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. Combat Obscura
    Leaning in to the style its patchwork of source material requires, Combat Obscura, is an eye-opening dispatch from a conflict mired in confusion.
  2. The Hummingbird Project
    As the geological, financial and personal barriers the cousins face grow increasingly absurd, the movie works up a satisfying sweat.
  3. The Mustang
    The Mustang is direct and almost perilously familiar — it draws from both westerns and prison movies — yet it is also attractively filigreed with surprising faces, unusual genre notes and luminous, evanescent beauty.
  4. The Highwaymen
    This isn’t an especially good movie — it’s too long, too drenched in Thomas Newman’s cloyingly eclectic score, too full of speechifying and self-regard — but it is a coherent one, with the courage of its vengeful, murderous, politically terrifying convictions.
  5. Wonder Park
    Although its protagonist is blessed with a gift for engineering the impossible, Wonder Park is a film where faulty execution betrays a healthy imagination.
  6. Five Feet Apart
    Richardson, previously wonderful with good material (“Columbus,” “Support the Girls”), here cements her genius status by finding depths beyond the contrived screenplay.
  7. Ash Is Purest White
    Enthralling.
    • 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.
  9. Lady J (Mademoiselle de Joncquières)
    Mouret manipulates our sympathies effortlessly as the story zigzags its way from there to its ultimately surprising and quite satisfying resolution.
  10. Babylon
    All of that observation in Babylon amounts to something that still feels new. You’re looking at people who, in 1980 England, were, at last, being properly, seriously seen.
  11. 3 Faces
    An immersive, pleasurably intelligent movie, one that weds documentary naturalism and melodramatic excess with formalist rigor.
  12. Gloria Bell
    As a performer, Moore can go big, and a terrible yowl here pierces the heart. But she’s a virtuoso of restraint. She shows you the rush of emotions just before they break the surface, so the hurt and confusion flicker on her face like minute shifts of light.
  13. I'm Not Here
    While the film aspires to a clipped complexity, it comes across as gimmicky and amateurish — a chain of miseries passed off as tough truths.
  14. The Kid
    Set in the American Southwest in 1879, The Kid feels less like an actual movie than a table-napkin idea for one.
  15. Island of the Hungry Ghosts
    Ethereal, intensely moving.
  16. Two Plains & a Fancy
    The mode of humor is close to cliquish anticomedy, and viewers not attuned to it may feel like there’s a joke they’re missing.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ferrante Fever
    It’s an anodyne fan flick that casts only furtive glances in Ferrante’s direction, as if the filmmaker, Giacomo Durzi, were a reverential subject who doesn’t dare to make eye contact with the queen.
  18. Black Mother
    In its poetic, elliptical, concise way, this film makes a grand statement: The black mother is the mother of life itself. And the gaze directed at the black faces and bodies in “Black Mother” is not a male gaze, or a documentarian’s gaze. It is a gaze of love.
  19. An Elephant Sitting Still
    Unsparing as Hu’s anatomy of moral drift may be, there is something graceful in his sympathetic attention to lives defined almost entirely by disappointment and diminished hope. Unlike the titular elephant, the film never stops moving, and by the end, instead of feeling beaten down, the viewer is likely to feel moved as well.
  20. Triple Frontier
    Chandor handles the action scenes smoothly, making it easy to gloss over what the movie is saying, trying to say or accidentally saying. He maintains the kind of accelerated pace that gives your eyes a workout, and pads the story with an inviting camaraderie that brings you into the group.
  21. Captain Marvel
    It’s pretty good fun, and could almost be described without sarcasm as a scrappy little picture, like most of Boden and Fleck’s other work.
  22. The Photographer of Mauthausen
    Targarona began as an actor before becoming a producer and, finally, a director. The Photographer of Mauthausen is her second feature, but if feels like the work of an old pro — vivid, involving and frequently terrifying.
  23. Tyler Perry's A Madea Family Funeral
    What Perry lacks in filmmaking rigor — like its predecessors, “Family Funeral” is a bit of a mess, formally and technically — he makes up for in generosity. The movie is the usual plateful of low humor and high melodrama, in no particular hurry to make its way through a busy plot.
  24. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
    Though hobbled by an obviousness that dampens any suspense, this sensitive, environmentally concerned movie is most successful when steeped in the particularities of its location.
  25. The Iron Orchard
    This lovingly made homage to avarice feels strangely limp. Instead of gushing, it trickles.
  26. Woman at War
    Approaching weighty themes with a very light touch, Benedikt Erlingsson’s Woman at War is an environmental drama wrapped in whimsical comedy and tied with a bow of midlife soul-searching.
  27. The Wedding Guest
    The scenery, nicely shot by Giles Nuttgens and covering a wide swath of the country — Amritsar, New Delhi, Jaipur and Goa — is always great, and Patel and Apte’s chemistry approaches scalding levels as their characters grow closer.
  28. Saint Judy
    While the viewer can intuit that Hanish has a strong clear story to tell, the director too often tricks things up.
  29. Climax
    Even though the techniques are immersive — plunging you into a disorienting reality that mirrors the drug-fueled frenzy you are witnessing — the effect is also curiously distancing.
  30. Joseph Pulitzer: Voice of the People
    While there are amazing anecdotes here, there is little to catch the eye or ear.
  31. Sharkwater Extinction
    Stewart recounts how he thought that if his films could make people love these animals, he could push popular opinion against their being hunted. He doesn’t quite pull this off here, despite impressive footage of him swimming with sharks. He does, however, convince us that these superpredators are important to oceanic ecosystems and that because they are so indiscriminate in their eating habits, they are full of toxins.
  32. The Hole in the Ground
    In a film where the central horror is the otherworldly absence of personality, the intended fear is undermined by the presence of a mother and son whose flawlessness is itself unnerving.
  33. Mapplethorpe
    Mapplethorpe, directed by Ondi Timoner, is a fictionalized biography of the photographer that is most alive when it’s putting its subject’s pictures on the screen, which it does often. And should have done more, because the movie is otherwise as timid as its subject was bold.
  34. Giant Little Ones
    Where many coming-of-age films build their stories around the discovery of a fixed selfhood, “Giant Little Ones” succeeds when it chooses to treat youthful identity as open to shift with accumulated experience.
  35. Transit
    By turns intimate and expansive, Transit is a thrilling, at times harrowing labyrinth of a movie.
  36. Apollo 11
    Although we know how the mission turns out, the movie generates and maintains suspense. And it rekindles a crazy sense of wonder at, among other things, what one can do practically with trigonometry.
  37. Styx
    A taut moral thriller, Styx is a story of what happens when self-reliance runs into other people’s desperation.
  38. Greta
    The point, and the fun, is the wild mischief of Huppert’s performance, which grows lighter and more joyful as Greta’s behavior slides from menacing to murderous.
  39. Paddleton
    Paddleton is so keyed into its protagonists’ various idiosyncrasies that it seems hesitant to grapple with its own central tension.
  40. Prosecuting Evil
    The main interest lies with Ferencz himself, who comes across as thoughtful, principled and engaging in a film that, in keeping with his demeanor, is a modest profile rather than a sprawling portrait.
  41. How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
    If you’ve spent any time with these characters, it’s hard not to get swept up in the saga, and it’s easy to be moved by the bond between Hiccup and Toothless, who is, in effect, a very loyal dog who can fly and harness the power of lightning bolts.
  42. Wrestle
    Wrestle isn’t slick or impartial, and doesn’t claim to be, yet the movie has a raw honesty that disdains forced uplift.
  43. The Changeover
    Thanks to fine performances and a narrative that doesn’t hang about to admire itself, the movie goes down as easily as a love potion at a coven.
  44. Holiday
    Because Eklof’s approach is formally very clean, showing some genuine, intriguing detachment, I’m apt to prefer it to Seidl’s work. But not by much.
  45. 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.
  46. The Wandering Earth
    It is just as awash in murky computer imagery, stupefying exposition and manipulative sentimentality as the average Hollywood tentpole.
  47. The Breaker Upperers
    This collaboration between Jackie van Beek and Madeleine Sami — who wrote, directed and star together — exhibits their fairly irresistible comic chemistry, even if the conceit of the movie wears a bit thin.
  48. Hotel by the River
    Hotel by the River is — surprisingly, from the standpoint of a skeptic — one of Hong’s most unexpectedly poignant works, self-reflexive in a way that feels searching rather than rote.
  49. Parkland: Inside Building 12
    The movie, directed by Charlie Minn, is unbearable to watch, yet its centering of first-person testimony — supplemented with floor plans of the building and phone footage from that day — makes the massacre immediate in a way that sometimes gets lost in news coverage or political debates.
  50. A Tuba to Cuba
    High on music and hot with the thrill of discovery, A Tuba to Cuba swarms with shiny happy people.
  51. Donnybrook
    Ear-shredding to listen to (the soundtrack, between chunks of a comically portentous score, is mostly thrash metal) and soul-destroying to watch, the movie trembles with tragedy. Yet because almost everyone and everything — dialogue, image, setting — is presented in such broad, symbolic strokes, we feel absolutely nothing.
  52. Happy Death Day 2U
    Jessica Rothe as Tree is still an appealing presence. But the film is overstuffed with unfunny self-parodying gore slapstick, half-felt sentimentality and semi-meta sci-fi.
  53. The Unicorn
    Isabelle Dupuis and Tim Geraghty have made a grim and haunting documentary about what it means to burn bright, then die alone.
  54. 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.
  55. Clara's Ghost
    As is perhaps appropriate, given the comic occupations of the Reynolds (and the Elliott) family, this unusual, unsettling and terrific little film presents itself not as a domestic opera, but as a family comedy.
  56. Ruben Brandt, Collector
    The movie is fun to look at without quite being exciting to watch. This is mostly because the story never fully lives up to the ideas, and the ideas themselves are fuzzy and scattered.
  57. Sorry Angel
    It took a while for this digressive movie to get its hooks in me, but once it did, Sorry Angel didn’t let go.
  58. Alita: Battle Angel
    A pileup of clichés in service to technological whiz-bangery, “Alita” is one more story of the not quite human brought to life with hubris and bleeding-edge science.
  59. Birds of Passage
    Instead of stepping back to explain the beliefs and practices of its main characters, it plunges you into the reality of their lives, trusting that both their humanity and their distinctiveness will be apparent, that they are no more inherently mysterious — or inherently noble — than anyone else.
  60. Isn't It Romantic
    The film’s reliance on conventions even as it snickers at them gives it the faint air of a con.
  61. What Men Want
    While What Men Want starts off as a stinging critique, it undermines that message with one of Hollywood’s favorite idiotic subplots.
  62. Cold Pursuit
    I can’t deny that the glum, resentful, not-giving-a-damn masculine vibe of Cold Pursuit has its appeal, as does Moland’s blunt knack for efficient screen violence.
  63. To Dust
    You can see what this movie is after, something cockeyed but sincere, something in the neighborhood of Paul Mazursky, Elaine May or Alexander Payne. But the writing and filmmaking (Snyder directed) just aren’t quick enough.
  64. The Prodigy
    The movie’s occasional chills do little to obscure the thin plotting, problematic pacing and a central mystery that’s left aggravatingly vague.
  65. High Flying Bird
    The intellectual virtuosity on display is somehow both ostentatious and casual. The performances — Holland’s in particular, full of sadness, guile and audacity — feel the same way.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dear Ex
    It is a remarkably affecting and cogent picture.
  67. One Million American Dreams
    This documentary makes a powerful case that the city’s lost dead are due more honor than what Hart Island currently extends.
  68. Berlin, I Love You
    Most of this movie, which is almost entirely in English, is taken up with tone-deaf humanist tales.
  69. Under the Eiffel Tower
    The film is yet another ode to the restorative magic of wine country sunshine, which apparently also has the power to expose the story’s egregious midlife-crisis clichés.
  70. Untogether
    There’s scarcely a behavior or line reading in this exasperating relationship drama that doesn’t feel like affectation. Fraudulence might be a plot point, but only the writer and director, Emma Forrest, knows why it has to permeate the entire movie.
  71. The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then The Bigfoot
    There is something admirably perverse about a movie that treats the killings of Hitler and Bigfoot as secondary to a character study of a crusty old man and his regrets, but that doesn’t make the film less dull or deflating to watch.
  72. The Gospel of Eureka
    Favoring the superficial over the substantive, The Gospel of Eureka keeps skirting opportunities to excavate experience.
  73. Lords of Chaos
    Akerlund, a veteran music-video director who intersperses Lords of Chaos with mildly surrealistic bursts, never establishes a coherent or interesting point of view. The tone unproductively veers from the goofy to the creepy, which creates a sense that he was still figuring it out in the editing.
  74. The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part
    The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part isn’t as distractingly fun, shiny and bright as the more satisfying franchise installments. It drags and sometimes bores, which makes it easier for your mind to drift elsewhere.
  75. Everybody Knows
    Farhadi’s choreography of the shift from rowdy celebration to frantic desperation is the most effective part of the movie, and he keeps the suspense going on several fronts.
  76. Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga
    The makers of the Bollywood movie Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga have a touching, if slightly demented, belief in the transformative power of art. How to combat ugly stereotypes and entrenched beliefs? Put on a show!
    • 19 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Polar
    If Polar were a teenager, it might be content to chug Mountain Dew while playing first-person shooter games and trolling innocents online. Unfortunately, Polar is a movie, and if it has any redeeming qualities, it chooses to keep them a secret.
  78. They Shall Not Grow Old
    Peter Jackson has taken a mass of World War I archival clips from Britain’s Imperial War Museum and fashioned it into a brisk, absorbing and moving experience.
  79. Daughter of Mine
    Ardent and primal, Daughter of Mine addresses complicated ideas with head-clearing simplicity.
  80. The Unicorn
    Robert Schwartzman’s direction is blah, his story labored and the supporting characters one-note.
  81. Piercing
    The movie gains momentum as it indulges in hallucinogenic phantasmagoria. Whatever you make of its intentions, it’s certainly exceptional in its visual distinction.
  82. Outlaws
    Oppressively mirthless, Outlaws can nevertheless be enjoyed, after a fashion, as a surreal tapestry of macho garbling.
  83. Braid
    Peirone’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink directing does tend to head butt her thin writing, but the movie eventually coalesces as a sly, bitter parable against chasing-your-dreams optimism.
  84. Arctic
    Arctic has the courage to avoid obvious payoffs.
  85. Miss Bala
    This version, in the dreariest Hollywood-remake tradition, turns a grim, morally ambiguous story into a fable of empowerment. That might be kind of fun if it didn’t feel so tired and timid.
  86. Velvet Buzzsaw
    The confident storytelling and the bravura acting — Daveed Diggs, Toni Collette and John Malkovich contribute compelling caricatures — carry “Buzzsaw” all the way home.
  87. 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.
  88. The Gandhi Murder
    The conspiracy thriller The Gandhi Murder begins with a claim to be “based on verified facts.” Given the overall shoddiness of the production, including distractingly inapt casting and matte work that makes a Ganges River scene look fake, those facts are probably worth reverifying.
  89. Soni
    Ayr does not offer any tension-releasing catharsis, making his film efficiently disquieting in its own unassuming manner.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski
    A title like Struggle: The Life and Lost Art of Szukalski suggests a breadth and depth that’s difficult to live up to, which makes it all the more remarkable that this Netflix documentary by Irek Dobrowolski manages to deliver.
  91. Never Look Away
    Never Look Away bristles with half-formed thoughts and almost-heady insights, and hums with an ambition that is exasperating and exhilarating in equal measure.
  92. The Invisibles
    Hearing from these survivors is vitally important. But by smushing together two distinct styles of narrative, The Invisibles risks draining the power from both.
  93. Jihadists
    The erasure of the difference between propaganda and reality cuts to the heart of what is appalling about Jihadists, a terrorist mixtape that appears remarkably uninterested in presenting these men in a more critical way than they would want.
  94. Heartlock
    Some scenes in this film, directed by Jon Kauffman, put across the perversity of prison social ecosystems. But the picture’s gender and race dynamics, not to mention its forced star-crossed lovers theme, are sufficiently commonplace to register as hackneyed.
  95. The Kid Who Would Be King
    The action is creatively staged, without ever getting too intense or scary for young viewers. And the script balances humor, pathos and wish fulfillment as it portrays Alex’s rise from mopey dreamer to confident warrior, without overdoing the mythic portent.
  96. Tito and the Birds
    The adventure plot in the Brazilian feature Tito and the Birds, directed by Gustavo Steinberg, Gabriel Bitar, and André Catoto, is no great shakes — it wouldn’t be out of place on a Saturday-morning cartoon — but visually, the movie leaves room for the viewer to synthesize, and to dream.
  97. Serenity
    More than half the reason I went to see this movie is because I miss “Fool’s Gold,” too. But that movie is 11 years old. And the days of low-stakes thingamabobs with some stars and even a little bit of writing are gone. Instead of a caper with Kate Hudson, McConaughey has got a mess written and directed by Steven Knight.
  98. King of Thieves
    For all its flaws — and they are legion — King of Thieves wraps you in a fuzzy blanket of familiarity.
  99. The Image Book
    I found it haunting, thrilling and confounding in equal measure. It is a work of ecstatic despair, an argument for the futility of human effort that almost refutes itself through the application of a grumpy and tenacious artistic will.
  100. IO
    The dynamic between Sam and Micah shifts the film into romantic melodrama, as lifeless and as chaste as the windswept apocalypse that surrounds them.
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