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. Mother Schmuckers
    The title is bad enough, but it’s all downhill from there in the revolting Belgian farce Mother Schmuckers. I would say words fail me, but they don’t. It’s just that most of them are unprintable.
  2. Asking for It
    Subtle as a sledgehammer and shallow as a saucer, Asking for It is painted in such broad strokes that — with just a smidgen of humor — it would pass for satire.
  3. Huda's Salon
    Where Abu-Assad falters is in turning Huda into a didactic mouthpiece for the very themes that Reem’s tribulations, filmed up-close with a jerky camera, convey effortlessly.
  4. Fresh
    A wickedly funny cannibal romance and dazzling feature debut from the director Mimi Cave.
  5. After Yang
    With eyebrow flicks, tiny physical modulations and shifts in pitch, Farrell movingly turns a shadow into a recognizable person, while also bringing much-needed humor to the movie.
  6. Against the Ice
    It’s perfectly formulaic.
  7. The Batman
    I can’t say I had a good time, but I did end up somewhere I didn’t expect to be: looking forward to the next chapter.
  8. Tyler Perry's A Madea Homecoming
    The script has plot twists so cuckoo they make soap operas look cowardly.
  9. Careless Crime
    Mokri constructs his film like a control experiment, tweaking each of its variables — time, space, narrative — as if to see what he might catalyze.
  10. The Desperate Hour
    The only thing I want less than a thriller about a school shooting is a thriller whose other main character is the main character’s iPhone.
  11. Butter
    For all its ache and churning emotions, “Butter” winds up being little more than a meager “Afterschool Special.”
  12. Servants
    Ostrochovsky often begins shots with characters frozen in place for several seconds before they launch into action, as if they were chess pieces moved by God across the bare lines of the seminary’s crumbling stone architecture.
  13. Friends and Strangers
    While the pieces don’t necessarily fit in obvious ways, that’s presumably the point — and part of what makes Friends and Strangers so singular.
  14. Family Squares
    Filmed during quarantine in 2020, Family Squares uses the communication tools of the pandemic era to deliver a film with the intimacy of a home movie, while still exploring the chaos and limitations of technology.
  15. No Exit
    No Exit drops an arsenal of twists and rug-pulls at a machine gun’s pace, though Power, the director, doesn’t quite know how to milk the tension, and the perfunctory script (written by Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari) tries and fails to give the events a greater resonance.
  16. Big Gold Brick
    The title of this perfectly well-appointed production is apt: Big Gold Brick looks all right but it truly just sits there.
  17. The Burning Sea
    We get little more than a bland romance, smoothly professional special effects and a story that’s finally too predictable to raise the heart rate.
  18. Creation Stories
    “Stories” does have a handful of funny and affecting scenes. But it’s most interesting when McGee, after sobering up, makes an ill-advised alliance with Tony Blair.
  19. Hellbender
    While the result is a mostly-compelling tale of matriarchal megalomania, occasionally this group composition feels more like a jumble.
  20. Three Months
    The contrast between Caleb and Estha remains the movie’s greatest asset. Their relationship grants room for the audience to witness and appreciate their differences, not just culturally, but as fully drawn individuals.
  21. Mr. Bachmann and His Class
    This isn’t a heroic-teacher drama about idealism in the face of adversity. It’s an acknowledgment of the hard work of learning, and the magic of simple decency.
  22. Strawberry Mansion
    This is a movie about letting the mind roam.
  23. Cyrano
    From the moment Cyrano enters the action, his charisma and intelligence are on splendid display, and Dinklage — jaunty, melancholy, sly — takes possession of the movie. But that means that the argument on which the drama depends is over before it has even begun.
  24. Studio 666
    No one tries for anything mightier than put-on dumbness because that’s the outer limit of where the acting, writing (by Jeff Buhler and Rebecca Hughes) and directing (by BJ McDonnell) can take this premise. It’s fun, nonetheless, to catalog everybody’s imperviousness to embarrassment.
  25. Inspector Ike
    It’ll work best with viewers whose funny bones are of the dry variety.
  26. The Automat
    If anything, The Automat seeks to burnish the mystique — it won’t be hijacked by social politics even if the company’s stance in such matters appeared to be the right one. The movie opts for a starry, top-down vantage.
  27. Fistful of Vengeance
    Without tactical, philosophical or emotional grounding, the battle scenes don’t land with any cinematic force.
  28. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
    In David Blue Garcia’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre the blade is more active than ever. But while Leatherface, the homicidal head case who fashions masks from the skin of his victims, might be busier, his ability to scare has waned considerably.
  29. Uncharted
    At least give Sony credit for recycling. That is the best that can be said for its nitwit treasure-hunt movie Uncharted, an amalgam of clichés that were already past their sell-by date when Nicolas Cage plundered the box office in Disney’s “National Treasure” series.
  30. Downfall: The Case Against Boeing
    It is likely to leave viewers shaken, and it is always comprehensible, even in sequences that illustrate what the pilots saw in the cockpit.
  31. Ted K
    The film is a tad reductive, leaning too heavily on currently fashionable explanations for why lonely white men resort to violence. But Stone makes up for it with some magnificently eerie moments.
  32. A Banquet
    You’re likely to leave this film starving for answers, but that hunger can be just as stimulating as it is burdensome.
  33. Taste
    There’s something here. It’s just undercooked. The cinematic philosophy around these minimalist hallucinations comes down to whether the images ought to amount to anything, as they always do with Weerasethakul and almost always with Reygadas.
  34. For Lucio
    This isn’t “Lucio for Beginners” by any means. Nor is it a greatest-hits anthology or a “behind the music” tell-all. It’s a tribute and an invitation to further research.
  35. Dog
    Dog is unabashedly sentimental. A movie about a dog and a soldier could hardly be otherwise. Luckily, Tatum’s self-deprecating charm and Carolin’s script keep the story on the tolerable side of maudlin.
  36. Icahn: The Restless Billionaire
    The perspective — while producing something eminently watchable — may strike some viewers as old-fashioned and incomplete.
  37. Oscar Peterson: Black + White
    “Black + White” does feature plenty of Peterson’s music, including several cover renditions performed in tribute for the film by a contemporary ensemble. But at almost every opportunity, Avrich undermines these numbers by cutting to one of an endless lineup of talking heads, usually to repeat predictable platitudes about Peterson’s brilliance.
  38. Somewhere with No Bridges
    Even as Frank keeps questioning and exploring, Madeiras and the full sweep of his life remain as out of focus as this documentary, an essay without a coherent thesis.
  39. Playground
    This is the first feature from the writer-director Laura Wandel, and it’s a knockout, as flawlessly constructed as it is harrowing.
  40. Tall Girl 2
    The plot is scattershot; the drama ant-size.
  41. The Unmaking of A College
    The closing titles say Nelson “would not agree to be interviewed.” While others try to explain her perspective, her nonparticipation leaves an unavoidable hole. And the testaments to Hampshire’s distinctive academic culture aren’t especially germane.
  42. Worst to First: The True Story of Z100 New York
    The movie’s prefab on-screen graphics are just one reason “Worst to First” has such a limp tone overall.
  43. Bigbug
    Despite some snappy ideas (an aggressive advertising drone pushing products as answers to the family’s every problem), Bigbug is overdressed, overlong and diminishingly amusing
  44. The In Between
    This mawkish plot might be tolerable if its characters were more likable; instead, they are pretension personified.
  45. My Best Friend Anne Frank
    Clinging to Hannah’s naïve viewpoint and the cherished ideal of her friendship with Anne results in some hard truths being hidden away or oddly sanitized.
  46. The Fabulous Filipino Brothers
    Every frame is flush with warm, saturated color, and the vibrant quality of the images conveys joyous generosity. The most poignant appeal of this movie is the feeling it creates of being welcomed into a family that radiates all things bright and good.
  47. The Pact
    Neumann’s baroness is grandiose and transfixing (as are Anne-Dorthe Eskildsen’s handsome costumes).
  48. Marry Me
    Marry Me is a sad tale that’s too busy leaping from plot point to plot point for Lopez to express anything close to real. It tells a lot and shows nothing.
  49. Catch the Fair One
    The nexus of racism, patriarchal power and sexual exploitation gives Catch the Fair One a pulse of righteous anger, and Reis’s charisma — her willingness to show fear as well as resolve — makes Kaylee a magnetic protagonist.
  50. Indemnity
    A South African thriller haunted by the ghosts of many Hollywood blockbusters past, Indemnity trades plausibility and originality for a worthy substitute: a great deal of fun.
  51. Blacklight
    At least Williams displays a bit of inventive flair with novel booby traps and a chase scene that features a lurching garbage truck.
  52. The Sky Is Everywhere
    Too many works aimed at younger age groups ooze with sentimentality or buckle under a condescending tone. Here, in figurative voice-over full of imagery, we receive Lennie’s unbridled imagination and worldview.
  53. I Want You Back
    I Want You Back isn’t particularly clever or emotionally stirring, but it does briskly deliver on the corny promises of the genre, navigating relatable relationship issues by the least relatable means.
  54. 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.
  55. Death on the Nile
    Death on the Nile, Kenneth Branagh’s second adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot stories, forgets the simple pleasures of ensemble excess and pure messing about.
  56. Home Team
    It’s yet another comedy of indignities — sorry, make that inanities.
  57. Book of Love
    When, and in which picturesque city, Henry and María will acknowledge their mutual affection is the burning question of this romantic comedy trifle, which offers a few laughs and many more exasperated groans.
  58. Alone with You
    Unfortunately, its lesbian representation is so shoddy that its scares also suffer.
  59. Lingui, The Sacred Bonds
    Again and again, Haroun shows you Amina and Maria alone and together, at times exchanging hugs or tenderly bowing their heads toward each other. Every so often, you see each running along a street alone, her clothes fluttering and body straining with effort. He shows feet and braids, a flash of a bared leg, the teasing glimpse of a belly. He shows you women in motion and in revolt, fleeing and escaping and at times running sly, joyous circles around the men in their lives.
  60. Last Looks
    Kirkby does keep up a jaunty pace. But he also seems preoccupied with impressing his inner hipster, as with an attitude toward race that dares you to call it cavalier. And his again edgy music choices.
  61. The Worst Person in the World
    If The Worst Person in the World is about Julie’s indecision, it’s also about Trier’s ambivalence. Some of the suspense in the film comes from wondering what he will do with her, and whether, as much as he loves her, he can figure out how to set her free.
  62. Breaking Bread
    A lot of the observations in “Breaking Bread” — the repeatedly offered notions that food is a common language or that politics has no place in the kitchen — seem trite and perhaps overly optimistic. The movie would ideally be shown with an accompanying tasting menu.
  63. Moonfall
    This off-world adventure flirts with the transcendently goofy, but Emmerich spoils it by crosscutting to a useless narrative thread on Earth.
  64. Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché
    More than a journeyman rockumentary, “Poly Styrene” is a thoughtfully finessed filial reckoning: a daughter’s journey toward understanding her mother as a young artist and as a young woman of color.
  65. Jackass Forever
    Two things continue to hoist “Jackass” above its legion of imitators, many of whom are now found on TikTok. First, the razor-sharp slow-motion cinematography, which immortalizes writhing men in wet underpants with the devotion of Michelangelo sculpting “The Pietà.” Second — and more important — is the crew’s friendship.
  66. The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild
    Of all the movie’s sins, [Scrat's] omission is unforgivable.
  67. La Soga: Salvation
    Perez is a flimsy leading man, and the film around him — a modest production that doesn’t exactly hide its budgetary shortcomings — is at best a borderline campy B-movie with bursts of bloody action. At worst, it’s a completely self-serious slog.
  68. Clean
    Clean has some real craft, but doesn’t quite satisfy as it toggles between bloodbaths and bathos.
  69. They/Them/Us
    They/Them/Us finds sharp humor in more relatable friction: namely between Charlie and Lisa (Amy Hargreaves) as they attempt to reconcile their domestic responsibilities with their voracious sexual appetites.
  70. The Conductor
    As filmmaking, The Conductor takes a fairly standard approach. The most engaging portions involve music-making itself.
  71. Futura
    Anyone with a heart will be stirred by the generous, critical, humanist spirit shared by the kids in front of the camera and the grown-ups on the other side.
  72. A Taste of Hunger
    The effect is a movie that resembles nothing so much as the centerpiece of the Malus menu — a hot dog made with elevated ingredients.
  73. The Fallout
    Ortega nails her role as a levelheaded teen who, nevertheless, is still a teen, reeling from an unthinkable event on top of the usual growing pains.
  74. Sundown
    Sundown lands more like a one-note thought exercise than a fully fleshed out story.
  75. Compartment No. 6
    Part of what makes Compartment No. 6 engrossing and effective is how Kuosmanen plays with tone.
  76. Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes
    While there is much to admire in this scrappy, micro-budgeted debut feature, its sci-fi shenanigans are too convoluted and its visuals too claustrophobic to sustain interest.
  77. Introduction
    Shot in black and white (with Hong serving, for the first time, as cinematographer) and clocking in at a little more than an hour, Introduction is both lucid and elusive.
  78. Salt in My Soul
    Salt in My Soul is extremely painful to watch, especially as it shows the roller coaster of Smith’s recurring hospitalizations. But it does paint a vivid portrait of who she was and what she believed.
  79. The Tiger Rising
    The metaphors are so obvious that the film becomes trapped in its own cage of archetypes and clichés, and unlike the tiger, there is no champion to open the gates to a more original cinematic world.
  80. Nocturna: Side B — Where the Elephants Go to Die
    Calzado uses more experimental techniques to expand his narrative, paralleling the flickering impermanence of filmed images with physical and psychological decay.
  81. Nocturna: Side A — The Great Old Man’s Night
    Sad and strange and deeply upsetting, “Side A” profits from Claudio Beiza’s velvety, gray-green images and a soundtrack pulsing with heartbeats and the distressing whine of Ulysses’s hearing aid.
  82. The Royal Treatment
    The movie comes across as a deliberately, almost defensively, inane trifle; a cupcake whose icing reads, “Enjoy the tooth decay.”
  83. Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom
    The gently efficient story feels like an attempt to illustrate Bhutan’s real-life “Gross National Happiness” initiative.
  84. Donkeyhead
    Despite her minor rebellions, Mona remains a frustratingly opaque character; a stereotypically troubled woman whose eventual awakening merits a shrug at most.
  85. Definition Please
    More touching than riotous, Definition Please proves to be impressively nuanced once it begins revealing why Monica is so prickly around Sonny.
  86. The Last Thing Mary Saw
    The Last Thing Mary Saw is as surprising as it is frustrating.
  87. The King's Daughter
    Here’s a tragic tale: Once upon a time, an action-adventure drama began production. Nearly eight years, a title change and a new distribution plan later, the movie finally sees the light of day. Nothing about it feels worth the wait.
  88. A Shot Through the Wall
    Though attentive to calls for police accountability, and the media’s role in reducing complex issues into simple narratives, Long’s schematic script ramps up theatrics at the expense of more challenging insights.
  89. Munich: The Edge of War
    A plodding bureaucratic procedural that features many, many characters strategizing in various spaces with furrowed brows and clenched jaws, mostly in relentless medium close-up.
  90. Simple Passion
    While keeping a stalwart female perspective, Simple Passion follows an arc so standard it could be called banal.
  91. Why Is We Americans?
    It’s a story that spans past and present, arts and politics, and kin and country — and the movie, with its haphazard editing, struggles to contain it all.
  92. 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.
  93. Brazen
    Brazen occasionally scratches the same itch as does a cop procedural, or a Lifetime drama so formulaic you foresee every beat.
  94. Dear Mother
    Adapted by Lafitte from a 2013 play by Sébastien Thiery, Dear Mother is the kind of screwball comedy whose absurd premise and speedy pacing very nearly allow you to overlook the fact that it’s not exceedingly bright or witty.
  95. Belle
    Colors and hearts explode in Belle, and your head might too while watching this gorgeous anime.
  96. A Cops and Robbers Story
    The repetition of verbal and visual storytelling points to the limited scope of this film. A Cops and Robbers Story explores Pegues’s split loyalties, but the talking head interviews tend to isolate characters whose very intimacy is the subject of the film.
  97. Hotel Transylvania: Transformania
    Despite some flourishes (such as a mirror-like crystal cave), “Transformania” feels locked into the routine rhythms of its plotting and makes one-note jokes out of its human incarnations.
  98. The Pink Cloud
    Even as the lockdown accelerates intimacy and conflict between the protagonists, their actions feel inconsequential compared with the greater world outside.
  99. Scream
    Throttled by a corrosive self-awareness, the latest Scream is a slasher movie with resting smug face, so enamored of its own mythology that its characters speak of little else.
    • 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.
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