The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Keep On Keepin' On
    Like other stories of musical tutelage, Keep On Keepin’ On is ultimately an examination of the pursuit of greatness. It is a grueling and demanding endeavor, for sure, but also, for Mr. Terry and anyone lucky enough to enter his orbit, a source of unending joy.
  2. The Hunt
    The Hunt doesn’t know where to stop. It is undermined with a short, unsatisfying epilogue whose shocking final moment isn’t enough to justify its inclusion.
  3. Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
    At this point in time, Springsteen is the world’s greatest living entertainer, full stop. “Road Diary,” a new documentary directed by Thom Zimny, offers dynamic proof for this argument.
  4. Hoosiers
    This film's very lack of surprise and sophistication accounts for a lot of its considerable charm.
  5. A Touch of Sin
    A blistering fictionalized tale straight out of China, A Touch of Sin is at once monumental and human scale.
  6. The Beguiled
    [Ms. Coppola’s] Beguiled is less a hothouse flower than a bonsai garden, a work of cool, exquisite artifice that evokes wildness on a small, controlled scale.
  7. On the Adamant
    That Philibert doesn’t stick to a “main character,” or impose a phony narrative arc, vibes well with the facility’s free-spirited methods, even if the documentary lacks the drama of a more structured production.
  8. Winter Kills
    Winter Kills isn't exactly a comedy, but it's funny. And it isn't exactly serious, but it takes on the serious business of the Kennedy assassination.
  9. The Heiresses
    This isn’t a perfect movie — sometimes the machinery of plot-focused screenwriting hums a little too insistently, especially toward the end, disrupting the quieter, richer music of everyday life — but its clearsighted sensitivity makes it a satisfying one.
  10. The Mustang
    The Mustang is direct and almost perilously familiar — it draws from both westerns and prison movies — yet it is also attractively filigreed with surprising faces, unusual genre notes and luminous, evanescent beauty.
  11. Somers Town
    An agreeable if slight, vaguely sketched character study times two.
  12. Scratch
    Dense, exhilarating.
  13. Shanghai Noon
    A refreshing movie that's so good natured, so confident of its ability to provoke not queasy awe or numb exhaustion but pure delight.
  14. Daughter from Danang
    May not be a great piece of filmmaking, but its power comes from its soul's-eye view of how well-meaning patronizing masked a social injustice, at least as represented by this case.
  15. Under the City's Skin
    The real protagonist is the family itself -- a fragile, complex organism undermined by internal conflict and menaced by the cruelty and indifference of the society around them.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Tazza: The High Rollers
    Bet on Tazza to entertain; you can't lose.
  17. Two Years at Sea
    The result is haunting.
  18. Madam Phung's Last Journey
    Gentle, coaxing questions from off camera draw out their stories.
  19. Presenting Princess Shaw
    Yes, the documentary is undeniably uplifting. But …
  20. Westworld
    Crichton the director seems to have had more fun with the film than Crichton the writer, whose screenplay can offer us no better explanation for the sudden, bloody robot rebellion than an epidemic of "central mechanism psychosis."
  21. Soufra
    Crisply directed by Thomas Morgan, the film depicts a succession of challenges facing Ms. Shaar, a smart, understated and tenacious entrepreneur.
  22. A Star Is Born
    The original beauty. Not as glittery as Garland-Mason but in some ways even more golden.
  23. La Flor
    La Flor is perhaps more fun to think about than to sit through, though there are some exquisitely beautiful sequences.
  24. The Apollo
    While “The Apollo” itself might have taken a more inventive approach, it derives its power from the artistry it captures.
  25. Carnal Knowledge
    More than any other film Nichols has made, Carnal Knowledge reminds me of his stage work at its best, particularly of the highly stylized Luv in which low comedy techniques were employed to illuminate material that might otherwise seem too cruel, or too anti‐heroic for a dramatic medium.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Story of a Three-Day Pass
    The film is a kind of gentle cross between Hiroshima Mon Amour and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner—a little hard to imagine, it is true, but less pretentious than the first and less false than the second. If you like one of them I think you are obliged to like all three.
  27. Chang Can Dunk
    A funny and thoughtful high school comedy.
  28. The Holy Girl
    The Holy Girl may occasionally frustrate your desire for clarity and order, but in the end it will reward your patience, and you leave the theater in a state of quiet awe.
  29. Clara Sola
    Araya is remarkably tender as she sinks her fingers into the earth or gingerly lifts bugs off the ground, while Sophie Winqvist Loggins’s hushed, soft-focus camerawork imbues these moments with an almost spiritual grace.
  30. Philomena
    Even through improbable moments and abrupt changes of pace and tone, Ms. Dench and Mr. Coogan hold the movie together.
  31. First Love
    Miike’s seemingly offhand inventiveness is evident in almost every shot and cut.
  32. Get Low
    Though the story sometimes wanders into hazy, corny sentiment, its protagonist (called Felix Bush, which was apparently a nickname or alias of Breazeale's) is vivid, enigmatic and unpredictable.
  33. Jauja
    The rounded-off corners of the almost-square frames evoke early movies and antique photographs, and there is wit and mischief in the way Mr. Alonso plays with the relationship between what we see, what we don’t see and what we expect to see.
  34. Blue Collar
    Is Blue Collar an action film or a meditation upon the American Dream? I suspect it wants to be both though it's not very serious at being either.
  35. Changing the Game
    Changing the Game could have gone further, analyzing how fairness in sports is a myth to begin with. But the movie isn’t interested in rewriting the rules; it would rather introduce us to the brave young people who are.
  36. The Immigrant
    The film is earnestly and unabashedly melodramatic to an extent that may baffle audiences accustomed to clever, knowing historical fictions. But it also has a depth and purity of feeling that makes other movies feel timid and small by comparison.
  37. Don't Call Me Son
    The narrowness of its perspective and its relatively brief 82-minute length disappoint. Yet Don’t Call Me Son still manages to be a fascinating, sympathetic portrait of a lost boy abruptly thrown to the wolves.
  38. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
    In a film filled with plaintively expressive faces, characters say as much when they don't talk as when they speak Mr. Arriaga's dialogue, which sometimes sounds like hardscrabble poetry, sometimes sounds real as dirt and is, rather surprisingly, often darkly funny.
  39. The Best Intentions
    For a time, The Best Intentions captures the elements of a profoundly difficult and credible love story, one plagued by essential differences that cannot be resolved.
  40. Detroit
    The film’s struggle against simplification — against the sentimentality, wishful thinking and outright denial that defines most Hollywood considerations of America’s racial past — is palpable, almost heroic, even if it is not always successful.
  41. Kirikou and the Sorceress
    It's more a piece to admire than to be involved by, yet it's easy to imagine children hypnotized by a hero tinier than they are when "Kirikou" is continually loaded into the VCR.
  42. The Edge of Seventeen
    [Ms. Steinfeld] manages a tricky balancing act, making Nadine simultaneously sympathetic and dislikable.
  43. Brooklyn Castle
    It's deeply satisfying watching these public school, hard-knock kids win, and Ms. Dellamaggiore knows it.
  44. Logan
    Logan is a strong argument for bringing the comic-book movie down to earth. It solidly hits its marks as it moves the franchise furniture around, and features striking special-effects scenes in which the world shudders to a near standstill.
  45. Circo
    Circo offers a touching chronicle of a dying culture harnessed to ambitions that remain very much alive.
  46. 28 Years Later
    These nods at a past that’s by turns historic and romantically mythic, feed an undercurrent of tension that Boyle builds on, one kill at a time.
  47. Stephanie Daley
    Without standing on a soapbox Stephanie Daley suggests a tragic gender gap between men who judge and women who feel.
  48. Water
    An exquisite film about the institutionalized oppression of an entire class of women and the way patriarchal imperatives inform religious belief.
  49. Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts
    Working with the cinematographer Yunus Pasolang, Ms. Surya gives “Marlina” a stark, steady, captivating look that keeps you largely engaged even when the story and your attention drift.
  50. Italian for Beginners
    Despite its hip, off-center style and pointed de-glamorization of its singles, the movie adds up to little more than feel-good fluff.
  51. Bukowski: Born into This
    Definitive and engrossing documentary.
  52. Monsoon Wedding
    The agile handling of the soap-opera elements -- conventional plotting at best -- finally makes "Wedding" a pop, facile take on Capulet versus Montague stuff, likable but square.
  53. Home of the Brave
    Includes familiar film of marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and of demonstrators in Birmingham being attacked with fire hoses, but it distinguishes itself with touching film of Jim Liuzzo and his children being interviewed and of political leaders of the day.
  54. Searching for Mr. Rugoff
    As someone who grew up going to some of the theaters Rugoff once ran — which included Cinema I and II and the Beekman, among others — I got the warm-and-fuzzies from seeing the love here for moviegoing and exhibition, which he goosed with gonzo showmanship.
  55. High Ground
    Michael Brown (a renowned mountaineer), digs below the adventure itself to reveal the gaping holes in our veteran care. Doing so, he translates a collage of experiences - some desperate, some hopeful, all tragic - into a first-person commentary on the malign reverberations of war.
  56. Louder Than a Bomb
    The efforts to document the teams' creative processes aren't particularly successful - no camera can capture something that elusive - but the filmmakers do a fine job with the back stories of the featured poets.
  57. The Last Race
    Dweck divides his efforts between elegiac tone poem and shaggy-dog ensemble piece.
  58. The Plot Against Harry
    Behind the film's easygoing mood there is firm directorial control. This, together with Mr. Roemer's keen sense of personality and place and his wry humor, accounts for why The Plot Against Harry holds up so well.
  59. I Stand Alone
    The movie's triumph -- if that's what it is -- is in the force of its assault. It takes one man's unbearable truth and bashes us in the skull with it.
  60. The Big Easy
    The screenplay, by Daniel Petrie Jr. and Jack Baran, has a number of funny lines and situations, but the end result looks fiddled with by people attempting to ''fix'' things.
  61. Code Black
    Slicing through the fat of policy debates to the visceral rush of critical care, the narrative combines existential worries... and blood-and-guts immediacy with a seamlessness that made me want to high-five the editor, Joshua Altman.
  62. The Wife
    The Wife pulls off the not inconsiderable feat of spinning a fundamentally literary premise into an intelligent screen drama that unfolds with real juice and suspense.
  63. Bedazzled
    Maybe the brand of British banter and buffoonery that Peter Cook and Dudley Moore bombard us with in Stanley Donen's Bedazzled would be very funny if it came in small bursts at not too frequent intervals in an expansive musical comedy or revue. But fired at you exclusively and endlessly for more than an hour and a half in this pretentiously metaphorical picture...it becomes awfully precious and monotonous.
  64. How to Train Your Dragon 2
    Dragon 2 is considerably darker and more self-aware than its forerunner. Both films are speedier than the average animated blockbuster. In places, Dragon 2 is almost too fast to keep up with, and, in other places, it’s a little too dark, at least in 3-D.
  65. Still Bill
    Much of the biographical documentary Still Bill pleasant and even moving.
  66. Career Girls
    There is the sense that Mr. Leigh, whose unusual collaborative method with actors is an essential facet of his writing and direction, is too willing to confuse tics with truth. Indeed, this time the actors' solipsism is more apparent.
  67. Around The World In 50 Concerts
    If the movie gets a bit gooey at times that’s probably an occupational hazard when considering the sublime. And Ms. Honigmann’s restraint — there’s something classical in her style, too — keeps the film from floating away. When it threatens to, something piercing or traumatic brings it back to earth, where any account of art belongs.
  68. Dheepan
    [Mr. Audiard] makes popcorn movies disguised as art films, and vice versa. Dheepan is a bit like a Liam Neeson revenge-dad action thriller directed by the Dardenne brothers. I mean that in the best possible way.
  69. The Messenger
    Overall, the arguments are persuasive, the message from the birds powerful, and the film a rich and satisfying call to action that is presented with some novel ideas for how to restore the ecological balance.
  70. Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool
    More than a few moments here are new, and real grabbers.
  71. The Disaster Artist
    It’s a divertingly funny movie, but its breeziness can also feel overstated, at times glib and a bit of a dodge.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Bill Cunningham New York
    If the film suggests that there's something bittersweet about a life dedicated to a single pursuit cultivated with an almost religious fervor, it also stands in awe of its subject's seemingly inexhaustible, self-abnegating capacity to remain attuned to the expression of others.
  73. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World
    The internet is an elusive quarry. It’s a marvel and a menace, a banal fact of life and a force for incalculable change. But it’s also less the subject of this captivating, uneven film than an excuse for its director to add to his collection of memorable faces and voices.
  74. Service (Serbis)
    Gentle, bawdy and at times rambunctiously, ticklishly rude.
  75. All Light, Everywhere
    In a manner that is patient — and sometimes even playful — rather than polemical, “All Light, Everywhere” contributes to debates about crime, policing, racism and accountability.
  76. A Nightmare on Elm Street
    A Nightmare on Elm Street puts more emphasis on bizarre special effects, which aren't at all bad.
  77. Dig!
    If universities ever start graduate programs in rock stardom, Dig! will surely be a cornerstone of the curriculum, for it works as both an instruction manual and a cautionary tale.
  78. Keep Quiet
    Even if you are unmoved by Mr. Szegedi’s personal story (I found him somewhat sympathetic), what Keep Quiet tells us about its larger themes is upsettingly pertinent.
  79. Kneecap
    The film, as a result, feels wildly uneven, though it cruises on the strength of its underdog narrative and its weird, sordid touches.
  80. A Poem Is a Naked Person
    This film, commissioned by Mr. Russell and directed by Les Blank, is among other things a strange and gorgeous artifact of its moment. Happily indifferent to the conventions of its genre, it’s neither the record of a concert nor a talking-head-driven biography.
  81. Leaning Into the Wind
    Because time erases or alters Mr. Goldsworthy’s sculptures, movies are the ideal medium to capture them.... The surprise of Leaning Into the Wind is that it’s just as concerned with how time has changed Mr. Goldsworthy.
  82. Broken Embraces
    Broken Embraces leaves the viewer in a contradictory state, a mixture of devastation and euphoria, amusement and dismay that deserves its own clinical designation. Call it Almodóvaria, a syndrome from which some of us are more than happy to suffer.
  83. Rosetta
    Instead of feeling universal, the movie feels claustrophobic.
  84. Kandahar
    Kandahar feels like a Magritte painting rendered in sand tones, and your eyes are drawn to the screen. There aren't enough of these moments, though, and Mr. Makhmalbaf lessens their power by repeating them.
  85. My Beautiful Laundrette
    My Beautiful Laundrette has the broad scope and the easy pace that one associates with our best theatrical films. It puts its own truth above the fear of possibly offending someone. Without showing off, it has courage as well as artistry. A fascinating, eccentric, very personal movie.
  86. Father Mother Sister Brother
    The third segment, “Sister Brother,” is so lovely it prompts reconsideration of the first two.
  87. Blue Caprice
    The Beltway sniper case was solved a long time ago. But in some respects, Mr. Moors’s haunting film suggests, it is still a mystery.
  88. Buddy
    The movie is warm, observant, mildly philosophical and deeply curious about the daily and inner lives of both the people and their four-legged assistants.
  89. Two Gods
    Ali brings a matter-of-fact compassion to the experiences of three different people: Hanif, a Black Muslim man in Newark, and the two boys he is mentoring, Furquan and Naz.
  90. Maggie's Plan
    Ms. Miller’s choices are hard to argue with. She steers gracefully through a zigzagging plot, slowing down for quiet, contemplative stretches and pausing for jokes that are irrelevant but irresistible. She finds a tricky balance of farce, satire and emotional sincerity, a way of treating people as ridiculous without denying them empathy.
  91. Heavy
    Though Heavy begins beautifully, it isn't always able to sustain its balance between narrative subtlety and inertia.
  92. The Sure Thing
    The Sure Thing is glowing proof of two things: Traditional romantic comedy can be adapted to suit the teen-age trade, and Mr. Reiner's contribution to ''This Is Spinal Tap'' was more than a matter of humor.
  93. Spring Awakening: Those You've Known
    Michael John Warren’s film is a sure-handed blend of making-of explainer, theater-kid scrapbook and jukebox documentary, doling out hits from its theatrical run (through clips) and the reunion.
  94. Adventureland
    Somehow the story of a young man's coming of age never gets old, at least when it is told with the kind of sweetness and intelligence Adventureland displays.
  95. Every Little Step
    The premise of Every Little Step is no less inspired for seeming so simple and obvious, and it pays tribute to the durability and continued relevance of “A Chorus Line,” which first opened in New York in 1975, before many of the performers in the movie were born.
  96. Testament of Youth
    Testament of Youth, James Kent’s stately screen adaptation of the British author Vera Brittain’s 1933 World War I memoir, evokes the march of history with a balance and restraint exhibited by few movies with such grand ambitions.
  97. Like Someone in Love
    Every shot — everything you see, and everything you don’t — imparts a disturbing and thrilling sense of discovery.
  98. Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest
    The actor Michael Rapaport (Brad Pitt's roommate in "True Romance"), in his feature directorial debut, does an admirable job recounting the group's formation and dissecting its dissolution.
  99. The Last Resort
    The cultural transformation and re-transformation of Miami Beach (specifically its southern tip, South Beach) is a story that’s fascinating, poignant, garish and, in some ways, befuddling.
  100. Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché
    By the end of “Be Natural,” you won’t only have a clear idea of who this remarkable woman was; you may well have acquired a new taste in old movies.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »