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. Buffaloed
    Simultaneously rowdy and slick, Buffaloed is exuberantly paced and entirely dependent on Deutch’s moxie and pell-mell performance.
  2. Ordinary Love
    It almost works, but as persuasive as the performers can be, Tom and Joan seem less real the more time you spend with them.
  3. Come As You Are
    It softens the cruder edges of the original, but the candor with which Erik Linthorst’s script regards the characters’ sexual desires — coupled with the winning performances of the actors — leavens any sentimentalism.
  4. VFW
    Essentially a geezers-fight-back siege movie (Tom Williamson plays the sole young veteran), VFW is riotously scuzzy and warmly partial to its rusty heroes.
  5. You Go to My Head
    Until its surprisingly effective ending, You Go To My Head keeps its drama under the skin. Like an animal in captivity, Bafort, who is also a model, slinks and lounges with long-limbed grace; but it’s Cvetkovic who holds the movie steady, giving Jake a secretive, worn gentleness that’s tinged with tragedy.
  6. Olympic Dreams
    Compared to the drama of the competition, the story and its characters always feel slight, an excuse to hang out among Olympians rather than a movie that builds upon (or for that matter critiques) its surroundings.
  7. The Times of Bill Cunningham
    This talking-head footage is a promising start that ultimately leads to a less than illuminating documentary.
  8. A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon
    “Farmageddon” features plenty of inspired, boomeranging slapstick, executed with clockwork precision. It’s a very funny movie — and an endlessly, refreshingly cheerful one, which is just as rare.
  9. Sonic the Hedgehog
    Other than product placement, the movie’s primary goal seems to be delivering 1990s nostalgia.
  10. I Was at Home, But
    In I Was at Home, but…, the German director Angela Schanelec seems to have taken her ideas and stashed them deep in a private vault. Every so often, though, she cracks open this movie — with a line, an image, a snatch of a song — offering you fugitive glimpses of an intensely personal world.
  11. Untouchable
    A respectable and all-too-real introduction to a chilling chapter of a Hollywood horror story.
  12. To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You
    To the director Michael Fimognari’s credit, "P.S. I Still Love You” doesn’t condescend to Lara Jean’s dilemma even as her choices deserve popcorn pelted at the screen. Yet, he’s content with a product that seems beamed in from a staticky old channel.
  13. The Cordillera of Dreams
    The Cordillera of Dreams is a beautiful film about nightmares that have yet to end.
  14. Cane River
    The movie itself, which was lost until a few years ago, is relaxed, reflective and sweet, a romance shadowed by the complexities of history, race and politics that manages to be both modest and ambitious.
  15. Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)
    Like other big-studio exercises in pseudo-subversion (very much including “Deadpool”), Birds of Prey is happy to play at provocation with swear words and violence while carefully declining to provoke anything like a thought.
  16. Waiting for Anya
    Waiting for Anya is not so sentimental that it imagines every character can escape death. But it has little use for complexity.
  17. Come to Daddy
    Absurd yet bold, lurid yet a tiny bit touching, Come to Daddy drags poor Norval from hopefulness to horror to a wickedly literal form of closure. More than a few audience members might even be happy to accompany him.
  18. And Then We Danced
    The cast perform with conviction, and the whole movie is attractively, solidly put together. But its dramatic components, fraught as they are, are tepidly delivered.
  19. Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made
    There isn’t enough in the way of good jokes or clever references to investigators of yore to make the film appealing, and the flatness of Timmy’s delivery, which is supposed to scan as deadpan, doesn’t contain enough nuances to make much of the humor land.
  20. The Lodge
    Despite its visual flair and unrelentingly taut atmosphere, The Lodge is more successful in sustaining unease — like the eerie, unexplained shots of a spooky dollhouse — than in building a convincing narrative
  21. Horse Girl
    Horse Girl delves into a troubled mind only to get lost among its oddities, forgetting the sensitivity that drew it there in the first place.
  22. Miss Americana
    Wilson has captured Swift at a convincing turning point, ready, perhaps, to say a lot more.
  23. Gretel & Hansel
    Essentially the story of a young woman coming into her power, Gretel & Hansel is quietly sinister, yet too underdeveloped to truly scare. Together, Jeremy Reed’s production design and Galo Olivares’s photography weave a chilly spell that’s regrettably undermined by the opacity of the storytelling.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words
    If “Created Equal” is trying to promote the conservative cause, it does so gently, and blandly.
  25. Incitement
    Potently, Incitement depicts Amir as just one member of a self-reinforcing fringe.
  26. The Rhythm Section
    The talented Morano, whose work on the TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale” shows a knack for shuddery grim realism, sometimes seems to want to subvert the espionage-action genre by bludgeoning the pleasure out of it.
  27. The Assistant
    Unfolding over one acutely distressing workday, The Assistant is less a #MeToo story than a painstaking examination of the way individual slights can coalesce into a suffocating miasma of harassment.
  28. José
    The film delicately depicts the hardship of being gay in a Catholic culture and the pressure for machismo in a crime-ridden country.
  29. The Traitor
    Bellocchio’s approach to the story is at once coolly objective — the movie is part biopic, part courtroom procedural — and almost feverishly intense. He has a historian’s analytical detachment, a novelist’s compassion for his characters and a citizen’s outrage at the cruelty and corruption that have festered in his country for so long.
  30. Beanpole
    This is only the second feature from the sensationally talented Russian director Kantemir Balagov (who was born in 1991), and it’s a gut punch. It’s also a brilliantly told, deeply moving story about love — in all its manifestations, perversity and obstinacy.
  31. Panga
    Tiwari is better at probing the emotions under the drama than building a nail-biting, rah-rah finish, though she tries.
  32. I Wish I Knew
    In effect, with I Wish I Knew, Jia is building not just a portrait of a city, but of a fragmented people — one story and memory at a time. He is finding meaning in collective remembrance and revealing a world, to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin, “under the gaze of the melancholy man.”
  33. John Henry
    This first feature from Will Forbes is a big slice of ham.
  34. The Turning
    It’s the movie’s open-endedness and literary vestiges that sit uneasily with its repetitive goosings, which manifest in exceedingly familiar ways.
  35. Quezon's Game
    Unfortunately, in Matthew Rosen’s fictionalized take, Quezon’s Game, this story of intrigue turns stiff and sentimental.
  36. Zombi Child
    The movie’s inconclusiveness is the source of its appeal; Zombi Child is fueled by insinuation and fascination.
  37. The Last Full Measure
    The movie is written and directed, with undeniable sincerity, by Todd Robinson. While its story mechanics are creaky, the valor of Pitsenbarger is evoked cogently, in well-executed battle sequences
  38. Color Out of Space
    Using shape-shifting as a messy metaphor for sickness and childhood trauma, Stanley and Cage leap so far over the psychological top that they never come back to earth. By the end, my own eyeballs hadn’t changed color, but they must have looked like pinwheels.
  39. The Gentlemen
    The point is cleverness and looking cool, though, mostly the movie is about Ritchie’s own conspicuous pleasure directing famous actors having a lark, trading insults, making mischief. There’s not much else, which depending on your mood and the laxity of your ethical qualms, might be enough.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    A Fall from Grace
    Ultimately, nothing is much of a surprise in a story that fails to untether itself from Perry’s longest lasting trope: the sad black woman.
  41. Weathering with You
    The pace is sometimes so rapid that you scarcely have time to look, much less admire the translucent sheen of a plastic garbage bag or the meticulous lettering on a beer can (“Since 1978”). That’s to Shinkai’s purpose. As streets, homes, rooms and faces hurtle by, a textured world emerges detail by detail, one that looks like life yet is also expressionistic.
  42. Citizen K
    Although the film has long, engaging stretches, there is something slightly unsatisfying about the whole.
  43. VHYes
    Even when the ghost of a point materializes — that recording ephemera can be a self-soothing behavior — VHYes is too unsophisticated to develop it.
  44. Intrigo: Death of an Author
    The movie’s structural dynamics make it play like a cross between “Nocturnal Animals” and “Sleuth.” But the stagings are stilted; the relations between the conflicted characters never catch fire.
  45. Troop Zero
    What Troop Zero lacks in complexity, it makes up for in heart.
  46. Dolittle
    The charm of this fantasy has always been dubious and will presumably fade as the natural world continues to disappear and more and more species become extinct.
  47. Bad Boys for Life
    Lawrence’s riffs almost always land. They especially need to in the final quarter, when the movie sets the bar high for this year’s Dopiest Movie Plot Twist competition.
  48. System K
    Barret makes the viewer understand, implicitly at least, the desperation of these creators, even as views of their work, and the simmering electronic Afro-funk of the soundtrack, make a case for the indomitability of their creative impulse.
  49. The Woman Who Loves Giraffes
    Blessed with a trove of 16-millimeter film footage captured during this yearlong adventure, the director, Alison Reid, uses it as the foundation for a far-ranging story of scientific discovery, sexual discrimination and environmental alarm.
  50. Like a Boss
    Actors make lousy choices all the time and if Like a Boss makes money no one will care that it’s formulaic, unfunny, choppy, insults women and seems to be missing much of its middle.
  51. The Sonata
    Bedazzled or otherwise, clichés are still clichés, and this debut feature from Andrew Desmond is strewn with them.
  52. Three Christs
    Whether it is the star power of the cast or the seductiveness of the period recreation, Three Christs has an appealing professionalism — an odd fit for a film about challenging a profession.
  53. Inherit the Viper
    As the movie heads for its quietly ghastly denouement, its plot mechanism gets a little wobbly, which is ultimately forgivable. It’s a genuinely tough picture, but it also has a real undercurrent of compassion.
  54. Afterward
    The resulting emotions are complex, and Bloch, here directing her first feature, can be excused for allowing a few of the scenes to stray. But by the end of the documentary, she and many of her subjects posit that it’s possible to learn from history and to change, and to trust each other a little more.
  55. Underwater
    It’s a challenge to keep action coherent and build suspense in the submerged environment simulated in “Underwater,” but Eubank doesn’t meet it, instead falling back on stale shocks that are not credibly buttressed by swelling bass effects on the soundtrack.
  56. The Grudge
    The remake remains cursed by a fatally hokey concept.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ghost Stories
    Ghost Stories is the third anthology film by this foursome of Indian filmmakers. As with any samplers, however, there are some tastes better left forgotten and others one hopes will be expanded into fuller, even more terrifying forms.
  58. Advocate
    Provocative as the film is, it doesn’t fully reconcile Tsemel’s contradictions, if such a thing were even possible or desirable.
  59. Clemency
    Woodard’s performance gathers its astonishing force incrementally, in subtle choices and inflections that you might not even register as actorly decisions.
  60. One Cut of the Dead
    Ueda’s wonderfully tight script is divided into three acts, with the second and third parts casting the opener in an entirely new light — so much so that I rewatched it as soon as the movie ended.
  61. The Song of Names
    There is much to admire in the fluidity of Girard’s storytelling, in the music (Ray Chen did the violin solos) and in the complicated questions raised about social obligations. Still, the movie never quite justifies the contrivance of its puzzle-box construction.
  62. Ip Man 4: The Finale
    There is no mystery about who wins the movie’s final bout, but it is never less than thrilling to watch Yen’s fluttering limbs in action.
  63. What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael
    A numbing torrent of largely unidentified film clips and poorly labeled commentary, Rob Garver’s overstuffed tribute to the life and work of America’s best-known — and most written about — film critic is at times barely coherent.
  64. Just Mercy
    Just Mercy is saved from being an earnest, inert courtroom drama when it spends time on death row, where it is opened up and given depth by two strong, subtle performances, from Foxx and Rob Morgan.
  65. Spies in Disguise
    The lessons are so treacly, and their delivery method so single-minded, that the Valley Girl phrase “gag me with a spoon” springs to mind. But you have to give the movie credit for sticking to its lack of guns.
  66. 1917
    A carefully organized and sanitized war picture from Sam Mendes that turns one of the most catastrophic episodes in modern times into an exercise in preening showmanship.
  67. Dabangg 3
    Dabangg 3 is earnest, and it earnestly wants to deliver thrills. To do so, though, it would have to provide that other essential Bollywood ingredient: emotion. What’s missing are the tears. The movie hardly leaves a trace.
  68. Little Women
    Like any good novelist and every great filmmaker, Gerwig isn’t afraid to let her audience work a little. She trusts our intelligence and our curiosity, and also her own command of the medium.
  69. Dead Kids
    This often compelling window into the boys’ culture is muddied by overly slick stylization.
  70. A Christmas Prince: The Royal Baby
    Although it offers a dungeon, a curse and a shocking theft, this flat, anodyne movie is unlikely to join the pantheon of holiday classics, so keep a rein on your expectations and accept that you’ll need something more to salvage the evening.
  71. She's Missing
    She’s Missing is slow and dreamy and frustratingly opaque. Yet it has a potent sense of place and an ominous atmosphere of impermanence.
  72. Invisible Life
    There’s such a disconcerting rush of lush imagery and action in the first 40 minutes or so of “Invisible Life” that one is apt to wonder whether there’s any kind of focused narrative. But the casual misdirection is setting the viewer up for an emotional kill.
  73. Togo
    When Togo gets going, it goes.
  74. Cats
    Generally, Hooper pulls away from loony-tunes excess, tries for sexy rather than freaky, and plucks at heartstrings, a reflex that pulls the story into mawkishness, particularly when he cuts to Victoria.
  75. Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker
    The Rise of Skywalker — Episode IX, in case you’ve lost count — is one of the best. Also one of the worst. Perfectly middling. It all amounts to the same thing.
  76. 6 Underground
    When it comes to turning up action to 11, Bay is incorrigible. Not just with sound and fury; there are genuinely eccentric innovations here. There’s certainly not a whole lot of recognizable humanity, but hey, that’s why there’s “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”
  77. Jumanji: The Next Level
    It’s perhaps unfair to call this a turkey. It’s got some sweet moments, and the cast, as it did in the previous picture, enjoys itself at least semi-infectiously. But the action sequences are lifeless; the lessons valid but arguably stale; and the trimmings, mere bloat.
  78. Uncut Gems
    Lots of stuff happens, lots and lots, and some of it can be hard to track. But the bedlam is intentional and amusing. All you need to do is latch onto Howard as he runs from here to there, yelling greetings, taking calls, making deals, always moving amid jump cuts, zooms and lurid close-ups.
  79. Black Christmas
    If the 2019 Black Christmas is not nearly as chilling as the original, it is genuinely barbed as gender satire, and it cleverly pre-empts obvious outrage.
  80. The Great War
    It simply does not have the budget or craft for the scale it requires.
  81. The Death and Life of John F. Donovan
    Struggling to connect the filaments of past and present, youth and maturity, Dolan seems lost, his signature vivaciousness and sense of fun almost entirely muted. Instead, what lingers is a feeling of being lectured to — which isn’t much fun at all.
  82. Seberg
    A flawed and fascinating film about fame and martyrdom.
  83. Richard Jewell
    The shadows are what linger from this flawed, fascinating movie.
  84. A Hidden Life
    Franz Jägerstätter’s defiance of evil is moving and inspiring, and I wish I understood it better.
  85. Chinese Portrait
    Its primary interest lies in the tension between candid moments and shots that appear artfully composed.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cunningham
    What the film doesn’t give is an accurate sense of Cunningham time. In a Cunningham dance, the mind can wander, experience different rates of change, be baffled, engrossed, astonished, bored. The price of Kovgan’s efficiency is impatience, always cutting away and moving on.
  87. Bombshell
    Part of what works in the movie is that it does a good job of presenting the ordinary assaults that women, even those with great privilege, can endure simply to get through a day, including dehumanizing “compliments.”
  88. The Disappearance of My Mother
    At the very least, it’s impossible to watch The Disappearance of My Mother without a measure of ambivalence. Gratitude for the chance to make Barzini’s acquaintance, and for Barrese’s sensitivity in making the introduction, is accompanied by ethical queasiness.
  89. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
    This is less a chronicle of forbidden desire than an examination of how desire works. Like a lost work of 18th-century literature, it is at once ardent and rigorous, passionate and philosophical.
  90. Temblores
    Bustamante renders the film’s distinct milieus with extraordinary texture. The sanitized and soulless spaces of Pablo and his family form an evocative contrast with the lively, bustling bars and streets frequented by Francisco. But this emphasis on sensory detail comes at the cost of the big picture.
  91. My Friend the Polish Girl
    Shot mostly in black and white and with an improvisational feel, My Friend the Polish Girl is cool and clever, feigning social realism with winking calculation.
  92. Les Misérables
    Ly shows command of staging and shooting throughout, simulating documentary form while maintaining a tight grip on narrative coherence.
  93. White Snake
    The forbidden romance has its will-they-or-won’t-they thrills, but this first feature by the directors Amp Wong and Ji Zhao, becomes a basket of tangled snakes when Blanca faces far too many obstacles.
  94. Melody Makers
    [A] hardly epochal but largely pleasant documentary.
  95. Feast of the Epiphany
    It is easier to like Feast of the Epiphany as an idea for an uncompromising film than it is to reconcile its pretensions.
  96. After Parkland
    After Parkland is not easy to watch, and certain choices (of images, of music) could be construed as calculated. But the movie succeeds where it counts: showing the reverberations of violence long after most cameras left.
  97. Cavale
    As a trio, Viance, Zaghouani and Pellizari are bright and full of energy, and Gourmel allows their scenes together to play with improvisational looseness. Their vivacity lends purpose to the entire film.
  98. A German Youth
    The pace is too rapid for any nonexpert to absorb or glean the significance of all the details, which Périot generally leaves unexplained. But this documentary is fitfully thought-provoking, and particularly good at illustrating political fault lines of the time.
  99. Ximei
    This isn’t a groundbreaking documentary, but it does pay its subjects the ultimate courtesy, treating them as officials have not: as fully rounded human beings.
  100. The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open
    Filmed almost entirely in real time, and using a series of long, intimate takes, “The Body Remembers” is about privilege and its lack, motherhood and its absence, race and its legacy.
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