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. A Dark, Dark Man
    The mystery aspect is handled obliquely. The film is more of a mood piece, and much of its pitch-black humor derives from the contrast between the barren landscape and the sheer number of horrors it contains.
  2. The Day the Music Died: The Story of Don McLean’s American Pie
    The movie really comes alive when it is recreating the recording session for the song, showing how the ace studio keyboardist Paul Griffin transformed the tune with his energetic gospel-style piano.
  3. My Donkey, My Lover & I
    My Donkey, My Lover & I is yet another story about a woman who ventures out into the wild and finds herself. But to the writer and director Caroline Vignal’s credit, this low-key romantic French comedy proves friskier and more idiosyncratic than its reliance on this trope of feminist empowerment would suggest.
  4. Nope
    There are some fascinating internal tensions within the movie, along with impeccably managed suspense, sharp jokes and a beguiling, unnerving atmosphere of all-around weirdness.
  5. Aftershock
    Aftershock is a moving ode to Black families in a society where too many forces work to tear them apart.
  6. Queen of Glory
    The child of Ghanaian parents herself, Mensah traverses the polyglot turf well, infusing details with astute affection and understated laughs. Even the occasional slapstick proves more sweet than silly.
  7. Marx Can Wait
    It’s a complicated and painful story, humanely and sensitively told.
  8. From Where They Stood
    His film can feel overly cerebral—a bit like being plunged into a seminar—and the text cards do a lot of explanatory heavy lifting. But Cognet’s forensic approach does insist on memorializing these events in an important, physically specific way and, intentionally or not, queasily anticipates a world without any living eyewitnesses to these horrors.
  9. Zombies 3
    This is not your mother’s Disney Channel, and thank god. All of the “Zombies” movies are brimming with camp delights, as though the crew watched “But I’m a Cheerleader” while dropping acid. This is particularly true for Zombies 3.
  10. Gabby Giffords Won't Back Down
    Even during more analytic or crusading sections, the documentary’s mood never strays from inspirational.
  11. 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.
  12. She Will
    Blending sensuous imagery with jabs of feminist wit — at one point, a vibrator is weaponized against a male intruder — Colbert sends her heroine on a transformative journey of revenge and renewal.
  13. Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank
    Despite its risqué origins, “Paws of Fury” manages to dish out lighthearted fun, swashbuckling action and surface-level messaging about following your dreams, though not every joke lands.
  14. The Deer King
    The film is tenderly wrought and brilliantly animated, with transitions that emphasize the communion between the land and the human body.
  15. Don't Make Me Go
    Cho and Isaac’s stellar performances expose the gulf between familiarity and intimacy.
  16. Persuasion
    The story’s heroine, its dialogue and even its themes of regret and loneliness seem to be swallowed up by the need to maintain an appearance of contemporary cheek.
  17. Earwig
    Hadzihalilovic is an expert conjurer of other worlds, and “Earwig” unearths a startlingly seductive array of visual and sonic textures that don’t quite add up to much more than a powerful mood.
  18. Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris
    Despite its gleeful showcasing of beautiful clothes and vibrant midcentury Parisian sights, the film is caught between its fantasies and its principles, landing somewhere more annoyingly clueless — and dull — than it ought to be.
  19. Anonymous Club
    Barnett muses on the contradiction of how, in one performance, she might be “vivid and alive” and in the next “distant,” even though she’s going through the same motions with each show.
  20. My Name Is Sara
    The film is sharp at illustrating how Sara is never totally safe, and how survival requires improvising again and again.
  21. The Killer
    While the nimble Jang holds together the robust action sequences — bloody freakouts often captured in slow motion — no one else grounds any of the scenes with any emotion. Consequently, The Killer fails to land a real knockout blow.
  22. Fair Play
    While its stylings, including perky music and cutesy graphics, can sometimes verge on trite, its insights and guidance are encouraging, actionable and necessary.
  23. Dangerous Liaisons
    The director Rachel Suissa runs Laclos’s story through a heavy Instagram filter in this outlandish, flimsy adaptation.
  24. The Sea Beast
    This script’s greatest sin is its steadfast predictability.
  25. Murina
    For the most part, the director cuts loose her characters and lets them and the story’s vague ideas — about gender, sexuality, money and power — swirl and drift, leaving you to decide how and whether they all fit together, or don’t.
  26. Thor: Love and Thunder
    Waititi’s playfulness buoys Love and Thunder, but the insistence on Thor’s likability, his decency and dude-ness, has become a creative dead end. The movie has its attractions, notably Hemsworth, Thompson and Crowe, whose Zeus vamps through a sequence with a butt-naked Thor and fainting minions.
  27. Both Sides of the Blade
    How strange that a filmmaker as idiosyncratic and fearless as Denis has made such a generic, tentative film.
  28. Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel
    The film avoids providing too much context, a choice that contributes to the spectral atmosphere. The directors aren’t after a news piece; they’re just listening to voices that continue to echo in the corridors.
  29. Cop Secret
    Familiarity might be the point, but a screenplay this coarse leaves the actors little wiggle room, reducing them to mouthpieces for recycled jokes.
  30. This Much I Know to Be True
    A rather fun Nick Cave movie might not have been on your 2022 bingo card, but here we are.
  31. Moon, 66 Questions
    Lentzou, with her first feature no less, gets at something much knottier about what it feels like to get older and perceive your parents as full people, in all their flaws and vulnerabilities; the pains and pleasures of adulthood, contrary to expectation, yield just as much, if not more, unpredictability than in youth.
  32. Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between
    For those viewers aged out of the movie’s intended demographic, that quandary isn’t as compelling as the evidence of its lead actors’ talents, as well as that of the nimble actors who play their besties, Stella (Ayo Edebiri) and Scotty (Nico Hiraga).
  33. Fire of Love
    In their last years, the Kraffts spent most of their time studying the killers, hoping to discover patterns that would enable people living in the path of destruction to escape. They risked their lives to do this, and the movie argues that their sacrifice wasn’t in vain. More than that, it preserves their work and their idiosyncratic, unforgettable human presence.
  34. Fourth of July
    As a director, Louis C.K. puts several feet wrong.
  35. The Princess
    The high-aggro guitar score is a misstep, but a panting, battered King is credible and compelling as she kicks, stabs and screams for the right to choose her own destiny.
  36. Mr. Malcolm's List
    A tepid Regency-era romance.
  37. The Forgiven
    Fiennes peels David in layers, unraveling this man until you see his hollow interior.
  38. The Man from Toronto
    In The Man From Toronto, directed by Patrick Hughes, the vague sense of location is typical of a broader lack of effort. Although Hart, as the broadly comic version of the classic Hitchcockian Wrong Man, has a certain goofball charm, his frantic coward routine gets old quickly, with no appreciable change as the action-flick danger continues to escalate.
  39. Rubikon
    However thoughtful and well-intentioned, this debut feature is too airless and long-winded to excite.
  40. Beauty
    Consider Beauty an elegy with an edge, one that touches on faith and financials, love and condemnation.
  41. Clara Sola
    Araya is remarkably tender as she sinks her fingers into the earth or gingerly lifts bugs off the ground, while Sophie Winqvist Loggins’s hushed, soft-focus camerawork imbues these moments with an almost spiritual grace.
  42. Sniper. The White Raven
    Like many other movies trailing a lone gunslinger, Sniper: The White Raven builds to a tense face-off, which for our hero comes to represent a small measure of justice.
  43. Minions: The Rise of Gru
    Amiable and colorful as it is, the movie is also spectacularly inconsequential.
  44. Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song
    The documentary’s account of the song’s fate, indebted to Alan Light’s book “The Holy or the Broken,” is a fascinating study in the mechanics and metaphysics of pop-culture memory.
  45. Accepted
    As we witness both the documentary’s subjects — and its director — navigate a shocking development in real time, a quietly probing film emerges that pierces the myth of American meritocracy.
  46. The Art of Making It
    Edwards’s generic approach — heavy on talking heads and explanatory title cards — often yields fuzzy results, with a haphazard rush of information overwhelming the rare moments the documentary settles into a more defined and compelling point of view.
  47. Down with the King
    The trait Down With the King exhibits most powerfully is patience, something in short supply in modern cinema or, for that matter, the modern world.
  48. Doula
    The running time is too long, and the finale’s screaming too prolonged; but, unlike childbirth, this good-natured movie delivers a dry, funny and utterly painless experience.
  49. Endangered
    Covered in isolation, any of these interview subjects, or any of the problems facing journalists raised — online harassment, police intimidation, hedge fund ownership of newspapers, news deserts — might have made for a more detailed and compelling film.
  50. Beba
    Beba is profound. The filmmaker delves into all of who she is, including darker or more destructive aspects of her identity, pushing viewers to see Huntt’s complexity — and perhaps their own.
  51. Rise
    It’s not simply a movie about how Giannis became one of the most dominant players in the league. It’s about why Giannis is so lovable.
  52. Vedette
    Vedette joins a recent roster of documentaries about the uses and abuses of farm animals (others include “Cow” and “Gunda”). It’s disappointing that Bories and Chagnard fail to add anything to this environmentally urgent topic beyond their own surprise that these animals are more than indistinguishable milk factories.
  53. We
    An acute awareness of the relationship between memory, whether personal or collective, and identity emerges as the engine of We.
  54. Olga
    Budiashkina, a Ukrainian gymnast in her acting debut, plays Olga beautifully as a guarded, stubborn teenager with the weight of exile on her shoulders, who refuses to quit but still needs her mother, who is stone-faced on the mat but still cries into a stuffed animal.
  55. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
    The self-reflexiveness of the entire enterprise only breaks the spell that Slate and Camp work hard to maintain — one which Rossellini effortlessly keeps intact with intelligence, beautifully controlled phrasing and a soft, melodious warmth that feels like a tender caress.
  56. Trevor: The Musical
    One wonders if this generation’s more attuned and sensitive kids will find this staging of “Trevor” quaint, kitschy — or perhaps still universal.
  57. Elvis
    In the end, this isn’t a biopic or a horror movie or a cautionary parable: It’s a musical, and the music is great. Remixed, yes, and full of sounds that purists might find anachronistic. But there was never anything pure about Elvis Presley, except maybe his voice, and hearing it in all its aching, swaggering glory, you understand how it set off an earthquake.
  58. Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe
    “Do the Universe” knows it won’t change the world, or precincts outside it. But the abundance of not entirely cheap laughs that this movie — which is best watched over a plate of nachos — delivers is therapeutic.
  59. The Human Trial
    Shot largely in hospital waiting areas, offices and conference rooms, The Human Trial is not a visually dynamic movie. But it builds a good head of steam in the narrative intrigue department before resolving on a low-key note of hope.
  60. Wildhood
    The quiet candor with which Hannam addresses issues of masculinity, and how it intersects with an Indigenous and queer identity, elevates this otherwise conventional story.
  61. Love & Gelato
    It’s the kind of film that is more interested in the appeal of a good Italian accent than it is in finding novel, or even particularly beautiful, ways to shoot and see Rome. The conscious callowness is agreeable, but it lacks freshness, like a midnight pasta reheated in the microwave.
  62. Apples
    The movie never manages to hit above a dim emotional pitch, and a final-act awakening lands with a shrug.
  63. Flux Gourmet
    The film isn’t so much an allegory or fantasy as a witty philosophical speculation on some elemental human issues. We are animals driven by lust, hunger and aggression, but also delicate creatures in love with beauty and abstraction. Those two sides of our nature collide in unexpected, infinitely variable ways.
  64. The Black Phone
    In place of gouting gore and surging fright, this enjoyable adaptation of Joe Hill’s 2005 short story has an almost contemplative tone, one that drains its familiar horror tropes — a masked psychopath, communications from beyond the grave — of much of their chill. The movie’s low goose bump count, though, is far from ruinous.
  65. Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes
    Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes, directed by James Jones, does not extensively explore the history of its components. It’s less concerned with the tapes themselves than with the act of bearing witness.
  66. Granada Nights
    a hackneyed story of a tedious, lovelorn expatriate, pulling himself together and dragging us around with him.
  67. The Story Won't Die
    If Gerson’s brisk supercut style can feel frustratingly cursory at times, he chooses wisely to concede the stage to the artists — rousing scenes from concerts and recitals are the film’s highlights — rather than turn them into data points for an exhaustive account of the refugee crisis.
  68. Civil: Ben Crump
    “Civil” yields fewer insights than hoped. At times, the neat documentary feels nearly as tailored as Crump’s suits.
  69. 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.
  70. Cha Cha Real Smooth
    I didn’t believe a single second in Cha Cha Real Smooth, but the movie isn’t trying to convince you of anything. It just wants you to like it. It wants you to smile, nod in recognition, shed a tear or two and feel good about yourself for liking it. It’s an exemplar of American indie entertainment at its most canned and solipsistic.
  71. Sing, Dance, Act: Kabuki featuring Toma Ikuta
    Even for viewers with no relationship to Ikuta or his prior roles, “Sing, Dance, Act” provides a fascinating look into Kabuki theater and the particular sets of skills that are required to pull off such idiosyncratic performances.
  72. Cocoon
    The softness lacks detail, the butterfly metaphors lack originality, but the movie is pleasant, a balmy introduction to adult feelings of desire and belonging.
  73. Stay Prayed Up
    As self-promotional ventures go, this is an effort of integrity and good will, and packs in a lot of spirited music that more or less sells itself.
  74. Poser
    At once polished and punky, Poser is about the maturing of a vampiric personality. Like its music, the movie feels exploratory and raw-edged, yet with a persistent pathos that clings to Lennon and isolates her.
  75. My Fake Boyfriend
    To set expectations, it’s best to think of My Fake Boyfriend as two movies. There’s the gay rom-com, focused on Andrew, that Pride month viewers have presumably tuned in for, and then there’s an almost “Black Mirror”-ish comedy, centered on Jake, about a meddling techie who gets caught up in his best friend’s life.
  76. A Man of Integrity
    Employing minimal background music and a bleak, blue-gray color palette, Rasoulof evokes a sense of nihilism that is as suffocating as it is affecting.
  77. Brian and Charles
    Too soon, however, this intriguing psychological study turns into a programmatic geeks-vs-bullies story that relies on pushing the easiest emotional buttons.
  78. Bitterbrush
    In following two young women employed as range riders in Idaho, the film presents its own modern-day picture of hard work and camaraderie.
  79. Jerry and Marge Go Large
    While the movie sustains levity, its lack of subtlety — and a lack of stakes, save for sweepstakes — make for an altogether bland bonanza.
  80. Spiderhead
    Kosinski can’t make the inane philosophizing about free will sound profound or new, and the hectic, hasty finale, lacking the nerve or chilly interiority of the original story, plays like something that blew up in the lab.
  81. Father of the Bride
    Father of the Bride shows the sort of rich cultural representation that can happen when people from the cultures being represented are enlisted to tell their own stories.
  82. Lightyear
    Lightyear, directed by Angus MacLane from a script by Jason Headley, aims to please by pandering, to be good-enough entertainment. As such, it succeeds in a manner more in line with second-tier Disney animation than with top-shelf Pixar.
  83. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
    “Leo Grande” proves to be a tart and tender probe into sex and intimacy, power dynamics and human connection.
  84. Official Competition
    In the end, this is a one-joke movie — a shaggy-dog meta-narrative — but it’s not a bad joke.
  85. Halftime
    In Halftime, she is seen in top J. Lo form, an empowering Hollywood icon with an inspirational story to share. Is that reason enough to watch this scattershot portrait? It depends on if she had your love to begin with.
  86. I'm Charlie Walker
    It’s Charlie’s wife, Ann (Safiya Fredericks), who provides the movie’s voice-over. Her account has a mythmaking undercurrent but is also the film’s deft way of celebrating Black love and family.
  87. Lost Illusions
    Giannoli illuminates the dank frenzy of the 19th-century attention economy with an eye on our own post-truth era. Lost Illusions is sensational. Nobody paid me to say that. Well, actually, The New York Times did, but you should believe me anyway.
  88. The Lost Girls
    Those poor viewers willing to take on this Freudian tale and its dialogue rivaling “The Room” must brave a ludicrous slog for crumbs.
  89. Small Town Wisconsin
    Mueller’s direction is patient and sensitive, the cast is accomplished and committed, and the picture’s comedic aspects sometimes earn a chuckle. But Small Town Wisconsin is not sufficiently distinctive to rise above the standard-issue cinematic contemplation of the arguably poignant state of the white male American screw-up.
  90. Tahara
    This is a canny, compact portrait of teenage insensitivity, all the more riveting for its biting dialogue and funny performances.
  91. 1982
    Working with a shrewdly limited setting, Mouaness skillfully gives the film a near-real-time feel, conveying a sense that the war is approaching through small-scale details like radio broadcasts, Wissam’s observation that pigeons have flown unusually close to the school and the volume and frequency of aerial noise.
  92. Ninja Badass
    The result is a 103-minute vanity project I found utterly exhausting.
  93. The Janes
    Cookie-cutter though it is, The Janes does have something going for it: its interview subjects, the former Janes, who all speak about their beliefs and shared past with striking clarity.
  94. The Walk
    The topic is, of course, timely. (When is racism not?) Yet The Walk feels dated.
  95. Jurassic World Dominion
    This is a very crowded movie — so many species of dinosaur, and I’m so bad at keeping track of them that my 8-year-old-self is no longer speaking to me. They are variously menacing, ravenous, bizarre and kind of cute, but the frenzied live-action and digital special effects rarely produce moments of Spielbergian awe.
  96. The Policeman's Lineage
    The director, Lee Kyu-man, makes the camera hover tensely over scenes, but only a couple of action sequences pack much oomph. There’s more sinister tension in brief scenes with elder statesmen of the criminal world, who are chillingly self-assured.
  97. Being BeBe
    With her feature debut, Branham exposes her hand as filmmaker, and reminds us that Being BeBe is only a snapshot of Ngwa’s persona; the real thing is so much richer.
  98. A Sexplanation
    Liu lends a frankness and sensitivity to the topic that would make A Sexplanation suitable to be shown in a classroom, which was perhaps his intention all along.
  99. Funny Face
    Roger Edens, the talented producer, and Stanley Donen, the director, have turned the whole thing into a lovely phantasm made up of romance, tourism and chic.
  100. My Dead Dad
    The gear-grinding tedium of the movie’s taking-responsibility scenario is occasionally broken up by not-quite-lyrical sequences of Los Angeles sunsets seen from car windows.
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