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. Toy Story 4
    In other words, the movie is exactly what you expect — not more, not less — from an estimably well-oiled machine like Pixar.
  2. Child's Play
    In trying to build a smarter Chucky, the filmmakers have assembled something unfathomably dumb.
  3. The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir
    Despite the film’s syrupy sweetness, it takes some risks ... and its relentless earnestness is tough to resist, even as the film sugarcoats intimations of real danger.
  4. Burn Your Maps
    For all of the film’s attention to the contradictory emotional aftermath of loss, its Mongolian escape valve feels strangely obligatory — not a reason to get away from mourning, but a gimmick around which a film about bereavement was built.
  5. Wild Rose
    First and foremost, the movie, written by Nicole Taylor and directed by Tom Harper, is a superb showcase for Jessie Buckley. Doing her own singing, Buckley is a rich, startling vocalist who if anything seems to under-excite the crowds she performs for.
  6. Billboard
    The details of the story, as they unfold, do not correspond with any dimension of reality. Character development is nonexistent. The sluggish rhythms, the awkward cuts, the unlovely cinematography cohere into what seems like the enactment of a pointless dream.
  7. The Command
    The fine cast keeps us engaged, even if the film sometimes loses the narrative thread.
  8. The Quiet One
    Wyman narrates throughout, and his innate common sense can be persuasive.
  9. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am
    It’s less a biography than an extended essay, which is entirely a good thing. If you want a thorough documentation of everything Morrison has done and everyone she knows, there’s always Wikipedia. But if you’d prefer an argument for her importance and a sense of her presence, then you won’t be disappointed.
  10. The Edge of Democracy
    Though she is a scrupulous and dogged digger-up of hidden facts and a thoughtful interpreter of public events, Costa hasn’t produced a work of objective journalism or detached historical scholarship so much as a personal reckoning with her nation’s past and present.
  11. Back to the Fatherland
    The survivors offer several potent recollections. Yet most other scenes linger and provide few insights.
  12. Murder Mystery
    Aniston and Sandler have a goofy, relaxed rapport that is often amusing despite the film’s best efforts to smother any sign of verve.
  13. Daughter of the Wolf
    With facile plotting — you could fashion a pretty deadly drinking game out of all the scenes in which someone gets knocked out, or is conveniently left for dead — and humdrum action, the lack of depth or dimension becomes fatal.
  14. Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes
    This tidy, thoughtful film gets at jazz’s joy and pain.
  15. In the Aisles
    Imagine a Kaurismaki with less humor and a slower pace, and you’ll have a sense of how singular yet insubstantial In the Aisles ultimately appears.
  16. Hampstead
    Overall, the lively, unfussy Hampstead goes down easy.
  17. The Dead Don't Die
    This is an end-of-the-world party with an appealing guest list and inviting, eccentric décor.
  18. American Woman
    The performances are excellent, and Ingelsby’s dialogue largely rings true. But while the movie is indeed considered and conscientious, it’s also careful. It doesn’t risk going over any edges itself. And it shows more than a few instances of fussy and telegraphing Conspicuous Direction.
  19. Being Frank
    It’s a period movie with little style and a family flick wholly lacking in charm or warmth.
  20. Shaft
    You occasionally sense the presence of an interesting movie struggling to get out of this hyperactive action comedy — or even just a better Tim Story action comedy, something like “Ride Along” or “Ride Along 2.”
  21. Plus One
    Every minute Erskine isn’t on screen is a minute wasted.
  22. Our Time
    The movie asks a lot of the viewer, but to this viewer, it gave back more.
  23. Men in Black: International
    F. Gary Gray can be a fine action director and sometimes better than fine, but the scenes that should pop and pow — given the squealing tires, bared knuckles and laser beams — consistently fall flat.
  24. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese
    Dylan was interested in how movies stop time, but he also told Ginsberg that he wanted “to be entertained,” adding, “If I see a movie that really moves me around I’m totally astounded.” To watch Rolling Thunder Revue is to understand what he meant.
  25. The Reports on Sarah and Saleem
    Alayan’s light directorial touch can make the storytelling seem overly straightforward. But his tight control over the proceedings becomes clear in a closing shot that elegantly encapsulates the film’s complexities.
  26. All Is Well
    Trobisch has made a drama of tragic accommodation — limited not to one woman’s sexual assault, but to the everyday interactions that all women must navigate carefully.
  27. 16 Shots
    16 Shots remains valuable as a record of past events that hold sway over the present.
  28. The Raft
    By setting Genovés’s words in counterpoint with the recollections of seven of the participants who are still alive, [Lindeen] reinterprets the experiment, finding meanings that the scientist missed.
  29. Framing John DeLorean
    Framing John DeLorean doesn’t fully answer its own central question, and leaves several others hanging as well. As frustrating as this can be in hindsight, the movie, while it’s playing, is unfailingly engrossing.
  30. The Last Black Man in San Francisco
    Mostly, the movie has a cascade of images and ideas, reference points and glimpses of everyday beauty that flow and swirl and, over time, gather tremendous force.
  31. Dark Phoenix
    Kinberg does better when he goes big, which suits this franchise delivery system. For the most part he just moves characters from point A to B, pausing for face-to-face heart to hearts before the next blowout. But the mayhem is generally coherent and executed with clean, crisp special effects, even if Kinberg settles for slo-mo clichés.
  32. Nureyev
    Nureyev, directed by the brother-and-sister team of Jacqui Morris and David Morris, suffers from a common documentary-film problem: great story, not-so-great storytelling.
  33. This One's for the Ladies
    The movie’s determination to make stripping mundane has a way of infecting the film. Even the dancing sequences, often shot in poor lighting as if on a smartphone camera, look perfunctory.
  34. Ghost Fleet
    Ghost Fleet hits its marks as advocacy, but editing might have put more emphasis on the individual men, added further detail about the illicit networks or tracked Tungpuchayakul’s journey in a more focused and suspenseful manner.
  35. Papi Chulo
    Papi Chulo tries to subvert the conceit that casts brown people as uncomplicated support systems for conflicted white people, but lacks the vision to transform these familiar stereotypes.
  36. The Black Godfather
    Because one of this Netflix documentary’s producers is Avant’s daughter, Nicole A. Avant, and both she and her husband, Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s head of content, appear as talking heads, this overlong love-in sometimes plays like an illustrated conflict of interest. But the anecdotes are gold.
  37. Funan
    Do’s tale is resolutely earthbound. He uses animation as an interrogation into the practice of fictional depiction derived from actual atrocities.
  38. Pavarotti
    This is a film too enamored of its subject to pry very deeply. And yet, it’s hard not to be enamored as well, as Pavarotti’s larger-than-life personality shines in almost every scene.
  39. 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.
  40. The Secret Life of Pets 2
    Too scattered narratively to cohere, and yet somehow still funny enough to justify its existence, The Secret Life of Pets 2 makes for an entertaining trifle.
  41. Late Night
    Every time you think Late Night is settling into familiar tropes — about workplace politics, mean bosses, long marriages, fish out of water, bootstraps and how to pull them — it shifts a few degrees and finds a fresh perspective.
  42. Joy
    Matching content with form, the movie is tight and merciless, even if parts play like a tract.
  43. The Fall of the American Empire
    With its galloping pace and strange criminal bedfellows, this funny and engrossing film sometimes feels like the droll capers of the Ealing studio (maker of “The Lavender Hill Mob” among other small classics). But Arcand packs in a lot of pointed social and political commentary.
  44. The Spy Behind Home Plate
    There’s much to absorb throughout “The Spy Behind Home Plate,” and sometimes details speed by too fast or digressions go on a bit long. Still, Kempner’s passion for her remarkable subject is always evident.
  45. XY Chelsea
    What’s left is a touching and tragic portrait of a vulnerable work in progress, one that for now might only be visible through a clouded lens.
  46. Domino
    De Palma can’t realize all the elaborate effects he clearly wanted (the film’s climax occurs at a bullfight that’s conspicuously not crowded). But his direction often compensates with B-movie energy, particularly when he’s able to concentrate on his perverse vision.
  47. The Russian Five
    Riehl gears his documentary more toward avid fans than casual viewers, though he nods to the human side of story.
  48. Too Late to Die Young
    Too Late to Die Young is above all an achievement in mood and implication. Sotomayor has a way of structuring scenes and composing images that makes everything perfectly clear but not obvious.
  49. Yomeddine
    Yomeddine makes its strongest impression through the direction and performances; at times, the story is rather flimsy.
  50. Echo In the Canyon
    The delight of Echo in the Canyon is in the delicious details its subjects impart.
  51. For the Birds
    Miron avoids easy conclusions about what drives Kathy, and he stays with her long enough for her story to surprise. The reward of his patience is a psychological portrait that develops mystery the more it reveals.
  52. Always Be My Maybe
    Always Be My Maybe feels a lot like a movie propped up by a stunt, a high-gloss romantic comedy so mired in triteness and unconvincing emotions that its main recommendation is the appealing diversity of its cast.
  53. The Image You Missed
    The Image You Missed is less compelling as an act of personal therapy than it is as filmed film criticism, but even if it doesn’t fully cohere, Foreman’s family stake helps keep it original.
  54. Ma
    The movie ties itself up in knots as it tries to be provocative without giving offense, and offering more complacency and comfort than terror.
  55. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
    This movie is often pretty slack in matters of story construction and direction.
  56. Rocketman
    The point of Rocketman isn’t self-aggrandizement. It’s fan service of an especially and characteristically generous kind.
  57. Leaving Home, Coming Home: A Portrait of Robert Frank
    This material covers a good deal of the same ground as the 2016 documentary on Frank, “Don’t Blink.” Both films give a strong “lion in winter” sense and are moving in their treatments of the tragedies of Frank’s life. If you’ve seen “Don’t Blink,” you may ask whether you “need” to see this. I’d say yes. “More light,” as Goethe put it.
  58. The Perfection
    This is a filmmaker aware of the conventions, who wields them with wit and precision and knows his audience is on the gag as well. In many ways, The Perfection amounts to little more than a bag of tricks. But no one is pretending otherwise. And they’re good tricks.
  59. Halston
    I liked the deluge of visual information and personalities. The pictures, footage, biography, news and gossip are the opposite of a Halston dress — unruly, busy, fussed over. But they come at you with an energy that feels substantial. Knowing what to do with all of that material is its own kind of intelligence. Why overthink it? Or: why show us what you’ve overthought?
  60. Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground
    An informative and overdue documentary.
  61. Brightburn
    The gore and the scares work pretty well.
  62. Q Ball
    As a sales pitch for an undeniably popular program, Q Ball (filmed in 2018) builds a crescendo of hope and good will. Anyone seeking a more substantive conversation on life beyond the basket, however, will have to look elsewhere.
  63. Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation
    Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation, directed by Barak Goodman, uses the perspective of nearly 50 years’ hindsight to demonstrate anew how the festival was both a mess and a miracle, and implicitly argues that it was a good deal more miracle than mess.
  64. The Proposal
    Detailing at once an art project and a rescue mission, a love triangle and an elaborate, outlandish bargain, the movie has a surface serenity that belies its fuming emotions.
  65. Diamantino
    There are moments in which this film, written and directed by Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt, feels like an early Adam Sandler comedy remixed by Pier Paolo Pasolini.
  66. Booksmart
    The rapid-fire, note-perfect dialogue is punctuated with moments of brilliant conceptual whimsy: animated and underwater sequences; horror-movie jump scares; immersive theater.
  67. Aladdin
    The movie itself, while not entirely terrible — a lot of craft has been purchased, and even a little art — is pointless in a particularly aggressive way.
  68. The Tomorrow Man
    The Tomorrow Man is a cloying, at times disturbing tale of two dotty seniors whose eccentricities unexpectedly mesh.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    See You Yesterday
    Although the film doesn’t sugarcoat the horrors of police brutality, it does empower C.J. to think she has invented a loophole around it. That is the dream worth cherishing.
  70. The Souvenir
    The Souvenir feels like a whispered confidence, an intimate disclosure that shouldn’t be betrayed because it isn’t really yours.
  71. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
    In “Chapter 3,” the violence has been supercharged, and so has the virtuosity. At a certain point, though, the carnage becomes deadening, its consequences no more than soulless tableaus of damage that encourage disengagement.
  72. All Creatures Here Below
    Its ideas aren’t new, and at times Ruby and Gensan can feel like recognizable symbols of societal failure. What’s different, though, is the performers’ skill in portraying characters whose extreme mutual dependence is touchingly believable, giving no hint of the damage later revealed.
  73. Asako I & II
    Asako proceeds from a premise that flirts with the mystic, but Hamaguchi executes it with elegantly rendered realism. (It is adapted from a 2010 novel by Tomoka Shibasaki.) The result is a picture that is simultaneously engaging and disconcerting.
  74. A Dog's Journey
    I suppose it’s a genuine achievement that a movie packed with as much delightful canine (and agreeable human) talent as this one should be so insufferable.
  75. Perfect
    The upshot is an oppressive, inscrutable puzzle that made me more curious about the inside of Alcazar’s head than that of his tortured subject — the kind of movie that, in some circles, might inspire fetishistic rewatching. Just don’t forget to fire up the bong.
  76. Photograph
    If the story is familiar, the storytelling can be immersive — Batra shades in the leads and their worlds with a human specificity that makes Photograph compelling in a slice-of-life way, particularly regarding class in India.
  77. Aniara
    Kagerman and Lilja thoughtfully constructed their film, yet they leave nothing for the mind to do besides consume unrelenting tragedy.
  78. The Professor
    Depp’s turbocharged archness is basically the whole show.
  79. Trial by Fire
    Expertly acted throughout...the movie’s raw facts are sufficient to rouse viewer indignation. But the material arguably calls for a more proactively provocative approach.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    We Have Always Lived in the Castle
    Under Stacie Passon’s precise direction, this gothic fable of isolation and violence expertly treads a fine line between tragedy and camp.
  81. Walking on Water
    We spy on an artist who races around like a mad scientist, and who seems comically befuddled by technology. His passion is genuine, as is his sense of wonder.
  82. The Wandering Soap Opera
    It was clearly made with slender financial means and abundant enthusiasm, and it functions simultaneously as a critique of the self-serious idiocy of authority and a celebration of the anarchic power of imagination.
  83. The Sun Is Also a Star
    The story and its trappings feel a little generic, the dialogue studiously bland and the characters and their problems curiously weightless, in spite of gestures in the direction of real-world issues.
  84. The Third Wife
    It’s too cool for melodrama and too pretty for politics, and the drama of May’s experience occupies a middle ground between pity and indignation.
  85. Shéhérazade
    It’s rare that a director’s first feature film, accomplished with an ensemble of nonprofessional actors, proves to be as quietly powerful as Jean-Bernard Marlin’s simple but lyrical “Shéhérazade.”
  86. All Is True
    While All Is True might not brim with excitement, it’s beautifully acted, richly photographed (by Zac Nicholson) and blessedly free of histrionics. Between them, Branagh and Elton have concocted a respectful story of loss, regret and wistful genius.
  87. Charlie Says
    It’s a tough, difficult story that, anchored by Guinevere Turner’s script, Harron recounts with lucid calm, compassion and intelligent interpretive license.
  88. The Hustle
    Comedy is in a weird place right now, and The Hustle deserves some credit for fulfilling its own modest, escapist ambitions. Unlike a lot of what we see these days, in movies and elsewhere, it doesn’t feel like a rip-off or a scam. It’s downright innocent.
  89. Poms
    An uncomfortable blend of sickness and silliness, this dancing-past-the-graveyard comedy suggests that the many travails of aging can be endured if you only gather enough friends and surrender enough dignity.
  90. David Cross: Oh Come On
    With the possible exception of his jokes about fatherhood, which are sharp, unsentimental and more economical than the rest of his digressive 70 minutes, Cross’s labored new special picks easy targets.
  91. The River and the Wall
    The River and the Wall” comes on as innocent and glossy as a travelogue, but its scenic delights are the sugar coating on a passionate and spectacularly photographed political message.
  92. My Son
    An endorsement of milquetoast vigilantism that’s not nearly as knotty as it presumes to be, the French thriller “My Son” is so reserved in its storytelling and vague in its details that all it elicits is a yawn.
  93. Tolkien
    Tolkien manages several scenes of credible emotional delicacy.
  94. Pasolini
    The blend of pornography and humor, obnoxiousness and elegance, sweetness and cruelty reminds you that this is, above all, an Abel Ferrara movie. And the splendor of Pasolini lies in its essentially collaborative nature.
  95. 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.
  96. The Serengeti Rules
    In mirroring the gaze of his professorial subjects, Brown rewards audiences with a film that happily weds the scientific and the cinematic.
  97. Pokémon Detective Pikachu
    This is 1 hour and 44 minutes of Pikachu short-circuiting your brain.
  98. Wine Country
    The comedy is situational and confessional, the flat one-liners mixed in with more memorable physical comedy. The scripted lines rarely zing, sing or sting (some seem improvised), but when the performers fall down or screw up their faces, you get to watch them fill in their characters with something like real feeling.
  99. The Silence of Others
    Informative, if not always as specific as it might have been.
  100. Hesburgh
    Hesburgh is consistently smart about its subject. It makes a convincing case that the priest was one of a handful of whites in the civil rights movement who understood the systemic nature of racism in the United States.
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