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. Mayor Pete
    Showing Buttigieg at one public appearance after another, “Mayor Pete” more often plays like outtakes from the trail than an inside glimpse.
  2. Paper & Glue
    In 2017, JR was half of the delightful tag-team of “Faces Places,” the Oscar-nominated documentary he and the groundbreaking director Agnès Varda made in the French countryside. Paper & Glue, while not as tender a romp, is a sequel in spirit. Faces and their places continue to matter.
  3. Uppercase Print
    The film, a rousing, form-bending new feature by the Romanian auteur Radu Jude, rails at the tyrannical potential of language — particularly when backed by government power — to suffocate people’s freedoms.
  4. Passing
    Together with Thompson and Negga, Hall hauntingly brings to life characters forced to exist in that “not entirely friendly” space, with its cruelties, appearances, ambiguities and hard, merciless truths.
  5. Home Sweet Home Alone
    Who’s the real victim here? The audience — yet Kemper’s no-nonsense pixie who suffers a dozen thumbtacks to the face runs a close second.
  6. Julia
    Julia is an apt tribute to a life well-lived and well-fed.
  7. Red Notice
    Uninterested in world building or creating any sense of stakes, Red Notice is merely an expensive brandishing of star power — only the stars haven’t got it in them.
  8. 7 Prisoners
    Rather than being a simple examination of a social problem, the film excels at excavating the deep-rooted, sprawling violence that affects everyone living under hierarchies of power.
  9. Belfast
    Branagh’s remembrances may be idealized, but with Belfast he has written a charming, rose-tinted thank-you note to the city that sparked his dreams and the parents whose sacrifices helped them come true.
  10. Clifford the Big Red Dog
    Genuine sweetness can be found in Emily’s fidelity to her rowdy new best friend. Still, naturalism is hard to fake, and it’s difficult to divorce Clifford from the lines of code that animate him.
  11. Sooryavanshi
    Sooryavanshi is both overstuffed and paper-thin.
  12. Beans
    This is the first fictional film directed by the documentarian Tracey Deer, and she brings a good eye for which characters might make a compelling story.
  13. Love Hard
    In presenting a female character who is attractive, but bereft of substance, the movie subverts its own premise.
  14. A Cop Movie
    Ambitious, heady and distinctive, if easier to admire in theory than engage with moment to moment, A Cop Movie has a conceptual strangeness that’s difficult to overstate.
  15. Mark, Mary & Some Other People
    It’s clear these overgrown kids are careening toward adult-size pain. But Marks’s infatuation with her flawed lovebirds also seduces the audience.
  16. A Man Named Scott
    Thanks to its perceptive insights and a range of interviewees, from fellow industry professionals to a clinical psychologist, A Man Named Scott is that rare musician-focused doc, one as sensitive, fully formed and noble in its intentions as Cudi himself.
  17. Hive
    Hive seizes and holds your interest simply through the drama created by sympathetic characters trying to surmount awful, unfair hurdles. Mostly, though, what holds you rapt is Gashi’s powerful, physically grounded performance, which lyrically articulates her taciturn character’s inner workings.
  18. Finch
    Finch is sweet, yet disappointingly uneventful.
  19. Simple as Water
    Simple as Water is anything but simple when it comes to its technical achievements, weaving together familiar immigrant narratives in ways that still manage to surprise and stun.
  20. Spencer
    Stewart leverages her own star power to turn Diana into someone familiar. The intimacy and care the character craves is something the audience feels compelled to supply.
  21. All Is Forgiven (2007)
    The atmosphere the director creates, once fully breathed in, has an emotional gravity that becomes devastating as it settles.
  22. Eternals
    The actors are the movie’s great superpower and give it warmth, even a bit of heat, and a pulse of life that’s never fully quelled by the numerous clamorous action sequences.
  23. The Harder They Fall
    Samuel makes the most of his formidable cast. If anything, he may be overgenerous. The narrative sometimes flags so that everyone can get in a few volleys of the salty, pungent dialogue on the way to the next round of gunplay or fisticuffs.
  24. Isolation
    Though there are a few standout creations, the anthology is mostly muddled, privileging a heightened version of 2020 over a reality that was plenty scary on its own.
  25. Speer Goes to Hollywood
    “Speer” is an intriguing document, highlighting the ease with which the most reprehensible figures are able to whitewash their legacies. But once you settle into its wavelength, the documentary begins to feel simplistic, like a one-track excuse to roll out rare film clips and testimony.
  26. Chess of the Wind (1976)
    Aslani pulls story threads together with an elegant moving camera that doesn’t immediately give up all the secrets a scene may contain.
  27. How They Got Over
    With a trove of archival performance footage, much of it from the television show TV Gospel Time, and the wisdom to let those images breathe, the film leans into the maxim about showing not telling.
  28. Cicada
    Ben and Sam’s blossoming romance does a lot of telling and little showing. While there’s the occasional amusingly idiosyncratic section of dialogue that sounds like a series of stagily poetic non-sequiturs, much of the couple’s bonding feels straightforward and unremarkable.
  29. Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin
    Absent formal rigor, the “Paranormal Activity” concept doesn’t offer much else.
  30. Roh
    Symbolism overshadows characterization, or any sense of motive for that matter, nevertheless Roh succeeds as a spine-tingling baffler, hitting at nerves we can’t quite articulate but feel all the same.
  31. Joy Ride
    Some of the material feels fairly standard, as they share misfit upbringings and showbiz gossip, but each veteran comedian lends an unpredictable element through self-deprecating candor.
  32. A Mouthful of Air
    Directed by Amy Koppelman and based on her novel of the same name, A Mouthful of Air aspires to show how depression can sully even the loveliest of scenes. The scenes the movie chooses, however, play like a parody of white privilege.
  33. The Souvenir: Part II
    Hogg’s filmmaking presents its own forceful draw and is the reason I watched Souvenir Part II again.
  34. Snakehead
    Wu plays Dai Mah with a no-frills abandon that often makes her feel like the film’s protagonist, but even her performance can’t overcome the narrative missteps.
  35. Attica
    There is a fascination in hearing about the logistics of the riot and just how surreal events were for the prisoners.
  36. Hypnotic
    The twists in Hypnotic may not be brilliant, but they are abundant, making for the sort of straight-to-streaming treat best enjoyed on a couch, with company who will laugh with you and let you yell at the screen.
  37. Bulletproof
    What this admirably hands-off film shows is how the feelings of anxiety that have surrounded school shootings have been monetized and translated into demand for consumer products. It is a nightmarish vision — the military industrial complex deployed in the halls where children ought to roam.
  38. Violet
    Crowding the screen with jarring sounds and disturbing visuals, Bateman experiments with so many cinematic frills and fancies that Munn’s touching work is too often obscured.
  39. The Spine of Night
    Alas, all the world-building filmmakers may contrive doesn’t count for much if they don’t put it across visually. And this heavily rotoscoped vision does not get where it needs to be to achieve genuine trippiness.
  40. My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission
    “World Heroes’ Mission” has little to offer veteran fans of the series or new viewers, who won’t find any of what makes the series great in what’s essentially a filler arc.
  41. Only the Animals
    The multiple viewpoints are just a clever, self-satisfied device to deliver stale goods and familiar ugliness with a soupçon of glib class politics.
  42. Antlers
    The film’s self-seriousness is as oppressive as its setting’s monotonous fog.
  43. Army of Thieves
    A winking attitude doesn’t make the extremely tired formula any less rote or tiresome. Despite the in-jokes and references (including nods to “Point Break” and “Heat”), the movie can’t transcend its own clichés.
  44. Last Night in Soho
    Nothing in Wright’s previous work quite prepared me for Last Night in Soho, its easy seductiveness and spikes of sophistication. Dissolving the border between present and past, fact and fantasy, the director (aided by the euphoric talents of the cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung) has produced some of the most dazzling imagery of his career.
  45. Warning
    Together, these tales feel like the hangover at a wake for mankind. The film’s dusky pastel color palette recalls dying flowers on a grave. Yet, even as the synth score mutters anxiously in the background, Alexander takes a prankish delight in her own doom and gloom.
  46. Learning to Live Together: The Return of Mad Dogs & Englishmen
    Here the now-elders seem delighted to make a joyful noise with the generations they influenced.
  47. No Future
    In flattening everything into a single shade of funereal gray, “No Future” has none of the ineffable, multifaceted complexity of life.
  48. Minyan
    The film allows its societies to speak through gestures, whether it is the passing of personal possessions after a death or the brush of bodies behind a bar, and its portrait of both Jewishness and queerness is richer for it.
  49. The Electrical Life of Louis Wain
    Louis is a funny, complicated character, and while the movie could have expanded its horizons (particularly in view of the changes roiling the art world), Cumberbatch fills in this expressionistic portrait exquisitely.
  50. Ron's Gone Wrong
    As family entertainment, it’s fine.
  51. Becoming Cousteau
    It’s a swift-moving, detailed biography, recounting a life that was long, eventful and stippled with tragedy and regret.
  52. Women Is Losers
    It’s arguable that Celina’s emotional distance is a true reflection of how working class women manage their feelings in order to cope. But it could be dissatisfying to a viewer craving to see women’s interior lives; their pain rather than their resilience.
  53. Escape from Mogadishu
    With little interest in elucidating the conflict at hand, much less in distinguishing between the various Somali parties in play, “Escape” is a wildly inadequate history lesson — it’s a silly blockbuster after all. More offensive is the film’s eagerness to whittle one nation’s traumatic episode into a setting for confectionary escapades.
  54. Found
    While the young women harbor overlapping questions, Found makes it clear they also have yearnings unique to them.
  55. Dune: Part One
    The designs and textures of the movie’s various worlds and their inhabitants are arresting, filigreed and meaningful, with characters and their environments in sync.
  56. The French Dispatch
    Anderson expresses a fan’s zeal and a collector’s greed for both canonical works and weird odds and ends, a love for old modernisms that is undogmatic and unsentimental. Which is not to say unfeeling.
  57. Night Teeth
    A strangely listless vampire tale that unspools with some style and precious little sense.
  58. All About My Sisters
    A film bristling with the kind of familial rancor that usually only emerges behind closed doors.
  59. Prism
    Densely thoughtful, Prism has beautiful and poignant moments.
  60. Introducing, Selma Blair
    The greatest asset of the film is its ability to simulate the intimacy of disclosure, and Blair’s comfort with the camera — her actress-y will to entertain — makes her a uniquely endearing subject.
  61. Son of Monarchs
    The film’s rich imagery will be imprinted in your memory, returning to you in dreams.
  62. Convergence: Courage in a Crisis
    The critical edge of the film feels blunted by platitudes (“Opportunities are born from crises,” says Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization), not to mention the exhaustion viewers will likely feel in reliving early memories of the still-ongoing pandemic for nearly two hours.
  63. Fever Dream
    Lllosa’s sensually shot film takes the story of a mother facing strange danger and casts a spell that feels like being dropped into the character’s mind.
  64. Bergman Island
    It’s a movie that isn’t quite sure whether it wants to be one, or which one it wants to be. Which makes it feel like more than just a movie.
  65. The Velvet Underground
    As a documentary, it’s wonderfully informative. It’s also a jagged and powerful work of art in its own right, one that turns archaeology into prophecy.
  66. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
    Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is a perfect entry point into Hamaguchi’s work. Not every episode works equally well or hits as hard, but both times I watched this movie, I found something to admire, consider, argue with and weep over.
  67. Halloween Kills
    An indolent, narratively impoverished mess that substitutes corpses for characters and slogans for dialogue.
  68. Suzanna Andler
    It’s a test of patience to watch these glass figurines discuss their romantic entanglements, the doll house on the Riviera that they will maybe rent, the bourgeois marriages they will maybe leave. Even the camera seems bored, as if it might wander off.
  69. Held for Ransom
    Should you be willing to overlook certain intrinsic difficulties, Held for Ransom is a surprisingly thoughtful hostage drama given the blunt meatheadedness of its title.
  70. The Trip
    The Trip is occasionally fun, but other films have handled gleeful gore and psychological torture with a far more skillful touch.
  71. Luzzu
    Malta’s views are arresting, but the images Camilleri chooses would never be found in a travel brochure. In his subtle, vérité approach, he captures something special — not one man’s crisis, but a community’s culture.
  72. Needle in a Timestack
    [A] sluggish, blandly slick time-travel romance.
  73. Hard Luck Love Song
    Corsbie has filmmaking energy to spare but also makes many undergrad errors.
  74. The Last Duel
    The movie is weirdly entertaining, but the world it presents, despite its flourishes of comedy, is cold, hard and unforgiving.
  75. South of Heaven
    The execution is at once laconic and nonsensical.
  76. Lamb
    Slow-moving and inarguably nutty, Lamb nevertheless wields its atavistic power with the straightest of faces, helped in no small measure by an Oscar-worthy cast of farm animals.
  77. The Rescue
    The mechanics of the operation boggle the mind, and in presenting them so elegantly, Vasarhelyi and Chin offer more edge-of-your-seat drama than most thrillers — certainly enough to make the Hollywood version in the works from Ron Howard feel surplus to requirements before cameras have even rolled.
  78. Mass
    The movie lacks the gut punch of live theater, the thrill or discomfort of watching people show their feelings in real time. But as cinema, it demonstrates the effectiveness of simplicity. A well-written script and an exemplary cast can still produce a movie worth watching.
  79. Pharma Bro
    Hodge is not always on Shkreli’s side, but he appears convinced he’s made a well-rounded portrait, as opposed to a dubious, bottom-feeding, bro-to-bro testimonial.
  80. Distancing Socially
    It’s fine that nothing major happens in this charmless quaran-com; it is concerning, however, that neither the audience nor the actors, sitting stiffly behind their screens, are given reason to care.
  81. Knocking
    The film does strike one long, nerve-jangling note, but the style leaves Molly with nowhere to run.
  82. Golden Voices
    Job tensions hammer at the fault lines of the couple’s marriage, but the movie maintains an understated “I love ya, tomorrow” tone. A pleasant sit — the kind of picture that’s moving, but not too moving.
  83. There's Someone Inside Your House
    In trying to have it both ways, Brice has created a messy, overstuffed parody of moral policing that squanders the promise of its cleverly executed opening.
  84. Ascension
    This aestheticization of Chinese society doesn’t exactly sit well with this viewer: one wonders if this counts as a kind of tourism.
  85. Justin Bieber: Our World
    Alternating like clockwork between live numbers and soft insight dulls the film’s rhythm, diminishing the excitement it’s going for as it counts down the days to showtime.
  86. Jacinta
    This is not a happy story. The lucidity with which these subjects speak to their own mistakes and sorrows will leave you haunted.
  87. The Manor
    Despite some flat cinematography and borderline goofy special effects, The Manor gives us a distinctive 70-year-old woman as its protagonist and a twisty ending sure to polarize.
  88. Madres
    A subdued score and some by-the-book camerawork can make this urgent story drag, but what it lacks in sting it makes up for with an original script (by Marcella Ochoa and Mario Miscione) and a ferociously pregnant protagonist who would make the “Fargo” character Marge Gunderson proud.
  89. V/H/S/94
    I suppose it doesn’t cohere into anything more than the sum of its parts. But this is the first time I’ve felt the anthology horror format really worked, and gosh, the parts are really good.
  90. Britney Vs. Spears
    Britney vs Spears underscores how tricky it is to make a credible documentary about a celebrity under duress without repeating many of the gestures that treat fame as the sine qua non of American culture.
  91. The Addams Family 2
    Where it could lean into the typically bone-dry Addams family humor, this film more often relies on poop jokes, explosions and the musical talents of Snoop Dogg. It’s sure to entertain little ones, but parents may find themselves itching for something more impish.
  92. Enormous: The Gorge Story
    [A] friendly and entirely uncritical documentary.
  93. Coming Home in the Dark
    While the whole thing is ruthlessly well done, it also sometimes seems to lean into a kind of moral relativism.
  94. Falling for Figaro
    [A] thoroughly generic and often monotonous romance.
  95. Mayday
    For a film about misandrist revolutionaries, Mayday lacks the courage of its convictions — it sets up boogeymen as targets only to shoot them point blank, in broad daylight.
  96. Bingo Hell
    Despite the generally humorous vibe, Bingo Hell quietly accumulates an unignorable pathos.
  97. Black as Night
    The special effects are fine, if unremarkable, but the actors are into it and the script manages to be thoughtful without dampening the fun.
  98. Karen Dalton: In My Own Time
    An excellent documentary directed by Richard Peete and Robert Yapkowitz.
  99. The Many Saints of Newark
    In the end, the best thing about “The Many Saints of Newark” is that it makes you think about “The Sopranos,” but that’s also the worst thing about it.
  100. Venom: Let There Be Carnage
    Let There Be Carnage flourishes in high-energy moments and feeds off low expectations; it’s the mold in the Avengers’ shower.
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