The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
For 20,311 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: 9,399 out of 20311
  2. Mixed: 8,446 out of 20311
  3. Negative: 2,466 out of 20311
20311 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Bring Her Back
    I’m beginning to think that the Philippous don’t just want to shatter our nerves: They want to break our hearts.
  4. Watch on the Rhine
    Its sense resides firmly in its facing one of civilization's most tragic ironies, its power derives from the sureness with which it tells a mordant tale and its beauty lies in its disclosures of human courage and dignity.
  5. Good Boy
    This is assured horror filmmaking. Heartbreaking too: Anyone who’s held a pet as comfort from pain or despair should have tissues at hand.
  6. The Christophers
    I have rarely enjoyed watching two actors’ rapport the way I loved watching McKellen and Coel; it could have gone on forever and not been long enough.
  7. Eddington
    Your mileage will vary according to your stomach for this stuff, but I found myself breathless with giggles at times, sometimes the therapeutic laugh of recognition and sometimes because Aster has a keen eye for what’s most absurd about human nature.
  8. Young Mothers
    Because of the ensemble structure, each tale is interrupted by another, so “Young Mothers” lacks some of the suspense that powers many of the Dardennes’ other films. Yet that slower pace allows a tenderness to develop, and the tension between the girls’ youth and newfound maternal instincts to emerge.
  9. The Mastermind
    Like the overall movie, the character opens up incrementally to quiet, meaningful effect.
  10. Die My Love
    Submerged in Grace’s overheated, claustrophobic, tedious, maddening reality, we are drowning, just like her. It is full-body immersion cinema.
  11. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come
    Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is a worthy sequel, repeating some of the same beats as its predecessor, but cleverly reinvented so that it’s still unpredictable and hilariously bizarre.
  12. Miroirs No. 3
    These cinematic allusions are catnip to film lovers, and while they’re pleasurable to consider they’re so delicately woven into the story that they never distract from the characters or the emotion, or edge into directorial cleverness.
  13. Resurrection
    Strange describes the world of “Resurrection,” as does entrancing, tender, surprising, mournful and, at times, mystifying; it too is a labyrinth of a kind, one that Bi has filled with abrupt turns, elusive figures and shattering moments.
  14. Nouvelle Vague
    Watching it again, I recognized that Linklater’s film is itself an expression of a certain approach — a consciousness — toward cinema’s pleasures and possibilities, one that at once embraces the art’s past and insists on its future.
  15. Alpha
    Softer and gentler than either of its forbears, "Alpha" hums with a dreamlike unease, a movie less concerned with sensation than with genuine feeling.
  16. Two Prosecutors
    Mordantly comedic, Two Prosecutors is deliberately paced but makes a tightly conceived addition to Loznitsa’s work, which rides deep into the long, dark nights of Russian history with fiction, observational documentary and immersions in the Soviet archives.
  17. The Little Sister
    There is a tender exuberance to “The Little Sister,” which renders Fatima’s development from an uncertain, sullen high school student into a more confident young woman as just one step on a journey.
  18. Splitsville
    Covino and Marvin continue to forge a distinct comic sensibility — and, what’s rarer these days, they know how to make the camera work for the humor. Their knack for sight gags and staging in depth would shame the makers of the recent “Naked
  19. Sentimental Value
    Trier’s lightness of touch makes a striking contrast to the film’s emotional weightiness. Death haunts this movie, as it does other of Trier’s features, and while “Sentimental Value” has bursts of pure comedy (it can be very funny), it’s steeped in melancholy.
  20. Yes
    Yes is an unsparing movie and can be hard to watch partly because Lapid’s raw fury and maximalist approach can border on off-putting excess. There are times in “Yes” when he seems to be veering out of control. At other times, he almost seems to bait you to look away, to turn off and tune out just like his revelers, even as he inexorably pulls you in, forcing you to bear witness alongside him.
  21. My Father's Shadow
    It’s that sharp contrast of beauty with an undercurrent of pain that makes “My Father’s Shadow” so bittersweet, and it’s why it cuts to the quick.
  22. The President's Cake
    It’s a striking, mature debut.
  23. Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5
    Densely packed, the movie is a whirlwind of ideas and images, by turns heady, enlivening, disturbing and near-exhausting. It’s a work of visceral urgency from Peck, who’s best known for his 2017 documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” about James Baldwin.
  24. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
    What really makes Wake Up Dead Man work is that Father Jud and Benoit Blanc are two peas in a pod, when it comes right down to brass tacks.
  25. My Mom Jayne
    It is the exquisitely relatable messiness of this exceptional family tale that lingers.
  26. A House of Dynamite
    Bigelow’s work here is superb. She puts the many moving parts into coordinated place and keeps them coherently spinning even as she switches out some elements and introduces others; she doesn’t drop a single plate. The script occasionally gets in her way, which sometimes happens in her work.
  27. Boys Go to Jupiter
    Here is a movie notably unafraid to manifest the weirdest of the weird, no matter what the Mr. Moolahs of the world have to say.
  28. Life After
    Life After doesn’t equivocate; neither does it offer easy answers. It tackles a thorny topic in a challenging way, with the tenderness, complexity and — notwithstanding Davenport’s earlier wish — the personal perspective it deserves.
  29. Preparation for the Next Life
    Preparation for the Next Life is all the more potent for choosing naturalism over melodrama and sensitivity over sentiment.
  30. Sunday Best: The Untold Story of Ed Sullivan
    A music journalist-turned-filmmaker, Jenkins had the hip-hop bona fides to guarantee “Sunday Best” would not be a white savior tale. Instead, his film reveals the authentic amity and steadfast values of an ally.
  31. Diva
    Though it means to be a romantic suspense-thriller, it has the self-consciously enigmatic manner of a high-fashion photograph, the kind that's irresistible to amateur artists who draw mustaches on the perfectly symmetrical faces of pencil-thin models in sables.
  32. Forastera
    Forastera is an exquisitely deconstructed ghost story, a muted mystery that beguiles while remaining deeply grounded in its evocative setting.
  33. Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk
    Put Your Hand on Your Soul and Walk is not just a document of a life and a hope extinguished. It is also the best way to hear from Hassouna. And it’s a film about crossing borders; we get to see just a little of what she saw.
  34. Two Seasons, Two Strangers
    Li, carrying a camera she has inherited, appears to search for inspiration in her surroundings, too. Whatever elusive quality she is seeking, Miyake has found something like it. His film gently balances tidiness and looseness, connection and alienation and artifice and the natural world.
  35. Magellan
    The most arresting way that Diaz telegraphs, though, is through the sheer beauty of his images. The movie is often visually intoxicating, at moments gasp-out-loud ravishing, especially in its presentation of the natural world, which can have a soft visual quality that deepens the sense of otherworldliness.
  36. Our Land (Nuestra Tierra)
    Drawing attention to the filming technology, Martel implicitly reminds us that Chocobar’s case only came to trial because it was filmed and uploaded to the internet in the first place.
  37. Cover-Up
    Cover-Up is a model of efficient, engaging documentary filmmaking; it looks good, for starters, and it moves energetically.
  38. Calle Málaga
    The viewer might think, Ah, it’s going to be one of those films where the hero’s resistance softens as she meets a quirky collection of fellow residents. It is not. The Moroccan director Maryam Touzani and her husband, Nabil Ayouch (“The Blue Caftan”), who wrote the script with her, have something more delicate in mind.
  39. The Choral
    A moving account of music as a way of coping with war, as well as keeping it at bay.
  40. 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.
  41. The Love That Remains
    The landscape in which this family makes its domestic life is wild and lovely, and Palmason signals the changing of the seasons by showing us all of its beauty: the snow and ice, the sunshine and greenery, beautiful skies, placid water. The weather can be both delightful and harsh, warm and chilly, and that’s mirrored in the characters.
  42. Send Help
    Send Help may not be peak Raimi (that, to my mind, would be A Simple Plan), but it’s Raimi at peak pulp. I’ll happily take it.
  43. You Got Gold: A Celebration of John Prine
    As concert films go, “You Got Gold” is pretty straightforward. It doesn’t need to be anything more than that. Prine’s songs are full of wisdom, drama, laughs and heartache.
  44. Hokum
    Reveling in misdirection and a teasing duality . . . Hokum profits from Colm Hogan’s insinuating camera as it noses through gloomy corridors and a terrifying dumbwaiter shaft, hinting at what lurks on the other side of the frame.
  45. Billy Preston: That's the Way God Planned It
    As tough a life as Preston had, the music that buoys this chronicle is a constant source of joy.
  46. A Poet
    The writer and director Simón Mesa Soto skewers with knowing precision a kind of devotion to the creative life — without much of the creating — that renders one useless in the real world. The allure of the image of the tortured artist can be so enticing that it obscures the actual art.
  47. Disclosure Day
    Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is one of those movies that sweeps you up from the start and rarely lets you down.
  48. 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.
  49. Fiume o morte!
    The re-enactment approach may not be as novel as it once was, but it’s still a heady, creative way to excavate layers of buried history in a location that has more than its share.
  50. Exit 8
    Exit 8 is a pip and as fun to watch as it is to mull over.
  51. Wuthering Heights
    It is Goldwyn at his best, and better still, Emily Brontë at hers. Out of her strange tale of a tortured romance Mr. Goldwyn and his troupe have fashioned a strong and somber film, poetically written as the novel not always was, sinister and wild as it was meant to be, far more compact dramatically than Miss Brontë had made it.
  52. Lumiere, Le Cinema!
    It’s funny and beautiful and lively.
  53. Stop! That! Train!
    With the same kind of sweetness and heightened stylization that he brought to “Hairspray,” the director Adam Shankman balances jokes for an in-crowd with the pleasures of spoofs like “Airplane!” and “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar,” plus the appeal of seeing Joel McHale in a harness (one of the better star cameos, which also include Sarah Michelle Gellar and Charo).
  54. Departures
    Departures is still tender and winsome, with graphic-novel-style animation lightening the load, but is ultimately punishing in tone. It lives by a truth that might ring familiar for gay men particularly: Humor that cuts deep is a form of survival.
  55. Been Here Stay Here
    Time is slipping away for Tangier Island, just like its shoreline. Been Here Stay Here beautifully captures what it is right now, then asks us to consider what will probably be lost soon.
  56. The Furious
    The Furious is a rousing piece of spectacle.
  57. Sherman's March
    As Mr. McElwee fusses with himself for not getting on with his meditation on Sherman's march, and as the loose ends of his private life accumulate, a wonderfully goofy, pertinent movie comes into focus.
  58. Up in the Air
    One of the pleasures of Up in the Air is that its actresses share the frame with Mr. Clooney as equals, not props
  59. An Education
    If in hindsight An Education might make you a little queasy, it is hard to resist, like David himself.
  60. A Single Man
    While A Single Man has its flaws, many of these fade in view of the performance and the power of Isherwood’s story.
  61. District 9
    In the best B-movie tradition, the filmmakers embed their ideas in an ingenious, propulsive and suspenseful genre entertainment, one that respects your intelligence even as it makes your eyes pop (and, once in a while, your stomach turn).
  62. Police, Adjective
    So much in this meticulous and moving film is between the lines, and almost nothing is by the book.
  63. A Perfect Getaway
    A B-movie-style throwback that’s consistently diverting and blissfully free of morals and messages, A Perfect Getaway is just the thing for the summertime movie blahs: it’s a genuinely satisfying cheap thrill.
  64. Drag Me to Hell
    Drag Me to Hell has a tonic playfulness that’s unabashedly retro, an indulgent return to Mr. Raimi’s goofy, gooey roots.
  65. Adventureland
    Somehow the story of a young man's coming of age never gets old, at least when it is told with the kind of sweetness and intelligence Adventureland displays.
  66. Let the Right One In
    There is a remarkable stillness to many of the film's most indelible images, particularly the exteriors, which are so carefully photographed, and without the usual tiresome camera jiggling, as to look almost frozen.
  67. The Departed
    What helps make The Departed at once a success and a relief isn't that the director of "Kundun," Mr. Scorsese's deeply felt film about the Dalai Lama, is back on the mean streets where he belongs; what's at stake here is the film and the filmmaking, not the director's epic importance.
  68. Séraphine
    The mystery of Séraphine de Senlis -- who died in a mental hospital in 1942 and whose work survives in some of the world’s leading museums -- is left intact at the end of Séraphine. Rather than trying to explain Séraphine, the film accepts her.
  69. The Best of Youth
    Full of nuance and complexity, but it is also as accessible and engrossing as a grand 19th-century novel.
  70. Julie & Julia
    Julie & Julia proceeds with such ease and charm that its audacity -- is easy to miss.
  71. World's Greatest Dad
    With a merciless acuity this nihilistic comedy ridicules collective grief and the news media's cynical marketing of inspirational uplift after a death.
  72. 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.
  73. Life Is Beautiful
    Benigni effectively creates a situation in which comedy is courage. And he draws from this an unpretentious, enormously likable film that plays with history both seriously and mischievously. Piety has no place here, nor do tears until the final reel. Life is Beautiful plays by its own rules
  74. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
    Above all, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a triumph of technique.
  75. Murderball
    The evenness of its emotional pitch almost incidentally helps the film become an unusually deep exploration of sports, machismo and the competitive spirit.
  76. Little Miss Sunshine
    Tucked in between all the hurt and the jokes, the character development and the across-the-board terrific performances is a surprisingly sharp look at contemporary America.
  77. Babel
    In the end Babel, like that tower in the book of Genesis, is a grand wreck, an incomplete monument to its own limitless ambition. But it is there, on the landscape, a startling and imposing reality. It's a folly, and also, perversely, a wonder.
  78. House of Flying Daggers
    A gorgeous entertainment, a feast of blood, passion and silk brocade. But though the picture is full of swirling, ecstatic motion, it is not especially moving.
  79. Into the Wild
    Though the film’s structure may be tragic, its spirit is anything but.
  80. Casino Royale
    The latest James Bond vehicle -- call him Bond, Bond 6.0 -- finds the British spy leaner, meaner and a whole lot darker.
  81. Ong Bak
    Mr. Jaa, blessed with astonishing muscle definition and a stoical, sensitive face, clearly has the potential to be an international action movie star, and Ong-Bak feels like the start of a scrappy, potent franchise.
  82. Taxi Driver
    Acting of this sort is rare in films. It is a display of talent, which one gets in the theater, as well as a demonstration of behavior, which is what movies usually offer. Were Mr. De Niro less an actor, the character would be a sideshow freak.
  83. Head-On
    Despite the tears, the blood and the booze, Head-On is a hopeful film.
  84. Monsieur N.
    If it all adds up to too much for one film to encompass with ease, Monsieur N, is certainly richer than most of what you'll find on the History Channel.
  85. Watermarks
    A moving documentary that approaches the Holocaust from a fresh, intimate perspective.
  86. Lost Embrace
    This is a small movie about a small world, but its modesty is part of what makes it durable and satisfying.
  87. My Mother's Smile
    Though the narrative is spotty, and occasionally confounding, there is an epic warmth in the way it's rendered.
  88. The Animation Show 2005
    As it is, this collection clocks in at a fleet 87 minutes, which is shorter (and taken together, more lively) than a whole mess of features.
  89. Up and Down
    It skips from buoyant satire to domestic melodrama, leaving behind a curious mix of emotions.
  90. Gunner Palace
    The resulting film is an unruly, riveting assemblage of anecdotes and impressions. The larger political and military questions about the war in Iraq are kept deliberately in the background, which some viewers may find frustrating.
  91. Whisky
    A deadpan comedy shot through with a vein of despair, the Uruguayan film Whisky is a pint-size pleasure.
  92. Millions
    A heartfelt, emotionally delicate children's movie about life and death and all the parts in between.
  93. The Buffalo Boy
    One of the strengths of Mr. Nguyen-Vo's film is that despite the overwhelming physical beauty of the landscape and the simplicity of his characters, he doesn't succumb to such aerated thinking. The world in Buffalo Boy" is filled with wonder, but it is a world also filled with real desire, real death, not abstractions.
  94. Steamboy
    The film turns into a preposterous but engrossing spectacle, fueled by a resource more enduring than steam or its successors: big ideas.
  95. Look at Me
    A witty and acute examination of friendship, ambition and betrayal in the Parisian literary world.
  96. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
    A tight, fascinating chronicle of arrogance and greed.
  97. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    Mr. Jennings and Mr. Goldsmith have held onto a genuine sense of childlike wonder, which works as a nice corrective to what might otherwise come across as an overabundance of hip.
  98. 3-Iron
    A teasing, self-conscious and curiously heartfelt demonstration of his (Mr. Kim) mischievous formal ingenuity.
  99. À Tout de Suite (Right Now)
    The downbeat story unfolds in quick, incisive slashes in which the combination of minimal dialogue and gorgeous black-and-white photography lends the movie a chilly documentary realism.
  100. 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.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »