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. Ralph Breaks the Internet
    Somewhere amid the film’s ornate imagery and deliriously irreverent humor, we might begin to realize that we’re watching a terrifying, incisive satire about the ways that a life lived online makes monsters of us all.
  2. At Eternity's Gate
    By adamantly focusing above all else on van Gogh’s work — and its transporting ecstasies — Schnabel has made not just an exquisite film but an argument for art.
  3. Green Book
    There’s not much here you haven’t seen before, and very little that can’t be described as crude, obvious and borderline offensive, even as it tries to be uplifting and affirmative. And yet! There is also something about this movie that prevented me from collapsing into a permanent cringe as I watched it. Or rather, two things: the lead performances.
  4. Miss Dalí
    Relentless, spell-it-all-out dialogue is wedded to a clunky visual approach that’s pretty much the cinema equivalent of a wikiHow entry.
  5. Widows
    The result is a fascinating and sometimes frustrating hybrid, a film that tries both to transcend and to exploit its genre.
  6. Under The Wire
    While the movie is rightfully more interested in lauding her bravery than highlighting her sometimes abrasive personality, these small moments help to humanize a portrait that can at times seem more awestruck than enlightening.
  7. The Clovehitch Killer
    With its achingly slow build and understated performances, The Clovehitch Killer strains to surmount its lack of urgency.
  8. Mobile Homes
    This is an atmospheric, well-acted film that leaves us mostly cold.
  9. Cam
    Cam is more successful as an oddly feminist tale of gutsy self-reliance than as a fully developed drama.
  10. Jonathan
    The movie, itself somewhat torn in sensibility, permits itself an easy out.
  11. The Last Race
    Dweck divides his efforts between elegiac tone poem and shaggy-dog ensemble piece.
  12. Of Fathers and Sons
    Of Fathers and Sons is ultimately more impressive for its access than it is revealing of drives or beliefs. If Derki’s goal was to capture what causes ideology to spread, he and his camera look without seeing.
  13. Instant Family
    Instant Family isn’t a hellish movie, although it is very much a Hollywood one.
  14. Shoah: Four Sisters
    Their stories are as harrowing, complicated and rife with imponderables as any Lanzmann filmed. And together, collected in a form that is much less labyrinthine than “Shoah,” they represent an ideal introduction (and capstone) to Lanzmann’s project.
  15. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
    It’s an embarrassment of riches, and it’s suffocating.
  16. Outlaw King
    Mackenzie does nice, tight work now and again, mostly in more intimate sequences, but too many scenes drag, and his fetishistization of violence proves numbing.
  17. The Price of Free
    The Price of Free is interested in spreading the word about Satyarthi’s work, both in India and globally, and in getting consumers to approach what they buy with a critical eye, so as not to support child labor. That’s an important message, and it’s not essential to watch the movie to receive it.
  18. Overlord
    As seen in the film’s terrifying opening and its gruesome climax, Avery deftly orchestrates some grisly, intense set pieces. He delivers on the thrills, even if the story leaves something to be desired.
  19. Postcards from London
    The film’s elegant compositions themselves are painterly, with the actors carefully posed; and the atmosphere is theatrical, with crisp line readings and sparsely populated frames. Those elements, plus a meandering story line, may not make for a particularly involving narrative experience. But it sure is nice to look at.
  20. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
    The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is one of the darkest movies by Joel and Ethan Coen, and also among the silliest. It swerves from goofy to ghastly so deftly and so often that you can’t always tell which is which.
  21. Here and Now
    It all adds up to a film aiming to be a moving character study (and an ostensible homage to Agnés Varda’s “Cléo From 5 to 7,” a far more vivid exploration of existentialism), but instead feels adrift.
  22. Weightless
    Several long, wordless stretches arise during the film, all of them thoughtful. Jaron Albertin, directing his first feature, cultivates tension in small moments and doesn’t force the drama.
  23. Pimp
    Lousy with stereotypes and filthy language, the sordid Pimp wraps 21st-century blaxploitation in a lesbian love story as unconvincing as every other relationship on screen.
  24. The Long Dumb Road
    The leads’ chemistry nearly redeems this shopworn setup, and the movie is at its best when it simply chills out with them.
  25. Infinite Football
    While the movie has allegorical resonances with the political and human rights disasters of 20th-century Romania, by the end, its surfaces, while remaining superficially unimpressive, open up as the film moves from epistemological speculation onto a plane of mysticism. This relatively short film contains worlds.
  26. Number 37
    Cheerfully derivative yet doggedly entertaining, Number 37 benefits from Dumisa’s slick execution and impressive acting by her small cast.
  27. In a Relationship
    The upshot is a gentle, gossamer movie that, like its soundtrack, goes down easy and is almost instantly forgotten.
  28. Chef Flynn
    Chef Flynn is an engaging documentary about McGarry’s boy-to-man journey.
  29. El Angel
    Carlitos’s sole reason for living is moving from one transgression to the next. The same might be said of the movie, which superficially probes his amorality while exploiting it for slick thrills.
  30. The New Romantic
    Mirroring its green protagonist, The New Romantic presents an image of sophistication while playing with ideas that are out of its depth.
  31. The Girl in the Spider's Web
    Alvarez tries to pep things up with chases, near escapes, dramatic rescues, fetish wear and female nudity. But the whole thing is a bummer, at times risible.
  32. The Grinch
    The filmmakers keep the visuals merry and popping bright. Benedict Cumberbatch, voicing the Grinch, opts not to compete with Karloff at all, which is smart, and speaks in an American accent, sounding rather like Bill Hader, which is confusing.
  33. The Front Runner
    Reitman uses Altmanesque sound design and serpentine camera movements to convey the chaos and kineticism of a process in constant, frantic motion. But after a while, once we’ve met the principal players, the speechmaking starts and a potential comedy of political manners turns into a pious, tendentious morality play.
  34. Narcissister Organ Player
    Narcissister’s background in stagecraft, movement and rhythm serves her well as a filmmaker: Far from a conventional autobiography, Narcissister Organ Player always offers something to catch your eye or ear.
  35. Nobody's Fool
    If the movie’s looseness lets in an excess of dead air, “Nobody’s Fool” is still dotted with pleasures besides those Haddish brings.
  36. Monrovia, Indiana
    While there’s no reason to suppose that this is Wiseman’s last movie, it doesn’t seem impossible that, at 88, he is aware of lengthening shadows and autumnal tints, of the fragility of perception and the finite nature of consciousness. Monrovia, Indiana is not precisely about any of those things, but it carries intimations of them, elegiac strains amid the doggerel of daily life.
  37. They'll Love Me When I'm Dead
    Neville was inspired by Josh Karp’s engrossing book “Orson Welles’s Last Movie,” which goes into greater detail than Neville can in 98 minutes. Karp also pays closer attention to Welles’s artistic process, which in the documentary can seem little more than pure chaos.
  38. The Other Side of the Wind
    What we have is something of a seductive tease, a haunted film that at times entrances and delights and at times offends and embarrasses.
  39. Marfa Girl 2
    Clark likes to linger on close-ups of intertwined naked bodies, and he seems to admire these characters’ freedom. But ultimately, it all feels whisper thin: The film, already quite short, doesn’t offer enough about any of these people for us to care genuinely about what happens to them.
  40. The Grief of Others
    It’s an artful portrait of a world that refuses the order we try to impose on it when we close ourselves off to heartache, doubt and pain.
  41. Daughters of the Sexual Revolution: The Untold Story of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders
    The tone is unabashedly partial, yet the women are such entertaining company it’s hard to mind.
  42. A Private War
    Anchored by Rosamund Pike’s powerhouse lead performance, this restive, raw movie slowly accumulates the heft to render its flaws irrelevant.
  43. Bodied
    With visuals as kinetic as its language, Joseph Kahn’s Bodied is an outrageously smart, shockingly funny satire of P.C. culture whose words gush so quickly you’ll want to see it twice.
  44. Searching for Ingmar Bergman
    Enthusing over an effect Bergman used in his great 1983 “Fanny and Alexander,” the director Olivier Assayas concludes, “Art defines truth.” Just about every minute of this movie shows how that’s true.
  45. Distant Constellation
    Said to be intended as a reflection on shifts in Turkish history and identity, it is too diffuse and withholding to add up to a cogent result.
  46. Maria by Callas
    The movie is to Callas what last year’s “Jane” was to Jane Goodall: A documentary that revitalizes history through primary sources, to illuminating, at times enthralling effect.
  47. 9 Fingers
    Some striking scenes notwithstanding, this movie doesn’t achieve the delirium it aspires to. It’s often flat and tame, and obvious in the wrong ways.
  48. The Nutcracker and the Four Realms
    The ballet dancer Misty Copeland, who makes a brief appearance during the film and in the closing credits, is the highlight, gracefully unhindered by silly dialogue in two dance sequences.
  49. Boy Erased
    The film’s sensitivity, though it is an ethical strength, is also a dramatic limitation.
  50. Goyo: The Boy General
    Jerrold Tarog, the director, follows the same game plan as he did in “Heneral Luna,” with sweeping music and proud speeches (he wrote the script with Rody Vera). There are also some nice images of the lush Philippine countryside and of del Pilar’s troops.
  51. Bohemian Rhapsody
    A baroque blend of gibberish, mysticism and melodrama, the film seems engineered to be as unmemorable as possible, with the exception of the prosthetic teeth worn by the lead actor, Rami Malek, who plays Freddie Mercury, Queen’s lead singer.
  52. Foreign Land
    In place of some kind of discovery there is mostly lamentation. That may be a valid response to events in Israel, but it’s not always a good way to engage a viewer.
  53. Trust Machine: The Story of Blockchain
    A hodgepodge of boosterish arguments for blockchain technology, Trust Machine: The Story of Blockchain, directed by Alex Winter (Bill of “Bill & Ted” fame), is not always a model of clarity, but it does a decent job of explaining the basic concept.
  54. Burning
    While each event expands the narrative — filling in the larger picture with nods at sexual relations, class divisions and a riven people — they don’t necessarily explain what happens or answer the fundamental question that burns through this brilliant movie.
  55. Vaya
    Using real experiences shared by the homeless in story workshops, Omotoso — who was also a creator of the South African television series “A Place Called Home” — directs with empathy and without sentimentality.
  56. A Bread Factory Part One: For the Sake of Gold
    Patrick Wang’s A Bread Factory has an immense cast, a deliberate pace and thematic ambition to spare — but it also has a ground-level, plain-spoken modesty that renders it hypnotic.
  57. A Bread Factory Part Two: Walk With Me a While
    The focus on the workings of an American institution may remind some of the expansive comedies of Robert Altman or the documentaries of Frederick Wiseman. But also, the blurring of the line between performance and reality, the embrace of an intimate theatricality, recalls the work of Jacques Rivette. These are cinematic giants, and this director may be on his way to joining them.
  58. The Dark
    Mina and Alex seem less like teenagers and more like case studies with traumas rather than personalities. The horror genre can be a pipeline into the dark corners of the psyche, but the impact of The Dark is more clinical than cathartic.
  59. London Fields
    London Fields, directed by Matthew Cullen and adapted from Martin Amis’s 1989 novel, is, quite simply, horrendous — a trashy, tortured misfire from beginning to end.
  60. Shirkers
    Like a photograph slowly developing before our eyes, Shirkers (which was also the title of the original picture) is both mystery and manhunt, a captivating account of shattered friendship and betrayed trust. The skill of the editing (by Tan and two colleagues), though, is key.
  61. 1985
    Cory Michael Smith’s performance as Adrian is a quiet marvel in a movie that’s superbly acted all around. The film’s intimate consideration of still-enormous issues is intelligent, surprising and emotionally resonant.
  62. Don't Go
    It falls on the performances to add subtle touches to the narrative’s broad strokes. George is admirably warm as the earthbound Hazel, and Dorff suggests the selfishness of his character’s selfless desperation.
  63. Viper Club
    Viper Club falters with mawkish flashbacks of the mother and son, and with its ham-fisted, repeated emphasis on the smarm of government officials. But it is mostly gripping.
  64. Hunter Killer
    However nutty its geopolitics, Hunter Killer does its job as popcorn thriller with brisk efficiency.
  65. Border
    This is a movie that aims to startle in overt and subtextual ways; the less known before viewing, the better.
  66. Suspiria
    As the first hour of Suspiria grinds into the second and beyond (the movie runs 152 minutes), it grows ever more distended and yet more hollow. Unlike Argento, who seemed content to deliver a nastily updated fairy tale in 90 or so minutes, Guadagnino continues casting about for meaning, which perhaps explains why he keeps adding more stuff, more mayhem, more dances.
  67. Johnny English Strikes Again
    Johnny English Strikes Again has a few more laughs and far fewer cringes (and stereotypes) than the two films that preceded it. Plus it knows where to steal from. Watching it is like having a good time by proxy.
  68. Life and Nothing More
    A portrait of lives that can’t be reduced to statistics.
  69. Mid90s
    Like its hero, Mid90s struggles to figure out what it wants to be, and the struggle makes it interesting as well as occasionally frustrating.
  70. Impulso
    The movie’s challenge is to bottle her spontaneity, which is clearly thrilling to behold in person but less dynamic in a medium that requires every move to be selected in advance, without the suspenseful bond that an artist shares with a live audience. Belmonte gets caught between two modes of nonfiction filmmaking.
  71. A Season in France
    While the story plays a bit with the notion of the supernatural, the spirit foregrounded here is more tangible: an ominous sense of restlessness and curtailed dreams.
  72. The Waldheim Waltz
    Beckermann wants not so much to contextualize as to invoke — with the hope, perhaps, that placing us in the middle of this debate will create its own context.
  73. What They Had
    Programmatic and groaningly trite, What They Had, the debut feature from Elizabeth Chomko, would be impossible to swallow without its star-studded cast. Even so, it requires all their considerable skills to stop this soapy family drama from sliding into complete banality.
  74. The Guilty
    Unfolding in real time, this immediately involving story bends and turns in surprising, sometimes horrifying ways. Enriched by Oskar Skriver’s marvelous sound editing, which takes us from a speeding van to a bloodcurdling crime scene with equal authenticity, the movie smoothly blends police procedural with character study.
  75. Caniba
    The filmmakers, who made “Leviathan,” the striking 2012 immersion into commercial fishing, seem to be arguing that Sagawa needs to be understood beyond moralistic preconceptions. Caniba did not make the case for me. I consider Sagawa repellent, and the movie an exercise in intellectualized scab-picking.
  76. On Her Shoulders
    Alexandria Bombach’s direction and editing are exceptional; she captures images that are both subtle and formidable. Her film is, first and foremost, a profile of Murad and her mission. Yet it’s also a comment on the media and on government aid.
  77. Wildlife
    Wildlife is a domestic drama both sad and terrifying. The entire cast does exceptional work (Oxenbould is an exciting find), but the movie is anchored by Mulligan, who gives the best performance of any I’ve seen in film this year.
  78. Nigerian Prince
    In Grace’s stifling house, the electricity is dicey and the internet nonexistent. There isn’t a shower or extra bed. Just the third-world glaze of sweat and privation you see everywhere in this richly endowed land of economic imbalance, an atmosphere the film, Faraday Okoro’s feature debut, captures expertly.
  79. Galveston
    With shadowy imagery that pushes the boundaries of visibility and a mumbly lead performance from Ben Foster that strains the limits of intelligibility, Galveston goes past film noir and lands at film murk.
  80. Halloween
    This isn’t a wisecracking, tongue-in-cheek picture: Green wants us to believe in his Bogeyman, and Curtis is his ace card. Leaving no room for winks or giggles, she makes Laurie’s long-festering terror the glue that holds the movie together.
  81. Watergate
    Ferguson’s narrative is so dense and complicated, and at the same time so dramatic, suspenseful and clear, that it absorbs all of your attention.
  82. Horn from the Heart: The Paul Butterfield Story
    While the last third of Butterfield’s life is tragic, spending the better part of 90 minutes with the man and his music is exhilarating. The picture may get at least a few people talking about him again.
  83. Charm City
    The film captures up close the way violence transforms neighborhoods and families with an immediacy that transcends headlines or sensationalism.
  84. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
    Partly because the movie is so splendidly and completely absorbed in its characters and their milieu, it communicates much more than a quirky appreciation for old books and odd readers.
  85. The Price of Everything
    While this colorful and inquisitive cinematic essay on the state of the art world is occasionally skeptical and consistently thoughtful, cynicism isn’t really on its agenda.
  86. First Man
    It reminds you of an extraordinary feat and acquaints you with an interesting, enigmatic man. But there is a further leap beyond technical accomplishment — into meaning, history, metaphysics or the wilder zones of the imagination — that the film is too careful, too earthbound, to attempt.
  87. Bad Times at the El Royale
    Goddard keeps everything smoothly, ebbing and flowing as the characters separate and join together, but at some point during this logy 2-hour-and-21-minute exercise you want something more substantial than even Hemsworth’s admittedly mesmerizing snaky hips.
  88. The Kindergarten Teacher
    Fluidly capturing the trajectory of a ruinous obsession, the writer and director, Sara Colangelo, skillfully fudges the line between mentoring and manipulation, and between nurturing talent and appropriating it. Suffusing each scene with an insinuating, prickly tension, she remains ruthlessly committed to her screw-tightening tone, offering the viewer no comforting moral escape hatch.
  89. Classical Period
    Classical Period is often very funny, but it’s also poignant, imagining a milieu — part heaven, part purgatory — in which daily lives can be devoted to pondering the aggregated wisdom of the past.
  90. Sadie
    Lynskey and Schloss are well matched as mother and daughter, and Griffiths builds a relationship between them as this far-from-innocent teenager navigates her world. That rough journey is worth watching even when this film falls short.
  91. The Sentence
    By making you feel deeply for his sister and her children, Valdez has fashioned his film to make the lapses less glaring.
  92. After Everything
    White and Monroe demonstrate natural chemistry, and they discretely suggest the private experiences of their characters, the youthful doubts that can’t be extinguished by passion. In unpretentious fashion, After Everything portrays the bittersweetness of a first love that blooms in crisis.
  93. Over the Limit
    Reports of excessively punitive training of female gymnasts surface with some regularity, so in that sense Over the Limit is not unexpected. But the Polish director Marta Prus, brilliantly constructing a very particular look at a sport in which the arch of an eyebrow is as important as that of a spine, remains coolly impassive.
  94. Bikini Moon
    Bikini Moon is better in separate scenes than as a whole, where Manchevski’s overreaches and plot lapses become more glaring. In this film, the harshest truths — make that “truths” — are best served in small doses.
  95. All Square
    Hyams directs Timothy Brady’s script appropriately if not brilliantly (Hyams is also credited as a co-editor), but the movie’s main attraction, finally, is its cast.
  96. Barbara
    It’s a film of scenes rather than of one unified narrative, but each scene is a showcase for the magnificent talents of Ms. Balibar, a multifaceted performer of spectacular magnetism and intelligence.
  97. The Oath
    It was said by many after the 2016 election that the Trump administration would yield great satirical art. This is not an example of that.
  98. Beautiful Boy
    It is hard not to be touched by the testing of paternal love, or by Nic’s fragility. But Beautiful Boy, rather than plumbing the hard emotional depths of its subject, skates on a surface of sentiment and gauzy visual beauty.
  99. Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween
    The production design displays a genuine enthusiasm for the decorative kitsch of the Halloween season, and the flashes of giddy craftiness beneath the slick style almost compensate for the toothlessness of the horror.
  100. 22 July
    Fiction that hews close to fact, the movie is serious and meticulous, yet hollow.
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