The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,278 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: 9,380 out of 20278
  2. Mixed: 8,434 out of 20278
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20278
20278 movie reviews
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  1. The Mend
    Directing his first feature after some shorts, John Magary digs into his characters with fresh eyes and a sly sense of adventure.
  2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    Though Ms. Rapace is a fine professional scowler, with cheekbones that thrust like knives and a pout that’s mostly pucker, she tends to register as an intriguing idea instead of a thoroughly realized character. She more or less looks the part that the filmmakers don’t let her fully play.
  3. The Tarnished Angels
    Mr. Faulkner's faded story does have some flavor of the old barnstorming tours of the early air-circus fliers, but there is precious little of it in this film, which was badly, cheaply written by George Zuckerman and is abominably played by a hand-picked cast.
  4. Five Star
    Slow and steady, and with remarkable assuredness, Keith Miller’s Five Star plays mean-streets drama in the lowest of keys.
  5. The Fire Inside
    The Fire Inside has a little more going on under the hood than your average sports movie.
  6. The Killing Fields
    Unfortunately, the most moving aspect of The Killing Fields is not the friendship, which should be the film's core, but the fact that the friendship never becomes as inspiriting as the one Mr. Schanberg recalled in his own searching, unhackneyed prose.
  7. Stuff and Dough
    The brilliance of Stuff and Dough is that it wraps this powerful, disturbing drama in an anecdote from ordinary life. As is often the case in recent Romanian movies, the acting is so accomplished as to be invisible.
  8. Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience
    The best pieces portray combat as such a heightened sensory experience that it demands to be written about, and they suggest that war can turn ordinary men who wouldn’t think of keeping diaries into latter-day Hemingways.
  9. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
    The next two hours might not have quite delivered on that initial promise of wonder - we grown-ups, being heavy, are not so easily swept away by visual tricks - except when I looked away from the screen at the faces of breathless and wide-eyed children, my own among them, for whom the whole experience was new, strange, disturbing and delightful.
  10. For Ahkeem
    While the film ends at a logical stopping point, it feels incomplete. It probably could have used a few more years of filming.
  11. Once Upon a Time in America
    It's a collection of occasionally vivid but mostly unfathomable incidents in which people are introduced and then disappear with the unexplained suddenness of victims of mob murders. [U.S. theatrical release]
  12. Loveless
    An aimless film about an aimless fellow, but it's not without its charms. It may be without a point, but hey, you can't have everything in a no-budget film like this.
  13. Kids for Cash
    Carefully assembled and soberly presented, Robert May’s Kids for Cash takes a lacerating look at America’s juvenile justice system.
  14. Straw Dogs
    It is an intelligent movie, but interesting only in the context of his other works.
  15. Encanto
    The Madrigal family members belong even when they’re not conjuring roses or transforming the weather. And even with these fantastic feats of wizardry, the Madrigals, with all of their relatable family dynamics, are believably loving, funny and flawed.
  16. Don't Blink - Robert Frank
    You leave with a vivid sense of the man’s living presence and a reasonably thorough account of his life, work and associations. Given the sheer volume and variety of the work in question, this is an impressive achievement.
  17. Yourself and Yours
    Hong’s formal confidence yields a movie that’s very simply constructed and utterly engrossing.
  18. The Hit
    The Hit' is a disappointing English underworld movie directed by Stephen Frears. Less a film noir than a film gris, partly because almost all of it takes place in sun- drenched Spain and because the characters talk too much. These guys don't have to use guns. All they have to do is open their mouths and bore each other to death.
  19. Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
    The diverting Beetle Queen, like “Lost in Translation” or Takashi Murakami’s art, says less about Japan than it does about America’s continuing fascination with modern Japanese culture.
  20. Farewell Amor
    Even as Farewell Amor treads familiar paths, its tripartite structure allows for uncommon nuance.
  21. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
    It’s less that Mr. Cedar blends realism with absurdity than that he refuses to acknowledge any distinction between them.
  22. A Family Affair
    By the jaw-dropping climax (an argument over a family portrait), and the film’s not-entirely unpredictable denouement, you aren’t sure whether you are witnessing an investigative family chronicle or an act of revenge.
  23. Ascent
    Ultimately, Ascent is a genuinely poetic portrait of a place, and various people’s relation to it.
  24. Lucas
    No, it's not a daringly original plot and yes, it is sentimental, but Mr. Seltzer handles his small story as gently as Lucas handles the baby locust he finds in the road.
  25. Inherit the Wind
    One of the most intelligent, respectable and entertaining motion pictures of this year.
  26. Kiss the Future
    This is history told through emotions as much as through well-documented events, conveying both the resilience of Sarajevans and the power of pop music (without falling into too much celebrity self-regard).
  27. Queen of Chess
    Kennedy sticks largely to conventional documentary techniques for Queen of Chess, which is not a bad thing: It’s a good story, well told, and Polgar makes for an interesting subject.
  28. Ghost Trail
    The cat-and-mouse game, which involves Hamid tracking his suspect throughout campus, plays out in a relatively low-key manner, with the film relying on Bessa (and eventually, an eerie Barhom) to deepen the survivor’s dilemma.
  29. Taboo
    Illustrates the underlying fear that when energies that should be directed toward warfare are diverted into passion, unity is impossible.
  30. The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg
    Simultaneously fascinating and vexing in ways that might tax informed devotees of both baseball and film.
  31. Pistol Opera
    Insanely likable but suffers from anemia.
  32. State and Main
    A surprisingly unpolished piece of work that plays as though it were written for the stage and only slightly modified for the screen.
  33. OT: Our Town
    At the end, when they have created a vibrant new theater program for their school, their sense of triumph is infectious. " 'Our Town' Is Ghetto!" one of them exults. Thornton Wilder, wherever he is, would understand and take it as a compliment.
  34. Mistress America
    Far from romanticizing creativity and the artistic process, Mr. Baumbach’s films portray the world of painters, filmmakers and literati as an overcrowded, amoral jungle of viperish entitled narcissists stealing from one another for fame and profit.
  35. The Hottest August
    This collection of interactions with ordinary people is a cinematic gift both simple and multilayered, an intellectual challenge and an emotional adventure.
  36. Look at Me: XXXTentacion
    Fascinating and exasperating.
  37. Cinema Sabaya
    Rotem’s organic approach steers clear of icky idealism, but its conclusions nevertheless feel worn out. Talking helps, sure, but getting people in the same room is too often the stuff of fiction.
  38. OBEX
    There’s something smarter between the lines about the way technology warps our (self-) perception, but maybe that’s giving too much credit to a film so giddy about its warping. That’s not totally bad: Some films are like dreams whose meanings never materialize.
  39. Young@Heart
    The movie offers an encouraging vision of old age in which the depression commonly associated with decrepitude is held at bay by music making, camaraderie and a sense of humor.
  40. Rango
    Rango, which may take place entirely within its hero's head - that kind of ambiguity worked in "Inception" and "Black Swan," so why not here? - is about the appetite for myths and stories, whether or not they make sense. It is about the worlds we dream inside our fishbowls, helped by the weird reflections on the walls.
  41. Once Upon a Time in Uganda
    Once Upon a Time in Uganda reminds you how the art of moviemaking can make dreams real.
  42. Patience (After Sebald)
    If he is a self-revealing writer, it is not in the usual, confessional sense, but rather because he seems so strongly present in his books, with a personality that is both the source and aftereffect of the prose.
  43. Border
    This is a movie that aims to startle in overt and subtextual ways; the less known before viewing, the better.
  44. Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys
    This challenging and mesmerizing documentary captures horror and joy with the same gorgeous dispassion.
  45. Waiting for August
    Soft in tone and muted in color, Waiting for August is a child’s-eye view of one family — among many in today’s Romanian economy — rising to the challenge of living without parents.
  46. Ali & Ava
    The onscreen chemistry between them feels forced and flat, and the decidedly tame portrayals of physical intimacy only accentuate this absence.
  47. From Nowhere
    Their ordeal feels cruel, unnecessary and infuriatingly real.
  48. Frank
    Mr. Abrahamson’s main achievement, enabled by the sensitive and resourceful cast, is to find a tone that is funny without flippancy, sincere without turning to mush.
  49. Europa Europa
    This film includes several remarkable episodes illustrating the strange events that shaped Mr. Perel's destiny and the full force of his terror and sorrow.
  50. Easy Money
    In a director's note Mr. Espinosa describes his fascination with "the idea of thief's honor" and with portraying criminals who, from their point of view, "are trying to do good through their own ethics." And this soul-searching quest lends Easy Money a depth rarely found in gangster films.
  51. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
    The screenplay, by W. D. Richter, remains bright and lively throughout, but the plot just isn't full enough to carry a feature film. The characters are vivid, and uniformly well-played, and their pre-pod lives are fairly well established. But an hour into the film, once the menace is identified, the few remaining humans begin fleeing for their lives, and after that it's just run, run, run.
  52. The Kindergarten Teacher
    Fluidly capturing the trajectory of a ruinous obsession, the writer and director, Sara Colangelo, skillfully fudges the line between mentoring and manipulation, and between nurturing talent and appropriating it. Suffusing each scene with an insinuating, prickly tension, she remains ruthlessly committed to her screw-tightening tone, offering the viewer no comforting moral escape hatch.
  53. The Art of the Steal
    One weakness is the too-brief, tantalizing peeks inside the Barnes. Yet, like the movie as a whole, this limitation comes with dividends: it made me want to hop on a plane to Philadelphia as soon as possible to see the original before it’s emptied.
  54. Tin Men
    Barry Levinson's richly textured new film also has a rueful nostalgia, a fine-tuned streak of con artistry, and the same hilarious, nit-picking small talk that colored Diner, his first and best film - which is recalled, rivaled and in a few ways even outdone by this one.
  55. Try Harder!
    Quiet yet assertive, Try Harder! itself succeeds at not trying too hard.
  56. Tokyo Godfathers
    For all its echoes of Frank Capra and Charlie Chaplin (as well as Ford), the movie is also a love letter to modern Tokyo, whose alleyways and skyscrapers are drafted with flawless precision and tinted with tenderness and warmth.
  57. The Naked Gun
    Taken individually, a lot of the jokes might not work, but when you’re in a blizzard you don’t notice each snowflake.
  58. Ennio
    One of the movie’s nice surprises is that Morricone turns out to be a total charmer, a low-key showman with a demure gaze that he works like a vamp and an impish smile that routinely punctuates one of his anecdotes.
  59. What Happened, Miss Simone?
    An often electric, bracingly urgent documentary.
  60. Bodied
    With visuals as kinetic as its language, Joseph Kahn’s Bodied is an outrageously smart, shockingly funny satire of P.C. culture whose words gush so quickly you’ll want to see it twice.
  61. Sleepless Night
    Hectic and harebrained, this galloping French thriller tosses a potpourri of plot points - crooked cops, sleazy gangsters, stolen drugs and an underage hostage - into a packed-to-the-gills nightclub, and stirs. Repeatedly.
  62. The Load
    The gray skies under which Glavonic shoots, the unhurried takes in which he chronicles the drive, they put us with Vlada in an unmitigated way, the better to compel viewers to ask themselves what they would do in his position.
  63. Fear and Trembling
    Mr. Corneau, an eclectic director with a mildly perverse sensibility, turns the conflict of cultures into a psychodrama that is at once lighthearted and intense.
  64. Ruben Brandt, Collector
    The movie is fun to look at without quite being exciting to watch. This is mostly because the story never fully lives up to the ideas, and the ideas themselves are fuzzy and scattered.
  65. Power Trip
    A skillful assemblage of newsreel clips, cartoons ridiculing the American interlopers, television commercials and interviews with power officials and ordinary Georgians. It gives new and darker meaning to that comfy adage "We're all connected."
  66. Man on the Train
    Mr. Leconte gives this meeting of opposites in Claude Klotz's script a lovely, sportive élan, instead of making it register as lumpy, obvious polemics.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Jeremiah Johnson
    There are momoments of great beauty and terror and deeply earned pathos. There are as well such not-so-incidental pleasures as John Rubinstein's lovely and serviceable musical score, and a cast of excellent supporting actors.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Nightmare Alley
    Despite some fine and intense acting by Mr. Power and others, this film traverses distateful dramatic ground and only rarely does it achieve any substance as entertainment.
  69. North Circular
    Not all the material is equally striking, but the film has an original and at times disarming approach to bearing witness.
  70. Possession
    It's a movie that contains a certain amount of unseemly gore and makes no sense whatsoever.
  71. 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.
  72. Blaze
    The usual sequence of ballad-of-a-tormented-artist verses plays out: early promise; success and betrayal; redemption and death. What pulls against the relentless momentum of biography is the sweet inertia of life, a lot of which is spent drunk, in bed, on the road, hanging out with friends or all of the above.
  73. Living the Land
    The film tracks about a year in Chuang’s life in a sober, sociological style of long takes and smooth pans. The story feels loose, intentionally directionless, at first, but as it winds toward the cooler months, its collection of small details builds up to big-picture revelations about the imminent rise of China as a global superpower.
  74. Down by Law
    The excitement of Down by Law comes not from what it's about. Reduced to its plot, it is very slight. But the plot isn't the point. The excitement comes from the realization that we are seeing a true film maker at work, using film to create a narrative that couldn't exist on the stage or the printed page of a novel.
  75. Anton Chekhov's The Duel
    Once again, Mr. Kosashvili mixes moments of bitterness and laughter with strong dramatic passages, creating a social milieu in The Duel that is believably inhabited, consistently surprising and true-feeling in detail and sweep.
  76. Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine
    In lingering over moody night streets and trembling faces, Ms. Josue has brought this film to the verge of becoming a tear-jerker. But, as epitomized in an extraordinary scene with a conflicted priest, it’s all part of a shared soul-searching that still continues.
  77. This Is Congo
    There is much to admire here, but the sheer scope of the subject matter might be even better served by the capaciousness of a mini-series.
  78. Boy A
    Mr. Garfield's performance makes Jack so endearing and vulnerable that as he takes his first wobbly steps, like a baby bird shoved from its nest, your instincts are protective.
  79. The Order
    The movie is more effective as a grim, involving cop thriller than it is as an ostensible statement on the Order’s reverberations in the present.
  80. The Punk Singer
    Ms. Hanna’s creativity and force are catching. But other voices are needed to evaluate her achievements with a fuller sense of cultural context and perspective.
  81. Capernaum
    Capernaum, a sprawling tale wrenched from real life, goes beyond the conventions of documentary or realism into a mode of representation that doesn’t quite have a name. It’s a fairy tale and an opera, a potboiler and a news bulletin, a howl of protest and an anthem of resistance.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sands of Iwo Jima
    Sands of Iwo Jima so easily could have been a great war film instead of just a good one.
  83. An Officer and a Gentleman
    Undeniably, there's an element of corniness to this. But that doesn't keep An Officer and a Gentleman from being a first-rate movie - a beautifully acted, thoroughly involving romance.
  84. It's Not Yet Dark
    Painful to watch and uncomfortably intimate at times, perhaps by design, It’s Not Yet Dark could have been very dark indeed.
  85. It's Always Fair Weather
    Howling with derision at such recognizable idiocies of TV as singing and slobbering commercials, audience-participation shows, give-away plugs for mundane products and the wise-talking agency boys, Miss Comden and Mr. Green fling some pretty sharp barbs in this bright film.
  86. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
    On the spectrum from heroic patriot to craven traitor, this detailed, clearly told and persuasive film, directed by Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith, is firmly on the side of heroic.
  87. Martha Marcy May Marlene
    Patrick periodically criticizes his disciples, including Martha, for failing to be open enough with him, and that is also a shortcoming of Martha Marcy May Marlene, which is a bit too coy, too clever and too diffident to believe in.
  88. José
    The film delicately depicts the hardship of being gay in a Catholic culture and the pressure for machismo in a crime-ridden country.
  89. House of Pleasures
    Throughout the film there is an abundance of sumptuously photographed flesh on view. But House of Pleasures is not an erotic stimulant so much as a slow-moving, increasingly tragic and claustrophobic operatic pageant set almost entirely in the brothel.
  90. Silicon Cowboys
    Silicon Cowboys prizes the human drama behind business events, much as in “The Social Network” or “Steve Jobs.” Those films, too, pretended that technology was the star. But they knew that people were the real story.
  91. The Settlers
    While any explanation of this fraught phenomenon feels like an oversimplification, Mr. Dotan sorts out the forces and personalities that shaped the movement.
  92. On Any Sunday
    The movie itself is anything but anticlimactic. By putting his cameras on the cycles, Brown achieves audience-participation effects with speed that amount to marvelous delirium.
  93. Leaving Home, Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank
    This material covers a good deal of the same ground as the 2016 documentary on Frank, “Don’t Blink.” Both films give a strong “lion in winter” sense and are moving in their treatments of the tragedies of Frank’s life. If you’ve seen “Don’t Blink,” you may ask whether you “need” to see this. I’d say yes. “More light,” as Goethe put it.
  94. My Neighbors the Yamadas
    Mr. Takahata’s broad, cartoony family comedy whose smeary watercolor washes and Peanuts-like line drawings don’t follow Ghibli’s house style. The family’s misadventures are standard stuff, but the art is continuously inventive.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Flying Leathernecks
    With Mr. Wayne, Mr. Ryan and their charges in the cockpits against the crackling magnificence of Mr. Ray's battletorn sky, the picture is all it should be.
  96. Dina
    The filmmakers might have cleared up suspicions about their motivations and ethics had they worked them into the narrative.
  97. The Retrieval
    Mr. Eska’s choices are thoughtful if sometimes studied: the movie is well cast with solid performers, and if the handsome digital images look overly sharp, as if outlined in razor, he consistently makes the most of his limited resources.
  98. The Trip to Italy
    Like its predecessor, The Trip to Italy flirts with seriousness yet invariably, perhaps rightly, it always goes for the joke, the pun, the fun and the sun.
  99. Sauvage / Wild
    It’s tough to build a character study around an unconvincing character.
  100. Pacifiction
    It suggests John le Carré by way of David Lynch — a feverish and haunting but also wry and meditative rumination on power, secrecy and the color of clouds over water at sunset.
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