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 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.
  2. The Last Vermeer
    The film moves from detective story to courtroom drama with nicely sketched character studies as a bonus.
  3. Vanguard
    Tong is not a stickler for verisimilitude. Hence, this movie’s ridiculous computer generated lions; hence also, its solid-gold sports cars.
  4. Soros
    Even as hagiography, Soros is unfocused.
  5. Small Axe: Mangrove
    A history lesson doesn’t have to be a lecture, and at its best, Mangrove, with its clear and painful implications for the present, conveys the sense of a world in motion, as the possibility of something new comes into being.
  6. Collective
    The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice. But as Collective lays out with anguished detail and a profound, moving sense of decency, it takes stubborn, angry people — journalists, politicians, artists, activists — to hammer at that arc until it starts bending, maybe, in the right direction.
  7. Ainu Mosir
    Rather than relying on dialogue, Fukunaga allows emotion to shine through musical performances — a school anthem, folk songs, drunken karaoke. These scenes speak for themselves, and they build upon the story with quiet power.
  8. 69: The Saga of Danny Hernandez
    Gandhi’s insights into Tekashi69’s psyche are limited, and some of his conclusions about the disgraced rapper’s character are bizarre.
  9. Cemetery
    Cemetery is primarily a slow and lovingly detailed immersion in the sights and sounds of the jungle and the mahout’s devoted attention to his animal.
  10. Crazy, Not Insane
    Dr. Lewis is an engaging interview subject whose clarity and upbeat demeanor contrast strikingly with the macabre material. Her writings are read as voice-overs by Laura Dern. Dr. Lewis has also kept an excellent archive.
  11. Born to Be
    Through it all Ting is an anchor, a presence of compassion and good sense. Anyone confused about transgender people will certainly benefit from a viewing of this picture.
  12. Come Away
    Like a magic brew thinned into bouillon, Come Away folds spellbinding storybook tales into a mundane melodrama.
  13. The Climb
    Rather than ascending to new heights of bromance, The Climb coasts down into the barren flatlands of masculine self-pity.
  14. I Am Greta
    It’s a bit of a blur, but Thunberg strikingly upends the stereotype of the young innocent as poster girl.
  15. Make Up
    It’s an intriguing interpretation of adolescent discovery, one that uses horror to suggest the dread that comes with finding a sense of self.
  16. The Life Ahead
    This picture earns its tear-jerking without becoming treacly. OK, without becoming too treacly. And it has other charming, enlightened components.
  17. Wolfwalkers
    As much a joy as this movie . . . is to behold, its scenario is more than a little overbaked and overdrawn.
  18. Monsoon
    The ambience doesn’t register with full force, or do the heavy lifting entrusted to it. Monsoon finally tips over the line that separates minimalism from a not-fully-developed movie.
  19. Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds
    This film rests on the fact that Mother Earth is always being called on by other worlds in the forms of comets, meteorites and asteroids — and it’s about as transportive as documentaries get.
  20. Dreamland
    It’s a lot of hooey and might have been at least tolerable if the movie had been rougher, meaner, tighter, and if the filmmakers — the writer is Nicolaas Zwart, the director is Miles Joris-Peyrafitte — had never watched a Terrence Malick movie.
  21. Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey
    The movie is packed with thrilling sequences, charming songs (by Philip Lawrence, John Legend and others), flashy dance numbers and a delightful cast. Although parts of the film veer on cliché, its intentions are well-meaning and its messages about nurturing curiosity and fostering community are well worth hearing right about now.
  22. Ammonite
    The movie needs Winslet and Ronan’s skills, their ability to semaphore more with sliding glances and tiny gestures than many actors manage with pages of dialogue. There’s pleasure in deciphering these signals.
  23. Freaky
    Vaughn and Newton prove remarkably effective at selling the benefits of their alternate packaging. Their efforts, however, are too often diluted by the film’s lazy plotting and Millie’s hackneyed emotional baggage.
  24. Fatman
    Waffling between anger and pathos, dry humor and dead-eyed violence, Fatman feels tonally befuddled.
  25. Free Time
    The sound effects are emphatic enough to call attention to themselves, and serve as a tacit, admirable acknowledgment that this material has been shaped. Even so, some of the clatter distracts from the purity of these great images.
  26. Transhood
    With so much ground to cover, the scenes’ shortness can feel unsatisfying and even occasionally facile. Though conversations between parents and their children are designed to be emotional beats, there’s a peculiar staginess that comes off as jarring at times.
  27. Coded Bias
    The most cleareyed of several recent documentaries about the perils of Big Tech (“The Great Hack,” “The Social Dilemma”), Coded Bias tackles its sprawling subject by zeroing in empathetically on the human costs.
  28. The Endless Trench
    It’s fertile thematic ground, but as in most survival movies, showy feats of filmmaking take precedence over insight or revelation.
  29. Koko-di Koko-da
    Though at times tasteless and barely coherent, the story is oddly affecting, the very strangeness of Nyholm’s folkloric vision and its unnerving execution pulling you in.
  30. Let Him Go
    With uncommon stealth, Let Him Go morphs from a drama about loss and grief into a terrifying thriller.
  31. The Dark and the Wicked
    Pitiless in its intent, and hopeless in its sense of sorrowful dereliction, The Dark and the Wicked fully earns its horrifically distressing final scenes.
  32. Proxima
    Torn between the maternal and the cosmic, the tactile and the unearthly, Proxima feels as unsettled as its heroine.
  33. Mortal
    Mortal isn’t really a movie proper as it is ponderous scene-setting for a potential sequel.
  34. Kindred
    A derivative, irritating thriller.
  35. Triggered
    Melding “Saw” with “The Hunger Games,” Triggered wins no points for originality or distinctiveness, not least of its cookie-cutter characters. But its relentlessness, and the gusto with which it embraces its mandate to make a mess, is tough to resist.
  36. Operation Christmas Drop
    Much of the film feels not light and breezy, but like a self-conscious chore, unwilling to deviate from an established blueprint.
  37. Jungleland
    The sweaty clichés enacted along the way are uniformly tired and ultimately offensive. A love scene near the movie’s finale, Winkler’s vision of sex among the underclass, is a caricature that could comfortably fit in the new “Borat” movie.
  38. The Informer
    The movie has a surfeit of the sudden reversals and interlocking loyalties that can make for an absorbing time killer.
  39. Rogue City
    Violent, law-defying cops would be a tough sell at any time, but “Rogue City” is oblivious to the changed context surrounding their stories. They don’t hold much romantic allure nowadays.
  40. City Hall
    City Hall runs four and a half mostly engrossing hours, making it one of Wiseman’s longest. That sounds daunting, but I could have watched hours more of people simply talking to one another in auditoriums and across conference-room tables.
  41. Us Kids
    Us Kids skillfully handles a sensitive subject and prudently connects the Parkland students’ stories to those of Black students whose experiences with gun violence rarely garner similar national attention.
  42. The True Adventures of Wolfboy
    No one could accuse these adventures of being conventional.
  43. Fire Will Come
    Fire Will Come practically becomes a documentary, and a devastating one at that.
  44. Come Play
    Come Play feels secondhand in its overarching conceit, its scare tactics and even its sentimentality.
  45. The Donut King
    Too sentimental in its final act, “The Donut King” doesn’t quite manage to connect the dots between Ngoy’s financial troubles and the voracious capitalism that enabled his rise. The result is a cheery portrait of immigrant entrepreneurship that lacks political punch.
  46. Madre
    The result is an unusually compelling character study, one that, commendably, opts to end on a humane note rather than a dark judgment.
  47. Spell
    Laden with references to race, class and the legacy of slavery, Spell, directed by Mark Tonderai from a script by Kurt Wimmer (a pen on the “Point Break” and “Total Recall” remakes), is stronger on maintaining suspense and a macabre atmosphere than it is at following through on its ideas, which give it a thin veneer of topicality.
  48. Holidate
    Far worse than these characters’ grating personalities are the regressive strains underpinning their flirtation.
  49. The Craft: Legacy
    Zoe Lister-Jones’s The Craft: Legacy, produced by Blumhouse (“Get Out”), is a disappointing distillation of the original that’s mostly devoid of personality.
  50. What the Constitution Means to Me
    Schreck succeeds in widening her autobiographical play into a paean for basic fairness: The American Constitution, admired as it is, fails to protect all of us from violence and discrimination.
  51. Coming Home Again
    Wang — using a direct, unadorned shooting style — along with his cast (Justin Chon, who’s been around for some time, makes a strong impression as Chang-rae) put them across with unusual integrity.
  52. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
    The elaborate ruses of Borat Subsequent Moviefilm left me neither entertained nor enraged, but simply resigned.
  53. Radium Girls
    The script, by Mohler and Brittany Shaw, tends to be overtly formulaic, but the emotional resonance of the two leads carries this movie.
  54. Ham on Rye
    Taormina purposefully dresses his cast and designs their environment in a way that throws them into a sort of temporal never-never land. He achieves a number of other startling effects in this impressive movie, which sheds its naturalism slowly as it embraces a surrealism that’s both disquieting and poignant.
  55. Over the Moon
    Over the Moon deserves credit for launching an unflinching lesson about grief. If only it had taken a different flight path.
  56. Synchronic
    Moorhead and Benson don’t overlook the more amusing aspects of the scenario . . . . And the duo deliver shocks, scares and a resonant payoff.
  57. Midnight in Paris
    A week is too short a time frame. A longer view might have left a deeper impression.
  58. The Place of No Words
    It’s sweet, personal and tedious.
  59. Friendsgiving
    At the heart of Friendsgiving, like many movies of its kind, is a story about the importance of family (both blood and chosen). But the film also captures, with a deft mix of earnestness and humor, the messiness of grief.
  60. Bad Hair
    Despite the potentially heavy (or heavy-handed) material, Bad Hair is self-consciously and pleasingly campy, and it delivers a new cinematic monster: the sew-in weave.
  61. The Witches
    Zemeckis improves on the first film adaptation, a 1990 oddity directed by Nicolas Roeg. There’s more heart in the new version and more emotion, qualities which can go missing in those Zemeckis movies that get lost in his technical whiz-bangery.
  62. Rebecca
    This Rebecca can’t really suffer in comparison to its predecessor. To suffer it would need nerves, a pulse, a conscience, or at least some idea of its reason for being.
  63. White Noise
    Close observation can illuminate contradictions, and Lombroso, semi-edifyingly, catches his subjects in moments of opportunism or hypocrisy, even if those aren’t much of a trade for spending 90 minutes in this company.
  64. The Goddess of Fortune
    The details of this engaging and sometimes heart-tugging picture are entirely contemporary.
  65. Freedia Got a Gun
    Freedia’s beguiling charisma carries the film, and it makes the case that her impressive power, in conjunction with collective action, could help carry a movement, too.
  66. The Devil Has a Name
    Clearly well-intentioned, The Devil Has a Name means to deliver an inspirational lesson about the depravity of big industry and the power of the little guy. But it’s mostly a muddle.
  67. Belly of the Beast
    Belly of the Beast does not reach for happy endings and is most absorbing in its thesis, which makes the stakes of this battle against human rights violations loud and clear.
  68. White Riot
    One of the many things that White Riot, a documentary about RAR directed by Rubika Shah, brings home is that the world could still use more somethings against racism.
  69. Clouds
    While Clouds is as doe-eyed and puppyish as an acoustic serenade, Baldoni is wise to recognize that attention must be paid to Zach’s survivors.
  70. Shithouse
    Raiff deserves credit for an unexpectedly elliptical coda, but much of the chatter between the leads has the emo-tedium of dorm room blather.
  71. Love and Monsters
    Love and Monsters lacks the self-seriousness of typical dystopian flicks but, despite its surprisingly perfunctory title and relatively thin plot, it doesn’t completely lack depth.
  72. Honest Thief
    It’s an inoffensive movie, full of such familiar tropes, it hardly matters if you can keep your eyes open to the end.
  73. Martin Eden
    The true miracle of this film is how Marcello translates both London’s scabrous tone and his lush, character-revealing prose into pure cinema. Lines have been plucked from the novel, yet even at its wordiest, the film is never weighed down by the burden of faithfulness.
  74. David Byrne’s American Utopia
    Some filmed stage shows die on the screen from a sheer lack of visual energy and invention. Lee, a master of the art, uses cinema’s plasticity to complement this production, making it come alive in two dimensions.
  75. Blackpink: Light Up the Sky
    While its salute to the artists flicks at the cynical side of their industry, it is less a probing profile than a backstage pass for fans of the band (a.k.a. Blinks) old and new.
  76. Evil Eye
    Choudhury is excellent here as a fraught matriarch — as good as she was as a young rebel three decades back. And Maskati’s performance is a slippery mix of suave and menacing, which helps sell the farthest-fetched elements of this story.
  77. Nocturne
    Contrivances are par for the course in this genre, but Nocturne lacks the stylistic flair to make them fun.
  78. Totally Under Control
    It elevates voices who sounded early alarms about the virus and whose warnings were lost in a din of complacency, incompetence and political calculation. Not all of these interviewees or their messages have broken through to the public consciousness.
  79. The War with Grandpa
    De Niro is game throughout, and sometimes amusing in that way he can be. But Walken is the funniest performer here.
  80. Hubie Halloween
    Occasionally, the nostalgic back-patting makes way for a few good jokes.
  81. The Forty-Year-Old Version
    It revels in the pleasure and struggle of creative work. This comes through in the rambunctiousness of Radha’s students, in her belated appreciation of her mother’s paintings, in shots of street murals and sonic scraps of freestyle rhyming — in pretty much every frame of a film that, like its heroine, is grumpy, tender, wistful, funny and combative. Also beautiful.
  82. Faith Based
    Pity, or prayer, couldn’t change the fact that Faith Ba$ed is abysmally unfunny.
  83. Aggie
    However great Gund’s influence on other collectors and philanthropists has been, and however progressive and righteous her advocacy for racial justice, Aggie doesn’t match her originality with an accordingly innovative approach.
  84. Books of Blood
    It’s a mess — and I’m not just talking about the close-up of a bleeding, ghost-gratified fingernail.
  85. Yellow Rose
    Above all, the music has the greatest staying power — it is the film’s saving grace, just like it is Rose’s during her darkest days.
  86. Charm City Kings
    The dirt bikes and their exuberant operators are the saving grace — and joy — of the sincere if overstuffed drama Charm City Kings.
  87. Time
    Substantive and stunning, the documentary Time delivers on the title’s promise of the monumental as well as the personal.
  88. Siempre, Luis
    The HBO documentary Siempre, Luis wants to be about a political lion of a father, but it ends up more enamored with his charmed son.
  89. American Pie Presents: Girls' Rules
    The original “American Pie” was tasteless; this version is flavorless.
  90. David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet
    The film’s grand achievement is that it positions its subject as a mediator between humans and the natural world. Life cycles on, and if we make the right choices, ruin can become regrowth.
  91. Black Box
    It also brings some devilish ingenuity to its variations on “Memento” and other “who am I?” thrillers. And it adds to that something more rare: a genuine emotional potency.
  92. The Lie
    This is a whiffed effort at an all too familiar subgenre: the ostensibly dark, searing human drama undercut by the fact that all the humans in it are boorish idiots.
  93. On the Rocks
    In the past, Coppola’s embrace of ambiguity could feel like a dodge, a way of evading meaning. But in On the Rocks, a wistful and lovely story about finally coming of age, there’s nothing ambiguous about how she makes us see a woman too long lost in life’s shadow.
  94. The Great American Lie
    The documentary fares better when it cuts the interviews and simply follows working class people in their daily lives.
  95. 12 Hour Shift
    It’s hard to argue with Bettis’s frazzled underplaying or Farnworth’s stellar airhead routine, an impressively sustained study in quick-witted dimwittedness.
  96. Eternal Beauty
    For the first half-hour or so of Eternal Beauty, Roberts and Hawkins take an unusual and intermittently illuminating approach to depicting mental illness. . . . But the movie doesn’t keep up its good work.
  97. A Call to Spy
    One wishes the movie had been imagined as a limited series, which would give viewers an opportunity to spend more time with these women whose lives were so clearly rich and textured — not to mention, courageous.
  98. Possessor Uncut
    Possessor is a shocking work that moves from disquieting to stressful with ruthless dispatch.
  99. Save Yourselves!
    The quirky Save Yourselves! is not necessarily a genre reinventor but a good example of how much fun you can have on a non-studio budget.
  100. Dick Johnson Is Dead
    Pitched artfully between the celebratory and the elegiac, it is an inarguably serious documentary with light, surrealistic flourishes that, at times, veer into exuberant goofiness.
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