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 Secret Garden
    In a year defined by surprise, the predictability of The Secret Garden — a new film adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved 1911 novel — proves more charming than tedious.
  2. Song Without a Name
    The narrative drifts, but the alienation communicated by the movie’s images feels purposeful and striking.
  3. Howard
    By the end of Howard, it’s the songs we’ll never hear that may haunt us most.
  4. River City Drumbeat
    Though the movie does include footage of drum performances, it doesn’t move at the clip of sticks on snares. Instead, the film listens for this community’s heartbeat, finding its steady pulse just as expected: healthy and strong.
  5. Psychomagic, A Healing Art
    Jodorowsky’s patients express gratitude and relief. But there has to be an easier way to alleviate stuttering than rubbing red dye on your genitals, putting on gold lamé hot pants, being body painted and walking the streets of Paris talking to oneself.
  6. The Tax Collector
    LaBeouf, like his castmates — in particular, the talented Chelsea Rendon from the STARZ drama, “Vida” — is constrained throughout by the weight of the stereotyping and dialogue that doesn’t stand a chance against the violence.
  7. Sunless Shadows
    Mehrdad Oskouei’s latest documentary, Sunless Shadows, is a startling, raw confrontation with Iran’s patriarchy.
  8. An American Pickle
    Pickles can be comfort food. Not too filling, good for the digestion, noisy and a little sloppy rather than artful or exquisite or challenging. This one, as I’ve said, isn’t bad, and even allows a soupçon of profundity into its formula.
  9. She Dies Tomorrow
    Dazed but far from confused, “She Dies Tomorrow” tugs at you, nagging to be viewed more than once. Eerie and at times impenetrable, the movie (which was completed pre-pandemic) presents a rapidly spreading psychological contagion that feels uncomfortably timely.
  10. La Llorona
    There are some very good scenes in the movie’s second half; even so, it’s striking that the most unsettling aspect of “La Llorona” is that history doesn’t simply shape the movie. It also haunts and finally overwhelms it with terrors far more unspeakable than any impressively manufactured shock.
  11. Red Penguins
    If Red Penguins doesn’t always strike a satisfying balance between the glib and the grim, the broader topic — the commercialization of hockey — affords it a novel lens on Russia’s economic transition.
  12. A Most Beautiful Thing
    The film’s fast-paced editing makes it difficult to get to know individual members, but the men register powerfully as a collective, just like a real rowing team.
  13. Nose to Tail
    The cliché of the volatile chef riding roughshod over his subordinates receives a thorough airing in Nose to Tail, a resolute but finally punishing wallow in self-destructiveness and obnoxious male behavior.
  14. Shine Your Eyes
    Shine Your Eyes, from the Brazilian filmmaker Matias Mariani, finds a distinctive way to tell a familiar narrative — of immigrants in megacities, of how dreams can pummel you and of the complexity of fraternal bonds.
  15. A Girl Missing
    As he proved in his 2017 drama, “Harmonium,” Fukada excels at unfurling near-hysterical narratives in restrained, sometimes icily sterile scenes. But while the earlier film pulled us in, this one repels, its cloudy colors and depressing mood making us long for a single moment of joy.
  16. Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind
    Lightfoot is frank about sizing up that work — the movie opens with him expressing disdain for the sexism of his early hit “For Lovin’ Me” — and he’s refreshingly up-to-date in his perspectives about today’s music.
  17. Calm with Horses (The Shadow of Violence)
    The movie tries to convince you that Douglas is better than his worst self and can transcend the dehumanizing degradations in which he’s mired. But not even the filmmakers seem convinced, which may explain why they embrace baroque brutality topped by a dollop of audience-mollifying sentimentality.
  18. Summerland
    A thumb to suck in troubled times, Summerland offers a digit of nostalgia that many viewers will latch onto with something approaching relief.
  19. Host
    Though not as dynamic as “Unfriended,” another “desktop movie,” Host observes uncannily the supernatural, ephemeral, and material worlds colliding together, gesturing toward an uncertain future.
  20. Rebuilding Paradise
    Though it might seem generic in some respects, Rebuilding Paradise resonates with the moment.
  21. The Cuban
    Complications culminate in epiphanies and brief triumphs, as is customary. But this genial, well-intentioned movie never quite lands a real emotional punch.
  22. The Fight
    If the filmmakers succeed in wringing drama from decisions that have already come down, their efforts at character development are hit-and-miss.
  23. The Hater
    The movie is most effective in detailing how disinformation campaigns work.
  24. Radioactive
    Radioactive, a thoughtful, very watchable fictionalized portrait of Marie Curie, tries hard to nudge the halo off its subject. Given her endeavors and accolades — including two Nobel Prizes — this simple, humanizing effort proves tough but also feels necessary.
  25. City Dreamers
    The documentarian Joseph Hillel tells their stories in somewhat formulaic fashion, creating a perfectly pleasant, educational movie that is not as riveting as it should be.
  26. The Kissing Booth 2
    If The Kissing Booth, stacked with regressive relationship dynamics, is Victorian in its views, The Kissing Booth 2 progresses to the midcentury.
  27. The Grand Unified Theory of Howard Bloom
    Directed by Charlie Hoxie, "The Grand Unified Theory" is a moderately engaging documentary that credibly portrays Bloom’s indefatigability.
  28. Days of the Whale
    The cast is appealingly natural, the cinematography subtly seductive, and the Colombian pop songs on the soundtrack establish a sinuous groove.
  29. The Rental
    Featuring one of the most dissatisfying, anticlimactic endings in genre memory, this paranoid thriller (the directing debut of Dave Franco) turns an isolated seaside villa into a slaughterhouse.
  30. Retaliation
    Mostly, Retaliation accords Bloom a chance to deliver some impressive, anguished monologues, although the scenes focusing on those around him (particularly a late conversation between Montgomery and Ferns’s characters) hint at a more expansive, unrealized complexity.
  31. Fisherman's Friends
    Between predictable, commonplace plot turns and characterizations of music business types that are even more obnoxious than the norm, the movie’s straining for effect is less than ingratiating.
  32. Amulet
    This is Garai’s feature directing debut, and it is as satisfying as it is promising, despite an unfortunate wind down. She has a great eye — and a real feel for the power of silence and visual textures — but she stumbles when she explains too much.
  33. Yes, God, Yes
    Burdened by a silly R rating that may deter the very youngsters who are likely to enjoy it most, Yes, God, Yes (written and directed by Karen Maine) fights back with an appealing lead and an overwhelmingly innocent tone.
  34. Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful
    A gossipy portrait of a charmingly naughty boy whose genius is perhaps best appreciated on a second viewing with the sound off and the eyes wide open.
  35. F11 and Be There
    The film is as beautifully composed as Uzzle’s pictures. The director Jethro Waters also shot the movie, a subtle feast of light and color.
  36. Dateline—Saigon
    Despite stodgy trappings, Dateline-Saigon captures a swirl of personalities and conveys the excitement of reporting in a fast-moving, confusing and dangerous atmosphere.
  37. Fatal Affair
    There is so much recycled material in “Fatal Affair” that its carbon footprint must have been zero.
  38. The Painted Bird
    While Kosinski’s prose renders the grotesque vivid by understatement, this adaptation often seems to have little purpose beyond literal-minded visualization.
  39. Flannery
    This biographical documentary of the writer Flannery O’Connor, directed by Mark Bosco and Elizabeth Coffman, is sporadically informative. But it mostly underscores the shortcomings of the varied methods it uses.
  40. Blessed Child
    Jones’s former affiliation presumably helped with access; adherents seem to trust her, and some clips are credited to the church. It also gives her a complicated, at times surprisingly sympathetic outlook on the cult.
  41. Father Soldier Son
    Like life, it sometimes skips years, only to land on an evening that feels like an epoch.
  42. Dirt Music
    Every so often, a movie comes along that isn’t particularly good, yet somehow gets to you — even as your eyes start to roll, they can’t look away. “Dirt Music” is one of those, a strangely fascinating delivery system for so much visual beauty that its flaws scrabble to gain a purchase.
  43. The Sunlit Night
    This movie about artistic inspiration is meandering and slight, but, in a way, it provides evidence for why it’s helpful to cast actors with movie-star charisma.
  44. Never Too Late
    While it’s generally a pleasure to see stalwarts like Cromwell, Weaver and Jack Thompson (as one of the old gang) at work, one also wishes they had found, well, better work.
  45. Palm Springs
    Pain is a necessary ingredient in any successful comedy. The trick, which Barbakow and Siara seem to have mastered on their very first try, is to find the misery of the right kind and intensity, to imply tears that match the laughter.
  46. Widow of Silence
    Breathtakingly photographed by Mohammad Reza Jahanpanah, Widow of Silence is a movie with a cool head and a sharp eye — one that sees greater hope in the flamboyantly jeweled tones of a carmine head scarf than in the entrenched absurdities of a broken bureaucracy.
  47. Tito
    Tito is a better achievement in sound and visuals than plot or character. The sheer strangeness of the film may be mesmerizing at first, but even the slim 70-minute run time eventually feels tedious when so little happens.
  48. Olympia
    At times, Mavromichalis himself seems starstuck, to the extent that he can’t distinguish the disarming from the banal.
  49. Guest of Honour
    The movie is consistently seductive, and it makes lovely use of a composition by Shannon Graham that is woven into Veronica’s work as a music teacher. But several story shortcuts . . . ensure that the characters’ anguish feels more constructed than organic.
  50. We Are Little Zombies
    Smart, noisy and flashily assured, We Are Little Zombies is entirely, gleefully its own thing.
  51. Relic
    Relic deftly merges the familiar bumps and groans of the haunted-house movie with a potent allegory for the devastation of dementia.
  52. The Old Guard
    I’m not usually someone to hope for sequels, but I guess if you live long enough …
  53. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
    Seen with or without foreknowledge of its methods, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is only fitfully engaging — suspect as documentary, insubstantial as fiction.
  54. The Tobacconist
    This is a pretty movie to be sure, with attractive cinematography, period costume and production design. But the film has no political or philosophical weight, and it is ultimately a movie that is as hard to take seriously as its somewhat dunderheaded protagonist.
  55. Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly
    Even for those familiar with Ai and his work, the film’s offerings of fascinating insights into his personal life and an exploration of the stakes of personal freedom make it a worthy viewing experience.
  56. Inmate #1: The Rise of Danny Trejo
    There are a lot of laughs in his Hollywood redemption story, which also reveals Trejo’s hard-won gentleness.
  57. The Beach House
    After a dillydallying slow start, Brown ratchets up the tension efficiently, summoning a mix of gross-out body invasion, eco-mutation and large-scale cosmic dread on a small budget.
  58. Mucho Mucho Amor
    The movie is generous about allowing Mercado to present his view of the world in his own words, but it’s a shame not to be able to see the world through his eyes.
  59. Greyhound
    While much of the movie was shot on an actual ship, there is a lot of C.G.I., and a good deal of it is not entirely convincing. “Greyhound” also feels like a movie that was conceived as an epic but could not quite muster the necessary force. As such, it’s ultimately one of Hanks’s most perfunctory pictures.
  60. Scheme Birds
    For all the impetuousness of its subjects, this is a film of remarkable respect and restraint — a documentary that carves shape into a messy reality.
  61. Bungalow (2002)
    Unspooling over the course of a few lazy summer days, the film offers an enigmatic examination of youthful alienation, its plot irresolute and unpredictable.
  62. The Truth
    The story gradually emerges through an accretion of details and personal dynamics, often in families that stand in for the larger world. Things happen quietly or offscreen. The drama is measured out in sips, in gazes, gestures, silences, off-handed humor and shocks of brutality.
  63. Four Kids and It
    Though the Psammead grants the children’s wishes . . . they come with a catch: a set up for an unimaginative moral lesson and nearly two hours of lukewarm familial bonding.
  64. Viena and the Fantomes
    The Mexican-born Naranjo, best known for the showy 2011 thriller “Miss Bala,” here depicts the toxic gender relations of young louts — culminating in assault, forced drugging, and general grossness and incoherence — with a stoic grimness that wants to look like resigned wisdom. It’s not.
  65. John Lewis: Good Trouble
    Although the film uses a conventional format, it makes an urgent argument: that a new wave of voter suppression has threatened the rights that Lewis labored to secure.
  66. Family Romance, LLC
    In many of Herzog’s nonfiction films, the director himself is a defining presence. One understands why he wanted to stay behind the camera and off the soundtrack here. This wrinkle in modern social life is best taken in without the mitigation of overt distancing.
  67. The Outpost
    The Outpost evolves from what initially feels like a collection of war-movie commonplaces, highlighting crude-talking soldiers in a bad situation, into something more complex and illuminating.
  68. Denise Ho: Becoming the Song
    The film does an excellent job of introducing the pop star to unfamiliar audiences, contextualizing her activism and, more broadly, examining the role art can play in shaping our beliefs.
  69. Welcome to Chechnya
    Welcome to Chechnya is a moving and vital indictment of mass persecution.
  70. Skyman
    Subdued and temperate, Skyman refuses to lean into the mystery of Carl’s claims or wind us up for a final resolution. Those elements might be present, but they’re never allowed to obscure what is essentially an empathetic, textured portrait of loneliness and loss.
  71. The Wages of Fear (1953)
    The excitement derives entirely from the awareness of nitroglycerine and the gingerly, breathless handling of it. You sit there waiting for the theatre to explode.
  72. Unsettled: Seeking Refuge in America
    More than the informational nuggets the movie flashes onscreen, these scenes of personal interaction help make “Unsettled” distinctive.
  73. Hamilton
    The close-ups and camera movements in this version enhance the charisma of the performers, adding a dimension of intimacy that compensates for the lost electricity of the live theatrical experience.
  74. Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga
    More tribute than parody, this over-egged farce whips slapstick and cheese into an authentic soufflé of tastelessness.
  75. Lost Bullet
    This impressively lean French thriller wastes nothing in its quest to deliver the goods.
    • The New York Times
      • Posted Jun 25, 2020
  76. A Regular Woman
    A film that feels exploitative, not enlightened.
  77. Irresistible
    It feels like an artifact from a particularly contentious past, a stale corn chip trampled into Party-convention carpeting.
  78. House of Hummingbird
    Kim works like a pointillist with lots of short scenes and daubs of textured nuance that build the portrait incrementally.
  79. The Last Tree
    The film feels at times like it is trying to take on too much — plotlines are rushed, relationships feel unearned or not explained. Still, I can’t help but be impressed by Amoo’s attempts to direct a familiar narrative with such a complicated set of questions.
  80. The 11th Green
    The measured tone with which the movie presents its ostensible revelations is more than half the fun; nothing that comes up is ever played as a twist; the aforementioned opening scene shows Munch’s hand deliberately.
  81. All I Can Say
    The movie will be most profitably consumed by fans — people who believe Hoon earned the tribute. While one does not want to be cruel, one is obliged to be frank.
  82. Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things
    It proceeds dryly and largely chronologically through her life, sometimes with an awkward sense of proportion.
  83. The Audition
    Hoss’s work is impeccable and illuminating, and the movie’s foursquare, frank, brisk approach is salutary. But its final scenes lean into triteness and frustrating evasiveness, which makes the picture a less than entirely satisfying experience.
  84. Beats
    This tender, detail-filled movie lives for the moment.
  85. My Spy
    It has too much violence and language for family viewing, but doesn’t commit enough to the danger of spy thrillers to stir the Bond and Bourne lovers among us. In the end, it doesn’t know which mission it chooses to accept.
  86. The Ghost of Peter Sellers
    Neither bitter nor maudlin, The Ghost of Peter Sellers is a movie about filmmaking and soul-searching, a tale of two Peters and maybe the worst of times for both.
  87. Nobody Knows I'm Here
    Not all the misdirection is elegant, but the film’s tenderness flowers in a lovely, unexpected final shot.
  88. Athlete A
    Cohen and Shenk amplify the voices of the survivors while recognizing that Nassar’s arrest doesn’t dissipate the pain or deep-rooted exploitation.
  89. Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall
    What it resembles more than anything is a deluxe extended episode of a television music-biography series like “Unsung” (or “Behind the Music” minus the scandals).
  90. If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise
    It was created under different circumstances and it is, perhaps inevitably, a less powerful work than “When the Levees Broke,” more diffuse in its storytelling and more uncertain in its point of view.
  91. You Should Have Left
    Koepp and Kehlmann’s screenplay fails to properly set the groundwork for the film’s final twist, instead dropping egregious and poorly incorporated hints on the sluggish march to a telegraphed conclusion. And the direction, too, feels languid, almost mechanical, with rote terrors and tones robbed from horror movies past.
  92. Disclosure
    With each successive trip to the grim vaults, the hard-won dignity of the film’s transgender speakers is brought into sharper and sharper relief.
  93. Feel the Beat
    The harmony among the kids, particularly the older girls Kari (Lidya Jewett) and Sarah (Eva Hauge), is the film’s greatest asset, and the director, Elissa Down, uses their natural charm as a crutch for the run-of-the-mill story.
  94. Mr. Jones
    More than anything, Mr. Jones is an argument for witnessing and remembrance.
  95. Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn
    Long stretches are not a personal reckoning but an overview; many details overlap with “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” from last year, although the clips here are at least as good. It is also more sympathetic to Cohn than either Cohn’s reputation or the familial animosity would suggest.
  96. My Darling Vivian
    The film, ultimately, still lacks Liberto’s own sense of agency.
  97. Picture of His Life
    For a film granted so much up-close access with its subject, Picture of His Life hears surprisingly little from Nachoum himself. Between vérité clips of the journey, the film is inundated with archival footage.
  98. Babyteeth
    The movie has texture but no depth, tears but no snot. Who are these people, I kept wondering.
  99. Miss Juneteenth
    Instead of just depicting the myriad ways black women carry their communities, the movie goes further to explore how these women and black girls support each other in a world that often fails them.
  100. Wasp Network
    There are times in which Wasp Network feels like a John le Carré tale drenched in Miami sun, or even a serious-minded “Top Gun” variant. But it’s also a provocative demonstration of how strange life can get when the political and the personal intertwine like roots of a mammoth tree.
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