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. I Shot Andy Warhol
    The film's greatest directorial success is in finding a thoroughly entertaining way of inviting the audience to share Valerie's point of view.
  2. Samson and Delilah
    How do you know you're looking at a pretty good piece of filmmaking? When the director and actors can make you care about the central characters even though they exchange almost no dialogue.
  3. The Strange Case of Angelica
    The charm of The Strange Case of Angelica lies in the way it balances this mysticism with a thoroughly secular sense of the business of everyday life.
  4. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
    Witty but not campy, grand without being unduly somber, it is a crazy, almost-coherent riot of intrigue, color and kineticism anchored by the charisma of its cast.
  5. I'll See You in My Dreams
    A modest, quietly touching portrait of an older woman radiantly embodied by Blythe Danner.
  6. Our Little Sister
    Seeming to wander through small incidents and mundane busyness, it acquires momentum and dramatic weight through a brilliant kind of narrative stealth. You are shaken, by the end, at how much you care about these women and how sorry you are to leave their company.
  7. Sound of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story
    It’s a fond and forgiving tribute to the man, filled with music that moves beyond happy and sad, and toward something like brilliance.
  8. Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe
    One need not admire Zweig’s writing to recognize the worth of this thoughtful treatment of one of the countless real-life tragedies of 20th-century history.
  9. Nico, 1988
    Ms. Dyrholm, photographed frequently in brutally unforgiving close-up, fully captures the faded charisma of the woman whose life reads like a Who’s Who of the New York midcentury art scene.
  10. The Professionals
    The scenery provided for this picture is clearly more profound than the script, and the sense of magnitude in the environment more engrossing than that in the plot.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The World of Jacques Demy
    [Varda's] film slides in and out of [Demy's] career and personal life with a French sensibility that puts no great stock in exact chronological order or clearly announced shifts from one film to the next. At times this is annoying, but it pays to keep up, or if necessary back up a bit, to get the measure of an elegantly romantic filmmaker with a strong feel for nostalgia and chance. [09 Dec 2003, p.E1]
    • The New York Times
  12. Santosh
    Santosh is equally about the methods by which the poor and oppressed are kept in their place, and about what it means to be woman among men who aren’t at all interested in sharing their power.
  13. Jean de Florette
    Jean de Florette has the delicacy or something freshly observed. It's so good that one needn't be ashamed of escaping into its idealized if harsh and rocky world.
  14. Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost
    At least two ideas running through “Nothing Is Lost,” which is streaming on Apple TV, and which takes its title from a line in a play that Anne wrote, give it a complexity that usually eludes profile-of-an-artist documentaries.
  15. Spy
    The busy, silly script allows Ms. McCarthy to be her own best sidekick, in effect an entire sketch-comedy troupe unto herself.
  16. Lilo & Stitch
    Hardly a work of state-of-the-art virtuosity, but rather an example of quiet, confident craftsmanship that tells a sweet, charming tale of intergalactic friendship.
  17. A Chiara
    You feel the weight of Chiara’s dilemma, the cost of the knowledge she demands, and the heroism of her willingness to pay it.
  18. An Unreasonable Man
    Its ideological leanings are evident and unsurprising, but more screen time for Mr. Nader's pre-2000 (or pre-post-2000) adversaries would have made a richer film.
  19. 24 City
    The actors in 24 City bring their own existential realities to their short, touching performances. In the end, the deep emotions they stir up -- the actress Lv Liping delivers a harrowing story about a lost child -- constitute another kind of monument to the workers of Factory 420.
  20. Night Moves
    Some of the climactic turns seem to follow the kind of narrative rules that this film, and this filmmaker, have otherwise defied.
  21. Casualties of War
    Mr. Penn plays Meserve with terrific elan. There is plausibility in every movement and gesture, and especially in his crafty handsomeness. His Meserve is the sort of man one credits with thoughts when the mind may, in fact, be completely blank.
  22. The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness
    This affectionate documentary is more of a bonbon for longtime fans than an entryway for a broader audience.
  23. Satan & Adam
    The blues seep into every scene of Satan & Adam, a gritty yet lovely documentary. And even after the songs stop, the music’s bittersweet emotions linger.
  24. Crude
    Ahead of us lie many more documentaries similar in tone and spirit to this one. We can hope that at least a few of them are as intelligently and artfully made.
  25. Tanna
    Despite its best efforts, Tanna drifts into a mode of exoticism that renders it an ultimately frustrating experience.
  26. John Wick: Chapter 2
    The plot matters only inasmuch as it allows the returning director, Chad Stahelski, to stage his spectacular fight sequences in various stunning Roman locations, where they unfold with an almost erotic brutality.
  27. The Escape
    Subtle and slow and wrenchingly empathetic, The Escape is about gradually realizing that the life you have may not be the one you want.
  28. Send Help
    Send Help may not be peak Raimi (that, to my mind, would be A Simple Plan), but it’s Raimi at peak pulp. I’ll happily take it.
  29. Belfast
    Branagh’s remembrances may be idealized, but with Belfast he has written a charming, rose-tinted thank-you note to the city that sparked his dreams and the parents whose sacrifices helped them come true.
  30. The Witnesses
    The Witnesses may frustrate those who prefer movies that tell clear-cut stories in which hard lessons are learned. But in the director’s farsighted vision of life, the ground under our feet is always shifting. As time pulls us forward, the shocks of the past are absorbed and the pain recedes. In its light-handed way, The Witnesses is profound.
  31. How to Train Your Dragon
    The reason it deserves to be seen in a theater with special glasses on, rather than slapped on the DVD player when the children are acting up -- lies in those airborne sequences.
  32. Unrest
    The film punctures that airless sense of fate which can suffocate period pieces and restores this moment of upheaval to immediacy.
  33. Destination Unknown
    Ms. Ferguson’s film does not seem to have a particular organizing principle at first. These survivors do not necessarily know one another. But their stories, intercut with archival footage over a brisk and frequently harrowing 81 minutes, build to a pitch of horror and sadness that eventually allows for a note or two of hope to sound.
  34. Bulworth
    Its best moments come from witnessing the Senator's inspired unraveling, not from watching where it will end.
  35. Civil War
    Rarely have I seen a movie that made me so acutely uncomfortable or watched an actor’s face that, like Dunst’s, expressed a nation’s soul-sickness so vividly that it felt like an X-ray.
  36. Side Effects
    While the plot may be predictable (and more than a little preposterous) in retrospect, Mr. Soderbergh handles it brilliantly, serving notice once again that he is a crackerjack genre technician.
  37. The Battered Bastards of Baseball
    The Battered Bastards of Baseball is an affectionate scrapbook of a documentary.
  38. The Stunt Man
    The film's cleverness is aggressive and cool, and so its mysteries, though elaborate, remain largely uninviting.
  39. Titanic
    A huge, thrilling three-and-a-quarter-hour experience that unerringly lures viewers into the beauty and heartbreak of its lost world.
  40. Oceans
    The filmmakers work tirelessly to parallel their undersea world with the larger universe, offering genteel reminders of our mutual dependence.
  41. That Evening Sun
    Hal Holbrook strips the stereotype of the grumpy old man of sentimental shtick and cutesy old-codger mannerisms.
  42. Blindspotting
    This movie, which was written by Mr. Diggs and Mr. Casal, has an energetic-to-the-point-of-boisterous style. Its lively frequency is embedded in the writing, bolstered by Carlos López Estrada’s direction, and kept buoyant by the performers. This particular aspect of the film makes it exciting to watch, but can also be confounding.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
    A fast, funny and sprightly rustic romp well worth seeing.
  44. Immediate Family
    Tedesco is the son of the West Coast guitar great Tommy Tedesco, and he clearly has a knack for getting musicians to open up. The band members.
  45. The Invisible War
    This means that the violations chronicled in The Invisible War are compounded by a deep and terrible betrayal, which ripples outward from the various branches of the service into the society as a whole. This is not a movie that can be ignored.
  46. Down from the Mountain
    If you have any affection at all for traditional American music, the movie itself -- is pretty close to heaven.
  47. Metropolis
    A hallucinatory tour de force of color, perspective and scale, virtually encapsulates the history of Japanese animation.
  48. The Motorcycle Diaries
    Mr. Bernal's soulful, magnetic performance notwithstanding, the real star of the film is South America itself, revealed in the cinematographer Eric Gautier's misty green images as a land of jarring and enigmatic beauty.
  49. A Private War
    Anchored by Rosamund Pike’s powerhouse lead performance, this restive, raw movie slowly accumulates the heft to render its flaws irrelevant.
  50. The Wolfpack
    Documentary has a tradition of trafficking in the misery of other people’s lives, so it’s a relief that “The Wolfpack” doesn’t drag you down or offer packaged uplift, but instead tells a strange tale with heart and generosity.
  51. A Beautiful Planet
    It’s appealing to adults and accessible to younger viewers. And it delivers an environmental message that is strong and serious while remaining encouraging and optimistic. That’s important to hear. The rest is just amazing to watch.
  52. The Kind Words
    Humor creeps in from strange sources, including a seller of funeral packages and a march through a Paris graveyard. And while not every motivation is clear, subtext isn’t everything in a movie as complex and satisfying as this one.
  53. Infinite Football
    While the movie has allegorical resonances with the political and human rights disasters of 20th-century Romania, by the end, its surfaces, while remaining superficially unimpressive, open up as the film moves from epistemological speculation onto a plane of mysticism. This relatively short film contains worlds.
  54. Little Children
    The result is a movie that is challenging, accessible and hard to stop thinking about...But in too many recent movies intelligence is woefully undervalued, and it is this quality -- even more than its considerable beauty -- that distinguishes Little Children from its peers.
  55. Terminator 2: Judgment Day
    Mr. Cameron has made a swift, exciting special-effects epic that thoroughly justifies its vast expense and greatly improves upon the first film's potent but rudimentary visual style. He has also broadened his initial idea to encompass better developed characters (after all, the first Terminator was barely verbal), a livelier wit and a more ambitious, if nuttier, message.
  56. Morris from America
    There is plenty of drama in a teenager’s everyday life — no need to sensationalize — and Morris From America feels true to both the pleasures and the frustrations of its title character.
  57. The Plagiarists
    The Plagiarists does skewer its characters, but where it goes from there is more genuinely bleak than what mere finger-pointing can achieve.
  58. The State Against Mandela and the Others
    Mandela did not die before effecting a huge change in his still-traumatized country. This movie sheds a valuable light on his struggle.
  59. Another Road Home
    Moving and ultimately hopeful, Another Road Home makes no effort to soften or simplify its prickly themes.
  60. The Boxer
    Mr. Day-Lewis, looking wearily rugged and battling his way through several plausible boxing matches, once again breathes fire into the character of a high-minded loner, and his vitality lends real force to the film's moral arguments.
  61. Together
    It’s clever in concept and kind of silly in execution, which wouldn’t be a bad thing if it knew how to commit to its goofiness.
  62. By the Grace of God
    By the Grace of God is a rarity: An important film that’s also utterly inspired.
  63. Rich Hill
    Regular hazily scored, gauzy interludes cut into the film’s immediacy and tone. But the filmmakers shade in humble, sympathetic portraits of these children.
  64. Song Without a Name
    The narrative drifts, but the alienation communicated by the movie’s images feels purposeful and striking.
  65. Dark Days
    Dark Days illustrates even the worst nightmare can have descending levels of horror.
  66. Kicking and Screaming
    The film succeeds in finding something sweetly romantic and visually fresh in Grover's flashback memories of Jane, along with allowing Grover plenty of room for wisecracks.
  67. 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.
  68. Captain America: Civil War
    This very crowded, reasonably enjoyable installment in the Avengers cycle...reveals, even more than its predecessors, an essential truth about the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s not so much a grand science-fiction saga, or even a series of action-adventure movies, as a very expensive, perpetually renewed workplace sitcom.
  69. The Eyes of Orson Welles
    The movie intersperses observations and speculations on Welles’s life and work with long looks at his graphic pieces. These are fascinating.
  70. Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser
    The film reminds us again and again that Monk was as important a jazz composer as he was a pianist.
  71. The Stones and Brian Jones
    [Broomfield’s] announcer-like voice-over and sometimes dishy interviews might evoke a “Behind the Music” exposé, but he seems most like a fan with a rueful sympathy for his devil of a subject.
  72. The Ister
    The Ister asks you not to think, but to think hard. Your reward, given in proportion to your level of attention, commitment and participation, is to see the simplest things in a new light, possessed of vast new dimensions.
  73. The Desert of Forbidden Art
    The filmmakers found an appealing collection of relatives and others who knew these artists and Savitsky to tell the story, but they also let the art do the talking, with loving, lingering shots of the brightly colored works.
  74. My Mom Jayne
    It is the exquisitely relatable messiness of this exceptional family tale that lingers.
  75. The Baltimorons
    The Baltimorons aims for bittersweet rather than wacky. Didi is lonely; Cliff struggles with sobriety. And while the film has clear affection for its Baltimore locations (it’s dedicated to the workers killed when the Key Bridge collapsed in 2024), considerably less thought has gone into creating convincing situations for those backdrops.
  76. Finding Vivian Maier
    The film, which [Mr. Maloof] directed with Charlie Siskel, is absorbing, touching and satisfyingly enjoyable because Maier was a fascinating, poignant and somewhat enigmatic woman.
  77. Cusp
    A portrait of modern girlhood, this documentary ultimately becomes a bleak look at the normalization of sexual abuse among the very victimized young women.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Set-Up
    The Set-Up is a real dilly for those who go for muscular entertainment.
  79. Super Dark Times
    The performances from the film’s young cast members are uniformly excellent, including Owen Campbell as Zach and Charlie Tahan as Josh. But the direction from Mr. Phillips is what makes Super Dark Times unusual.
  80. Middle of Nowhere
    Ms. DuVernay, from start to finish in this very fine movie, works to make sure that Ruby is a woman to remember.
  81. The Kid Stays in the Picture
    One of the funniest, and most telling, films of the year. The filmmakers call "Kid" a documentary, but the movie is one of the unusual kind that is firmly lodged inside the subject's perspective.
  82. Startup.com
    Moves slowly and grimly toward the moment that for the audience is the most engrossing though filled with dread: when things begin to unravel and the participants are no longer aware of the cameras. That is when your shoulders tense and you lean toward the screen.
  83. Harry Is Here to Help
    A strange and funny film, smart, complex and difficult to shake.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Full Monty
    Inevitably, the film has echoes of "Brassed Off," another recent British export. The Full Monty is less sentimental and arguably funnier.
  85. Roger Dodger
    One of the juiciest male characters to pop up in an independent film this year.
  86. Liberty Heights
    If Liberty Heights is much too soft at its center, it still offers a deeper immersion in that old '50s feeling than any other Hollywood film in recent memory.
  87. The Deserted Station
    If repetition has stripped Iran's post-revolutionary cinema of some of its modish luster, The Deserted Station is still a valuable addition to a literature whose characteristics are now internationally well-established.
  88. Kitchen Stories
    His painstakingly coordinated scenes and exquisitely timed takes are the filmmaking equivalent of wringing every single use from a paper towel and then folding it before disposal.
  89. Beauty in Trouble
    A movie of stark contrasts and zigzagging motives, Beauty in Trouble moves from the golden serenity of a Tuscan villa to the powdery chaos of a Czech garage without sacrificing thematic confidence or nuanced performances.
  90. The Square
    By the time the final measure of rough cosmic justice is meted out, The Square has completed a tour of moral squalor that is suspenseful, invigorating and sometimes harshly funny.
  91. The Thieves
    Loaded with all the twists, disguises, glamorous settings and split-screen montages you could ask for.
  92. Intent to Destroy
    While there may be no completely dispassionate way to discuss its topic — the Armenian genocide — the film’s balance of emotion and composure helps make its stories even stronger.
  93. When Evil Lurks
    This is a dark and timely parable about what happens when trust — among community members, within families, between a government and its people — disintegrates.
  94. Sally
    Sally, a welcome but unadventurous documentary about the astronaut Sally Ride (who died in 2012), wraps a risk-taking personality inside a risk-averse package.
  95. Les amitiés maléfiques
    As a group portrait of apprentice intellectuals the film has an almost documentary accuracy. It also has a degree of energy, an appetite for strong feelings and big ideas, notably missing in American movies about the young and overeducated, which tend to specialize in mumbled ironies and tiny epiphanies.
  96. Born on the Fourth of July
    It is a film of enormous visceral power with, in the central role, a performance by Tom Cruise that defines everything that is best about the movie.
  97. Funny Face
    Roger Edens, the talented producer, and Stanley Donen, the director, have turned the whole thing into a lovely phantasm made up of romance, tourism and chic.
  98. Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy
    More curious and combative than the movie around her, Kennedy is as much anthropologist as chef, her deep love for her adopted country palpable.
  99. 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.
  100. Dial M for Murder
    The thrills come in following a succession of dawnings in people's minds.But Mr. Hitchcock has presented this mental material on the screen with remarkable visual definition of developing intrigue and mood.
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