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. Some Kind of Heaven
    Oppenheim resists easy misanthropy, showing unexpected empathy for people who have cocooned themselves from the outside world, only to confront its headaches anyway.
  2. All This Panic
    All This Panic can feel glancing, its more painful revelations sliding in unheralded and slipping away just as quietly. What’s left is a dreamy diary of a time that passes so quickly yet impacts so profoundly.
  3. From Afar
    In withholding biographical information about the characters, the movie supplies just enough material to prompt you to fill in the blanks.
  4. Matewan
    There's not a weak performance in the film, but I especially admired the work of Mr. Cooper, Mr. Tighe, Miss McDonnell, Miss Mette, Mr. Gunton, Mr. Strathairn and Mr. Mostel. They may be playing Social-Realist icons, but each manages to make something personal and idiosyncratic out of the material, without destroying the ballad-like style.
  5. Roxanne
    A thoroughly pleasant, down-to-earth romantic comedy that never entirely takes flight, though it picks up immeasurably whenever Mr. Martin is on screen.
  6. Tangerines
    The film, beautifully shot and cleanly edited, has the economy of a short story, unfolding in a mood of slightly sentimental masculine stoicism.
  7. The Surrogate
    The Surrogate feels like the vexed progeny of an elevator pitch and an ethics advice column.
  8. Beba
    Beba is profound. The filmmaker delves into all of who she is, including darker or more destructive aspects of her identity, pushing viewers to see Huntt’s complexity — and perhaps their own.
  9. 1945
    Absorbing and finely wrought, 1945 is not perfect.
  10. On the Rocks
    In the past, Coppola’s embrace of ambiguity could feel like a dodge, a way of evading meaning. But in On the Rocks, a wistful and lovely story about finally coming of age, there’s nothing ambiguous about how she makes us see a woman too long lost in life’s shadow.
  11. Red Road
    In the arresting Red Road, the dire Orwellian warning that Big Brother is watching has evolved from a grim fantasy of totalitarianism into a banal fact of life.
  12. Malcolm X
    Mr. Lee means for Malcolm X to be an epic, and it is in its concerns and its physical scope. In Denzel Washington it also has a fine actor who does for Malcolm X what Ben Kingsley did for “Gandhi.” [18 November 1992]
    • The New York Times
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fantastic Planet
    This is highly engrossing science-fiction, a French-Czechoslovak co-production in animation.
  14. Final Destination: Bloodlines
    There’s not much more a “Final Destination” fan could ask for, but “Bloodlines” — which at times feel more like a dark satire than a straightforward horror movie — reminds us we’re powerless against the world’s morbid whims. Best we can do is laugh about it.
  15. Palm Trees and Power Lines
    Dack takes obvious care to make sure that the filmmaking and camerawork don’t further exploit the character. Yet it’s a bummer that the ethical and political thoughtfulness that she extends during Lea’s most harrowingly vulnerable moments doesn’t extend to the rest of the movie.
  16. 4 Days in France
    While Mr. Reybaud has exemplary artistic confidence and an interesting vision, this is a movie that in many ways defines or justifies the “not for everybody” critical hedge.
  17. Into the Wild
    Though the film’s structure may be tragic, its spirit is anything but.
  18. Miss Juneteenth
    Instead of just depicting the myriad ways black women carry their communities, the movie goes further to explore how these women and black girls support each other in a world that often fails them.
  19. 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.
  20. Unicorn Wars
    Unicorn Wars is forcefully provocative, trying too hard to push buttons at the cost of more nuanced explorations of masculinity and power. For Vázquez, a pile of cartoon corpses makes enough of a point.
  21. The Party
    The Party is a brittle, unfunny attempt at comedy that features some very fine actors and a lot of empty chatter.
  22. A Scanner Darkly
    Rotoscoping makes certain sense for a film about cognitive dissonance and alternative realities, though both the vocal and gestural performances by Mr. Reeves, Mr. Harrelson and, in particular, the wonderful Mr. Downey make me wish that we were watching them in live action.
  23. Cropsey
    Its straggling, true-crime narrative, leaping hither and yon like a dog chasing butterflies, is not what holds the film together; the real glue is the emergence of a parallel between location and suspect, between literal dumping ground and figurative. This is so effective that there was no need for the directors to conduct a handheld, "Blair Witch"-y foray into the nighttime woods -- their film is creepy enough in broad daylight.
  24. The Great Man
    The filmmaker Sarah Leonor has a keen eye and a gentle, unassuming touch. In The Great Man, she discreetly changes moods and storytelling modes like a pianist sliding her hand down a short, soft glissando.
  25. Olympic Pride, American Prejudice
    [A] deft and comprehensive documentary.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    One Way Passage
    In its uncouth, brusque and implausible fashion "One Way Passage," a pictorial comedy drama which arrived at the Warners' Strand last night, offers quite a satisfactory entertainment.
  27. The House of the Devil
    Mr. West shows a real gift for the genre, particularly in his ability to generate dread with pinpricks rather than bludgeoning shocks, something even veterans twice his age have difficulty achieving. After years of vivisectionist splatter, here is a horror movie with real shivers.
  28. The Dinner Game
    The Dinner Game, which Veber wrote and directed, is one of his better-constructed comedies of errors.
  29. The Iron Claw
    There’s pleasure and meaning in the sons’ roughhousing and camaraderie, as well as beauty, heat and melancholy in their heartbreakingly fleeting physical perfection. Yet as the story’s uglier side emerges, Durkin hedges.
  30. Red Cliff
    While handsome and intelligent and perfectly easy to sit through, never really approaches the visceral tug of Mr. Woo’s Hong Kong hits.
  31. Cool and Crazy
    Consistently offbeat and entertaining; at such moments, it is also quite moving.
  32. Chisholm '72: Unbought & Unbossed
    Ultimately, the adored candidate looks as if she were really running for posterity, not for the presidency - a noble, lesser accomplishment.
  33. The Limey
    Among Soderbergh's widely varied films ("sex, lies and videotape," "Kafka," "The Underneath," "Schizopolis," "Out of Sight"), this one actually has the best chance of becoming anyone's sentimental favorite.
  34. Behind the Sun
    The blend of grim violence with romantic whimsy tilts toward sentimentality. Mr. Salles has the confidence of a storyteller too entranced by his tale to worry about the resistance of his audience, which he thus effortlessly overcomes.
  35. Show Me Love
    The film has some charm and a winning simplicity but not an iota of depth.
  36. My Terrorist
    The movie's disparate voices coalesce here as an emotionally charged microcosm of the conflict.
  37. 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.
  38. A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks
    Perhaps no one documentary can do justice to Parks. But “Choice of Weapons” ends up streamlining his complexity, and its wind-down looks past his other audiovisual output.
  39. Yannick
    Dupieux’s fans will be happy to know that his surreal humor is gloriously intact, while newcomers might find in this movie a gateway into one of contemporary cinema’s most idiosyncratic universes.
  40. The Tale of King Crab
    The movie’s depictions of landscapes both sere and fertile, and its all-but-palpable portrayals of isolation, have echoes of the best work of Werner Herzog and Lucrecia Martel. But de Righi and Zoppis here show more genuine affinity than affected influence; they’re moviemakers worth keeping an eye on.
  41. Rust and Bone
    Rust and Bone is a strong, emotionally replete experience, and also a tour de force of directorial button pushing. Mr. Audiard is a canny showman, adept at manipulating the audience's feelings and expectations with quick edits and well-chosen songs.
  42. Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America
    It’s a confrontational film, but never an alienating one, and so much of what’s in it is persuasive.
  43. Woodstock 99: Peace Love and Rage
    Much of the footage is hair-raising, especially the women being groped and the mobs of young white men whipping themselves into a frenzy of aggressive stupidity, aimless anger and turbo-boosted misogyny. This is these dudes’ coming-of-age as an aggrieved demographic, and it’s frightening.
  44. Inland Empire
    One of the few films I've seen this year that deserves to be called art. Dark as pitch, as noir, as hate, by turns beautiful and ugly, funny and horrifying, the film is also as cracked as Mad magazine, though generally more difficult to parse.
  45. The Rape of Recy Taylor
    The miracle, though, is that the movie isn’t a diatribe. Its voices...are gentle and persuasive, using the horrific details of the rape and its aftermath as ballast to stabilize a heart-wrenching history of systemic injustice.
  46. Eye in the Sky
    A grim, suspenseful farce in which unpredictable human behavior repeatedly threatens an operation of astounding technological sophistication.
  47. Kiki
    Kiki shows us a group of brave and beautiful souls for whom the struggle is, unfortunately, probably about to get even harder.
  48. The Illinois Parables
    The Illinois Parables is not, strictly speaking, an educational film, but it conveys a unique and precious kind of knowledge.
  49. Concrete Utopia
    Smoothly shaping familiar genre tropes into a brutal study of class warfare and the stifling of pity, the director, Um Tae-hwa (who wrote the script with Lee Shin-ji), makes human kindness the first casualty of social disorder.
  50. Down in the Delta
    The movie, which often threatens to disappear into a tub of soapsuds, is elevated immeasurably by the calm, stately performances of Mary Alice and Mr. Freeman.
  51. Frantz
    Frantz takes pains to show both sides’ lingering hostility after a devastating and (the movie implies) senseless war.
  52. Val
    More a self-portrait than a profile, Val tells the story of a Hollywood career with a candor that stops short of revelation. The tone is personal but not quite intimate, producing in the viewer a warm, slightly wary feeling of companionship.
  53. The Fight
    If the filmmakers succeed in wringing drama from decisions that have already come down, their efforts at character development are hit-and-miss.
  54. All About Lily Chou-Chou
    Much of All About Lily Chou-Chou is mesmerizing: some of its plaintiveness could make you weep. If only Mr. Iwai trusted the material enough.
  55. Robin's Wish
    As potentially valuable as Robin’s Wish is for illuminating Williams’s death — initial reports noted his past struggles with addiction and depression — it is more affecting and appealing as a tribute. Stories of Williams as a matchless improviser, an unpretentious neighbor and a man who had a gift for consoling others suggest the world lost not just an uproarious presence but a kind one.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wordplay
    Whatever the documentary's flaws, the filmmakers should be saluted for giving us a rare glimpse of life in these trenches.
  57. Cheech and Chong's Last Movie
    The documentary doesn’t quite cover everything — their collaborations with Joni Mitchell and Martin Scorsese go unmentioned, for example. This is still a rollicking account that will make even non-herbally-inclined viewers root for the fellows.
  58. Like Father, Like Son
    Mr. Hirokazu never overly explains his stories through the dialogue, preferring to tease out their meaning visually.
  59. 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.
  60. Night Owls
    The performances are so crackling that you can imagine Ms. Salazar and Mr. Pally, given richer material, becoming a slapstick comedy team: the spitfire and the nerd.
  61. Filmworker
    The material about Kubrick’s process is finally more interesting than the discussions about his temperament.
  62. The Silence of Others
    Informative, if not always as specific as it might have been.
  63. Major Barbara
    This is something more than just a brilliant and adult translation of a stimulating play, something more than a captivating compound of ironic humor and pity. This is a lasting memorial to the devotion of artists working under fire, a permanent proof for posterity that it takes more than bombs to squelch the English wit.
  64. Marked Woman
    Marked Woman could easily have become a maudlin piece. It totters every now and then on the brink of bathos and of melodramatic hokum. But invariably it is snatched back by Lloyd Bacon's direction or by the honesty of its players.
  65. She Will
    Blending sensuous imagery with jabs of feminist wit — at one point, a vibrator is weaponized against a male intruder — Colbert sends her heroine on a transformative journey of revenge and renewal.
  66. Queen of Katwe
    In Ms. Nair’s hands, Phiona’s story has a richness and unpredictability that separates it from other, superficially similar movies. It also has the buoyant, cleareyed feel for the particulars of culture and place that is among this director’s great gifts.
  67. Werewolf
    The performers don’t seem like they’re acting at all, which contributes to the film’s unsettling power. The elliptical narrative structure articulates a sad truth of the addict’s life concerning both the challenge and the tedium of making it through to the next fix.
  68. Pop Aye
    They make a funny pair, by turns amusing and puzzling, though also melancholic and touching. For the most part, these variations seem by design in a movie that flirts with assorted narrative conventions and fluctuating moods without ever settling into a familiar template.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Time
    Mr. Kim flips between soapy melodrama and dry, self-aware comedy. The effect is thrilling and disorienting, like walking on a trampoline.
  70. A Field in England
    The actors are uniformly impressive, and Mr. Wheatley’s longtime cinematographer, Laurie Rose, shooting in black and white, combines stunning pastoral compositions with bursts of graphic violence punctuated by blazing flintlocks.
  71. I'm Not There.
    Among its many achievements, Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There hurls a Molotov cocktail through the facade of the Hollywood biopic factory.
  72. Of Mice and Men
    Yet for all its evident talent, Of Mice and Men is not very exciting. It could be that looking back at Lennie and George with the perspective of time robs them of their urgency. There's no surprise left.
  73. Wham!
    Nothing here’s overthought or pumped up. To invoke the words of a different beacon of catchiness, “Wham!” is a teenage dream. You could drink it from a coconut.
  74. Inside Out 2
    Franchises often bank on nostalgia, so it’s easy to fall for “Inside Out 2,” which works largely because the first one does wonderfully well. The new movie conforms to the original’s ethos as well as inventive template, its conceit and visual design, so its pleasures are agreeably familiar.
  75. The Proposition
    The cast of The Proposition is reason enough to see the film.
  76. Himalaya
    Somehow, in spite of the stunning vistas and some witty and affecting moments, the story seems to unfold at a distance; the human drama is diminished by the setting rather than amplified by it.
  77. Water Drops on Burning Rocks
    A brilliant satire of emotional politics.
  78. The Son's Room
    The movie's rejection of even a tinge of melodrama lends it a special integrity.
  79. Derrida
    The adoring and adorable documentary on the philosopher Jacques Derrida.
  80. The Man Who Wasn't There
    The Coens have used the noir idiom to fashion a haunting, beautifully made movie that refers to nothing outside itself and that disperses like a vapor as soon as it's over.
  81. The Bourne Supremacy
    This is high-speed action realism carried off with the dexterity of a magician pulling a hundred rabbits out of a hat in one graceful gesture. The crowning flourish is an extended car chase through the streets and tunnels of Moscow that ranks as one of the three or four most exciting demolition derbies ever filmed.
  82. You Don't Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantanamo
    Painfully stark yet utterly magnetic, You Don't Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo presents excerpts from the 2003 interrogation of the 16-year-old Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen accused of killing an American soldier during a firefight in an Afghan village.
  83. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
    Mr. Day-Lewis, Miss Binoche and Miss Olin (who was spectacular in Ingmar Bergman's ''After the Rehearsal'') are surprisingly fine -both modest and intense as lovers whose private lives are defined by public events.
  84. Hill of Freedom
    The ingenuity of the movie’s structure is stimulating and delightful, but there’s one aspect of “Hill” that some may find a trifle exasperating: Even more than any of the sad-sack men who populate the director’s other movies, Mori is kind of a stiff.
  85. The King of Comedy
    Though The King of Comedy seems less substantial than past De Niro-Scorsese collaborations, it's a funny, stinging film in which there's much to enjoy. Miss Abbott, Mr. De Niro, Mr. Lewis and the unforgettably alarming Sandra Bernhard (as a fan even crazier than Rupert, and one who looks like an enraged ostrich) deliver fine performances, and the film's satirical edge can indeed be cutting.
  86. Robin and Marian
    Robin and Marian is a hybrid movie, one that seems embarrassed by feelings; yet it works best when it admits those feelings, when it plays them straight.
  87. The Fall Guy
    The Fall Guy is divertingly slick, playful nonsense.
  88. Creed III
    As entertaining as it is predictable, Creed III does exactly what you expect, delivering nicely balanced helpings of intimacy and spectacle, grit and glamour.
  89. Wicked
    Despite its bumps, the movie is consistently amusing simply because it is “The Wizard of Oz” and it’s fun watching colorful, off-kilter characters singing, dancing and sometimes flying through the air (without a superhero suit).
  90. Khodorkovsky
    The prisoner rather eloquently portrays himself as a victim of human rights abuse.
  91. The Biggest Little Farm
    If you’ve entertained “Green Acres”-inspired reveries on the joys of “farm living,” this documentary may rid you of them in short order. But it may also revive your wonder at the weird but ultimately awe-inspiring ways in which humans can help nature do its work.
  92. Laurence Anyways
    A big, beautiful, rambling immersion in a passion whose heat is fueled primarily by its impossibility.
  93. Sollers Point
    Mr. Porterfield’s evenhanded direction doesn’t try to pull the viewer’s sympathies one way or another. Within his realistic mode he crafts some startling effects — a strip-club brawl that spills out into broad, embarrassing daylight is eye-opening.
  94. Pillow Talk
    One of the most lively and up-to-date comedy-romances of the year.
  95. Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
    It’s a kind of stealth home movie: a portrait of two generations of an immigrant family in the United States.
  96. Dukhtar
    Its principal merit is the quiet authority of Ms. Mumtaz, who combines a mother’s passionate concern with glimmers of an awakening consciousness.
  97. Taylor Mac's 24-Decade History of Popular Music
    We do see some of the audience participation, which was an integral part of the show, but we don’t hear from attendees. It’s a loss, because the event was, in essence, about the making of community through the ages but also through one day and night.
  98. Les Destinées
    Like a good novel, Les Destinées is many things: a family chronicle, a series of psychological portraits, a sumptuous re-creation of the past. But the film is also a pointed tribute to the French tradition of quality and distinction, a tradition in which it clearly includes itself.
  99. 1971
    Ms. Hamilton’s straightforward documentary skillfully interweaves reminiscences by members of the group with re-enactments of the burglary.
  100. Hounds of Love
    It’s a tense, sharply assembled debut feature from Ben Young. Its main problem, though, is that it never answers a basic question: Why are we watching this?
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