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. White as Snow
    As satisfying as Huppert is, the movie dances on the pinpoint of de Laâge’s performance. The name Claire signifies light and clarity, and there’s a transparency to de Laâge’s portrayal of this innocent who remains thus while discovering a lavish sensuality.
  2. CODA
    The template of CODA — the title is also a term used to describe the hearing children of deaf adults — might be wearyingly familiar, but this warmhearted drama from Sian Heder opens up space for concerns that feel fresh.
  3. Free Guy
    Free Guy has charm, but there’s not much memorable in the same old quest, same old boss fight, then game over.
  4. Misha and the Wolves
    Misha and the Wolves plays best on first viewing, with its surprises intact.
  5. Pickpocket (Xiao Wu)
    As skillfully written and directed by Jia Zhang Ke, a product of the Beijing Film Academy who uses a nonprofessional cast, the cool-eyed Xiao Wu appears to be more than a relatively nonjudgmental portrait of an emotionally repressed young thief turned against the weight of conformity.
  6. Bix: 'Ain't None of Them Play Like Him Yet' (1981)
    The movie looks like a 40-year-old mix of talking-head and archival footage. What makes it extraordinary is the story it tells of an uncanny musician and his beautiful playing and songs.
  7. The Kissing Booth 3
    Like a scoop of vanilla ice cream atop scoops of chocolate and strawberry, The Kissing Booth 3 rounds out the sugary teen trilogy with a fitting, if bland, finale.
  8. Bring Your Own Brigade
    It’s a tough, smart, impressive movie, and one of its virtues is that Walker, a British transplant to Los Angeles, doesn’t seem to have figured it all out before she started shooting.
  9. What We Left Unfinished
    Ghani’s mode is less interrogative than associative. Her montage of film fragments illustrates and sometimes poetically belies the interviewees’ recollections, evoking the ambiguous and unresolved contours of collective memory.
  10. The Viewing Booth
    Though moderately compelling to bear witness to one individual’s objections in real time, The Viewing Booth touches on gloomy truths about spectatorship in the digital era that might have felt novel a decade ago.
  11. The Last Matinee
    Tipping his hat to the Italian thriller genre known as giallo, Contenti (who wrote the unfussy script with Manuel Facal) sets up a string of witty, highly specific slayings of audience members unaware they’re both voyeurs and prey.
  12. Whirlybird
    Drawing on an amazing video stockpile from the 1980s and ’90s, Whirlybird is an editing feat.
  13. Swan Song
    Kier is unfailingly captivating in the film, which makes it all the more bothersome that the film itself doesn’t match him.
  14. John and the Hole
    Chilly, enigmatic and more than a little spooky, John and the Hole patrols the porous border between child and adult with more style than depth.
  15. Naked Singularity
    This convoluted clash of competing interests, though, is so poorly explained it’s as arduous to untangle as it is to enjoy.
  16. Vivo
    Vivo, despite its exuberant beginning and heartfelt ending, struggles to offer more than odd turns and clichés in the rest of its story.
  17. The Macaluso Sisters
    [Emma Dante] imagines the ripple effects of a sister’s death across generations with metaphysical grace and hints of fantasy, straying from the plot-reliant mold of most human dramas toward something more haunting and powerful.
  18. The Suicide Squad
    The violence is the most consistently inventive part of the whole package, though it grows tiresome in its thudding repetition. Like the story’s superficial finger-wagging at American wrongs, the brutality is both decorative and ritualistic.
  19. Annette
    Annette masters its own paradoxes. It’s a highly cerebral, formally complex film about unbridled emotion.
  20. Pray Away
    The harms conversion therapy causes, and the tactics it uses, aren’t news at this point, and Pray Away is more interesting when it focuses on how most of its subjects eventually embraced gay and bisexual identities despite having formerly been so public in their homophobia. Some shifts weren’t long ago.
  21. The Last Mercenary
    The fight scenes have wit and Van Damme delivers his lines with just the right amount of weary good humor.
  22. The Boy Behind the Door
    Charbonier and Powell, themselves childhood friends from Detroit, focus on the boys’ allegiance to each other with an unwavering focus. This intent minimalism is also why the movie does not transcend its virtuosic, almost abstractly taut storytelling.
  23. Fauna
    Brimming with postmodern flourishes, Fauna calls attention to the slippery nature of performance and identity, lodging a complex, yet highly engrossing critique of narco culture’s influence on Mexican storytelling — and it does so without a drop of that pesky didacticism.
  24. Sabaya
    Mahmud and Ziyad, volunteers at the Yazidi Home Center in Syria, will make several more such trips over the course of the film, and hundreds more after the cameras stop rolling. Their task is enormous, and it demands a stoicism that Hirori’s intrepid, immersive filmmaking mirrors.
  25. Tailgate
    This well-choreographed hunt is chilling, sure — particularly because of de Wolf’s terrifying performance and unconventional choice of weapon — but it’s also a little bit fun.
  26. The Green Knight
    The Green Knight is always interesting — and occasionally baffling — but at the end it rises to a swirling, feverish pitch of feeling and philosophical earnestness.
  27. Nine Days
    The narrative conceits of Nine Days, while exquisitely constructed, are intricate to the point of laborious. At times the movie almost sinks under their weight.
  28. Never Gonna Snow Again
    Utgoff is irresistibly compelling, instilling in his character a silent yet singular presence worthy of the “superhero” status that he ultimately acquires.
  29. Lorelei
    The film is invested in accurately depicting the details of its character’s lives, but its collection of studied impressions doesn’t coalesce into a coherent final portrait.
  30. Resort to Love
    In Resort to Love, the lack of discernible chemistry between the characters makes it hard to believe they belong together.
  31. The Evening Hour
    King works to portray a tight mesh of relationships around Cole, directing Elizabeth Palmore’s valiant adaptation of the sensitively rendered Carter Sickels novel. But lacking a strong central performance from Ettinger — who gets stuck on a half-pained, half-exasperated setting — much of the movie feels like a series of comings and goings, entrances and exits.
  32. Enemies of the State
    Kennebeck weaves uncertainty into the formal design, staging re-enactments mingled with original audio, for instance. The movie is a spoiler deathtrap, but the questions it raises are fascinating.
  33. Ride the Eagle
    "Where do these people get their money,” I wrote in my notes as Leif and his dog set out for a long drive at the film’s fade-out. Doesn’t matter. Nor do the multiple clichés. In Ride the Eagle, the laid-back vibe is all.
  34. Stillwater
    It’s clear that Damon and McCarthy have thought through this man in considered detail, from Bill’s plaid shirts to his tightly clenched walk. The character looks as if he hasn’t moved his bowels in weeks; if anything, he feels overworked, a product of too much conceptualizing and not enough feeling, identifiable humanity or sharp ideas.
  35. Jungle Cruise
    Jungle Cruise is less directed than whipped to a stiff peak before collapsing into a soggy mess.
  36. The Year of the Discovery
    If the convoluted history and corresponding formal conceits are difficult to absorb, that is part of the point.
  37. Playing with Sharks
    Playing With Sharks would like to position Valerie as both intrepid diver and valiant activist, but with its focus on thrills and gills, the film goes light on the context needed to reconcile these two identities.
  38. Stuntman
    There’s something morbid about a world where a brave man is more scared of financial, than physical, risk. But that’s a leap this doc can’t take.
  39. Woodstock 99: Peace Love and Rage
    Much of the footage is hair-raising, especially the women being groped and the mobs of young white men whipping themselves into a frenzy of aggressive stupidity, aimless anger and turbo-boosted misogyny. This is these dudes’ coming-of-age as an aggrieved demographic, and it’s frightening.
  40. Broken Diamonds
    The movie treats illness as a series of contrivances, an engine that keeps the plot pistoning forward, and the result of this approach is a film that feels lifeless, or worse, reductive.
  41. Charlatan
    Often as thorny as its subject but also oddly fascinated by his near-magical abilities, “Charlatan” is a temporary cure for the common biopic.
  42. Settlers
    Settlers purports to challenge violence against women and colonialism. Instead, the female protagonist wallows in powerlessness for most of the movie, and a boxy robot is ultimately presented as more sympathetic than a displaced brown man.
  43. Eyimofe (This Is My Desire)
    The portrait of life that emerges organically from this understated, observant approach makes Eyimofe the rare social realist drama that conveys critique without didacticism and empathy without pity.
  44. Midnight in the Switchgrass
    The atmosphere is thoroughly sleazy without being distinctive, and everything about the movie — the emotionless line readings, the half-baked back stories — exudes a terse functionality.
  45. Val
    More a self-portrait than a profile, Val tells the story of a Hollywood career with a candor that stops short of revelation. The tone is personal but not quite intimate, producing in the viewer a warm, slightly wary feeling of companionship.
  46. How It Ends
    The film plays as a series of perfectly enjoyable sketches strung together, an excuse for veteran actors to chew on playful dialogue.
  47. Jolt
    The plot, stretched thin even at just 90 minutes, is extremely predictable, and therefore boring, and the film doesn’t do enough with its high-concept shock-therapy conceit to feel fresh or novel.
  48. Mandibles
    Mandibles is sweet, simple, and oh-so-very stupid — a stupidity that’s oddly liberating, like making up ridiculous scenarios with a pal over bong hits.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Ailey
    Like Ailey’s dances, the documentary leaves you swimming in sensation.
  50. All the Streets Are Silent: The Convergence of Hip Hop and Skateboarding (1987-1997)
    The film excels when it harnesses the wistful thrill of a bygone era, reminding us of a rich, creative past that deserves ample recognition.
  51. Last Letter from Your Lover
    In short, it too efficiently glosses over multiple plotlines to have much of an emotional impact. What remains are mostly generic beats. Still, the formula is engrossing enough, and its midcentury vintage appeal — the pillbox hats, headscarves and swanky soirees — is particularly seductive.
  52. Old
    Shyamalan’s fluid filmmaking style, outstanding features of which are an almost ever-mobile camera and a bag of focus tricks, serves him especially well here.
  53. Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins
    For an ostensible action hero, Henry Golding in the title role does an awful lot of standing around and looking tense. The mayhem is frantic yet forgettable.
  54. The New Bauhaus
    It is a good primer, well illustrated.
  55. Toofaan
    In Toofaan, the Bollywood director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra attempts — with some success — to deepen the standard-issue sports drama with sociopolitical strife ripped from Indian headlines.
  56. The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)
    The movie reflects upon how people organize experience through our memories and our actions, but the filmmakers also have a self-awareness about their steadfast methods.
  57. The Hidden Life of Trees
    The documentary The Hidden Life of Trees uses the sensorial capacities of cinema to thrillingly visualize Wohlleben’s observations.
  58. The Boys in Red Hats
    Between a bro-friendly voice-over and “TMZ Live”-style bull sessions with his producer, Schroder’s exploratory pose comes to feel exasperatingly clueless. Yet the film also assembles soothingly sharp commentators who lay bare the power and race dynamics and aggression at play in the Lincoln Memorial encounter.
  59. No Ordinary Man
    This is a respectful tribute that is a shade too morally and cinematically safe in its execution.
  60. Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters
    The intercutting between vintage footage of the Jones/Zane company and the student production, as well as footage from another contemporary production of the piece — shot with an onstage intimacy that recalls the in-the-ring segments of Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull” — make for an unusually lively documentary experience.
  61. Fin
    There is little here that was not already tackled in Rob Stewart’s 2007 documentary “Sharkwater,” nor in the more recent, less artful “Seaspiracy.” Though where Stewart painstakingly explained the beauty, intelligence and importance of sharks, Roth would rather that we love these animals simply because he does.
  62. Mama Weed
    The list of charges against this watery café au lait of a crime caper is extensive — wearisome ethnic stereotypes, cop-movie clichés, awkward pacing, a labored plot — but the chief transgression is that it wastes the time and talent of one of the supreme screen actors of our time.
  63. Die in a Gunfight
    It’s a shame that it’s all so wincingly contrived. The film tries so hard to be slick, but its efforts are both unoriginal and painfully amateurish.
  64. Pig
    Pig, Michael Sarnoski’s stunningly controlled first feature, is a mournful fable of loss and withdrawal, art and ambition.
  65. 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.
  66. Casanova, Last Love
    Though Jacquot throws into question our presumptions about figures like Casanova, as well as vilified women like La Charpillon, he leaves it at that, leaving us wondering what exactly it was all for.
  67. Space Jam: A New Legacy
    There’s a nearly astute satire of the app-driven life bubbling under the meta high jinks. And the movie throws so many gags at the screen that several jokes actually stick. But the purposeful sensory overload mostly yields head-spinning stupefaction, leaving a viewer feeling like Wile E. Coyote after hitting a mesa wall.
  68. Gunpowder Milkshake
    Papushado’s flamboyance feels cocky and indiscriminate, as if he’s simply trying really hard to make every image seem cool.
  69. We Intend to Cause Havoc
    The music itself is exciting enough that it washes out some of the unpleasant taste of the film’s early “white people discovering stuff” tone. And Chanda himself is incredibly winning, especially when he takes the stage.
  70. Last Summer
    For all the beauty of its dazzling vacation setting, Last Summer coasts, but not toward any satisfying destination.
  71. Her Socialist Smile
    Her Socialist Smile, written, directed and shot by John Gianvito, is a fascinating and challenging exploration of Keller’s political thought.
  72. The Price of Freedom
    Muckraking documentaries often conclude with declined-to-comment disclaimers, but David Keene, a former N.R.A. president, is here. Toward the end, he chillingly cautions anyone who thinks the N.R.A. might disappear.
  73. First Date
    What follows is a barrage of gunfire, wah-wah guitars and a surprising amount of novelty and heart for a film that can feel as if it’s a road trip through the directors’ inspirations.
  74. Running Against the Wind
    The film is, at the very least, never boring. It’s also, despite a potentially compelling conceit, pretty ridiculous.
  75. The Woman Who Ran
    The Woman Who Ran is a cinematic sketch, and also the work of a master.
  76. The Witches of the Orient
    If the team was derided by their prejudiced (and defeated) foes in the moment of their success, this documentary elegantly restores the glow of legend, saving the champions the trouble of having to explain their heroism in words.
  77. Scales
    Ameen prioritizes symbolism teeming with sensory spirit over plot-based narrative, which ultimately renders her attempt at making a political statement too opaque and disjointed to have much of an impact.
  78. Summertime
    The most successful sequences are the ones that find new ways of illustrating the meaning of a poem besides lingering on the face of the performer uttering purposefully syncopated and painstakingly intonated lines.
  79. Rock, Paper and Scissors
    Given the cast’s three outstanding performances and slick camerawork by Nicolás Colledani, this makes for a fascinating capsule of family brutality.
  80. The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52
    Neither slick nor propulsive, The Loneliest Whale gently combines aquatic adventure and bobbing meditation on our own species’s environmental arrogance.
  81. Black Widow
    Despite the intriguing opening sequence, which involves shootings, a jet and a family escape, Black Widow, directed by Cate Shortland, lags, unsure of how to proceed with the story.
  82. The Legend of the Underground
    The filmmakers Giselle Bailey and Nneka Onuorah capture arguments as other activists wrestle with the contradictions of James’s motivations. But crucially, they don’t shy away from James.
  83. White on White
    Court — whose languorous pacing heightens the film’s brief, bewildering moments of action — summons an unsettling experience from relatively restrained gestures.
  84. Some of Our Stallions
    No equine beasts adorn this queasy comedy. Too bad.
  85. 915: Hunting Hispanics
    The value of this demystifying film is its tactical breakdown of a form of violence that has become increasingly common in the United States. Here, both prevention and survival are a result of communal strategy.
  86. Cousins
    Widespread racism, discriminatory laws and the Maori people’s centuries-long struggle for autonomy bracket the characters’ lives in Cousins. The film trembles with sound, color and feeling, deriving much of its power from an excellent ensemble cast (particularly Te Raukura Gray and Ana Scotney as the child and adult Mata).
  87. Scenes from an Empty Church
    “Scenes” has its moments, as any film that sits Ryan and Corrigan opposite each other in a confessional would. But even special effects near the end play more like the response to a challenge than a spark of inspiration.
  88. Being a Human Person
    The revelation of Andersson’s method, his painstaking use of trompe l’oeil both painterly and cinematic, is fascinating enough. But the chronicle takes an unexpected turn.
  89. America: The Motion Picture
    A raunchy, aggressively inane cartoon that flips the bird — both onscreen and thematically — to a strain of patriotism that insists that men who profited from slavery were sober-minded heroes whose vision of democracy remains flawless, bro.
  90. Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over
    Lunch’s entire aesthetic is centered around trauma: how abusers dispense it, how it is — and how she thinks it ought to be — received, and turned back on the world.
  91. The God Committee
    A natural ham, Grammer only amplifies what is grandiose and bogus in this material.
  92. No Sudden Move
    The schematic for No Sudden Move remains perfectly intact, and the thing itself works pretty much according to the specifications. A consumer-rating agency would give it high marks for safety and efficiency, but it never leaves the showroom.
  93. Let Us In
    The film’s derivativeness — residents literally fight darkness with light — is countered by strong acting from the two leads and a director who just might be having the time of his life. That apparent delight seeps into almost every frame, giving the film a guileless warmth that drew my good will.
  94. The Phantom
    Adapting research that is, by now, hardly breaking news, Forbes has some solid strategies for making the material cinematic.
  95. Till Death
    This straightforward romp focuses its attention on its cunning and no-nonsense scream queen. And what Fox lacks in dramatic prowess, she makes up for in pure, wicked magnetism.
  96. The Forever Purge
    Words like “colonialism” and “the American dream” are thrown around, to little avail. This movie ultimately cares more about monotonous shootouts than making points about border relations
  97. No. 7 Cherry Lane
    Consider this film a master class in world-building, a bewildering but poignant dream — one that will leave you with plenty of burning questions.
  98. Long Story Short
    Spall summons a kind of early Ryan Reynolds haplessness, talking a mile a minute while catching up. But a sheepish pall steadily creeps over the whole endeavor.
  99. The Boss Baby: Family Business
    A baby in a suit? Always cute. Recycled gags? Not so much — this “Boss Baby” just didn’t get the memo.
  100. The Tomorrow War
    The Tomorrow War is betting its flash will blind us to its vacuity.
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