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. China Heavyweight
    Illustrating the film's rags-to-ring narrative with panoramic mountain views and compact shots of young bodies punching their way up the food chain, Mr. Sun straddles ancient and modern, tranquillity and turmoil, with equal sureness.
  2. Sleeper
    There are some comparatively calm spots in the film, here and there, but they don't count. If anything, they allow you to catch your breath. Sleeper is terrific.
  3. Jiro Dreams of Sushi
    Despite foodie-baiting close-ups of nigiri sushi brushed with soy sauce, and montages of skillful food prep, the film falls short as a satisfying exploration of craft. Like many other such portraits, it wastes valuable time declaring its subject's excellence that could be spent fleshing out demonstrations, explanations, context.
  4. Longlegs
    As chilling and stylish as it is, Longlegs is a frustrating pleasure.
  5. The Dark Horse
    The movie partly resists the temptation to follow a predictable feel-good route to a fairy-tale ending. That said, it has enough conveniently timed little triumphs to send up warning signs.
  6. Seduced and Abandoned
    Seduced and Abandoned may be the year’s most entertaining put-on.
  7. Burden of Dreams
    One of the most candid, most fascinating portraits ever made of a motion picture director at work.
  8. The Gift
    Underneath it all, The Gift is a merciless critique of an amoral corporate culture in which the ends justify the means, and lying and cheating are O.K., as long as they’re not found out.
  9. Every Body
    The film benefits from its choice of subjects, as Wall, Gallo and Weigel are all endearing and deeply informed.
  10. Paper Moon
    Peter Bogdanovich and his screenwriter, Alvin Sargent, who adapted Joe David Brown's novel, have set out to make a bittersweet comedy that is both in the style of thirties movies and about the thirties. They evoke the time (1936) and the place (rural Kansas and Missouri) so convincingly that their rather sweet formula story seems completely inadequate, even fraudulent.
  11. Donnie Brasco
    Crackling good... the best crime movie in a long while.
  12. Dear Mr. Brody
    Dear Mr. Brody invites timely thoughts about the wealthy and income disparity.
  13. I Killed My Mother
    As a director, Mr. Dolan has a freewheeling style, and he’s self-dramatizing enough to want to call attention to it without being too much of a visual show-off.
  14. Victoria
    Victoria is a sensational cinematic stunt.
  15. You Will Die At Twenty
    Avoiding didactic conclusions or pat answers, Alala’s film questions blind belief but finds boundless enchantment in every frame.
  16. Courage Under Fire
    Despite its underlying predictability, Courage Under Fire manages warmth, intelligence and a healthy share of surprises.
  17. Mugabe and the White African
    The courses of colonialism and racial strife were radically different in America and Australia than they were in Africa. That doesn't make Mr. Freeth's cause any less just, but it does mean that Mugabe and the White African needs to be approached with care.
  18. Bunny Lake Is Missing
    The movie has its share of logical inconsistencies, although to dwell on them is to ignore its deliberate ambiguities and considerable panache.
  19. Broker
    Kore-Eda, remarkably, doesn’t counterfeit a happy ending, but he also refuses despair. He’s an honest broker of heartbreak.
  20. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
    As the recreated picture of one of our coldest blows in this war and as a drama of personal heroism, it is nigh the best yet made in Hollywood.
  21. Queen of Earth
    Ms. Waterston, a Modigliani in motion and often in black, easily holds your attention, but it is Ms. Moss, with her intimate expressivity, who annihilates you from first tear to last crushing laugh.
  22. Paddington
    In stark contrast to their furry, blundering star, the makers of Paddington have colored so carefully inside the lines that any possibility of surprise or subversion is effectively throttled.
  23. Women Talking
    The root of Protestantism, after all, is protest — against arbitrary and unaccountable authority in the name of a higher truth. Women Talking reawakens that idea and applies it, with precision and passion, to our own time and circumstances. The women don’t want pity or revenge. They want a better world. Why not listen?
  24. Mississippi Grind
    Mississippi Grind itself may be a bit of a throwback to the lived-in, character-driven, landscape-besotted films of the 1970s, but it’s less a pastiche or a homage than the cinematic equivalent of a classic song, expertly covered.
  25. The League
    This history has surely been well-covered elsewhere, but The League recounts it movingly.
  26. The Virgin Suicides
    Except perhaps for Lux, who, like The Virgin Suicides itself, is a hothouse flower perishing for want of sunshine and fresh air.
  27. Mother of George
    This is not a fable of assimilation or alienation, but rather the keenly observed story of two people seeking guidance in painful and complicated circumstances.
  28. Wetlands
    The tone is breezy, bright and brash, vividly illuminated by Ms. Juri’s extraordinarily unprotected and utterly fearless performance.
  29. Fly Away Home
    Rekindling the delicacy and invigorating naturalness he brought to "The Black Stallion," and again helped immensely by the radiant cinematography of Caleb Deschanel, Ballard turns a potentially treacly children's film into an exhilarating '90s fable.
  30. Pollock
    May be the first movie about a painter to transcend the gushy clichés found in movies that try to unravel the mysteries of artistic creation.
  31. Our Song
    So unlike most Hollywood coming-of-age stories as to seem downright revolutionary.
  32. Crimes and Misdemeanors
    Mr. Allen's most securely serious and funny film to date.
  33. A Christmas Story
    Though Mr. Billingsley, Mr. Gavin, Miss Dillon and the actress who plays Ralphie's school teacher are all very able, they are less funny than actors in a television situation comedy that one has chosen to watch with the sound turned off.
  34. 51 Birch Street
    Mr. Block has put his parents’ life, and his own, into this film with such warmth and candor that it may take more than one viewing to recognize it as a work of art.
  35. Alamar (To the Sea)
    The characters in Alamar may be playing versions of themselves, but the writer, editor and director Pedro González-Rubio has constructed a film in which the journey has an overarching mythic resonance that evokes fables from "Robinson Crusoe" to "The Old Man and the Sea."
  36. Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness
    It is a rich, beautifully organized and illustrated modern history of Eastern European Jewry examined through the life and work of the author, born Sholem Rabinovich in Pereyaslav (near Kiev) in 1859.
  37. Las Acacias
    The very definition of modest, Las Acacias articulates emotional transformation with simplicity and grace. Rarely has a film managed to say so much while saying so little.
  38. A River Changes Course
    This human story is profound enough to stand on its own.
  39. Expedition to the End of the World
    The film is essentially an evolved hybrid of global environmental documentary and the group-trip experiments of reality television. Its biggest step onto unfamiliar terrain might be its ambivalent ending, conveying uncertainty about what can or should be done next.
  40. Icaros: A Vision
    You may find this sparse film maddeningly elusive, but chances are you’ll come out of it with your head spinning, in a good way.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Masque of the Red Death
    The film is vulgar, naive and highly amusing, and it is played with gusto by Mr. Price, Hazel Court and Jane Asher. As for Mr. Corman, he has let his imagination run riot upon a mobile decor singular for its primary color scheme. The result may be loud, but it looks like a real movie. On its level, it is astonishingly good.
  42. Let It Be Morning
    Despite flashes of droll humor, the film builds up an undercurrent of suspense, with the prospect of violence always near. Kolirin (the movie version of “The Band’s Visit”) orchestrates the proceedings with confidence and significant subtlety, never letting political diagnoses overwhelm character.
  43. The Graduates
    Peterson’s script is frustratingly single-note and occasionally bends toward unearned sentimentality. Still, The Graduates feels true to its milieu; its emotional clarity impressive given the loaded subject matter and the film’s subdued style.
  44. Silver Dollar Road
    Amid the looming threats to a cherished home, Peck’s accomplishment is to let the Reels family own their emotional space.
  45. Mrs. Miniver
    Certainly it is the finest film yet made about the present war, and a most exalting tribute to the British, who have taken it gallantly.
  46. Wild Tales
    Mr. Szifron creates inhabited worlds with comic timing and visual flair, but you can hear him chortling as he shovels his people into the grinder.
  47. Corpus Christi
    The idea that a charlatan might offer more solace than a real priest is a trite concept, but it’s one that Corpus Christi portrays with conviction. The movie rests on the shoulders of Bielenia — or rather, in his eyes, which photograph as a chilling gray.
  48. Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice
    The political intelligence and matter-of-fact feminism that emerge in this portrait are among its most intriguing aspects. Her cleareyed, down-to-earth thoughts on her profession, her family and American culture (musical and otherwise) make her someone you want to know better.
  49. Buoyancy
    There is evil and it helps keep the world running, our clothes and food coming. This is the greatest, most difficult, most unspeakable violence laid bare in Rathjen’s measured, insistently political movie.
  50. Stand and Deliver
    Mr. Olmos seems to be living and breathing this role rather than merely playing it, and his enthusiasm really catches on.
  51. The Royal Hotel
    Inspired by Pete Gleeson’s 2016 documentary about two Finnish backpackers, “Hotel Coolgardie,” The Royal Hotel is after something more subtle than pure horror.
  52. Kramer vs. Kramer
    Kramer vs. Kramer is densely packed with such beautifully observed detail. It is also superbly acted by its supporting cast, including Jane Alexander, Howard Duff and George Coe.
  53. The Story of Film: A New Generation
    Cousins’s assessments offer plenty to argue with, but it’s possible to enjoy “A New Generation” without agreeing that “Booksmart” “extends the world of film comedy,” as he claims, or that a shot in “It Follows” merits comparison to the camerawork in Michael Snow’s landmark experimental film “La Région Centrale.”
  54. Best of Enemies
    Is this chronicle of their combat an occasion for nostalgia or a cautionary tale? The film’s perfectly sensible, not entirely satisfying answer is “both.”
  55. Buzzard
    With its casual deadpan attitude, Buzzard offers a nightmare portrait of arrested development and anomie for the age of inequality.
  56. WarGames
    An entertaining movie that, like a video game once played, tends to disappear from one's memory bank as soon as it's finished.
  57. Blanquita
    Unfolding like a David Fincheresque procedural and doused in gloomy grays and blues, the film, by the writer and director Fernando Guzzoni, may seem provocative to some in the context of #MeToo and its popular mantra to “believe women.”
  58. 24 Frames
    24 Frames can’t help but be affecting because it is Kiarostami’s final movie. But it’s intellectually uninvolving, and its technical limitations prove frustrating.
  59. God's Country
    The movie works best when it doesn’t over-explain and instead lets the land and the characters, the wide open spaces and the performances — especially Newton’s meticulously controlled turn — speak for themselves.
  60. Shanghai Triad
    However endlessly film makers around the world have told that story, Mr. Zhang reimagines it with immense grace and turns it into a deeply felt tragedy.
  61. Hairspray
    The actors are best when they avoid exaggeration and remain weirdly sincere. That way, they do nothing to break the vibrant, even hallucinogenic spell of Mr. Waters's nostalgia.
  62. Grass
    When the writer opts to just let things be, the movie is at its most content.
  63. Apolonia, Apolonia
    Apolonia, Apolonia is beguiling as a portrait of women with ambition, but also bittersweet.
  64. Red Riding Trilogy
    The Red Riding trilogy looks fine blown up on the big screen, though it’s easier to watch at home, where the remote offers fast relief from a grim fiction that, with its murky palette and unyielding cruelty, serves up a nihilistic vision that is unyielding, hermetic, unpersuasive and finally self-indulgent.
  65. The Three Musketeers
    Mr. Lester's interpretation of The Three Musketeers looks like an evening in a bump-o-car arena, with magnificently costumed people in place of cars. The adventures are less swashbuckle than slapstick.
  66. Personal Shopper
    Personal Shopper is sleek and spooky, seductive and suspenseful. It flirts with silliness, as ghost stories do. And also with heartbreak.
  67. Open Hearts
    Until the end, when it begins to go soft, the movie takes two strands of soap opera convention -- a life-changing accident and an adulterous affair -- and spins their suds into gold.
  68. 8 Mile
    What Mr. Hanson has done with 8 Mile is make a pop movie instead of a movie about pop. There's nothing disreputable about this.
  69. A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake
    A cinematic tone poem as much as a biography.
  70. Once Were Warriors
    A brutally effective family drama. Rough around the edges and crudely obvious at times, it still presents a raw, disturbing story of domestic strife.
  71. In Search of Memory
    It is an engrossing portrait all the same, a generous introduction to someone worth knowing, who knows an awful lot.
  72. Neighboring Sounds
    With his sound designer, Pablo Lamar, Mr. Mendonça has created the aural landscape of a horror movie. And, for much of its running time, a thriller without a plot.
  73. The Ghost Writer
    Mr. Polanski’s work with his performers is consistently subtle even when the performances seem anything but, which is true of this very fine film from welcome start to finish.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Ailey
    Like Ailey’s dances, the documentary leaves you swimming in sensation.
  75. The Teacher
    Ms. Maurery has great fun with the character, a tricky part because Maria nearly always maintains a kindhearted veneer, even at her most venal.
  76. Tatami
    The mounting tensions of these moving parts — and steely performances by Mandi and Amir — make for an engrossing thriller fueled by female rage.
  77. Babyteeth
    The movie has texture but no depth, tears but no snot. Who are these people, I kept wondering.
  78. The Jungle Book
    While this The Jungle Book is lightly diverting, it is also disappointing, partly because it feels like a pumped-up version of Disney’s 1967 animated film, with more action and less sweetness. It also feels strangely removed from our moment.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Monterey Pop
    It is possible that the way to a new kind of musical—using some of the talent and energy of what is still the most lively contemporary medium—may begin with just this kind of musical performance documentary.
  80. Zulu
    If you're not too squeamish at the sight of slaughter and blood and can keep your mind fixed on the notion that there was something heroic and strong about British colonial expansion in the 19th century, you may find a great deal of excitement in this robustly Kiplingesque film.
  81. Human Nature
    Every “Oh wow” in Human Nature is matched by an “Oh no” somewhere down the line. Together, these two competing emotions — excitement and unease — make for one pretty fascinating documentary.
  82. Slalom
    The writer and director, Charlène Favier, had previous experience as a competitive skier, and she is attentive to the textures of mountainside sports and how abuse plays out in this setting.
  83. Guys and Dolls
    It's as tinny and tawny and terrific as any hot-cha musical film you'll ever see.
  84. The Hunting Ground
    What cuts through the filmmaking clutter are the young women and men who share their accounts of abuse by both their attackers and their schools.
  85. Prosecuting Evil
    The main interest lies with Ferencz himself, who comes across as thoughtful, principled and engaging in a film that, in keeping with his demeanor, is a modest profile rather than a sprawling portrait.
  86. While We're Young
    This film, Mr. Baumbach’s movie, mostly brings a light touch and a forgiving gloss to its own self-consciousness. It is not afraid to be implicated in the confusion — in the self-involvement, the anxiety, the pettiness — it depicts. But there are also areas where it feels soft and compromised, where the subtlety and clarity of Mr. Baumbach’s vision seem to desert him.
  87. Inu-oh
    Even as Yuasa’s approach changes from section to section — as he plays with texture, volume and hue and gently shifts the balance between the figurative and the abstract — his extraordinary touch remains evident in each line and in every eye-popping swirl.
  88. Urchin
    Urchin doesn’t break the mold, but it’s a confident, quietly affecting drama that strikes above the standard character study.
  89. 12:08 East of Bucharest
    Though it is modest, almost anecdotal, in scale, 12:08 East of Bucharest is also characterized by a precise and sneaky formal wit.
  90. Shut Up & Sing
    The movie offers a revealing case study of the relationship between politics, celebrity and the media in today’s polarized social climate.
  91. The Taste of Tea
    A bit of patience is required to get through The Taste of Tea, but patience is often rewarded, and it certainly is by this droll and oddly touching film.
  92. Mediterranea
    This calm, hardheaded film never sacrifices its toughness for a swooning, misty-eyed moment of hope.
  93. Miss Sharon Jones!
    When [Ms. Jones] bounds onstage with a holler and a howl — and diction that nails every last word to the melody — it’s clear she deserves that exclamation point in the title. Even if the movie around her sometimes struggles to do the same.
  94. Jockey
    The light is beautiful in Jockey, an enjoyable old-warrior movie with a surprising sting, even if the bones and story are creaky.
  95. The Verdict
    A solidly old-fashioned courtroom drama such as The Verdict could have gotten by with a serious, measured performance from its leading man, or it could have worked well with a dazzling movie-star turn. The fact that Paul Newman delivers both makes a clever, suspenseful, entertaining movie even better.
  96. Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius)
    The movie gets lost in the gulf between standard, if illuminating, biography and roiling existential crisis.
  97. Dallas Buyers Club
    There is warmth and intelligence here, and undeniable sincerity, but also a determination, in the face of much painful and fascinating history, to play it safe.
  98. Better Man
    Gracey paints a fabulously entertaining and touching picture of an insecure, complicated man hauling himself from a quicksand of grasping fans, greedy impresarios, unresolved addictions and father-son dysfunction.
  99. Prophet's Prey
    Ms. Berg has created an unnerving, sometimes infuriating documentary. She makes smart choices throughout as she weaves together this chronicle of faith and abuse.
  100. Notre musique
    Mr. Godard treads on dangerous ground by linking the historical suffering of Jews and the Palestinians, but his sympathy for both people is so manifest, his sense of history so deep, that the film defies reductive readings.
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