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. Western
    A funny, romantic film filled with cozy intimacies and lovely, wide-screen images of the French countryside.
  2. My Old Ass
    It’s as much about reframing middle-aged regrets as it is a story about youth, love and possibility — and thus the emotional heft it wields is two-pronged.
  3. Thirteen Conversations About One Thing
    Thrillingly smart, but not, like so many other pictures in this vein, merely an elaborate excuse for its own cleverness. As you puzzle over the intricacies of its shape, which reveal themselves only in retrospect, you may also find yourself surprised by the depth of its insights.
  4. Where Are You Taking Me?
    Though it eventually includes landscape and wildlife, Where Are You Taking Me? is no survey of Uganda; it's too quiet, slow and personal for that. But the film is an unusual, visually rich visit to the nation.
  5. Barcelona
    Barcelona, like "Metropolitan," indulges in long, hair-splitting discussions without resorting to broad gags or worrying about wearing out its welcome.
  6. The Cakemaker
    Sad and sweet, and with a rare lyricism, The Cakemaker believes in a love that neither nationality, sexual orientation nor religious belief can deter.
  7. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
    The latest and most uncertain of Disney's animated efforts, with its manic mood swings and cloying, none-too-cuddly hero.
  8. Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind
    Lightfoot is frank about sizing up that work — the movie opens with him expressing disdain for the sexism of his early hit “For Lovin’ Me” — and he’s refreshingly up-to-date in his perspectives about today’s music.
  9. Jackass Forever
    Two things continue to hoist “Jackass” above its legion of imitators, many of whom are now found on TikTok. First, the razor-sharp slow-motion cinematography, which immortalizes writhing men in wet underpants with the devotion of Michelangelo sculpting “The Pietà.” Second — and more important — is the crew’s friendship.
  10. Duck Season
    Inside this small canvas - almost the entire film unfolds in the one apartment - Mr. Eimbcke turns each character into an epic.
  11. Inception
    Though there is a lot to see in Inception, there is nothing that counts as genuine vision. Mr. Nolan’s idea of the mind is too literal, too logical, too rule-bound to allow the full measure of madness -- the risk of real confusion, of delirium, of ineffable ambiguity -- that this subject requires.
  12. Serenity
    Scene for scene, Serenity is more engaging and certainly better written and acted than any of Mr. Lucas's recent screen entertainments.
  13. Mysterious Object at Noon
    Mr. Weerasethakul's film is like a piece of chamber music slowly, deftly expanding into a full symphonic movement; to watch it is to enter a fugue state that has the music and rhythms of another culture.
  14. The Life of Jesus
    I wanted to show how the underlying racism of society can transform a banal love story into a tragedy, Mr. Dumont has said. His film, for all its characters' uncommunicativeness, is too flat and unswerving to convey that idea surprisingly. But it does bring haunting power to the bitter, tongue-tied helplessness that sets its tragedy in motion.
  15. Computer Chess
    Peculiar and sneakily brilliant.
  16. Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo
    Light on plot yet heavy on chemistry, Paris 05:59 is at times a little precious. But the two leads are so believably besotted that their occasional immaturity doesn’t rankle.
  17. Casting JonBenét
    It’s a handsome package that never transcends the banality of its ideas, most of which involve how different people, including from Boulder, were affected by the case.
  18. The Last King of Scotland
    Furiously paced, with excellent performances by Forest Whitaker as Amin and James McAvoy as the foolish Scotsman who becomes the leader's personal physician, the film has texture, if not depth and enough intelligence to almost persuade you that it actually has something of note to say.
  19. After Innocence
    Calm, deliberate and devastating, Jessica Sanders's documentary After Innocence confirms many of the worst fears about weaknesses in the American criminal-justice system.
  20. Cast Away
    At its best, Cast Away, like "Titanic," awes us with its sheer oceanic sweep and its cosmic apprehension of human insignificance.
  21. Caucus
    The film is a testament to the power of observational documentary to tenderly present hypocrisy and to show eccentricity peeking out from behind social masks.
  22. Nostalghia
    Loveliness, I'm afraid, is really what this movie is all about.
  23. Unrelated
    This is civilized human behavior captured with a clinical precision and accuracy.
  24. The Trouble with Harry
    It is not a particularly witty or clever script that John Michael Hayes has put together from a novel by Jack Trevor Story, nor does Mr. Hitchcock's direction make it spin. The pace is leisurely, almost sluggish, and the humor frequently is strained. But it does possess mild and mellow merriment all along the way.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Gun Crazy
    Pretty cheap stuff.
  26. Tomboy
    The story that emerges is programmatic and largely unsurprising, but these children give it messiness, joy and life.
  27. Farewell
    When it comes to actual historical details, Farewell crams too many notions into expositional blips of dialogue. And the scenes of conferences in the corridors of power, whether in Moscow, Paris or Washington, are strained and abrupt.
  28. The Orphanage
    The Orphanage, a diverting, overwrought ghost story from Spain, relies on basic and durable horror movie techniques.
  29. Bones and All
    Bones and All is a ragged hybrid of genres and styles, an elevated exploitation movie, a succession of moods — anxious, horny, dreamy, sad — in search of a metaphor. Or maybe the metaphor is obvious.
  30. The Bleeding Edge
    The surgery scenes in The Bleeding Edge are squirm-in-your-seat uncomfortable. But it’s the interviews — watching patients recount agonies they’ve suffered from poorly researched and regulated medical devices — that are hardest to sit through.
  31. Motel Destino
    The payoff feels somewhat slight, but the foreplay — the will-they-or-won’t-they and the will-he-find-out — builds up with energy and flare. Maybe climaxes are overrated, anyway.
  32. Dune: Part One
    The designs and textures of the movie’s various worlds and their inhabitants are arresting, filigreed and meaningful, with characters and their environments in sync.
  33. Le jour avant le lendemain
    Frustratingly sketchy partly because it is not finally a survival tale but a mystical evocation of the power of Inuit mythology, and how the passing down of ancient wisdom can sustain the human spirit in the direst circumstances. But the unanswered questions still nag.
  34. Welcome to Pine Hill
    [Mr. Miller's] film shows the influence of other recent work in the American neo-neo-realist vein, notably Ramin Bahrani’s “Goodbye, Solo” and Lance Hammer’s “Ballast,” and like them relies on understatement and indirection to arrive at a powerful and resonant meaning.
  35. Cheatin'
    Mr. Plympton rewrites the laws of physics at will, but within a rigorous and coherent logic. He conjures a world of absolute improbability that, somehow, makes perfect sense.
  36. The Invitation
    If the movie works as well as it does, it’s because Ms. Kusama can coax scares from shadows, silences and ricocheting looks.
  37. A Woman's Life
    Its images and scenes are suffused by an intensity that seems almost to be a quality of the light and air as they play across Ms. Chemla’s watchful, sometimes inscrutable features.
  38. Roxanne Roxanne
    What distinguishes Roxanne Roxanne, a sensitively observed new movie with a dynamite performance by Chanté Adams, is that it marries a traditional hip-hop biopic, a form long dominated by male rappers, with a more idiosyncratic and deeply felt slice of life.
  39. End of the Century
    As End of the Century reveals even more starkly than the recent Metallica documentary, "Some Kind of Monster," harmony among band members becomes harder to sustain as the years gather, youthful enthusiasm wanes, and personalities define themselves.
  40. Scottsboro: An American Tragedy
    The filmmakers know how potent the material is, and they don't hammer away at the obvious.
  41. Joe Gould's Secret
    Settles for being an atmospheric scenes-in-the-life biography of someone's most unforgettable character. It could have been so much more.
  42. Red Lights
    The brilliant, sinister French thriller Red Lights is a twisty road movie in which every sign points toward catastrophe.
  43. Ocean's Eleven
    Soderbergh rallies a seismic jolt of enthusiasm, and the movie is an elating blaze of flair and pride.
  44. Human Weapon
    A gripping and important documentary.
  45. Raja
    What distinguishes Raja from every other movie to contemplate the treacherous intersection of passion, avarice and power is its unsettling emotional honesty. The two central performances are so spontaneous and mercurial that the reckless flirtation seems to be unfolding before your eyes.
  46. They Shot the Piano Player
    Javier Mariscal and Fernando Trueba’s They Shot the Piano Player is an astoundingly vibrant animated project, fitting for its subject matter.
  47. Every Little Thing
    Masear is a terrific documentary subject, but the hummingbirds are as well, and Aitken brings them close to us.
  48. In the Shadow of Women
    Mr. Garrel is always worth attending to when he takes up the rhythms and paradoxes of love, and even though this is a minor entry in his canon of melancholy romances, it is brief, brisk and intermittently affecting.
  49. Wonder Boys
    With so much going for it, how could the movie be such a dud?
  50. The Strangler (1970)
    It’s like “Peeping Tom” meets one of Dario Argento’s giallo joints, but slathered in a coat of melancholic malaise.
  51. Forty Shades of Blue
    Alan, who Mr. Sachs has said was based on his own father, is a great character - passionate, complicated, bursting with life. Those words also describe Mr. Torn's performance.
  52. Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles
    The animation is handsome, the graphic settings understated but intelligently detailed.
  53. Mysterious Skin
    A gorgeous, heartbreaking and utterly convincing work of art.
  54. Rush
    Mr. Howard doesn’t just want you to crawl inside a Formula One racecar, he also wants you to crawl inside its driver’s head.
  55. The Time That Remains
    The Time That Remains has the scope of a historical epic with none of the expected heaviness.
  56. Smooth Talk
    A remarkably fine film about the muddle of emotions that separates the child from the adult.
  57. Mean Creek
    Like an uncommonly artful and well-acted after-school special. I don't mean this as a put-down: its combination of realism and fretful moral inquiry is best suited to the tastes and sensibilities of young teenagers who devour young-adult fiction.
  58. Bully
    Bully forces you to confront not the cruelty of specific children - who have their own problems, and their good sides as well - but rather the extent to which that cruelty is embedded in our schools and therefore in our society as a whole.
  59. The Half of It
    With tenderness, humor and beauty, The Half of It comprehends the chasm between wanting and being.
  60. The Garden of Earthly Delights
    Affected but elegant, this digital video riff on "Death in Venice" was orchestrated by Lech Majewski, the Polish writer, painter and director of films, plays and operas. His musicality is evident in the fresh and lively flow of images, though his tin ear for dialogue and staleness of theme enervates the composition.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Magnificent Seven
    A gifted director like Mr. Sturges (who also produced) can't be held entirely responsible for this endless dawdling prologue, since William Roberts' scenario increasingly flattens the action with philosophical talk on all sides and some easy clichés.
  62. Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan
    Mongol -- or, as I prefer to think of it, "Genghis Khan: The Early Years" -- is a big, ponderous epic, its beautifully composed landscape shots punctuated by thundering hooves and bloody, slow-motion battle sequences.
  63. Kundun
    It's all very beautiful, not to mentioned high-minded. But the loftiness comes at a sacrifice.
  64. Winnie the Pooh
    It is comfortable with itself and confident in its ability to amuse and beguile young viewers.
  65. Armageddon Time
    It is — astutely, uncomfortably and in the end tragically — about privilege.
  66. Munich
    More than anything, Munich is a slammin' entertainment filled with dazzling set pieces and geometric camerawork.
  67. Lovesong
    [An] exquisite, beautifully shot meditation on love clouded by fear and doubt.
  68. 2nd Chance
    Bahrani’s film (which he narrates) beetles along without fully exploiting Davis’s ample entertainment value, which is counterbalanced by accounts of his dubious actions and sometimes unseemly opinions.
  69. M.C. Escher: Journey To Infinity
    Whether anyone else, including Escher, would have done a more engaging job is debatable, but this movie, directed by Robin Lutz, offers an only intermittently satisfying look at his interests and methods. Don’t call it art; Escher felt his output hovered between art and mathematics.
  70. Thelma
    Mr. Trier’s experimenting mostly works, especially when the genre pieces dovetail with his gifts and Thelma’s story.
  71. Plan B
    The movie doesn’t make a joke of Sunny and Lupe’s concerns about pregnancy, dating and parental expectations, and in turn, it’s a delight to laugh through their goofier exploits.
  72. Take My Eyes
    The director, Iciar Bollain, who wrote the screenplay with Alicia Luna, invests Antonio with humanity, which would be more impressive if she had paid more attention to exploring the darker recesses of Pilar's inner life.
  73. Colette
    Colette is an origin story, a tale of metamorphosis rather than of already formed greatness. What interests Mr. Westmoreland is how a self-described country girl became a woman of the world, a transformation that in its deeper, more intimately mysterious registers remains out of reach of this movie and of the hard-working Ms. Knightley.
  74. Little Sister
    A strange, spiky movie that refuses to beg for our affection, Little Sister, the fifth feature from Zach Clark, molds the classic homecoming drama into a quirky reconciliation between faith and family.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Workshop
    It’s a measure of this film’s stealthy brilliance that it blurs the line between empathy and exploitation.
  76. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem
    A film unintentionally stuck in its own kind of adolescence, “Mutant Mayhem” has plenty of charms but tries so hard to be cool, funny and relevant — so totally online — that it forgets to kick back with a slice, some buds and just, you know, vibe.
  77. Millions
    A heartfelt, emotionally delicate children's movie about life and death and all the parts in between.
  78. Disobedience
    The director Sebastián Lelio should have been a good fit for this story if only because of the sensitivity he’s brought to female-driven movies like “Gloria.” Although Disobedience seems to offer him similar material — female desire up against the patriarchy — it defeats him.
  79. Judy Berlin
    Mendelsohn's fusion of science fiction and Chekhovian melancholy finds a fresh perspective on a familiar theme.
  80. The Legend of Drunken Master
    Has enough going on to make it a classic. You'll want to own it.
  81. Dangerous Liaisons
    Nothing Miss Close has done on the screen before approaches the richness and comic delicacy of her work as the Marquise. [21 Dec 1988, p.C22]
    • The New York Times
  82. My Big Night
    Thanks to his editor, Domingo González, Mr. de la Iglesia skillfully keeps these many balls in the air, a palpable affection for his players seeping through.
  83. Pin Cushion
    While Pin Cushion might prove too distressing for some, it’s still peculiarly, undeniably original.
  84. Commune
    A breezy, informal history of the Black Bear Ranch, a long-running California commune begun in the summer of 1968 and still in existence, offers the fascinating spectacle of observing people then and now.
  85. Becoming Cousteau
    It’s a swift-moving, detailed biography, recounting a life that was long, eventful and stippled with tragedy and regret.
  86. Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words
    It’s a fantastic collage that the filmmaker, Thorsten Schütte, uses to illuminate not only Zappa (who died of cancer in 1993), but also the cultural upheavals that defined his time.
  87. Woman of the Hour
    As a drama, Woman of the Hour is effective and infuriating.
  88. In the Line of Fire
    It's movie making of the high, smooth, commercial order that Hollywood prides itself on but achieves with singular infrequency.
  89. Love, Gilda
    Love, Gilda is a very affectionate reminder of her brief and brilliant career, a heartfelt love letter whose title might be more accurate without the comma.
  90. Hidden Figures
    From one scene to the next, you may know more or less what is coming, but it is never less than delightful to watch these actors at work.
  91. Sylvie's Love
    Ashe is using a familiar, long-derided film genre both affectionately and critically to explore the gleaming surfaces of life as well as the anguish that lies beneath.
  92. Eno
    There’s a pure joy to this documentary, a sense that creativity is miraculous and we ought to be grateful that we get to participate in it. I left both screenings full of ideas for my own work.
  93. The Infiltrators
    Jumping between wildly dissimilar styles makes for an occasionally jarring film. Yet despite this awkwardness, the movie works.
  94. Assassins
    Its main virtues are a wild story and a stealth sense of outrage. It argues that these so-called assassins became political pawns and had to face the courts without witnesses who might have aided their defense.
  95. Plan C
    At times, all of the secrecy and legal caution can make it hard to understand the complex logistics of getting a legal abortion in the United States. But the risks involved are bracingly apparent, and the documentary benefits from its attempts to capture Plan C’s high-stakes operation in progress.
  96. A Gray State
    There’s a morbid fascination inherent to documentaries like A Gray State, which is engrossing for the reasons it’s also unsatisfying: As Adam Shambour, a friend of Mr. Crowley’s, says, it’s a mystery that answers all the major questions except “Why?”
  97. Heart Like a Wheel
    Its story is unusual, but it's told in a style that is immediate and understandable, and that never opts for heroism at the expense of authenticity.
  98. Sand Storm
    As a director, Ms. Zexer has a fine eye for the texture of daily life, which she fills in with resonant physical details and sweeping, scene-setting views.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Panic in Needle Park
    It is a nightmare world view, but it is a world view, and The Panic in Needle Park never pretends that it is subject to moral condemnations, or to easy cure or the insights of urban sociology.
  100. The Line
    If the movie’s portrayal of rivalrous (and homoerotic) hypermasculinity doesn’t always seem original, it is nevertheless realized with seriousness and vigor.
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