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. Knives and Skin
    It is manifestly unfair to compare the work of a near-universally admired auteur to an odd, ambitious independent film, but Knives and Skin owes so much to David Lynch, particularly “Twin Peaks,” that it feels wrong to pretend it exists in a vacuum.
  2. The Wolf Hour
    The result is a sometimes punishingly theatrical experiment that teeters on the verge of surreality, transfixing us with the promise of something terrible lurking just beyond those ratty curtains.
  3. A Million Little Pieces
    Another ruin-and-rehab tale, one that initially tantalizes then flatly disappoints.
  4. When Lambs Become Lions
    It’s a striking, human portrait of men in trouble, looking for escape and possibly redemption.
  5. Daniel Isn't Real
    What starts as a mediocre psychological thriller finishes as a surprisingly toothsome and creative horror film, complete with creature features and journeys into the abyss.
  6. Little Joe
    Little Joe manages to exert a peculiar pull in spite of being constructed with material you’ve likely seen elsewhere.
  7. In Fabric
    The film spaces out several nasty and effective frights. And as its narrative seems to deliberately devolve into a dissociative dream, even the funny material hits with a choke in the throat.
  8. The Aeronauts
    Gorgeous and goofy, fanciful and unrepentantly old-fashioned, this Victorian adventure (it’s set in 1862) delights much more when its head is in the clouds than when its feet are on the ground.
  9. The Cat Returns (2002)
    As it is, it’s the best non-Miyazaki, non-Takahata Ghibli feature. A girl prevents a cat from getting crushed by a truck and gains favor with a nocturnal kingdom of hipster felines, in a story with echoes of Alice in Wonderland and the novels of Haruki Murakami.
  10. Knives Out
    Johnson’s own sleight of hand is estimable, even if his effort to add politics into the crowded mix rings hollow. The machine is what matters here, and he has clearly had such a good time engineering it that it’s hard not to feel bad when you don’t laugh along with him.
  11. 63 Up
    There’s great pleasure in revisiting this series, seeing who turned out just fine and sometimes better than you might have expected or hoped.
  12. The Two Popes
    The actors draw out both the spiritual and the psychological dimensions of their characters. The interplay, a duet with sweet and eccentric harmonies, is fascinating to observe, even as it undermines the overall structure of the narrative.
  13. Queen & Slim
    The film fumbles some of its big gestures and over-italicizes a few statements. What lingers, though, are strains of anger, ardor, sorrow and sweetness, and the quiet astonishment of witnessing the birth of a legend. This movie feels like something new, and also as if it’s been around forever, waiting for its moment.
  14. Frozen II
    The ensuing adventure is lively, amusing and predictably predictable with revelations, reconciliations and some nebulous politics for the grown-ups. It’s never surprising, yet its bursts of pictorial imagination — snowflakes that streak like shooting stars — keep you engaged, as do Elsa and Anna, who still aren’t waiting for life to happen.
  15. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
    It’s not only Mister Rogers’s kindness that hovers over “Beautiful Day,” but also his creative spirit. Paying tribute to his skills as a composer, performer and puppeteer, the movie affirms his status as a hero of the imagination.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator
    This haunting documentary is a powerful addition to a growing body of post #MeToo films — including “Finding Neverland” and “Surviving R. Kelly” — that show how cultural power is accumulated and weaponized.
  17. Dark Waters
    You do feel Haynes’s touch now and again, particularly in the sense of menace that seeps into a crepuscular law office and in the everyday eeriness that suffuses outwardly ordinary homes that are anything but normal.
  18. Varda by Agnès
    It’s a perfect introduction and a lovely valediction.
  19. Shooting the Mafia
    Idiosyncratic to the point of alienation.
  20. 21 Bridges
    Spraying what seems like several thousand rounds of ammunition, this sturdy thriller (the big-screen feature debut of the director Brian Kirk) has no patience for nuance. It’s a big, blunt, battering ram of a movie, but it’s not dumb.
  21. 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.
  22. The Courier
    This is another cinematic slab of sound and fury signifying nothing.
  23. Mr. Toilet: The World's #2 Man
    This is a puff piece of a documentary, eager to spread a message and go down easy.
  24. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project
    “Recorder” doesn’t explore the extent to which Marion’s original project of analysis was subsumed by the compulsion to tape everything. But her taping of everything created an irreproducible archive that is enlightening and the stuff of madness.
  25. Ernie & Joe: Crisis Cops
    As promising as Ernie and Joe’s program may seem, there is no insight into whether the nation’s law enforcement agencies are prioritizing these humane methods.
  26. The Report
    However crucial and opportune in its truth-seeking and depictions of political trickery (Burns could hardly have known his film would plop into theaters alongside the impeachment hearings for President Trump), The Report is too often dramatically frozen, its emotions stubbornly internal.
  27. Lady and the Tramp
    The movie is middle-of-the-road rather than bad — hard to hate and harder to love.
  28. Everybody's Everything
    An engaging account of Peep’s life and the alt-music scene.
  29. Waves
    All of Shults’s stylistic brio and formal inventiveness is finally in the service of a story about love, its mutability and fragility.
  30. Atlantics
    It testifies to the variety and vitality of politically alert genre filmmaking. It’s a suspenseful, sensual, exciting movie, and therefore a deeply haunting one as well.
  31. Scandalous: The Untold Story of the National Enquirer
    The various excuses made for The Enquirer’s ethics undermine Landsman’s efforts to portray the paper as splashy, all-American fun.
  32. The Hottest August
    This collection of interactions with ordinary people is a cinematic gift both simple and multilayered, an intellectual challenge and an emotional adventure.
  33. Ford v Ferrari
    Ford v Ferrari is no masterpiece, but it is — to invoke a currently simmering debate — real cinema, the kind of solid, satisfying, nonpandering movie that can seem endangered nowadays.
  34. I Lost My Body
    The movie abounds with imagination, but is unfortunately too unnerving — even nauseating — to enjoy.
  35. To Kid or Not to Kid
    Candid and empathetic, the movie’s segments can feel rushed and unfocused; yet they have a ragged intimacy that argues implicitly for an individual’s right to choose, without interference or condemnation.
  36. The Warrior Queen of Jhansi
    An unfortunately clunky, relentlessly corny salute to Rani Laxmibai.
  37. Radioflash
    At fault is a threadbare, irritatingly vague script (by the director and artist Ben McPherson) that simply strings together a series of generic setups and forgettable characters.
  38. The Good Liar
    The real good liar is whoever convinced Mirren and McKellen to class up such thin and arbitrary material.
  39. Charlie's Angels
    Banks wants to fight a righteous fight. But she is selling stale goods in which adult women spout girl-power clichés and conform to norms that make it very clear what kind of heroines still get to fly high: young, thin, beautiful, perfectly coifed, impeccably manicured and profoundly unthreatening.
  40. Mickey and the Bear
    A sturdy, watchable character drama.
  41. Harpoon
    It’s a sparse, nasty little thriller.
  42. Playing with Fire
    It’s an unchallenging movie, but as far as unchallenging kids movies go, the actors ensure this one doesn’t fall into soullessness.
  43. Doctor Sleep
    This screen adaptation feels like a clumsy hybrid. It’s a little too long and winding to work as a feature film, especially in the horror genre, and might have worked better as a limited series, with a little more room for the many characters who populate its grimly imagined American landscape.
  44. Watson
    The movie can be frustratingly deferential toward Watson, but it is never less than urgent.
  45. Crown Vic
    Souza’s feature plays like an amalgam of the tropes of numerous TV and movie police procedurals.
  46. Earthquake Bird
    For all its consideration, while Earthquake Bird adds up to a “real” movie, it’s too polite to add up to an entirely compelling one.
  47. 16 Bars
    The individual stories have moments of power, but 16 Bars feels abbreviated. It only sometimes transcends its role as an awareness tool and reveals the texture and detail that long-term documentary filming can produce.
  48. Honey Boy
    One could watch Honey Boy musing that it must be nice to have someone finance a movie of your 12-step qualification. That assessment is actually too generous.
  49. Klaus
    It all moves along so amiably, and offers such consistently delightful visuals, that the conventional plot points, up to and including an inevitable “but I can explain” bit, are entirely digestible.
  50. Midway
    It is rousing and respectful in its best moments and faintly ridiculous in others.
  51. Last Christmas
    Feig is an adroit director of comedy and he gives Last Christmas some fizz now and again. But he’s stymied by the romance and the gimmick, and the pairing of Clarke and Golding proves an impossible hurdle, making even the seemingly simplest moments — an intimate walk, a heartfelt talk — feel badly labored.
  52. The Kingmaker
    It’s an ugly story shrewdly told, with a sense of humor and also a deeper feeling for history.
  53. Marriage Story
    It’s funny and sad, sometimes within a single scene, and it weaves a plot out of the messy collapse of a shared reality, trying to make music out of disharmony. The melody is full of heartbreak, loss and regret, but the song is too beautiful to be entirely melancholy.
  54. Harriet
    It is a rousing and powerful drama, respectful of both the historical record and the cravings of modern audiences.
  55. To Be of Service
    Though To Be of Service skips over specifics, the big picture is clear, and its overriding point well made: These dogs are saving the lives of those who’ve sacrificed so much. Every person profiled here deserves an immense amount of respect. Every animal, too.
  56. Queen of Hearts
    When the movie isn’t straining, the go-for-broke performances of Dyrholm and Lindh give it a specific, unusual tension — like the feeling you get when you’ve over-tightened a corkscrew and know the matter around it is about to crumble.
  57. Cubby
    Whatever charms the filmmakers envisioned are nowhere apparent in these 83 cringe-worthy minutes.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    American Son
    At some point you’re tempted to stop following the narrative and start keeping score between husband and wife. It’s a good debate. It just isn’t much of a movie.
  59. Adopt a Highway
    Like a spare short story, this little indie nurtures a few simple emotions, then hopes its audience will stick around to share in them. I’m glad I did.
  60. Gay Chorus Deep South
    The documentary is able to record only small, not sweeping, changes of heart. Nevertheless, the film, like the singers, maintains a compassionate optimism.
  61. The Apollo
    While “The Apollo” itself might have taken a more inventive approach, it derives its power from the artistry it captures.
  62. The World is Full of Secrets
    Intriguing, but ultimately slight.
  63. American Dharma
    Certainly, American Dharma offers no comfort to those disturbed by Bannon or harmed by the policies he has pressed for. But Morris wants to map how Bannon thinks. The movie he has made is less an act of muckraking than it is a psychological thriller, with Bannon its implacable villain.
  64. Motherless Brooklyn
    The high-mindedness of the movie, its showy conviction that its heart is in the right place, dulls some of its political insights. And its grandiosity undermines the ragged pleasures of the genre.
  65. Light From Light
    Light From Light reveals it’s far more interested in human concerns than metaphysical ones.
  66. Terminator: Dark Fate
    There are a number of reasons to like Terminator: Dark Fate — Linda Hamilton’s scowl, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s stubble, MacKenzie Davis’s athleticism — but my favorite thing about this late addition to a weary franchise is how little it cares about timeline continuity.
  67. Redoubt
    Redoubt reaches for intimations and apprehensions of the cosmic.
  68. Western Stars
    The energy here is controlled, the mood reflective. These character-driven songs are populated by the washed-up and the run-down — an aging actor, a hitchhiker — and the shared themes are remembrance and regret.
  69. The Kill Team
    While the leads are credible, the filmmaking (including a hacky score) adds a sheen of macho familiarity to a narrative that was eerily matter-of-fact in doc form.
  70. Synonyms
    Furious, brilliant, exhausting, Synonyms is the story of a man in self-imposed exile.
  71. Black and Blue
    Its pulpy pop-cultural credibility is inseparable from its honest, brutal assessment of the state of the world. Its ideas about the nature and limits of heroism — about just how hard and terrifying the resistance to evil can be — are spelled out in vivid black and white.
  72. Portals
    It is difficult to believe that an actual first encounter with interdimensional beings would be such a complete waste of time.
  73. Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound
    Documentaries about film technology, at least those that aspire to reach some portion of a mainstream audience, have to make wonkiness ingratiating. Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound, a cogent and winning picture directed by Midge Costin, does this in a variety of ways.
  74. The Gallows Act II
    The movie’s finale offers a twist that ostensibly ameliorates the internal-logic complaints. But it most vividly registers as a rancid misogynist cherry atop a sloppy concoction of tired jump scares.
  75. Frankie
    Huppert’s uncanny mixture of self-possession and wildness is never not interesting to watch, but when Frankie is off screen she takes the film’s life force with her.
  76. Paradise Hills
    Despite her shaky handle on the movie’s ideas and the appealing if uneven performances, Waddington holds your attention with visual beauty and humor.
  77. The Current War: Director's Cut
    As its energetic early scenes give way to a sluggish second half, you start to sense how much better this good-enough movie might have been.
  78. The Great Alaskan Race
    In addition to his acting duties, Presley also wrote and directed the film. But while he provides beard and brawn as the heroic musher, he struggles with the technical challenges of editing and staging the run.
  79. Burning Cane
    Burning Cane is short and difficult. It does not aspire to entertain. Its realism is shot through with a constant dull ache.
  80. Farming
    Farming is a mystery movie in which the author investigates himself — and doesn’t fully share the answers.
  81. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
    You don’t wait long to be disappointed.
  82. Kinetta
    Time hasn’t made it more than a cryptic curiosity. Dialogue is sparse, and it takes some time for the threesome’s dynamic to come into focus, to the extent that it ever does.
  83. Wounds
    The lack of local color notwithstanding, the movie more than fulfills its promise to unsettle and to incite shivers — and it doesn’t quit.
  84. On the President's Orders
    The thesis of On the President’s Orders isn’t terribly original, but in a needlessly roundabout way, it makes its case that these killings are not the work of isolated individuals, but the product of a top-down culture that stems from Duterte's assent.
  85. Cyrano, My Love
    As the camera circles swirling skirts and sweeps through elegant cafes, the director, Alexis Michalik, whisks up a whirlwind of soapy declarations and backstage chaos. For many viewers, that will be enough, with enjoyment in direct proportion to tolerance for theatrical farce and hyper-romantic dialogue — and a lead character who is less engaging than either.
  86. Tell Me Who I Am
    Their moment of resolution at the end is very moving, but the movie also testifies that while love and forgiveness can ameliorate suffering, it can’t really wipe it all away.
  87. By the Grace of God
    By the Grace of God is a rarity: An important film that’s also utterly inspired.
  88. The Elephant Queen
    Young viewers could certainly handle a few more harsh facts. Yet The Elephant Queen sets out, first and foremost, to use a narrative to build compassion. And here, a good story is as effective as a shout.
  89. Serendipity
    It seems best to view Serendipity as one component of a much bigger project (a book on Nourry’s work with the same title was published in 2017) — a body of work in which life and art are inseparable.
  90. The Cave
    Entering theaters at a timely moment, The Cave is a frightening immersion in life under siege in Syria that, as difficult as it often is to watch, can’t come close to replicating how harrowing it must have been to film.
  91. #Female Pleasure
    [An] illuminating if one-sided overview of the myriad ways in which women’s sexuality is controlled and subjugated.
  92. Greener Grass
    A deadpan take on suburban hell — I hesitate to call it a comedy, black or otherwise — the movie takes competitiveness to such excruciatingly surreal lengths that every would-be joke feels agonizingly strained.
  93. Jojo Rabbit
    The humor is so audacious and the psychological insight at times so startling that it’s hard not to be dismayed when an easy and familiar dose of comfort is supplied at the end. This “Rabbit” is maybe just a little too cute, and a little too friendly.
  94. The Lighthouse
    Eggers meticulously sets the scene, adds texture and builds tension and mystery from men locked in battle and sometimes in embrace. He has created a story about an age-old struggle, one that is most satisfyingly expressed in this film’s own tussle between genre and its deviations.
  95. Zombieland: Double Tap
    Zombieland: Double Tap sets the bar low and steps easily over it, which makes it better than a lot of recent big-screen comedies. It doesn’t have much on its mind, but it isn’t completely brain-dead either.
  96. Stuffed
    While Derham banks on the surprise factor of seeing taxidermists acting as stealth conservationists, the film leaves the impression that she could have scalpel-dug into deeper layers.
  97. Jexi
    While its mode of argumentation gets weaker as the standard-issue boy-meets-girl-meets-carpe-diem plot progresses, the appealing cast and brisk running time help “Jexi” not wear out its welcome.
  98. El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
    Paul’s performance was often overshadowed by Cranston’s during the series’s run, but he’s phenomenal here.
  99. The Addams Family
    If this installment lays on the moral (all families are freaky in their own ways) a bit thick, it has just enough wit and weirdness to honor its source material.
  100. Parasite
    Bong’s command of the medium is thrilling. He likes to move the camera, sometimes just to nudge your attention from where you think it should be, but always in concert with his restlessly inventive staging.
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