The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. The Little Things
    Thanks to Hancock’s craft and the discipline of the actors, it’s more than watchable, but you are unlikely to be haunted, disturbed or even surprised. You haven’t exactly seen this before. It just feels that way.
  2. Penguin Bloom
    Gamely navigating a script that ushers her from seaside despair to hilltop elation, Watts gives a touching and blessedly understated performance, assisted by Sam Chiplin’s warmly expansive cinematography. As for the bundle of scene-stealing magpies (patiently trained by Paul Mander) who collectively bring Penguin to life, they’re a delight.
  3. Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself
    In & Of Itself reframes familiar tropes like card tricks, vanishing objects and stupendous feats of mentalism to new ends. It is not often that a magic show makes you ponder not just the how, but the why.
  4. News of the World
    This isn’t a bad movie. The problem is that it’s too nice a movie, too careful and compromised, as if its makers didn’t trust the audience to handle the real news of the world.
  5. Spoor
    Spoor is sensationally atmospheric. . . . The structure, though, seems counterproductively, even confusingly, elliptical, and the timing of flashbacks muddles the point of view. This is a whodunit that plays tricks with the “who.”
  6. Atlantis
    Vasyanovych and his actors manage to make this parable both heartening and stupefying.
  7. The Human Factor
    The Human Factor presents a cogent and involving view of the Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, mainly from 1991 until the end of Bill Clinton’s first term, told through the recollections of United States negotiators charged with brokering a peace.
  8. Notturno
    The past two decades of documentary film have produced many anatomies of history that attempt to summarize several millenniums, but Rosi’s borderless tableaus bring out another kind of truth in faces, places and pure feeling.
  9. You Will Die At Twenty
    Avoiding didactic conclusions or pat answers, Alala’s film questions blind belief but finds boundless enchantment in every frame.
  10. Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
    A noirish psychodrama simmering with ambiguities, the film cleverly toys with our perception by loosening our heroine’s grip on reality.
  11. Our Friend
    This drippy drama presents precisely the kind of prettified portrait of death that Teague’s candid writing sought to rebut.
  12. 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.
  13. Identifying Features
    It’s a confident debut feature, and a sophisticated acknowledgment of the powerlessness that migrants face.
  14. No Man's Land
    Strangled by good intentions and teachable-moment clichés, Conor Allyn’s No Man’s Land turns the border between Texas and Mexico into a gateway to racial empathy.
  15. The Salt of Tears
    The Salt of Tears is quite a bit more than a cad’s progress. There are fleeting shadows of Flaubert in this tale, which Garrel crafted in collaboration with two venerable screenwriters, Jean-Claude Carrière and Arlette Langmann.
  16. Outside the Wire
    Grainy establishing shots of the skirmish offer little visual information other than its location on an expressway. Without viewers knowing where, and at whom, the soldiers are firing, the onscreen action is rendered indecipherable. Mackie’s quirky performance — Leo ends every order to Harp with an uncomfortable smile — is likewise baffling.
  17. Don't Tell a Soul
    A plot twist saves (that might not be the word for it) Don’t Tell a Soul from being absolutely oppressive, merely by injecting a scintilla of “what happens next” appeal — and letting the always-interesting Wilson stretch a bit.
  18. Acasă, My Home
    It’s both intimate and analytical, a sensitive portrait of real people undergoing enormous change and a meditation on what that change might mean. It taps into something primal in the human condition, a basic conflict between the desire for freedom and the tendency toward organization — an argument, finally, about the meaning of home.
  19. MLK/FBI
    The result is at once suspenseful, visually engrossing and intellectually bracing. It also raises urgent, sometimes uncomfortable questions about power, privacy and the ethical challenges of examining the past.
  20. American Skin
    Instead of lending immediacy, the padded-out documentary conceit only spotlights the stiltedness, and Parker falls short of building credible drama out of urgent issues.
  21. Bloody Hell
    It’s a buffet of only sour dishes, a rank fete of foulness.
  22. The Marksman
    Predictable to a fault, the movie coasts pleasurably on Neeson’s seasoned, sad-sweet charisma — an asset that’s been tragically imprisoned in mopey-loner roles and generic action thrillers.
  23. Hunted
    Adding a fairy-tale cast to a generic horror setup is of no benefit to Hunted, Vincent Paronnaud’s unpleasant merger of slasher movie and survival thriller.
  24. Some Kind of Heaven
    Oppenheim resists easy misanthropy, showing unexpected empathy for people who have cocooned themselves from the outside world, only to confront its headaches anyway.
  25. My Little Sister
    Distinguished by a modestly discreet directing style that allows the actors to shine, My Little Sister offers neither false uplift nor dreary realism.
  26. Film About a Father Who
    [A] brisk, prismatic and richly psychodramatic family portrait.
  27. Locked Down
    The best that Locked Down has to offer, at least while we remain in the throes of a deadly crisis, is a window into a luxurious space to quarantine.
  28. One Night in Miami
    Malcolm’s manner can be didactic, but One Night in Miami is anything but. Instead of a group biopic or a ready-made costume drama, it’s an intellectual thriller, crackling with the energy of ideas and emotions as they happen.
  29. Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets
    The movie gets so drunk on its stylistic affectations (and unfunny attempts at cerebral comedy) that by the time it sobers up to take James’s mental health seriously, it’s too little, too late. And also too bad, as it’s only in the last quarter that the viewer gets to appreciate the range of the movie’s appealing lead players.
  30. Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy
    Racial injustice, economic inequities, police corruption, media ethics and foreign-policy scandals are all crammed — a bit too cursorily — into Stanley Nelson’s brisk primer on the 1980s crack epidemic.
  31. Grizzly II: Revenge (1983)
    Dopey dialogue and less-than-scrupulous continuity augment the ramshackle vibe of a movie that’s too inept to qualify as camp or cult.
  32. Beautiful Something Left Behind
    It could be argued that the film needed a little more documentary-style explanation about how the facility works — how long children stay, the goals of the treatment, and so on. But ultimately, Philp can’t be blamed for stressing emotional engagement over exposition.
  33. The Reason I Jump
    The portraits are moving and informative. . . . As an aesthetic endeavor, though, The Reason I Jump is questionable, regardless of how much sensitivity the filmmakers took in their approach.
  34. Blizzard of Souls
    “Blizzard” is almost immaculately shot and edited, but its good-taste approach to warfare, along with its treacly music score by Lolita Ritmanis, underscores what seems its main reason for being: a relentless “Go, Latvia!” agenda — which has extended to its marketing here.
  35. If Not Now, When?
    It doesn’t take long to notice that these are earnest, even humorless, women. They are too busy contemplating their daily turmoil to play or crack a joke. As a result, their chemistry never coheres, and the movie flounders under the weight of lifeless sincerity.
  36. My Rembrandt
    While My Rembrandt poses heady questions about the difference between acquisitiveness and appreciation, it mostly plays like a straight art-world documentary that itself would have benefited from a more vertiginous, obsessive approach.
  37. Happy Face
    Happy Face dares to be distinctive, and that’s something, even if the behavior — particularly Stan’s — isn’t always convincing.
  38. Shadow in the Cloud
    The twists come rapidly in the movie’s first half; in the second, the narrative dissolves into a zigzag of flying bodies and explosions that bend the laws of space-time. But the implausibility of it all is a perk: There’s never a moment in this rollicking film when you can tell what’s coming next.
  39. Night of the Kings
    Lacôte crosses the open-ended energy of griot traditions with the surging tensions of the prison’s close quarters.
  40. Pieces of a Woman
    Set over eight harrowing months, Pieces of a Woman is a ragged, mesmerizing study of rupture and reconstruction. The ending is ill-judged, but the movie understands that while we love in common, we grieve alone.
  41. Safety
    Hudlin transforms a film that would be, in lesser hands, a formulaic hardship-as-aesthetic drama, into an earnest examination of what community means on the field, in the classroom and in our society.
  42. Pinocchio
    This new cinematic imagining of Carlo Collodi’s classic fantasy tale is alternately enchanting and befuddling.
  43. Promising Young Woman
    A muddled mélange of black comedy, revenge thriller and feminist lecture, Promising Young Woman too often backs away from its potentially searing setup.
  44. Soul
    It’s a small, delicate movie that doesn’t hit every note perfectly, but its combination of skill, feeling and inspiration is summed up in the title.
  45. Wonder Woman 1984
    Patty Jenkins is behind the camera again, but this time without the confidence. Certainly some of the problems can be pinned on the uninterestingly janky script, a mess of goofy jokes, storytelling clichés and dubious politics.
  46. Sylvie's Love
    Ashe is using a familiar, long-derided film genre both affectionately and critically to explore the gleaming surfaces of life as well as the anguish that lies beneath.
  47. Effigy: Poison and the City
    Wordy and stilted (it was derived from a stage play), this low-budget debut nevertheless benefits from a mesmerizing central performance by Suzan Anbeh.
  48. Fatale
    While this latter-day noir never builds up the froth of lurid delirium that brings genre pictures into a headier dimension, it’s got enough juice to hold your attention.
  49. Nasrin
    This extraordinary woman, seemingly incapable of despair through roughly two decades of struggle, remains elusive. There’s something daunting about this degree of implacable selflessness, and it has a curiously flattening effect on a movie that feels less emotionally complex — less enraged — than it ought to.
  50. Museum Town
    For those even mildly curious about the story of one of the country’s largest visual and performing arts spaces, Museum Town is worth watching.
  51. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
    Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a powerful and pungent reminder of the necessity of art, of its sometimes terrible costs and of the preciousness of the people, living and dead, with whom we share it.
  52. Belushi
    Belushi taps the sweetness in a cultural fixture with an irreplaceably wild sense of fun.
  53. The Last Blockbuster
    As this pleasant but ultimately inconsequential movie’s narrative thins out, it emphasizes again and again that there is, as of now, only one operating Blockbuster store in the world. Luckily its proprietor is the warm and ingratiating Sandi Harding.
  54. Sing Me a Song
    Balmès doesn’t arrive at easy, scathing conclusions about the internet. Instead, he lets the camera journey to unexpected places, leading to a different kind of meditation that strikes with deep emotional resonance.
  55. The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart
    Grooving through the decades, this entertaining documentary aspires to prove that the Bee Gees were more than a hitmaker for disco nightclubs. Rather, Barry, Maurice and Robin were master songwriters and chameleons, continually reinventing themselves to harmonize with the times.
  56. Small Axe: Lovers Rock
    Electric and alive as few films are, Lovers Rock will make you giddy with longing for a pleasure we’ve been too long denied: The singular rush of being one with a beat and a roomful of possibilities.
  57. Small Axe: Red, White and Blue
    Some of Red, White and Blue is hard to watch, but the film is eloquent on how an institution will resist change, perhaps especially from inside its own walls.
  58. Small Axe: Alex Wheatle
    A film in which violence and stillness alternate with queasy regularity.
  59. Small Axe: Education
    McQueen, who attended one of these schools, uses this small, hopeful story to illustrate how one generation, by means of an ingenious workaround to bigotry, fought to secure the future of the next.
  60. Farewell Amor
    Even as Farewell Amor treads familiar paths, its tripartite structure allows for uncommon nuance.
  61. The Weasel's Tale
    The Grand Guignol conclusion does fulfill the flair promised by the film’s tuned-up colors and by Mara’s vintage posters for her movies, which have glorious titles like “The Other Woman Forever.”
  62. Wild Mountain Thyme
    It is also a romantic comedy/drama whose tone ping-pongs from grave to lyrical to absurdist willy-nilly, and hits all those registers at fortissimo volume.
  63. The Prom
    The story unwinds with histrionics and homilies, jazz hands and twinkle toes, overly busy camerawork and hookless lung bursters.
  64. Assassins
    Its main virtues are a wild story and a stealth sense of outrage. It argues that these so-called assassins became political pawns and had to face the courts without witnesses who might have aided their defense.
  65. Gunda
    Sublimely beautiful and profoundly moving, it offers you the opportunity to look — at animals, yes, but also at qualities that are often subordinated in narratively driven movies, at textures, shapes and light.
  66. Funny Boy
    Mehta’s elaborate long takes contribute to the general sense of tumult, but the film never fully shakes the sense of stating the obvious.
  67. A Dog Called Money
    Harvey is detail-oriented, good-humored, intimately involved and encouraging of her fellow musicians. The tunes she crafts for the resulting record are intricate and eclectic, but still honor the raw directness of her early work.
  68. Kill It and Leave This Town
    The grim film feels excavated from the subconscious: The coarse illustration style, with its frazzled, stray lines, emphasizes the bleakness of the images.
  69. Let Them All Talk
    Despite the talented actors onscreen, Soderbergh’s mannered direction lacks charisma and the characters lack chemistry.
  70. To the Ends of the Earth
    Kurosawa’s command of film form gives the movie an embracing magnetism despite its seeming thinness of plot.
  71. Baby God
    Olson’s poetic b-roll and Will Epstein’s soft, pulsing piano score buff away the lurid shocks.
  72. Godmothered
    Is the film trapped in Disney orthodoxy? If the shoe fits.
  73. Minor Premise
    When a movie that feels this scientifically far-reaching lacks heart, the viewing experience is a dreary, soulless one.
  74. Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan
    The director Julien Temple — who has excellent documentaries on the Sex Pistols, Joe Strummer and other galvanic musicians under his belt — is very good at this sort of thing.
  75. Billie
    If Billie gives short shrift to its subject’s artistry while underscoring her life’s squalor, it still offers pockets of valuable insight.
  76. I'm Your Woman
    The movie’s vagueness wants to appear purposeful, reflecting Jean’s disorientation, but it’s mostly confounding. Brosnahan, when she’s not playing panicked, largely enacts Jean as an irritated cipher.
  77. Half Brothers
    The movie clearly intends to send a serious message about how draconian immigration policies tear families apart. But a hard-hitting drama would be preferable to this strenuously wacky bromance.
  78. 76 Days
    76 Days, which gets its title from the Wuhan lockdown imposed from January 23 to April 8, is defined more by the human capacity for resilience and compassion than by a relentless sense of doom (or by a focus on China’s policy decisions).
  79. Another Round
    It’s a sweet, strangely modest tragicomedy about the pleasures of (mostly banal) excess.
  80. Black Bear
    The movie plays like a well-crafted game, one with stable rules and safeties, perfectly enjoyable but limited. The director and the performers circle ideas about how intimacy can be manipulated to satisfy artistic ambitions, but the experiment feels easy to leave behind.
  81. Mank
    David Fincher’s Mank is a worthy, eminently watchable entry in the annals of Hollywood self-obsession. That it is unreliable as history should go without saying.
  82. Mayor
    A disarming subject, Hadid comes across as a cleareyed, forthright leader. But Mayor also stands out because Osit has thought it through in cinematic terms: He knows when to dwell on a striking image (such as Hadid examining a painting of Jerusalem on his global travels) and when to let a counterintuitive soundtrack selection play through.
  83. My Psychedelic Love Story
    [A] heady, fascinating movie.
  84. Mosul
    Instant death lurks around every corner, and the movie doesn’t shy from killing off major characters. But it does play like an odd match of form and content: a story of single-minded humanitarianism framed as a relentless action spectacular.
  85. Stardust
    The director, Gabriel Range, who wrote the movie with Christopher Bell, opted to press on, even after he was denied permission to use Bowie’s songs. They might not have helped much, however.
  86. Black Beauty
    Avis loses the novel’s sincerity by watering down Sewell’s animal welfare plea. In this update, the humans are not as villainous. Beauty is not as prominent. And the novel’s mustang spirit diminishes into a ho-hum horse movie.
  87. Superintelligence
    This is a movie of bits, enacted by varied comic luminaries. McCarthy’s “who me?” winsomeness, running neck and neck with her quick-witted cheekiness, is familiar. A new dynamic is added by the inspired Brian Tyree Henry.
  88. Overseas
    With a fly-on-the-wall approach, the movie allows the center’s cruel contradictions to accumulate with a slow burn.
  89. Dolly Parton’s Christmas On the Square
    It’s bad, the sort of bad that knows what it is — campy rather than camp. “Campy” is camp with a diploma and a martini. And “Christmas on the Square” is a drunk.
  90. Uncle Frank
    In Uncle Frank, the writer-director Alan Ball (“True Blood”) combines several overworked genres — the coming-of-age picture, the road-trip odyssey, the angst-filled family-reunion movie — and mostly steers clear of the obvious pitfalls.
  91. The Christmas Chronicles 2
    As Kate and Jack’s adventures turn to lessons in love and courage, the movie starts to feel mechanical, like the Village’s churning candy cane mill. But its output is always as sweet.
  92. Team Marco
    Marco’s sourness curdles the confection and his undercooked complaints clack against the movie’s warm tone, sending its simple pleasures into a scatter.
  93. The Croods: A New Age
    Paradoxically, the movie’s energy ebbs as the proceedings turn more antic.
  94. Happiest Season
    The movie practically vibrates with its own meta tension.
  95. Shawn Mendes: In Wonder
    “In Wonder” wants so much to be a humanizing portrait, but it doesn’t go deep enough to crack Mendes’s polished love-crooner veneer, nor does it say anything new about fame that hasn’t been said in other pop-star docs of recent years.
  96. Embattled
    When it’s showing its sensitive side, the film, scripted by David McKenna (“American History X”) and directed by Nick Sarkisov, unexpectedly shines.
  97. The Twentieth Century
    Is it all a bit much? Sure, but the self-consciousness is baked in: Rankin names one public gathering place “Disappointment Square.”
  98. Run
    Despite a script (by Chaganty and Sev Ohanian) that sees no need to flavor its tension with flashbacks or character-fleshing, Run has fun with its ludicrous plot.
  99. Sound of Metal
    Propelled by a distinctive style and a potent lead performance, Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal builds a singular tension between silence and noise.
  100. The Princess Switch: Switched Again
    Yes, The Princess Switch: Switched Again is syrupy, and no, beyond its central gimmick, there is little substance to be found. But the same could be said for many a beloved romance film or holiday movie.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »