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. 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.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Solo
    The end result is a survival story that never quite sinks or swims, but rather drifts with the tide.
  3. Glass
    Shyamalan’s talent for primitive scares remains intact in Glass, as does his love for cramming a whole lot of story in one feature.
  4. 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.
  5. Who Will Write Our History
    Using newsreels, voice-overs and re-enactments, Roberta Grossman, the documentary’s director, paints a comprehensive portrait of the times and of the risks taken by Ringelblum and his group. The staged scenes are well acted, while readings from diaries and letters are heartbreaking.
  6. I Hate Kids
    The single achievement of I Hate Kids, a new comedy directed by John Asher, is that it is simultaneously tepid and offensive.
  7. An Acceptable Loss
    For a political thriller to come up with a scheme that feels genuinely rousing, An Acceptable Loss would need the two qualities it most severely lacks: style and substance.
  8. The Standoff at Sparrow Creek
    The Standoff at Sparrow Creek, the writing-directing feature debut of Henry Dunham, strands seven actors in a warehouse to bark exposition at one another. Listening closely is necessary: The monotonously dark visuals barely function to carry the story on their own.
  9. Adult Life Skills
    Anna feels more like a device than a person, a collection of eccentric behaviors (her job involves counting molehills) that support an aesthetic of excessive cuteness.
  10. Fyre
    Fyre needs another layer. You can locate in it this national moment of brashness and effrontery.
  11. The Heiresses
    This isn’t a perfect movie — sometimes the machinery of plot-focused screenwriting hums a little too insistently, especially toward the end, disrupting the quieter, richer music of everyday life — but its clearsighted sensitivity makes it a satisfying one.
  12. The Last Laugh
    The picture’s single saving grace is Chase’s co-star Dreyfuss, who deploys all of his considerable charisma. He shines, but not brightly enough to bring this moribund project to life.
  13. What Is Democracy?
    Like democracy itself, the movie assumes such a broad mandate and has such noble intentions that indicating its shortcomings seems almost beside the point.
  14. Lionheart
    It is globally minded filmmaking that is also comfortingly familiar.
  15. Ashes in the Snow
    There are a few powerful images.
  16. Pledge
    If you like your torture movies tight, twisty and decently executed, then Pledge is for you.
    • 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.
  18. Perfect Strangers (Perfectos Desconocidos)
    This picture is well acted (one of the cast members, Manuel García-Rulfo, has a growing profile in Hollywood; he was seen last year in “Widows” and “Sicario: Day of the Soldado”) and maintains narrative interest without ever grabbing the viewer by the lapels.
  19. The Upside
    Some squinting will be required to block out the race and class stereotyping, as well as the puddles of sentiment scattered throughout the highly predictable plot. Yet Jon Hartmere’s script has genuinely funny moments and is blessedly short on crassness.
  20. A Dog's Way Home
    As ridiculous as it gets, and that’s plenty, A Dog’s Way Home manages to serve up a one- to two-hankie finale, depending on the extent of your dog-person-ness.
  21. The Aspern Papers
    Too bad that the best that can be said about the woeful movie version of the The Aspern Papers, based on the Henry James novella, is that it might send you running to the original.
  22. Touch Me Not
    You could say that what the film is about lies just beyond the reach of images or words. It’s a necessarily cerebral meditation on the nature of physicality.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Newly Single
    An examination of the unconscious racial bias embedded in Izzy and Astor’s interactions would have made for a more revelatory take on relationship dysfunctions. Still, Izzy’s despair and self-loathing force Astor to confront his own, redeeming an often insufferable protagonist and ultimately salvaging the film.
  24. Escape Room
    There are intimations of “Tales From the Crypt,” “Final Destination,” “The Game,” and other older, better films here; this movie never catches a fire like any of those did, and even its twist coda feels dreary and pro forma.
  25. Rust Creek
    Corfield is fine in a role that gives her little opportunity to do more than run and fight, but a woman this empowered removes the question mark from her survival — and the tension from the movie.
  26. 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.
  27. The Vanishing
    While Jorgen Johansson’s windswept photography creates a credible sense of isolation (he filmed in part at the Mull of Galloway lighthouse), we sense the ominous rhythms of impending calamity.
  28. State Like Sleep
    The images serve the dialogue, but they are not given a chance to expand the story, depriving the movie of texture and energy. Danluck dives with Katherine into the depths of grief-stricken obsession, and her film suffocates for want of room to breathe.
  29. Genesis 2.0
    While the sights and sounds here are unique, the movie seems frustratingly torn about whether to buy the futurism and mysticism it’s selling.
  30. Stan & Ollie
    Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly deliver dynamite performances that capture the expressions and physicality of the star comedians without ever descending into caricature. They never strain for laughs but are consistently amusing.
  31. Holmes & Watson
    There is still intermittent joy to be found in their autumnal bromance.
  32. On the Basis of Sex
    On the Basis of Sex does a brisk, coherent job of articulating what Ginsburg accomplished and why it mattered, dramatizing both her personal stake in feminist legal activism and the intellectual discipline with which she approached it.
  33. 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.
  34. Bad Seeds
    There’s some fun in watching Wael con his students into learning — while also teaching them the art of the con — but the film . . . can’t keep the sentiment at bay for long.
  35. Avicii: True Stories
    The director, Levan Tsikurishvili, never reconciles the movie’s competing impulses. It’s part promotional video, part backstage doc and — in retrospect — part tragedy.
  36. The Last Resort
    The cultural transformation and re-transformation of Miami Beach (specifically its southern tip, South Beach) is a story that’s fascinating, poignant, garish and, in some ways, befuddling.
  37. American Renegades
    Part of the thrill of heist movies is in watching a caper take shape before its execution. But the director, Steven Quale, rushes through the planning stages; there’s no obstacle that can’t be overcome with a quick line of exposition.
  38. Between Worlds
    While fragments of past, present and who-knows-what events flash past, Cage, bless him, fully commits to the nuttiness.
  39. Cold War
    The movie is filled with ordinary and surprising beauty, with gleaming and richly textured surfaces, and the kind of velvety black chiaroscuro you can get lost in. Its greatest strengths, though, are its two knockout leads, who give the story its heat, its flesh and its heartbreak.
  40. Welcome To Marwen
    What makes the movie interesting — and disturbing on a few different levels — is how its sentimental, inspirational elements do battle with darker impulses.
  41. Second Act
    This is Jenny from the blah.
  42. Aquaman
    It’s just two and a half years of — sorry, two and a half hours — of oceanic screen savers and hair that won’t stop undulating so we know when we’re underwater.
  43. The American Meme
    The American Meme is a polemic as shallow and artificial as it thinks its subjects are.
  44. Bumblebee
    There’s a lot to like here, particularly Steinfeld’s performance.
  45. Mary Poppins Returns
    What’s odd here is how closely the new movie follows the original’s arc without ever capturing its bliss or tapping into its touching delicacy of feeling.
  46. Vice
    Vice offers more than Yuletide rage-bait for liberal moviegoers, who already have plenty to be mad about. Revulsion and admiration lie as close together as the red and white stripes on the American flag, and if this is in some respects a real-life monster movie, it’s one that takes a lively and at times surprisingly sympathetic interest in its chosen demon.
  47. Capernaum
    Capernaum, a sprawling tale wrenched from real life, goes beyond the conventions of documentary or realism into a mode of representation that doesn’t quite have a name. It’s a fairy tale and an opera, a potboiler and a news bulletin, a howl of protest and an anthem of resistance.
  48. The House That Jack Built
    Something feels off with von Trier’s sense of artistry now. Something feels stuck, like his head’s wound up lodged in his rear, which brings the movie closer to “The Human Centipede” than I would have thought. But this isn’t cinematic horror. It’s proctology.
  49. The Mule
    The story shifts and lumbers toward redemption that Earl doesn’t earn and that sentimentalizes a movie that is never especially good and often teasingly offensive but also fitfully entertaining and willfully perverse.
  50. Martyr
    The more time Khaled’s camera takes to wend its way around Hassane’s suspended body, the more its caresses seem to match all the embracing and caressing Hassane’s friend does. And the more time the movie devotes to the parts of this one man’s body the more that care seems to stand in for a country’s neglected whole.
  51. The World Is Yours
    The young director Romain Gavras does not reinvent the comic caper in the French film The World Is Yours, but he revitalizes that genre with pop verve, goofy humor and visual sophistication. A flamboyant turn from Isabelle Adjani doesn’t hurt either, with the star sending up her own image as an aloof leading lady.
  52. Lots of Kids, a Monkey and a Castle
    Along with the loving portraiture are elements of peculiar mystery.
  53. Dead Souls
    Despite its intense running time and disturbing subject matter, Dead Souls does not seek a complete accounting. In fact, it’s partly about the inability to convey the full horror of these experiences.
  54. Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki
    It’s never boring but a trifle diffuse. If you’re a Miyazaki fan, you’ll want to see it anyway.
  55. Ghostbox Cowboy
    Ghostbox Cowboy feels like a William Gibson adaptation directed by David Lynch and Jean-Luc Godard — while not directly lifting from or nodding to those artists. It’s rare that a release so late in the year is so noteworthy, but this is a genuine find.
  56. 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.
  57. Bird Box
    The squelching of promise is not my worst (cinematic) fear, per se. But it’s still disappointing.
  58. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
    Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse contains a vital element that has been missing from too many recent superhero movies: fun.
  59. If Beale Street Could Talk
    When Jenkins is true to himself, he soars; he stumbles, though, when he’s overly faithful to the novel or doesn’t trust the audience.
  60. Mortal Engines
    As these things go, Mortal Engines offers a fair amount of fun.
  61. Vox Lux
    Vox Lux is an audacious story about a survivor who becomes a star, and a deeply satisfying, narratively ambitious jolt of a movie.
  62. Mary Queen of Scots
    It looks beautiful and moves swiftly but never quite takes full imaginative flight.
  63. Bitter Melon
    Although the first hour of Bitter Melon is a spiky and absorbing story of repressed feelings, the movie grinds to a halt in its final third as the characters talk things out, which might be helpful in life but in drama tends to belabor the obvious, as well as offer an easy exit.
  64. Dumplin'
    Kristin Hahn’s script gives Will sassy lines and too many tears, but the filmmakers never give this character a real, searching, complex inner life. They give her problems to solve, hurdles to clear. They turn emotional complexity into affirmations and a potentially transformational character into a you-go-girl cliché.
  65. Swimming with Men
    Although the film has no grand cinematic ambitions, its unsensationalized focus on these aging bodies invites welcome kindness.
  66. The Party's Just Beginning
    Gillan plays her messy, mournful role with unfussy integrity. The movie does not stray beyond the borders of the modest character study, but within those parameters, it’s accomplished and impressively straightforward.
  67. The Great Pretender
    Some of the details about female characters that Silver and the screenwriter Jack Dunphy choose to foreground...indicate that the filmmakers share with their male characters a strain of artsy-bro misogyny. The movie is nevertheless striking and stimulating in some respects.
  68. 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.
  69. Asher
    Unfortunately the pace is so relaxed as to be meandering; and Jay Zaretsky’s screenplay is cliché-packed.
  70. The Wild Boys
    It’s hard to untangle the film’s many bizarre indulgences, which at times seem intended to titillate as much as disturb, and yet somehow do neither. It’s all a bit too ludicrous to be sensuous or unsettling, or ultimately all that insightful.
  71. Ben Is Back
    Ben Is Back is really Holly’s story, and notwithstanding the all-around excellence of the cast, it’s very much Roberts’s movie. This isn’t a matter of ego or showboating. On the contrary, what is so moving and effective about Roberts’s work here is her shrewd subversion of her long-established persona.
  72. Head Full of Honey
    To go with its bizarre plotting and shrill performances, the film seems to have been edited in a Cuisinart. But those are the least of its crimes.
  73. Tyrel
    The stranger Tyrel gets, the more accurate it feels. The ecosystem of behaviors and attitudes on display is so unnervingly sharp that some of us may well find ourselves wincing in recognition.
  74. The Charmer
    It’s impressive that Alami can put all this across — romance, suspense and, in the moving final act, a kind of tragedy — and maintain the movie’s nimbleness. But he’s a natural storyteller.
  75. Amazing Grace
    You get both the most lovely gaze a professional camera’s ever laid upon Aretha Franklin and some of the mightiest singing she’s ever laid on you. The woman practically eulogizes herself. Don’t bother with tissues. Bring a towel.
  76. Write When You Get Work
    Neither remotely credible nor more than minimally entertaining, Stacy Cochran’s New York City romance, Write When You Get Work, presents rich folk as gullible idiots and blue-collar crooks as heroes.
  77. The Possession of Hannah Grace
    Van Rooijen’s overreliance on herky-jerky jump scares is a pity, because the movie that exists in the silence is surprisingly satisfying.
  78. Song of Back and Neck
    What Lieberstein has made is a self-help manual disguised as a comedy.
  79. Elliot: The Littlest Reindeer
    New evidence for the case that computer animation is homogenizing children’s movies, robbing them of visual interest, this harmless, charmless movie plods along well-trodden turf.
  80. People's Republic of Desire
    You don’t wait for what comes next in People’s Republic of Desire as much as you watch and wonder why any of it is happening. That sensation arises often in this canny documentary about a baffling topic.
  81. 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.
  82. The Mercy
    In prioritizing Crowhurst’s psychological frailty over his physical challenges (both conveyed more evocatively in the excellent 2007 documentary “Deep Water”), Firth and his director find something quietly touching, even soulful, in the character’s wretchedness. In this somber tragedy, the real demons are never anywhere but right inside that boat.
  83. United Skates
    This is a passion project in the best sense of the word, a movie in which the ingenuity and dedication of the filmmakers illuminate the same qualities in their subjects.
  84. Mirai
    Fluctuating between the minor daily occurrences of Kun’s life and his touching sojourns into the past and the future, Hosoda’s film privileges moments of emotion over belabored story mechanics. Thus, it gathers complexity without sacrificing any of its guileless modesty.
  85. Sicilian Ghost Story
    This beautifully realized movie casts a sensitive, secretive spell.
  86. DriverX
    This is not a perfect film, and features maybe one wild night too many. But its outlook — optimistic about human nature yet cynical about the times — lingers.
  87. Anna and the Apocalypse
    Anna and the Apocalypse is more sketch than developed movie. Directed by John McPhail from a script by McHenry and Alan McDonald, the movie is thinly plotted, its pacing slack, its staging uninspired; Anna remains merely an idea for a plucky heroine, despite Hunt’s smile and sweat.
  88. Happy as Lazzaro
    A rich sense of mystery pervades this movie. You succumb to its strangeness the way that a child is enveloped in a bedtime story, trusting the teller even when you don’t fully understand the tale or know where it’s going.
  89. 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.
  90. Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle
    The filmmakers are clearly trying to bring an uncommon maturity to the fantasy film, and in many respects they succeed. While not everything here works, what does is impressive.
  91. Family in Transition
    Trainin’s film spends a good deal of its running time surveying the emotions that affect everyone here, including the Tsuk children. Yet there’s quite a bit left unexplored; after the start, the director rarely returns to examine Amit’s past or seek insights into Amit’s inner self.
  92. Becoming Astrid
    Erik Molberg Hansen’s relaxed camera movements and fuzzy-soft compositions are quite beautiful, and the performances — including the superb Trine Dyrholm as the baby’s Danish foster mother — are pitch-perfect. Best of all is the magnetic August, whose open, mobile features can slide from plain to lovely with just a shift in the light and whose embrace of the character is a joy to watch.
  93. Invisible Hands
    Rich in information and dense with quiet outrage, Shraysi Tandon’s debut feature, the investigative documentary Invisible Hands, jumps into the murky and shameful world of child trafficking and forced labor.
  94. Shoplifters
    In the past, Kore-eda’s delicacy has at times enervated his movies. Here, though, the family’s toughness, thieving and secrets, its poverty and desperation, work like ballast on his sensibilities. In their grubby imperfections, Kore-eda finds a perfect story about being human.
  95. The Favourite
    The Favourite, with a profane, erudite script by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, is a farce with teeth, a costume drama with sharp political instincts and an aggressive sense of the absurd.
  96. Creed II
    Creed II is a terrific movie, a boxing picture full of inspired sweetness and shrewd science that honors the cherished traditions of the genre while feeling like something new and exciting in the world.
  97. Roma
    Cuarón uses one household on one street to open up a world, working on a panoramic scale often reserved for war stories, but with the sensibility of a personal diarist. It’s an expansive, emotional portrait of life buffeted by violent forces, and a masterpiece.
  98. Las Sandinistas!
    For a movie trying to push back at popular perceptions of history, ¡Las Sandinistas! could stand to be more lucid.
  99. 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.
  100. Robin Hood
    The plot is twisty in a perfunctory way, the action predictably explosive, the sought-after exhilaration nonexistent.
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