The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,280 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: 9,381 out of 20280
  2. Mixed: 8,435 out of 20280
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20280
20280 movie reviews
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  1. Uncle Howard
    The movie is a deft sort of dual narrative.
  2. Portrait of a Garden
    The vision of nature being lovingly tended in Rosie Stapel’s documentary, Portrait of a Garden, is remarkably evocative.
  3. Don't Call Me Son
    The narrowness of its perspective and its relatively brief 82-minute length disappoint. Yet Don’t Call Me Son still manages to be a fascinating, sympathetic portrait of a lost boy abruptly thrown to the wolves.
  4. Your Name.
    The beauty of Your Name is that, as in the best animated movies, the thin black lines of the character design invariably dissolve, and all that remains are Taki and Mitsuha, thoroughly mixed-up teenagers.
  5. Off the Rails
    An assured and thoughtful debut.
  6. Hunter Gatherer
    This amiable look at life on the margins gradually accumulates a melancholy that punctures the drollness.
  7. The Illinois Parables
    The Illinois Parables is not, strictly speaking, an educational film, but it conveys a unique and precious kind of knowledge.
  8. Two Trains Runnin'
    This captivating movie, like the blues itself, is at once a recognition of those somber truths and a gesture of protest against them.
  9. My Life as a Zucchini
    Mr. Barras’s film, with its bigheaded, asymmetrical modeling-clay figures and off-kilter picture-book backdrops, explores a harsh situation with gentle whimsy.
  10. An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
    In a summer movie landscape with Spider-Man, a simian army waging further battle for the planet and Charlize Theron as a sexy Cold War-era superspy, it says something that one of the most compelling characters is Al Gore.
  11. Kedi
    The movie is replete with ingeniously constructed mini-narratives, including a turf war. The mesmerizing score by Kira Fontana, interspersed with well-chosen Turkish pop, is a real asset.
  12. Manifesto
    As an oblique examination and critique of political and art history and their various interactions over the 20th century, Manifesto is both witty and provocative. It is not, however, a motion picture for people seeking a plot.
  13. The Ataxian
    The Ataxian has moments of inspiration, beauty, even euphoria. But its lasting contribution is in making the world a little more familiar with this disease, and a little less lonely for the families struggling against it.
  14. Ocean Waves (1993)
    In its sensitivity and attention to detail, Ocean Waves makes itself into something special, and kind of magical, and so proves very much a Ghibli gem.
  15. Everybody Loves Somebody
    The setup is commonplace, but the scenery is delicious, the dialogue refreshingly tart and the keen supporting cast frisky or affecting, as the occasion demands.
  16. Isle of Dogs
    Time and again, Mr. Anderson pulls you hard into Isle of Dogs. His use of film space, which he playfully flattens and deepens, is one of his stylistic signatures; he likes symmetry and, in contrast to most directors these days, does a lot inside the frame. He’s especially inventive in this movie, and I could watch hours of its noble dogs hanging out, sniffing the air.
  17. Between Us
    Stingingly attuned to the tension between long-term love and last-minute misgivings, Between Us makes a familiar situation feel remarkably fresh.
  18. Vince Giordano: There's a Future in the Past
    This movie, directed and produced by Dave Davidson and Amber Edwards, digs deeply enough into Mr. Giordano’s world to convey the drudgery and headaches of being a bandleader.
  19. The Beguiled
    [Ms. Coppola’s] Beguiled is less a hothouse flower than a bonsai garden, a work of cool, exquisite artifice that evokes wildness on a small, controlled scale.
  20. Red Sparrow
    It helps that Ms. Lawrence, like all great stars, can slip into a role as if sliding into another skin, unburdened by hesitation or self-doubt. Craft and charm are part of what she brings to this role, as well as a serviceable accent, but it’s her absolute ease and certainty that carry you through Red Sparrow.
  21. Coco
    If Coco doesn’t quite reach the highest level of Pixar masterpieces, it plays a time-tested tune with captivating originality and flair, and with roving, playful pop-culture erudition.
  22. Megan Leavey
    If the conclusion doesn’t bring a tear to your eye, you’re way too cynical.
  23. Tempestad
    It’s an artful and lyrical assembly.
  24. Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire
    The movie is a worthy time capsule and a must for Cohen devotees. Its occasional meanderings into artiness, which take the form of interpolation of outside footage (war atrocities and home movies, mainly) are emblematic of the time it was made and mercifully brief.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Murder of Fred Hampton
    Although it is unabashedly biased and it is flawed in technical execution, it emerges as a disturbingly somber illustration of some of the ills that beset us and our social system.
  26. The Incredible Jessica James
    This is Ms. Williams’s movie, and she owns it.
  27. The Hero
    This film belongs to its star.
  28. Whose Streets?
    This is direct and frequently powerful filmmaking that doesn’t much care about meeting my aesthetic standards.
  29. Long Strange Trip
    It’s surprising there has never really been an extended cinematic exploration of the band. Long Strange Trip, ambitiously assembled and elegantly directed by Amir Bar-Lev, fills that void.
  30. Raees
    Avoiding flabby subplots, Mr. Dholakia keeps Raees taut and suspenseful, even at two and a half hours, though it probably has a song too many
  31. Chasing Coral
    It’s an environmental tragedy of our own making, the film heartbreakingly argues, that has little hope of being reversed without immediate human intervention.
  32. From Nowhere
    Their ordeal feels cruel, unnecessary and infuriatingly real.
  33. Super Dark Times
    The performances from the film’s young cast members are uniformly excellent, including Owen Campbell as Zach and Charlie Tahan as Josh. But the direction from Mr. Phillips is what makes Super Dark Times unusual.
  34. Chapter & Verse
    The movie’s wide-screen framing, ruthless plot reversals and say-what-you-mean writing sometimes recall a master of socially conscious cinema from another era, Sam Fuller. But this is a picture with its own strong voice.
  35. On the Beach at Night Alone
    Ms. Kim is simultaneously an ordinary woman and a melodramatic heroine, her performance made more layered and intriguing by the intimation that she may be playing herself.
  36. Paraguay Remembered
    This quiet movie, shot in black-and-white and color, is an unhurried, beautiful, and pained work that through simple means resonates on various levels.
  37. Junction 48
    Junction 48 is more than a mere crowd-pleaser, and it refuses easy catharsis, ending with a cliffhanger. But since this is a movie about deciding to act, maybe that’s the perfect note.
  38. The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography
    Ms. Dorfman emerges as an artist of deep compassion, empathy, humor and wisdom.
  39. Les Hautes Solitudes (1974)
    The film’s silence works as a kind of invitation, encouraging you to infer meaning and jump to conclusions as one image gives way to the next.
  40. Apprentice
    At first Apprentice seems to be a basic revenge film in which Aiman stalks the man who killed his father. But it becomes psychologically more complex.
  41. The Women's Balcony
    The entire cast is solid, but the women, especially Ms. Hagoel, bring depth to their comedic and dramatic turns.
  42. The Land of Steady Habits
    Even though Anders and the people around him can be sorted into recognizable types (a fault, mostly of Mr. Thompson’s book), they are also amusing and awful in ways that can feel disconcertingly real.
  43. The Sting
    A lot of the other period details aren't too firmly anchored in time, but the film is so good-natured, so obviously aware of everything it's up to, even its own picturesque frauds, that I opt to go along with it. One forgives its unrelenting efforts to charm, if only because The Sting itself is a kind of con game, devoid of the poetic aspirations that weighed down "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."
  44. Canners
    Canners is a testament to its director’s indefatigable humanism, and to the human beings who feed it. The movie follows the money, a nickel at a time, and discovers something far more valuable.
  45. Radio Dreams
    The movie’s tree-falling-in-the-forest-with-no-one-to-hear-it denouement is an apt but not entirely hopeless metaphor for the condition of its characters.
  46. The Death of Louis XIV
    [Mr. Léaud's] riveting, and a little alarming. As for Mr. Serra, while he often enjoys playing the foppish provocateur in his interviews, his film is sober, meticulous and entirely convincing in its depiction of period and mortality.
  47. Tickling Giants
    There’s a lot to laugh at, and to learn from, in Tickling Giants, a documentary that starts off by telling the story of one man and ends up speaking volumes about satire, freedom of expression and political pressure.
  48. P.S. Jerusalem
    An exemplar of how to make the personal political.
  49. Most Beautiful Island
    Dark corners of the immigrant experience in New York City, especially for women, are frighteningly dramatized in Ana Asensio’s suspense film Most Beautiful Island, a modest but effective writing-directing debut.
  50. The Nightingale
    This is a difficult movie because the questions it raises are not easy. There are sentimental and reassuring movies about vengeance, and comforting stories about the resistance to historical oppression. This isn’t one of those. You might say it’s too angry. Or too honest.
  51. Karl Marx City
    Karl Marx City, Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein’s unsettling new documentary, is a smart, highly personal addition to the growing syllabus of distressingly relevant cautionary political tales.
  52. A Dark Song
    The movie dives into the black arts with methodical restraint and escalating unease.
  53. God Knows Where I Am
    This documentary, coupled with Ms. Aviv’s article, addresses unresolved issues of personal autonomy versus a patient’s inability to protect herself. It will haunt you.
  54. Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World
    If you couldn’t name two Native American musicians at the beginning of the documentary, you’ll remember at least a half-dozen after the end. And it’s a good bet you’ll be searching for their albums, too.
  55. Last Men in Aleppo
    This is an essential film, but it is also a terribly dispiriting one.
  56. Glory
    Glory is celebratory, but it celebrates in a manner that insists on acknowledging the sorrow. This is a good, moving, complicated film.
  57. Two Lottery Tickets
    Negoescu has adapted a short story by Ion Luca Caragiale from 1901, and the lottery ticket concept is not necessarily novel, but he gives the film fresh zest with droll observations and pitifully endearing characters — all while poking meta fun at the austere Romanian New Wave movement he works within, and works to dismantle.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Obit
    It is modest, observant, graceful and nonchalantly witty.
  59. Finding Oscar
    The barbarity described in Finding Oscar is stomach-turning, but moments of courage still shine through in this unsettling yet vital documentary.
  60. Lucky
    The accumulation of spot-on performances and long-familiar faces, small-town routines and dusty-worn locations, finally coalesces into a picture that’s greater than the sum of its oft-clichéd parts.
  61. Urban Hymn
    If Urban Hymn starts with that familiar dynamic, it stays surprisingly fresh thanks to three fine performances and a willingness to be uncompromising.
  62. 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.
  63. Score: A Film Music Documentary
    In 1993, the documentary “Visions of Light” won critical love for its overview of Hollywood’s classic cinematographers. Matt Schrader’s tidy and informative “Score” lavishes similar adoration on moviedom’s great composers.
  64. Leaning Into the Wind
    Because time erases or alters Mr. Goldsworthy’s sculptures, movies are the ideal medium to capture them.... The surprise of Leaning Into the Wind is that it’s just as concerned with how time has changed Mr. Goldsworthy.
  65. Flower
    Cruelly amoral and only marginally credible, Flower is nevertheless wildly entertaining and at times even touching.
  66. The Public Image Is Rotten
    Even if you’ve scratched your head over Mr. Lydon’s TV ad work and other efforts to maintain a professional life in recent years, this affectionate and frank movie can elicit newfound admiration for a slightly mellowed iconoclast.
  67. A River Below
    The truth turns into a tangled mess in A River Below, a bold and urgent documentary whose seemingly straightforward story quickly runs awry.
  68. Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS
    A mostly impressive array of experts (including, in the movie’s one unfortunate off note, Michael T. Flynn, who was forced to resign as national security adviser) adds to the merciless clarity of this tragic picture.
  69. Sweet Virginia
    A twisty, small-town thriller that blooms in the shadows and shies from the light, “Sweet Virginia” marshals a relentlessly threatening mood from dangerous secrets and unpleasant surprises.
  70. Keep the Change
    Keep the Change is not a seamlessly crafted movie, but it’s awfully tenderhearted and thoroughly disarming. It deserves to be widely seen.
  71. Angkor Awakens: A Portrait of Cambodia
    The graphic evidence here, in testimony on camera and in period photographs, is absolutely harrowing.
  72. Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower
    Amid the fight, there’s a sense of hope as we watch one tough kid turning into one tough man. With luck, that will lead to a sequel.
  73. Icaros: A Vision
    You may find this sparse film maddeningly elusive, but chances are you’ll come out of it with your head spinning, in a good way.
  74. Buena Vista Social Club: Adios
    It’s not as poetic or immediately enjoyable as the first film. But it is tougher and more analytical, with real challenges embedded in its pleasures.
  75. Midnight Cowboy
    Midnight Cowboy often seems to be exploiting its material for sensational or comic effect, but it is ultimately a moving experience that captures the quality of a time and a place. It's not a movie for the ages, but, having seen it, you won't ever again feel detached as you walk down West 42d Street, avoiding the eyes of the drifters, stepping around the little islands of hustlers, and closing your nostrils to the smell of rancid griddles.
  76. Tehran Taboo
    Subtlety and aesthetic elegance — the jerky animation complements the blunt tone — are not among the film’s virtues. Tehran Taboo aims to expose systemic hypocrisy; in that respect, it is brisk and bracing.
  77. Let the Sunshine In
    Ms. Binoche, effortlessly charismatic and ruthlessly unvain, has no investment in the character’s likability. She and Ms. Denis could not care less what you think of her. Let the Sunshine In commits itself to taking Isabelle on her own terms. The challenge, for her and for the audience, is to figure out what those terms are.
  78. Hermia & Helena
    The film belongs to Ms. Muñoz. She’s the kind of performer (like Setsuko Hara, the Japanese actress to whom the film is dedicated) you can’t take your eyes off, even when she doesn’t seem to be up to much of anything.
  79. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc
    “Jeannette” throws the modern back at the medieval, making no distinction between religious ecstasy and that experienced in certain contemporary contexts of music and ritual. It’s a provocative proposition that yields a film of genuine spiritual dimension.
  80. Before We Vanish
    Mr. Kurosawa, a prolific and skilled genre master, spins this parable with a light, nimble touch, punctuating heavy passages of exposition with punchy, modest action sequences and snatches of incongruously bouncy music.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    High Anxiety
    As witty and as disciplined as "Young Frankenstein," though it has one built-in problem: Hitchcock himself is a very funny man. His films, even at their most terrifying and most suspenseful, are full of jokes shared with the audience. Being so self-aware, Hitchcock's films deny an easy purchase to the parodist, especially one who admires his subject the way Mr. Brooks does.
  82. Cool Runnings
    A cute, buoyant sports fantasy, jolted along by a reggae soundtrack and playfully acted by an appealing cast. This new Disney comedy is slick, funny and warmhearted, very much in the old-fashioned Disney mode.
  83. The Rider
    Ms. Zhao’s commitment to her craft — she knows how to take care and when to take risks — matches Brady’s. She has an eye for landscape and an acute sensitivity to the nuances of storytelling, a bold, exacting vision that makes The Rider exceptional among recent American regional-realist films.
  84. A Ciambra
    Mr. Carpignano has a shrewd sense not only of the character’s psychology, but also of the audience’s expectations, and our tendency to confuse realism with magical thinking.
  85. Unrest
    It powerfully insists on giving a voice to victims whose greatest challenge, apart from their symptoms, is surmounting a world of indifference.
  86. Dolores
    Peter Bratt, the director, uses an immense amount of historical footage and interviews, arranged with clarity.
  87. What's Eating Gilbert Grape
    Particularly impressive are the sweet, weirdly idyllic tone of Mr. Hallstrom's direction and Johnny Depp's tender, disarming performance as the long-suffering Gilbert Grape.
  88. Blow Out
    Yet more important than anything else about Blow Out is its total, complete and utter preoccupation with film itself as a medium in which, as Mr. De Palma has said along with a number of other people, style really is content.
  89. Night School
    The result is a movie about large setbacks and small triumphs, and the grit that takes you from one to the other.
  90. Moonraker
    Moonraker begins with one of the funniest and most dangerous (as well as most beautifully photographed and edited) sequences Bond has ever faced.
  91. Moka
    The movie’s climax has sufficient twists and turns for a conventional payoff. But the movie, adapted from a novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, is ultimately more concerned with the genuinely tragic dimensions of the story than its suspense angles.
  92. Cat's Eye
    Cat's Eye is pop movie making of an extremely clever, stylish and satisfying order.
  93. Cujo
    As directed by Lewis Teague, Cujo is by no means a horror classic, but it's suspenseful and scary. The performances are simple and effective, particularly Miss Wallace's. And Danny Pintauro does a good job as the frightened child.
  94. Firestarter
    A good, stylish mixture of the kind of hokey horror and science-fiction elements in which Mr. King specializes.
  95. Hampstead
    Overall, the lively, unfussy Hampstead goes down easy.
  96. Village of the Damned
    Mr. Carpenter gives this formerly black and white story a handsome color retelling and a lot of new punch. And he avidly exploits the fears that are at its heart. Now add a new one. With its baleful little villains, Village of the Damned is even creepier to watch as a parent than it was to see as a child.
  97. Bill Nye: Science Guy
    In the film Bill Nye: Science Guy, Mr. Nye, the 1990s children’s-television personality with the signature bow tie, warns of “an anti-science movement” afoot in this country. And this delightful, revealing documentary, directed by David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg, offers evidence supporting that assessment.
  98. The Rose
    BY the time you realize what's wrong with "The Rose," it will have you hooked anyhow...The Rose has an earnest, affecting character at its core. Even at its most preposterous, it never feels like a fraud.
  99. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
    At its best, which it frequently is, it's a lunatic ball, an extremely genial, witty example of what is becoming a movie genre all its own.
  100. Thunderball
    [Bond] also has a much better sense of humor than he has shown in his previous films. And this is the secret ingredient that makes Thunderball the best of the lot.
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