshine
    Tucked in between all the hurt and the jokes, the character development and the across-the-board terrific performances is a surprisingly sharp look at contemporary America.
  57. The Endless
    The Endless rewards patience with mind-bending twists and turns.
  58. Indivisible
    The performances of the young actors who play them (actual twins, though not conjoined) are the real miracles here, each one creating a distinct personality.
  59. Sweetgrass
    In Sweetgrass, a graceful and often moving meditation on a disappearing way of life, there is little here that is objective and much that is magnificent.
  60. All Is Well
    Trobisch has made a drama of tragic accommodation — limited not to one woman’s sexual assault, but to the everyday interactions that all women must navigate carefully.
  61. Liyana
    By addressing strife in Africa in a roundabout way, Liyana breaks free of the heaviness that can weigh down an issue-based documentary.
  62. The Old Man & the Gun
    How much intensity and suspense can you drain from a movie about cops and robbers without having the thing collapse into anecdote and whimsy? The Old Man & the Gun kind of does just that, but it’s hard to mind too much.
  63. Tarzan
    It proves to be one of the more exotic blooms in the Disney hothouse, what with voluptuous flora, hordes of fauna, charming characters and excitingly kinetic animation that gracefully incorporates computer-generated motion.
  64. The Four Times (Le Quattro Volte)
    There is something startling, even shocking, about the angle of vision Mr. Frammartino imposes by juxtaposing apparently disparate elements and lingering on what seem at first to be insignificant details. You have never seen anything like this movie, even though what it shows you has been there all along.
  65. The Box
    The Venezuelan director Lorenzo Vigas’s The Box weaves some of the greatest horrors of modern Mexican life into an unsettlingly cryptic thriller.
  66. The War of the Roses
    The film's outstanding nastiness, which is often diabolically funny until a poorly staged final battle sequence simply takes things too far, has something real and recognizable at its core.
  67. Linoleum
    Just when we’re wondering where all this is going, West executes a final act as devilish as it is emotionally potent.
  68. The Last of the Unjust
    “Shoah” remains a heroic reckoning with the limits of collective understanding, but The Last of the Unjust is something smaller, stranger and more paradoxical: the portrait of an individual whose actions still defy comprehension, and the self-portrait of an artist consumed by the past.
  69. The Other Side of the Wind
    What we have is something of a seductive tease, a haunted film that at times entrances and delights and at times offends and embarrasses.
  70. Cow
    We somehow feel connected to these animals — not by their precious, humanlike relatability — but by the cyclically banal and thorough means with which they are exploited, milked and bred on aggressive schedules that break their bodies down prematurely.
  71. West of Memphis
    The film is inspiring because it has a semi-happy ending attached to a love story.
  72. Frost/Nixon
    Stories of lost crowns lend themselves to drama, but not necessarily audience-pleasing entertainments, which may explain why Frost/Nixon registers as such a soothing, agreeably amusing experience, more palliative than purgative.
  73. Last Resort
    Though Last Resort dwells on sorrowful circumstances and illuminates a grim corner of contemporary reality, it is far from depressing.
  74. From Selma to Soweto
    Even at the level of average-to-mediocre television, though, “Have You Heard” tells an amazing story. If you don’t know it, or you want reminding, the clumsy storytelling can be endured.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    MASH
    Although it is impudent, bold, and often very funny, it lacks the sense of order (even in the midst of disorder) that seems the special province of successful comedy.
  76. Papirosen
    But instead of a dignified stroll down genealogy lane, Mr. Solnicki has made a sparking, gossipy soap opera that’s riddled with emotion and stuffed with strong characters.
  77. Arabian Nights: Volume 3, The Enchanted One
    There is a fine line between delving into the mysteries of life and engaging in mystification, and Mr. Gomes lands on the wrong side of it. There is something disingenuous in the way this movie disowns its own ambitions and scorns the possibility of clarity or coherence. Maybe its opacity is a matter of principle. Or maybe it’s just an excuse.
  78. Sunday Ball
    Captured more for poetry than for clarity, the topography of penalties and free kicks can be impossible to follow. But Léo Bittencourt’s photography has flash and flair, and hardscrabble determination on a real-life field of dreams has a narrative all its own.
  79. Hissein Habre, A Chadian Tragedy
    It’s more of a document than a documentary; calling it cinema seems like an error of categorization.
  80. What Lies Upstream
    Is “What Lies Upstream” persuasive in all respects? No. Will it make you think twice about what’s gone unnoticed in your tap water? Absolutely.
  81. Wildlife
    Wildlife is a domestic drama both sad and terrifying. The entire cast does exceptional work (Oxenbould is an exciting find), but the movie is anchored by Mulligan, who gives the best performance of any I’ve seen in film this year.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Darby O'Gill and the Little People
    Overpoweringly charming concoction of standard Gaelic tall stories, fantasy and romance.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Get Carter
    Its violence is so ghastly and unremitting and its view of the human condition is so perfectly vile that one would almost rather wash one's mouth out with soap than recommend it. Yet it is so finely acted and crafted—and is so spectacularly better than the run of its genre—that as a lover of movies one feels practically diity‐bound to sing its praises.
  84. Eat Drink Man Woman
    Its thoughts about its characters don't go much deeper than the bottom of a soup bowl, but those thoughts are still expressed with affection, wit and an abundance of fascinating cooking tips.
  85. Red Rooms
    The film’s tension rides on the unknown, a paranoid vibe accented by Kelly-Anne’s shady online presence and Gariépy’s stark, sphinx-like performance.
  86. My Love Affair with Marriage
    The result evokes an adult puppet show crossed with a graphic novel, and like the budding female identity the film untangles, the whole thing takes a little time getting used to. Once you do, it is remarkably beautiful.
  87. In the Shadow of Beirut
    The four stories are almost overwhelming to witness all packed together, but the mission to communicate them to a larger audience is admirable.
  88. Not a Pretty Picture
    Made nearly half a century ago and long hiding in plain sight, Martha Coolidge’s “Not a Pretty Picture” is at once an autobiographical documentary, a Pirandellian psychodrama, an acting exercise, a personal exorcism and a powerful political tract.
  89. Mr. Nobody Against Putin
    The documentary tries to heighten the stakes of Talankin’s story by casting his efforts under a pall of danger, dread or distress. But these bids for drama are far less persuasive than the horrifying raw footage Talankin captures, such as one scene in which young students are coached to march down a hallway, as if preparing for battle.
  90. Senna
    As a personality profile, Senna is sketchy at best. Born into a well-to-do family in São Paulo, Brazil, Senna pursued the sport from a young age with a maniacal zeal. He comes across as a fatalistic daredevil and as a man of the people, his wealthy background aside.
  91. The Piano Teacher
    Has the feel of a clinical case study elevated into a subject of aesthetic and philosophical discourse.
  92. The Lost Leonardo
    It’s a dizzying tale. And whether or not you believe “Salvator Mundi” to be a real Leonardo, it’s ultimately a disgusting one.
  93. Mickey and the Bear
    A sturdy, watchable character drama.
  94. Monsters, Inc.
    There hasn't been a film in years to use creative energy as efficiently as Monsters, Inc.
  95. Time Bandits
    Time Bandits is a cheerfully irreverent lark - part fairy tale, part science fiction and part comedy. It's a fantastic though wobbly flight through history and legend in the company of a small boy named Kevin and six dwarfs named Randall, Fidgit, Wally, Og, Stutter and Vermin.
  96. Beyond the Hills
    Even as Mr. Mungiu maintains a detached, objective point of view, allowing the details of the story to speak for themselves, he also allows you to glimpse the complex and volatile inner lives of his characters.
  97. Wife of a Spy
    Wife of a Spy is something like linear narrative perfection, with every scene perfectly calibrated.
  98. Glen Campbell: I'll Be Me
    The film is a rare combination of instructive and poignant.
  99. Orlando, My Political Biography
    Preciado’s superpower in this warm, generous movie is that while he speaks brilliantly to the cages of identity, he sees — and shares — a way out of them. He talks and listens, he exhorts and confesses. He insists on pleasure, speaks to happiness, invites laughter and opens worlds. Here, joy reigns supreme, and it is exhilarating.
  100. Working Woman
    Despite its surface-level placidity, the Israeli feature Working Woman unfolds like a psychological thriller — a procedural that, as it tightens its grip, captures how workplace sexual harassment slowly takes over one woman’s life.
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