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. Roofman
    Here is a protagonist who clearly straddles the line between right and wrong; the trouble is that in Roofman, that line wobbles, leaving the movie somewhere between a fun-loving caper and a finger-wagging morality tale.
  2. After the Hunt
    After the Hunt seems wildly desperate to be seen as provocative about things like cancel culture and the “feminist generation gap.” But my overriding sense was that some earlier, better version of the script exists, and all the political stuff was stapled on later to make it feel more “relevant.”
  3. TRON: Ares
    Ranked against other “Tron” feature-length installments, while this one fails to capture the adolescent low-fi charm of the 1982 film, it’s appreciably more enjoyable (and, frankly, comprehensible) than “Legacy.”
  4. Urchin
    Urchin doesn’t break the mold, but it’s a confident, quietly affecting drama that strikes above the standard character study.
  5. A House of Dynamite
    Bigelow’s work here is superb. She puts the many moving parts into coordinated place and keeps them coherently spinning even as she switches out some elements and introduces others; she doesn’t drop a single plate. The script occasionally gets in her way, which sometimes happens in her work.
  6. Ozzy: No Escape From Now
    The movie chronicles eventual triumphs that are invariably tinged with sadness. Through it all, Osbourne’s devotion to his family, his fans, his bandmates and, yes, his art is palpable.
  7. The Alabama Solution
    This isn’t just about crime and punishment, but about a human rights crisis and willful blindness. Bringing several types of filmmaking, amateur and professional, together for a movie like this makes that message all the more powerful.
  8. Are We Good?
    Part of the accomplishment of Feinartz’s film, which at times comes across as too deferential, is that it fitfully succeeds in cracking his shell.
  9. Anemone
    There is, of course, enormous pleasure in watching Daniel Day-Lewis, an actor of extraordinary sensitivity whose ability to convey a character’s interiority — the delicacy and the violence — can seem almost mystical. The problem is that as Anemone continues, the strength of the actor’s performance lays bare the banality of the writing, and Ray’s grip on your imagination loosens even as Day-Lewis’s remains fixed.
  10. Bone Lake
    The only serious liability is the script, which never quite goes far enough. The provocative questions don’t have provocative answers, and though the film gestures toward edginess, it feels altogether too tame, lacking a bunny-boiling moment that would really make you squirm.
  11. Good Boy
    This is assured horror filmmaking. Heartbreaking too: Anyone who’s held a pet as comfort from pain or despair should have tissues at hand.
  12. Fairyland
    This moving film’s sense of hometown pride is subtle but apt.
  13. The Ice Tower
    The Ice Tower is ultimately too glacial and secretive to fully satisfy. The real magic here lies in Jonathan Ricquebourg’s dazzlingly chilly images, and two leads as compelling as the fantasy that set them in motion.
  14. The Librarians
    From its superb opening-credits sequence paying tribute to card catalogs of yore to its sharp selection of vintage clips and intimate reportage, The Librarians is as well-crafted as it is profoundly alarming.
  15. Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5
    Densely packed, the movie is a whirlwind of ideas and images, by turns heady, enlivening, disturbing and near-exhausting. It’s a work of visceral urgency from Peck, who’s best known for his 2017 documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” about James Baldwin.
  16. Steve
    In hewing closely to Steve, the whole affair takes on a grating note of self-sacrifice, of perseverance through suffering.
  17. The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue
    It would be easy to dismiss the movie’s perspective as limited and jingoistic, but “The Road Between Us” never pretends to offer more than an in-the-moment chronicle of a violent clash. The bigger problem is that its slickness cheapens the most harrowing recollections.
  18. The Smashing Machine
    Johnson’s performance is the magnetic center of the film, and unless you’re a huge fan of watching this kind of fighting, it’s also the whole reason to watch the movie.
  19. Play Dirty
    Play Dirty is a misanthropic work. Which isn’t inherently a deal breaker, but a stiff Wahlberg lacks the moxie to make the brutal barrage of death amusing or worthwhile.
  20. The Strangers: Chapter 2
    With little furtherance of the plot beyond confusing flashbacks to a creepy childhood triad, “Chapter 2” is hackneyed and silly, relying heavily on Petsch’s sneakily resilient scream queen.
  21. All of You
    Spanning many years and a lot of relationship tumult, All of You is a weepy, sweeping love story that knows full well that it’s trying to be one. But it never succumbs to cheap execution, and all of that comes down to Goldstein and Poots. They make for a terrific pair.
  22. Eleanor the Great
    There’s enough in Eleanor the Great to still make it watchable, especially the genuinely moving intergenerational connection between two women who need each other to move past their particular grief. If only the world around them had been developed more carefully, too.
  23. Dead of Winter
    Brian Kirk, the director, has a good feel for this formidable, intimidating setting; the viewer appreciates its beauty while maintaining a keen sense of how awful it would be to get stranded there.
  24. Gabby's Dollhouse: The Movie
    What comes next is a case of sensory overload without substance, complete with nondescript pop songs and an array of outfits — each purchasable online! — for Gabby and the gang. Even Wiig, giving it her all as a modern clone of Cruella de Vil, appears somewhat shipwrecked amid the sugary material.
  25. French Lover
    It’s an open question as to whom the film insults the most: the principals (Marion gullibly believes that Abel does his own stunts; Abel is so spoiled he can’t perform basic household tasks); the public (depicted as clamoring for brainless celebrity gossip); or you, the viewer, from whom so little has been demanded.
  26. One Battle After Another
    Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is an exciting, goofy and deadly serious big-screen no — a no to complacency, to oppression, to tyranny. It’s a carnivalesque epic about good and evil, violence and power, inalienable rights and the fight against injustice; it’s also a love story.
  27. Peacock
    Watching Matthias on the job is entertaining enough, even as the movie’s allegorical ambitions are stymied by a narrative inertia, and by a sneaking suspicion that we’ve seen this sort of social commentary before.
  28. In Whose Name?
    The film, which could definitely focus more on the multiple-Grammy-Award-winner’s music, peters out around 2024, a year before Ye released a song called “Heil Hitler.” But Ballesteros, who started the project when he was 18 years old, does his best to portray a reflexive iconoclast without excusing the inexcusable.
  29. Plainclothes
    While the writer-director Carmen Emmi’s evocative debut relies on a nostalgically textured aesthetic that sometimes seems to mask its thin narrative, the heat builds in unexpected ways, ultimately igniting through the quiet agony of living as someone you’re not.
  30. Predators
    As David Osit’s probing, troubling documentary Predators demonstrates, the sociological implications of the show were (and are) anything but simple, beginning with what the series’ popularity suggests about the viewers who watched it.
  31. The Senior
    You can simply surrender yourself to the bland moral lessons of the movie, but even then, it’s hard not to feel like this was best left as a quirky human interest segment on a slow news day.
  32. Speak.
    The lens through which the movie views these kids is objective and balanced, but there’s an empathy at work that makes the viewer understand what each of the subjects is going through.
  33. The Summer Book
    Scanning the elder woman’s weathered visage and the grandchild’s open face as well as giving the island’s rocky, forested, mossy and watery environs their many close-ups, The Summer Book offers a loving portrait of budding and fading.
  34. Swiped
    James has a great capacity to pull fragility and strength together, and her performance is the movie’s backbone. The movie itself is both shakier and shallower.
  35. Demon Slayer -Kimetsu no Yaiba- The Movie: Infinity Castle
    It could take a lifetime, or at least the sustained attention of an aficionado, to untangle all the lore. But the themes — solidarity and self-interest, allegiance and betrayal, love and loathing — are easy to follow. For the casual fan, the chief reason to seek out “Infinity Castle” is for its visuals, which position passionately emotive characters over impressionistic backdrops.
  36. A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
    Instead of an auteur upgrading his sensibilities with a studio paycheck, “Beautiful Journey” mostly reads as a for-hire job doomed with jumbled writing.
  37. The Lost Bus
    Greengrass knows how to shoot and cut, but The Lost Bus is at once too high-minded and too exploitative to work. However skilled the cinematography and editing, there is no saving a movie predicated on looming death with badly written characters and such a frustratingly narrow point of view.
  38. Him
    For too long, we’re like players stuck in a dark stadium tunnel, retreading the same concepts and fending off opaque threats, when all we wanted was some action.
  39. Lost in the Jungle
    Lost in the Jungle can’t really explain how the children survived, or how, ultimately, they were rescued. Miracles and mysteries happen in the jungle. What the film does elucidate, in rich and tense storytelling, is that no headline story like this is ever as simple as it seems on the surface.
  40. The Wrong Paris
    While the movie’s production design has considerable mojo — the trappings of a “Bachelor”-style reality show are sharply drawn, and the swimming hole on Trey’s ranch is practically Edenic — the anodyne writing reins in whatever satire one might have expected.
  41. Men of War
    The film’s often frenetic editing tends to weaken this strong story. But this hopeless history does have the flair to deploy Depeche Mode’s “Never Let Me Down Again,” capturing the tragic absurdity to Goudreau’s ambition.
  42. Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale
    The director, Simon Curtis, deftly choreographs what feels like a series’ worth of brief interactions into a mostly satisfying whole.
  43. Happyend
    Sora deftly calibrates the angst of his young characters — and the collective edginess of a nation, while nodding to the joys of the teen genre.
  44. Dreams
    Coming-of-age works are about discovery, but Dreams reminds us that this process can be fluid and fanciful. Our fantasies shape who we are because they invite us to clear out the mist — and find firmer ground on the other side.
  45. The History of Sound
    The History of Sound doesn’t trust its own gentleness, and the inertia of the filmmaking gives the whole affair a detached, try-hard feeling.
  46. The Long Walk
    Lawrence’s commitment to authenticity may be laudable (he filmed almost the entire project on the move in Canada), but it’s clear that he was so busy honoring the book, he forgot to entertain the audience.
  47. The Man in My Basement
    Streamlined a little, it would have made for a rich text. But as it is, it’s too much to wade through.
  48. Rabbit Trap
    Rabbit Trap, the horror folk tale from Bryn Chainey, is that unfortunate kind of creation: a work that so clearly possesses the tools that might make a good, captivating film, but instead ends up lost in the workshop, too busy admiring its own handiwork.
  49. Spinal Tap II: The End Continues
    It’s almost always pleasant to hang out with old friends, particularly when no one overstays their welcome. The good news about “Spinal Tap II” is that everyone involved seems to have understood the assignment, which makes for a genial 83 minutes of soft jokes and jowls.
  50. A Savage Art: The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant
    It’s a compelling history, one that’s especially vital in a time when irony and satire can be hard to pin down. Oliphant is the vehicle for the story, but there’s a bigger point here: that American politics, in particular, are built on a rich heritage of protest, of challenging authority, and that cartooning has been a part of that from the start.
  51. Riefenstahl
    Veiel’s documentary is a welcome addition to the historically grounded rebukes to Riefenstahl and her apologists, including bad feminists.
  52. The Baltimorons
    The Baltimorons aims for bittersweet rather than wacky. Didi is lonely; Cliff struggles with sobriety. And while the film has clear affection for its Baltimore locations (it’s dedicated to the workers killed when the Key Bridge collapsed in 2024), considerably less thought has gone into creating convincing situations for those backdrops.
  53. The Conjuring: Last Rites
    The film is a disappointing send-off; more an eccentric family drama than a real chiller.
  54. Preparation for the Next Life
    Preparation for the Next Life is all the more potent for choosing naturalism over melodrama and sensitivity over sentiment.
  55. The Cut
    Bloom plays his role with a feral commitment, and while Turturro has portrayed several villains in his career, here his refusal to ingratiate even slightly yields a genuinely frightening characterization.
  56. Twinless
    Despite its charms, and it is frequently charming, Twinless also succumbs to some of the issues that tend to plague movies of this type, the small and clever dark comedy about young people having big feelings.
  57. Tinā
    The earnest mood and regional touches of Tinā, a New Zealand movie that centers on a choir instructor who teaches her students to harmonize, distinguish it from others using the familiar formula.
  58. Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
    It’s a film of sensations and mystery that feels like it’s wafting toward us from another century, like much of the Quays’ work, channeling uncanny realms of Central European puppetry.
  59. Motel Destino
    The payoff feels somewhat slight, but the foreplay — the will-they-or-won’t-they and the will-he-find-out — builds up with energy and flare. Maybe climaxes are overrated, anyway.
  60. The Roses
    I’m here to litigate “The Roses,” and on that front I’m quite confident that it’s a strangely boring failure, whoever’s at fault.
  61. Griffin in Summer
    A winking ode to queer youth who still dream — too fiercely, too soon — amid self-discovery and family disruption, Griffin in Summer gives aching shape to a child’s need for order in a world that defies their understanding.
  62. The Toxic Avenger
    The outrageous violence, a core allure of the original, remains, but the gross-out is situated in a more colorfully pulpy universe and has a more smartly self-conscious touch to its comedy.
  63. Stranger Eyes
    Always intriguing, Stranger Eyes proves stronger on concept than coherence. Perhaps the loose ends are Yeo’s way of suggesting that a film director, too, lacks omniscience.
  64. Love, Brooklyn
    It has its moments — Nicole and Roger on the steps of her brownstone, for one. And it’s awfully lovely to look at (cinematography by Martim Vian). But, like its characters, it’s a little too comfortable with being betwixt and between.
  65. Vice Is Broke
    Huang has made an eye-opening capsule history that will resonate most keenly with Vice fans. But there’s something more widely instructive, too, in his portrait of a culture clash that turned into an unlikely courtship: ragtag punks and the investment bankers eager to hit the “millennial sweet spot.”
  66. A Little Prayer
    This is a filmmaker able to wrest real feeling from his actors, and from his audience.
  67. The Thursday Murder Club
    Aiding their investigations is an underappreciated policewoman appealingly played by Naomi Ackie. The proceedings are marshaled with affection by the director Chris Columbus.
  68. Caught Stealing
    For whatever reason here, Aronofsky always remains at a frustrating remove from Hank, which flattens the emotional and psychological stakes that Butler works so hard to raise.
  69. Sudan, Remember Us
    Meddeb keeps her focus on several young Sudanese activists. It’s a wise choice, creating an intimate portrait of their dreams and fears.
  70. Eenie Meanie
    While an early, silly death . . . suggests an exuberant self-awareness a la Quentin Tarantino, other scenes, like those that position Edie and John as star-crossed lovers, indicate that this movie’s melodrama takes itself deadly seriously. But it’s hard for the audience to do so in a story that asks us to not merely suspend disbelief, but slaughter it.
  71. The Map That Leads to You
    Ultimately, the romance’s sentimental plotting needs more of Heather’s grounded logic and far less of Jack’s greeting card sayings. She’s much too sensible to lose herself so quickly to his brand of bland.
  72. Eden
    It’s a little surprising that these proceedings are led by the director Ron Howard, since this subject matter is more perverse than anything he has set his sights on before. The actors are up to the task, however.
  73. Lurker
    It takes its time at first, but once it really gets going, Lurker is snaky and disconcerting and smart.
  74. Ne Zha 2
    The writer-director Jiao Zi uses equally expansive storytelling and visuals to deliver an epic, fantastical hero story about power hierarchies and the fall of institutions.
  75. Splitsville
    Covino and Marvin continue to forge a distinct comic sensibility — and, what’s rarer these days, they know how to make the camera work for the humor. Their knack for sight gags and staging in depth would shame the makers of the recent “Naked
  76. Relay
    Relay, a slick, sneaky thriller that’s elevated by both the actor and the director, David Mackenzie, makes it clear that Ahmed also has a silent-era performer’s gift for feverish stillness.
  77. Pools
    Rather than being its own entry into the genre, Pools instead is a green director’s hodgepodge emulation of ideas and tricks we’ve seen elsewhere.
  78. Honey Don't!
    Cooke and Coen’s winding narrative feels muted and underdeveloped, making the film’s offscreen deaths and treacherous reveals feel less like cosmic twists of fate than speed bumps that yield small chuckles and sighs.
  79. Songs from the Hole
    Gayles has crafted a film that refuses to tidy the conflicted feelings its subjects share — or those feelings it stirs in us.
  80. The Knife
    With its twists and rug-pulls, The Knife makes for an absorbing drama, but it’s also deeply exasperating in that it feels less like a social commentary grounded in reality than an edgy play on emotions.
  81. My Undesirable Friends: Part I - Last Air in Moscow
    I’m trying to avoid hyperbole, but I don’t know how else to say this: It is perhaps the most essential investment of time you can make in a movie theater this year. And yet it is not just “important” or consequential — it is brilliant, riveting, vital, devastating.
  82. Checkpoint Zoo
    Checkpoint Zoo portrays a caged and dependent menagerie that bewilderingly experienced humans at their worst and, fortunately, their best.
  83. East of Wall
    Narrative beats aren’t what make East of Wall worth watching. That would be the people — particularly Porshia and her jubilant pals, whose skills in the saddle leave a lasting impression.
  84. Nobody 2
    Like many sequels, this one ramps up everything, including the body count. The fight sequences here are well-staged, shot and cut, more elaborate than in the earlier movie and at times gleefully grisly, with skewered and barbecued flesh.
  85. Suspended Time
    The most appealing character in Suspended Time is Assayas, a hovering offscreen presence who delivers the confessional, gracefully digressive narration.
  86. Highest 2 Lowest
    Washington’s most successfully sustained sparring partner is Jeffrey Wright, who plays Paul, the family’s chauffeur. He comes into focus through his beliefs, his attire and salient details (including a banner for the Five Percenters, an offshoot of the Nation of Islam), though primarily through Wright’s discreet, moving performance.
  87. Americana
    Compared with “Eddington,” this summer’s other tongue-in-cheek neo-western, the movie, ostensibly set in South Dakota, is less aggressive in its efforts to appear topical; it may not even have much on its mind beyond clever plot construction. But watching its pieces snap into place is more fun.
  88. Night Always Comes
    The movie resolves into a relatively deft combination of message picture and suspense thriller.
  89. Fixed
    The film can’t quite fill in much beyond its initial wacky conceit, lacking the extra narrative and comedic pieces to match, for better or worse, a counterpart like “Sausage Party,” Seth Rogen’s own bawdy animation entry.
  90. Weapons
    Weapons may not be about anything much other than Cregger’s talent, but the guy knows how to slither under your skin — and stay there.
  91. It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley
    Most artist documentaries attempt but rarely get to a true and palpable essence of their subjects, but it’s this sense of his earnestly tender nature, pieced together from loved ones and old archive interviews of Buckley, that leaves an impression.
  92. An Officer and a Spy
    An Officer and a Spy is well-crafted; Polanski’s movies generally are. Its contribution to cinema’s role in historical storytelling, though, seems largely as an allegory about Polanski.
  93. My Mother's Wedding
    We’re wondering why these accomplished women could be so uniformly stunted by their delusions of paternal grandeur — which could maybe make for a funny setup. In this overly mannered, weirdly flat dramedy, it’s not.
  94. Boys Go to Jupiter
    Here is a movie notably unafraid to manifest the weirdest of the weird, no matter what the Mr. Moolahs of the world have to say.
  95. Ebony & Ivory
    Ebony & Ivory, in its unrelenting aggression, is particularly exhausting, though I suppose you have to admire the integrity of its vision. Irritating as Hosking’s humor is, you can’t deny his commitment to the bit.
  96. Strange Harvest
    The film is naturalistic enough to be convincing and sick enough to be disturbing, even if the acting falls scattershot on the persuasiveness scale.
  97. Sketch
    A children’s film that fares better with its nimble special effects than its clunky dramatics.
  98. Freakier Friday
    By the middle of the film, the narrative also begins to stutter, set piece after set piece, caper after caper, loping toward the inevitable moment of collision and resolution, without always maintaining the narrative tension to keep things interesting. Since we know where this is going, these bits need to be really funny, not just broadly perfunctory jokes about how generations don’t understand each other.
  99. The Pickup
    Even as they find themselves running out of things to do, each actor hangs on to his or her charisma and manages to land a line every now and then.
  100. Kerouac's Road: The Beat of a Nation.
    The film does not fully succeed, though that’s a tall order for anyone. Too many things need wrapping up by the end, so the concluding rhythm drags. There’s just too much to say, and that always leads to saying less than you might want.
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