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. Duck, You Sucker
    The resultant mix of dreaminess, violence and politics is a bit unwieldy, but it sticks to your ribs. You'll savor pieces of Duck, You Sucker in your head much later: the mark of a work by a true voluptuary, the overspill in whose craft comes as much from enthusiasm as arrogance.
  2. Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee
    In an era whose culture was defined by what the literary critic Richard Poirier called the performing self, Mr. Ali's persona was one of the greatest performances of all.
  3. The Cockettes
    Revisits the San Francisco of the late 1960's and early 70's, a time and place so encrusted with legend and cliché that you might wonder if there is anything left to say. It turns out there is quite a lot -- which the filmmakers have brought triumphantly to life.
  4. The Imposter
    One of the most entertaining documentaries to appear since "Exit Through the Gift Shop," a film similarly obsessed with role playing and deception.
  5. The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography
    Ms. Dorfman emerges as an artist of deep compassion, empathy, humor and wisdom.
  6. Dead Lover
    It’s too much yet not enough.
  7. Left-Handed Girl
    Expressive visuals and evocative scenes, including one involving an overactive meerkat, make Left-Handed Girl a memorable family affair. It’s only when the film introduces one too many social realist tropes . . . that the melodrama grows unwieldy.
  8. Güeros
    The story pops and swerves; the images are by turns comical, banal and ravishing; and the result is a briskly shaken cocktail made of equal parts provocation and comfort. You come away with a buzz that is invigorating and pleasantly familiar.
  9. The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed
    Arnow’s sophisticated point — the one referenced in the film’s unwieldy title — is what drives interest until our own spirits snap.
  10. Winter Nomads
    What little we learn of Pascal, who has worked in Switzerland as a shepherd for more than 30 years, and Carole, who is a former dietitian, fits in a scene or two, but their practical journey yields a certain contemplative equanimity.
  11. Fort Buchanan
    If, at barely more than an hour, the movie initially seems slight, its inconsequentiality might be better viewed as polemical.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    And Breathe Normally
    It engages the audience with a deeply resonant narrative that highlights the ways our sense of safe keeping can suddenly be ripped from our grasp. And it reminds us of the power we possess, even when we think we’re helpless.
  13. Porgy and Bess
    Almost a quarter of a century after its initial performance on the stage (and seventeen years after the revival that really established it), this most haunting of American musical dramas has been transmitted on the screen in a way that does justice to its values and almost compensates for the long wait.
  14. Josep
    The 74-minute film leaps among time frames without much warning. Occasionally, the screen erupts into crackling black-and-white images drawn directly from Bartolí’s work — as if torn from the very pages of his sketchbooks.
  15. The Promised Land
    It has sweep, romance, violence and spectacle, but what makes it finally work as well as it does is that it largely avoids the ennobling clichés that turn characters into ideals and movies into exercises in spurious nostalgia — well, that and Mads Mikkelsen.
  16. 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.
  17. My Brilliant Career
    My Brilliant Career doesn't need to trumpet either its or its heroine's originality this loudly. The facts speak for themselves — and so does the radiance with which Miss Armstrong and Miss Davis invest so many memorable moments.
  18. The Color of Money
    ''The Color of Money'' isn't ''Mean Streets'' or ''Raging Bull.'' It is, however, a stunning vehicle - a white Cadillac among the other mainstream American movies of the season.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Harder They Come
    The largely amateur cast of black performers and their producer-director may be involved in basically simple action fare in The Harder They Come, but they also leave a slightly disturbing, documentary impression of the darker side of the sunny Jamaica.
  20. Ornette: Made in America (1985)
    Miss Clarke's methods tend to be as fanciful as Ornette Coleman's are rigorous and abstract, but the collaboration between film maker and subject has its own kind of harmony.
  21. Introduction
    Shot in black and white (with Hong serving, for the first time, as cinematographer) and clocking in at a little more than an hour, Introduction is both lucid and elusive.
  22. The Messenger
    No movie can convey the truth of war to those of us who have not lived through it, but The Messenger, precisely by acknowledging just how hard it is to live with that truth, manages to bring it at least partway home.
  23. Under the Sea 3D
    A visually enthralling 40-minute tour of the southwestern Pacific depths.
  24. Private Fears in Public Places
    The film is accessible, pleasant, dreamy, a touch goofy and melancholic. Its modernist gestures are little more than stylistic tics, but there's an image of snow falling on two clasped hands that is almost rapturous. The role of the artist remains, for Mr. Resnais, the role of a lifetime.
  25. Play It Again, Sam
    Even when he's not in an anarchic mood, Woody Allen is still the funniest neurotic in American movies today and Play It Again, Sam, directed by Herbert Ross from Allen's screenplay, will probably remain the funniest new movie around this summer until another Allen work shows up.
  26. The Devil and Daniel Johnston
    Jeff Feuerzeig, who won the best-director award at the 2005 Sundance festival, cobbles together a moving portrait of the artist as his own ghost, using a wealth of material provided by Mr. Johnston, from home movies to audiocassette diaries to dozens of original, and often heartbreakingly beautiful, songs.
  27. Sin Nombre
    What keeps the movie from tipping into full-blown exploitation like "City of God," which turns third-world misery into art-house thrills, is Mr. Fukunaga's sincerity. What keeps you watching is his superb eye.
  28. Children of Heaven
    In Children of Heaven, life is sweet despite countless hardships, and no reality beyond the economic intrudes upon a fairy tale atmosphere. Only through heavy-handed emphasis does the quest for new sneakers take on any greater meaning.
  29. Revenge of the Mekons
    The film is both a generous primer on the band, which grew out of the punk movement in Leeds, England, in 1977, and a celebration of its longevity.
  30. Marona's Fantastic Tale
    Marona has three real homes in her life, and past abandonments have taught her that heartbreak waits in every happiness. But fortunately, the film stays buoyant through its unique, boisterous animation.
  31. Incitement
    Potently, Incitement depicts Amir as just one member of a self-reinforcing fringe.
  32. The Nightingale
    This is a difficult movie because the questions it raises are not easy. There are sentimental and reassuring movies about vengeance, and comforting stories about the resistance to historical oppression. This isn’t one of those. You might say it’s too angry. Or too honest.
  33. Mountain Patrol
    Films about environmental catastrophes tend to wax preachy, putting pedagogy and scolding above art. This one, for all its sorrow and the throb of righteous anger it provokes (only about 50,000 antelopes remain), is more than anything a work of creative imagination.
  34. Child's Pose
    It’s too bad that the filmmakers don’t allow an occasional breath of air into the sepulchral proceedings or ease up on the increasingly heavy-handed lessons.
  35. Grandma
    There is much to praise about this sweet, smart comedy of intergenerational conflict and solidarity.... But honestly, the wonder that is Grandma can be summed up in two words: Lily Tomlin.
  36. 'Til Kingdom Come
    Zinshtein’s patient, observant approach catches her subjects in moments of damning irony.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Man Who Knew Too Much
    Although the photography and lighting are inferior according to Hollywood standards, the film is an interesting example of technical ingenuity as well as an absorbing melodrama.
  38. Presence
    Presence is another ideal trap to trip for a filmmaker who enjoys challenges and changing it up artistically as much as Soderbergh does.
  39. The Road Warrior
    In its stripped-down, cannily cinematic way, it's one of the most imaginative Australian films yet released in this country. It has no pretensions to do anything except entertain in the primitive, occasionally jolting fashion of the first nickelodeon movies, whose audiences flinched as streetcars lumbered silently toward the camera.
  40. I, Tonya
    As I, Tonya skips here and there and thickens the plot, it becomes increasingly baffling why the filmmakers decided to put a comic spin on this pathetic, dispiriting story. No matter how hard the movie tries to coax out laughs, there’s little about Ms. Harding, her circumstances or her choices that skews as funny.
  41. God Loves Uganda
    A searing look at the role of American evangelical missionaries in the persecution of gay Africans, Roger Ross Williams’s God Loves Uganda approaches this intersection of faith and politics with some fairness and a good deal of outrage.
  42. Evolution
    It’s an impeccable, creepy and genuinely transporting movie.
  43. Fat Girl
    Much more than a perfectly realized vignette about seduction. It is the latest and most powerful dispatch yet from Ms. Breillat, France's most impassioned correspondent covering the war between the sexes.
  44. Ulee's Gold
    Beautiful and heartfelt, an oasis of humanity in a season of furious hyperbole.
  45. Humanité
    You probably won't feel comfortable when Humanité is over, but as you leave the theater you will feel more alive than when you entered.
  46. Grindhouse
    The obsessive crosshatching of allusion, spoof and homage that gives Grindhouse its texture is the product of a highly refined generational sensibility.
  47. How to Change the World
    This absorbing account is hardly definitive, but it teaches movement building without denying the high costs paid by true believers.
  48. 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.
  49. Caesar Must Die
    There’s an elemental, almost primitive quality to the Tavianis’ condensing that, at its most effective, dovetails with the prison’s severely circumscribed material reality, as if the high walls, barred windows and suffocating rooms were manifestations of the characters’ states of mind.
  50. Body Heat
    While Body Heat involves murder, fraud, a weak hero led astray and a seductive, double-dealing broad, it also incorporates something new: a sexual explicitness that the old films could only hint at.
  51. The Pool
    In the manner of a Satyajit Ray film, The Pool avoids melodrama, the better to capture the texture of Venkatesh's vagabond life.
  52. Benda Bilili!
    Benda Bilili! is brutally real, a document of willpower that shows not only the magic of transcendence - which may be fleeting - but also the transformation of aspiring to it, every struggling step of the way.
  53. Gerhard Richter - Painting
    Gerhard Richter may not fling paint at the canvas, Jackson Pollock-style, but as Corinna Belz shows in her documentary Gerhard Richter Painting, he can be his own kind of action painter.
  54. Pom Poko
    Its ecological concerns, nuance and occasional lyricism place it squarely within the Ghibli oeuvre but not among its masterpieces.
  55. The Twentieth Century
    Is it all a bit much? Sure, but the self-consciousness is baked in: Rankin names one public gathering place “Disappointment Square.”
  56. French Postcards
    Parts of French Postcards have considerable charm, even if it is charm with the consistency of bunny-fluff.
  57. Father's Little Dividend
    It is not very often that the sequel to a successful film turns out to be even half as successful or rewarding as the original picture was. But we've got to hand it to Metro: its sequel to "Father of the Bride" is so close that we'll willingly concede it to the humor and charm of that former film.
  58. The War Tapes
    Whatever your opinion of the war - and however it has changed over the years - this movie is sure to challenge your thinking and disturb your composure. It provides no reassurance, no euphemism, no closure. Given the subject and the circumstances, how could it?
  59. Maestro
    Maestro is as ambitious as Cooper’s fine directorial debut, “A Star Is Born,” but the new movie is more self-consciously cinematic.
  60. Jerry Maguire
    Jerry Maguire is loaded with them: bright, funny, tender encounters between characters who seem so winningly warm and real.
  61. Songs from the Second Floor
    A heartbreakingly thoughtful minor classic, the work of a genuine and singular artist.
  62. Baden Baden
    It’s very fresh and often very funny stuff, communicated in a direct, unforced style.
  63. Project Hail Mary
    Lord and Miller, almost by default, accentuate the positive to the detriment of the very movie that they’ve painstakingly created. Like a lot of Earthlings, they seem more at home in a far-out fantasy than on our ordinary, terrifying planet, which is why this particular message of hope ends up being a bummer.
  64. Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond — Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton
    The result isn’t another ho-hum documentary likeness in which all the elements neatly and often flatteringly stack up. “Jim & Andy” is instead a complexly layered and textured Cubist portrait, one that’s been constructed from fragments of its two title subjects and their work.
  65. Relic
    Relic deftly merges the familiar bumps and groans of the haunted-house movie with a potent allegory for the devastation of dementia.
  66. 3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets
    At the time of a fervent national debate on race and justice, part of what is impressive about 3 ½ Minutes is the cool temperature at which it is often served.
  67. Advocate
    Provocative as the film is, it doesn’t fully reconcile Tsemel’s contradictions, if such a thing were even possible or desirable.
  68. A Band Called Death
    A Band Called Death is more concerned with bringing out the personal connections behind their driven music than with insisting upon the group’s distinction in the perennial music history search for oddities and firsts.
  69. Good News
    Even though an oldtimer may view this Good News with mocking eyes—may mutter that, back in 1927, which is the advertised date of its events, the goal-posts were set on the goal-line and the huddle was an undeveloped freak—the pleasures of reminiscence which the picture affords are worthwhile. As for the untraditioned youngsters—especially the Lawford-Allyson fans—the stars and the dancing activity should adequately satisfy.
  70. Small Axe: Alex Wheatle
    A film in which violence and stillness alternate with queasy regularity.
  71. Ruby in Paradise
    Ruby in Paradise is more often pensive than genuinely thoughtful, but it is helped immensely by Ms. Judd's gravity and strength.
  72. The Decline of Western Civilization Part III
    Best and most touching when it shows how willing punk is to eat its young.
  73. Chi-Raq
    The laughs in Spike Lee’s corrosive Chi-Raq burn like acid. Urgent, surreal, furious, funny and wildly messy, the movie sounds like an invitation to defeat, but it’s an improbable triumph that finds Mr. Lee doing his best work in years.
  74. 2040
    Although the odds of implementing all these ideas might seem steep, “2040” is a rare climate documentary with an optimistic message.
  75. Thelma
    Margolin’s empathy for Thelma (he based the story on a scam perpetrated on his own grandmother) lends the film a sweetness and occasional poignancy that help mitigate much of the foolishness.
  76. Olga
    Budiashkina, a Ukrainian gymnast in her acting debut, plays Olga beautifully as a guarded, stubborn teenager with the weight of exile on her shoulders, who refuses to quit but still needs her mother, who is stone-faced on the mat but still cries into a stuffed animal.
  77. Young and Innocent
    Alfred Hitchcock, England's jovial and rotund master of melodrama, has turned out another crisply paced, excellently performed film in "The Girl Was Young."
  78. Saturday Night Fever
    Fever beings to flag when, after an initial hour filled with high spirits and jubilant music, it settles down to tell its story; the effect is so deflating that it's almost as though another Monday has rolled around and it's time to get back to work.
  79. Pump Up the Volume
    Working within the confines of the teen-age genre film, Pump Up the Volume succeeds in sounding a surprising number of honest, heartfelt notes.
  80. Starving the Beast
    As an overview of the issues, the history and the players, Starving the Beast makes a powerful survey course, a prerequisite for further studies.
  81. Who's Crazy? (1966)
    The movie, shot mostly in crisp, sometimes smoky black and white, is far better, a quirky but purposeful grafting of Mack Sennett to the French New Wave. Yet it’s the soundtrack that has the staying power.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Animal Crackers
    A further example of amusing nonsense.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
    Miss Jane Pittman fulfilled my deepest expectations. I did not look for a miracle nor did I view it with malice. That the show will spawn another film depicting other blacks in other experiences is unquestioned. That it was a triumph of and for the enduring strength of black people is also beyond doubt.
  84. Waitress: The Musical
    This is Bareilles’s show in every way. While she doesn’t quite match the emotional subtlety of Jessie Mueller, who originated Jenna, she has grown in leaps and bounds as an actress and provides a warm anchor for the movie.
  85. The Tuba Thieves
    Its connective tissue is an idea, an exploration, and it’s designed to be more absorbed than understood. But for the patient audience, it’s richly illuminating.
  86. Love Lies Bleeding
    In Love Lies Bleeding, Glass borrows liberally but not mindlessly. Instead, she takes familiar themes and more than a few clichés — romantic doom, family trauma — and playfully bends them to her purposes.
  87. Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara
    “Fanatical” is both a truly appalling story and a peek into something darker and more sinister about the way social groups form and evolve — and devolve, too — when the internet mediates it all.
  88. Everybody to Kenmure Street
    Everybody to Kenmure Street is an exceptional documentary, both in the story it tells and in the way it tells it, about what happened that day.
  89. Girls State
    Girls State endears, but it also leaves viewers with the sense that, for a film about young women eager to take on the world’s challenges, the movie could stand to tackle a few more.
  90. Calvary
    The limitations of Calvary are summed up by the insistent, dialectical chatter that almost mechanically pings and pongs between lightness and darkness, glibness and seriousness, insincerity and honesty, faithfulness and despair.
  91. The House I Live In
    It's easy to take issue with a documentary like The House I Live In, which tackles too much in too brief a time and glosses over complexities, yet this is also a model of the ambitious, vitalizing activist work that exists to stir the sleeping to wake.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Breakfast at Tiffany's
    Like that storied novella by Truman Capote from which it stems, it is a completely unbelievable but wholly captivating flight into fancy composed of unequal dollops of comedy, romance, poignancy, funny colloquialisms and Manhattan's swankiest East Side areas captured in the loveliest of colors.
  93. Tom Jones
    One of the wildest, bawdiest and funniest comedies that a refreshingly agile filmmaker has ever brought to the screen.
  94. Suzume
    It’s not just the drama that works. Shinkai delivers hilarious physical comedy in the awkward gambols and leaps of Souta the three-legged chair — a refreshing reversal of the trope of the handsome young love interest who leads the naïve girl on a journey.
  95. Apprentice
    At first Apprentice seems to be a basic revenge film in which Aiman stalks the man who killed his father. But it becomes psychologically more complex.
  96. Apples
    The movie never manages to hit above a dim emotional pitch, and a final-act awakening lands with a shrug.
  97. People's Republic of Desire
    You don’t wait for what comes next in People’s Republic of Desire as much as you watch and wonder why any of it is happening. That sensation arises often in this canny documentary about a baffling topic.
  98. Little Fish
    As in all her screen performances, Ms. Blanchett immerses herself completely in her character, a damaged, high-strung woman determined to live the straight life while surrounded by temptation.
  99. Two Lottery Tickets
    Negoescu has adapted a short story by Ion Luca Caragiale from 1901, and the lottery ticket concept is not necessarily novel, but he gives the film fresh zest with droll observations and pitifully endearing characters — all while poking meta fun at the austere Romanian New Wave movement he works within, and works to dismantle.
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