The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,271 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 20271
  2. Mixed: 8,430 out of 20271
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20271
20271 movie reviews
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  1. 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.
  2. Tempestad
    It’s an artful and lyrical assembly.
  3. Barbarosa
    The best western in a long while is Barbarosa, a film that uses one American legend, Willie Nelson, to create another.
  4. Frankenstein
    Lush, melodramatic, sweepingly romantic and achingly emotional, it is a tale of fathers and sons, of lovers and outcasts, of men as the true monsters.
  5. Sorry to Bother You
    Mr. Riley isn’t constructing yet another postmodern playhouse out of borrowings and allusions. He’s building a raft, and steering it straight into the foaming rapids of racism, economic injustice and cultural conflict.
  6. The Case Against 8
    The Case Against 8 functions as a valuable record of the nuts-and-bolts conference room side of advocacy — an aspect of civil rights work not often seen on screen.
  7. Midnight Run
    Mr. De Niro and Mr. Grodin are lunatic delights, which is somewhat more than can be said for the movie, whose mechanics keep getting in the way of the performances. [20 July 1988, p.C15]
    • The New York Times
  8. The Devil Came on Horseback
    Brutal, urgent, devastating -- the documentary The Devil Came on Horseback demands to be seen as soon as possible and by as many viewers as possible.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Teza
    Has all the hallmarks of a career summation -- and early on it seems fated to collapse beneath the weight of its ambitions. Instead, it soars, thanks to Mr. Gerima’s bracingly direct storytelling.
  10. A Season in France
    While the story plays a bit with the notion of the supernatural, the spirit foregrounded here is more tangible: an ominous sense of restlessness and curtailed dreams.
  11. Those Who Remained
    Those Who Remained leaves much unsaid about their pasts, sometimes at the risk of seeming coy (the word “Jewish” is never spoken). But Hajduk and Szoke are strong performers.
  12. The Human Factor
    The Human Factor presents a cogent and involving view of the Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, mainly from 1991 until the end of Bill Clinton’s first term, told through the recollections of United States negotiators charged with brokering a peace.
  13. Moby Dick
    This is the third time Melville's story has been put upon the screen. There is no need for another, because it cannot be done better, more beautifully or excitingly again.
  14. The Great Lillian Hall
    Like many of the best golden-age melodramas, this HBO film fully commits to both unabashed emotion and a complicated female lead, a role filled by Jessica Lange with a finely tuned mix of showmanship and nuance.
  15. All That Heaven Allows
    Solid and sensible drama plainly had to give way to outright emotional bulldozing and a paving of easy clichés.
  16. 1917
    A carefully organized and sanitized war picture from Sam Mendes that turns one of the most catastrophic episodes in modern times into an exercise in preening showmanship.
  17. A Simple Life
    Ms. Hui, a rare successful female director in the Hong Kong film industry, drew her story from real events, and the movie retains a tonic flavor of the everyday: its drama unfolds simply, without explosive moments but not without emotion. She and her two excellent leads keep the film buoyant.
  18. Kedi
    The movie is replete with ingeniously constructed mini-narratives, including a turf war. The mesmerizing score by Kira Fontana, interspersed with well-chosen Turkish pop, is a real asset.
  19. Love Exposure
    Merging the sacred and the profane, the bloody and the batty, Love Exposure tunnels into serious topics - warped parenting, sexual intolerance and the way religious cults enslave damaged souls - with a hilariously blasphemous shovel.
  20. Waste Land
    "We are not pickers of garbage; we are pickers of recyclable materials," Tião, an impoverished Brazilian catadore, or trash picker, declares to a talk-show host in Lucy Walker's inspiring documentary Waste Land.
  21. Goldstone
    Its sociopolitical concerns — primarily around indigenous land rights — are muted and muddled by a script that favors manly grunting and moody looks over clarifying dialogue. Riven with racism and sharp bursts of violence, Goldstone nevertheless has a rough, desolate beauty.
  22. Limbo
    Sen, who also handled both the black-and-white cinematography and the editing, has a terrific eye for shot composition and sets a deliberate pace that feels implacable rather than merely slow.
  23. Hitler's Hollywood
    The most charged implication of Hitler’s Hollywood is that artistry enabled the Third Reich.
  24. Gaslight
    Prepare yourselves rather for a lengthy and restless stretch on tenterhooks.
  25. 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.
  26. Murderous Maids
    Ms. Testud's performance, which earned her a César, the French Oscar, for most promising actress, is the source of the movie's lingering, troubling power.
  27. Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.
    Morris, instead of evoking the solemnity that surrounds most films that touch on the Holocaust, has directed Mr. Death as the blackest of comedies.
  28. Last Orders
    Like finding that perfect stage of moderate drunkenness in which the senses are sharpened rather than dulled, and time passes with leisurely grace.
  29. Ça commence aujourd'hui
    Strikes a difficult and necessary moral balance, refusing to succumb to hopelessness but also refusing to rule it out.
  30. Son frère
    Stringent, clinical and almost unbearably moving.
  31. Afghan Star
    The movie uses the talent show Afghan Star as a prism through which to examine the fragmented tribal culture of Afghanistan as reflected in the backgrounds of four finalists (two of them women) and the public responses to their performances.
  32. The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear
    It is startling that a three-hour film dealing largely with the history of the Middle East should find no time to mention either the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the role of oil in the region. And it is more than a little unsatisfying to see the complex history of American conservatism reduced to the dreams and schemes of a handful of intellectuals.
  33. The Aura
    Mr. Bielinsky, in what would sadly be his last film, demonstrates a mastery of the form that is downright scary.
  34. Paradise: Hope
    Instead of being contemptuous and sardonic, the portrait of inchoate adolescent longing in Paradise: Hope is poignant.
  35. Logan Lucky
    Logan Lucky is a terrific movie. That’s a matter of skill, and maybe also of luck. But mostly it’s a matter of generosity.
  36. James and the Giant Peach
    A technological marvel, arch and innovative with a daringly offbeat visual conception. But it's also a strenuously artful film with a macabre edge that may scare small children. And beyond that, it lacks a clear idea of who its audience might be.
  37. The Starling Girl
    A tender tale, The Starling Girl twirls through a spate of clichés — many surround Jem’s relationship to her alcoholic father, Paul (Jimmi Simpson) — but sticks the landing thanks to Parmet’s rapt attention to the shifting desires of her central character.
  38. High Life
    Too often the ideas here, visual and otherwise, feel haphazard — outer and inner space, Pattinson’s head, sexual taboo, apocalypse now or maybe then — more like material for a vision board than a fully realized vision.
  39. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
    Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is an American comedy of the sort of vitality that dazzles European film critics and we take for granted. It's full of attachments and associations to very particular times and places, even in the various regional accents of its characters. It's beautifully written (by Robert Getchell) and acted, but it's not especially neatly tailored. [29 Jan 1975]
  40. Nosferatu
    Setting aside some gratuitous jump scares, Eggers has now made a Dracula movie that’s more than an exercise, more than an assertion of talent. There’s a vision at work.
  41. The Blue Trail
    Alas, Tereza, whose interior life remains largely obscured from start to finish, isn’t a compelling vessel for whatever Mascaro is trying to do in this movie. And, as it drifts from one place to another, one encounter to another, one sketchy idea to another, so may your attention.
  42. Missing
    Missing is Mr. Costa-Gavras's most beautifully achieved political melodrama to date, a suspense-thriller of real cinematic style, acted with immense authority by Jack Lemmon, as Charles Horman's father, Ed Horman, and Sissy Spacek as Charles's wife, Beth.
  43. The Betrayal - Nerakhoon
    The result is imperfect, but its roughness is entirely consistent with the way the filmmakers understand the traumatic experiences of displacement, loss and deprivation.
  44. 2046
    Like Hitchcock, Mr. Wong is at once a voyeur and fetishist par excellence.
  45. The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart
    Grooving through the decades, this entertaining documentary aspires to prove that the Bee Gees were more than a hitmaker for disco nightclubs. Rather, Barry, Maurice and Robin were master songwriters and chameleons, continually reinventing themselves to harmonize with the times.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Emitaï
    It is a cool, balanced, proportionate spirit, affectionate but unillusioned, and wonderfully suited to the intricacies (and the idiosyncracies) of the subject matter. Sembene does not grab you; he engages you.
  47. A Quiet Passion
    Mr. Davies, whose work often blends public history and private memory, possesses a poetic sensibility perfectly suited to his subject and a deep, idiosyncratic intuition about what might have made her tick.
  48. My Darling Vivian
    The film, ultimately, still lacks Liberto’s own sense of agency.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Nothing Sacred
    Briskly paced under the direction of William Wellman, the caustic comedy by Ben Hecht treads harshly on many a taboo. [16 May 1999, p.5]
    • The New York Times
  50. Pusher II: With Blood On My Hands
    Where "Pusher" worked fresh texture and authenticity into a classic noir template, Pusher II reaches toward the mode of hyperrealist allegory perfected by the Dardenne brothers.
  51. Abortion: Stories Women Tell
    What Ms. Tragos succeeds in illustrating is that if you take away the signs and listen to the stories, there is little difference between women on opposite sides of the debate — at least in the region she covers.
  52. Tickling Giants
    There’s a lot to laugh at, and to learn from, in Tickling Giants, a documentary that starts off by telling the story of one man and ends up speaking volumes about satire, freedom of expression and political pressure.
  53. A Man of Integrity
    Employing minimal background music and a bleak, blue-gray color palette, Rasoulof evokes a sense of nihilism that is as suffocating as it is affecting.
  54. Kung Fu Hustle
    For all its punches, kicks, whacks and thumps, the movie does not have much impact, and for all its affectionate nostalgia, it produces a strange kind of amnesia. It knocks the sense right out of your head, and its own as well.
  55. Apollo 13
    You can know every glitch that made this such a dangerous mission, and Apollo 13 will still have you by the throat.
  56. Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan
    The director Julien Temple — who has excellent documentaries on the Sex Pistols, Joe Strummer and other galvanic musicians under his belt — is very good at this sort of thing.
  57. Meru
    Blindingly beautiful and meticulously assembled by the award-winning editor Bob Eisenhardt, Meru easily makes you forget that what you are watching is completely bananas.
  58. The Personal History of David Copperfield
    Restructuring some story arcs and jettisoning others, Iannucci and his collaborator, Simon Blackwell, have created a souped-up, trimmed-down adaptation so fleet and entertaining that its cleverness doesn’t immediately register.
  59. Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It
    Moreno is given full rein of her story, which doubles as a case study in the highs and lows of showbiz for a woman of color.
  60. Clemency
    Woodard’s performance gathers its astonishing force incrementally, in subtle choices and inflections that you might not even register as actorly decisions.
  61. Command and Control
    The film effectively recreates the sense of confusion over how to try to contain the leak and what might happen if the fuel ignited.
  62. Fancy Dance
    Tremblay’s film is not always graceful — the dialogue and acting can be stilted, and one hopes for a little more formal rigor — but it’s a strong debut undergirded by a palpably real emotional core and an un-showy sense of the reality of reservation life.
  63. Panic
    A sneaky and smart film noir.
  64. My Own Private Idaho
    The film itself is invigorating - written, directed, and acted with enormous insight and comic elan. [27 Sept 1991]
    • The New York Times
  65. The Aviator
    Visually sumptuous if disappointingly hollow account of Hughes's early life.
  66. Island of the Hungry Ghosts
    Ethereal, intensely moving.
  67. A Secret Love
    It is a compliment that A Secret Love, which runs under an hour and a half, could stand to be longer, with an expanded portrait of Terry and Pat’s early life as a couple.
  68. Till
    Chukwu revisits the past while doing something extremely difficult. She makes this grim American history insistently of the moment — and she does so by stripping the story down to its raw, harrowing emotional core.
  69. Ratcatcher
    The power of Ratcatcher comes from its hushed lyricism and Ms. Ramsay's talent for conveying emotional complexity.
  70. A Talking Picture
    In both its intellectual reach and the elegant simplicity of its form, A Talking Picture bears resemblance to Andrei Sokurov's "Russian Ark."
    • 77 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Magnificent Obsession
    Playing his first major role, the strapping, manly Mr. Hudson gives a fine, direct account of himself, in the film's only real surprise. Otherwise, Universal has delivered the goods—or good—exactly as prescribed by the doctor.
  72. The Big Red One
    The Big Red One, for all its uncompromising brutality, is viscerally, angrily alive. Fuller was lucky to survive the war. It is our good fortune that this film, a tribute to his luck (and to those who did not share it), has come back to life.
  73. Hukkle
    It works just fine as a sophisticated wildlife documentary with a submerged narrative. But if you enjoy the challenge of solving difficult mysteries, Hukkle presents a tantalizing case waiting to be cracked.
  74. Last Tango in Paris
    Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris is a beautiful, courageous, foolish, romantic, and reckless film.
  75. Above and Below
    Mr. Steiner’s tightly interconnected documentary, with transporting shots, visits people on the margins in the United States.
  76. Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience
    Mr. Malick presents these events as if he had drawn them not from his mind but from some repository of celestial memory. Which may be to say that Voyage of Time ultimately proves his point about the way the universe and human consciousness mirror each other. But it’s a point that might have been more powerful if he had left it unspoken.
  77. Legion of Brothers
    You’ll have to wade through several topics to get to the heart of Legion of Brothers, but once you’re there, some intense stories make the effort worthwhile.
  78. Ernie & Joe: Crisis Cops
    As promising as Ernie and Joe’s program may seem, there is no insight into whether the nation’s law enforcement agencies are prioritizing these humane methods.
  79. White Noise
    Close observation can illuminate contradictions, and Lombroso, semi-edifyingly, catches his subjects in moments of opportunism or hypocrisy, even if those aren’t much of a trade for spending 90 minutes in this company.
  80. Abuse of Weakness
    It is hard to imagine that any other actress could muster the stubborn ferocity that Isabelle Huppert brings to the role of Maud.
  81. Obsession
    Barker shows real promise as a horror storyteller; his instincts about when to hold back and when to plunge the knife are scalpel sharp. If only the sexual politics at play in Obsession didn’t feel so callow.
  82. Christmas, Again
    This is a Christmas movie in which magic exists largely on the periphery, and that is just the right mix of chilly and sweet.
  83. Asia
    Asia and Vika struggle to emerge as full-fleshed characters from the movie’s dull, blue-grey frames, while the script rushes through provocative plot turns in its bleak procession toward a wrenching conclusion.
  84. KPop Demon Hunters
    The action sequences are fluid and immersive, the art is frequently striking and the music (catchy, if formulaic earworms) is a properly wielded and dynamic storytelling tool.
  85. Trapped
    Trapped is not a balanced analysis of the abortion debate; it makes its sympathies clear. But it is a powerful and persuasive rendering of a corner of women’s health care under siege.
  86. Have a Nice Day
    Leisurely and deliberate, intelligent and casually cruel, Have a Nice Day is a stone-cold gangster thriller whose violence unfolds in passionless bursts.
  87. Zero Days
    Zero Days has a similarly balanced outlook along with a critical political viewpoint that avoids hysteria and demagogy. Its strongest protest is against what Mr. Gibney sees as the dangers of excessive American secrecy.
  88. Nope
    There are some fascinating internal tensions within the movie, along with impeccably managed suspense, sharp jokes and a beguiling, unnerving atmosphere of all-around weirdness.
  89. Grandma, a Thousand Times
    Warmhearted and defiantly unsentimental, Grandma, a Thousand Times gains lightness from Teta's tart observations.
  90. The Misfits
    Mr. Huston's direction is dynamic, inventive and colorful. Mr. Gable is ironically vital. Miss Ritter, James Barton and Estelle Winwood are amusing in very minor roles, and Alex North has provided some good theme music. But the picture just doesn't come off.
  91. They'll Love Me When I'm Dead
    Neville was inspired by Josh Karp’s engrossing book “Orson Welles’s Last Movie,” which goes into greater detail than Neville can in 98 minutes. Karp also pays closer attention to Welles’s artistic process, which in the documentary can seem little more than pure chaos.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Shootist
    Mr. Siegel's lack of form and fidelity to his own story means that as the movie proceeds, even those things that are charming turn to lead.
  93. Finding Dory
    What “Dory” lacks in dazzling originality it more than makes up for in warmth, charm and good humor.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Rescue Dawn
    For the most part, Rescue Dawn is a marvel: a satisfying genre picture that challenges the viewer’s expectations.
  95. A Clockwork Orange
    It seems to me that by describing horror with such elegance and beauty, Kubrick has created a very disorienting but human comedy, not warm and lovable, but a terrible sum- up of where the world is at... Because it refuses to use the emotions conventionally, demanding instead that we keep a constant, intellectual grip on things, it's a most unusual--and disorienting--movie experience.
  96. No Way Out
    No Way Out has the exuberance of something freshly conceived. It's so effective, in fact, that when it's all over, you might want to sit through the beginning again just to see if the end is justified by the means. I suspect that it is.
  97. Human Flow
    What Mr. Ai seeks is to go far beyond the nightly news; he wants to give you a sense of the scale of the crisis, its terrifying, world-swallowing immensity. And so he jumps from one heartbreak to the next.
  98. Happy Feet
    While compromised by the uplift and affirmation that mainstream animation regurgitates like a mommy penguin, it also shows a remarkable persistence of vision. Even in a story about singing-and-dancing fat and feather, Mr. Miller can’t help but go dark and deep.
  99. The Weather Underground
    This terrifically smart and solid piece of filmmaking lets the former Weathermen, now in their 50's and older, speak into the camera and reveal a bit of their personal histories as well as what the peace movement meant to them.
  100. Facing the Music
    Often feels like two movies loosely sewn together. By far the most compelling of the two is its portrait of Ms. Boyd, a woman who for all her quirks and self-dramatizing flourishes, emerges as a noble spirit on the side of the angels.
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