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. Little Monsters
    The charismatic Nyong’o is easily the best part of this feeble Australian horror comedy.
  2. The King
    What Michôd never manages to make clear is what we are to make of this version’s nationalism, its glorification of war, its ambivalence toward corrupting power and its selective, finally misguided attempt to brush off Shakespeare.
  3. Emanuel
    The movie is primarily an act of bearing witness that does not ask to be judged on conventional filmmaking terms.
  4. Mary
    Narrative ellipses and a slew of visual clichés — like vague shapes, ghostly footprints and disorienting flashes of light — make Mary (the name shared by the ship and the couple’s younger daughter) a particularly unsatisfying possession yarn.
  5. Fantastic Fungi
    A charming blend of science and conjecture, Fantastic Fungi wants to free your mind.
  6. Lucky Day
    If you’re one of those people who believes the Tarantino of today still needs to “grow up,” this movie will provide an oblique but vivid insight into how much worse things might have been.
  7. The Sky Is Pink
    The fantasy of The Sky Is Pink is that Aisha’s death allows her to see her mother with adoring omniscience, and the film is never more pleasing than when it revels in the glamorous melodrama of a superstar performing motherhood.
  8. In My Room
    Abetted by Patrick Orth’s careful, almost obsessively calm camerawork, Köhler has concocted an uncommonly subtle and deliberately ambiguous work, one that’s delicately rewarding, if you meet it halfway.
  9. Gemini Man
    The idea of confronting an unknown second self is full of rich, uncanny potential — there’s a literary tradition going back at least to Edgar Allan Poe — but Gemini Man squanders it, along with what might have been two interesting performances.
  10. Pain and Glory
    A great deal happens in Pain and Glory, just not ritualistically and not at top volume. Its agonies are tempered, its regrets hushed, its restraint powerful.
  11. Memory: The Origins of Alien
    While it is generally engaging to learn about the influences of the screenwriter Dan O’Bannon or the artistic process of H.R. Giger (who designed the alien), the documentary is at its least fawning when it focuses on technique.
  12. Lucy in the Sky
    It’s a dispiriting mess and waste of talent, sunk by a lack of focus, misguided choices and insistently unproductive, at times incoherent clashing tones.
  13. Cuck
    If you want to make a movie that argues for stricter gun laws, or more conscientious nationwide mental health care, by all means go ahead. But this kind of morbid, witless scab-picking, capped by an oh-so-ironic choice of closing credits song, is worse than useless.
  14. In the Tall Grass
    Natali whips up an atmospheric frenzy in kind, but every new addition is a subtraction. Two characters condemned to an eternal game of “Marco Polo” is scary enough on its own.
  15. Joker
    To be worth arguing about, a movie must first of all be interesting: it must have, if not a coherent point of view, at least a worked-out, thought-provoking set of themes, some kind of imaginative contact with the world as we know it. Joker, an empty, foggy exercise in second-hand style and second-rate philosophizing, has none of that.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Harder They Come
    The largely amateur cast of black performers and their producer-director may be involved in basically simple action fare in The Harder They Come, but they also leave a slightly disturbing, documentary impression of the darker side of the sunny Jamaica.
  17. Celebration
    Saint Laurent was essential to 20th-century culture, and Celebration shows the inevitable fading of glory as well as the enduring features of his life’s work.
  18. Dolemite Is My Name
    It has a loose, friendly, house-party vibe, and it’s impossible not to have a good time watching the actors have a good time with one another. If there’s a problem, it’s that the good humor has the effect of lowering the film’s dramatic stakes, and risks turning its cultural reference points into cartoons.
  19. The Pretenders
    As nostalgic twaddle goes, “Me and Phil and the New Wave Girl” (I mean Pretenders) initially feels like an innocuous treatment of the joys and sorrows of cinephilia and young love. The sort of thing concocted by men whose collegiate experience taught them little beyond how to turn self-serving reminiscences into middling indie movies. Soon, though, it descends into several discrete modes of misogyny.
  20. The Irishman
    A monument is a complicated thing. This one is big and solid — and also surprisingly, surpassingly delicate.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    In the Shadow of the Moon
    The film is never less than engaging, and it’s just about always clever.
  22. Sink or Swim
    A gentle, genial dip into a pool of midlife despair.
  23. The Day Shall Come
    A circular firing-squad of full-on crazy, Chris Morris’s The Day Shall Come barges into American counterterrorism tactics with sledgehammer satire and a numbingly repetitive plot.
  24. Sister Aimee
    A weird, erratic and occasionally insightful experiment that, unlike its indefatigable star, never quite finds its zing.
  25. The Golden Glove
    Akin may deserve credit for not flinching from the grotesque; other serial-killer-adjacent entertainments, like “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Zodiac” or “Mindhunter,” tend to concentrate on the cerebral mechanics of crime solving. But sordid details, undermined by snickers, aren’t in themselves illuminating.
  26. 10 Minutes Gone
    The title of this movie proves unusually apt: You will figure out its climactic plot twist within the first 10 minutes.
  27. Jim Allison: Breakthrough
    Documentaries about innovative figures don’t always offer correspondingly innovative filmmaking. But even coloring within the lines of conventional biographical storytelling, Jim Allison: Breakthrough provides an accessible introduction to James P. Allison.
  28. Abominable
    Abominable is an exceptionally watchable and amiable animated tale.
  29. The Death of Dick Long
    The Death of Dick Long, until it meanders into a semisincere dramatic dimension, manages to pack in a good number of laughs for a significant amount of time.
  30. First Love
    Miike’s seemingly offhand inventiveness is evident in almost every shot and cut.
  31. Anthropocene: The Human Epoch
    As a work of cinema, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch can seem a bit torn in its approach, caught between a desire to spread a message to mainstream viewers and more cryptic, artistic aims. At times, more information would be preferable; in other scenes, images speak volumes without words. But as advocacy, the movie is potent and frequently terrifying.
  32. Judy
    Mostly, Judy offers the familiar spectacle of one star playing another. Zellweger’s performance is credible, with agitated flutters and filigreed touches, though it leans hard on Judy’s tremulous fragility, as if she were a panicked hummingbird. The take is also cautious, too comfortable; it never makes you flinch or look away.
  33. The Laundromat
    Soderbergh and his top-notch cast (Sharon Stone shows up, as do Jeffrey Wright and Matthias Schoenaerts) keep things lively, playing out parables of betrayal and deception with pulpy, TV-movie flair.
  34. Between Two Ferns: The Movie
    Some promising ideas and characters are introduced, but the narrative is so superfluous, the connecting segments so fleeting, that little is fleshed out.
  35. Always in Season
    Olive weaves these stories together with fluidity and purpose, but the ideas of Always in Season sometimes crowd one another out.
  36. Downton Abbey
    From its spectacularly detailed aesthetic to the characters’ march down well-worn personality paths, Downton Abbey argues insistently for the status quo.
  37. Ad Astra
    Ad Astra is unambiguously a film of its moment, one about a man’s struggle for personal meaning and a place in the world in a time of fallen fathers.
  38. Britt-Marie Was Here
    Britt-Marie Was Here is a relatively unchallenging yet ultimately pleasant watch.
  39. Zeroville
    A raft of marquee names — including Seth Rogen, James Franco and Will Ferrell — can’t save Zeroville, a maddeningly surreal head trip through Hollywood history and movie-fan insanity.
  40. Diego Maradona
    It is exhausting and exhilarating, cheap looking and slick, a documentary for Maradona fans but also for many others besides.
  41. Villains
    Despite some committed performances, particularly from a refreshingly natural Maika Monroe, Villains is a hackneyed farce rich in gimmicks and poor in substance.
  42. Corporate Animals
    If what you’re looking for are vulgar cartoons based on facile social stereotypes being awful to each other, Corporate Animals will fill the bill.
  43. Where's My Roy Cohn?
    Where’s My Roy Cohn?” is most interesting for the questions it doesn’t explicitly ask. Those have to do with not with Cohn’s blatant amorality, but with the moral compromises of the elite who tolerated his company and found uses for his talents.
  44. Loro
    In some ways Berlusconi, a media mogul and cruise-ship crooner in earlier phases of his career, a creature of appetite and excess, is Sorrentino’s ideal subject. But the overlap in their sensibilities turns Loro into a blurry, distracted, sentimental portrait.
  45. Rambo: Last Blood
    While the killings (replete with beheadings, dismemberments and more) are zestfully depicted — the director Adrian Grunberg has a way with pace and bloody impact to be sure — the picture overall is rote, mechanical.
  46. Tall Girl
    A big problem is that the students are all affluent and status-obsessed, but the film has no temperament for self-examination: Instead of a John Hughes-style satire of class and social divides — not that acute here, to begin with — we get an uncritical depiction of homogeneous entitlement.
  47. Midnight Traveler
    What largely distinguishes Midnight Traveler is its anxious intimacy, a sense of uneasy closeness that pulls you into a family circle that at times gets very small, creating a sense of appropriate claustrophobia.
  48. América
    This is an exemplary, moving, show-don’t-tell record of family tenacity.
  49. Redistribution
    If evacuating cinema means engaging with the medium’s properties in only the silliest ways — mismatching subtitles with images and voices with speakers — Price certainly does that.
  50. Freaks
    Appealing, partly because it’s so unembarrassed by its genre's done-to-death social-injustice themes, this undercooked blend of science fiction and family drama virtually dares you to turn up your nose.
  51. Moonlight Sonata: Deafness in Three Movements
    The film’s deaf subjects feel creatively and philosophically shortchanged.
  52. Cracked Up
    Hammond, who describes his face as so bland that it becomes a canvas for so many others, emerges as a riveting, eccentric character: Fragile, lyrical and haunted, like a doomed figure out of Tennessee Williams.
  53. American Dreamer
    Not even a month after the John Travolta travesty “The Fanatic” seemed to have secured the title of Worst Film of 2019, up comes this movie to overtake it. By several lengths.
  54. Ms. Purple
    Ms. Purple is a moody, downbeat drama soaked in color and saturated with sadness.
  55. Another Day of Life
    It uses animation to depict a conflict in fresh dimensions.
  56. Depraved
    Making the most of his limited budget, not unusual for the prolific Fessenden, he has produced possibly his most coherent and visually polished work to date. The makeup effects and lead performances are excellent, and Fessenden’s signature cheek (two strip-club employees are called Stormy and Melania) never tips into silliness.
  57. The Sound of Silence
    The Sound of Silence wants to be heard, but, in the end, doesn’t have much to say.
  58. Monos
    It’s frustrating to see such a sophisticated cinematic apparatus used in the service of such muddled half-ideas.
  59. Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins
    While cuddling up to the adored one is a familiar biographical tactic, some critical distance might have made for a deeper, stronger movie.
  60. Chained for Life
    Schimberg’s film is odd, darkly funny and — when it means to be — a little frightening.
  61. The Goldfinch
    It looks and sounds like a movie without quite being one. It’s more like a Pinterest page or a piece of fan art, the record of an enthusiasm that is, to the outside observer, indistinguishable from confusion.
  62. Hustlers
    The spirit of Hustlers is so insistently affirmative and celebratory that all kinds of interesting matters are left unexplored.
  63. I'm Leaving Now
    A close-range film about distance, the short, poignant documentary “I’m Leaving Now” unfolds like a character study.
  64. Satanic Panic
    The comedy-horror film Satanic Panic is the kind of movie that revels in the details of eviscerations and demonic orgies. With jovial bad taste and a bag of gruesome tricks, the director Chelsea Stardust cheerfully invites her audience to hail Satan.
  65. Promise at Dawn
    The movie looks and sounds great, but greatness and depth elude it.
  66. Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice
    The political intelligence and matter-of-fact feminism that emerge in this portrait are among its most intriguing aspects. Her cleareyed, down-to-earth thoughts on her profession, her family and American culture (musical and otherwise) make her someone you want to know better.
  67. Heading Home: The Tale of Team Israel
    "Heading Home” is not a movie with much interest in geopolitics. It roots, roots, roots for its home team — and does little more.
  68. Blink of an Eye
    The interactions between these real-life characters are here recalled with fondness and rue by the surviving participants. Taublieb’s approach is straightforward, but also a little pedestrian.
  69. Edie
    Hancock is wasted here, as are the meaty dramatic threads that Elizabeth O’Halloran’s formulaic screenplay never bothers to pull.
  70. Night Hunter
    Caught between a hero with no personality and a villain with way too much (Fletcher’s slobbering performance has to be seen to be believed), Raymond comforts himself with shots of people gazing pensively at clues and pulling grisly things from drains.
  71. Strange But True
    The tale is a jolting one, and the superb players do justice to the emotional distress of its characters. But a surer directorial hand might have yielded a more resonant experience.
  72. Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken!
    The movie is at its most engaging when examining the near-monopolies controlling chicken farmers in the United States.
  73. Jinn
    Jinn may end a little too neatly after challenging so many of the conventions of its genre, but it’s easy enough to look past.
  74. Ága
    The movie’s truth is presumably meant to rest in its emotions, in the spilled tears of its characters, but the only things at stake here are the cozy sniffles of the art-film patron.
  75. It: Chapter Two
    This 2-hour-49-minute movie drags more than it jumps, wearing out its premise and possibly also your patience as it lumbers toward the final showdown. Along the way there is some fun — some scares, some warm feelings, some inventive ickiness — to be found.
  76. Saaho
    The movie is crisply, sometimes stylishly shot (Madhie did the cinematography), but it’s too muddled to be slick and too lacking in charm to establish any emotional stakes.
  77. The Banana Splits Movie
    More of a raspberry than a reboot, The Banana Splits Movie, available to buy (and later to rent) on multiple digital platforms, is far less crazy than it wants to be and far more soporific than a synopsis would suggest.
  78. Ne Zha
    A computer-animated feature of bright hues, hectic action and only occasional charm.
  79. Killerman
    The result might feel overlong and overwrought; yet thanks to Bader’s clever plotting and fruity dialogue — as well as strong supporting players — this grimy picture climaxes more satisfyingly than expected.
  80. The Fanatic
    As it lumbers to its climax, the movie delineates the border that separates the merely stale from the genuinely rancid. For all the heavy lifting The Fanatic does, it winds up on the weaker side of the divide.
  81. Angel of Mine
    Rapace’s jangly, one-note performance is rendered bearable by Yvonne Strahovski’s warmly natural turn as Lola’s increasingly furious mother.
  82. Before You Know It
    There are a good number of funny and pointed individual scenes and bit parts here (Alec Baldwin is droll as an inept therapist).
  83. The Load
    The gray skies under which Glavonic shoots, the unhurried takes in which he chronicles the drive, they put us with Vlada in an unmitigated way, the better to compel viewers to ask themselves what they would do in his position.
  84. Falling Inn Love
    The movie becomes a cavalcade of tired gags — less com than rom.
  85. Don't Let Go
    You get lost in its thickets because Estes hasn’t wholly figured out how to make toying with time work. But he has a fine cast and a good sense of place, including a feel for the spookiness of emptied-out spaces, and he makes his conspicuously low budget work for the near-claustrophobic intimacy.
  86. Official Secrets
    The director Gavin Hood, who wrote the script with Sara Bernstein and Gregory Bernstein, fits the pieces together coherently, no small thing given the complications. But the characters are malnourished and Hood’s attempts to build suspense often fall flat because he leans hard on genre conventions, on dark shadows, ominous music and abrupt sounds straight from a horror flick.
  87. The Miracle of the Little Prince
    The Miracle of the Little Prince seems to have been made from the supposition that too many discussions of grammar or syntax might bore viewers. Even so, the platitudes are worse. A stronger movie might have dug more deeply into the languages it wishes to save.
  88. Hot Air
    The film feints at comedy with background gags and an occasional broad performance or two, but it’s primarily a dramatic story — and not a focused one at that.
  89. No Place Like Home (2006)
    The picture abounds with amazing landscapes and trenchant but quietly articulated commentaries on tourism and Jamaica’s other economies, or lack thereof, in this era.
  90. Give Me Liberty
    Give Me Liberty is a jolt of a movie, at once kinetic and controlled. It’s an anarchic deadpan comedy that evolves into a romance just around the time the story explodes. It has moments of unembellished realism as well as a fictional story line that runs through the bedlam.
  91. Jawline
    A “Grey Gardens” for Generation Z, Jawline underscores the contrast between Austyn’s optimism and his drab surroundings.
  92. Genèse (Genesis)
    The film may be maddening as a character study, and it could damage an ionizer with its air of self-importance, but its experiments in form and tone are highly original.
  93. Vita & Virginia
    Vita & Virginia takes a passionate, real-life affair between two enormously gifted writers and proceeds to throttle the life out of it.
  94. Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool
    More than a few moments here are new, and real grabbers.
  95. Brittany Runs A Marathon
    Bell imbues Brittany with humanity and wit, but all too frequently she is working within the framework of a story that seems hellbent on robbing her character of joy.
  96. Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles
    Some shows deserve reverential treatment. And the love letter is, to use a word so associated with this show it influences the way many say it, tradition.
  97. Friedkin Uncut
    The documentary also reminds viewers of why Friedkin has earned this tribute. For all his career ups and downs, he has remained devoted to making genuinely challenging and exciting work, and has succeeded more often than not. The documentary serves as a strong incitement to dig into it.
  98. Angel Has Fallen
    "The Fugitive,” to which “Angel” owes perhaps even its rooftop finale, is a template against which this movie inevitably falls short.
  99. American Factory
    Complex, stirring, timely and beautifully shaped.
  100. Ready or Not
    It’s Weaving who gives this blunt satire of class warfare a heart.
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