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. 1BR
    Drawing on a fascination with cults and utopian communities, the director and co-writer, David Marmor, has created a mildly entertaining survival story whose depiction of psychological indoctrination far outstrips its generic dips into torture.
  2. 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.
  3. Circus of Books
    The remembrances are the movie’s heart — not a family secret, but a community’s pride.
  4. The Willoughbys
    Though it tends to feel disjointed as a whole, The Willoughbys thrives when it embraces its grim plot and lets mischief reign.
  5. Why Don't You Just Die!
    Sokolov’s debut feature is a clever, bloody as hell, often hilarious virtuoso exercise in excruciating harm-doing among mendacious people.
  6. The Quarry
    The film plays as if it’s been smothered under a pile of rocks.
  7. Abe
    This is a maudlin and predictable film, with oversimplified, kid-friendly takes on complex political issues. It’s also a surprisingly joyless production, lacking the stylistic and emotional flair to deliver even on the cheesy, feel-good promise of the setup.
  8. Endings, Beginnings
    The writing might be a tangle of limp clichés, but the actors — especially Woodley and the terrific Wendie Malick as Daphne’s mother — sweat to sell every line.
  9. Bad Therapy
    Bad Therapy is the cinematic equivalent of lukewarm water.
  10. Selah and The Spades
    Selah and the Spades shimmers with youthful promise, both in front of the camera and behind it.
  11. A White, White Day
    The result is an emotionally wringing film, equally effective in the narrative and tone-poem departments.
  12. Children of Paradise (1945)
    M. Carne has created a frequently captivating film which has moments of great beauty in it and some performances of exquisite note.
  13. Butt Boy
    Maybe it’s the hell we’re all living through right now, but Tyler Cornack’s orificial fantasy struck me as a hilariously bawdy, intermittently inspired act of vivacious vulgarity.
  14. Trolls World Tour
    While the genre-bridging premise affords the film more variety and verve than its sugary predecessor, the movie, directed by Walt Dohrn, still gives you the sensation of being barricaded in a karaoke lounge where all the attendees have snorted Sweet Tarts.
  15. LA Originals
    Way too much of LA Originals has that overly chummy vibe, but the shambling, yearbook quality of the film is also its reason for being.
  16. The Main Event
    The Main Event is a light comedy that takes the joys of a real WWE match — the escapism, the performance — and gives them a kid-centric spin. Karas balances the movie’s clowning with a human story, while showing empathy for childhood growing pains.
  17. Love Wedding Repeat
    Craig’s comic delivery belabors gags that should run light on their feet. Rather than serving up a variety of zingers, the movie settles for one joke per character, repeated endlessly. . . . Instead, the best bits of comedy come from physical slapstick.
  18. Tigertail
    Spanning more than half a century, Tigertail goes back and forth in time, tracing the events that allowed Pin-Jui to achieve his American dream yet made him so aloof to his loved ones. It does this to mixed results.
  19. Same Boat
    While Glanz is the only cast member who gets within swinging distance of charisma, Roberti’s chops as a romantic lead are lacking.
  20. Stray Dolls
    Despite its sense of dead-end desperation, Stray Dolls is made worthwhile by the richness of Shane Sigler’s nighttime cinematography and the consistent empathy of its tone. Sinha, herself a first-generation immigrant, isn’t about to judge anyone for reaching.
  21. The Uprising
    Turning the Arab Spring into an invented revolution even as it presents specific incidents from an actual one, The Uprising demands an active viewer. Throughout, there are multiple things to consider.
  22. Sea Fever
    It’s all very resonant stuff, performed by an earnest and committed cast. But Sea Fever speeds through these turns of plot as if to check them off a list, with characters dropping dead before they’ve had a chance to earn our sympathy.
  23. Lazy Susan
    The proceedings, which also include Susan falling hard for a smarmy “Jumpoline” proprietor played by Jim Rash, are professionally executed. Yet the movie’s pace seems glacial. It’s as if the filmmakers tossed a bunch of fish into a barrel and didn’t bother to shoot them.
  24. Almost Love
    The aimless characters in Almost Love like to talk through their feelings, their aspirations, their disappointments, but there is little substance in their epiphanies, and the comedy is too low key to make up for its absence.
  25. Clover
    It’s chock-full of gore and expletive-laden banter, but lacks the key ingredients to make it worthy of its influences: original ideas and a strong script.
  26. Slay the Dragon
    Slay the Dragon is not short on outrage, and just because some of this material is not new doesn’t mean it’s not worth repeating.
  27. Coffee & Kareem
    The buddy cop movie genre is by all means worth interrogating as conversations around institutional racism and police brutality continue. But this film’s jabs are dull and sophomoric.
  28. The Other Lamb
    Existing outside of time and place, The Other Lamb is a gorgeous revenge fable with an excess of atmosphere and zero subtlety — a mallet wrapped in gauze and girlish laughter.
  29. Uncorked
    While the characters interact against the backdrop of varying degrees of racism and socioeconomic stressors, they are not defined by them. In other words, they are ordinary but no less noteworthy.
  30. Banana Split
    Is Banana Split an empty indulgence or a comfortingly familiar confection? Probably both.
  31. Tape
    Tape, in short, is a terrible movie about appalling behavior.
  32. Resistance
    Resistance feels disjointed and dated.
  33. The Platform
    A gnarly mash-up of midnight movie and social commentary, the picture is overly overt but undeniably effective, delivering genre jolts and broad messaging in equal measure.
  34. Vivarium
    There’s a consistent inventiveness — and grim humor — to this treatment of a seemingly well-worn theme.
  35. The Occupant
    The Occupant gets eyebrow-raisingly nasty without ever getting interesting.
  36. Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution
    Newnham and LeBrecht deftly juggle a large cast of characters past and present, accomplishing the not-so-easy task of making all the personalities distinct, and a build a fair amount of suspense in their nearly day-by-day account of the sit-in.
  37. Blow the Man Down
    While the sisterhood in Easter Cove is indeed powerful, the secrets that bind its members prove to be fairly simple, and the result is intriguing enough to make you wonder what these writer-directors might accomplish if they applied their vision to a more expansive canvas.
  38. Dosed
    The shot-calling undermines the movie’s pro-psychedelics argument, because there is no way to control for the psychosomatic effects of starring in a documentary. Nor does Dosed do much to counter or even address objections to mushrooms or iboga as treatments, although it does include firm warnings about the need for supervision.
  39. Lost Transmissions
    The movie’s strongest feature is its depiction of a male-female friendship that matter-of-factly abjures any romantic component. Temple and Pegg, when their characters aren’t falling apart (and even sometimes when they are), convey intelligence and mutual regard with refreshing straightforwardness.
  40. Justine
    The movie is a tightly observed character study that thins out during more expositional moments, but it’s still a thoughtful tale of loneliness and its remedies.
  41. Hooking Up
    With his first feature, the director and co-writer Nico Raineau flips gender stereotypes, giving Darla more sexually aggressive traits and Bailey more timid ones. But even that feels trite.
  42. Human Capital
    The Italian movie, which Paolo Virzì directed, had a marrow-deep instinct for class. There were higher costs. The people in it were stranger, with sharper angles; they were alive. This new movie, which Oren Moverman wrote, Marc Meyers directed and has parts for Liev Schreiber and Marisa Tomei, is a character study that hasn’t done its homework.
  43. Never Rarely Sometimes Always
    In “Never Rarely,” the hurdles to an abortion are as legion as they are maddening and pedestrian, a blunt political truism that Hittman brilliantly connects to women’s fight for emancipation.
  44. Inside the Rain
    Based on Fisher’s own life experiences, Inside the Rain switches erratically between comedy and drama while juggling many half-realized plot threads. But the movie’s strange, inconsistent rhythm ultimately works as a reflection of Ben’s manic and depressive states.
  45. The Dog Doc
    For audiences who don’t mind being jealous of sick dogs, The Dog Doc is a thought-provoking look at what is missing from modern medicine — for animals and for people.
  46. Lost Girls
    There are different ways to describe Garbus’s telling of this mystery: it’s serious, respectful, gravely melancholic. Yet anger best describes the movie’s atmosphere, its overall mood and its authorial tone.
  47. Stargirl
    Stargirl was published twenty years ago, and its age occasionally shows in this adaptation; some of the story beats and character qualities (particularly those of the rather precious title character) have congealed into cliché. But Hart (who wrote the screenplay with Kristin Hahn and Jordan Horowitz) is such an enchanting filmmaker, her storytelling style so warm and welcoming, that those concerns fade.
  48. Big Time Adolescence
    Despite some moments of tenderness and easy chemistry between Zeke and Mo, “Big Time Adolescence” doesn’t have enough heart or humor to save it from becoming just another movie about white dudes bro-ing out.
  49. 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.
  50. The Roads Not Taken
    Potter delivers her vision here in a form that’s perhaps too raw, too undistilled. There’s precious little lightness negotiating with the dark. Her lack of compromise is, as always, admirable — as is her way with actors.
  51. Human Nature
    Every “Oh wow” in Human Nature is matched by an “Oh no” somewhere down the line. Together, these two competing emotions — excitement and unease — make for one pretty fascinating documentary.
  52. The Hunt
    Rage — shared by characters on both sides, even as they direct it at each other — is what “The Hunt” is all about. Anger is the source of its humor and its horror, both of which are fairly effective. The fights and shootouts are brisk and brutal. The dialogue pops with inventive profanity and familiar varieties of name-calling and woke-speak.
  53. Bloodshot
    Bloodshot runs out of meta tricks before it is over, and David S.F. Wilson, who borrows his visual vocabulary from Tony Scott and Michael Bay, delivers action sequences with such choppy continuity that viewers may be as confused as Ray. He deserves bonus points, however, for embracing silliness.
  54. Spenser Confidential
    The prospect of spending more time with this crew is not a bad one.
  55. Hope Gap
    While you’ve seen this portrait before, and better, Nighy and Bening are so in tune with their characters that such rote renderings are easily forgiven.
  56. Extra Ordinary
    While Extra Ordinary overextends its ghosts-are-blasé conceit, Higgins and Ward are appealing leads, and the movie has plenty of charming moments, such as Rose watching an episode of her dad for guidance.
  57. Run This Town
    The movie never quite reconciles its assorted perspectives into a coherent point of view.
  58. Only
    The writer-director Takashi Doscher forgoes apocalyptic spectacle to focus on the pandemic’s effects on Will and Eva’s romance. Too bad. Most of the scenes could have been lifted from a generic relationship drama, and it is only the couple’s conversation, not their visually desaturated world, that distinguishes them.
  59. The Wild Goose Lake
    The movie exhilarates.
  60. Swallow
    Given how nauseating it is to watch Hunter perform increasingly perilous acts of self-harm in her prison of a mansion, neither the payoff nor the psychology behind her actions makes Swallow an illuminating enough addition to the woman-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown genre.
  61. Go Back to China
    The biggest trouble here is in the writing. By the time the film gets around to showing what a character has felt, they have already told the audience twice — and most likely another character has explained as well, just in case anyone missed the memo.
  62. The Burnt Orange Heresy
    There’s some grim stuff here, but very little of Willeford’s mordant humor. A small and potent quantity of this quality is delivered by the larger-than-life rock star Mick Jagger in the role of Cassidy. Jagger shows a refreshing lack of conventional vanity by allowing both Bang and Debicki to tower over him.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Booksellers
    Charming.
  64. Bacurau
    In this sensational genre whatsit, a town finds itself fighting for its very existence. (Good thing Sônia Braga lives there.)
  65. Onward
    The film is a brightly rendered, sentimental ode to adolescence that hits all the right emotional buttons, even as it risks being forgotten itself.
  66. The Banker
    For a film about the struggles of a black man in America, The Banker spends an awful lot of time on a false white front.
  67. Sorry We Missed You
    There’s no way for Loach to have gone smaller. When the movie’s over, you have, indeed, witnessed a tragedy, just not the usual kind. Nobody dies. No one goes to prison (there is one police-station visit unlike any I’ve seen). But life: that’s the tragedy, what it takes to get by, what it takes be just a little bit happy — for one lousy meal.
  68. The Way Back
    The movie withholds a crucial bit of back story in early scenes only to drop it like an anvil later on. Since the revelation is known to the characters the whole time, the decision to deploy it as a surprise is cheap and shameless — a blatant foul in a movie otherwise filled with smoothly executed plays.
  69. First Cow
    First Cow is fundamentally a western: It takes up questions of civilization, solidarity and barbarism on the American frontier. And like many great westerns it critiques some of the genre’s foundational myths with bracing, beautiful rigor, including the myth of heroic individualism.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    All the Bright Places
    Theodore’s story line is not always handled with the depth it should receive. It’s an unfortunate flaw in a film that impressively balances moments of joy with equally resonating despair.
  71. Wendy
    Wendy has her moments, certainly, but she remains frustratingly undeveloped and uninvolving, despite the clamor and the score’s triumphalism.
  72. Burden
    Though the themes of Burden feel uncomfortably current, their execution is leaden and dismayingly artless.
  73. Saint Frances
    With a warm heart and a nonjudgmental mind, Saint Frances weaves abortion, same-sex parenting and postpartum depression into a narrative bursting with positivity and acceptance.
  74. Greed
    Coogan brings his usual comic reliability to his characterization, as does Isla Fisher as the rich man’s predictably estranged wife, and they wring laughs from the material.
  75. Blood on Her Name
    Oppressively dark and unrelentingly intense, Blood on Her Name packs down-and-dirty performances, and a few surprises, into a tight 85 minutes.
  76. Guns Akimbo
    A satire of overamped gamer culture that is itself too overamped to be much fun, Guns Akimbo takes a while before it stops showing off its virtuosity — shots that turn cartwheels, frantic cutting, an onslaught of graphics — and finds a groove.
  77. Straight Up
    You never quite buy Todd and Rory as flesh-and-blood people who could have conversations that don’t sound rehearsed.
  78. The Jesus Rolls
    The movie doesn’t always work, but it’s never boring.
  79. The Invisible Man
    Moss’s full-bore performance — anchored by her extraordinarily supple face — gives the movie its emotional stakes.
  80. The Whistlers
    It is Porumboiu’s most elaborate feature and in some ways his least ambitious. Like a meringue or like a whistle, its substance is mostly air.
  81. Disappearance at Clifton Hill
    For patient or forgiving fans of idiosyncratic thrillers, “Disappearance” may deliver satisfactory spills and chills.
  82. My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising
    This is canny, passionate filmmaking, a reminder of the power of two-dimensional animation. First, it humanizes, then it astounds.
  83. Emma.
    Austen’s story and words, it turns out, prove unsurprisingly durable and impervious to decorative tweaking. And so, after a while, the Anderson-ish tics become less noticeable, and both the emotions and overall movie more persuasive.
  84. Young Ahmed
    Young Ahmed is suspenseful and economical, with a clear sense of what’s at stake, but something crucial — perhaps a deeper insight into the character or the contradictions that ensnare him — is missing.
  85. Vitalina Varela
    Vitalina Varela is socially conscious, but dreamlike, elegiac. And an inquiry, too, into the abilities and deficiencies of film as a medium to illuminate human consciousness and experience. It’s essential cinema.
  86. Viral: Antisemitism in Four Mutations
    The trouble with this skimmed approach is that by sidelining historical analysis, the film denies its audience the best defense against distortion, a rational necessity when interpreting a conversation that often seems to happen in code.
  87. Goldie
    Woods, remarkably comfortable in her first film role, gives Goldie a steel spine and a feisty resourcefulness, her moments of vulnerability rare, but essential.
  88. Cabaret Maxime
    Despite the classic David-versus-Goliath narrative, the story is never as mesmerizing as the grotesquely glam stage numbers and Imperioli’s illuminated face watching them, glowing with pride.
  89. Jinpa
    As amusing as these interludes are, they read as attempts to force an exaggerated sense of mystery into an ultimately simple and moralistic tale about the futility of vengeance.
  90. Balloon
    There is nothing objectionable about Michael Bully Herbig’s glossy political thriller, Balloon, but there’s nothing particularly exciting about it, either.
  91. Premature
    Every moment rings true, the vividly textured locations and knockabout relationships more visited than created.
  92. The Call of the Wild
    This “Call of the Wild,” however defanged and updated, doesn’t lack for exciting canine brawls or tense rescues from frozen waters. It also doesn’t lack for an almost soothing corniness.
  93. Ride Your Wave
    The director, Masaaki Yuasa, is adept at stories and visuals where water is a major character.
  94. Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band
    You can’t beat the access or the clips, although the absence of Hudson (whom Roher apparently filmed) from the present-day interviews is peculiar. His voice might have provided a valuable counterpoint to Robertson’s recollections.
  95. 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.
  96. Corpus Christi
    The idea that a charlatan might offer more solace than a real priest is a trite concept, but it’s one that Corpus Christi portrays with conviction. The movie rests on the shoulders of Bielenia — or rather, in his eyes, which photograph as a chilling gray.
  97. Blumhouse's Fantasy Island
    This is all interesting from a pro-am cinema semiotics perspective, but none of it is in the least bit scary. This, really, is what happens when you take all the wrong lessons out of film school.
  98. Downhill
    There are some jokey parts, some weepy bits, a sexy moment and a few fine displays of anger from Louis-Dreyfus, but they’re all just thrown together like salted nuts and cheap candies in a snack mix.
  99. The Photograph
    The sparks fly fast and persuasively — Rae and Stanfield make sense right away — and you’re soon cozying up with the couple while they share stories and increasingly heated looks in a dimly lit restaurant. The writer-director Stella Meghie understands that you want to see these two beautiful people get together, and she smoothly delivers on your own romantic (and romance genre) longings.
  100. The Last Thing He Wanted
    The big problem with the movie isn’t the muddle, but the strain.
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