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. Freakscene: The Story of Dinosaur Jr.
    The movie is nothing if not relentlessly focused on Dinosaur Jr. itself. The band is a noteworthy one. But this treatment feels skimpy.
  2. Miracle
    Framed by scenes of weeping, the narrative does not entirely pull itself into a satisfying arc, but the film nevertheless unfolds with dexterity and suspense.
  3. The Phantom of the Open
    A different actor than Rylance might have revealed the slight darker, impostor wrinkles of the tale. Instead, his character, an unflummoxed optimist, shares some of the same cheery qualities as Ted Lasso.
  4. Neptune Frost
    This isn’t a tight, tidy allegory of capitalism and colonialism so much as a collage of vivid images, sounds and words that punch the movie’s themes like hashtags. Williams and Uzeyman marry anarchist politics with anarchist aesthetics, making something that feels both handmade and high-tech, digital and analog, poetic and punk rock.
  5. 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.
  6. 18½
    The film’s referential pleasures feel insubstantial, diminished by the direct comparison to more meaningful works of the period.
  7. Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko
    Although she is buoyant and cheerful, Nikuko is cast as oafish and uncouth, and she is always ultimately the butt of the joke. It’s a puerile, mean-spirited tendency that altogether spoils the otherwise exquisite imagery.
  8. Maika: The Girl from Another Galaxy
    "Maika” stands out for its moments of weird eccentricity. Bad guys get slapped by gobs of kimchi and Hung and Maika float around in a bubble, zooming past airplanes. Sure, it’s all very loud and cartoonish, but at least we’re not stuck in the suburbs.
  9. Hollywood Stargirl
    Hollywood Stargirl could be seen as a filmmaking exercise. How do you build a story around a character who was auxiliary by design? Hart’s solutions are manifold, but her most effective one is to quash the grating altruism that drove Stargirl in the first movie.
  10. Eiffel
    One can’t help but wonder if Eiffel is merely a lame fantasy or a particularly spineless form of mythmaking, whittling down as it does one nation’s politically loaded event to the equivalent of an Eiffel Tower key chain with an inscription reading “city of love.”
  11. Benediction
    The film never quite conjures a link between the life and the work.
  12. The Score
    The film is besotted by its own cleverness. The overwrought dialogue clashes with the rest of the movie’s naturalism. But Smyth’s very point is that ordinary folk have the right to strive for poetry — and his shaggy sincerity wins out in the end. With this promising ditty as his debut feature, the filmmaker introduces himself as a voice to be heard.
  13. Interceptor
    The fun is not always contagious, even for someone like me who grew up reading Tom Clancy’s wonky Cold War fantasias.
  14. After Blue (Dirty Paradise)
    It’s unclear what Mandico is trying to say, if anything, and the film overstays its welcome — even the wildest visuals lose their power to stun after a while — but “After Blue” certainly is sui generis.
  15. Watcher
    One of this century’s most arresting tales of female anxiety.
  16. Fire Island
    The pace is slacker than it should be, but still, “Fire Island” fits neatly alongside Kristen Stewart’s lesbian Christmas movie “Happiest Season” on Hulu’s rom-com shelf.
  17. A Chiara
    You feel the weight of Chiara’s dilemma, the cost of the knowledge she demands, and the heroism of her willingness to pay it.
  18. Zero Contact
    There’s a vicarious pleasure to be found in watching Hopkins, the octogenarian actor, getting the hang of technology that allows him to film himself without the usual hovering crew.
  19. 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.
  20. The Bob's Burgers Movie
    The Bob’s Burgers Movie, directed by Bouchard and Bernard Derriman, is such a breezy, engaging picture that it qualifies as a summer refreshment.
  21. Top Gun: Maverick
    Though you may hear otherwise, Top Gun: Maverick is not a great movie. It is a thin, over-strenuous and sometimes very enjoyable movie. But it is also, and perhaps more significantly, an earnest statement of the thesis that movies can and should be great.
  22. Look at Me: XXXTentacion
    Fascinating and exasperating.
  23. Fanny: The Right to Rock
    What the movie showcases best from its subjects, then, is the humor and ease of women who have survived a lifetime of setbacks and strife. Fanny has already proven itself — what’s left is for us to enjoy its growing catalog.
  24. A Taste of Whale
    Provocative as it may be at first glance, A Taste of Whale, in theaters and on demand, offers a refreshingly multidimensional take on the controversy around whale hunting in the Faroe Islands, a tradition that dates back to the 9th century.
  25. There Are No Saints
    The director, Ulloa, tries to mask the derivative story by embellishing the violence, cutting to closeups of flesh wounds and bullet holes as a distraction from the routine plot and hardboiled dialogue — he seems to be aiming for stark and gritty, but his tough-talking assassins, crime lords and arms dealers bring the whole thing closer to unintentional camp.
  26. Playlist
    There are no particularly moving insights, and it falls short of a proper character study, but “Playlist” does intrigue with its droll individual parts — if not the sum of them.
  27. Dinner in America
    There is, perhaps, an argument to be made for representing a time and place truthfully, but because the film does not critically engage with the uglier elements of the society it portrays, these become a distraction. And a viewer might find it difficult to get sucked into the love and music story at its center.
  28. Paulie Go!
    Directed by Andrew Nackman in his feature debut, Paulie Go! unabashedly aspires to the sentimental whimsy that once swamped film festivals, and certain moments — including a self-consciously awkward dance scene — seem near quotations of dozens of offbeat movies that came before.
  29. A Perfect Pairing
    It’s all so anodyne that the also-obligatory girl-gets-mad-at-hunk plot turn before the love-conquers-all finale feels like being shaken awake during a dream of drowning in butterscotch sunsets.
  30. Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBets
    It’s a zippy, entertaining approach that offers a surprising degree of insight into the psychology that produced the GameStop phenomenon. Investors played with serious money, but their mind-set was a farcical dive into hyperspace — a week of gambling in a cyber-Vegas that, for some, was worth the hangover.
  31. Family Camp
    Dad humor abounds in Family Camp, a vanishingly mild comedy that resembles other films about parents and kids bumbling in the wilderness
  32. Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet Horror
    What could have been an urgent inquiry into the systems enabling sex criminals becomes something more pedestrian — a stylized replay of a game of cat and mouse.
  33. Cane Fire
    The cinematography is often grainy, and occasionally Banua-Simon’s choice of interview subjects feels unfocused or repetitive. But there is tremendous educational and moral value in his overview of the history of Kauai.
  34. Torn Hearts
    Unfortunately, the script is too disjointed to keep its own complex characters afloat. Little is revealed as the plot bounces from one climax to another, making any eventual bloodshed feel exhausting and unearned.
  35. Hold Your Fire
    The film’s intention may have been to highlight the negotiator’s achievement, but it appears that it was public pressure, as much as his influence, that prevented more bloodshed.
  36. Digger
    Its terse David and Goliath conflict doesn’t yield satisfyingly punchy results.
  37. The Valet
    The Valet is an earnest crowd pleaser that unabashedly celebrates the bonds of a Latino family in a tight-knit neighborhood with rom-com aplomb.
  38. Cordelia
    Enigmatic and imperfect, but nonetheless absorbing and consistently unsettling, Cordelia offers a haunting visualization of a breaking-apart psyche.
  39. A New Old Play
    At once tragedy and farce, it breathes new life into a story as old as civilization.
  40. Men
    The movie, an uneasy amalgam of horror and allegory, full of creepy, gory effects and literary and mythological allusions, amounts to a sustained and specific indictment of the titular gender.
  41. Mondocane
    At its grungy heart, Alessandro Celli’s Mondocane is about the dissolution of a friendship. Yet this cynical, near-future crime thriller, with its Hunger Games morality and Mad Max aesthetic, is too busy glamorizing cruelty to allow its central relationship to resonate.
  42. Fire in the Mountains
    Its criticisms of patriarchal authority, bureaucratic corruption and superstition in rural India are sharp and unsparing, but its political themes are embedded in a humanism that is at once expansive and specific. The characters don’t deliver a message; their lives are the message.
  43. Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers
    A wry take on the material that combines animation and live-action comedy, the movie has some of the hip flair and anarchic meta-humor of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” as well as an irreverent, self-referential attitude that’s rather appealing.
  44. Deception
    True, its hero is a philandering middle-aged novelist; he has an affair with a divine younger woman; and there’s even an imaginary trial where said novelist stands before a jury of women accusing him of misogyny. But, if you can tolerate these passé indulgences, there’s also something slyly compelling about this ethereal, pillow-talk-heavy drama.
  45. Emergency
    Thanks to some good filmmaking decisions, Emergency is rife with tart observations about campus life.
  46. Downton Abbey: A New Era
    Fellowes manages to navigate Downton Abbey to charm both reactionaries and revolutionaries.
  47. Firestarter
    This movie brushes aside a lot of things — the most shocking thing about it is how soggily noncommittal it is.
  48. Senior Year
    The film’s early snark turns as cloying and insincere as the cultural doublespeak that it parodies. By the final act, its dialogue is so burdened by inspirational maxims about personal authenticity that it feels as though the script has been hijacked by yearbook quotes.
  49. Our Father
    It is the siblings — their anguish and their anger, as well as the compassion they extend to one another — that drive the narrative.
  50. Pleasure
    Excess is the sine qua non of porn, so that’s expected. What is more surprising — and welcome — is how Thyberg engages feminist issues like a woman’s agency while making you laugh, freaking you out and prompting you to squirm.
  51. Jonathan Agassi Saved My Life
    Heymann situates the notion of celebrity in the context of not just performance and gay culture but also familial intimacy, with striking detail.
  52. Foxhole
    The three-part scope is ambitious, but Foxhole is a film made on a very small scale.
  53. 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.
  54. Sneakerella
    If this spin on the tale is not quite diverting enough to justify its existence, the movie, directed by Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum, is at least not a soulless exercise.
  55. Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story
    The ebullient history — which also cites on-site food tents as a mind-blowing component of the fest’s appeal — becomes tearful when Hurricane Katrina decimates New Orleans in 2005.
  56. Operation Mincemeat
    Operation Mincemeat is overall light on remorse and far more interested in intrigue, both political and romantic.
  57. Il Buco
    Frammartino connects the physical with the metaphysical. The world as he renders it is an anthology of concrete objects and unrepeatable moments that are somehow infused with abstract, even spiritual meanings.
  58. Montana Story
    When Montana Story works, you are effortlessly drawn into a world — which allows you to go with the easygoing, realist groove — even as you’re taking stock of the artifice and waiting for the hammer to fall.
  59. 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.
  60. Spring Awakening: Those You've Known
    Michael John Warren’s film is a sure-handed blend of making-of explainer, theater-kid scrapbook and jukebox documentary, doling out hits from its theatrical run (through clips) and the reunion.
  61. Reflection
    It would be a bracing, haunting work even if it weren’t so timely.
  62. Along for the Ride
    Such a breezy, Instagram-friendly adaptation feels like a betrayal to Dessen’s original, neurotic protagonist, who has a more difficult journey from self-induced solitude to romance.
  63. Happening
    Throughout, Diwan’s gaze remains clear, direct, fearless. She shows you a part of life that the movies rarely do. By which I mean: She shows you a woman who desires, desires to learn, have sex, bear children on her terms, be sovereign — a woman who, in choosing to live her life, risks becoming a criminal and dares to be free.
  64. The Takedown
    Even the sight of the two frenemies wiping out racist goons is not enough to make up for the desperately frantic action scenes (hope you like interminable car chases), joyless jokes and hackneyed clichés.
  65. Randy Rhoads: Reflections of a Guitar Icon
    Rhoads comes off as a pleasant guy (never a big partyer; he tried to counsel Osbourne on his excessive drinking) and a genuine ax savant who died with a lot more music in him.
  66. The Sanctity of Space
    “It is belief as much as anything that allows one to cling to a wall,” James Salter wrote in his mountaineering novel “Solo Faces.” The Sanctity of Space is at its best when conveying the power of that belief.
  67. Sheryl
    Crow herself is a more than interesting subject. She’s a musician whose Rock-with-a-capital-R cred — her guitar playing is ace, her voice is soulful and her ear for a hook is unimpeachable — is sometimes overlooked in favor of her pop appeal. And her story has a lot of twists.
  68. Human Factors
    The tone is too rigidly intellectual for the movie to succeed as a tense thriller. But the actors are up to the challenge of not so much sharing scenes as coexisting within them, particularly Timoteo as the embittered wife who roils like a teakettle that has been welded shut.
  69. Shepherd
    With Shepherd, the Welsh writer and director Russell Owen shows us how to accrue a great deal of atmosphere with very little fuss.
  70. In Front of Your Face
    The secret is poised somewhere between triteness and disarming simplicity.
  71. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
    There isn’t much of a love story here. There isn’t much of anything, even as there’s too much of everything.
  72. In a New York Minute
    The promising first-time feature filmmaker Ximan Li embraces the twists of immigrant experiences in the drama In a New York Minute.
  73. Inbetween Girl
    Though the dialogue is often hit-or-miss, this young adult drama doesn’t simply put a fresh spin on old tropes: It takes seriously the messiness of growing up, the hardest parts of which involve accepting life’s ambiguities.
  74. All My Puny Sorrows
    The ensemble builds believable chemistry as intimate family members, and when their characters deliver their arguments for life or death, the stakes feel appropriately high.
  75. Black Site
    Perhaps the most depressing thing about Sophia Banks’s Black Site — a dreary, underwritten thriller — is an ending that suggests a sequel might already be in the works. For the sake of its beleaguered star, Michelle Monaghan, I can only hope not.
  76. Crush
    It is clear from the offset which sibling will win both Paige’s affection and the obligatory climactic smooch. The journey there can drag. More fresh is the movie’s sex-positive empathy.
  77. Bad Roads
    The four wartime stories in “Bad Roads” fall short on delivering any meaningful insight into the nature of conflict, relying instead on moments of lackluster tension and shock value that greatly overstay their welcome.
  78. Anaïs in Love
    What took a while to grasp is that it isn’t necessary to like Anaïs. What’s crucial is that you stick with her, that you listen to what she says and doesn’t say, that you look beneath the skittishness to get a handle on what drives this woman — that you see her for who she is.
  79. Luzifer
    Its intellectual aspiration produces an ideologically crowded film, where each philosophical meditation struggles to receive the attention and depth it deserves. Perhaps that is the point: Brunner seems to want to leave us with more questions than answers — or at least, compel us to search for the devil in everything.
  80. Africa
    The result is a bittersweet family portrait that, though relatable, lacks the specificity that makes for truly universal cinema.
  81. Hello, Bookstore
    Tannenbaum’s fondness for his store and its wares is a beautiful thing to behold, even at its most vulnerable.
  82. Fortress: Sniper's Eye
    A sequel so dumb that no effort by Willis could reasonably be expected to save it.
  83. Fiddler's Journey to the Big Screen
    Raim is interested in how Jewison sought to preserve the story’s essence while making creative updates, and in doing so “Fiddler’s Journey” touches on issues of Jewish representation but does not interrogate them.
  84. Firebird
    Each line and image feels predetermined, as if Rebane and his characters had already decided this love story was a losing battle. There is loss, but little sense of risk.
  85. Vortex
    Among the comforts Vortex refuses is the bittersweet balm of nostalgia. It’s a blunt reckoning with the inevitability of loss, including the loss of memory. We dream for a while, and then we sleep.
  86. I Love America
    Marceau beams with unshakable good vibes, like a lion in the sun, though that makes her woes feel not so woeful. But Azuelos’s film does glimpse moments that feel true to the sometimes strange complexity of emotions.
  87. Los Conductos
    Out of Pinky’s marginalized life, Restrepo conjures a lush but nevertheless desolate cinematic atmosphere.
  88. Memory
    It plays as if the worst episodes of “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” have all been processed in a blender and then stretched to nearly two hours long.
  89. The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes
    Mostly the film presents a banal rehash of established facts and well-circulated rumors about Monroe’s life.
  90. Hatching
    A sometimes uneasy merger of monster movie and psychological horror — with a dollop of social-media satire — this inventive first feature mines tween confusion (there are nods to both bulimia and menstruation) for grotesque fun.
  91. The Survivor
    While Levinson is not working from his own history as in “Diner” or “Avalon,” The Survivor, partly because of its subject matter and postwar milieu, feels of a piece with those overtly personal films. Whatever its flaws, it’s powerful.
  92. Navalny
    This documentary, directed by the Canadian filmmaker Daniel Roher (“Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band”), plays like a crowd-pleaser, a profile of a politician with the unflagging courage to swim against a rising totalitarian tide. It helps that Navalny has a movie star’s charisma and wit.
  93. Polar Bear
    To its credit, Polar Bear isn’t just playing in the snow; there’s a very conscious through-line of conservation, highlighting how climate change has negatively affected the Arctic’s ecosystem
  94. Stanleyville
    The contest intentionally lacks meaningful rewards, an obvious metaphor for life’s arbitrary stakes. But as cinema, the lack of purpose becomes a test of patience.
  95. Hit the Road
    What makes Hit the Road so memorable and devastating is the way it explores normal life under duress.
  96. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
    The director Tom Gormican, who wrote the script with Kevin Etten, gets the job done, churning the nonsense. There are no surprises other than the movie is watchable and amusing, though it’s too bad Gormican didn’t let Cage and Pascal just go with the absurdist, shambolic flow.
  97. The Northman
    What’s perhaps most impressive about The Northman is that it hurtles through 136 minutes of musclebound, shaggy-maned mayhem without a whisper of camp or a wink of irony. Nobody is doing this for fun. Even if, in the end — thank goodness — that’s mostly what it amounts to.
  98. Charlotte
    In the end, Charlotte is bereft of the spirit of the artist who made the uncanny “Life? or Theatre?” What an even better tribute the movie would have been had it also taken heated energy from Salomon’s art.
  99. Y cómo es él?
    Though Winograd questions the film’s gender biases in the conclusion, he does so unconvincingly. At a quick 95 minutes, at least the whole thing zips by, however brainlessly.
  100. Marvelous and the Black Hole
    Cech is believable as a troubled teenager, and it’s refreshing to see an Asian American girl as a protagonist, but the film has a limited emotional range, jumping among several plot elements without fully fleshing them out.
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