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. Rose
    Alongside Oplev’s commitment to genuine feeling and complexity — you won’t find easy solutions here — Grabol’s performance shines.
  2. Kinds of Kindness
    It’s a triptych that at first seems slight, then gains meaning the longer you hold its three seemingly disconnected short films in juxtaposition and peer through the overlaps.
  3. Megalopolis
    In the end, what matters is the movie, a brash, often beautiful, sometimes clotted, nakedly personal testament. It’s a little nuts, but our movies could use more craziness, more passion, feeling and nerve. They could use a lot more of the love that Coppola has for cinema, which he continues to pry from the industry’s death grip by insisting that film is art.
  4. Blitz
    The movie bears comparisons to Dickens, both for George’s plight and for the depiction of class divides across a war-torn London. But there is something else going on narratively here. For one, McQueen makes a point of integrating into the film what is rarely seen in movies of this sort: a sharp depiction of racism among Londoners, the enraging sort that has so calcified it still surfaces when people are just trying to survive.
  5. The Brutalist
    Many movies offer up a slice of reality; true to the architectural aesthetic that its title invokes, this one offers a slab.
  6. It's Not Me
    Love poem, restless dream, troubled history, alchemist’s scrapbook — Leos Carax’s It’s Not Me is pure cinema as it dances through its dense 42 minutes.
  7. A Different Man
    There’s some John Carpenter in this film, and some Woody Allen, and some John Cassavetes, and a healthy dose of Charlie Kaufman-style surreality. The result is shrewd, and fantastic, and something all its own.
  8. The Fire Inside
    The Fire Inside has a little more going on under the hood than your average sports movie.
  9. MaXXXine
    Darker, moodier and altogether nastier than its predecessors — “X” (2022) and, later that same year, “Pearl” — this hyperconfident feature is also funny, occasionally wistful and deeply empathetic toward its damaged, driven heroine.
  10. Oh, Canada
    Schrader’s approach to this material — it’s his second movie based on a novel by Banks, the first being “Affliction” (1998) — is fascinating, a filmmaker’s translation in every sense of the word.
  11. The Substance
    The sharpest critique isn’t about bodies, but about the way we’ve trained ourselves to look at those bodies, and the effect that has on our own. The movie is, appropriately enough, a mirror, and our discomfort reveals our own hidden biases and fears about ourselves.
  12. Household Saints
    The story is filled with strange, homespun miracles, and this single-minded little film could be counted as one of them.
  13. Mambar Pierrette
    Mbakam hits a remarkable balance. The sociopolitical truths that make up Pierrette’s losing streak are evident, without the miserable patronizing so common in films about struggle in Africa.
  14. Skin Deep
    What does love really mean? Skin Deep gives an answer: that real love is an act of radical imagination, of working to understand what it feels like to be another person. In reality, we can’t just swap bodies to find out — but love beckons us to try anyhow.
  15. Presence
    Presence is another ideal trap to trip for a filmmaker who enjoys challenges and changing it up artistically as much as Soderbergh does.
  16. Between the Temples
    The movie is consistently funny, but its humor tends to be fairly gentle because it’s rooted in human behavior rather than in condescending, judgmental ideas about such behavior.
  17. Exhibiting Forgiveness
    Forgiveness may not be about making nice. Filling in a painful gap may not lead to tidy reconciliation. Still, something true will appear. Kaphar may be new to feature filmmaking, but that’s some grown wisdom.
  18. My Old Ass
    It’s as much about reframing middle-aged regrets as it is a story about youth, love and possibility — and thus the emotional heft it wields is two-pronged.
  19. Good One
    Good One is the writer and director India Donaldson’s feature debut, and an astounding one, full of the kind of emotional detail that can only come from personal experience.
  20. Dìdi
    You get the sense watching Didi that this is a bit of an apology from Wang to his own mother for not seeing her as a real person when he was young. But that isn’t all it is: It’s a funny, heartfelt movie, tapping into the audience’s latent memories as well as our great relief at no longer being 13.
  21. Nocturnes
    The moths remain a puzzle of data that awaits analysis. Dutta and Srinivasan’s understated approach shows research and nature in action without pretending to make a forest give up its secrets.
  22. Eno
    There’s a pure joy to this documentary, a sense that creativity is miraculous and we ought to be grateful that we get to participate in it. I left both screenings full of ideas for my own work.
  23. Sugarcane
    For one, it’s immersive and incredibly beautiful, shot like poetry and scored by Mali Obomsawin. The result is both stunning and sobering.
  24. The Room Next Door
    Often movies ask what makes life worth living; this one asks what makes life worth leaving. It is a controversial subject, both in the movie and in the real world, and the film doesn’t treat it lightly.
  25. The Arc of Oblivion
    The Arc of Oblivion is a documentary, which means it captures something about life right now, archiving it for the future. But Cheney is also exploring the meaning of archiving itself.
  26. Snack Shack
    With its rambling momentum and quick-witted, almost musical dialogue, it feels less like “Superbad” than a Robert Altman movie, sort of like a pint-size “California Split.”
  27. Crossing
    In this town, in this movie, you feel absolutely certain each face has its own fascinating story to tell.
  28. Superman
    As both a story on its own and a prequel to a whole bunch of others, this movie must introduce us to a variety of characters we’ll meet later, and it does it without feeling too much like fan service or exposition.
  29. Art Talent Show
    Art Talent Show is itself provocative but also hilarious, both a sendup and a tribute to the complexity of contemporary art.
  30. Música
    Música, Mancuso’s phenomenal feature debut, is a comic trip inside a mind that’s forever feverishly creating — even against his will.
  31. The Wild Robot
    The movie is a dazzling triumph of animation in which you feel the filmmakers’ attention on every frame. In a revivifying turn away from the gag-a-minute, computer-generated extravaganzas clogging up the animated zoological canon, this is a work that cares most about two things: big feelings and great beauty.
  32. A Nice Indian Boy
    In this vibrant addition to cinema’s romantic landscape, love isn’t the only winner: cultural understanding and the freedom to choose your own path triumph as well.
  33. The Truth vs. Alex Jones
    The Truth vs. Alex Jones offers a lesson in just how vicious and pervasive conspiracy theories can become and a chilling portrait of how little they may trouble their purveyors.
  34. Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead
    It’s a snappy, gutsy comedy about how kids are spoiled and ignorant, and yet the adult workplace is only passingly more mature.
  35. The Damned
    The Damned is shaped as a wistful and laconic study of the minutiae of survival. Though billed as his first fiction film, it wobbles tantalizingly on a permeable line between narrative and documentary.
  36. Intercepted
    Intercepted is yet another crucial eyewitness document of the Russia-Ukraine war, one that makes the personal stakes painfully vivid. It’s a reminder that war isn’t waged by putative monsters but by monstrous human beings who sometimes need to hear the sounds of their mothers’ voices.
  37. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
    [Nyoni] says all she needs to with each lapidary image, with every resonant silence and with the undaunted power of Shula’s gaze.
  38. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
    The Seed of the Sacred Fig asks us to enter a family’s story, but also to acknowledge that we are part of it. We’re extras in the background, no matter how far away we are. For Rasoulof, the world he’s created is far from theoretical. The consequences have been, too.
  39. Misericordia
    Misericordia is film noir with the lights turned on. Even when its characters are working your nerves, it tickles. Guiraudie is playing those nerves like a harp.
  40. Santosh
    Santosh is equally about the methods by which the poor and oppressed are kept in their place, and about what it means to be woman among men who aren’t at all interested in sharing their power.
  41. Eephus
    It dwells in some languid liminal space between hangout movie and elegy, a tribute to the community institutions that hold us together, that introduce us to one another and that, in an age of optimized life choices and disappearing public spaces, are slowly fading away.
  42. Rumours
    Sporadically ingenious, occasionally chilling and entirely bonkers, Rumours sees Maddin (writing and directing with his longtime collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson) abandoning his more familiar black-and-white, silent-film aesthetic for vibrant color.
  43. The Count of Monte Cristo
    Refusing to pander to restless derrières, they’ve given this big, bounding, beautifully cinematic swashbuckler almost three hours to breathe. Yet their pacing is so frisky — and Celia Lafitedupont’s editing so elegant — your derrière is unlikely to complain.
  44. Universal Language
    It’s a pensive meditation in an era of displacement, even if the film never tries to make a big point. The mood is palpable, and the meditation legible, even if Winnipeg and Iranian cinema are to you as remote as a chilly winter moon.
  45. Souleymane's Story
    Boris Lojkine’s Souleymane’s Story, an affecting film about struggle set over two days in Paris, is the rare character study that does not only build empathy with its hero’s pain but channels its sensation.
  46. Vulcanizadora
    Spasmodically funny, though hardly a comedy, Vulcanizadora is raw, moving and, briefly, horrifying.
  47. 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.
  48. Viet and Nam
    Quy treats the love affair between Viet and Nam with exquisite tenderness.
  49. Smile 2
    Smile 2, directed by Parker Finn, is more thematically ambitious than the original, which also allows Finn to stage more satisfyingly ridiculous kills and ramp up its air of delirium
  50. The Sheep Detectives
    Not only is The Sheep Detectives delightful, but it’s funny and emotionally complex and, dare I say, unusually deferential toward the noble sheep, frequently cast as brain-dead losers in cinema’s barnyards (Shaun notwithstanding).
  51. Great Absence
    In the end, Great Absence contains the grace that arises from a great struggle.
  52. Black Bag
    By the time Pierce Brosnan shows up, you may find yourself giggling at the whole meta deliciousness of this enterprise. You may also find yourself feverishly hoping that when it comes time to revive the Bond series, someone has the brains to call Koepp and Soderbergh.
  53. Sullivan's Travels
    A beautifully trenchant satire upon "social significance" in pictures, a stinging slap at those fellows who howl for realism on the screen and a deftly sardonic apologia for Hollywood make-believe.
  54. Blue Sun Palace
    It’s often said that New York is a city of neighborhoods, little galaxies contained within themselves, but the truth is more granular: We walk by a dozen massage parlors like the one in Blue Sun Palace every day, and never dream the whole cosmos of human emotion is inside.
  55. Youth (Hard Times)
    Shot in a present-tense vérité style, it stitches together micro-stories into a larger narrative in which negotiation can’t undo exploitation.
  56. Holy Cow
    The low-key charms of the coming-of-age story Holy Cow emerge gradually but steadily.
  57. Ernest Cole: Lost and Found
    The result is an elegantly wrought documentary that pulls off the trick of leaving viewers sated yet also craving more.
  58. I Like It Here
    [Arlyck’s] doing precisely what great memoirists do: invite us into their stories as a way of making space for us to reflect on our own.
  59. Holding Back the Tide
    By the end, Holding Back the Tide feels like both an elegy and a prophecy, looking toward both past and future to imagine what kind of possibilities oysters represent.
  60. The Last Showgirl
    Modestly scaled and loosely plotted, it is an unusually tender movie and an ideal vehicle for Coppola’s gift for expressing the intangible and the ephemeral.
  61. Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
    At this point in time, Springsteen is the world’s greatest living entertainer, full stop. “Road Diary,” a new documentary directed by Thom Zimny, offers dynamic proof for this argument.
  62. The Friend
    This is a love story, after all, and one with a keen grasp of the mournful, curious glances between its two leads — of how much goes untranslated between them, and how much is conveyed.
  63. All of You
    Spanning many years and a lot of relationship tumult, All of You is a weepy, sweeping love story that knows full well that it’s trying to be one. But it never succumbs to cheap execution, and all of that comes down to Goldstein and Poots. They make for a terrific pair.
  64. Hard Truths
    With deep feeling and lacerating and gentle words, Leigh creates a world that, like the vast, mysterious one hovering outside its frame, can seem agonizingly empty if you can’t see the people in it.
  65. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
    While I don’t remember seeing any fingerprints dotting their forms this time around, the tender care that went into fashioning each of Wallace’s toothy expressions and Gromit’s quizzically raised brow remains palpable. The love, well, that you feel, too.
  66. September 5
    It’s a serious movie unburdened by self-seriousness, its own and that of the profession it explores with cool, analytic dispassion.
  67. Bonjour Tristesse
    A work of image and mood, Bonjour Tristesse captures the mythopoetic wonder of an adolescent summer, and the effect is trancelike.
  68. The Return
    Less an epic poem than a showcase for two of cinema’s finest actors, The Return is visually bleak and emotionally gripping.
  69. Apocalypse in the Tropics
    It is very precisely not about American politics. Yet the temptation for a segment of viewers to see it as being about that will, I suspect, be insurmountable. But Costa is here to tell a bigger story.
  70. Familiar Touch
    In the end, Familiar Touch reveals itself to be less about the agonies of change than in the concessions we make to feel closer to our loved ones and ourselves.
  71. Better Man
    Gracey paints a fabulously entertaining and touching picture of an insecure, complicated man hauling himself from a quicksand of grasping fans, greedy impresarios, unresolved addictions and father-son dysfunction.
  72. Happyend
    Sora deftly calibrates the angst of his young characters — and the collective edginess of a nation, while nodding to the joys of the teen genre.
  73. Flow
    The animals act like real animals, not like cartoons or humans, and that restraint gives their adventure an authenticity that, in moments of both delight and peril, makes the emotion that much more powerful. With the caveat that I’m a cat lover, I was deeply moved.
  74. Juror #2
    Eastwood has explored systemic injustice before, including in “Changeling” and “Richard Jewell.” This is a stronger movie than those two by far, and if this one proves, as rumors have it, that it’s his last as a director, he is going out with a bang.
  75. The Cranes Are Flying
    Thanks to Mr. Kalatozov's direction and the excellent performance Tatyana Samoilova gives as the girl, one absorbs a tremendous feeling of sympathy from this film—a feeling that has no awareness of geographical or political bounds.
  76. Song Sung Blue
    The couple’s earnestness sounds mockable, but it’s not: They are too sincere, too joyful and too grateful to be doing the only thing that either of them ever wanted to do. And right now all I want to do is dust off my vinyl copy of “Hot August Night.”
  77. Day of the Fight
    Day of the Fight is an unabashed genre picture that manages to be both the kind of movie they supposedly don’t make like they used to, and also something bracingly fresh. It’s anchored by the lead actor, Michael C. Pitt, here ferocious and heart-stabbingly vulnerable in equal proportion.
  78. Night Is Not Eternal
    It’s the rare truly nuanced political documentary that is likely to challenge every viewer’s perspective — not because it tries to see all sides of an issue and leaves the viewer suspended in confusion, but because its point of view feels radically outside of convention, beholden to no one.
  79. A Photographic Memory
    It’s a film that captures the unsettling sensation of reaching middle age, knowing the length of the road ahead is uncertain but certainly shorter than it’s ever been, and not being able to see past the age your parent was upon death.
  80. Sabbath Queen
    [A] fascinating look at the act of questioning yourself and your family, your surroundings and your decisions.
  81. Warfare
    The highest praise I can offer Warfare, a tough, relentless movie about life and death in battle, is that it isn’t thrilling. It is, rather, a purposely sad, angry movie, and as much a lament as a warning.
  82. Every Little Thing
    Masear is a terrific documentary subject, but the hummingbirds are as well, and Aitken brings them close to us.
  83. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
    DaCosta’s talents as a director are a terrific, confident match for this material.
  84. Peter Hujar's Day
    The result is a charming experiment that should delight those who like their pleasures both nostalgic and voyeuristic.
  85. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
    Wrenching and at times suffocating, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a howl of maternal desperation spiked with jagged humor.
  86. Rebuilding
    One could surmise that it takes a village of women to save a stubbornly reticent man. But the lesson of Rebuilding is gentler, broader and timelier: Accepting help is a necessary step toward offering it to others in lasting ways.
  87. All That's Left of You
    In depicting scenes of dispossession and fraught encounters with soldiers, the filmmaker offers a saga of trauma that has antecedents in dramas set during previous mass conflicts like Apartheid as well as in the Jim Crow South. If that strikes you as pointed, it is.
  88. The Ugly Stepsister
    The movie, adapted by the Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt from the Cinderella story, is the opposite of didactic: Slyly funny and visually captivating (the luscious cinematography is by Marcel Zyskind), its scenes move with ease from gross to gorgeous, and from grotesque to magical.
  89. Come See Me in the Good Light
    Nonfiction films often grapple with mortality and the meaning of existence, and usually those center on grief. This one wraps its arms around the full range of feeling that follows a terminal diagnosis: fear, love, desire, anger, wonder, hope, despair, even joy.
  90. 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.
  91. Cutting Through Rocks
    Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni, who directed and edited the documentary, with Eyni also serving as cinematographer, have made a film that pulses with so much hopefulness that when Shahverdi’s story takes a shocking turn, it’s a punch to the solar plexus.
  92. Predators
    As David Osit’s probing, troubling documentary Predators demonstrates, the sociological implications of the show were (and are) anything but simple, beginning with what the series’ popularity suggests about the viewers who watched it.
  93. The Things You Kill
    Debts to Luis Buñuel and David Lynch are obvious, but The Things You Kill has its own way of getting inside its protagonist’s head space — and yours.
  94. DJ Ahmet
    In this strikingly assured debut, the writer-director Georgi M. Unkovski demonstrates gentle realism, paired with luminous cinematography and a superb young cast.
  95. Seeds
    Though Seeds is a lyrical portrait of a way of life, it also harbors an urgency that’s very much of our moment.
  96. The Alabama Solution
    This isn’t just about crime and punishment, but about a human rights crisis and willful blindness. Bringing several types of filmmaking, amateur and professional, together for a movie like this makes that message all the more powerful.
  97. Cactus Pears
    While the film centers on the comfort Anand finds with Balya and vice versa, it is also an elegantly reserved study of Anand’s grief, finding a rhythm in its scenes of ritual that allows us to ache alongside.
  98. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
    As the recreated picture of one of our coldest blows in this war and as a drama of personal heroism, it is nigh the best yet made in Hollywood.
  99. Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo)
    In his first feature, the writer and director Joel Alfonso Vargas takes a rather unremarkable premise and unspools it with sedulous care.
  100. Blue Moon
    The way to enjoy Blue Moon — and I think it’s terrifically enjoyable, despite the bright thread of melancholy running down the middle — is to settle into the theatricality, especially Hawke’s performance.
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