The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Father of the Bride
    The film, while it packs all the satire of our modern tribal matrimonial rite that was richly contained in the original, also possesses all the warmth and poignancy and understanding that makes the Streeter treatise much beloved.
  2. Ammonite
    The movie needs Winslet and Ronan’s skills, their ability to semaphore more with sliding glances and tiny gestures than many actors manage with pages of dialogue. There’s pleasure in deciphering these signals.
  3. Luca
    It’s about the sometimes risky discovery of pleasure, and it’s a pleasure to discover.
  4. Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President
    “Rock & Roll President” is a potent and poignant reminder of how some things used to be and may never be again.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Little Miss Marker
    Tiny Shirley Temple is a joy to behold and her spontaneity and cheer in speaking her lines are nothing short of amazing.
  6. Lover Come Back
    One of the brightest, most delightful satiric comedies since It Happened One Night.
  7. Pieces of a Woman
    Set over eight harrowing months, Pieces of a Woman is a ragged, mesmerizing study of rupture and reconstruction. The ending is ill-judged, but the movie understands that while we love in common, we grieve alone.
  8. The Major and the Minor
    A bountiful comedy-romance.
  9. Our Time Machine
    This often visually beautiful movie sometimes ventures full-time into Maleonn’s own dreams and is frank in its depiction of the conflicts in the family — as well as of Maleonn’s struggles to be a good son and an active artist, as his ambitions for the project run ahead of his financial resources.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back
    It is an absorbing film. Whether one is a member of the under-30 set that regards Mr. Dylan as a spokesman, or one of the vanishing Americans over that age, this look into the life of a folk hero is likely to be both entertaining and occasionally disturbing.
  11. True Confession
    A valiant comedy, it stands on a level with such blissfully remembered items as I Met Him in Paris and Nothing Sacred... for they are all of a piece -- witty, clever and hugely amazing shows.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shanghai Express
    It is by all odds the best picture Josef von Sternberg has directed.
  13. The World to Come
    Waterston and Kirby are both superb at creating characters whose attraction must be shown to grow by degrees, without overt admission. Affleck and Abbott, too, navigate a tricky dynamic, playing men who perhaps lack an understanding of their own compassion or brutishness.
  14. Road to Zanzibar
    Farce of this sort very seldom comes off with complete effect, but this time it does, and we promise that there's fun on the Road to Zanzibar.
  15. Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
    A noirish psychodrama simmering with ambiguities, the film cleverly toys with our perception by loosening our heroine’s grip on reality.
  16. Beans
    This is the first fictional film directed by the documentarian Tracey Deer, and she brings a good eye for which characters might make a compelling story.
  17. My Man Godfrey
    An exuberantly funny picture.
  18. Road to Utopia
    A blizzard of fractious sport and clowning, a whirlwind of gags and travesty, a snowdrift of suffocating nonsense.
  19. My Favorite Blonde
    Bob is the hub of the picture, and Director Sidney Lanfield has kept the confusion spinning around him. That is entirely gratifying, for, in these times, we can't have too much Hope.
  20. Black Box
    It also brings some devilish ingenuity to its variations on “Memento” and other “who am I?” thrillers. And it adds to that something more rare: a genuine emotional potency.
  21. Road to Morocco
    A lampoon of all pictures having to do with exotic romance, played by a couple of wise guys who can make a gag do everything but lay eggs.
  22. 76 Days
    76 Days, which gets its title from the Wuhan lockdown imposed from January 23 to April 8, is defined more by the human capacity for resilience and compassion than by a relentless sense of doom (or by a focus on China’s policy decisions).
  23. Pillow Talk
    One of the most lively and up-to-date comedy-romances of the year.
  24. The Life Ahead
    This picture earns its tear-jerking without becoming treacly. OK, without becoming too treacly. And it has other charming, enlightened components.
  25. Bird Island
    Not much happens in Bird Island, but the center’s cycles of regeneration and care leave their mark, invigorating both the characters and us.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    American Murder: The Family Next Door
    Popplewell’s film presents the Watts story as more than a crime story. It is a thematic film about marriage and the deception of social media, as well as a piercing examination of domestic violence constructed with care and undeniable craft.
  27. Ball of Fire
    Mr. Goldwyn has turned out a very nice comedy, indeed.
  28. I Carry You with Me
    Turning time and memory into an elliptical portrait of what it means when borders become barriers, I Carry You With Me, the first narrative feature from the documentary filmmaker Heidi Ewing, trades distance for empathy.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Informer
    Ford has made an astonishing screen drama out of Liam O'Flaherty's novel The Informer.
  30. The Witches
    The Witches resembles a brilliantly told bedtime story, though the teller of this children's tale may well be the slightly cracked relative who can't judge when scary stories become nightmares.
  31. Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey
    The movie is packed with thrilling sequences, charming songs (by Philip Lawrence, John Legend and others), flashy dance numbers and a delightful cast. Although parts of the film veer on cliché, its intentions are well-meaning and its messages about nurturing curiosity and fostering community are well worth hearing right about now.
  32. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
    Mr. Sturges as author and director, is thoroughly up to his stinging style in this film. Situations spark, dialogue crackles and his camera works like a playful Peeping Tom. And from all of the actors he gets performances that make them look like inspired comedians.
  33. Belushi
    Belushi taps the sweetness in a cultural fixture with an irreplaceably wild sense of fun.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Thin Man
    An excellent combination of comedy and excitement.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Daughters of Darkness
    Subtle, stately, stunningly colored and exquisitely directed by Belgium's young Harry Kumel, the coscenarist, this is far and away the most artistic vampire shocker since the Franco-Italian Blood and Roses 10 years ago.
  36. 8½
    It has no more plot than a horse race, no more order than a pinball machine, and it bounces around on several levels of consciousness, dreams and memories as it details a man's rather casual psychoanalysis of himself. But it sets up a labyrinthine ego for the daring and thoughtful to explore, and it harbors some elegant treasures of wit and satire along the way.
    • 97 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Battleship Potemkin
    Whether or not one is disposed to accept all the details as a faithful record, the fact remains that it is a production in which the director displays a vivid imagination and an artistic appreciation of motion picture values.
  38. White Riot
    One of the many things that White Riot, a documentary about RAR directed by Rubika Shah, brings home is that the world could still use more somethings against racism.
  39. Belly of the Beast
    Belly of the Beast does not reach for happy endings and is most absorbing in its thesis, which makes the stakes of this battle against human rights violations loud and clear.
  40. Ham on Rye
    Taormina purposefully dresses his cast and designs their environment in a way that throws them into a sort of temporal never-never land. He achieves a number of other startling effects in this impressive movie, which sheds its naturalism slowly as it embraces a surrealism that’s both disquieting and poignant.
  41. The Company of Wolves
    It's also absolutely jam- packed with the kind of symbols that delight Freudian analysts of culture, particularly of folk tales.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Tale of Two Cities
    Directed by Jack Conway, the picture is a compelling expansion of Dickens's story of the French Revolution, with the central role of Sidney Carton, a disreputable lawyer, memorably projected by Ronald Colman. [14 Feb 1999, p.6]
    • The New York Times
  43. Anchors Aweigh
    For a popular entertainment, Anchors Aweigh is hard to beat. The proof is that it pleases both the pro and con Sinatra-ites.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Narcissus
    Powell and Press-burger may have a picture that will disturb and antagonize some, they also have in Black Narcissus an artistic accomplishment of no small proportions.
  45. America America
    Mr. Kazan catches the poetry of immigrants arriving in America. With some masterfully authentic staging and a fitly hard-focus camera, he gives us as fine an understanding of that drama as the screen has ever had.
  46. Guys and Dolls
    It's as tinny and tawny and terrific as any hot-cha musical film you'll ever see.
  47. Born to Be
    Through it all Ting is an anchor, a presence of compassion and good sense. Anyone confused about transgender people will certainly benefit from a viewing of this picture.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Darby O'Gill and the Little People
    Overpoweringly charming concoction of standard Gaelic tall stories, fantasy and romance.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Shalako
    Lots of shooting, galloping, terse dialogue—it is the perfect movie to see in a two-theater town on a Saturday night.
  50. Identifying Features
    It’s a confident debut feature, and a sophisticated acknowledgment of the powerlessness that migrants face.
  51. Some Kind of Heaven
    Oppenheim resists easy misanthropy, showing unexpected empathy for people who have cocooned themselves from the outside world, only to confront its headaches anyway.
  52. 3 Godfathers
    It is Mr. Ford's wonderful style in picturing a frontier fable that has the classic mould. His unsurpassed talent for bringing upon the motion-picture screen the nature and the drama of the great West is in itself an art.
  53. Meet Me in St. Louis
    Vincente Minnelli, in his direction, has got all the period charm out of ladies dressed in flowing creations, gentlemen in straw "boaters" and ice-cream pants, rooms lush with golden-oak wains-coating, ormolu decorations and red-plush chairs.
  54. Flora & Ulysses
    Flora & Ulysses veers close to falling into the trap of cheesiness that kids’ movies of this genre often find themselves in, but miraculously never does. In fact, this hopeful comedy, in showing how a twitchy-tailed hero can change a family, lifts off and flies.
  55. Sing Me a Song
    Balmès doesn’t arrive at easy, scathing conclusions about the internet. Instead, he lets the camera journey to unexpected places, leading to a different kind of meditation that strikes with deep emotional resonance.
  56. Land
    Wright’s movie is ambitious (that location! that weather!), but not grandiose. Its storytelling economy helps make it credible and eventually moving.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Get Carter
    Its violence is so ghastly and unremitting and its view of the human condition is so perfectly vile that one would almost rather wash one's mouth out with soap than recommend it. Yet it is so finely acted and crafted—and is so spectacularly better than the run of its genre—that as a lover of movies one feels practically diity‐bound to sing its praises.
  58. For Love or Money
    Barry Sonnenfeld...proves that he does not need the Addams family to develop a wry, cartoonish atmosphere filled with funny, well-etched minor characters.
  59. Film About a Father Who
    [A] brisk, prismatic and richly psychodramatic family portrait.
  60. The Man in the Moon
    Until its final reel, when it strains badly to accommodate an almost biblical stroke of retribution, The Man in the Moon is a small, fond film that achieves a kind of quiet perfection.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mirror (1975)
    Mirror, a new film by Andrei Tarkovsky, the controversial and unorthodox Soviet director, is delighting, puzzling, disaping serious Muscovite movie enthusiasts.
  62. Cryptozoo
    Cryptozoo stands out as an aesthetically ambitious undertaking, seducing viewers with its hypnotizing hand-drawn animation and John Carroll Kirby’s pulsing electronic score.
  63. Scum
    If some of the plot seems familiar, the intelligence with which Mr. Clarke dissects the flaws of Britain’s “borstal” system is not. [15 Jun 2017]
    • The New York Times
  64. Those Who Wish Me Dead
    New Mexico plays Montana, and not being familiar with the terrain, I was convinced by that. Accurate or not, the landscape gives as sensational a performance as any of the actors.
  65. The Sparks Brothers
    The Sparks Brothers, an energetic documentary directed by Edgar Wright, explains their appeal in part by emphasizing how it cannot be explained.
  66. Strawberry Mansion
    This is a movie about letting the mind roam.
  67. Together Together
    Sweet, sensitive and surprisingly insightful, Nikole Beckwith’s Together Together fashions the signposts of the romantic comedy — the meet-cute, the misunderstanding, the mutual acceptance — into a wry examination of a very different relationship.
  68. Wild Indian
    The ensuing violence and its aftermath are chilling, woeful and utterly consistent with the tragedy that began long before a fateful afternoon in the woods.
  69. Hive
    Hive seizes and holds your interest simply through the drama created by sympathetic characters trying to surmount awful, unfair hurdles. Mostly, though, what holds you rapt is Gashi’s powerful, physically grounded performance, which lyrically articulates her taciturn character’s inner workings.
  70. What's Love Got to Do with It
    The brilliant, mercurial portrayal of Ike Turner by Laurence Fishburne, formerly known as Larry, is what elevates What's Love Got to Do With It beyond the realm of run-of-the-mill biography.
  71. Dream Lover
    The whole film has the intensity of a dream, and Mr. Kazan selects his fantasy elements with great care.
  72. Test Pattern
    Test Pattern achieves a lot with very little: The film’s nonlinear editing and cannily scored silences invite our interpretations, locating in them the entanglements of race and gender. Ford pushes us, if not to definitive answers, then to the right questions.
  73. The Handmaid's Tale
    With its devilish attention to polite little touches, its abundant bitchiness, its decrying of the Handmaids' oppression along with its tacit celebration of their fecundity, The Handmaid's Tale is a shrewd if preposterous cautionary tale that strikes a wide range of resonant chords.
  74. Last Exit to Brooklyn
    Though Last Exit to Brooklyn is bleak, the gloom is never trivial. The effect, instead, is elegiac.
  75. This Is the Life
    In the illuminating This Is the Life, DuVernay not only fills in an important formative gap in California’s hip-hop history, she displays the inventive eye that would later lead to her future cinematic successes.
  76. Un Film Dramatique
    It’s the cumulative effect of seeing the world through the eyes of these children that makes this movie so deeply joyful. This is a heartening project, a philosophical excavation of a school that abounds with playful optimism.
  77. Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal
    The gripping documentary Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal shifts the spotlight back to Singer, played in re-enactments by Matthew Modine with dialogue taken directly from wiretaps, to understand how a flip flop-clad former basketball coach rebranded himself as an academic glad-hander for the 1 percent.
  78. Lost Course
    [A] sobering, sprawling documentary.
  79. Introduction
    Shot in black and white (with Hong serving, for the first time, as cinematographer) and clocking in at a little more than an hour, Introduction is both lucid and elusive.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Romeo and Juliet
    A lovely, sensitive, friendly popularization of the play.
  81. Sonatine
    Sonatine, made in 1994, predates the Japanese director's art-house hit Fireworks by three years and is arguably stronger than its successor.
  82. Microcosmos
    Unless the viewer has ever been inside an anthill, Microcosmos is sure to reveal a strange and transfixing secret universe, one in which even the physics of splashing raindrops looks suddenly new.
  83. Detective Story
    Detective Story is a hard-grained entertainment, not revealing but bruisingly real.
  84. The Cutting Edge
    Although the movie follows the standard Hollywood formula of pictures dealing with athletic competition, it is snappily paced and unusually well acted.
  85. Oxygen
    The premise is simple, but this twist-filled script by LeBlanc gives Laurent ample opportunity to shine. Because of its limited setting, the film hangs on Laurent’s acting ability, and she gamely vaults between elation, terror and determination.
  86. Before the Dying of the Light
    Even for viewers with little grounding in Moroccan history, Essafi’s film offers an inspiring view of a roiling period of artistic exploration.
  87. Edge of Seventeen
    The movie gets the music, the clothes and the tone of the teen-age culture of that era exactly right.
  88. Cry Macho
    This one is something different — a deep cut for the die-hards, a hangout movie with nothing much to prove and just enough to say, with a pleasing score (by Mark Mancina) and some lovely desert scenery (shot by Ben Davis). If the old man’s driving, my advice is to get in and enjoy the ride.
  89. Małni—Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore
    An undeniable melancholy — a sense of loss — pervades the film. Yet it is never resigned. The ghosts of history live among us. To ignore their presence, “Małni” seems to say, is to forget who we really are.
  90. Thunderheart
    A film this intent on authenticity might easily grow dull, but this one doesn't; Mr. Apted is a skillful storyteller. He gives Thunderheart" a brisk, fact-filled exposition and a dramatic structure that builds to a strong finale, one that effectively drives the film's message home.
  91. Spellbound
    Not to be speechless about it, David O. Selznick has a rare film in Spellbound.
  92. To Have and Have Not
    What Mr. Hawks and his script-writers have done to Mr. Hemingway's tale is to shape it out of all recognition into a pattern of worldly intrigue.
  93. Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts
    This documentary, directed by Jeffrey Wolf, is a plain, sincere, nourishing account of the artist.
  94. Best Summer Ever
    Tender and exuberant, it includes set pieces modeled on “Footloose” and “Grease,” and feels closer to those films in spirit than to the Disney Channel. This is the kind of movie that vibrates with the energy of the people who made it, whose enthusiasm radiates from the screen.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Story of a Three-Day Pass
    The film is a kind of gentle cross between Hiroshima Mon Amour and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner—a little hard to imagine, it is true, but less pretentious than the first and less false than the second. If you like one of them I think you are obliged to like all three.
  96. Red Moon Tide
    Though thin on story, the film (streaming on Mubi) is a majestic vision. But most captivating are the settings.
  97. Separate Tables
    The characters here are all misfits—people who have not quite been able to adjust their own inadequacies and terrors to the hard realities of life. And it is in the revelation of these people to a more or less brilliant extent that the fascination and satisfaction of this picture lie.
  98. Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It
    Moreno is given full rein of her story, which doubles as a case study in the highs and lows of showbiz for a woman of color.
  99. The In-Laws
    Andrew Bergman has written one of those rare comedy scripts that escalates steadily and hilariously, without faltering or even having to strain for an ending.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »