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. Tex
    An unexpected but certainly major force in movies at the moment, S.E. Hinton (with four of her novels being adapted for the screen), created in Tex an utterly disarming, believable portrait of a small-town adolescent. Tim Hunter's film version captures Miss Hinton's novel perfectly.
  2. Outside In
    In a movie whose greatest tension comes from wondering whether Chris will violate his parole by drinking a beer, the actors need to be compelling. Easily clearing that bar, Ms. Falco gives Carol a gentle kindness and the emotional intelligence to transform Chris’s ardor into a catalyst.
  3. Beauty and the Dogs
    The filmmaking is so striking — and Ms. Al Ferjani so movingly, indefatigably resolute — it’s impossible not to persevere right along with her.
  4. Hannah
    Rigorously structured and glacially paced, this sophomore feature from Andrea Pallaoro (after his 2015 family tragedy, “Medeas”) is a minimalist portrait of brutal isolation and extreme emotional anguish.
  5. Rogers Park
    The screenwriter, Carlos Treviño, crafts frank dialogue and the director, Kyle Henry, films the scenes with an eye for the intimate, dividend-paying gesture. The superb actors, given opportunities to go for broke, make each one count, and make the movie worth watching.
  6. Tin Men
    Barry Levinson's richly textured new film also has a rueful nostalgia, a fine-tuned streak of con artistry, and the same hilarious, nit-picking small talk that colored Diner, his first and best film - which is recalled, rivaled and in a few ways even outdone by this one.
  7. Grass
    When the writer opts to just let things be, the movie is at its most content.
  8. The Heiresses
    This isn’t a perfect movie — sometimes the machinery of plot-focused screenwriting hums a little too insistently, especially toward the end, disrupting the quieter, richer music of everyday life — but its clearsighted sensitivity makes it a satisfying one.
  9. Touch Me Not
    You could say that what the film is about lies just beyond the reach of images or words. It’s a necessarily cerebral meditation on the nature of physicality.
  10. Museo
    In spite of a meandering story and some fuzzy passages, there is a touch of magic in Museo, a sense of wonder and curiosity that imparts palpable excitement.
  11. Dark River
    Gorgeously photographed by the Brazilian cinematographer Adriano Goldman, Dark River is a raw ballad of doom and damage.
  12. Dora and the Lost City of Gold
    Like a child unwittingly navigating a jungle full of booby traps and deadly creatures, the film walks a treacherously fine line without ever seeming to break a sweat.
  13. The Endless
    The Endless rewards patience with mind-bending twists and turns.
  14. Heavy Metal
    For anyone who doesn't think an hour and a half is a long time to spend with a comic book, Heavy Metal is impressive. Though it owes some slight bit of its toughness and nihilism to Ralph Bakshi, this animated feature is off on its own track, combining science fiction, mysticism, sex, violence and rock music. Much of the time, these elements do what the film makers want them to, and make for a heady mix.
  15. Unfriended: Dark Web
    What’s striking in this movie, apart from an ostentatiously glitchy screen distortion that occurs whenever a denizen of the “dark web” appears on one of the screens within screens, is how credibly its extreme trolling plays.
  16. Us and Them
    With frothing energy and unfettered vulgarity, Us and Them lances the boil of working-class grievance and watches as the infection spreads to everyone in its path.
  17. The Guardians
    The Guardians is a historical drama that doesn’t lose itself in decorative period detail, a beautifully photographed chronicle of rural existence that refrains from picturesque sentimentality and grinding misery, the usual modes for this kind of film.
  18. 12 Days
    [A] lucid, focused and adamant documentary.
  19. Maineland
    Maineland takes up a large and complicated set of topics — the global economy, the shifting relations between East and West, the commodification of American education — and addresses them with understated delicacy.
  20. Fast Color
    Moody and strange, Fast Color has a solemnity that haunts almost every frame.
  21. 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.
  22. Wild Nights with Emily
    This is an irreverent film, but its lightness is meaningful. With each silly flourish, Olnek offers joy and companionship to a figure whose history was more conveniently presented to generations of readers as solitary.
  23. Summer in the Forest
    Summer in the Forest is an extraordinarily tender documentary that asks what it means to be human. Here, even the most gentle scenes raise mighty questions.
  24. Three Days of the Condor
    Fast, vivd espionage-betrayal thriller, dandy plot. [24 Sep 1975]
    • The New York Times
  25. The Dogs of War
    It demonstrates the kind of intelligence and thought one doesn't often find in a movie aimed at the action-adventure crowd. This is evident as much in what the film doesn't do and say as in what is actually seen on the screen.
  26. Duck Butter
    [Ms. Shawkat] and Mr. Arteta, a sensitive observer of life’s everyday churn (his credits include “Beatriz at Dinner”), do some lovely work in a movie that reminds you that sometimes all you need in realist fiction is a glimpse into another person’s being — but with heart and intelligence, good craft and technique.
  27. Re-Animator
    Re-Animator has a fast pace and a good deal of grisly vitality. It even has a sense of humor, albeit one that would be lost on 99.9 percent of any ordinary moviegoing crowd...All of this, ingenious as it may be and much as it will redound to Mr. Gordon's credit in hard-core horror circles, is absolutely to be avoided by anyone not in the mood for a major bloodbath.
  28. Revenge
    Revenge leaves a lurid, punchy afterimage, an impression somewhere between righteous delight and quivering revulsion. It’s both a challenge and a calling card, in which Ms. Fargeat at once exposes what’s wrong with her chosen genre and demonstrates her mastery of it.
  29. Fighting with My Family
    Like its amiable, irresistible ménage, Fighting With My Family softens its rougher edges with humor. It’s often broadly funny but never mean or patronizing; it takes the Knights, their eccentricities and quixotic aspirations seriously, but not enough to squelch the fun.
  30. Salomé
    The concentration of the performers and the power of Wilde’s unusually baroque, even for him, language (he originally composed the play in French, as it happens) makes for some mesmerizing scenes.
  31. Big Fish & Begonia
    Never short on visual or emotional wonder, Big Fish & Begonia contemplates mortality with the imagination of an old soul who has been given new eyes.
  32. Good Luck
    Both halves feature breathtaking camera work.
  33. My Beautiful Laundrette
    My Beautiful Laundrette has the broad scope and the easy pace that one associates with our best theatrical films. It puts its own truth above the fear of possibly offending someone. Without showing off, it has courage as well as artistry. A fascinating, eccentric, very personal movie.
  34. This Is Our Land
    The drama is well-paced, and all of the actors are wonderful. Mr. Dussollier, a regular presence in the late works of Alain Resnais, is resourceful in communicating Berthier’s disturbing dual nature, and Ms. Dequenne remains appealing even when her character is making the most grievously ill-advised choices.
  35. Sammy and Rosie Get Laid
    Mr. Frears and Mr. Kureishi have composed Sammy and Rosie as if they were building a giant bonfire in a mock celebration of the achievements of contemporary British society and, by extension, of the civilized world. They throw everything on -love, death, sex, politics, violence. A lot of stuff doesn't easily burn, but there's also plenty that does.
  36. The Jerk
    By turns funny, vulgar and backhandedly clever, never more so than when it aspires to absolute stupidity. And Mr. Martin, who began his career with an arrow stuck through his head, has since developed a real genius for playing dumb.
  37. Red Rock West
    The director and co-writer, John Dahl, keeps up perfect swift timing throughout the film, playfully loading on every suspense-genre trick he can imagine.
  38. 10
    Blake Edwards's frequently hilarious new film, “10,” is the story of George's desperate efforts to come to terms with life in Southern California even though he knows he's inadequate.
  39. The Wife
    The Wife pulls off the not inconsiderable feat of spinning a fundamentally literary premise into an intelligent screen drama that unfolds with real juice and suspense.
  40. Kids
    Mr. Clark's vision of these characters is so bleak and legitimately shocking that it makes almost any other portrait of American adolescence look like the picture of Dorian Gray...Kids is far too serious to be tarred as exploitation, and its extremism is both artful and devastatingly effective. Think of this not as cinema verite but as a new strain of post-apocalyptic science fiction, using hyperbole to magnify a kernel of terrible, undeniable truth.
  41. Cold Water (1994)
    Mr. Assayas's screenplay is loose and uneventful, but his direction has more energy.
  42. Picnic at Hanging Rock
    The result is a movie that is both spooky and sexy.
  43. The 12th Man
    The reward of Mr. Zwart’s attention to the unique details of this historical account is that Jan’s path to safety frequently shocks, offering scenes of defiance that are unfamiliar or unexpected. In a familiar genre, The 12th Man preserves the element of surprise by understanding its terrain.
  44. The Misandrists
    With The Misandrists, Mr. LaBruce announces, here is queer cinema: confrontational, pansexual, gender-fluid, racially inclusive, angry and surprisingly romantic.
  45. The Snapper
    A small, joyful lark of a film.
  46. Eraserhead
    The black-and-white world of Eraserhead disturbs, seduces and even shocks with images that are alternately discomforting, even physically off-putting, and characterized by what André Breton called convulsive beauty.
  47. Clouds of May
    The film's shapeliness and depth are not immediately apparent; for much of its running time, it feels diffuse and anecdotal, but in retrospect you appreciate the subtlety and heft of the story, as well as the tricky profundity of Mr. Ceylan's approach.
  48. McQueen
    The filmmakers’ emphasis on drama honors the driven personality of their subject, while tracing a fairly conventional glad-rags-to-riches narrative arc.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Boxcar Bertha
    The thoughtful, ironic script by Joyce H. Corrington and John William Corrington thins only toward the middle and the whole thing has been beautifully directed by Mar tin Scorsese, who really comes into his own here.
  50. 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.
  51. 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.
  52. The Party's Just Beginning
    Gillan plays her messy, mournful role with unfussy integrity. The movie does not stray beyond the borders of the modest character study, but within those parameters, it’s accomplished and impressively straightforward.
  53. Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro
    An interestingly wild hybrid of visual styles and cultural references.
  54. Porco Rosso
    Muting adult concerns — like the jackboots of fascism and the ubiquity of male violence — with marshmallow clouds and subtly shifting light, Mr. Miyazaki smooshes fantasy and history into a pastel-pretty yarn as irresistible as his feminism.
  55. Crane World
    Powerfully gritty.
  56. Ideal Home
    Ideal Home is genuinely funny, and the poignant and pithy script is aided by the chemistry between its stars, who are equally adept with comedic punch lines as they are with dramatic gut punches.
  57. Until the Birds Return
    Although each chapter is built around an event — a tryst or a revelation — the film comes to life in quiet, conversational details that capture the textures of people’s lives across different generations and classes.
  58. Papillon
    A big, brave, stouthearted, sometimes romantic, sometimes silly melodrama with the kind of visual sweep you don't often find in movies anymore.
  59. Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist
    The most powerful and disturbing personal documentary since Crumb, Sick examines the life of the performance artist Bob Flanagan, who died of cystic fibrosis. [14 Nov 1997, p.E24]
    • The New York Times
  60. Private Practices: The Story of a Sex Surrogate
    Sympathetic account of a sort of human frailty that is not easy to talk about, much less make a movie about.
  61. 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.
  62. The World According to Garp
    If it was finally the book's whimsical side that endeared it to so many readers, the movie is missing none of that charm. If anything, it's got a little more...A gentle, intelligent film and an interesting one.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Girl
    If, however, you can tune out even a little of the background noise, you’ll find an immersive, empathetic film that speaks the language of tolerance without getting preachy.
  64. Leto
    Weaving a glancing love triangle into a poignant observation on the waxing and waning of creativity, Serebrennikov revels in radiant black-and-white scenes of urban grit. The vibe veers from grungy to blissful, the characters’ earnest charisma serving as the movie’s force field against criticism.
  65. The Wild Pear Tree
    The unapologetic, sometimes heavy-handed literariness of The Wild Pear Tree is leavened by hints of grim comedy and sharp, if subtle, social criticism.
  66. Border
    This is a movie that aims to startle in overt and subtextual ways; the less known before viewing, the better.
  67. Knife + Heart
    This movie packs in plenty of cinema acrobatics and spectacle without ever feeling out of control, even as it morphs into a far-fetched whodunit.
  68. The Truth
    The story gradually emerges through an accretion of details and personal dynamics, often in families that stand in for the larger world. Things happen quietly or offscreen. The drama is measured out in sips, in gazes, gestures, silences, off-handed humor and shocks of brutality.
  69. 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.
  70. Rocketman
    The point of Rocketman isn’t self-aggrandizement. It’s fan service of an especially and characteristically generous kind.
  71. Less Than Zero
    At heart, the film version of Less Than Zero is deeply conventional, with its underlying notion that these young people's lives are ruined because their rich parents neglect them. However, Mr. Kanievska gives it a superficial stylishness that is quite spectacular; every scene revolves around one ingeniously bizarre touch or another (the lighting effects are especially dazzling), and the cumulative effect is as striking as it means to be.
  72. Pin Cushion
    While Pin Cushion might prove too distressing for some, it’s still peculiarly, undeniably original.
  73. To All the Boys I've Loved Before
    Ms. Johnson directs the picture with an assurance that matches that of her plucky protagonist.
  74. The Comfort of Strangers
    Mr. Schrader is a director of great rigor and discipline. The movie is fascinated by the baroque behavior it observes, but without imitating it.
  75. Araby
    Thanks to Mr. de Sousa’s superb performance, the movie often convincingly portrays not just the exploited condition of laborers such as Cristiano, but the nagging sadness of life itself.
  76. Burnt Offerings
    Director Curtis times his audience immersions into the ice bath of terror with such skill that moviegoers will scarcely have the leisure to ask why some of the renters aren't a bit more observant and curious about their dwelling.
  77. What Will People Say
    In a resolute acknowledgment of the oppression that too many young women face at home, the film portrays the family structure as the enforcing unit of feminine docility. Here, love is another form of bondage.
  78. Soul Man
    It has a breezy, unapologetic manner. And it also happens to be funny, which goes a long way toward making up for any underlying obtuseness or insensitivity.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Super Fly
    The film's gut pleasures are real, and there are a lot of them. But, they always connect with one another in a world so precisely, cruelly, excitingly balanced that there is no movement without countermovement, no pressure without a greater pressure in return.
  80. Dumbo
    Ho-hum until it takes a turn toward the fascinatingly weird, the movie is a welcome declaration of artistic independence for Burton...Watching him cut loose (more recklessly than his flying baby elephant) is by far the most unexpected pleasure of this movie, which dusts off the 1941 animated charmer with exhilaratingly demented spirit.
  81. The Three Caballeros
    A fantastic film...There is no question that Mr. Disney has got here a brilliant, fluid style for presenting musical pictures and that his enthusiasm expressed throughout is great. But he has't quite brought them into order. His film is flashy and exciting - and no more.
  82. Barfly
    Though it's set within the world of the seriously down-and-out in Los Angeles and is about people who are at the end of their ropes, Barfly somehow manages to be gallant and even cheerful. It has an admirably lean, unsentimental screenplay by Charles Bukowski, the poet laureate of America's misbegotten.
  83. Things Are Tough All Over
    Cheech and Chong have a good time with Things Are Tough All Over, and you will, too.
  84. The Captain
    The Captain, Robert Schwentke’s harrowing World War II psychodrama, isn’t what you would call enjoyable, exactly. More accurately, it compels our attention with a remorseless, gripping single-mindedness, presenting Naziism as a communicable disease that smothers conscience, paralyzes resistance and extinguishes all shreds of humanity.
  85. What Keeps You Alive
    True horror fans will forgive its shortcomings since they serve the greater good of gorgeous gore and stunningly staged scenes.
  86. Rock Rubber 45s
    Bobbito Garcia, the author, basketball maven, sneaker obsessive, D.J. and all-around culture entrepreneur, is one of the most personable documentary subjects I’ve encountered in quite some time.
  87. Calibre
    The character dynamics are recognizable in the way they hew to genre conventions. But the details provided in the writing, and by the two leads’ performances, add distinctive details and dimension here. This makes the film’s harrowing action all the more believable.
  88. BuyBust
    Wrapping a political-corruption yarn in a blanket of bullets and blood, the Filipino director and co-writer, Erik Matti, slides visual and textual jokes into the mayhem in ways both sly and blatant.
  89. Fahrenheit 11/9
    Mr. Moore recognizes an affinity he shares with the president — also a showman. So he is in a nearly unique position to shame the viewer with a frank perspective on how Mr. Trump used his extrovert side to make citizens complacent about the less savory aspects of his character.
  90. Enchanted April
    Miss Walker, who also plays a terrorist femme fatale in "Patriot Games," makes a mesmerizing impression as she holds her own against Miss Plowright without seeming remotely ruffled.
  91. 3 Men and a Little Lady
    A sunny, exuberant confection and an enjoyably skillful one.
  92. King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen
    Directed by Steve Mitchell, it’s as conventional as Mr. Cohen’s movies are not. Which is O.K. While the filmmaker himself is more interested in telling colorful anecdotes than dredging up the portions of his psyche that inspire him, the anecdotes are colorful indeed.
  93. Ben Is Back
    Ben Is Back is really Holly’s story, and notwithstanding the all-around excellence of the cast, it’s very much Roberts’s movie. This isn’t a matter of ego or showboating. On the contrary, what is so moving and effective about Roberts’s work here is her shrewd subversion of her long-established persona.
  94. Studio 54
    The movie is a fast account that is sometimes a tad facile in its analysis of a cultural moment. But as Mr. Schrager’s personal too-much-too-soon story, it’s compelling.
  95. Killer Bees
    The movie is ultimately less about the players or even the engrossingly shot games than the idea of basketball as a tradition, one that imbues lives with meaning and bonds a community.
  96. Cut Throat City
    The reversals the characters suffer across the movie’s running time are epic, and the movie’s finale unfolds to genuinely startling effect.
  97. Quincy
    The movie alternates between the present, with Mr. Jones on the go, and a retrospective of his life and career, narrated by the man himself. His hardscrabble early years on the South Side of Chicago are scary; his triumphs from the earliest points of his career onward are exhilarating; the racism he is obliged to endure throughout is infuriating.
  98. The Ladykillers
    Perhaps it is slightly labored. Perhaps it does have the air of an initially brilliant inspiration that has not worked out as easily as it seemed it should. Still and all, Mr. Rose's nimble writing and Alexander Mackendrick's directing skill have managed to assure The Ladykillers of a distinct and fetching comic quality.
  99. Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her
    Eloquent, understated film.
  100. Time After Time
    A movie that's as sweet as it is clever, and never so clever that it forgets to be entertaining.
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