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. Seven Days in May
    The whole thing achieves a tingling speed and irresistible tension under John Frankenheimer's direction, which deftly lifts some of the tricks of pictorial and musical emphasis from the old Nazi "Blitzkrieg" films.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    These Are the Damned
    Mr. Losey, proceeding with grim logic toward his apocalyptic climax, has made a strong comment about the nuclear age—while arrestingly demonstrating just how much a gifted filmmaker can accomplish with limited means.
  3. Another Day of Life
    It uses animation to depict a conflict in fresh dimensions.
  4. Firecrackers
    This is a movie that, like its characters, is more fluent in feelings than in words.
  5. 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.”
  6. Joan of Arc
    Here and in the earlier picture it’s perhaps easy to apprehend Dumont’s approach with a “What’s this oddball up to now?” smirk. But if Dumont is joking at all, it’s a form of what used to be called “kidding on the square.”
  7. Diego Maradona
    It is exhausting and exhilarating, cheap looking and slick, a documentary for Maradona fans but also for many others besides.
  8. The Lighthouse
    Eggers meticulously sets the scene, adds texture and builds tension and mystery from men locked in battle and sometimes in embrace. He has created a story about an age-old struggle, one that is most satisfyingly expressed in this film’s own tussle between genre and its deviations.
  9. Tommaso
    Tommaso has a different feel than your average variant on Fellini’s “8 ½.” Maybe it’s a sense of shame, something the older film’s Guido hadn’t much of. Whatever it is, it makes Tommaso crackle with ideas and empathy, as Ferrara’s best work always does.
  10. Family Romance, LLC
    In many of Herzog’s nonfiction films, the director himself is a defining presence. One understands why he wanted to stay behind the camera and off the soundtrack here. This wrinkle in modern social life is best taken in without the mitigation of overt distancing.
  11. 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.
  12. Beats
    This tender, detail-filled movie lives for the moment.
  13. The Invisible Man
    Moss’s full-bore performance — anchored by her extraordinarily supple face — gives the movie its emotional stakes.
  14. John Wick: Chapter 4
    There is simply and once again Reeves, the axis who centers this franchise with his grave sincerity, beatific glow and mesmerizing, rooted fighting style, with its heavy-footed solidity and surprising suppleness. No matter what happens, nothing ever feels as poignantly at stake here as Reeves’s own ravaged, beautiful, aging body.
  15. Barbara Rubin and the Exploding NY Underground
    An informative and overdue documentary.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Hell Is for Heroes
    An unusually well-made film.
  17. 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.
  18. The Garden
    Mr. Jarman's visual sense easily eclipses his conceptual talents. And The Garden has a burning, kaleidoscopic energy to compensate for the facile nature of some of its more unavoidable thoughts.
  19. 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.
  20. The Diary of Anne Frank
    Mr. Stevens has done a superb job of putting upon the screen the basic drama and shivering authenticity of the Frances Goodrich-Albert Hackett play, which in turn caught the magnitude of drama in the real-life diary of a Jewish girl.
  21. The Hustler
    Under Robert Rossen's strong direction, its ruthless and odorous account of one young hustler's eventual emancipation is positive and alive. It crackles with credible passions. It comes briskly and brusquely to sharp points.
  22. Sea of Shadows
    The plot twists are so spot on that a screenwriter might have rejected them.
  23. Ford v Ferrari
    Ford v Ferrari is no masterpiece, but it is — to invoke a currently simmering debate — real cinema, the kind of solid, satisfying, nonpandering movie that can seem endangered nowadays.
  24. The Defiant Ones
    A remarkably apt and dramatic visualization of a social idea—the idea of men of different races brought together to face misfortune in a bond of brotherhood — is achieved by Producer Stanley Kramer in his new film, The Defiant Ones.
  25. On the Beach
    Mr. Kramer has brilliantly directed a strong and responsive cast, headed by Gregory Peck as the submarine commander and Ava Gardner as the worldly woman who craves his love. Miss Gardner is remarkably revealing of the pathos of a wasted life. Fred Astaire is also amazing as the cynical scientist, conveying in his self-effacing manner a piercing sense of the irony of his trade.
  26. Atlantic City
    A rich, gaudy cinema trip.
  27. Stalag 17
    A humorous, suspenseful, disturbing and rousing pastime.
  28. The Hunger
    What makes The Hunger so much fun is its knowing stylishness, which Mr. Scott, who makes his theatrical film debut here, has brought to movies from a career in commercials and documentaries.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The War of the Worlds
    The War of the Worlds is, for all of its improbabilities, an imaginatively conceived, professionally turned adventure, which makes excellent use of Technicolor, special effects by a crew of experts and impressively drawn backgrounds.
  30. Fail-Safe
    It packs a melodramatic wallop that will rattle a lot of chattering teeth.
  31. The Americanization of Emily
    Here is a film that not only gives the charming Miss Andrews a chance to prove herself irresistible in a straight romantic comedy but also gets off some of the wildest brashest and funniest situations and cracks at the lunacy of warfare that have popped from the screen in quite some time.
  32. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
    The Disney people naturally have made it as elaborate as it was made by Verne. And they have likewise developed all the other intriguing potentials of the yarn with a joyful exaggeration that is expected in science-fiction films.
  33. Force of Evil
    A dynamic crime-and-punishment drama, brilliantly and broadly realized.
  34. Wise Guys
    From its cartoony credits to its knish-and-cannoli close, Wise Guys is one funny movie.
  35. Black and Blue
    Its pulpy pop-cultural credibility is inseparable from its honest, brutal assessment of the state of the world. Its ideas about the nature and limits of heroism — about just how hard and terrifying the resistance to evil can be — are spelled out in vivid black and white.
  36. The Great Hack
    If the paranoia level could probably withstand a slight reduction, much of the movie feels utterly credible.
  37. Local Hero
    Local Hero is a funny movie, but it's more apt to induce chuckles than knee-slapping. Like Gregory's Girl, it demonstrates Mr. Forsyth's uncanny ability for making an audience sense that something magical is going on, even if that something isn't easily explained.
  38. All Quiet on the Western Front
    Lewis Milestone's unsparing direction of the senseless slaughter more than makes up for the soft spots and does justice to Erich Maria Remarque's novel of a generation destroyed by war.
  39. Rojo
    Adopting a cool, oblique yet accessible approach that complements the washed-out, nicotine-stained palette, Naishtat builds a modular narrative that increasingly bristles.
  40. Breaker Morant
    By the time it plays out its hand, this film has become genuinely, surprisingly affecting. And unspeakably sad.
  41. Murder by Death
    Murder by Death is as light and insubstantial as one could wish.
  42. The Sweet Requiem
    The plot intrigues are arguably appropriate to genre pictures, but “Requiem” manages to play out as an urgent but understated drama. The film puts its points across with a delicacy and sobriety rare in moviemaking.
  43. Rosie
    [A] moving drama ... With its quiet realism and almost unbearably intimate hand-held camera work ... "Rosie" holds our hands to a flame of desperation.
  44. Love, Antosha
    This affectionate, heartbreaking documentary about his life, directed by Garret Price, presents Yelchin as a soldier of cinema, and a lot more.
  45. TINY: The Life of Erin Blackwell
    The combination of “Streetwise” and “Tiny” belongs on a short list with “Boyhood,” the “Up” documentaries and “Hoop Dreams” as exemplars of time-capsule filmmaking.
  46. Cassandro, the Exotico!
    This effervescent picture has an often infectious underground-movie aesthetic.
  47. Uncut Gems
    Lots of stuff happens, lots and lots, and some of it can be hard to track. But the bedlam is intentional and amusing. All you need to do is latch onto Howard as he runs from here to there, yelling greetings, taking calls, making deals, always moving amid jump cuts, zooms and lurid close-ups.
  48. This Changes Everything
    Once it finally begins to focus on the mission, however, This Changes Everything not only becomes engrossing but reveals itself as a crucial cri de coeur.
  49. End of the Century
    The measured ordinariness of its first section has been a sly setup for a poetic film that handles narrative as a kind of scarf dance.
  50. Angels Are Made of Light
    The director finds beauty everywhere — in a cloud of dust, a traffic jam, the raucous din of children at play. And wherever such beauty exists, we imagine, hope can never be entirely absent.
  51. Harriet
    It is a rousing and powerful drama, respectful of both the historical record and the cravings of modern audiences.
  52. The Last Duel
    The movie is weirdly entertaining, but the world it presents, despite its flourishes of comedy, is cold, hard and unforgiving.
  53. Bad Education
    It’s Jackman, whose smile appears increasingly wolfish as the film goes on (and as Frank’s face grows taut with cosmetic surgery), who ultimately owns Bad Education. It’s a plum part, sure, but also a deeply unsympathetic one — a chance for the actor to channel his charisma toward dark, mischievous ends.
  54. How to Build a Girl
    Like a stone skipping on water, How to Build a Girl leaps from raunchy to charming, vulgar to sweet, earthy to airy-fairy without allowing any one to settle. Yet it’s so wonderfully funny and deeply embedded in class-consciousness . . . that it’s tonal incontinence is easily forgiven.
  55. Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles
    Some shows deserve reverential treatment. And the love letter is, to use a word so associated with this show it influences the way many say it, tradition.
  56. Ms. Purple
    Ms. Purple is a moody, downbeat drama soaked in color and saturated with sadness.
  57. Los Reyes
    The kids’ ambling chatter, the dogs’ routine of rest and play, lull us into a contemplative state, which allows us to better appreciate the mystery of existence.
  58. Genèse (Genesis)
    The film may be maddening as a character study, and it could damage an ionizer with its air of self-importance, but its experiments in form and tone are highly original.
  59. Ladyworld
    Kramer choreographs action through striking tableaus that follow the group’s shifting dynamics; the score, built from percussion and a chorus of girlish hoots, builds the tension.
  60. The Hand
    A suspense-horror film of unusual psychological intelligence and wit.
  61. Eating Raoul
    It is full of smiles, punctuated here and there by marvelously unseemly guffaws, but most of the time it works its little wonders quietly.
  62. Splendor in the Grass
    Miss Wood has a beauty and radiance that carry her through a role of violent passions and depressions with unsullied purity and strength. There is poetry in her performance, and her eyes in the final scene bespeak the moral significance and emotional fulfillment of this film.
  63. Western Stars
    The energy here is controlled, the mood reflective. These character-driven songs are populated by the washed-up and the run-down — an aging actor, a hitchhiker — and the shared themes are remembrance and regret.
  64. Color Out of Space
    Using shape-shifting as a messy metaphor for sickness and childhood trauma, Stanley and Cage leap so far over the psychological top that they never come back to earth. By the end, my own eyeballs hadn’t changed color, but they must have looked like pinwheels.
  65. Play It Again, Sam
    Even when he's not in an anarchic mood, Woody Allen is still the funniest neurotic in American movies today and Play It Again, Sam, directed by Herbert Ross from Allen's screenplay, will probably remain the funniest new movie around this summer until another Allen work shows up.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Two Mules for Sister Sara
    I'm not sure that it is a great movie, but it is very good, and it stays and grows in the mind the way only movies of exceptional narrative intelligence do.
  67. Last Night in Soho
    Nothing in Wright’s previous work quite prepared me for Last Night in Soho, its easy seductiveness and spikes of sophistication. Dissolving the border between present and past, fact and fantasy, the director (aided by the euphoric talents of the cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung) has produced some of the most dazzling imagery of his career.
  68. Marona's Fantastic Tale
    Marona has three real homes in her life, and past abandonments have taught her that heartbreak waits in every happiness. But fortunately, the film stays buoyant through its unique, boisterous animation.
  69. The Load
    The gray skies under which Glavonic shoots, the unhurried takes in which he chronicles the drive, they put us with Vlada in an unmitigated way, the better to compel viewers to ask themselves what they would do in his position.
  70. Polyester
    Polyester is not Mr. Waters's ordinary movie. It's a very funny one, with a hip, stylized humor that extends beyond the usual limitations of his outlook.
  71. Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound
    Documentaries about film technology, at least those that aspire to reach some portion of a mainstream audience, have to make wonkiness ingratiating. Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound, a cogent and winning picture directed by Midge Costin, does this in a variety of ways.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cunningham
    What the film doesn’t give is an accurate sense of Cunningham time. In a Cunningham dance, the mind can wander, experience different rates of change, be baffled, engrossed, astonished, bored. The price of Kovgan’s efficiency is impatience, always cutting away and moving on.
  73. The Assistant
    Unfolding over one acutely distressing workday, The Assistant is less a #MeToo story than a painstaking examination of the way individual slights can coalesce into a suffocating miasma of harassment.
  74. Shadows
    Shadows is an unfinished picture in every sense of the word. Yet it is fitfully dynamic, endowed with a raw but vibrant strength, conveying an illusion of being a record of real people, and it is incontestably sincere.
  75. Say Amen, Somebody
    The music alone would be enough to make Say Amen, Somebody worth seeing. But it has warmth and friendliness, too, and some of its family scenes are as memorable as its songs.
  76. No. 7 Cherry Lane
    Consider this film a master class in world-building, a bewildering but poignant dream — one that will leave you with plenty of burning questions.
  77. The Sundowners
    A sense of outdoor living and a tingle of open-air adventure are the breath of life in this film.
  78. The Elephant Queen
    Young viewers could certainly handle a few more harsh facts. Yet The Elephant Queen sets out, first and foremost, to use a narrative to build compassion. And here, a good story is as effective as a shout.
  79. Sound of Metal
    Propelled by a distinctive style and a potent lead performance, Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal builds a singular tension between silence and noise.
  80. La Llorona
    There are some very good scenes in the movie’s second half; even so, it’s striking that the most unsettling aspect of “La Llorona” is that history doesn’t simply shape the movie. It also haunts and finally overwhelms it with terrors far more unspeakable than any impressively manufactured shock.
  81. The Killers
    Don Siegel’s remake was hardly so well received, although it is in many respects a more vivid, streamlined, callous film.
  82. The Disappearance of My Mother
    At the very least, it’s impossible to watch The Disappearance of My Mother without a measure of ambivalence. Gratitude for the chance to make Barzini’s acquaintance, and for Barrese’s sensitivity in making the introduction, is accompanied by ethical queasiness.
  83. Fantastic Voyage
    All I can tell you is it is quite a trip. Fortunately, all of the voyaging is done in the northern hemisphere.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bloody Mama
    What hoists the picture into real substance toward the home stretch is an eerie and fascinating by credible sequence with the Barker clan holding as captive a blindfolded millionaire, strongly played by Pat Hingle.
  85. Celebration
    Saint Laurent was essential to 20th-century culture, and Celebration shows the inevitable fading of glory as well as the enduring features of his life’s work.
  86. Richard Jewell
    The shadows are what linger from this flawed, fascinating movie.
  87. Lolita
    This is not the novel Lolita, but it is a provocative sort of film.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Burn, Witch, Burn
    This low-budget, British import, with Janet Blair and a small cast, is quite the most effective "supernatural" thriller since Village of the Damned.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Babes in Toyland
    This time, Mr. Disney, true to himself in his own fashion, has constructed a garden of dreams to delight every child, with the aid of a few of the noted Herbert melodies, a spate of new ones, a cast of photogenic kids and willing grown-ups and sets as stylized as those of any Disney cartoon.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Blackbeard's Ghost
    The whole thing, by the way, shines in nifty color. But the real appeal of such wholesomeness is the brisk, unsugary serving, under Robert Stevenson's trim direction, and the consistently adroit humor, which sidesteps slapstick.
  91. Candleshoe
    Candleshoe, with its beguiling English countryside settings, languid pace, defanged Dickensian villains, compassionate butler, down-at-the-heels nobility, hidden treasure and orphaned children engaged in a plot to outwit swindlers, keep up appearances and save the old manor from foreclosure, is the fiction of a bygone era.
  92. The Living Desert
    Mr. Disney's earnest people have done a remarkable job of collecting some extraordinary footage and his editors have assembled it well for excitement and fascination, more than for education.
  93. Old Yeller
    In this very lean and sensible screen transcription of Fred Gipson's children's book, adapted by himself and William Tunberg, a warm, appealing little rustic tale unfolds in lovely color photography. Sentimental, yes, but also sturdy as a hickory stick.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men
    An expert rendition of an ancient legend that is as pretty as its Technical hues and as lively as a sturdy Western.
  95. When Lambs Become Lions
    It’s a striking, human portrait of men in trouble, looking for escape and possibly redemption.
  96. Pacific Heights
    Pacific Heights deserves a little credit for originality, and a little more for remaining within the realm of realism until a contrived, violent ending becomes overdue. Thanks to its three stars and a well-chosen supporting cast, the film remains sly fun even when its characters begin making silly mistakes.
  97. Lady in White
    Here are the bones of an ordinary ghost story. But the writer and director Frank LaLoggia brings them to life with exceptional vitality.
  98. Human Nature
    Every “Oh wow” in Human Nature is matched by an “Oh no” somewhere down the line. Together, these two competing emotions — excitement and unease — make for one pretty fascinating documentary.
  99. A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon
    “Farmageddon” features plenty of inspired, boomeranging slapstick, executed with clockwork precision. It’s a very funny movie — and an endlessly, refreshingly cheerful one, which is just as rare.
  100. My Neighbors the Yamadas
    Mr. Takahata’s broad, cartoony family comedy whose smeary watercolor washes and Peanuts-like line drawings don’t follow Ghibli’s house style. The family’s misadventures are standard stuff, but the art is continuously inventive.
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