The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. 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.
  2. Sexual Drive
    Consistently intriguing and occasionally hilarious, the movie does not depict sex itself. Instead, the characters eat food items that become objects of titillation, lust and pleasure: the sticky goo around soybeans, chili oil sizzling in a wok.
  3. Saturday Fiction
    Star power is a logic unto itself, and Lou has ensured a limitless supply by casting Gong as an actress-spy. She conveys depths of pain and longing even when the script offers none, seducing us as effortlessly as Jean seduces her enemies.
  4. The Duke
    It is a pity that Richard Bean and Clive Coleman’s script mires Bunton in a soggy family drama about an unresolved death; an elder son (Jack Bandeira) who flirts with crime; and a wife, Dorothy (Helen Mirren, so sheepish as to be near invisible), who is humiliated that her husband prefers prison to a stable home.
  5. Petite Maman
    With delicacy, minimal dialogue and lucid, harmoniously balanced images, Sciamma (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) invites you into a world that is by turns ordinary and enigmatic.
  6. See You Then
    The chemistry of its stars gives the movie a curious magnetism that is almost enough to forgive its flaws.
  7. White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch
    While the movie provides encouraging evidence of how much societal sensibilities have changed, it is fundamentally dressing up well-worn material.
  8. Cypress Hill: Insane in the Brain
    Cypress Hill: Insane in the Brain, named for one of its signature songs, is an often engaging chronicle of the group (which has sold more than 20 million albums), one that is probably best appreciated by fans.
  9. Choose or Die
    If any creativity went into Choose or Die, a by-turns creepy and hacky feature debut from Toby Meakins, it appears to have been directed solely toward nastiness.
  10. To Olivia
    How parents mourn a child’s death together — or apart — is among life’s aching mysteries. The director John Hay plumbs the poignancy well but avoids any tussling with Dahl’s legacy, tarnished by antisemitic statements.
  11. Women of the White Buffalo
    Though the film lacks a clear narrative arc, put together, these stories draw a line between the historical genocide and displacement suffered by Indigenous people and the present destitution on reservations.
  12. Wyrmwood: Apocalypse
    If you’d like to see the horror-action equivalent of an old metal rock musician lighting his electric guitar on fire and then playing it with his teeth, this is your movie.
  13. We're All Going to the World's Fair
    In the tradition of internet science fiction, “World’s Fair” teases the boundary between the actual and the virtual, though in a frame of mind that is quietly ruminative rather than wildly speculative.
  14. The Tale of King Crab
    The movie’s depictions of landscapes both sere and fertile, and its all-but-palpable portrayals of isolation, have echoes of the best work of Werner Herzog and Lucrecia Martel. But de Righi and Zoppis here show more genuine affinity than affected influence; they’re moviemakers worth keeping an eye on.
  15. Dual
    There is something insincere in this movie’s manner, an aloofness that masquerades as satire but repels inquiry or emotion. “Dual” takes a worthy idea and throws a smoke bomb in its middle, leaving the audience to squint through the haze.
  16. Paris, 13th District
    Audiard’s touch here is light, sensitive and attentive as usual; you feel his fondness for these characters and their world in every frame.
  17. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
    This is the most absorbing and well-paced film in the trilogy to date, despite its nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time — de rigueur for modern spectacles that want to convince audiences they’re getting enough bang for their buck. “Secrets of Dumbledore” gestures toward themes of frailty, thwarted intentions and forgiveness.
  18. Father Stu
    Stu’s travails feed into his salty homilies about getting closer to God, delivered with Wahlberg’s usual bluffness. That doesn’t automatically translate into a religious experience, and watching the movie can feel like a two-hour hearty handshake.
  19. La Mami
    Garvín’s adept camerawork allows the story to unfold so seamlessly in its vérité style, that the film emanates the magic of a scripted drama without revealing any noticeable interference.
  20. Donbass
    Donbass, at once brutally satirical and grimly compassionate, focuses on the subtleties and grotesqueries of human behavior. Loznitsa paints sprawling tableaus of cruelty, corruption, vulgarity and lies through a series of intimate vignettes.
  21. Shakespeare's Sh*tstorm
    The durable director Lloyd Kaufman lobs multiple notions at the screen to see what sticks. In a movie held together with this many slimy fluids, pretty much everything does.
  22. As They Made Us
    Even with veterans like Hoffman and Bergen, it’s Agron’s film. She and Bialik make Abigail’s filial loyalty as sympathetic as it is exasperating, and as rife with difficult truths about aging as it is understatedly hopeful about growing up.
  23. Return to Space
    Glowing with grandiose pronouncements and uplifting sentiment, Return to Space, a draggy documentary about America’s first manned spaceflight since 2011, could be easily repurposed as promotional material for Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
  24. The Girl and the Spider
    The film demands and rewards repeat viewings; it’s different, and more entrancing, every time.
  25. ¡Viva Maestro!
    Dudamel is a joyfully appealing figure, and the film benefits from following such an amiable subject. But the documentary lacks the rigor it would take to turn this warm portrait into a proper cinematic symphony.
  26. a-ha: the Movie
    There’s a slight wonky interest in seeing the grind of recording sessions and fan service. But the film feels promotional enough that it won’t lean into the potential humor of their situation.
  27. All the Old Knives
    While All the Old Knives keeps cleverly resetting the table it’s laid out, it can’t fundamentally alter the meal.
  28. Sonic the Hedgehog 2
    Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is a fast-paced romp that’s silly, filled with quips and unabashedly for children — which is refreshing, coming at a time when so many other children’s franchises have succumbed to Sturm und Drang.
  29. Aline
    The movie’s passion is incredible — but, boy, is it embodied in something awkward.
  30. 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.
  31. Metal Lords
    Conventional but genuine, Metal Lords comprehends the riot of adolescent emotions and the many ways teenagers manage them.
  32. Ambulance
    Bay’s virtuosic flouting of the laws of physics, probability and narrative coherence is meant to catapult you into a zone of sublimity where melodramatic emotion and adrenalized excitement fuse into a whole new kind of sensation.
  33. Meat the Future
    If you’re not well-versed in bioengineering or food regulation, it’s a bit of a slog.
  34. RRR
    Rajamouli shoots the film’s action with hallucinogenic fervor, supercharging scenes with a shimmering brand of extended slow-motion and C.G.I. that feels less “generated” than unleashed.
  35. The Bubble
    Elements that have the potential to become running gags . . . either languish or are dropped, as if Apatow simply cut together what he felt were inspired improvisations without regard for flow (or the uncharacteristically cheap-looking visuals).
  36. Royalty Free: The Music of Kevin MacLeod
    The documentary is shot and edited like an infomercial, although it wanders from issue to issue to the extent that a viewer can’t be sure just what it’s pitching.
  37. How to Survive a Pandemic
    The message — that science cannot succeed without a politics of solidarity — is important, but the film ends on a note of uncertainty that feels defeatist rather than urgent.
  38. Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King
    This sensational documentary feels bankrupt at its core.
  39. Gagarine
    Gagarine is more interesting conceptually than it is in execution, but at least the filmmakers know to exalt the setting’s spectral qualities, adding dreamy, hypnotic touches to their phantom portrait of a place that is no longer of this world.
  40. The Contractor
    Pine and Foster sync up flawlessly, even when the dialogue fails them. This isn’t the reunion they deserve, but it’s nevertheless welcome. In silence and in action, they show you the unfathomable loss that the rest of movie never coherently expresses.
  41. Morbius
    Morbius is a ghoulish, suitably downbeat tale of madness, hubris, suffering and weird science set in a world that offers little solace. And while most of it is as predictably familiar as expected, it does something unusual for a movie like this: It entertains you, rather than bludgeons you into submission.
  42. 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.
  43. Bull
    The film’s rejiggered timeline is a little hard to follow, but the climax swings for the fences and shows an unashamed verve for tale-telling that warms the cockles.
  44. You Won't Be Alone
    You Won’t Be Alone, the ravishing, wildly original first feature from Goran Stolevski, moves so hypnotically between dream and nightmare, horror and fairy tale that, once bound by its spell, you won’t want to be freed.
  45. Barbarians
    “Antichrist” may have been chauvinistic in its own right, but at least was interesting to watch. Barbarians doesn’t provide much excitement at all.
  46. Better Nate Than Ever
    [Tim Federle's] leads deliver hearty performances that elevate the movie, particularly once we’ve had time to adjust to the gusto of Wood, whose wired performance has the flavor of Hugh Jackman’s exuberance squeezed into an espresso cup.
  47. The Rose Maker
    It’s a relaxed film, one that allows the audience to sit back and, if not smell the roses, then at least appreciate them.
  48. The Devil You Know
    The soft-spoken Epps is frustratingly miscast. The editing by Geofrey Hildrew and Scott Pellet limps lifelessly along, and the direction lacks the necessary pulse for a story line with more twists than a low-budget soap opera.
  49. Babi Yar. Context
    Loznitsa has assembled a wrenching and revelatory collage.
  50. Moonshot
    Sprouse plays it a touch broad, veering sometimes from endearing to goofy. But Condor is note-perfect, and Winterbauer directs with a light, playful touch, giving the movie an energy that’s nimble and vibrantly sexy.
  51. Nitram
    The killings themselves may remain off-camera, but the movie is still an uncomfortable watch. In Jones’s smoldering performance, we see a man stretched beyond his limits, a rubber band just waiting to snap back.
    • 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.
  53. 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.
  54. 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.
  55. Mothering Sunday
    Mothering Sunday never conveys the intensity of erotic passion, the ardor of creative ambition or the agony of grief. Even though it is ostensibly about all of those feelings, it handles them with a tastefulness that is hard to distinguish from complacency.
  56. King Otto
    Somewhat gratingly, King Otto treats its story as a tale of national stereotypes colliding head-to-head.
  57. Outside Noise
    Fendt is more interested in tracing the architecture of their ennui than considering its cause or consequences, and the movie observes their leisure with a warm gaze.
  58. Superior
    It is the film’s shaggier pleasures that leave an impression, particularly its soundtrack of ’80s electro disco and a physically shaggy ice-cream parlor manager (played by Stanley Simons) who is too stoned to notice that his new employee is two different people.
  59. Infinite Storm
    With this role, Watts is reminding us that she can hold the screen by herself and without saying a word tell you everything you need to know about a character — and all the while looking fantastic.
  60. Everything Everywhere All at Once
    The movie is a metaphysical multiverse galaxy-brain head trip, but deep down — and also right on the surface — it’s a bittersweet domestic drama, a marital comedy, a story of immigrant striving and a hurt-filled ballad of mother-daughter love.
  61. Olivia Rodrigo: driving home 2 u (a SOUR film)
    As a performance piece, “Driving Home 2 U” is an exhilarating and intimate showcase for Rodrigo, as commentary about her album’s tracks spills seamlessly, in musical-theater fashion, into “Sour” tunes. Songs are newly arranged and presented in some breathtakingly scenic spots.
  62. 7 Days
    7 Days takes a warm, witty look at the kinds of companionship that can emerge even — or especially — in the most unromantic, pragmatic of circumstances.
  63. The Lost City
    While “Raiders” transcends its inspirations with wit and Steven Spielberg’s filmmaking and “Romancing” tries hard to do the same, The Lost City remains a copy of a copy.
  64. Atlantide
    Had Atlantide granted deeper access to Daniele and Maila, these images might have lent a moody complement to the characters and their struggles. As is, any sense of meaning is cast adrift in a sea of pretty pictures.
  65. Bisping: The Michael Bisping Story
    This is all pretty conventional. But then the fighter’s story takes a twist.
  66. Windfall
    Windfall is dramatically flat and logically wanting.
  67. Playing in the FM Band: The Steve Post Story
    The documentary posits him as a pioneer but struggles to pin down how he was unique.
  68. The Cherry Bushido
    It’s all a mess of ideology and theology, of flowing robes, flying fists, karma, camp, cant and can’t: can’t act, can’t kick, can’t marshal any art.
  69. Jane by Charlotte
    Clearly a pet project for Gainsbourg (whose own electronic pop songs feature prominently in the soundtrack, clashing against her mother’s classic tunes), the documentary is defiantly insular and lacking in context.
  70. Love After Love
    What could make for a captivating story involving a transgressive love triangle is, even on a micro level, ineffective.
  71. More Than Robots
    Like many of the young inventors she documents, Jacobs has created a project that doesn’t fall apart at first touch. But her film doesn’t meet the mark for excellence, either.
  72. Intregalde
    Watching it again recently, I now saw a movie that, with humor, tenderness and flashes of filmmaking brilliance, looks at what happens when kindness is tested, masks are dropped and self-interest runs free. It’s all a mess and so are we, which I think is very much to Muntean’s point.
  73. Ahed's Knee
    There’s no doubt that this is, in several senses, a personal film. But that doesn’t mean that the character is simply the author’s mouthpiece; one of the things that gives this movie its raw, unbalanced energy is the indeterminacy of the distance between them.
  74. Cheaper by the Dozen
    The ensemble of children has a natural, authentic-seeming rapport, and Braff and Union, as the beleaguered but loving parents, have an easy, irresistible chemistry, buzzing with big-hearted charisma every time they share the screen.
  75. Panama
    It’s mostly a lot of manic editing and caffeinated camerawork, each trying and failing to juice some excitement out of Hauser’s dull performance.
  76. Alice
    Ver Linden wants us to view Alice as an empowered freedom fighter. Instead she lands as a caricature of one, as the film never really metabolizes or unpacks its conceit: the bonkers time-traveling predicament of its protagonist.
  77. The Outfit
    Sometimes, all you need in a movie is a great actor — well, almost all. Certainly Rylance’s presence enriches The Outfit, a moderately amusing gangster flick that doesn’t make a great deal of sense.
  78. X
    X is a clever and exuberant throwback to a less innocent time, when movies could be naughty, disreputable and idiosyncratic.
  79. Deep Water
    Like Vic’s snails, who must be starved before they can be consumed, Deep Water feels like a movie that’s had everything of interest well and truly sucked out.
  80. The Last Mountain
    There are no real answers for anyone in The Last Mountain. If Terrill never finds a clear narrative or emotional through line for this account, it’s not entirely a surprise. The material resists attempts at uplift.
  81. Josep
    The 74-minute film leaps among time frames without much warning. Occasionally, the screen erupts into crackling black-and-white images drawn directly from Bartolí’s work — as if torn from the very pages of his sketchbooks.
  82. Last Exit: Space
    The movie gives a stimulating but standard-by-Herzog-standards treatment to a stellar subject.
  83. I Am Here
    As inspiring as his chosen subject is, the director missed an opportunity to use the story to deepen our understanding of our own memories, trauma and forgiveness.
  84. The Exorcism of God
    [A] soulless film.
  85. Fear
    The director, Ivaylo Hristov, is adept at slow-burning suspense and comic misdirection.
  86. Gold
    The movie’s mood is unrelentingly miserable. Its cinematography, by Ross Giardina, is bleached-bone bright; its soundscape features more buzzing flies than music.
  87. Offseason
    Despite a wonderfully eerie atmosphere, this moody examination of guilt and mourning is too generic to scare and too predictable to surprise.
  88. All My Friends Hate Me
    Dancing on the line between funny and menacing, the ingenious script (by Stourton and Tom Palmer) is a tonal tease, a limbo where every joke has a threatening edge and every “Just kidding!” only increases Pete’s unease.
  89. Ultrasound
    There are some promising glints here and there, flashes of mordant wit and obvious ambition. But like too many movies, Ultrasound is better at setting up its story than delivering on its promise, as if the filmmakers were still pitching ideas in the elevator.
  90. Turning Red
    It’s too bad that Turning Red fumbles its storytelling, because at the very least it has fun when it lets its fur fly.
  91. The Adam Project
    Blissfully under two hours, The Adam Project is no modern classic. But it does benefit from an affecting finale that pays special attention to Adam’s strained relationship with his father.
  92. Calendar Girl
    This affectionate portrait is also well grounded. Finley is remembered as a hard worker among other hard workers.
  93. Rock Bottom Riser
    The film is sometimes hard to follow, because the connection between the images and the voice-overs is not always clear. But taken as a whole, Rock Bottom Riser leaves viewers with a strong sense of how native Hawaiians view themselves and their future, and encourages inquiry into how their land might be preserved.
  94. Dear Mr. Brody
    Dear Mr. Brody invites timely thoughts about the wealthy and income disparity.
  95. Great Freedom
    The director Sebastian Meise, who wrote the script with Thomas Reider, tells this story with open feeling and steady, emphatic calm.
  96. Lucy and Desi
    Here is a documentary that invites us to delight in the unexpected pairing of a famed funny lady and a hunky musician — but without analysis or nuance. Better to flip on a few “I Love Lucy” reruns instead.
  97. The Jump
    In its first half-hour, the documentary The Jump brings a bracing immediacy to a 50-year-old Cold War incident.
  98. The Unknown Man of Shandigor (1967)
    This gangly picture isn’t a lost masterpiece, to be clear. But it’s a magnetic curio, a fascinating relic of a vanished strain of European cinema.
  99. Hell is Empty
    Forget about hell, the emptiness these filmmakers must address lies primarily in their predominantly female cast of characters.
  100. The Long Walk
    The reward for waiting for the fog to lift is a movie that presents a unique take on science fiction, one that looks for the ghosts that linger on in a world that has been shaped by technology.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »