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. Spiral: From the Book of Saw
    The premise is disingenuous at best and, in a moment where scores of citizens are calling for widespread police reform, fearmongering at worst. Like Jigsaw offering one of his facile riddles, this film is not as clever as it thinks it is.
  2. Riders of Justice
    In the end, Jensen opts for feel-good fantasy over hardened truths, but his dizzyingly chaotic methods amount to a dynamic, unexpectedly touching ode to the difficulties of baring your vulnerabilities to genuinely overcome them.
  3. The Perfect Candidate
    The movie’s lived-in acting and unhurried pace make it a better-than-palatable viewing experience.
  4. The Djinn
    The film betrays its own less-is-more philosophy and becomes weighed down by exposition — but it’s a tense, thrilling ride nonetheless.
  5. Those Who Wish Me Dead
    New Mexico plays Montana, and not being familiar with the terrain, I was convinced by that. Accurate or not, the landscape gives as sensational a performance as any of the actors.
  6. Los Hermanos/The Brothers
    A moving documentary with generous amounts of music.
  7. Oxygen
    The premise is simple, but this twist-filled script by LeBlanc gives Laurent ample opportunity to shine. Because of its limited setting, the film hangs on Laurent’s acting ability, and she gamely vaults between elation, terror and determination.
  8. State Funeral
    Composed entirely of footage shot at the time in various parts of the Soviet Union, the film is a haunting amalgam of official pomp and everyday experience, the double image of a totalitarian government and the people in whose name it ruled.
  9. Monster
    Based upon a 1999 young-adult novel by Walter Dean Myers, Monster conveys the ache for all that its protagonist could lose, but it can’t escape the dramatic ruts of its own creation.
  10. Wrath of Man
    Ritchie reveals crucial story points with clever time-juggling editing, and keeps up the tension well into the movie’s climax, which delivers exactly what the viewer will have come to hope for.
  11. The Boy from Medellín
    Heineman delivers a relatively sophisticated form of celebrity publicity in this film, armed with stunning concert footage but unoriginal insights into the burdens of modern fame, like the difficulty of balancing the expectations of fans with personal desires.
  12. Queen Marie
    Romania has delivered some of the most bracing filmmaking of the past 20 years (“The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”), but Queen Marie shows that its cinematic output also extends to stiff, exposition-clotted biopics.
  13. Pink Skies Ahead
    It is not without tender or enjoyable moments — that’s the beauty of a formula — but there’s a tonal imbalance of comedy and drama. The two constantly deflate each other.
  14. The Water Man
    The keen affinity the actor David Oyelowo has for his fellow performers is the best thing about The Water Man.
  15. Citizen Penn
    Sean Penn’s work in Haiti after its devastating 2011 earthquake continues to this day. And this new documentary Citizen Penn is a revealing, engaging chronicle of the actor’s activism.
  16. The Paper Tigers
    Bao’s lighthearted, refreshing approach neither succumbs to whitewashing nor the model-minority myth. The film sticks to the action-comedy basics, which is just fine.
  17. In Our Mothers' Gardens
    As a director, Lewis is admirably present. She seems to have gained the trust of her interview subjects, and has taken care to create a space for openness.
  18. Silo
    If Burnette’s formal instincts are suboptimal — the pervasive backlighting and underlighting keep much of the action in shadow — his dramatic instincts are worse.
  19. Paper Spiders
    In absence of a bold visual style, the performers are tasked with providing the movie with its energy.
  20. The Columnist
    The Columnist doesn’t seem to care about making a cogent statement about feminist revenge or online culture. Perhaps it just needed an excuse to carry out its bloody high jinks, which are decent fun in their own right.
  21. Best Summer Ever
    Tender and exuberant, it includes set pieces modeled on “Footloose” and “Grease,” and feels closer to those films in spirit than to the Disney Channel. This is the kind of movie that vibrates with the energy of the people who made it, whose enthusiasm radiates from the screen.
  22. The Outside Story
    The film, which was written and directed by Casimir Nozkowski, sets an easy pace to match Charles’s mild ennui. The only problem is that the movie doesn’t supplement its lack of stakes with style or substance.
  23. Berlin Alexanderplatz
    Reinhold exerts a Svengali-like hold on Franz and the women they know, though the character’s questionable magnetism makes this dynamic increasingly baffling.
  24. The Virtuoso
    It’s not just the title character who fails to thrive. The filmmaking is on occasion, to put it kindly, fractured.
  25. Eat Wheaties!
    An unfortunate, unfunny mess.
  26. Cliff Walkers
    The numerous action set pieces would be memorable even if the plot points didn’t eventually fall into place, which they do.
  27. Four Good Days
    As a relationship movie, not just for the pair but those around them, Four Good Days is more complex than its outward trappings and preachier scenes — like an anguished Molly addressing a high school class — suggest.
  28. Percy Vs Goliath
    Sentimental and a little corny in parts, “Percy” is protected from bathos by Walken’s proudly minimalist performance as an intensely private man reluctantly drawn into an uncomfortably public fight.
  29. Limbo
    Limbo, written and directed by a ferociously talented filmmaker, Ben Sharrock, takes an insinuating, poetic and often wryly funny approach. And it’s both heartbreaking and heartlifting.
  30. The Mitchells vs. The Machines
    The Mitchells vs. the Machines not only has laughably eccentric characters but also a script packed with bonkers, fast-paced action — with elaborate, wild visuals to match.
  31. Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse
    Jordan makes a sturdy enough action hero, but the character as portrayed doesn’t give him any contours to play.
  32. Lucy The Human Chimp
    By turns alarming and poignant, Alex Parkinson’s infuriatingly deferential film recounts how Carter — passionately attached to Lucy and admittedly clueless about how to facilitate her adjustment — abandoned her life to live with Lucy on a remote island. Her devotion is extraordinary, but her obliviousness is shocking.
  33. About Endlessness
    Each shot is a kind of sight gag, a visual and philosophical joke with absurdity in the setup and sorrow in the punchline. But this time, more of the jokes are one-liners, in which the premise and the payoff are one and the same.
  34. Things Heard & Seen
    Rather than interweaving domestic drama, supernatural mumbo-jumbo and campus naughtiness, Pulcini and Berman lurch from one scene to the next, squandering scares and undermining the momentum of the story.
  35. Red Moon Tide
    Though thin on story, the film (streaming on Mubi) is a majestic vision. But most captivating are the settings.
  36. Tu Me Manques
    Though the movie’s aesthetics are tepidly pleasant, Bellott’s biggest success is freeing his film’s relationship to time. In this sense, the movie retains some of the vitality of theater, where the characters invite the audience into reverie.
  37. The Marijuana Conspiracy
    Wise viewers will not be expecting an action movie, but The Marijuana Conspiracy is worse than inert: It’s shallow and tone-deaf. Attempts to highlight the sexism and discrimination of the time are either embarrassingly awkward or troublingly facile.
  38. 8 Billion Angels
    The unfocused editing somewhat defangs the film’s urgency, but it does give a sense of the scale of the issue and the corporate greed that fuels overconsumption.
  39. My Wonderful Wanda
    The film, written by Oberli and Cooky Ziesche, satirizes class divides and xenophobia (“the Pole” constantly carries a derogatory connotation here), but never takes the satire far enough to be memorable, challenging or anything beyond whimsical.
  40. Mortal Kombat
    While the carnage demonstrates some imagination (can ice cauterize wounds? Did a hat just turn into a table saw?), the rules, extending even to whether death is permanent, are so arbitrary that nothing matters. Test … your patience.
  41. Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street
    Even those resistant to easy nostalgia will find plenty to think about.
  42. Paris Calligrammes
    The filmmaker has what seems like a torrent of anecdotes and attendant ideas to impart, but the movie never feels rushed.
  43. Wet Season
    Wei Lun comes off as one-dimensional in his brash, immature pursuit of Ling, yet their illicit relationship is portrayed in an anti-sensationalist light, blurring the lines between maternal and romantic love.
  44. Sisters with Transistors
    This film is informative and often fascinating.
  45. Stowaway
    For all the empathy it expects of its viewers — every character cries onscreen at least once — the film is troublingly removed from human reality.
  46. Together Together
    Sweet, sensitive and surprisingly insightful, Nikole Beckwith’s Together Together fashions the signposts of the romantic comedy — the meet-cute, the misunderstanding, the mutual acceptance — into a wry examination of a very different relationship.
  47. Arlo the Alligator Boy
    Long before the motley crew crashes the Met Gala, it’s clear that director Ryan Crego is bolting wacky gee-gaws onto a rote plot. Still, several gags pay off.
  48. Ride or Die
    The movie gracefully captures the rhythms of intimacy, how it deepens quicker in stolen time. But even as they develop a kinship, the women themselves remain ciphers.
  49. The Banishing
    The Banishing never finds its groove.
  50. Hope
    Raw, melancholy and unquestionably mature, Hope understands that some wounds may never be healed. Even so, it takes a brave movie to hold that stance until its very last second.
  51. Why Did You Kill Me?
    Just because a crime is true doesn’t mean it’s interesting. And as Why Did You Kill Me? makes clear, without substance, a dash of style won’t do.
  52. Beate
    The director Samad Zarmadili cobbles together this underdog story like a slapdash sitcom episode.
  53. Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts
    This documentary, directed by Jeffrey Wolf, is a plain, sincere, nourishing account of the artist.
  54. Monday
    While Monday is not quite as bracing as Papadimitropoulos’s prior feature, “Suntan,” it’s a sharply observed, well-acted picture with a lot of tart detail and a few real stings in its tail.
  55. We Broke Up
    The overwhelming impression is that of shrillness. It’s a tone that might be familiar to those who have experienced a broken heart, but this shallow exercise offers meager opportunity for discomfort to transform into either entertainment or contemplation.
  56. In the Earth
    If the bigger picture of In the Earth doesn’t appear fully realized — this is a movie not just of the moment, but perhaps rushed to meet it — it would be difficult, this year, for at least some of its atmosphere of isolation-induced madness not to inspire a chill.
  57. Our Towns
    As enjoyable as their writing can be, the filmmaking around them — aerial shots, time lapse photography, cuts to the couple looking engrossed — is less inspired than their project.
  58. Shiva Baby
    It’s rare for a film to simultaneously balance such wildly divergent tones, to interweave big laughs with gut-wrenching discomfort, but Seligman pulls it off.
  59. Future People: The Family of Donor 5114
    Although Future People struggles to break through to the kids, an engaging family portrait emerges nonetheless — of a group clustered by biology, but bonded by a singular shared experience.
  60. Thunder Force
    Thunder Force, the latest in a string of dismal comic collaborations between Melissa McCarthy and her husband, Ben Falcone, does nothing to improve upon its predecessors.
  61. Looking for a Lady with Fangs and a Moustache
    At least for the uninitiated, the drift of the filmmaking seemed to fall short of the transcendence envisioned by its story.
  62. The Tunnel
    The human dimension is painfully cliché, and Oie’s clunky orchestration of intersecting individual stories flattens the film’s overall momentum. It does, however, manage to eke out moments of genuine suspense and harrowing claustrophobia with its straightforward premise and contained, small-scale action.
  63. The Power
    The film stumbles in delivering a cohesive vision.
  64. Moffie
    In depicting the horrific specifics of this particular man’s awful military experience, Hermanus delivers in abundance.
  65. Voyagers
    This dull dig into human nature owes more to the aesthetics of Calvin Klein than the terrors of outer space.
  66. 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.
  67. Giants Being Lonely
    Nothing concrete emerges from this haze of oblique editing and barely written scenes, acted by cast members who are not up to making the dialogue sound convincing or filling the voids left in place of their characters.
  68. Małni—Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore
    An undeniable melancholy — a sense of loss — pervades the film. Yet it is never resigned. The ghosts of history live among us. To ignore their presence, “Małni” seems to say, is to forget who we really are.
  69. Malmkrog
    Imagine a Chekhov play without drama, an Oscar Wilde farce without humor, a Visconti film without desire, or a very long party at the home of a distant acquaintance, and you will have some idea of Malmkrog, Cristi Puiu’s latest film.
  70. The Man Who Sold His Skin
    The lustrously shot movie breaks Sam out of the gallery grind through Hollywood-grade somersaults in storytelling (one of them so breezily violent as to feel a little tasteless)
  71. This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection
    Mhlongo (who also appears in Beyoncé’s “Black Is King”) carries the movie on her shoulders with an authoritative presence.
  72. Amundsen: The Greatest Expedition
    Woefully short on excitement and long on — well, just long — “Amundsen,” away from the blizzards and chattering teeth, is a pompous parade of stiff collars and stuffy rooms.
  73. Concrete Cowboy
    The movie’s convincing accretion of detail and its affectionate fictionalization of an actual subculture are disarming.
  74. WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn
    On why what now looks like a tenuous, bluster-based business model would appeal to Wall Street, the director, Jed Rothstein, spends less time than he should.
  75. The Human Voice
    Almodóvar’s sense of cinema design — the décor simulates a luxe apartment and lays it bare as a soundstage illusion — is acutely keyed to Swinton’s performance here, which projects mercurial emotion with Swiss watch precision.
  76. Every Breath You Take
    With only a few fleeting moments of nail-biting thrills, Every Breath You Take remains mostly tepid and frustrating.
  77. Roe v. Wade
    Those who disagree that abortion is akin to murder are unlikely to be persuaded, and even those on the fence might struggle to sit through the hammy acting and poor production values.
  78. The Unholy
    Playing the evil entity with convulsive movements and a killer manicure, the contortionist Marina Mazepa turns in the movie’s most entertaining performance. That’s if you don’t count Morgan looking genuinely baffled as to what he’s doing here at all.
  79. The Place That Makes Us
    The families’ stories help turn The Place That Makes Us into more than a policy proposal in motion.
  80. Godzilla vs. Kong
    An action movie made with lavish grandiosity, zero pretension and not too much originality.
  81. Nina Wu
    This startlingly evocative, complex and confrontational new film is not interested in justice or didacticism.
  82. A Week Away
    This is a film as tidy, transparent and kid-friendly as a square of Jell-O salad, and so squishily eager-to-please that it doesn’t engage with its religious themes so much as tuck them into song lyrics to hover in the narrative like grapes.
  83. Miracle Fishing: Kidnapped Abroad
    Few people in this position would think to pick up a camera, let alone keep filming for so long. That makes Miracle Fishing a unique and harrowing record.Few people in this position would think to pick up a camera, let alone keep filming for so long. That makes Miracle Fishing a unique and harrowing record.
  84. Senior Moment
    This is the kind of movie that is usually defended with one word: “harmless.”
  85. The Good Traitor
    Rosendahl’s framing complicates any “great man” narrative of the period, and shows how the energies of public and private worlds course back and forth.
  86. Violation
    Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli have given their subject matter the focus it deserves, distinguishing themselves as thoughtful, artistic and uncompromising in their shared vision. This female-centered story manages to be gutsy while resisting exploitation — a welcome and nuanced addition to a genre often hobbled by didacticism.
  87. Six Minutes to Midnight
    The double-crosses are depicted by the director Andy Goddard with better-than-average craft, but the more the movie leans into old suspense conventions the more interest it loses, alas.
  88. Shoplifters of the World
    This sweetly nostalgic look at lost boys and lonely girls feels like it comes straight from the heart.
  89. Tina
    You may believe you know Turner’s tale. And you may be right. It is retold well here, but the most moving portions — and they could bring tears to your eyes — come as Turner, almost 80 at the time of this interview (and as beautiful as she has ever been), wearing a tailored black suit, sits and discusses where she’s at now.
  90. Bad Trip
    However effortful, the movie’s tricks are more likely to activate your gorge than your funny bone.
  91. Nobody
    As slick as a blood spill and as single-minded as a meat grinder, Nobody hustles us along with a swiftness that blurs the foolishness of its plot and the depravity of its message.
  92. Francesco
    Judged strictly as a movie, Francesco comes across as shapeless and secondhand — a missed opportunity to present a closer look at the daily work of being pope and perhaps to demystify elements of the papacy.
  93. Seaspiracy
    Even the film’s notable points seem to emerge only briefly before sinking beneath the surface, lost in a sea of murky conspiratorial thinking.
  94. Donny's Bar Mitzvah
    Donny’s Bar Mitzvah — which is littered with chaotic party scenes of horny, dysfunctional attendees — oscillates between offensive and offensively unamusing.
  95. Groomed
    Van de Pas calls on experts, psychologists and a convicted sex offender for interviews, but the most illuminating examples come from her own story.
  96. LUZ
    The film’s writer and director, Jon Garcia, treats the physicality of their romance in a frank way, staging realistic love scenes that show the attraction between the characters. But Garcia is less adept at finding passion in between scenes of sex.
  97. Before the Dying of the Light
    Even for viewers with little grounding in Moroccan history, Essafi’s film offers an inspiring view of a roiling period of artistic exploration.
  98. After the Murder of Albert Lima
    In its quest for entertainment value, this documentary loses sight of the actual grief and hurt a devastated son would feel.
  99. The Courier
    Though Jessie Buckley, as Wynne’s suspicious wife, and Rachel Brosnahan, as an amusingly pushy C.I.A. operative, add welcome jolts of female energy, The Courier is essentially the story of an extraordinary male friendship. The men’s mutual compassion peaks too late to save the picture, but is no less moving for that.
  100. Wojnarowicz
    [An] exemplary documentary.
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