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. Sid and Nancy
    Sid and Nancy doesn't try to win its audience's sympathy in any conventional way, which is just as well, since that would have been a losing battle. But it does succeed in offering bleak, nasty and sometimes hilarious glimpses of life in the punk demimonde.
  2. Lady Macbeth
    Mr. Oldroyd boxes Katherine in his attractive visuals, imprisoning her as her male relatives do. Yet his intellectual distance also turns her into a specimen, a pinned butterfly turned taxidermy beast.
  3. Inside Man
    Filled with playful noise and nonsense, clever feints and digressions, Inside Man has a story to tell, but its most sustained pleasures come from its performances, especially the three leads.
  4. Fifi Howls from Happiness
    A portrait of the artist as a refusenik, a recluse, a survivor and a stubborn question mark, “Fifi Howls From Happiness” registers, by turns, as a celebration, an excavation and an increasingly urgent rescue mission.
  5. Piaffe
    Its experimental style, marked by long, dialogue-free stretches, color flares and pristine sound effects, can seem calculated and off-putting, the narrative slight and dramatically slack. Yet the film’s provocations have a playfulness and generosity that are enormously appealing.
  6. Chico & Rita
    Sexy, sweet and laced with a sadness at once specific to its place and time and accessible to anyone with a breakable heart, Chico & Rita is an animated valentine to Cuba and its music.
  7. Something in the Air
    Mr. Assayas’s method is observant and immersive. His camera moves among young bodies like an invisible friend, and his somewhat messy narrative is propelled by fidelity to feeling rather than by the machinery of plot.
  8. Shayda
    In her first narrative feature, Niasari, who based the story in part on her own experiences, demonstrates an astounding control of pacing and mood.
  9. Dolemite Is My Name
    It has a loose, friendly, house-party vibe, and it’s impossible not to have a good time watching the actors have a good time with one another. If there’s a problem, it’s that the good humor has the effect of lowering the film’s dramatic stakes, and risks turning its cultural reference points into cartoons.
  10. Rebirth
    Stands as both a tribute and a study in healing.
  11. Guardians of the Galaxy
    Here, a pulse, wit, beauty and a real sensibility have been slipped into the fray, alongside the clockwork guffaws, kabooms and splats.
  12. Nana
    Naturalistic and mysterious, Nana is terrifyingly dependent on its diminutive star. Insisting on neither written lines nor predetermined actions (the film's short script was used primarily to obtain financing), Ms. Massadian, who worked with the child for almost two years, has coaxed a performance of remarkable lucidity.
  13. The Unspeakable Act
    Mr. Sallitt lays down a customarily restrained mode of acting (the kind that somehow seems less flat and more natural in French cinema), but it’s in the service of a rare lucidity about feeling.
  14. Ain't in It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm
    Less an archival clip job than a late-night jam session, it is informal and inviting.
  15. Nancy, Please
    It’s a brutally unsympathetic portrait of situational anxiety that withholds comfort from Paul and viewer alike, and Mr. Semans refuses to relent.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Birdman of Alcatraz
    A thoughtful yet powerful portrait that cleaves to the heart and mind despite its omissions.
  17. The Hunter
    The clammy chill that pervades The Hunter, the fourth feature film by the Iranian director Rafi Pitts, seeps under your skin as you wait for its grim, taciturn protagonist to detonate.
  18. Lore
    The film sustains an air of overarching mystery in which the viewer, like the title character, is in the position of a sheltered child plunked into an alien environment and required to fend for herself without a map or compass.
  19. We Are Little Zombies
    Smart, noisy and flashily assured, We Are Little Zombies is entirely, gleefully its own thing.
  20. A Prayer Before Dawn
    Mr. Sauvaire’s approach may not be for everyone, but his skill and audacity are invigorating — and, strangely, liberating.
  21. I Carry You with Me
    Turning time and memory into an elliptical portrait of what it means when borders become barriers, I Carry You With Me, the first narrative feature from the documentary filmmaker Heidi Ewing, trades distance for empathy.
  22. When Harry Met Sally...
    Like the sitcom version of a Woody Allen film, full of amusing lines and scenes, all infused with an uncomfortable sense of deja vu.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Jesus' Son
    One of the pleasures of Jesus' Son is watching a filmmaker take risks and discover new resources of style.
  24. In America
    Thanks to Jim Sheridan's graceful, scrupulously sincere direction and the dry intelligence of his cast, In America is likely to pierce the defenses of all but the most dogmatically cynical viewers.
  25. Morning Sun
    Does a thoughtful job of streamlining the bloody realities -- both literal and psychological -- of China's Cultural Revolution into roughly two hours of film.
  26. Corsage
    Making Elisabeth interestingly human proves more than enough, a feat that Kreutzer and Krieps accomplish to dazzling effect.
  27. Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai
    More moving than shocking, it proceeds slowly and gracefully, and the few scenes of bloodshed are emotionally intense rather than showily sensational.
  28. The Army of Crime
    Was it all for naught? Only weeks after the 23 partisans were arrested (and all but two promptly executed), Paris was liberated. Army of Crime is a passionate act of remembrance.
  29. Escape from Alcatraz
    Escape From Alcatraz is not a great film or an especially memorable one, but there is more evident skill and knowledge of movie making in any one frame of it than there are in most other American films around at the moment. I should also add that it's terrifically exciting.
  30. Room and a Half
    Despite its moments of pathos and its expressions of homesickness, A Room and a Half, is an uplifting comedy. Like Fellini’s screen reminiscences, it is suffused with a hearty appreciation of the world’s absurdity, along with a hungry appreciation of its beauty.
  31. Dirty Wars
    [A] pessimistic, grimly outraged and utterly riveting documentary.
  32. The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic
    The camera stays close to Jaakko, always at his eye level, blurring everything around him. But the script struggles to channel the character’s wonderfully playful, acerbic spirit.
  33. Grosse Pointe Blank
    Enough wild-card energy to keep it bright and surprising.
  34. Machuca
    Both sweet and stringent, attuned to the wonders of childhood as well as its cruelty and terror.
  35. Boyz n the Hood
    The film's strength is that it sustains an intimate and realistic tone. Mr. Fishburne, who is called upon to deliver several lectures, manages to do so with enormous dignity and grace, and makes Furious a compelling role model, someone on whom the whole film easily pivots.
  36. Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story
    “A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story” is a largely enjoyable, cozily intimate movie that plays like it was made by a fan.
  37. Night School
    The result is a movie about large setbacks and small triumphs, and the grit that takes you from one to the other.
  38. Choose Me
    If the film sometimes gives the impression of too much talent in the service of too little, that talent is evident all the same.
  39. Red Rocket
    It’s funny and abrasive, but also coy and, in the end, a bit tedious.
  40. 3:10 to Yuma
    More likely to be recalled as a moderately satisfying entertainment than remembered as a classic.
  41. Jane Eyre
    A splendid example of how to tackle the daunting duty of turning a beloved work of classic literature into a movie. Neither a radical updating nor a stiff exercise in middlebrow cultural respectability, Mr. Fukunaga's film tells its venerable tale with lively vigor and an astute sense of emotional detail.
  42. Actress
    Mr. Greene’s impressionistic style and rough, off-center compositions create an atmosphere of intimacy, as if the viewer were being invited to read Ms. Burre’s diary or her mind.
  43. Children of the Revolution
    This comedy has less to do with narrative than with sheer chutzpah and a first-rate cast. It manages to be irreverently funny despite a subject that is no laughing matter.
  44. A Monster Calls
    If you prefer to view dying as a natural part of life, a step in a cycle, this film will feel discordant and perhaps counterproductive. But visually it will certainly stick with you, and your children.
  45. Buck
    In some sense it was beauty that saved Mr. Brannaman, that of his conscience and that of horses, which, having been tied to humans long ago, became companions, workers and for some, as this lovely movie shows, saviors.
  46. Elza (Le bonheur d'Elza)
    Bathed in the flamingo colors and Caribbean rhythms of its location, this deeply personal debut from the writer and director Mariette Monpierre develops with a lingering attention to sensation and sound.
  47. Machines
    The ideological charge leveled for decades at this strain of filmmaking is that such eye-catching tableaus romanticize poverty, but prettified squalor has become sadly familiar in global documentary filmmaking. In Machines, even at barely more than an hour, the style leads to diminishing returns.
  48. Shaun of the Dead
    By treating the genre as a joke, this satire, whose title plays off George A. Romero's 1979 golden oldie, "Dawn of the Dead," yields ironic dramatic dividends.
  49. And Everything Is Going Fine
    This sense of intimacy makes And Everything Is Going Fine both vibrant - what amazing company this man was! - and terribly sad.
  50. Their Finest
    Their Finest is too understandably serious to be called a romp, yet it has a buoyancy that lifts you and, in Ms. McCrory, a woman who does, too.
  51. Creepy
    Creepy certainly works — looks and feels — like a horror movie, but it also has the conundrums of a detective story, the emotional currents of a domestic drama and the quickening pulse of a psychological thriller, a combination that creates a kind of destabilization.
  52. The White Tiger
    The characters don’t quite come to life. They aren’t trapped by prescribed social roles so much as by the programmatic design of the narrative, which insists it is showing things as they really are. If it wasn’t so insistent, it might be more convincing.
  53. Syriana
    It aims to be a great deal more than a standard geopolitical thriller and thereby succeeds in being one of the best geopolitical thrillers in a very long time.
  54. Rising Phoenix
    By avoiding complexity, Rising Phoenix preserves its inspiring mood, but offers only a platform for champions who already dominate the arena.
  55. The Stroll
    If The Stroll is an indictment and elegy, it is also a remarkable document of the self-determination of the women and workers who learned, in the face of the worst odds, to fend for themselves and each other.
  56. Confessions of a Good Samaritan
    What begins as an optimistic piece of advocacy eventually veers into something more complex, ambivalent and even frantic.
  57. Silent Souls
    Silent Souls is part folk tale, part lesson in letting go. In its quiet acceptance of the passing of time, this unusual film reminds us that to die is not always the same as to disappear.
  58. Stand by Me
    Some of their horsing around, 1950ish style, is comical, but too much of what they do is only too plainly imposed by the movie makers. Rob Reiner's direction hammers in every obvious element in an obvious script.
  59. Djomeh
    An investigation, at once lucid and enigmatic, of exile, loneliness and the fragile possibility of friendship.
  60. Vengeance
    Both newcomers to Mr. To and longtime admirers should be prepared for a master class in directing.
  61. Evolution of a Criminal
    Raising significant questions about the psychological effects of poverty on young children, this unsettlingly direct stab at atonement feels genuine.
  62. Reds
    Reds is an extraordinary film, a big romantic adventure movie, the best since David Lean's ''Lawrence of Arabia,'' as well as a commercial movie with a rare sense of history.
  63. Islands
    There’s a refreshing willfulness here to leave some quandaries lingering, and like the rough beauty of the volcanic island the movie is set on, Islands beckons and rebukes and beckons some more.
  64. The Colors Within
    The Colors Within has such an aloof tone that the deeper motivations and stakes for each character, though alluded to, don’t feel substantial enough to provide the story with any sense of urgency.
  65. The Baader Meinhof Complex
    A taut, unnerving, forcefully unromantic fictional film.
  66. Retrograde
    The shrewdly observant film sticks with one Afghan general, Sami Sadat, to tell an emotional story that feels as significant as any analysis of troop numbers.
  67. The Snake Pit
    The Snake Pit, while frankly quite disturbing, and not recommended for the weak, is a mature emotional drama on a rare and pregnant theme.
  68. It Felt Like Love
    A mood poem to summer loving and sexual awakening, It Felt Like Love powerfully evokes a time when flesh is paramount, and peer behavior is the standard by which we judge our own.
  69. Intimate Stories
    Almost every frame of this modest gem of a movie, directed by Carlos Sorin from a screenplay by Pablo Solarz, conveys the emptiness of the environment in which three interwoven vignettes unfold.
  70. Dreamgirls
    The problem with “Dreamgirls” -- and it is not a small one -- lies in those songs, which are not just musically and lyrically pedestrian, but historically and idiomatically disastrous.
  71. I Am: Celine Dion
    These awkward segments weaken the powerful emotional atmosphere of witnessing Dion transcend her circumstances. Especially when she lets the cameras stick around, showing some of the most grim health-related scenes I have ever seen of a superstar onscreen.
  72. Outside In
    In a movie whose greatest tension comes from wondering whether Chris will violate his parole by drinking a beer, the actors need to be compelling. Easily clearing that bar, Ms. Falco gives Carol a gentle kindness and the emotional intelligence to transform Chris’s ardor into a catalyst.
  73. Dogtown and Z-Boys
    As this taut, viscerally propulsive insider's history of the sport in its early years skids and leaps forward with a jaunty visual panache, it is impossible not to be seduced by its hard-edged vision of an endless teenage summer.
  74. All Quiet on the Western Front
    Berger has more tools at his disposal than Milestone did with the challenges of the early sound era, yet those advantages somehow make this update less impressive: The magnification in scale and dexterity lends itself to showing off. Still, the movie aims to pummel you with ceaseless brutality, and it’s hard not to be rattled by that.
  75. Peter Pan
    A wholly amusing and engaging piece of work within the defined limitations of the aforementioned Disney style. The Disney inventions are as skillful and clever as they have ever been.
  76. The Greatest Show on Earth
    Sprawling across a mammoth canvas, crammed with the real-life acts and thrills, as well as the vast backstage minutiae, that make the circus the glamorous thing it is and glittering in marvelous Technicolor--truly marvelous color, we repeat--this huge motion picture of the big-top is the dandiest ever put upon the screen.
  77. Escape from New York
    It's a toughly told, very tall tale, one of the best escape (and escapist) movies of the season.
  78. The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson
    There are several strong stories in The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, a documentary that, in trying to tell them all, takes on too much.
  79. Flight
    Flight is freakishly real; it's one of those big-screen nightmares that will inspire fear-of-flying moviegoers to run home and Google car rental deals and Greyhound schedules.
  80. Tucker: The Man and His Dream
    Mr. Coppola has done things this fancily before, but never with so clear and moving a sense of purpose.
  81. 99 Homes
    If 99 Homes is a scolding look at a society gone astray, it is also a minor masterpiece of suspense, as tightly wound as “Sicario,” Denis Villeneuve’s white-knuckle drug-war thriller, and almost as brutal.
  82. Father of My Children
    A tale of cinema, a story about the agonies of trying to work outside the cinematic mainstream (even in France!). Yet what makes the movie so affecting is that it’s also a love story about a family.
  83. Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story
    Reeve’s bond with his fellow actor Robin Williams also makes up one of the documentary’s meatiest threads, adding depth to the character study.
  84. The Trial of the Chicago 7
    I don’t think, on balance, that this is a very good movie. It’s talky and clumsy, alternating between self-importance and clowning. But it’s also not a movie that can be easily shaken off. Partly this is an accident of timing.
  85. Cloud
    For all of his genre-bending on display, Kurosawa is interested in something more real and more dark about humanity’s capacity for greed and bitterness, and the quiet ways that the internet can further mutate those diseases in us.
  86. A Cop Movie
    Ambitious, heady and distinctive, if easier to admire in theory than engage with moment to moment, A Cop Movie has a conceptual strangeness that’s difficult to overstate.
  87. Flora and Son
    This is Carney’s saltiest ode to creative expression — and, peculiarly, his most relatable.
  88. The Lunchbox
    The comedy is more wry than uproarious, the melodrama gently poignant rather than operatic, and the sentimentality just sweet enough to be satisfying rather than bothersome.
  89. Citizen K
    Although the film has long, engaging stretches, there is something slightly unsatisfying about the whole.
  90. Dave
    In spite of this sogginess, and despite a self-congratulatory, do-gooder streak that the film discovers within Dave, this comedy remains bright and buoyant much of the way through.
  91. Shine a Light
    As the director of the documentary Shine a Light, Martin Scorsese is a besotted rock ’n’ roll fan who wholeheartedly embraces its mythology.
  92. La Ciudad (The City)
    Indelible, deeply disquieting film.
  93. Menace II Society
    More acutely than any movie before, it gives cinematic expression to the hot-tempered, defiantly nihilistic ethos that ignites gangster rap.
  94. Chuck & Buck
    Strange, intense and moving -- one of the few truly grown-up movies you're likely to see this year.
  95. Blue Car
    Mr. Strathairn's complex, exquisitely nuanced portrayal of a man who goes over the line allows his character to be both hero and villain, sometimes at once.
  96. This So-Called Disaster: Sam Shepard Directs the Late Henry Moss
    Fascinating. Anyone interested in the challenges and techniques of acting -- which is really to say, anyone interested in human behavior -- should turn off E! and head down to Mr. Almereyda's film.
  97. A Very Long Engagement
    Only when Jodie Foster materializes midstory, delivering a beautiful, pocket-size performance as the mistress of one of the condemned men, does the film spring to life.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Friday
    Epic and raw, Black Friday is cut from the same bloody cloth as "Salvador" and "Munich."
  99. Rembrandt's J'Accuse...!
    Generally absorbing if sometimes fog-inducing.
  100. Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders
    The extent of the need around the world is so enormous and overwhelming that the efforts of the doctors in this sobering film seem both vitally necessary and woefully inadequate.
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