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. The Aeronauts
    Gorgeous and goofy, fanciful and unrepentantly old-fashioned, this Victorian adventure (it’s set in 1862) delights much more when its head is in the clouds than when its feet are on the ground.
  2. Places in the Heart
    Robert Benton has made one of the best films in years about growing up American.
  3. The Krays
    Gary Kemp, as the more commanding and peculiar Ron Kray, makes an especially scary impression, particularly once the Krays' perfect control has begun to unravel. In a series of events set off by Reg's marriage, the Krays are seen on a downhill spiral that Mr. Medak conveys with great and effective understatement.
  4. Destroyer
    Kusama is still figuring out how to balance form and pulp, but she has a singular unapologetic idea about what women can and cannot do onscreen, one she lets rip with verve and her superbly unbound star.
  5. Maison du Bonheur
    Ms. Bohdanowicz’s self-interrogation is clearly important to her art, but I think she worries too much, at least where this subject is concerned. Her hostess, a model of charm, good humor and senior wisdom, is a movie unto herself.
  6. Await Further Instructions
    While most movies of this type simply peter out, “Instructions” maintains such an unswerving commitment to its dark purpose that its final, gorgeously tenebrous images will leave you wobbly for days.
  7. The Other Side of the Wind
    What we have is something of a seductive tease, a haunted film that at times entrances and delights and at times offends and embarrasses.
  8. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
    The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is one of the darkest movies by Joel and Ethan Coen, and also among the silliest. It swerves from goofy to ghastly so deftly and so often that you can’t always tell which is which.
  9. Being There
    Hal Ashby directs Being There at an unruffled, elegant pace, the better to let Mr. Sellers's double-edged mannerisms make their full impression upon the audience.
  10. Our Time
    The movie asks a lot of the viewer, but to this viewer, it gave back more.
  11. Letter from Masanjia
    It’s an important story, made more intense by its tight focus.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
    A fast, funny and sprightly rustic romp well worth seeing.
  13. The Gunfighter
    One of the tautest and most stimulating Westerns of the year.
  14. American Dharma
    Certainly, American Dharma offers no comfort to those disturbed by Bannon or harmed by the policies he has pressed for. But Morris wants to map how Bannon thinks. The movie he has made is less an act of muckraking than it is a psychological thriller, with Bannon its implacable villain.
  15. 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.
  16. The Decline of the American Empire
    Mr. Arcand's dialogue is not didactic. It's spontaneously funny and rueful and full of oblique revelations. Though highly intelligent, his characters are prone to self-delusion. They're nothing if not civilized, but they don't hesitate to lie and cheat in their own interests.
  17. Hooper
    This time, Mr. Reynolds has made a movie to please fans of all persuasions, and to please them a great deal.
  18. Nigerian Prince
    In Grace’s stifling house, the electricity is dicey and the internet nonexistent. There isn’t a shower or extra bed. Just the third-world glaze of sweat and privation you see everywhere in this richly endowed land of economic imbalance, an atmosphere the film, Faraday Okoro’s feature debut, captures expertly.
  19. Night of the Living Dead
    [A] witty, entertaining remake.
  20. A Faithful Man
    [A] low-key, engaging comedy.
  21. The World Before Your Feet
    Short of walking with Green, a film is an ideal way to share in his knowledge. And after watching The World Before Your Feet, it’s difficult to look at the city the same way.
  22. Horn from the Heart: The Paul Butterfield Story
    While the last third of Butterfield’s life is tragic, spending the better part of 90 minutes with the man and his music is exhilarating. The picture may get at least a few people talking about him again.
  23. Saludos Amigos
    As always in Mr. Disney's pictures, the quality of the humor is bright and sly, with touches of gentle satire laced in with jovial fun.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Great Mouse Detective
    In The Great Mouse Detective the Disney formula is used undiluted, and that is how it works best. The heroes are appealing, the villains have that special Disney flair - humorous blackguards who really enjoy being evil -and the script is witty and not overly sentimental.
  25. 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.
  26. The Waldheim Waltz
    Beckermann wants not so much to contextualize as to invoke — with the hope, perhaps, that placing us in the middle of this debate will create its own context.
  27. A Season in France
    While the story plays a bit with the notion of the supernatural, the spirit foregrounded here is more tangible: an ominous sense of restlessness and curtailed dreams.
  28. Lots of Kids, a Monkey and a Castle
    Along with the loving portraiture are elements of peculiar mystery.
  29. Life and Nothing More
    A portrait of lives that can’t be reduced to statistics.
  30. Vaya
    Using real experiences shared by the homeless in story workshops, Omotoso — who was also a creator of the South African television series “A Place Called Home” — directs with empathy and without sentimentality.
  31. Number 37
    Cheerfully derivative yet doggedly entertaining, Number 37 benefits from Dumisa’s slick execution and impressive acting by her small cast.
  32. Weightless
    Several long, wordless stretches arise during the film, all of them thoughtful. Jaron Albertin, directing his first feature, cultivates tension in small moments and doesn’t force the drama.
  33. Peter Pan
    A wholly amusing and engaging piece of work within the defined limitations of the aforementioned Disney style. The Disney inventions are as skillful and clever as they have ever been.
  34. That Way Madness Lies...
    This film lays bare how the American health care system seems designed, at every level, to fail the mentally ill and those who try to be of genuine service to them.
  35. Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes
    It conveys a credible sense of Ailes’s psychology through the testimony of peers and co-workers who witnessed his ruthlessness firsthand.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    101 Dalmatians
    A generally cozy and sentimental little yarn about a nice young English couple, their brood of dogs and a lady dognapper who collects Dalmatians to make coats. It's a rather clever idea, if a bit unsettling.
  37. Semi-Tough
    A funny film that is as much satire as parody, as much about our time as it is about some of our more bizarre culture heroes.
  38. Biloxi Blues
    Biloxi Blues, carefully adapted and reshaped by Mr. Simon, is a very classy movie, directed and toned up by Mike Nichols so there's not an ounce of fat in it.
  39. Radio Days
    As free in form as it is generous of spirit.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Magnificent Ambersons
    All in all, The Magnificent Ambersons is an exceptionally well-made film, dealing with a subject scarcely worth the attention which has been lavished upon it.
  41. Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché
    By the end of “Be Natural,” you won’t only have a clear idea of who this remarkable woman was; you may well have acquired a new taste in old movies.
  42. Sweet Dreams
    What elevates these scenes from the usual concert simulations - and what gives the entire film its tremendous immediacy - is the extraordinary way in which Miss Lange has molded herself to fit the music. Although the performance is conspicuously prop-heavy, with brittle wigs and an enormous number of costume changes, Miss Lange makes herself a perfect physical extension of the vibrant, changeable, enormously expressive woman who can be heard on these recordings.
  43. The Turning Point
    The Turning Point is entertaining, not for discovering new material, but for treating old material with style and romantic feeling that, in this day and age, seem remarkably unafraid.
  44. Electro-Pythagorus: A Portrait of Martin Bartlett
    Fowler’s film is made up of familiar documentary components: archival footage, reminiscences by friends and readings of the subject’s letters. But these are ordered in a way that is less concerned with telling a story, or explaining Bartlett’s life, than with evoking his qualities of erudition, curiosity, enthusiasm, care and sometimes anger.
  45. Rams
    This film adheres to Rams’s aesthetics by being brisk, matter of fact, well lighted and composed of clean lines, metaphorically speaking. Brian Eno’s score, which he recorded as a series of discrete compositions, adds to the movie’s linear elegance.
  46. 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.
  47. Don't Come Back from the Moon
    The movie’s emotional potency is undeniable, its slow crescendo of wounded feelings and shimmering photography leaving unexpected imprints on the eyes and heart.
  48. The Last Unicorn
    Features a cast that would do any live-action film proud, a visual style noticeably different from that of other children's fare, and a story filled with genuine sweetness and mystery.
  49. Kagemusha
    There is beauty in Kagemusha but it is impersonal, distant and ghostly. The old master has never been more rigorous. [06 Oct 1980, p.14]
    • The New York Times
  50. Hail Satan?
    Wry and illuminating.
  51. Stand and Deliver
    Mr. Olmos seems to be living and breathing this role rather than merely playing it, and his enthusiasm really catches on.
  52. The Venerable W.
    Schroeder’s approach is calm, almost detached, in keeping with his other work (although the choice of de Medeiros to speak for Buddhism, and with a nonspecific Asian-seeming accent at that, struck me as an avoidable misstep); this makes the bleakness of what he recounts (which is buttressed by an insinuatingly menacing score by Jorge Arriagada) that much more resonant.
  53. Bat*21
    It's hard to imagine what the film might have been with anyone other than Mr. Hackman in this role, for this actor's quintessential decency and ordinariness have never seemed more affecting. It's precisely the lack of bravado in Hambleton that makes him an interesting character, and a poignant anti-Rambo.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    And Breathe Normally
    It engages the audience with a deeply resonant narrative that highlights the ways our sense of safe keeping can suddenly be ripped from our grasp. And it reminds us of the power we possess, even when we think we’re helpless.
  55. Heaven Help Us
    The director Michael Dinner, making his feature debut, and the screenwriter Charles Purpura have an unusually good feeling for the time, the place, the characters as kids and the adults they later turned into.
  56. The Eagle Has Landed
    A good old-fashioned adventure movie that is so stuffed with robust incidents and characters that you can relax and enjoy it without worrying whether it actually happened or even whether it's plausible.
  57. The Secret Garden
    Ms. Holland's film of The Secret Garden is elegantly expressive, a discreet and lovely rendering of the children's classic by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
  58. The 5 Browns: Digging Through the Darkness
    The director and his editor, Amanda Larson, construct the movie in a fairly conventional way, but leave a single string dangling, which they pull tight to devastating emotional effect near the end.
  59. Slut in a Good Way
    In satisfying fashion, Slut in a Good Way recognizes the potential for cruelty that exists as teenagers experiment and learn through sex, but its portrait of adolescence never feels less than loving.
  60. Styx
    A taut moral thriller, Styx is a story of what happens when self-reliance runs into other people’s desperation.
  61. Maiden
    A sleek, exhilarating documentary.
  62. Straight Time
    Straight Time is not a movie to raise the spirits. It is so cool it would leave a chill were it not done with such precision and control that we remain fascinated by a rat, in spite of ourselves.
  63. Clemency
    Woodard’s performance gathers its astonishing force incrementally, in subtle choices and inflections that you might not even register as actorly decisions.
  64. Hala
    If Baig’s writing is at times thin and excessively pointed — like a classroom discussion about what it means to live an authentic life — her grasp of mood is spot on.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cactus Flower
    The picture moves around comfortably in nice color, against some authentic Manhattan exteriors. But it is primarily the verve and skill of the performances, the pungent air of sexual chemistry and the peppery good humor that make the movie so diverting.
  66. Eye of the Needle
    An ambitious, energetic thriller that stops short of real excitement for reasons that are hard to pinpoint. It's an entertaining movie, and an extremely well-acted one.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dear Ex
    It is a remarkably affecting and cogent picture.
  68. Two-Lane Blacktop
    Two-Lane Blacktop is a far from perfect film (those metaphors keep blocking the road), but it has been directed, acted, photographed and scored (underscored, happily) with the restraint and control of an aware, mature filmmaker.
  69. Prince of the City
    Prince of the City begins with the strength and confidence of a great film, and ends merely as a good one. The achievement isn't what it first promises to be, but it's exciting and impressive all the same.
  70. Fort Apache the Bronx
    A tough-talking street melodrama, both shocking and sorrowful, acted by Paul Newman and a huge cast with the kind of conviction that can't be ignored.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Juanita
    Although Juanita teeters off track a bit with the chef’s half-baked back story, it soars when it allows its lead to explore the complexities of love and unbridled joy. And Woodard completely owns it.
  72. The Competition
    The movie’s most provocative aspect is its near-methodical portrayal of hive-mind thinking pursued as a kind of norm — not just by the examiners, but the hopeful applicants.
  73. The Unicorn
    Isabelle Dupuis and Tim Geraghty have made a grim and haunting documentary about what it means to burn bright, then die alone.
  74. A Tuba to Cuba
    High on music and hot with the thrill of discovery, A Tuba to Cuba swarms with shiny happy people.
  75. Driveways
    Slow and sweet and unassuming, Driveways, the second feature from the Korean-American director Andrew Ahn, tackles major themes in a minor key.
  76. Mr. Jones
    More than anything, Mr. Jones is an argument for witnessing and remembrance.
  77. Dune: Part One
    The designs and textures of the movie’s various worlds and their inhabitants are arresting, filigreed and meaningful, with characters and their environments in sync.
  78. Queen & Slim
    The film fumbles some of its big gestures and over-italicizes a few statements. What lingers, though, are strains of anger, ardor, sorrow and sweetness, and the quiet astonishment of witnessing the birth of a legend. This movie feels like something new, and also as if it’s been around forever, waiting for its moment.
  79. S.O.B.
    It's a nasty, biased, self-serving movie that also happens to be hilarious most of the time.
  80. South Mountain
    Balsam is marvelous throughout, precisely measured in portraying a state often teetering on abjection. Balsam’s Lila can turn from luminescent to hangdog in a flash. The character’s inner worlds register with exceptional vividness.
  81. Sword of Trust
    The humor has a persistent goofy streak, but what sticks to the ribs is the poignant stuff.
  82. Room at the Top
    Room at the Top is quite conservative in its morality — although its sledgehammer ending still packs an emotional wallop.
  83. Maze
    Yet underneath the plotting and internecine tussles of the would-be escapees lurks something much more interesting: the story of a seduction.
  84. Breakthrough
    You don’t have to believe in divine intervention to be moved by this story.
  85. Working Woman
    Despite its surface-level placidity, the Israeli feature Working Woman unfolds like a psychological thriller — a procedural that, as it tightens its grip, captures how workplace sexual harassment slowly takes over one woman’s life.
  86. Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes
    This tidy, thoughtful film gets at jazz’s joy and pain.
  87. The Last
    As the impossible Claire, the longtime character actor Rebecca Schull (a 90-year-old playing 92) is spectacular. Her character is lucid in her awfulness, and she almost never shuts up, relating endless anecdotes that don’t just force her family to face awful truths, but rub their noses in them.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    El Dorado
    The taut guidance of Mr. Hawks, an old frontier hand, the barbed, pungent and frequently funny dialogue, plus some murderous gun forays, add up to crisp entertainment
  89. Carmine Street Guitars
    In a film full of pleasant harmonies, a note of dread comes in.
  90. Master Z: Ip Man Legacy
    A lively, fun one.
  91. Nashville
    A couple of sequences in the middle of the movie just mark time, but usually everything works, to make Nashville the most original, provocative high‐spirited film Mr. Altman has yet given.
  92. The Searchers
    A rip-snorting Western, as brashly entertaining as they come.
  93. On the Town
    Gaiety, rhythm, humor and a good, wholesome dash of light romance have been artfully blended together in this bright Technicolored comedy.
  94. On Any Sunday
    The movie itself is anything but anticlimactic. By putting his cameras on the cycles, Brown achieves audience-participation effects with speed that amount to marvelous delirium.
  95. Buffaloed
    Simultaneously rowdy and slick, Buffaloed is exuberantly paced and entirely dependent on Deutch’s moxie and pell-mell performance.
  96. 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.
  97. Meeting Gorbachev
    But if Meeting Gorbachev finds its subject mostly staying on a pro-peace, antinuclear message — and it’s a script that’s hard to argue with — Herzog shapes the film into a study in how world events often come down to quirks of character and circumstance.
  98. House of Hummingbird
    Kim works like a pointillist with lots of short scenes and daubs of textured nuance that build the portrait incrementally.
  99. Scheme Birds
    For all the impetuousness of its subjects, this is a film of remarkable respect and restraint — a documentary that carves shape into a messy reality.
  100. 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.
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