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. 7500
    One thing Vollrath does well is create a credibly claustrophobia-inducing atmosphere. Then again, when you restrict your camera to the inside of a cockpit, you’d have to be pretty incompetent not to.
  2. My Father the Spy
    My Father the Spy doesn’t have a tidy point to make, but it succeeds at bringing a turbulent reminiscence to life.
  3. The Pollinators
    Here is a movie that presents an intelligent vision of nature. What’s pleasing to the eye is pleasing to the earth — a sentiment the film rigorously supports with science.
  4. Seahorse: The Dad Who Gave Birth
    "Seahorse” is the sort of documentary that gains its interest less from its technique than from its subject, and from the fact that the filmmaker was present at the right time. Articulate, reflective and unhesitant about getting personal, McConnell makes for a complicated character study.
  5. The King of Staten Island
    The King of Staten Island is one of those 10-block-radius life slices whose smallness and intimacy ought to be a virtue. But the movie seems afraid of itself.
  6. In My Blood It Runs
    The director Maya Newell gains access to both worlds that Dujuan traverses — home and school — and the trust that she seems to have built with all participants is vital to the success of this film.
  7. For They Know Not What They Do
    Its success comes from interrogating the cultural assumption that there is no space for a range of sexual orientations and gender identities within religious communities.
  8. Hill of Freedom
    The ingenuity of the movie’s structure is stimulating and delightful, but there’s one aspect of “Hill” that some may find a trifle exasperating: Even more than any of the sad-sack men who populate the director’s other movies, Mori is kind of a stiff.
  9. The Surrogate
    The Surrogate feels like the vexed progeny of an elevator pitch and an ethics advice column.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Aviva
    Pride in frank eccentricity pushes at times into the unintentionally absurd. Still, it’s exciting how these dance sequences are treated like any other scene, and disappointing when the compulsion to justify them takes hold.
  11. Marona's Fantastic Tale
    Marona has three real homes in her life, and past abandonments have taught her that heartbreak waits in every happiness. But fortunately, the film stays buoyant through its unique, boisterous animation.
  12. Da 5 Bloods
    In its anger, its humor and its exuberance — in the emotional richness of the central performances and of Terence Blanchard’s score — this is unmistakably a Spike Lee Joint. It’s also an argument with and through the history of film.
  13. Born in Evin
    Zaree makes an eloquent and arresting protagonist, though her documentary is a bit too tidy for its own good.
  14. You Don't Nomi
    If not revelatory, You Don’t Nomi is likely to persuade viewers that “Showgirls” is more than a “bare-butted bore,” as Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times 25 years ago.
  15. Searching Eva
    The film illustrates that being self-baring is different from being self-revealing. It inspires a vexing but welcome question: What did I just watch?
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Spelling the Dream
    Spelling the Dream is a film about winning, delivered with glossy visuals and a gratingly optimistic score that draws to a close with its champion showered in confetti — an obvious symbol for this overarching (and under-questioned) celebration of American multiculturalism.
  17. Dreamland
    Strange, challenging and boundlessly confident, this tripped-out noir from the Canadian filmmaker Bruce McDonald (best known for his 2009 horror movie, “Pontypool”) is part lucid dream, part drugged-out nightmare.
  18. Parkland Rising
    Parkland Rising passes the low bar of not undermining the people it covers, but by avoiding both research and conflict, it fails to provide a reason for its own existence.
  19. 2040
    Although the odds of implementing all these ideas might seem steep, “2040” is a rare climate documentary with an optimistic message.
  20. And We Go Green
    [A] cheery, lightweight documentary.
  21. Tommaso
    Tommaso has a different feel than your average variant on Fellini’s “8 ½.” Maybe it’s a sense of shame, something the older film’s Guido hadn’t much of. Whatever it is, it makes Tommaso crackle with ideas and empathy, as Ferrara’s best work always does.
  22. Feral
    As Feral — directed by Andrew Wonder from a script he wrote with Priscilla Kavanaugh and Jason Mendez — moves forward, it doesn’t always do a great job of splitting the difference between a raw depiction of harsh reality and ostentatious deck-stacking.
  23. Yourself and Yours
    Hong’s formal confidence yields a movie that’s very simply constructed and utterly engrossing.
  24. Judy & Punch
    What’s left is a baroque pantomime, a heavy-handed satire of intolerance whose fun fades faster than the livid bruises on Judy’s face.
  25. Shirley
    Moss, brazen and witty and seeming to push herself to the very edge of control, is a galvanizing presence, convincingly wild even as she’s trapped in a hothouse of sometimes dubious ideas.
  26. The Vast of Night
    The actors add some filigree to their genre types, but are consistently upstaged by the superb, supple camerawork. With the cinematographer Miguel Ioann Littin Menz, Patterson turns the camera into an uneasily embodied presence and when it takes flight so does the movie.
  27. Phoenix, Oregon
    It’s all a bit uneventful, but it works as an endearing portrait of average life: sometimes up, sometimes down, but moving steadily along.
  28. Street Fighting Men
    What makes the movie compelling, then, are not so much the stories that ebb and rise from despair to hope, like the tides, but the portraits of the people living them.
  29. Circumstantial Pleasures
    No matter how distinct the elements — and how differently arranged — they are of a feverish, profoundly uneasy piece.
  30. Ursula von Rydingsvard: Into Her Own
    This documentary portrait of the formidable sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard is, by dint of its brevity, more tantalizing than satiating. But it’s still a welcome cinematic account of her work.
  31. I Will Make You Mine
    The movie accumulates a rueful nostalgia. Soft black-and-white cinematography (by Bill Otto and Carl Nenzen Loven) and low-key humor help offset the limitations of its partly crowd-funded budget, as does the naturalism of the partly improvised performances
  32. On the Record
    Most of the accusations have been reported on extensively in the last two years in various publications. What the film does is bring these accounts to living, breathing and moving life, taking us beyond the media cycles of allegation and denial to a survivor’s intimate confrontations with cultural pressures and trauma.
  33. Papicha
    Marked by a fierce vitality and vivid emotional authenticity, Papicha thrives on the heat of Nedjma’s anger and the glorious bond among the mostly young female performers.
  34. The High Note
    The High Note is pleasant enough but disappointingly timid and thoroughly implausible.
  35. Stage: The Culinary Internship
    Cooking that makes diners uncomfortable hasn’t inspired comparable creativity of cinematic form. “Stage” makes you want to eat, not watch.
  36. I'm No Longer Here
    Frías de la Parra is thoughtful and precise in conveying the cultural identity of these young people, and their spirit pulses through the story.
  37. A Towering Task: The Story of the Peace Corps
    The documentary maintains an uncritical and even hagiographic view of the program’s stated premise, barely interrogating its ethics or on-the-ground efficacy.
  38. Survive the Night
    It’s possible to imagine a tight, suspenseful version of this home invasion chestnut, but Survive the Night is paced to run out the clock.
  39. Villain
    The result is an exceedingly well-made first feature, a simple genre movie elevated by strong visuals, potent performances and a mood that falls somewhere between resignation and guttering hope.
  40. Lucky Grandma
    The director Sasie Sealy’s feature debut has style and keenly observed visual humor. Each scene is paced as perfectly as a punchline.
  41. 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.
  42. Inheritance
    This movie aspires to generate the kind of rich-people-you-love-to-hate juice of cable TV series such as “Billions” and “Succession.” Ultimately, Inheritance doesn’t even get to the level of “Dynasty.”
  43. Joan of Arc
    Here and in the earlier picture it’s perhaps easy to apprehend Dumont’s approach with a “What’s this oddball up to now?” smirk. But if Dumont is joking at all, it’s a form of what used to be called “kidding on the square.”
  44. The Painter and the Thief
    The film resonates most deeply during its raw, vulnerable scenes.
  45. The Lovebirds
    Rae and Nanjiani do their best, but neither the dialogue nor the direction serves their talents adequately.
  46. Military Wives
    The title Military Wives is plain to the point of blandness. This good-hearted comedy-drama, starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan, deserves a little better.
  47. The Trip to Greece
    The “Trip” movies have always been self-aware about their own weightlessness, wringing laughs by needling the men and their vanity. That’s as smart as it is convenient; this time, though, it also feels like a cop-out.
  48. Body Cam
    Despite the ripeness and flammability of its material, the movie feels oddly distant, the screenplay marred by weak scares, graceless plotting and dashed-off characters.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wake in Fright (1971)
    Since Outback is a film I mostly admire, I had better allow that it is not without flaws. But they are flaws—in plotting, in Kotcheff's penchant for using five camera positions at a time where one might do—that may be, not overlooked, but safely admitted in a work that really does move from its strengths rather than its weaknesses.
  50. Scoob!
    The overall vibe is scarily close to what happened when “The Itchy & Scratchy Show” on “The Simpsons” added Poochie, except this time the pandering is not a joke.
  51. The Wolf House
    The film surprises, with incredible force, in every one of its 75 minutes.
  52. Graves Without a Name
    The accretion of detail — narrative, visual and verbal — gives the movie an unusual density. The depiction of human cruelty is appalling, but the way “Graves” makes the viewer feel the necessity of its filmmaker’s calling is profoundly moving.
  53. Castle in the Ground
    We’ve seen it before: Faces, substances and locations may change, but the self-destructive behavior and dreary vibe are pretty much constants.
  54. Blood and Money
    As derivative as its title and as implacable as its declining hero, Blood and Money suffers from near-calamitous narrative lapses.
  55. Alice
    Alice (rightfully) regards the choices of its heroine with respect and empathy. But its picture of sex work as an easy out, devoid of any real danger, feels like a simplistic fantasy.
  56. Fourteen
    What begins as a movie with two protagonists almost imperceptibly evolves into a movie with just one — a touching demonstration of how narratives that seem inevitably intertwined can unravel.
  57. The Wrong Missy
    Though the gags are retrograde groaners, Lapkus embarrasses herself with confidence. Her full-throttle verve transcends the script like a water skier leaping over a Great White.
  58. Capone
    The fantasy sequences are duller than the campy images from the present action.
  59. Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics
    With no real thesis or through-line, the movie winds up being little more than a series of revue-style blackout sketches, lengthy digressions and dead ends.
  60. Mossville: When Great Trees Fall
    The sub-90-minute run time isn’t an emblem of concision; the movie simply ends too soon.
  61. Intrigo: Samaria
    Fox is riveting as a stubborn go-getter who often employs morally questionable methods for the sake of truth and art. But her screen presence isn’t enough to fill out this lean thriller, which hits so many cliché beats along the way.
  62. Intrigo: Dear Agnes
    The film traces the falling out that led to the women’s current iciness. Their own connections, revealed bit by bit, make their plan even more ludicrous.
  63. Working Man
    An unconventional labor story, the movie doesn’t bask in the triumph of rebellion; instead, it’s an introspective portrait of men for whom working is a replacement for living.
  64. Rewind
    For the director, putting family members on camera clearly had a therapeutic value. Witnessing that unburdening feels almost ancillary, even intrusive. But Rewind could only be made by this filmmaker in this way, and that gives it an unsettling fascination.
  65. A Good Woman Is Hard to Find
    While the movie barrels toward a final act that’s more feminist fantasy than credible conclusion, Bolger’s phenomenal performance locks us tightly on Sarah’s side.
  66. Clementine
    Although the camera’s attention to faces and gazes, coupled with an eerie soundtrack, conjures a vague mood of suspense and seduction, the plot fizzles out quickly without any real provocations.
  67. Spaceship Earth
    Like the project itself, Spaceship Earth winds up caught in the gulf between rigor and showmanship. As entertaining as it can be, it is also disappointingly deferential to its subjects — the work of a filmmaker in thrall to characters who have welcomed him inside the bubble.
  68. How to Build a Girl
    Like a stone skipping on water, How to Build a Girl leaps from raunchy to charming, vulgar to sweet, earthy to airy-fairy without allowing any one to settle. Yet it’s so wonderfully funny and deeply embedded in class-consciousness . . . that it’s tonal incontinence is easily forgiven.
  69. Driveways
    Slow and sweet and unassuming, Driveways, the second feature from the Korean-American director Andrew Ahn, tackles major themes in a minor key.
  70. Arkansas
    Less a mob thriller than a ruminative drama about a life built around orders and betrayals, the movie takes an unusual perspective on a familiar genre but is weighed down by its dull, uneven pace.
  71. South Mountain
    Balsam is marvelous throughout, precisely measured in portraying a state often teetering on abjection. Balsam’s Lila can turn from luminescent to hangdog in a flash. The character’s inner worlds register with exceptional vividness.
  72. On a Magical Night
    Despite the fantastic premise and the ostensibly comedic bits of business Honoré strews throughout (pay attention to the changing marquee of the cinema on the street where both Maria’s apartment and the hotel are), the movie’s treatment of its themes still too often lists toward a near-ponderous solemnity.
  73. Becoming
    It hits all the notes of a megastar choosing to share her life with the public: selective biographical moments and star-studded guest appearances, plus a healthy dose of motivational messaging about the virtues of education and the holistic ownership of personal narratives.
  74. Blue Story
    The film has a powerful sense of place, with details that feel authentic and, in some cases, lived through. Yet Rapman’s civic-minded lyrics (“There really ain’t no winners when you’re playing with them guns”) have a habit of reducing the drama to tidy morals.
  75. All Day and a Night
    Choice, for many, is an illusion. This message repeats itself throughout the film, and while at times it feels clumsy, it is never tedious. Sanders especially shines among a formidable cast, and in his portrayal, excellently reflects on the herculean task his character faces.
  76. The Half of It
    With tenderness, humor and beauty, The Half of It comprehends the chasm between wanting and being.
  77. 15 Years
    Leopold and Persi are both compelling performers, but the writer-director Yuval Hadadi renders their characters with little subtlety.
  78. Tesnota (Closeness)
    This movie, which Balagov, a Nalchik native, states in an onscreen text is based on a true story, has a whole lot of “slow” and one very nasty burn.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Murder to Mercy: The Cyntoia Brown Story
    This is a quiet, elegant memoir that humanizes a systemic American challenge — and offers a narrative catharsis only possible with real-life mercy.
  80. Until the Birds Return
    Although each chapter is built around an event — a tryst or a revelation — the film comes to life in quiet, conversational details that capture the textures of people’s lives across different generations and classes.
  81. The Infiltrators
    Jumping between wildly dissimilar styles makes for an occasionally jarring film. Yet despite this awkwardness, the movie works.
  82. System Error
    If the movie’s points can be well taken, its rhetorical strategies are often facile.
  83. A Secret Love
    It is a compliment that A Secret Love, which runs under an hour and a half, could stand to be longer, with an expanded portrait of Terry and Pat’s early life as a couple.
  84. Deerskin
    A demented fetish comedy that escalates to startlingly nonchalant violence, Deerskin (written and directed by Quentin Dupieux) flickers tantalizingly between awful and awesome.
  85. Bull
    While Silverstein’s commitment to authenticity is admirable (she spent years visiting backyard rodeos across Texas, talking with the participants), her narrative is too tamped-down and languorous to catch hold.
  86. The Wretched
    Blessed with shivery setups and freaky effects — here, skin-crawling is literal — The Wretched transforms common familial anxieties into flesh, albeit crepey and creeping.
  87. Our Mothers
    Díaz’s approach is plain and solid, like a well-built wooden chair before varnishing.
  88. Capital in the Twenty-First Century
    The film necessarily lacks the thoroughness and interrogative qualities of Piketty’s written approach. More than the cutaways to Gordon Gekko and the Simpsons, it tends to be the economist’s own observations that satisfy the true wonk itch.
  89. Liberté
    Explicit but in no sense pornographic — it’s rather like antimatter with respect to pornography — Liberté plays an arguably specious moral and intellectual game, poking around the porous areas between squalor and perdition, and ultimately producing a pictorial and aural container of tedium.
  90. The Fate of Lee Khan (1973)
    Once the players are established, the movie falls into a sweet lather, rinse, repeat mode of scenes, alternating character intrigue and fighting.
  91. Extraction
    The fight scenes are plastic and glossy. Hargrave mistakes gore for cool and technical prowess for choreography, deploying overlong one-take shots that look like “Call of Duty” outtakes. He does commit to the location, though, creating a properly global thriller with a fine ensemble cast.
  92. Blood Quantum
    Unfortunately, the film emulates many of its genre brethren’s inability to convert a promising start into a solid second act. . . . though a haunting finale almost redeems the flabby midsection.
  93. Beastie Boys Story
    It’s a jaunt down memory lane and also a moving and generous elegy.
  94. The Plagues of Breslau
    A pulsating rage at the way society neglects women in particular, its weakest members in general, courses through the movie. More than the displays of flayed flesh, it’s what sticks.
  95. Bad Education
    It’s Jackman, whose smile appears increasingly wolfish as the film goes on (and as Frank’s face grows taut with cosmetic surgery), who ultimately owns Bad Education. It’s a plum part, sure, but also a deeply unsympathetic one — a chance for the actor to channel his charisma toward dark, mischievous ends.
  96. Rising High
    Other than its misogyny, the movie, stacked with try-hard hedonism, fails to provoke more than mild annoyance.
  97. Eating Up Easter
    Even with the personal elements, the lean feature also feels like an educational program, to a fault.
  98. Robert the Bruce
    There’s a pleasing humility and introspection to this Bruce — a ruler no longer sure if his patriotic purpose is worth the carnage. His joints may be stiffer than his resolve; but, in placing the warrior temporarily aside, Macfadyen and his director have helped us more clearly to see the man.
  99. Sergio
    This admiring yet sluggish movie mostly drowns its political revelations in sticky sentiment.
  100. To the Stars
    It’s always nice to see characters break free, but you need to care whether they do. One insurmountable problem with this story is that Iris just isn’t interesting enough and certainly not developed enough either as a character or in terms of the performance.
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