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. Little Girl
    [A] disarmingly sensitive documentary.
  2. Writing with Fire
    At a time when the profession faces increasing dangers in India, the film’s faith in the powers of grassroots journalism is nothing short of galvanizing.
  3. 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.
  4. True Things
    What makes the film’s episodic approach flow is the pulse-sensitive camerawork. It’s worth singling out, because it is the kind that is often described as “intimate” but rarely pulled off with such Maysles-esque aplomb.
  5. The Village Detective: a song cycle
    Morrison, who is the producer, director and editor of this strangely intoxicating film, is a cinematic investigator of the first stripe.
  6. The Tragedy of Macbeth
    There is no comfort in Coen’s vision, but his rigor — and Washington’s vigor — are never less than exhilarating.
  7. Karen Dalton: In My Own Time
    An excellent documentary directed by Richard Peete and Robert Yapkowitz.
  8. The First Wave
    The film succeeds in presenting an on-the-ground view of what it felt like to be inside a hospital in the spring of 2020. It was harrowing, death was everywhere and there was no end in sight.
  9. The Tsugua Diaries
    A work that possesses both the whimsy and fearlessness of a student project and the technical vibrancy of a veteran’s opus.
  10. A Man Named Scott
    Thanks to its perceptive insights and a range of interviewees, from fellow industry professionals to a clinical psychologist, A Man Named Scott is that rare musician-focused doc, one as sensitive, fully formed and noble in its intentions as Cudi himself.
  11. Chess of the Wind (1976)
    Aslani pulls story threads together with an elegant moving camera that doesn’t immediately give up all the secrets a scene may contain.
  12. All Is Forgiven (2007)
    The atmosphere the director creates, once fully breathed in, has an emotional gravity that becomes devastating as it settles.
  13. Simple as Water
    Simple as Water is anything but simple when it comes to its technical achievements, weaving together familiar immigrant narratives in ways that still manage to surprise and stun.
  14. 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.
  15. Torn
    Though there are no real secrets to be uncovered regarding Alex Lowe’s motivations for climbing, nor his infectiously exuberant personality in life . . . the film unavoidably feels confessional and cathartic.
  16. President
    Nielsson’s access to Chamisa allows for an intimate look at the Catch-22 of establishing a democracy amid state-sanctioned violence and corruption, and the grit of those fighting for it.
  17. Porgy and Bess
    Almost a quarter of a century after its initial performance on the stage (and seventeen years after the revival that really established it), this most haunting of American musical dramas has been transmitted on the screen in a way that does justice to its values and almost compensates for the long wait.
  18. Kimi
    However scary that world and however freaky Angela’s situation, Soderbergh never lets the movie get too heavy. Even as the vibe shifts and the atmosphere grows more ominous, he maintains a lightness of touch and a visual playfulness that keeps the movie securely in the realm of pop pleasure.
  19. Marx Can Wait
    It’s a complicated and painful story, humanely and sensitively told.
  20. Expedition Content
    The problem of translation — who speaks for whom and why — echoes through Expedition Content, which builds to a shattering climax during a long, boozy revel in which the expedition men joke and laugh.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Sansho the Bailiff
    Its impulses, which are profound but not transcendental, follow an esthetic program that is also a moral progression, and that emerges, with superb lucidity, only from the greatest art.
  22. Speak No Evil
    Gliding inexorably from squirmy to sinister to full-on shocking, this icy satire of middle-class mores, confidently directed by Christian Tafdrup, is utterly fearless in its mission to unsettle.
  23. Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America
    It’s a confrontational film, but never an alienating one, and so much of what’s in it is persuasive.
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
  26. Fresh
    A wickedly funny cannibal romance and dazzling feature debut from the director Mimi Cave.
  27. 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.
  28. Mars One
    Dreams are incubators for dissatisfaction, Martins seems to sigh.
  29. 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.
  30. Nanny
    Jusu draws fluidly from different genres and modes in “Nanny” — from scene to scene, the movie plays like an immigration drama, a lonely woman melodrama and a cruel labor farce — but at one point you realize that what you are watching looks, sounds and feels like a horror movie.
  31. Riotsville, U.S.A.
    This is not an objective film. It is a polemic, a work of activism, a challenge to the viewer.
  32. Tantura
    The emerging film is not simply a persuasive augmentation of Katz’s argument, but also a disturbing portrait of how very human impulses — passivity, rationalization, social pressures — can shape the writing of history.
  33. 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.
  34. 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.
  35. 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.
  36. You Are Not My Mother
    Imaginative and spooky, You Are Not My Mother shows just how frightening — and stigmatizing — a parent’s mental illness can be to a child.
  37. Unrest
    The film punctures that airless sense of fate which can suffocate period pieces and restores this moment of upheaval to immediacy.
  38. 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.
  39. The Innocents
    Skillfully merging menace and sweetness (when Anna begins to speak, her parents’ delight is incredibly touching), The Innocents constructs a superbly eerie moral landscape, one that the children (all of whom are fantastic) must learn to navigate.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    32 Sounds
    While there’s certainly a specific charm to seeing 32 Sounds live (particularly during a five-minute interactive dance break, when Green invites audience members to walk up to the stage and feel the quaking power of a pair of subwoofers as Samson acts as D.J.), the filmed narrative is engaging and richly visual enough that 32 Sounds would still achieve many of its most spectacular effects at home, preferably through a pair of good headphones.
  41. Linoleum
    Just when we’re wondering where all this is going, West executes a final act as devilish as it is emotionally potent.
  42. Wood and Water
    With a kind of dissociative, jet lag-induced delirium, the film transitions — somehow fluidly — from the lush woodlands and desolate churches of southern Germany to the flickering lights and modernist textures of Hong Kong in the throes of mass demonstrations.
  43. Till
    Chukwu revisits the past while doing something extremely difficult. She makes this grim American history insistently of the moment — and she does so by stripping the story down to its raw, harrowing emotional core.
  44. The Fabelmans
    The Fabelmans is, as the title says, somewhat of a fable and wonderful in both large and small ways, even if Spielberg can’t help but soften the rougher, potentially lacerating edges. It’s what he does; it’s also what the audience expects of him, and he’s nothing if not obliging.
  45. Broker
    Kore-Eda, remarkably, doesn’t counterfeit a happy ending, but he also refuses despair. He’s an honest broker of heartbreak.
  46. Crimes of the Future
    Despite the morbid laughs and the beatific smile that can light up Saul’s face like that of St. Teresa of Ávila, Crimes of the Future feels like a requiem. Cronenberg has always been a diagnostician of the human condition; here, he also feels a lot like a mortician.
  47. 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.
  48. The Village House (Gamak Ghar)
    The film’s still, square images feel so much like paintings that any stray movement — the smoke rising in spirals from a mosquito coil, or a palm tree swaying in the breeze — can seem like magic, a picture come to life.
  49. Armageddon Time
    It is — astutely, uncomfortably and in the end tragically — about privilege.
  50. Showing Up
    Together, Reichardt and Williams — with little dialogue and boundless generosity — lucidly articulate everything that Lizzy will never say and need not say, opening a window on the world and turning this wondrous, determined, gloriously grumpy woman into a sublime work of art.
  51. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
    Radcliffe is winningly guileless in his performance, twitching his costume-y eyebrows and mustache like gentle bunny ears even as he lip-syncs “Another One Rides the Bus” with such commitment that his neck veins nearly pop.
  52. Catherine Called Birdy
    Dunham prevails in convincing audiences that coming-of-age in a so-called simpler time was equally tumultuous, and crams the corners of her movie with images of other female characters discreetly seizing their own moments of satisfaction — glimpses of joys which realize that it’s in the margins of a medieval tale where the best stuff happens.
  53. One Fine Morning
    The story’s ellipses and graceful structure are certainly admirable, but what elevates One Fine Morning is the texture of Sandra’s emotions, the revelation of her character, the hunger of her embrace, the wildness of her mouth, the stillness of her sated body, and the love that she gives and will movingly embrace once more.
  54. A New Old Play
    At once tragedy and farce, it breathes new life into a story as old as civilization.
  55. Tahara
    This is a canny, compact portrait of teenage insensitivity, all the more riveting for its biting dialogue and funny performances.
  56. An Autumn Afternoon
    A profoundly simple, profoundly moving film.
  57. De Humani Corporis Fabrica
    The film’s sometimes brusque transitions and decentered perspectives are just as transgressive as any of the graphic imagery.
  58. The Eight Mountains
    The spiritual dimension of Pietro and Bruno’s bond has its appeal, and one of the movie’s pleasures is that it takes male friendship seriously. There’s an expressly erotic dimension to the men’s love for each other, as can be the case with intimate relationships, though not an explicitly carnal one.
  59. Enys Men
    At times, Jenkin’s bold, experimental style can perplex; but his vision is so unwavering and beholden to local history that his message is clear: On Enys Men, the earth remembers what the sea has taken.
  60. Tori and Lokita
    The precarity of the lives that the Dardennes explore give the stories feeling and tension while their directorial choices — including where they put the camera and how they situate characters in the world — give their work its characteristic ethical politics.
  61. Nostalgia
    Martone’s depiction of crime is at once expressive and economic, a world of danger boiled down to pregnant pauses and minute gestures.
  62. 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.
  63. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
    “Glass Onion” is completely silly, but it’s not only silly. Explicitly set during the worst months of the Covid pandemic — the spring of 2020 — “Glass Onion” leans into recent history without succumbing to gloom, bitterness or howling rage, which is no small accomplishment. One way to interpret the title is that a glass onion may be sharp, and may have a lot of layers, but it won’t make you cry.
  64. Barbarian
    Cregger sets up dozens of clichés and pulls them in genuinely surprising directions, brandishing his touchstones: American horror films of the 80s and 90s in the vein of Wes Craven.
  65. The Music Man
    It's here, and the rich, ripe roundness of it, the lush amalgam of the many elements of successful American show business that Mr. Willson brought together on the stage, has been preserved and appropriately made rounder and richer through the magnitude of film.
  66. 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.
  67. Asteroid City
    It’s comic and often wry, but like some of his other films, it has the soul of a tragedy.
  68. The Adventures of Milo and Otis
    The wonder of Mr. Hata's anthropomorphic fairy tale, which opens today at Cinema 3 and other theaters, is that it is cast with real animals who seem to share deep affection. And the mixture of realism and fantasy lends this children's film a poignancy that cuts much deeper than might a similar story featuring animated characters. [25 Aug 1989, p.10]
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Objective, Burma!
    Objective, Burma, directed exceedingly well by Raoul Walsh from a first-class script by Ranald MacDougall and Lester Cole, is a stirring tribute to the sterling fighting men who helped to reopen Burma after the initial Japanese onslaught in the Pacific.
  70. 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.
  71. The Crucible
    Handsome and impassioned, vigorously staged by the director of ''The Madness of King George,'' this ''Crucible'' is a reminder of the play's wide reach, which goes well beyond witch trials in any century. As adapted gamely by the playwright into a screenplay that takes advantage of scenic backgrounds and photogenic stars, ''The Crucible'' now speaks to subtler forms of dishonesty and opportunism than it did before.
  72. The Inspection
    The metamorphosis that Bratton explores, and that Pope embodies — the way Ellis both changes and remains ever faithful to himself — is subtle, bittersweet and beautiful.
  73. Witness for the Prosecution
    For a courtroom melodrama pegged to a single plot device--a device that, of course, everybody promises not to reveal--the Arthur Hornblow Jr. film production of the Agatha Christie play "Witness for the Prosecution" comes off extraordinarily well. This results mainly from Billy Wilder's splendid staging of some splintering courtroom scenes and a first-rate theatrical performance by Charles Laughton in the defense-attorney role.
  74. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
    The movie’s bifurcated shape isn’t novel, but Poitras’s marshaling of all this information is exceptionally graceful. She has an abundance of fantastic material at her disposal — including a generous selection of Goldin’s artwork — but what makes the movie work so well is how Poitras seamlessly uses the different sections of Goldin’s life to weave a coherent portrait of the artist.
  75. 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.
  76. Dos Estaciones
    At once specific and expansive, Dos Estaciones can be described several ways: as a drama, a character study, a meditative exploration of the ravages of globalization. At the same time, part of the movie’s pleasure is how it avoids facile categorization.
  77. The Sea Wolf
    The Sea Wolf is a triumph of studio filmmaking. [22 Oct 2017, p.11]
    • The New York Times
  78. The African Desperate
    Drawn from Syms’s own experiences as a visual artist, The African Desperate is less an art-school parody as it is a portrait of existential incongruity, where contempt mingles with deep affection.
  79. Dry Ground Burning
    Pimenta and Queirós invent a world in which Brazilian women at the very bottom of the social totem pole take matters into their own hands. They do so without an ounce of fear or self-pity — and in killer style to boot.
  80. Monica
    Both Lysette and Clarkson are naturally magnetic actors, and they don’t waste the attention they’re given on excess sentimentality.
  81. Master Gardener
    Part of the kick of “Master Gardener” is that the writer-director Paul Schrader manages to pull off this improbable movie. It shouldn’t work and, even after seeing it twice, I don’t think that it entirely does, which only makes it more fascinating and strengthens its power.
  82. Queens of the Qing Dynasty
    McKenzie doesn’t rely on the usual uplifting messaging and strained empowerment arc to humanize An and Star . . . Their friendship remains mysterious, yet the film, as if by witchcraft, makes their connection feel palpable and true.
  83. Elemental
    The staggering design ambition balances out the plot’s affecting, relatable ordinariness.
  84. Saint Omer
    An intellectually charged, emotionally wrenching story about the inability of storytelling — literary, legal or cinematic — to do justice to the violence and strangeness of human experience.
  85. Emily
    Building on a series of oppositions — nature and culture, realism and romance, duty and freedom — O’Connor brings Emily the myth to vibrant life, persuasively suggesting that this ostensibly strange and cloistered genius came into being not despite her contradictions but through them.
  86. 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.
  87. Terra Femme
    Stephens’s ideas and presentation make for a dense, continually absorbing hour.
  88. Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me
    An honest portrait study of stardom and mental illness, the film offers a hopeful catharsis: How, when we reveal our hardest truths, we can heal together.
  89. My Imaginary Country
    While this is a first-person documentary, with the director providing voice-over narration, it expresses a poignant humility and a patient willingness to listen.
  90. What We Leave Behind
    What We Leave Behind insists upon power in stillness, and the poignancy in staying — and leaving.
  91. Medusa Deluxe
    At a time when too many movies feel cautious and constrained, Medusa Deluxe is gloriously uninhibited and gaudily diverting.
  92. Piggy
    Pereda, who also wrote the script, is not afraid of psychological and moral ambiguity: It’s obvious that she is on Sara’s side — the bullying scenes are much harder to watch than the bloody ones — but she also knows that shame, guilt and secrecy fester into messy situations and messy people.
  93. Intervista
    A magical mixture of recollection, parody, memoir, satire, self-examination and joyous fantasy.
  94. There There
    The writer-director, Andrew Bujalski, zeros in on the delicate dances and negotiations between the people in these two-handers, which percolate with sly humor, decency, curiosity and sheer nerve.
  95. Last Flight Home
    “Last Flight” is at once a memorial to Eli, the last of that generation of the family to die, and — almost incidentally — a philosophical argument about how death can be faced well.
  96. Sepa: Nuestro Señor de los milagros
    It’s a provocative addition to the literature of incarceration.
  97. Challengers
    One of the other pleasures of Challengers is that despite some tears, tightened jaws and its fussy chronology, the movie isn’t trying to say anything important, which is a relief. It wants to engage and entertain you, and it does that very nicely.
  98. The Quiet Girl
    Although The Quiet Girl — Ireland’s entry for the best international feature Oscar — is not holiday fare, there may not be a movie more expressive of the season’s benevolent ethos than this hushed work about kith and kindness.
  99. Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb
    “Turn Every Page” is one step away from turning into a Herzogian monument to obsession or plunging into crazed psychodrama. Instead, it is merely a great profile, filled with wit, affection and detailed stories of how the books came to be.
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