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. La Llorona
    There are some very good scenes in the movie’s second half; even so, it’s striking that the most unsettling aspect of “La Llorona” is that history doesn’t simply shape the movie. It also haunts and finally overwhelms it with terrors far more unspeakable than any impressively manufactured shock.
  2. Before Sunrise
    What Mr. Linklater does best here is to come up with conversational gambits that have just the right fancifulness to suit this situation.
  3. The Pigeon Tunnel
    Intellectually rich and cinematically disciplined (brief movie clips, another perfectly aligned Philip Glass score), The Pigeon Tunnel is a cautious, playful portrait of an expert manipulator.
  4. Night Comes On
    The actress Jordana Spiro directed Night Comes On and wrote the script with Angelica Nwandu, a spoken-word poet and creator of the incisive gossip website The Shade Room. Ms. Nwandu is also a former client of the foster care system. The result of their partnership is a film that balances penetrating clarity with compassion.
  5. Look at Me
    A witty and acute examination of friendship, ambition and betrayal in the Parisian literary world.
  6. Dune: Part Two
    The art of cinematic spectacle is alive and rocking in Dune: Part Two, and it’s a blast.
  7. Lone Star
    Gratifyingly complex and beautifully told, this tale explores a huge array of cultural, racial, economic and familial tensions. In the process, it also sustains strong characters, deep emotions and clear dramatic force.
  8. Judy Blume Forever
    Blume has always been an open book, despite the flurry of controversy around her. That may not make for the most exciting documentary, but it does make Blume herself even more endearing.
  9. Summer Palace
    In Summer Palace Lou nonetheless succeeds in finding a cinematic language that does more than summarize the important events of a confusing decade. He distills the inner confusion -- the swirl of moods, whims and needs -- that is the lived and living essence of history.
  10. Drive
    The virtuosity on display is also the director's, of course, and that, for better and for worse, is pretty much the point of Drive, the coolest movie around and therefore the latest proof that cool is never cool enough.
  11. Film About a Father Who
    [A] brisk, prismatic and richly psychodramatic family portrait.
  12. Deep Sea
    The soothing voices of Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet provide the informative yet often uninspired narration. And Danny Elfman's mystical sounds serve up just the right atmosphere for this almost complete immersive experience, during which adults will be made into giggling children, and children into aspiring marine biologists.
  13. The American Friend
    Like Taxi Driver, The American Friend was a new sort of movie-movie — sleekly brooding, voluptuously alienated and saturated with cinephilia.
  14. The Fighter
    With solid bodywork, clever feints and tremendous heart, it scores at least a TKO, by which I mean both that it falls just short of overpowering greatness - I can't quite exclaim, "It's a knockout!" - and that the most impressive thing about it is technique.
  15. Jodorowsky's Dune
    Cheerfully partial and unapologetically deferential to its subject’s operatic self-promotion, Jodorowsky’s Dune makes you wish that he had scraped together the final $5 million needed, we are told, to realize his dream.
  16. The Five Obstructions
    Watching The Five Obstructions is at once like witnessing two chess masters playing dominoes and like spying on a series of therapy sessions. Mr. von Trier clearly sees himself as a maniacal psychoanalyst.
  17. Beasts of No Nation
    The movie itself is an effective nightmare, and a solid piece of filmmaking, strong enough to make you wish that it could have borne the full weight of the tragedy it set out to depict.
  18. Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood
    Apollo 10½ is more a modest memoir than a whiz-bang space epic. Its view of the past is doggedly rose-colored, with social and emotional rough edges smoothed away by the passage of time and the filmmaker’s genial temperament.
  19. Wings of Desire
    Startlingly original at first, Wings of Desire is in the end damagingly overloaded. The excesses of language, the ceaseless camera movement, the unyielding whimsy have the ultimate effect of wearing the audience down. (Review of Original Release)
  20. Gandhi
    Neither Mr. Attenborough nor John Briley, who wrote the screenplay, are particularly adventurous filmmakers. Yet in some ways their almost obsessively middle-brow approach—their fondness for the gestures of conventional biographical cinema—seems self-effacing in a fashion suitable to the subject. Since Roberto Rossellini is not around to examine Gandhi in a film that would itself reflect the rigorous self-denial of the man, this very ordinary style is probably best.
  21. Look Into My Eyes
    What I did not expect was to emerge with not only a deeper understanding of this strange calling, but far greater empathy for those who seek out its practitioners.
  22. Iron Monkey
    Saving the big number for the climax, like any good musical director, Mr. Yuen finishes up with a spectacular variation on the traditional kung fu pole fight.
  23. Tu Dors Nicole
    [A] wonderful, lighter-than-air movie.
  24. The Venerable W.
    Schroeder’s approach is calm, almost detached, in keeping with his other work (although the choice of de Medeiros to speak for Buddhism, and with a nonspecific Asian-seeming accent at that, struck me as an avoidable misstep); this makes the bleakness of what he recounts (which is buttressed by an insinuatingly menacing score by Jorge Arriagada) that much more resonant.
  25. Petrov's Flu
    Despite the grimness, the violence and the grotesque bleating of some hateful, prejudiced trolls, the movie never drags you down (though it might exhaust you) because it’s buoyed by Serebrennikov’s bravura, unfettered filmmaking.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    An Angel at My Table
    For all of the casual brutality of the hospital scenes, An Angel at My Table seems a very gentle film about a woman of such a passionate nature.
  27. Quest for Fire
    Quest for Fire is more than just a hugely enterprising science lesson, although it certainly is that. It's also a touching, funny and suspenseful drama about prehumans.
  28. Girls Will Be Girls
    The screenplay suffers from some unevenness, but it never wavers in its empathy. It helps that Talati demonstrates a keen eye for composition.
  29. Monster
    Lovingly detailed and accented by an aching score from Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died in March, Monster is one of the finest films of the year, and its structure — like its circle of characters — carries secrets that can only be unraveled through patience and empathy.
  30. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
    The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is one of the darkest movies by Joel and Ethan Coen, and also among the silliest. It swerves from goofy to ghastly so deftly and so often that you can’t always tell which is which.
  31. Fourteen
    What begins as a movie with two protagonists almost imperceptibly evolves into a movie with just one — a touching demonstration of how narratives that seem inevitably intertwined can unravel.
  32. Disclosure
    With each successive trip to the grim vaults, the hard-won dignity of the film’s transgender speakers is brought into sharper and sharper relief.
  33. The Visitor
    The curious thing about The Visitor is that even as it goes more or less where you think it will, it still manages to surprise you along the way.
  34. Bang! The Bert Berns Story
    If you love the music Berns made, you’ll love this movie; if you don’t, I feel for you, but “Bang!” might nevertheless entertain with its dish.
  35. Green Room
    Once the violence starts, Green Room settles into horror movie logic, becoming steadily more gruesome and less terrifying as the body count grows. You know some people are going to die, and figuring out who and in what order feels more like a brainteaser than like a matter of deep moral or emotional concern.
  36. The Plague
    This is what The Plague does best: Its storytelling inhabits a world so heated and confusing to its characters — that is, burgeoning adolescence — that it’s sometimes unclear whether things are actually happening or just in Ben’s head.
  37. Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll
    Mr. Pirozzi’s film is an unsparing and meticulous reckoning of the effects of tyranny on ordinary Cambodians. It is also a rich and defiant effort at recovery, showing that even the most murderous totalitarianism cannot fully erase the human drive for pleasure and self-expression.
  38. A Most Beautiful Thing
    The film’s fast-paced editing makes it difficult to get to know individual members, but the men register powerfully as a collective, just like a real rowing team.
  39. The First Slam Dunk
    The flashbacks are well-written and add off-the-court dramatic interest, but it’s the basketball action that is the movie’s claim to excellence. Expertly staged and beautifully rendered using a combination of computer-generated imagery and traditional hand-drawn animation, it’s often so spectacular that I am eager to watch again.
  40. Colliding Dreams
    A swift primer that favors breadth over depth, the movie saves some hopeful notes for the end.
  41. Family Plot
    A witty, relaxed lark. It's a movie to raise your spirits even as it dabbles in phony ones.
  42. Harvey
    If you're for warm and gentle whimsey, for a charmingly fanciful farce and for a little touch of pathos anent the fateful evanescence of man's dreams, then the movie version of "Harvey" is definitely for you.
  43. In Our Day
    As warm and wise as it is simple and languid.
  44. Iron Man
    Has the advantage of being an unusually good superhero picture. Or at least -- since it certainly has its problems -- a superhero movie that's good in unusual ways.
  45. Silent Light
    The film was written, directed and somehow willed into unlikely existence by the extravagantly talented Carlos Reygadas, whose immersion in this exotic world feels so deep and true that it seems like an act of faith.
  46. Control Room
    Whatever your opinions about the war, the conduct of the journalists who covered it and the role of Al Jazeera in that coverage, you are likely to emerge from Control Room touched, exhilarated and a little off-balance, with your certainties scrambled and your assumptions shaken.
  47. Deceptive Practices: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay
    Unsurprisingly, Mr. Jay proves a hugely entertaining guide, and as generous about his professional inspirations as he is reticent about his own life.
  48. 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.
  49. How to Have Sex
    Manning Walker sets the scene and stakes well enough, though after the millionth drink and shriek, whatever contact high you have is obliterated by a contact hangover. The largest problem, though, is that Manning Walker seems weirdly insensitive toward Tara, who endures a trauma that’s meant to say something about something — sex, consent, friendship — but mostly just gives the story some queasy heft.
  50. Salaam Bombay!
    Bombay is a place of noise, restless movement and no privacy whatsover. It is squalor accepted as the natural order of things, and thus accommodated. Miss Nair does not share this fatalism, but in ''Salaam Bombay!'' she allows us to examine it without panic, and without patronizing it. She is a new film maker to watch.
  51. Only Lovers Left Alive
    In many ways, Only Lovers Left Alive is among Mr. Jarmusch’s most voluptuous movies — full of rare and gorgeous images and sounds, heavy with wistful sighs and sprinkled with wry, knowing jokes — but it is also thin and pale, and perhaps too afraid of daylight for its own good.
  52. So Much So Fast
    Despite its immersion in tragedy and decline, So Much So Fast is leavened by unexpected humor.
  53. The People vs. Larry Flynt
    A blazing, unlikely triumph about a man who is nobody's idea of a movie hero. Smart, funny, shamelessly entertaining and perfectly serious too.
  54. Chained for Life
    Schimberg’s film is odd, darkly funny and — when it means to be — a little frightening.
  55. Ju Dou
    Ju Dou is an intellectually and artistically brave film. Asking for dramatic power and psychological depth as well may be expecting too much.
  56. In a World...
    Ms. Bell, who plays Carol with a perfect blend of diffidence, goofiness and charm, has written and directed an insightful comedy that is much more complex and ambitious than it sometimes seems.
  57. Celebration
    Saint Laurent was essential to 20th-century culture, and Celebration shows the inevitable fading of glory as well as the enduring features of his life’s work.
  58. Selma
    Even if you think you know what’s coming, Selma hums with suspense and surprise. Packed with incident and overflowing with fascinating characters, it is a triumph of efficient, emphatic cinematic storytelling. And much more than that, of course.
  59. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
    Miller is such a wildly inventive filmmaker that it’s been easy to forget that he keeps making movies about the end of life as we know it. It’s a blast watching his characters fight over oil, water and women, yet while I’ve long thought of him as a great filmmaker it’s only with “Furiosa” that I now understand he’s also one kick-ass prophet of doom.
  60. Pat and Mike
    It is smoothly directed by George Cukor and slyly, amusingly played by the whole cast, especially by its due of easy, adroit, experienced stars.
  61. Poltergeist
    Poltergeist often sounds as if it had been dictated by an exuberant twelve-year-old, someone who's sitting by a summer campfire and determined to spin a tale that will keep everyone else on the edges of their knapsacks far into the night.
  62. Tabu
    It is, of course, art rather than history - an elegant composition of dreams, memories and suggestive images - but its artfulness seems like an alibi, an excuse for keeping the ugliness of history out of the picture.
  63. Walking Out
    Even when its plot starts to sag, Walking Out remains beautiful to watch.
  64. The Thoughts That Once We Had
    Even if you don’t recognize the majority of the unidentified clips assembled here, or the quotations that divide and guide them, the fascination they exert is all their own.
  65. For All Mankind
    What emerges is an amazingly fresh visual immersion in space, and a film that works far better when dealing with inanimate objects than with humans.
  66. Endless Cookie
    In Endless Cookie, Seth and Pete Scriver’s kooky, grotesquely animated documentary, a rich oral history poetically blended with oddball comedy invites surprising political revelations.
  67. Baahubali: The Epic
    The battle scenes and one-on-one combat roar with energy, blending Rajamouli’s C.G.I. artistry, staging and inventive showmanship. The militarized kingdom of Mahishmati has the grandeur of silent-screen epics, and although romantic sequences with the rebel warrior Avanthika are scaled back, the film’s flying-ship song set piece is a candy-coated delight.
  68. The Assistant
    Unfolding over one acutely distressing workday, The Assistant is less a #MeToo story than a painstaking examination of the way individual slights can coalesce into a suffocating miasma of harassment.
  69. A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon
    “Farmageddon” features plenty of inspired, boomeranging slapstick, executed with clockwork precision. It’s a very funny movie — and an endlessly, refreshingly cheerful one, which is just as rare.
  70. Underground
    Feverish, whimsical allegory elevated by moments of brilliant clarity.
  71. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
    “Dawn” is more than a bunch of occasionally thrilling action sequences, emotional gut punches and throwaway jokes arranged in predictable sequence. It is technically impressive and viscerally exciting, for sure, but it also gives you a lot to think, and even to care, about.
  72. The Untouchables
    Hollywood's latest big-budget, high-concept, mass-market reworking of material not entirely fresh, has more endings than Beethoven's Fifth, but it's also packed with surprises, not the least being that it's a smashing work. It's vulgar, violent, funny and sometimes breathtakingly beautiful.
  73. IMAX: Hubble 3D
    Dazzling to look at of course. But such ponderous, cliché-heavy narration.
  74. Kokomo City
    Most important, Daniella, Koko, Liyah and Dominique provide a record of their own extraordinary lives, one that resonates with clarity and compassion.
  75. Trolösa
    This attenuated two-and-a-half-hour reflection on marriage, adultery, parenthood and the casualties of sexual warfare unfolds like a brooding autobiographical epilogue to Mr. Bergman's much stormier 1973 masterpiece, "Scenes From a Marriage."
  76. Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport
    Its subject matter is intrinsically upsetting.
  77. Blind Spot. Hitler's Secretary
    The access the filmmakers gained to Junge is remarkable, and it compensates for a lack of cinematic flair; it's concrete, cold and hard, with Junge speaking about being a few feet away from arguably the worst tyrant of the 20th century.
  78. Affliction
    Succeeds in finding something larger than one man's misery. It turns dark truthfulness into the cinematic sentiment most worth celebrating this season.
  79. Praise
    Praise will stick with you. It's more than worthy of its title.
  80. Hold Back the Dawn
    An amazingly poignant picture, rich in humor, heart and subtle ironies.
  81. Ghost Elephants
    Ghost Elephants resides in the intersection of science and lyrical reverie — Herzog’s treasured terrain.
  82. Hustlers
    The spirit of Hustlers is so insistently affirmative and celebratory that all kinds of interesting matters are left unexplored.
  83. Let the Sunshine In
    Ms. Binoche, effortlessly charismatic and ruthlessly unvain, has no investment in the character’s likability. She and Ms. Denis could not care less what you think of her. Let the Sunshine In commits itself to taking Isabelle on her own terms. The challenge, for her and for the audience, is to figure out what those terms are.
  84. Life of Pi
    The movie invites you to believe in all kinds of marvelous things, but it also may cause you to doubt what you see with your own eyes - or even to wonder if, in the end, you have seen anything at all.
  85. Let Me In
    The subtext of the relationship is not sexuality, as it is in "Twilight" or "True Blood," but rather the loneliness of children and their often unrecognized reservoirs of rage.
  86. 108 (Cuchillo de Palo)
    Patiently photographed by Carlos Vásquez, who bestows the same gentle attention on grainy snapshots and the beautifully ruined face of an aging drag queen, 108 peels back layers of delusion and dishonesty.
  87. Metalhead
    It taps into something universal, and very precious, about loss, art and adolescent rebellion.
  88. Return to Dust
    China’s leadership has a history of suppressing art that spotlights the failings of its ruling class and ideology, which is exactly what Li’s film does, with a script that feels only occasionally overwritten. That he succeeds without making it feel like homework — which is to say beautifully, humanely — is presumably what made the film so threatening.
  89. Fences
    Even as it properly foregrounds Wilson’s dialogue — few playwrights have approached his genius for turning workaday vernacular into poetry — Fences is much more than a filmed reading. Mr. Washington has wisely resisted the temptation to force a lot of unnecessary cinema on the play.
  90. Chats perchés
    One can never get enough of this prodigiously talented octogenarian artist and his bestiary.
  91. 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.
  92. The Witness
    A re-creation of the night, with an actress playing the screaming victim while Mr. Genovese observes, is harrowing.
  93. Twinless
    Despite its charms, and it is frequently charming, Twinless also succumbs to some of the issues that tend to plague movies of this type, the small and clever dark comedy about young people having big feelings.
  94. Miss Bala
    A first-rate art-house thriller, Miss Bala tells the strange, seemingly impossible story of a Mexican beauty queen who becomes the accidental pawn of a drug cartel. It's an adventure story that could be called a contemporary picaresque if it weren't so deadly serious.
  95. Conclave
    With pomp and circumstance, miles of scarlet cloth and first-rate scene-stealers, the movie snakes through the marbled corridors of Vatican City, pauses in bedchambers as cold as mausoleums and tunnels into the deepest secrets of the human heart. It’s quite the journey, and as unpersuasive as it is entertaining.
  96. Mother
    The hard-pounding heart of Mother, Ms. Kim is a wonderment. Perched on the knife edge between tragedy and comedy, her delivery gives the narrative -- which tends to drift, sometimes beguilingly, sometimes less so -- much of its momentum.
  97. Free Willy
    How each frees the other is the stuff of Free Willy, which is as engaging as such films can be without offering rude surprises.
  98. Keep the Lights On
    Its subject is not addiction or ambition, or even love in a conventional romantic sense, but rather the more elusive and intriguing matter of intimacy: how it grows, falters and endures over time.
  99. Fill the Void
    What the film makes clear, with unfailing sensitivity and wry humor, is that for Shira and her family the ordinary arrangements of living are freighted with moral and spiritual significance.
  100. Hermia & Helena
    The film belongs to Ms. Muñoz. She’s the kind of performer (like Setsuko Hara, the Japanese actress to whom the film is dedicated) you can’t take your eyes off, even when she doesn’t seem to be up to much of anything.
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