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. 2 Autumns, 3 Winters
    The wistful, overarching theme is the passing of time in the lives of young adults, aware of growing older, who seek to ground themselves in relationships and work, but relationships most of all. The movie reminds you with a series of gentle nudges that whether you want it to or not, the future happens.
  2. Heimat is a Space in Time
    Despite some tedious passages, Heimat Is a Space in Time takes an intriguing approach to history that remains refreshingly rooted in primary sources.
  3. The Man in the Basement
    Somewhere in “The Man in the Basement” there is a smart psychodrama sharpened by political urgency, but what we get is a middling think piece that too quickly loses momentum — and peters out by the end.
  4. Graceland
    Even while embracing the breathless beats of the crime thriller, Graceland holds tight to its concern for exploited children.
  5. Whitney
    Whitney is too funereal to be a party, too sad, strange and dismaying to cheer. Yet, in its grim, guilt-inducing way, the film works, even on the occasions when it’s working against itself.
  6. Catch Me If You Can
    Supremely entertaining.
  7. X-Men: Days of Future Past
    As usual, the characters — and the performers playing them — step unto the breach to provide just enough wit and feeling to make Days of Future Past something other than a waste of a reasonable person’s time.
  8. Land of Mine
    Mr. Zandvliet is less interested in the stark battle between good and evil than in the shifting ground of power and responsibility, and the way that every person carries the potential for decency and depravity.
  9. Polite Society
    It’s a delight that borrows from everything — westerns, musicals, heist capers, horror, Jane Austen and James Bond — to build its writer and director, Nida Manzoor, into a promising new thing: a first-time filmmaker impatient to evolve cultural representation from the last few years of self-conscious vitamins into crowd-pleasing candy.
  10. Thoroughbreds
    For all the chatter and intrigue, Mr. Finley never settles on a point or theme.
  11. The Bob's Burgers Movie
    The Bob’s Burgers Movie, directed by Bouchard and Bernard Derriman, is such a breezy, engaging picture that it qualifies as a summer refreshment.
  12. Peggy Sue Got Married
    Most of the time, Peggy Sue Got Married is either underdeveloped or simply not thought through. The way the film gets Peggy Sue into and out of the past is no less lame than the explanation for Bobby Ewing's recent resurrection in "Dallas." So much key information is missing or left uncertified or undramatized that the film appears to have been edited by termites.
  13. Bring Her Back
    I’m beginning to think that the Philippous don’t just want to shatter our nerves: They want to break our hearts.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Black Girl (1966)
    [Mr. Sembène's] sadly pensive story of a young Dakar girl hired as a governess for a white couple's three children appears unevenly weighted in favor of Mr. Sembène's dolorous thesis.
  15. Silent Movie
    A virtually uninterrupted series of smiles.
  16. Hoard
    Though at times squirmingly unpleasant, Hoard is never a drag. The insolence of the filmmaking and the artlessness of the leads energize a plot of stunning recklessness and unexpected humor.
  17. Treeless Mountain
    The problem is that while the children are lovely because they are children, there is nothing inherently interesting about them or their lives.
  18. The LEGO Batman Movie
    As gateway drugs go, The Lego Batman Movie is pretty irresistible. It’s silly without being truly strange or crossing over into absurdity. Along the way it pulls off a nifty balancing act: It gives the PG audience its own Batman movie (it’s a superhero starter kit) and takes swipes at the subgenre, mostly by gently mocking the seriousness that has become a deadening Warner Bros. default.
  19. Kate Plays Christine
    The film’s method of circling around its subject, then closing in at the end, feels coy and withholding, as if Mr. Greene reserved the few juiciest moments for last.
  20. A Prairie Home Companion
    It's not a perfect movie, and it does not aspire to be a great one. It's just wonderful.
  21. Mid-August Lunch
    A slender Chekhovian vignette about the joys and regrets of old age and the pleasures of sociability.
  22. Vision Portraits
    Despite its focus on as fluid and mysterious a subject as art, Vision Portraits addresses blindness in concrete, comprehensible terms.
  23. Afterimage
    This is an angry, vivid, passionate film.
  24. La Cocina
    The film’s epic finale feels stagy — while these real-life frustrations are anything but.
  25. House
    A midnight movie in lysergic spirit and vibe, this was a film made for late-night screening and screaming.
  26. Caterpillar
    Shinobu Terajima, a major figure in Japan who won the best actress award at the 2010 Berlin film festival for Caterpillar, is effective as the wife, though Mr. Wakamatsu is more interested in scoring political and historical points than in shaping her character.
  27. The Image You Missed
    The Image You Missed is less compelling as an act of personal therapy than it is as filmed film criticism, but even if it doesn’t fully cohere, Foreman’s family stake helps keep it original.
  28. Monica
    Both Lysette and Clarkson are naturally magnetic actors, and they don’t waste the attention they’re given on excess sentimentality.
  29. Microbe and Gasoline
    Time and again, Microbe and Gasoline risks cuteness without going overboard. Too easily taken for granted, its accomplishment is its ability to gaze steadily with warmth but minimal sentimentality at the world through unjaded 14-year-old eyes.
  30. Must Read After My Death
    An alternately fascinating and disquietingly intimate portrait of a 1960s American family falling apart.
  31. Baadasssss!
    Mario Van Peebles, of course, inhabits a very different world from that of his father: a world that his father, in some small way, helped to create. It is his awareness of this paradox, of the progressive import of his father's film and of the repressive import of his father's personality, that informs this modest but interesting work.
  32. Trainwreck
    What’s energizing and exciting about Amy, especially when compared with the sexless cuties populating rom-coms, in which female pleasure is often expressed through shopping, is that her erotic appetites aren’t problems that she needs to narratively solve and vanquish.
  33. Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story
    Like flipping through misplaced leaves in a photo book, the documentary maintains a free-flowing tone as it uncovers the work that went into creating some of the indelible scenes in Hollywood history.
  34. Sister Midnight
    In his first feature, Kandhari makes use of morbid humor and expressive imagery, including stop-motion effects. He rarely relies on dialogue and favors a fuzzier plot, which leaves the story with a shapeless and sometimes confusing midsection.
  35. The Jaundiced Eye
    A passionate, angry piece of advocacy, but it is equally, and in consequence, a brave and necessary act of truth-telling.
  36. Secret Ballot
    A very minor contribution to the great corpus of Iranian cinema that has emerged in the last 20 years.
  37. The Believer
    This willfully provocative film portrait offers lots of raging, vulgarity and shock but little insight into the character's psychopathology.
  38. About a Boy
    The Weitz brothers -- notorious as the authors of the "American Pie" series -- handle the sentimentality of the story with a light, sweet touch.
  39. In This World
    If there is heartbreak in this movie, there is also a sense of energy that makes it almost exhilarating.
  40. Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst
    Gathers riveting, rarely seen news clips from the era into a chronology that plays like a suspenseful police drama.
  41. Emily
    Building on a series of oppositions — nature and culture, realism and romance, duty and freedom — O’Connor brings Emily the myth to vibrant life, persuasively suggesting that this ostensibly strange and cloistered genius came into being not despite her contradictions but through them.
  42. This Film Is Not Yet Rated
    Feisty, intellectually engaging.
  43. 10,000 km
    The director’s discipline is remarkable, and also a bit constricting.
  44. Orlando
    This ravishing and witty spectacle invades the mind through eyes that are dazzled without ever being anesthetized
  45. When Lambs Become Lions
    It’s a striking, human portrait of men in trouble, looking for escape and possibly redemption.
  46. A Foreign Affair
    A dandy entertainment which has some shrewd and realistic things to say.
  47. Origin
    It is a great big swing about taking a great big swing, and while the film is more persuasive as a drama than the argument it relays, few American movies this year reach so high so boldly.
  48. Rebuilding
    One could surmise that it takes a village of women to save a stubbornly reticent man. But the lesson of Rebuilding is gentler, broader and timelier: Accepting help is a necessary step toward offering it to others in lasting ways.
  49. Peace Officer
    While Peace Officer could offer more information, what is here is disturbing and sometimes eye-opening.
  50. Point Blank
    I can't recall another thriller that has maintained this kind of velocity without going kablooey and losing its train of thought.
  51. Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words
    Part of what makes In Her Own Words so pleasurable is that it’s so insistently celebratory, despite the traumas and hurts that trickle in. To that upbeat end, it tends to soften and even elide some of the thornier passages in Bergman’s life.
  52. Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami
    The relief of Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami is that it seeks to square the person with the provocateuse. The documentary is a feat of portraiture and a restoration of humanity. It’s got the uncanny, the sublime, and, in many spots, a combination of both.
  53. Billy the Kid
    Presenting neither an argument for medication nor its rejection, Billy the Kid is a deceptively simple portrait of a shockingly self-aware and articulate young man.
  54. Jar City
    Jar City is chilly and cerebral but also morbidly and powerfully alive to grossness and physicality.
  55. Plot for Peace
    A fascinating account of off-the-books diplomacy in the 1980s, “Plot for Peace” is that rare documentary that both augments the historical record and is paced like a thriller.
  56. Pearl Jam: Let's Play Two
    It shares a side of Mr. Vedder his fans will enjoy: the baseball aficionado who fills out a scorecard and treats Wrigley sod as holy ground.
  57. The Russian Five
    Riehl gears his documentary more toward avid fans than casual viewers, though he nods to the human side of story.
  58. Whisper of the Heart
    Mr. Miyazaki wrote the screenplay for a love story about a shy girl and an aspiring violin maker (and a talking cat), but the result looks like a lot of non-Ghibli anime.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blast of Silence
    Molly McCarthy, however, is deceptively unaffected as the heroine, and her spirited attack on her two big scenes has the quality of the film as a whole—over-eager, unsuccessful, but worth watching.
  60. Coexistence, My Ass!
    The film leaves the impression that, sadly, comedy may be one of the only paths to peace left in the region.
  61. A House of Dynamite
    Bigelow’s work here is superb. She puts the many moving parts into coordinated place and keeps them coherently spinning even as she switches out some elements and introduces others; she doesn’t drop a single plate. The script occasionally gets in her way, which sometimes happens in her work.
  62. Okja
    The picture, which never stops moving, is dense with information and feeling. Barbs of satire pop up and are washed away on streams of strong emotion. It’s all marvelously preposterous and yet, at the same time, something important is at stake.
  63. National Bird
    [An] elegantly unsettling documentary.
  64. The Great Flood
    A striking experiment in music and moviemaking.
  65. Happyend
    Sora deftly calibrates the angst of his young characters — and the collective edginess of a nation, while nodding to the joys of the teen genre.
  66. Omar
    Mr. Abu-Assad shows a world from which all trust has vanished, where every relationship carries the possibility — perhaps the inevitability — of betrayal and where every form of honor is corroded by lies.
  67. Maurice
    Mr. Ivory and Ismail Merchant have long since learned to breathe life into their material without excessive reverence, in a manner that is as decorous as it is dramatic. As might be expected, the costumes, settings and cinematography are once again ravishing.
  68. Solo
    Simon’s drag spectacles may be intentionally fierce and operatic, but there’s something refreshing about this drama’s intimate scale and lack of interest in sweeping tragedies, especially in the context of queer cinema.
  69. Manhunter
    What matters in movies like this is that, with only hours, then minutes, then seconds to go as the murderer waves a knife in the vicinity of the blind woman's throat, the good guys are closing in, and Mr. Mann builds to his climax with considerable force.
  70. Full River Red
    At times, particularly in its overwrought closing act, the film feels as if it’s going to collapse under the weight of its relentless, convoluted twists. But the lighthearted tone poking through keeps it afloat, and suspends the viewer in mostly carefree entertainment for its two-and-a-half-hour running time.
  71. Titane
    For all its reckless style and velocity, Titane doesn’t seem to know where it wants to go.
  72. Scheherazade Tell Me a Story
    Lively, swift, vibrantly colorful and for the most part wonderfully acted, the film is slyly aware of the daytime talk show as a vehicle for women's concerns.
  73. Joy
    Matching content with form, the movie is tight and merciless, even if parts play like a tract.
  74. Fail-Safe
    It packs a melodramatic wallop that will rattle a lot of chattering teeth.
  75. Ivanhoe
    Production of this picture in England endowed it with a rich, distinctive air. It is a grand picture, told in what Sir Walter himself called his "big bow-wow style."
  76. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
    The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is comparatively mild Billy Wilder and rather daring Sherlock Holmes, not a perfect mix, perhaps, but a fond and entertaining one.
  77. Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII
    It is a glimpse into a vanished era, of self-indulgence mixed with wide-eyed experimentation, to watch ''A Saucerful of Secrets'' - with the band banging wildly at its instruments above Nick Mason's drumbeat - as musicians and director take everything very, very seriously. [13 May 1984, p.32]
    • The New York Times
  78. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
    Sleek and bloated, specific and generic, “Rogue Nation” is pretty much like most of the “Impossible” movies in that it’s an immense machine that Mr. McQuarrie, after tinkering and oiling, has cranked up again and set humming with twists and turns, global trotting and gadgets, a crack supporting cast and a hard-working star.
  79. The Purple Rose of Cairo
    I'll go out on a limb: I can't believe the year will bring forth anything to equal The Purple Rose of Cairo. At 84 minutes, it's short but nearly every one of those minutes is blissful.
  80. In the Last Days of the City
    Whether In the Last Days of the City ultimately comes together as a feature is open to debate, but this is a film of beauty and skill.
  81. Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara
    One gets the sense that the director, in not wanting to rob the adult Edgardo (Leonardo Maltese) of his agency, even if it was woefully compromised, resorts to a horror-inflected score and overdramatic scenes of parental anguish to make clear the devastating consequences of a child separated from his family. The heightened drama seems hardly necessary.
  82. Frozen
    Frozen, for all its innovations, is not fundamentally revolutionary. Its animated characters are the same familiar, blank-faced, big-eyed storybook figures. But they are a little more psychologically complex than their Disney forerunners.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    They Died with Their Boots On
    Dismiss factual inaccuracies liberally sprinkled throughout the film's more than two-hour length and you have an adventure tale of frontier days which for sheer scope, if not dramatic impact, it would be hard to equal.
  84. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
    The feeble attempts that Mr. Aldrich has made to suggest the irony of two once idolized and wealthy females living in such depravity and the pathos of their deep-seated envy having brought them to this, wash out very quickly under the flood of sheer grotesquerie. There is nothing particularly moving or significant about these two.
  85. Hatching
    A sometimes uneasy merger of monster movie and psychological horror — with a dollop of social-media satire — this inventive first feature mines tween confusion (there are nods to both bulimia and menstruation) for grotesque fun.
  86. Solas
    Galiana's quietly monumental performance is one for the ages.
  87. Shot in the Heart
    The director, Agnieszka Holland, and the screenwriter, Frank Pugliese, have created a scenario that unflinchingly captures the feverish and desperate intensity of Mikal's quest.
  88. On the Run
    There are some scenes that display impressive technical cunning, and others that show an astute regard for the emotional capacities of his able cast, but On the Run amounts to a sullen display of skill in a dubious cause.
  89. S21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine
    Mr. Rithy Panh makes telling use of a survivor whose ability to communicate lends itself to the subject. The tragedy is that Mr. Vann Nath's powers are used to illuminate these horrors.
  90. Bitter Money
    It’s not clear that the director quite found what he was looking for.
  91. Hala
    If Baig’s writing is at times thin and excessively pointed — like a classroom discussion about what it means to live an authentic life — her grasp of mood is spot on.
  92. The Longest Day
    It is hard to think of a picture, aimed and constructed as this one was, doing any more or any better or leaving one feeling any more exposed to the horror of war than this one does.
  93. Diamantino
    There are moments in which this film, written and directed by Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt, feels like an early Adam Sandler comedy remixed by Pier Paolo Pasolini.
  94. True History of the Kelly Gang
    Grant and Kurzel’s conceptions of the characters are so one-dimensional they seem to defeat the movie’s talented cast.
  95. Life, Animated
    Belaboring the cartoon connection, the director leaves the family struggles that enrich Mr. Suskind’s 2014 book of the same title stubbornly veiled.
  96. Waitress
    Part feminist fable, part romantic fairy tale, it is by turns tart and sweet, charming and tough, rather like its heroine and like Keri Russell, the plucky, pretty, nimble actress who plays her.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
    In its forthright dealing with the play, this becomes one of the most scathingly honest American films ever made.
  98. Auction
    Bonitzer evinces an appreciable warmth toward his creations that you feel even from the analytic distance he establishes.
  99. Prodigal Sons
    A tale of two siblings -- one basking in memories, the other fleeing them -- Prodigal Sons grapples with identity through the prism of sibling rivalry. In the end its conclusions have little to do with gender and everything to do with acceptance.
  100. The Skeleton Twins
    The Skeleton Twins is a well-written and acted movie about contemporary life that doesn’t strain for melodrama and is largely devoid of weepy soap opera theatrics. A small, precise, character-driven vignette, it has no pretensions to make any kind of grand statement about The Way We Live Now.
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