The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,271 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 20271
  2. Mixed: 8,430 out of 20271
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20271
20271 movie reviews
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  1. Ask Dr. Ruth
    A movie that feels more like an encomium than a thoughtful probe of a brilliantly mutinous mind.
  2. The Convent
    Hyett proves more successful with atmosphere than plot.
  3. Clara
    While the movie’s morose mysticism is tolerable enough, once “Clara” starts arguing for following feelings instead of data, it puts on its own tinfoil hat.
  4. El Chicano
    The director Ben Hernandez Bray began his career in Hollywood as a stuntman, and though too many bones are crunched to describe this film as elegant, Bray directs action with merciless kinetic logic.
  5. Shadow
    A martial-arts movie landmark, as strong in its performances as it is spectacularly novel in its violence.
  6. 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.
  7. The Intruder
    More silly than scary. This doesn’t seem to be entirely intentional, and it isn’t altogether unwelcome.
  8. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
    Working ostensibly from the viewpoint of Bundy’s longtime girlfriend, Liz Kendall (an excellent Lily Collins), [Director] Berlinger never fully commits. Instead, he appears as seduced by Bundy as virtually everyone else in the movie.
  9. Long Shot
    Long Shot isn’t going to save the romantic comedy, but it’s an adrenaline shot of pure pleasure to the genre’s failing heart.
  10. Decade of Fire
    Decade of Fire is at its best when showing how the fires affected individuals effectively left to fend for themselves.
  11. Non-Fiction
    Witty, intelligent, sometimes cryptic.
  12. UglyDolls
    Every aspect of this computer-animated movie directed by Kelly Asbury seems equally overdetermined and tossed-off, as if it were a caffeinated weekend project for everyone involved.
  13. Knock Down the House
    Exuberant.
  14. Return to Return to Nuke 'Em High a.k.a. Vol. 2
    This putrid but at times oddly amiable exercise raised questions of an esoteric nature to this reviewer’s mind, such as “Why do all the female extras look as if they’ve been kidnapped from the post-punk club Coney Island High, since that club closed over 20 years ago?” If you too are apt to be diverted by such concerns, you might be amused by this.
  15. The Silence
    The Silence posits a grand evolutionary struggle between mankind and its winged tormentors, but every moment feels like regression.
  16. Tesla Nation
    Mostly, the movie, directed by Zeljko Mirkovic, consists of a barely organized series of interviews with notable Serbs and Serbian-Americans, and name-checks of others.
  17. J.T. Leroy
    Anchored by its two excellent leads, the movie is sympathetic and, for the most part, unsentimental.
  18. Thriller
    Some early, halfhearted attempts at social relevance aside, Thriller is an act of quotation and little else. It’s less a movie than a mix tape.
  19. If the Dancer Dances
    As Wechsler allows rehearsal scenes to play out at length, the perfectionism of dancer-to-dancer lessons becomes improbably poignant.
  20. I Trapped the Devil
    By seesawing between bland normalcy and hellishness, Lobo denies his audience the immersive horror that his film’s best images promise.
  21. Chasing Portraits
    Chasing Portraits is small and subtle, with some missed opportunities and occasionally inexpert filmmaking. But it’s not an insignificant effort, and Ms. Rynecki’s cause is admirable.
  22. The White Crow
    The problem is that while there are dance performances scattered throughout The White Crow, as well as interludes with a sweaty Rudy practicing and striving, the offstage scenes tend to feel like filler, the bits stuck between the barre and the theater.
  23. 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.
  24. Carmine Street Guitars
    In a film full of pleasant harmonies, a note of dread comes in.
  25. Avengers: Endgame
    Settling scores, wrapping up loose ends and taking a victory lap — the main objects of the game this ostensibly last time around — generate some comic sparks as well as a few honest tears.
  26. Kalank
    This kind of fantasy-spectacle is Mr. Varman’s forte, not storytelling. When the singing and dancing and action stop, which is less often than you might think, so does “Kalank.”
  27. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
    Has moments of slackness and chaos (the book does, too), but for the most part it’s a lively, charming excursion.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Someone Great
    The hooks on which Someone Great chooses to hang its emotional hats are a little clichéd, but Rodriguez, Snow and Wise have enough chemistry to pull it all off.
  29. The Curse of La Llorona
    The scares are plentiful and sometimes ticklishly funny in The Curse of La Llorona, an enjoyably old-fashioned ghost story.
  30. Family
    Thoroughly good-natured and with a handful of decent jokes (like Kate McKinnon as a vulpine suburban mom), Family would be more interesting if, instead of trying to rewire Kate, it just admitted that her harsh honesty and benign neglect were more beneficial to Maddie than her mother’s anxious hovering.
  31. Red Joan
    Leave it to the feted British theater director Trevor Nunn to flatten the intrigue and dampen the lust that could have made Red Joan zing.
  32. Stuck
    When the characters are singing, you can’t wait for them to get back to talking. And when they’re talking, you can’t wait for them to get back to singing. After a while, you start wishing you were watching that TV ad with a bunch of people on a bus, singing about how they have a structured settlement but they need cash now.
  33. Instant Dreams
    Baptist’s approach, treating his subjects like characters in a drama, is ultimately frustrating.
  34. Grass
    When the writer opts to just let things be, the movie is at its most content.
  35. Rafiki
    This is a love story for the time, not for the ages.
  36. Little Woods
    DaCosta is better at setting scenes than digging into them.
  37. Fast Color
    Moody and strange, Fast Color has a solemnity that haunts almost every frame.
  38. Naples in Veils
    A tedious muddle.
  39. Under the Silver Lake
    The sweet smarts of Mitchell’s first movie, “The Myth of the American Sleepover” (treated to a bit of auto-allusion in “Silver Lake”) aren’t much in evidence here. Nor are the slippery psychosexual scares of “It Follows,” his breakthrough horror movie from 2015. The ambitions this time are grander, but also vaguer and duller.
  40. Hail Satan?
    Wry and illuminating.
  41. Breakthrough
    You don’t have to believe in divine intervention to be moved by this story.
  42. Penguins
    [A] beautiful but frustratingly shallow Disneynature documentary.
  43. 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.
  44. Teen Spirit
    Teen Spirit, Max Minghella’s sweet and touching directing debut, is both proudly clichéd and refreshingly different.
  45. Missing Link
    What’s missing from the movie, for all its technical skill, is simply inspiration — that extra touch of wit or imagination that might elevate it from a pleasant diversion to a rare sighting.
  46. Girls of the Sun
    Inspired by a 2014 ISIS raid on Kurdish territory, Girls of the Sun, unlike the women who populate it, is weak and often corny.
  47. Satan & Adam
    The blues seep into every scene of Satan & Adam, a gritty yet lovely documentary. And even after the songs stop, the music’s bittersweet emotions linger.
  48. The Most Dangerous Year
    While The Most Dangerous Year can be intensely personal — Knowlton speaks of the pain she felt watching visitors to a strawberry festival sign the petition for the anti-transgender ballot measure — it is primarily an informational documentary, not a film with artistic pretensions. But it makes its case effectively.
  49. Mary Magdalene
    Unfortunately, it’s a confused and frequently enervating effort.
  50. Dogman
    Social realism in a symbolist key, Dogman is at times more pleasurable to look at than to experience.
  51. Master Z: Ip Man Legacy
    A lively, fun one.
  52. Long Day's Journey Into Night
    Its various components defy logical arrangement both as viewed and in retrospect. What they build up to is even more seductive than anything that led up to it — a moment of breathtaking romanticism that’s as intoxicating as it is unexpected.
  53. Hellboy
    Marshall, a world away from the dank dread and crawling terror of his 2006 spelunking stunner, “The Descent,” directs like a dog at a squirrel convention, charging gleefully from one witlessly violent encounter to the next. Ian McShane, as Hellboy’s adoptive father, does what he can to calm the chaos, but the movie left me alternately baffled and battered.
  54. Stockholm
    Drowsy in feel and muted in color, Stockholm is lightly amusing and watchable — mostly thanks to Hawke — but never makes the case that this is a story that needed to be told, with or without laughs.
  55. Her Smell
    Moss strips away every shred of her charm to reveal her charisma in its rawest state, implicating Perry and the audience in a voyeurism that can feel almost holy.
  56. Sauvage / Wild
    It’s tough to build a character study around an unconvincing character.
  57. Little
    Little is overly protective of its characters and its audience; it’s soothing rather than sharp. That’s most likely because of an anxious concern for grown-up sensitivities. Smart 13-year-olds are likely to roll their eyes as well as laugh.
  58. Unicorn Store
    The message here is that there’s no one-size-fits-all formula for adulthood, but the film doesn’t bear it out.
  59. Suburban Birds
    The spectacular feature-directing debut of Qiu Sheng.
  60. Reinventing Rosalee
    If you can look past the low-grade production values — and to do that you’ll need two awfully forgiving eyes — Reinventing Rosalee delivers a few rewards, thanks to its vibrant subject and her noteworthy life.
  61. The Wind
    The movie’s most striking aspect, though, is Lyn Moncrief’s arresting cinematography, which turns the vast vacancy of the plains into both hostile observer and hellish metaphor. The story might finally slip its leash, but the baleful mood holds firm.
  62. The Public
    Most egregiously, Gabrielle Union plays a TV news reporter determined to portray the protest as a hostage situation. At the film’s nadir, Stuart, on the phone with her during a broadcast, stops making his case and begins quoting from “The Grapes of Wrath.”
  63. Storm Boy
    Storm Boy tries to present itself as a modern fable, where the lessons learned relate directly to present-day concerns over the environment, industrialization and the marginalization of indigenous cultures. But these themes come across as didactic rather than moving.
  64. Peterloo
    Leigh’s narrative is touched by the literary spirit of the later 19th century. Peterloo has the sweep of Tolstoy and the bustle of Dickens.
  65. High Life
    Too often the ideas here, visual and otherwise, feel haphazard — outer and inner space, Pattinson’s head, sexual taboo, apocalypse now or maybe then — more like material for a vision board than a fully realized vision.
  66. Pet Sematary
    But when they settle into a groove that aligns with the novel’s, the movie delivers great unsettling jolts that approximate the power of King’s vision.
  67. Shazam!
    It’s a nice change of pace for a big-screen mega-comic, if not a revolutionary shift.
  68. The Best of Enemies
    Rather than illuminating the politics of the present by examining the struggles of the past, Bissell lurches from folksy comedy to clattering melodrama, producing the opposite of enlightenment. To quote an old protest song: When will we ever learn?
  69. Wall
    Imperiously wringing his hands at both sides of the conflict, Hare never brings his observations together in a satisfying conclusion (not that any was likely, in just 80 minutes).
  70. The Legend of Cocaine Island
    The director (2014’s “Little Hope Was Arson”) can lay it on thick with the comic scene setups and James Bond-like soundtrack. Then again, this underlines the silliness of Rodney Hyden’s odyssey.
  71. Super Deluxe
    Super Deluxe, though, runs three hours, and Kumararaja loses his way in the draggy, overlong second act.
  72. A Vigilante
    Daggar-Nickson gestures in certain directions, but for the most part she avoids deeper, troubling questions about retribution and violence. Instead, she concentrates on the genre basics, as in the movie’s admirably hard-core final face-off.
  73. Tigerland
    Tigerland falls into a common trap of advocacy documentaries, which is to inform on an urgent issue — preserving a species — without a particularly urgent cinematic narrative to match it.
  74. 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.
  75. 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.
  76. The Chaperone
    Despite a thoroughly modern central character, this impeccably costumed, wishy-washy period piece feels like it emerged from a PBS storage trunk, wrapped in tissue paper and reeking of mothballs.
  77. The Burial Of Kojo
    The Burial of Kojo is a near-virtuoso work, a feast of emotion, nuance and beauty, and a startling feature directing debut.
  78. 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.
  79. The Beach Bum
    What The Beach Bum celebrates as transgression is pure tedium. What it takes for divine lunacy is frat house doggerel. The booze flows freely. The women are topless and ornamental. The cars and boats are fast and expensive. There’s nothing much worth writing about.
  80. The Brink
    Fast-moving, tightly packed, at times unnervingly entertaining.
  81. 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.
  82. The Dirt
    Plays like an ill-advised remake of “This Is Spinal Tap” — one in which all the laughs are unintentional.
  83. Triple Threat
    At times, the film’s demand for teamwork precludes satisfying payoffs.
  84. Maze
    Yet underneath the plotting and internecine tussles of the would-be escapees lurks something much more interesting: the story of a seduction.
  85. Out of Blue
    Out of Blue botches the source material’s story, misses its mordant humor and inverts its despairing core. Much of this is the filmmaker’s prerogative. But “Out of Blue” doesn’t strike out only as an adaptation. What it offers on its own is tepid and predictable.
  86. Roll Red Roll
    A tough but essential watch, Roll Red Roll documents how a sexual assault in a declining Appalachian town became an international cause célèbre. Shots of near-empty streets and an abandoned steel mill provide a melancholy frame for behavior that seems horrifyingly incomprehensible.
  87. Sunset
    While Nemes’s near-subjective technique can generate genuine tension, it more often yields anxious tedium.
  88. Hotel Mumbai
    It reduces the randomness of real-life bloodshed to the slick thrills of a popcorn movie. And after the mosque attacks in Christchurch, which led the film’s distributor in New Zealand to suspend the movie’s release there, its savagery is especially difficult to take.
  89. Ramen Shop
    A drama from the Singaporean director Eric Khoo that also demonstrates the power of Instagrammable cuisine to spice up an otherwise straightforward, sentimental film.
  90. Total Dhamaal
    The moral seems as tacked on as the villain. But it’s a sweet thought and not entirely out of keeping with a movie that for all its crassness, comic and commercial, is basically good-spirited.
  91. Us
    A vibrant, appealing screen presence, Nyong’o brings a tremendous range and depth of feeling to both characters, who she individualizes with such clarity and lapidary detail that they aren’t just distinct beings; they feel as if they were being inhabited by different actors.
  92. Dragged Across Concrete
    The movie is generally watchable, even at its slowest and ugliest, simply because the actors are solid even when their characters are repellent.
  93. Buddy
    The movie is warm, observant, mildly philosophical and deeply curious about the daily and inner lives of both the people and their four-legged assistants.
    • 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.
  95. The Eyes of Orson Welles
    The movie intersperses observations and speculations on Welles’s life and work with long looks at his graphic pieces. These are fascinating.
  96. Iceman
    Randau’s script, though, is an implacable plod from one bashing to another.
  97. Yardie
    John Conroy’s cinematography hustles and heaves, straining to inject a vitality that the story too often lacks. Yet whether in the kaleidoscopic warmth of Jamaica or the gray chill of London, Yardie’s sunlight-filled songs will make your toes twitch.
  98. The Aftermath
    An old-fashioned wartime romance whose plot highlights are recognizable from outer space, this gleaming dollop of prestige comfort food is neither logically coherent nor emotionally satisfying.
  99. 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.
  100. The Juniper Tree
    In watching a newly restored version, I was struck not only by Björk’s distinctive charisma at 24 years old but also by the talent of the film’s writer, director and editor, Nietzchka Keene.
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