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. The Fever
    By showing us the world through Justino’s searching gaze, Da-Rin gives us an elusive but powerful sense of the limits of our own vision.
  2. Happily
    Grabinski has both wit and energy, and these qualities, along with a game cast, help keep “Happily” afloat for far longer than most made-in-L.A. dark domestic comedies. But the movie wants to do too many things, and grows diffuse.
  3. City of Lies
    The look is grimy and the atmosphere is grim; but what could have been a moody character study or a taut conspiracy thriller is instead a dreary procedural, a misbegotten mush of flashbacks, voice-overs and dead ends.
  4. Rose Plays Julie
    Amid the lush greenery of the setting, the atmosphere is perpetually bone-chilling — complete with an ominously high-pitched score — making the film seem distant and difficult to fully embrace
  5. Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal
    The gripping documentary Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal shifts the spotlight back to Singer, played in re-enactments by Matthew Modine with dialogue taken directly from wiretaps, to understand how a flip flop-clad former basketball coach rebranded himself as an academic glad-hander for the 1 percent.
  6. Martha: A Picture Story
    The film does a fair job of explaining Cooper’s temperament. (An editor who tried to assign her to photograph pollen for National Geographic found that wasn’t a great fit.) Ultimately, though, the photos are the thing. A conventional biographical portrait almost feels redundant. Cooper has already documented her own life story
  7. Zack Snyder's Justice League
    Hope isn’t manufactured. It can’t be limited to a shadow of a gesture or shouldered by one man whose extraordinary abilities are heralded in the “super” of his name. And it’s definitely not in the cinematic equivalent of a four-hour-long cut scene.
  8. Yes Day
    Though Yes Day does not lack for energy, the jokes are too broad and the mishaps too safe for the movie to emerge as an honest or imaginative journey through family conflict and compromise.
  9. Own the Room
    Tucked like a pair of aces into a solid but unremarkable hand of poker is a story arc that not only heightens the dramatic tension, but also clarifies the film’s more compelling ideas, skillfully tying the stories of the documentary’s subjects to their political subtext.
  10. Bombay Rose
    The movie is lovely, but airless and bolted with scraps that barely hold together.
  11. On-Gaku: Our Sound
    In a world of C.G.I.-everything, “On-Gaku” comes as a refreshing blast from the past.
  12. Markie in Milwaukee
    If Markie is undeniably compelling as a subject, the film doesn’t quite match her bravery and her willingness to explore uncharted territory. There are plenty of fly-on-the-wall observations, but little play or introspection besides what Markie is able to offer.
  13. Long Live Rock: Celebrate the Chaos
    Long Live Rock feels, at best, like a passionate but elementary essay. More often than not, it feels like a table of contents. The hot-topic buttons are touched upon, but McHugh doesn’t forge far enough into the mosh pit.
  14. The Inheritance
    The Inheritance, Ephraim Asili’s debut feature film, beautifully abandons genre to consider questions about community, art and Black liberation.
  15. Kid 90
    If the unremarkableness of the moments captured in Moon Frye’s footage is refreshing, it also makes for a somewhat insipid film.
  16. Honeydew
    Food — its preparation, consumption and just what the hell its ingredients are — figures in a minimal plot that the filmmakers inflate in a variety of slick but ultimately unimpressive ways (particularly in the editing).
  17. Come True
    Like “Our House” (2018), Burns’s underseen feature debut, Come True is superior throwback horror marred mainly by familiarity and, in this case, an ending that feels like a tease.
  18. My Beautiful Stutter
    The lessons — for stutterers and non-stutterers — still hold.
  19. Quo Vadis, Aida?
    The rigorous honesty of Quo Vadis, Aida? is harrowing, partly because it subverts many of the expectations that quietly attach themselves to movies about historical trauma. We often watch them not to be confronted with the cruelty of history, but to be comforted with redemptive tales of resistance, resilience and heroism.
  20. Still Life in Lodz
    The individual stories are powerful, as are the visual comparisons between present-day and historical locations. A few animated sequences effectively evoke the evanescence of memory.
  21. Boss Level
    Roy grows as a killer over the course of the movie, which involves an increasingly tedious amount of repetitive violence played for laughs — he’s like Wile E. Coyote, brushing himself off after falling off a cliff or being blown up.
  22. Coming 2 America
    A genial, mostly inoffensive, sometimes quite funny sequel.
  23. Adam
    In Maryam Touzani’s Adam, certain stylistic choices — a muted palette, the absence of a melodramatic score, hand-held camerawork — help temper sentimentality with verisimilitude.
  24. The Walrus and the Whistleblower
    Frustratingly, the documentary declines to probe Demers’s evolving relationship to his activism and newfound fame.
  25. Gustav Stickley: American Craftsman
    The movie itself, directed by Herb Stratford, is so dull and unimaginative in its presentation — talking heads, an overused score that might as well have been downloaded from a free database — that it makes for an unfortunate match of subject matter and form.
  26. Truth or Consequences
    The realization that Jayanti is using these things to buttress a fiction — albeit a fiction that could perhaps become true in the blink of an eye — is disquieting in a way the filmmaker might not have intended.
  27. Lost Course
    [A] sobering, sprawling documentary.
  28. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run
    “Sponge on the Run” may take us back under the sea, but this sponge is all dried up.
  29. Keep an Eye Out
    Dupieux pulls off this bizarre procedural in a lean running time while hitting the notes of darkness and drollery just right.
  30. Boogie
    It’s a competent movie, but it doesn’t quite make it to the big leagues.
  31. Stray
    The filmmaker's eyes may rarely leave the dogs, but what she’s really looking at is us.
  32. My Salinger Year
    Muted almost to the point of effacement, this limp adaptation of Joanna Rakoff’s 2014 memoir, written and directed by Philippe Falardeau, only affirms that what might work on the page doesn’t always pop on the screen.
  33. The Truffle Hunters
    A charming and slyly poignant documentary.
  34. Raya and the Last Dragon
    The unity rhetoric feels awfully trite, but it also teaches forgiveness: a worthy lesson for the kids.
  35. Moxie
    Unfocused and too often unbelievable, Amy Poehler’s Moxie feels like a battle between two competing visions: go-girl crowd-pleaser and serious high-school harassment drama. Neither wins.
  36. Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell
    Maybe half of the film is about his music career, and of that, not much at all is devoted to his commercial prime. This makes the film anti-mythological, but also far more robust.
  37. Tom & Jerry
    The de rigueur slapstick scenes for the title characters don’t even play, as the integration of animation and live action is so clunky that it feels like we’re watching special effects demonstrations rather than gags.
  38. Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry
    “Blurry” isn’t triumphant, strictly speaking. Instead, it relies on the accretive power of the mundane. It moves forward without narration, and sometimes without narrative rhythm — often it feels almost observational, like a nature film.
  39. Un Film Dramatique
    It’s the cumulative effect of seeing the world through the eyes of these children that makes this movie so deeply joyful. This is a heartening project, a philosophical excavation of a school that abounds with playful optimism.
  40. My Darling Supermarket
    Better late than never, the film’s spiritual thrust becomes clear by the third act. The stark symmetry of the shelved merchandise and the eerily dissonant score assumes an otherworldly, ritualistic power when our subjects begin musing on faith and the nature of existence.
  41. Crisis
    The film is well-paced but often strains credulity.
  42. The Vigil
    Keith Thomas’s slim but effective The Vigil milks terror from a minimalistic setup, relying on the shapes we make out with squinted eyes in the shadows.
  43. The United States vs. Billie Holiday
    Like nearly everything else in this feverish, frustrating movie, the political themes are handled with maximal melodrama and minimal clarity.
  44. The Father
    At once stupendously effective and profoundly upsetting, The Father might be the first movie about dementia to give me actual chills.
  45. 'Til Kingdom Come
    Zinshtein’s patient, observant approach catches her subjects in moments of damning irony.
  46. Cherry
    Whether they’re comfortable owning up to it or not, the Russos are better moviemakers than their Marvel movies (the most recent of which was the gargantuan hit “Avengers: Endgame”) allow them to be. They demonstrate that here. Holland, also a veteran of the superhero mode of cinema (he’s Spider-Man these days) shows performing chops that web-slinging doesn’t often let him flex.
  47. My Zoe
    An unusually compelling domestic drama with sharp ears, a sharp eye, and up to a point, sharp teeth.
  48. Pelé
    I did yearn to see more of his talents in action; his header goal in that year’s Italy final feels cosmically liberating. But however conventional as a whole, the movie feels troubled by the traumas of Pelé’s heyday.
  49. Shook
    Shook is done in by its final reveal, which manages to be simultaneously improbable and conventional. For engagement, we’ll have to look somewhere else.
  50. Mafia Inc
    For better or worse, Grou has a knack for staging brutality, and for having his movie rock out to a Joy Division track or two.
  51. Test Pattern
    Test Pattern achieves a lot with very little: The film’s nonlinear editing and cannily scored silences invite our interpretations, locating in them the entanglements of race and gender. Ford pushes us, if not to definitive answers, then to the right questions.
  52. Days of the Bagnold Summer
    Amiably anecdotal, the movie gets wry results from Dolan and other players, including Rob Brydon as a would-be ladies man and Tamsin Greig as a “hipper” mom than Sue.
  53. Flora & Ulysses
    Flora & Ulysses veers close to falling into the trap of cheesiness that kids’ movies of this genre often find themselves in, but miraculously never does. In fact, this hopeful comedy, in showing how a twitchy-tailed hero can change a family, lifts off and flies.
  54. I Care a Lot
    An unexpectedly gripping thriller that seesaws between comedy and horror, I Care a Lot is cleverly written (by the director, J Blakeson) and wonderfully cast.
  55. Nomadland
    Nomadland is patient, compassionate and open, motivated by an impulse to wander and observe rather than to judge or explain.
  56. Blithe Spirit
    Surplus buffoonery and a new ending add nothing to the original, leaving us with a movie that obsesses over death while showing all too few signs of life.
  57. Silk Road
    In many respects, Silk Road is an excellent examination of why you should probably never date, or maybe even socialize with, a libertarian. It comes up short in almost every other way, though.
  58. Sin
    An austere, demanding sit, Sin — a Russian-Italian coproduction with Italian dialogue — nevertheless has a stubborn integrity in exploring the competing forces of patronage and creative inspiration that Michelangelo confronted in the 16th century.
  59. The Violent Heart
    Some of these central relationships are inappropriate, even dangerous, but the subtlety of Sanga’s filmmaking allows for big twists to come as a genuine surprise. It makes for a successful manipulation of his audience’s expectations, even if the overall effect is a movie that feels slightly detached.
  60. Little Big Women
    A gentle panning camera and a bland score milk every scene for emotion, and at more than two hours, the women’s journeys drag. By the time it is over, Little Big Women has lost any sense of restorative power — all that registers is tedium.
  61. Twilight's Kiss
    Handsomely shot but humble in approach, the film can often feel purposeful, laying down groundwork that other stories of queer experience might take for granted. But Tai Bo’s pragmatic momentum as Pak has a way of restoring a succinctness to the movie, which avoids minimizing or exploiting the pains of concealment.
  62. Minari
    Minari is modest, specific and thrifty, like the lives it surveys. There’s nothing small about it, though, because it operates at the true scale of life.
  63. Lapsis
    The narrative eventually loses steam, but the movie’s politics remain as low-key as its acting and as basic as its special effects. Lapsis isn’t a polemic, it’s a caricature, and all the more likable for having its claws sheathed in velvet.
  64. To All the Boys: Always and Forever
    Even at its most saccharine I can’t fault it for committing fully to what it is. I’m no fan of Valentine’s Day unless it’s a heart-shaped confection, but for those who are, “To All the Boys” is a light but satisfying dessert.
  65. Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar
    “Barb and Star” offers a mixed bag of laughs, often feeling like a Frankenstein assembly of various sketches. Still, I can’t help but admire its commitment to the act, and its gloriously unhinged absurdity.
  66. There Is No I in Threesome
    As our central couple’s connection falters, the documentary evolves into an astute examination of perspective.
  67. Ruth: Justice Ginsburg in Her Own Words
    Though filled with valuable details, the documentary has the misfortune of arriving after countless other appraisals.
  68. Young Hearts
    Imagine mumblecore with actual mumbling and no wit, even though those lo-fi auteurs, the Duplass brothers, are executive producers.
  69. The Mauritanian
    Trapped for the most part in featureless rooms, a stellar cast — including Jodie Foster, Benedict Cumberbatch and Shailene Woodley — deliver dull speeches and sift through redacted documents, brows furrowed and lips compressed.
  70. The Map of Tiny Perfect Things
    Last year, “Palm Springs” proved that the time-loop conceit from “Groundhog Day” still had some laughs in it. The Map of Tiny Perfect Things shows it’s a perfectly fine pretext for teenage treacle.
  71. Music
    This is a bizarre movie, one that parades confused ideas about care, fantasy and disability with a pride that reads as vanity. It is audacious, in the sense that making it certainly took some audacity.
  72. Breaking News in Yuba County
    One may wonder how Tate Taylor, who has overseen high-profile, conventional, ostensibly respectable Hollywood product like “The Girl on the Train” and “The Help,” came to direct this amoral, repellent bag of sick, a movie whose biggest ambition in life is to start a bidding war at a late 1990s Sundance Film Festival and then bomb at the box office. Call it water finding its own level, maybe.
  73. Dead Pigs
    It’s a tonal wild ride with eccentric characters, neon-lit settings and elaborately absurd detours. Unfortunately, the ripped-from-the-headlines meat of Dead Pigs gets lost in these affectations.
  74. Land
    Wright’s movie is ambitious (that location! that weather!), but not grandiose. Its storytelling economy helps make it credible and eventually moving.
  75. Cowboys
    The observant nature of this character drama offers Zahn in particular the opportunity to expand into new territory. He hasn’t lost the spaciness that once made him a lovable comedic sidekick, but here fatherhood endows that same charm with pathos, even tragedy.
  76. The World to Come
    Waterston and Kirby are both superb at creating characters whose attraction must be shown to grow by degrees, without overt admission. Affleck and Abbott, too, navigate a tricky dynamic, playing men who perhaps lack an understanding of their own compassion or brutishness.
  77. Judas and the Black Messiah
    Judas and the Black Messiah represents a disciplined, impassioned effort to bring clarity to a volatile moment, to dispense with the sentimentality and revisionism that too often cloud movies about the ’60s and about the politics of race. It’s fascinating in its own right, and even more so when looked at alongside other recent movies.
  78. French Exit
    Too listless to fizz and too peculiar to win us over, French Exit, directed by Azazel Jacobs, is hampered by clockwork quirkiness and disaffected dialogue.
  79. Earwig and the Witch
    For one, it’s the abundance of red herrings in this fleeting 82-minute feature; connections and relationships are implied (and a plot point about a witchy rock band flies by) but end up leading to dead ends, making the journey feel incomplete. But the most regrettable part is the animation.
  80. Son of the South
    Accepted on its terms, the film does a reasonably absorbing job of dramatizing how Zellner’s convictions strengthened, pulling him away from the security of inaction.
  81. Two of Us
    Through the use of symbolic peepholes, eavesdropping and dark rooms that provide cover for whispered assurances of devotion, Two of Us succeeds as a stealthy depiction of lesbian erotics, one that mirrors the inhibitions of a generation.
  82. Falling
    Some scenes scrape your senses like sandpaper, while others are so tender they’re almost destabilizing. Together, they shape a picture that’s tragically specific, yet more comfortable with mystery than some viewers might prefer.
  83. M.C. Escher: Journey To Infinity
    Whether anyone else, including Escher, would have done a more engaging job is debatable, but this movie, directed by Robin Lutz, offers an only intermittently satisfying look at his interests and methods. Don’t call it art; Escher felt his output hovered between art and mathematics.
  84. Malcolm & Marie
    A stylized stab at pandemic filmmaking, Malcolm & Marie, is at once mildly admirable and deeply unlikable. Beneath the film’s Old-Hollywood gleam and self-conscious sniping, serious questions are raised, only to lie fallow.
  85. Bliss
    Bliss fails to engage the senses, resulting in cinematic disappointment.
  86. Rams
    Directed with a genial breeziness by Jeremy Sims, the movie negotiates emotional downshift and uplift with confidence.
  87. Little Fish
    Once you’re swept up in Emma and Jude’s romance — it’s not hard, even though the montages veer a little too precious — the skimmed-over science matters little. This is sci-fi rooted more in feelings than fact. Its resonance is similar to “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” though it’s arguably antithetical in plot.
  88. A Glitch in the Matrix
    “A Glitch” wades only shin-deep into the complex logic that’s attached to this speculation.
  89. Palmer
    That Palmer eventually embraces Sam as an ally in misfitdom is inevitable. So is the annoyance inspired by this prosaic masculine melodrama.
  90. Just Don't Think I'll Scream
    By the time Beauvais dismisses some chestnut trees as “bland,” the movie screams nothing so much as the pained self-absorption of depression — an anguished revelation, but dead-on.
  91. Softie
    Soko gets credit for not softening Mwangi’s landing, and the outcome of the election is dropped as nearly an afterthought to his valiant efforts. But the on-the-ground campaigning and complex history could use a better shape than the film’s fits and starts.
  92. The Reunited States
    Topical in broad strokes yet frustratingly allergic to particulars
  93. Saint Maud
    Folding sexual arousal and religious ecstasy into a single, gasping sensation, Saint Maud, the feature debut of the director Rose Glass, burrows into the mind of a lonely young woman and finds psycho-horror gold.
  94. Finding 'Ohana
    A Gen Z crusade, hyper-aware of its Indiana Jonesian influences, is an entertaining conceit. But the plodding pace of Jude Weng’s film, along with its shabby dialogue, distracts from the more emotionally intricate subplot of the mother returning home to her father after her husband’s death.
  95. Supernova
    It’s rare to see a cinematic drama executed with such consistent care as Supernova, written and directed by Harry Macqueen and starring Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci. And here, that care pays off to devastating effect.
  96. The Night
    The repetition of the visions and the film’s deliberate pace gives the audience too much time to guess which betrayals haunt Babak and Neda, and this lack of emotional suspense hampers the horror.
  97. True Mothers
    Only a mountain couldn’t be moved by True Mothers — but like Asato’s parentage, the sources of that effect are complex. From one angle, True Mothers is sensitive and layered. From another, the tricks it plays with perspective constitute an all-too-calculated ploy for tears.
  98. Beginning
    Rarely has a film made me so painfully, viscerally aware of the impotence of spectatorship — of the dubious remove from which we watch suffering.
  99. The Dig
    To its credit, this consistently interesting and at times engrossing picture declines to strike any of its notes with a hammer. Trading on the great British art of understatement, it’s scrupulous, sober, and tasteful throughout.
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