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. birth/rebirth
    Wrapped in drab locations and jaundiced lighting (Chananun Chotrungroj’s photography is brilliantly bleak), this grisly gynecological horror movie is not for the squeamish.
  2. 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.
  3. Glory
    Glory is celebratory, but it celebrates in a manner that insists on acknowledging the sorrow. This is a good, moving, complicated film.
  4. The Deep End
    Fastidious and smart, and Ms. Swinton's fixated intensity isn't ever remote; we're always aware of how deeply she's feeling. Her work is magnificent.
  5. Aberdeen
    Skarsgard and Headey deliver perfectly meshed lead performances in a small, beautifully acted film that will make you squirm.
  6. The Taste of Others
    A witty, sociologically astute reflection on the attraction between opposites.
  7. Thirteen
    For all its narrative glitches and its homemade quality, Thirteen evokes the rhythm, texture and tone of Nina's world in a way that a more carefully scripted film never could.
  8. Beware of Mr. Baker
    Mr. Bulger, a former boxer and model before he turned to journalism and then filmmaking, does not let "Behind the Music" sensationalism overwhelm the music itself, which is Mr. Baker's great passion and the only reason anyone should take an interest in him.
  9. Women Who Kill
    The humor is dry and the acting deadpan in Women Who Kill, a comedy that plays it droll and is all the funnier for it.
  10. Castle in the Sky
    Its detailed fantasy world, including a dark turn-of-the-century mining town and candy-colored futuristic space bikes, is as alluring as any live-action film. Yet this two-hour story about a lost princess, a flying island and space pirates is liable to strain the patience of adults and the attention spans of children.
  11. Public Speaking
    In “Public Speaking,” Martin Scorsese’s enormously enjoyable and perceptive documentary about her, Ms. Lebowitz’s endearing narcissism is a study in the notion that arrogance and insecurity are largely two sides of the same cocktail coaster.
  12. In the Fog
    Mr. Loznitsa doesn’t lighten the mood with any familiar filmmaking tricks: there are, for instance, no musical cues to guide you over the troubling or ambiguous passages. Like the characters, you work through each surprising turn.
  13. A Bug's Life
    Makes jaunty, imaginative use of both extraordinary technology and bold storytelling possibilities within the insect world.
  14. Daratt
    The film has the feel of a gift. Particularly noteworthy are Mr. Haroun's eloquent silences, visual and aural.
  15. Tatsumi
    It's potent stuff, delving into pornography, incest, murder and mutilation in the company of alienated men and unhappy, sometimes cruel women.
  16. American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs
    Ms. Lee could have delved more deeply into Ms. Boggs’s thoughts, and slips into glib autopilot by using archival footage with sound effects or repeating ideas of personal transformation. But in sharing her subject’s life achievements, she raises meaningful questions and keeps them profitably open.
  17. The War Room
    A revealing film and an invaluable document.
  18. Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
    Nimble and self-assured as Mr. Daniels’s direction may be, he could not make you believe in “Precious” unless you were able to believe in Precious herself. You will.
  19. Funny Ha Ha
    It is a small, plain movie, shot in 16 millimeter in dull locations around Boston; but also, like its passive, quizzical heroine, it is unexpectedly seductive, and even, in its own stubborn, hesitant way, beautiful.
  20. Police Story (1985)
    Police Story is of principal interest as a souvenir of another culture.
  21. Before I Forget
    An unblinking portrait of a complicated, solitary gay man who has outlived his working years.
  22. 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.
  23. Welcome to Leith
    Welcome to Leith wisely resists the kind of gimmickry that might have resulted in a stylistic hybrid of “The Blair Witch Project” or “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
  24. 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.
  25. Argentina, 1985
    Cinema prizes a good man making history, but this story’s heroes are manifold.
  26. Love, Antosha
    This affectionate, heartbreaking documentary about his life, directed by Garret Price, presents Yelchin as a soldier of cinema, and a lot more.
  27. Into Great Silence
    I hesitate, given the early date and the project's modesty, to call Into Great Silence one of the best films of the year. I prefer to think of it as the antidote to all of the others.
  28. Hello Dankness
    Hello Dankness belongs to a venerable underground-film tradition of treating refracted entertainment as a mirror for society. No fan of Ken Jacobs’s “Star Spangled to Death,” Richard Kelly’s “Southland Tales” or Joe Dante’s “The Movie Orgy” could help but smile.
  29. Ernest and Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia
    In a film whose moral emphasizes the necessity of artistic freedom, there is a deceptive simplicity to this aesthetic style that makes it all the more special.
  30. Gloria Bell
    As a performer, Moore can go big, and a terrible yowl here pierces the heart. But she’s a virtuoso of restraint. She shows you the rush of emotions just before they break the surface, so the hurt and confusion flicker on her face like minute shifts of light.
  31. Monos
    It’s frustrating to see such a sophisticated cinematic apparatus used in the service of such muddled half-ideas.
  32. 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.
  33. The Last Man on the Moon
    You already know the history told in The Last Man on the Moon, but this story just never grows old.
  34. Blue Jasmine
    [Allen's] most sustained, satisfying and resonant film since “Match Point.”
  35. The Innocents
    Blistering.
  36. Little Hope Was Arson
    The filmmaker, Theo Love, presents the people in the story as they are, without passing judgment and without apology, whether they are investigators or pastors or just ordinary folks caught up in the inexplicable. It’s Americana unvarnished and, because of that, as absorbing as it is respectful.
  37. Overseas
    With a fly-on-the-wall approach, the movie allows the center’s cruel contradictions to accumulate with a slow burn.
  38. The Shadowless Tower
    This movie opens itself to you with its feeling for people, its grace notes and a few bravura moments that close the distance between characters beautifully.
  39. Crazy, Not Insane
    Dr. Lewis is an engaging interview subject whose clarity and upbeat demeanor contrast strikingly with the macabre material. Her writings are read as voice-overs by Laura Dern. Dr. Lewis has also kept an excellent archive.
  40. Racing Dreams
    One of the rare documentaries you leave wishing it was a little bit longer.
  41. It Comes at Night
    It Comes at Night is pretty terrifying to sit through, but it may be even scarier after it’s over, when you sift through what you’ve seen and try to piece together what it may have meant.
  42. Hellboy II: The Golden Army
    The whole affair is pulpy, jokey, sometimes touching and frequently nonsensical: a big mess and, mostly, a lot of fun.
  43. Please Give
    Few American filmmakers create female characters as realistically funny, attractively imperfect and flat-out annoying as does Ms. Holofcener, whose features include “Friends With Money” and “Lovely & Amazing.”
  44. 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.
  45. Painted Fire
    Mr. Im's own aesthetic command is evident in the movie's wealth of beautiful, perfectly framed images of nature -- shots so full of passion and perception that they could almost be paintings themselves.
  46. Lumumba
    Mr. Peck's gambit works, and the result is a great film and a great performance.
  47. How I Killed My Father
    A kind of murder mystery, but eventually the only victim is the audience's interest -- the picture is uncompromising and inauspicious.
  48. Beyond The Visible: Hilma af Klint
    Beyond the Visible bristles with the excitement of discovery and also with the impatience that recognition has taken so long. It refreshes the eyes and the mind.
  49. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
    “Leo Grande” proves to be a tart and tender probe into sex and intimacy, power dynamics and human connection.
  50. Rocks in My Pockets
    The bravery of Ms. Baumane’s own coping methods (which some may disagree with) brings her tough-minded film to a cleareyed, forward-looking conclusion that doesn’t lose sight of her demons.
  51. Tender Mercies
    Tender Mercies has a bleak handsomeness bordering on the arty, but it also has real delicacy and emotional power, both largely attributable to a fine performance by Robert Duvall.
  52. The Elephant Man
    What we eventually see underneath this shell is not the study in dignity that Ashley Montagu wrote about, but something far more poignant, a study in genteelness that somehow supressed all rage. That is the quality that illuminates this film and makes it far more fascinating than it would be were it merely a portrait of a dignified freak. [03 Oct 1980, p.C8]
    • The New York Times
  53. The World Before Your Feet
    Short of walking with Green, a film is an ideal way to share in his knowledge. And after watching The World Before Your Feet, it’s difficult to look at the city the same way.
  54. Born Into Brothels: Calcutta's Red Light Kids
    The resulting film is moving, charming and sad, a tribute to Ms. Briski's indomitability and to the irrepressible creative spirits of the children themselves.
  55. Putty Hill
    Putty Hill doesn't strive for overt social commentary. It drops you into a world that the director, who grew up in the area, knows firsthand: a suburban fringe of stasis, downward mobility and lowered expectations.
  56. Breathe
    Breathe conveys an uncanny insight into the psychology of late adolescence, when lingering childhood fantasies can combust with burgeoning adult sexuality in a swirl of uncontrollable feelings.
  57. The Freshman
    The visual style of The Freshman isn't always up to its verbal wit, but then the writing sets an exceptional standard.
  58. John Wick: Chapter 4
    There is simply and once again Reeves, the axis who centers this franchise with his grave sincerity, beatific glow and mesmerizing, rooted fighting style, with its heavy-footed solidity and surprising suppleness. No matter what happens, nothing ever feels as poignantly at stake here as Reeves’s own ravaged, beautiful, aging body.
  59. We Met in Virtual Reality
    Hunting’s documentary catches up with where many people are finding their dreams realized, and understands that sometimes the dream is simply to be yourself.
  60. Enys Men
    At times, Jenkin’s bold, experimental style can perplex; but his vision is so unwavering and beholden to local history that his message is clear: On Enys Men, the earth remembers what the sea has taken.
  61. Foreign Parts
    People talk but don't say too much, and as curious and thorough as Ms. Paravel and Mr. Sniadecki are - Foreign Parts is the result of many months of patient filming - they are too polite to pry. But their tact adds to the richness of their film, which discovers a busy, complicated world within the space of few unlovely city blocks.
  62. Clash
    Clash turns into a full-fledged horror movie, albeit one without the fake comfort of a supernatural or science-fiction pretext. It’s just man’s inhumanity to man, in full sway.
  63. Number 37
    Cheerfully derivative yet doggedly entertaining, Number 37 benefits from Dumisa’s slick execution and impressive acting by her small cast.
  64. The Grief of Others
    It’s an artful portrait of a world that refuses the order we try to impose on it when we close ourselves off to heartache, doubt and pain.
  65. Shuffle
    While some institutions are legitimate, Shuffle, a shocking and confounding new documentary directed by Benjamin Flaherty, lays out in painstaking detail the collusion between moneymaking rehab treatment centers, double-dealing insurance entities and predatory social-media “scouts” who make sure cash flows into corporate pockets while the sick and suffering never get well.
  66. Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain
    With immense perceptiveness, Neville shows us both the empath and the narcissist: The man who refused to turn the suffering he saw in war zones into a bland televisual package, and the one who would betray longtime colleagues to please a new lover.
  67. The Color Purple
    Some parts of it are rapturous and stirring, others hugely improbable, and the film moves unpredictably from one mode to another. From another director, this might be fatally confusing, but Mr. Spielberg's showmanship is still with him. Although the combination of his sensibilities and Miss Walker's amounts to a colossal mismatch, Mr. Spielberg's ''Color Purple'' manages to have momentum, warmth and staying power all the same.
  68. Amanda Knox
    The directors, Brian McGinn and Rod Blackhurst, have produced a tightly edited, coherently structured and ultimately moving reassessment that burrows beneath the lurid in search of the illuminating.
  69. Becoming Bulletproof
    While the scenes shown from “Bulletproof,” the western they complete, are haphazard, that’s of little concern. If you want to see real courage, it’s not in that movie anyway. It’s in this documentary.
  70. Queens of the Qing Dynasty
    McKenzie doesn’t rely on the usual uplifting messaging and strained empowerment arc to humanize An and Star . . . Their friendship remains mysterious, yet the film, as if by witchcraft, makes their connection feel palpable and true.
  71. High Flying Bird
    The intellectual virtuosity on display is somehow both ostentatious and casual. The performances — Holland’s in particular, full of sadness, guile and audacity — feel the same way.
  72. The Humans
    The confessions and tensions are commonplace, but The Humans is never less than high on the terrible power of the mundane.
  73. The Card Counter
    The solitary man returns in The Card Counter, a haunting, moving story of spirit and flesh, sin and redemption, love and death about another lonely soul, William Tell, who, with pen to paper, grapples with his present and his unspeakable past.
  74. Beatles '64
    Watching the band in the Plaza Hotel and fans in the streets, hoping to catch a glimpse of their idols, you can’t help but get swept up in a 60-year-old fervor.
  75. Near Dark
    You might call this the scattershot school of film making... The result of being pushed and pulled through the confusing styles of Near Dark is simple exhaustion.
  76. Babette's Feast
    All of this is by way of being the prelude to the film's extended, funny and moving final sequence, a spectacular feast, the preparation and execution of which reveal Babette's secret and the nature of her sustaining glory.
  77. 5 Broken Cameras
    5 Broken Cameras deserves to be appreciated for the lyrical delicacy of his voice and the precision of his eye. That it is almost possible to look at the film this way - to foresee a time when it might be understood, above all, as a film - may be the only concrete hope Mr. Burnat and Mr. Davidi have to offer.
  78. One of Us
    As a documentary, One of Us is a small act of portraiture, but each portrait captures the pain of having a life upended.
  79. How to Draw a Bunny
    An intriguing and entertaining introduction to Johnson through his varied art; the mystery surrounding his death, which may have been his final performance piece, and the reminiscences of contemporaries.
  80. Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony
    The film they have put together is dense with sound and information, but it moves with a swift, lilting rhythm that is of a piece with the musical heritage it explores.
  81. LaLee's Kin: The Legacy of Cotton
    An exemplary work of cinéma vérité that allows its subjects to speak for themselves, traffics neither in pity nor in political grandstanding.
  82. Dirty Pretty Things
    This film has a conquering spirit. The dankness is replaced by an optimistic blast of sunlight at the end, a contrast to the earlier lighting dimmed with human misery. Mr. Frears blasts away the blight, though he doesn't have to work to restore Okwe's dignity. It shines through from the start.
  83. Punch-Drunk Love
    Poetry is perhaps the best way to think about Mr. Anderson's suave, exuberant balance of free-form inspiration and formal control.
  84. Diamond Men
    Eddie Miller (Robert Forster), the stolid protagonist of Diamond Men, a small, finely acted slice of American life, is the sort of character the movies normally shun like the plague for lack of glamour.
  85. Chungking Express
    While its slender, two-tiered plot links love affairs that happen largely by accident, the film's real interest seems to lie in raffish affectation. Mr. Wong has legitimate visual flair, but his characters spend an awful lot of time playing impish tricks.
  86. Merrily We Roll Along
    Merrily We Roll Along is an OK movie of a good production of a great musical: on balance, another worthy addition to the Stephen Sondheim canon, which can always stand to be expanded.
  87. O'Horten
    O'Horten is about frustration, patience, kindness and the wildness that lurks in even the calmest hearts. What's odd about that?
  88. The Princess Bride
    Mr. Reiner seems to understand exactly what Mr. Goldman loves about stories of this kind, and he conveys it with clarity and affection.
  89. In Between
    In Between, Ms. Hamoud’s debut feature, is an unusually welcoming and engaging film, inviting you to become a part of the circle of friends it depicts with such energy and warmth. For that reason, it can also be frustrating.
  90. The Summit of the Gods
    On limited terms — capturing the physicality of mountain climbing within the ethereal medium of animation — The Summit of the Gods is distinctive.
  91. Not Yet Begun to Fight
    With their sensitive feature clocking in at an hour, the filmmakers make you wish only that they had developed their material further.
  92. Oceans Are the Real Continents
    The much-in-vogue hybrid mode proves more cryptic than edifying this time around.
  93. Pray the Devil Back to Hell
    Uplifting, disheartening, inspiring, enraging -- the mind reels while watching the documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, even as the eyes water, the temples pound and the body trembles.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wings
    Amazing air duels and an impressive study of aviators are depicted in Wings, Paramount's epic of the flying fighters of the World War.
  95. The Chronology of Water
    Imogen Poots’s fantastically expressive performance as the adult Lidia transforms this movie (the feature directing debut of Kristen Stewart) from punishing to mesmerizing.
  96. The Thin Red Line
    One more film that could have been helped by excising repetition and focusing performances, but it wanders almost randomly instead. The heart-piercing moments that punctuate its rambling are glimpses of what a tighter film might have been.
  97. Born to Fly
    A singularly focused and avant-garde talent, Ms. Streb bends the messy rush of risk to her indomitable will.
  98. Trouble in Mind
    Alan Rudolph's latest movie seems to be striving to say something but isn't able to break through the fog of his script.
  99. Diego Maradona
    It is exhausting and exhilarating, cheap looking and slick, a documentary for Maradona fans but also for many others besides.
  100. Lost Bullet
    This impressively lean French thriller wastes nothing in its quest to deliver the goods.
    • The New York Times
      • Posted Jun 25, 2020
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