The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,278 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: 9,380 out of 20278
  2. Mixed: 8,434 out of 20278
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20278
20278 movie reviews
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  1. City of Gold
    City of Gold transcends its modest methods, largely because it connects Mr. Gold’s appealing personality with a passionate argument about the civic culture of Los Angeles and the place of food within it.
  2. No Picnic
    It is impossible to separate Mr. Hartman's writing and direction from Mr. Horton's smooth, sophisticated camera work, which offers a broad view of the cluttered streets and also peers up narrow stairwells to suggest Mac's claustrophobic life. However their collaboration worked, ''No Picnic'' does not look or sound quite like any other film, and that's more than you can say about most movies of any size.
  3. Rejoice and Shout
    Your religion or lack of one doesn't matter. At some point while watching the film, you may feel that music IS God, or if not, a close approximation of divinity.
  4. In Bloom
    The two lead performances — Lika Babluani as Eka and Mariam Bokeria as Natia — are direct and unaffected, but also enigmatic in the way that nonprofessional screen acting can be in the hands of a sensitive director.
  5. A Man for All Seasons
    A Man for All Seasons is a picture that inspires admiration, courage and thought.
  6. Berlin
    As a cautionary tale Lou Reed’s Berlin is an 85-minute public-service announcement that preaches "Just say no." The force of the music, however, lends this tawdry melodrama a tragic stature.
  7. All That Jazz
    An uproarious display of brilliance, nerve, dance, maudlin confessions, inside jokes and, especially, ego.
  8. M3GAN
    The director Gerard Johnstone doesn’t go for elaborate suspense sequences or truly intense scares. He wants to please, not rattle. And while there are some hints at social commentary on how modern mothers and fathers use technology to outsource parenting, this movie is smart enough to never take itself too seriously.
  9. Belushi
    Belushi taps the sweetness in a cultural fixture with an irreplaceably wild sense of fun.
  10. God Grew Tired of Us
    Handsomely photographed and inspirational, but not cloyingly so, it is the rare contemporary documentary that doesn't leave a residue of cynicism and outrage.
  11. LOL
    Authentic in texture if narrow in scope, LOL is a movie about the way we live -- or rather about the way white, urban, heterosexual circuit boys are failing to live.
  12. Aimee & Jaguar
    There is surprisingly little emotional amplitude in the film.
  13. The Big Carnival
    Ace in the Hole is an acquired taste -- and an unforgettable one.
  14. Kissing Jessica Stein
    Amusing but extremely derivative.
  15. Seabiscuit
    Somehow we are never quite swept into the boisterous, democratic world of which Seabiscuit, in Ms. Hillenbrand's account, was the plucky, galloping embodiment.
  16. Always Shine
    Always Shine is a deft, assured movie with a sly self-reflexive undercurrent containing commentary on sexism and self-idealization that’s provocative, and sometimes disturbing.
  17. Lots of Kids, a Monkey and a Castle
    Along with the loving portraiture are elements of peculiar mystery.
  18. A Secret
    Nearly every melodramatic impulse has been suppressed in favor of a calm precision that serves both to intensify and delay the emotional impact of the film’s climactic disclosures.
  19. King Jack
    For everyone who ever had a close call as an adolescent and kept it from the grown-ups, King Jack will hit you where you live. The same for everyone who’s been pummeled by a bully or been left vulnerable by releasing a graphic selfie into the textosphere.
  20. Mickey 17
    Bong keeps things zipping along, and with such nimbleness that the movie’s heavier ideas never weigh it down. He jabs rather than pounds as he takes on targets — authoritarianism, comic-book heroics, the vanity of power — while playfully mixing moods and acting styles.
  21. 3-Iron
    A teasing, self-conscious and curiously heartfelt demonstration of his (Mr. Kim) mischievous formal ingenuity.
  22. Blow the Man Down
    While the sisterhood in Easter Cove is indeed powerful, the secrets that bind its members prove to be fairly simple, and the result is intriguing enough to make you wonder what these writer-directors might accomplish if they applied their vision to a more expansive canvas.
  23. No Ordinary Man
    This is a respectful tribute that is a shade too morally and cinematically safe in its execution.
  24. Happy End
    It has an uncommonly strong ensemble cast...but the movie belongs to Mr. Trintignant.
  25. Earth
    This is nature defanged and declawed for kiddie consumption, so the emphasis is on awwww-filled moments.
  26. Burden
    This is a film unafraid to look at [Burden's] acts, but timid when approaching his ideas.
  27. Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine
    If this isn’t the iPhone of documentaries, it gets its point across, and unlike Mr. Gibney’s Scientology exposé “Going Clear,” this movie has a harder target (albeit with its own devoted following).
  28. Strike
    Schlöndorff calls the film "a ballad inspired by true events," and its occasional bouts of clumsiness and sentimentality are inseparable from its power.
  29. Aliyah
    This smart, sober movie makes you feel the full weight of the challenges he faces.
  30. On the Silver Globe (1988)
    A certain amount of work is required to stitch together a sense of the plot, but as is often the case in Zulawski’s films, the story is less the point than an excuse, a loose temporal conceit holding together flights of visual invention, verbal extravagance and male and female nudity.
  31. The Hospital
    Although Mr. Chayefsky has written a very contemporary melodramatic farce, his political sympathies have their roots in the liberalism of 20 years ago.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Olive Trees of Justice
    What has emerged is not a towering film, nor a definitive war drama, but an extremely good one with real people, French and Algerian, dark and light.
  33. Big Fish & Begonia
    Never short on visual or emotional wonder, Big Fish & Begonia contemplates mortality with the imagination of an old soul who has been given new eyes.
  34. Bone Tomahawk
    Mr. Russell is far from the only reason to see this unexpected low-budget treat, a witty fusion of western, horror and comedy that gallops to its own beat. That rhythm is dictated entirely by the writer and director, S. Craig Zahler, a novelist and musician who flips genre conventions upside-down and cares more about character than body count.
  35. Cairo Conspiracy
    Cairo Conspiracy is a measured but unsparing portrait of corruption perpetrated by people who, across the board, are utterly confident of their own rectitude. Its denouement offers some mercy, but zero hope that the rot depicted can be corrected.
  36. Our Hero, Balthazar
    So many details in this comedy-drama (a characterization worth quibbling with) are meant to provoke. And Our Hero, Balthazar teases with the promise of a darkly intelligent film. Not unlike its protagonist’s tears, the effect is dismayingly performative.
  37. Risk
    To some degree in spite of Ms. Poitras’s journalistic intentions — though very much as a consequence of her rigorous honesty — the picture that emerges is complicated, unsettling and intriguingly ambivalent.
  38. Farewell, Herr Schwarz
    Yael Reuveny’s Farewell Herr Schwarz traces a Holocaust mystery with stumbling curiosity and endearing sincerity.
  39. Let Them All Talk
    Despite the talented actors onscreen, Soderbergh’s mannered direction lacks charisma and the characters lack chemistry.
  40. Zipper: Coney Island's Last Wild Ride
    Though not terribly nuanced, a bit muddled and lacking certain perspectives, “Zipper” drives home the fragile identity of even the city’s signature locales and the alarming cultural myopia of much redevelopment.
  41. Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower
    Amid the fight, there’s a sense of hope as we watch one tough kid turning into one tough man. With luck, that will lead to a sequel.
  42. Invisible Beauty
    At times, the film is hampered by the sheer amount of information there is to condense from across a 50-year career, but Hardison is never less than a fascinating subject — an artist whose medium is industrial disruption.
  43. Phantasm
    It's thoroughly silly and endearing.
  44. Widow of Silence
    Breathtakingly photographed by Mohammad Reza Jahanpanah, Widow of Silence is a movie with a cool head and a sharp eye — one that sees greater hope in the flamboyantly jeweled tones of a carmine head scarf than in the entrenched absurdities of a broken bureaucracy.
  45. Am I OK?
    The movie feels very lived-in, the banter fresh and funny, even if sometimes it feels like it’s standing in place a bit too long
  46. 7 Days
    7 Days takes a warm, witty look at the kinds of companionship that can emerge even — or especially — in the most unromantic, pragmatic of circumstances.
  47. 7 Boxes
    The filmmakers stage an amazing race that almost absolves an overstuffed plot and an over-reliance on coincidence.
  48. Meeting Gorbachev
    But if Meeting Gorbachev finds its subject mostly staying on a pro-peace, antinuclear message — and it’s a script that’s hard to argue with — Herzog shapes the film into a study in how world events often come down to quirks of character and circumstance.
  49. Nine Days
    The narrative conceits of Nine Days, while exquisitely constructed, are intricate to the point of laborious. At times the movie almost sinks under their weight.
  50. Exhibition
    Exhibition is an exquisitely photographed film that requires unusually close attention for it to reveal itself.
  51. Mike Wallace Is Here
    There are times when you wish Belkin wouldn’t cut away so quickly and would allow answers to tough questions (or Wallace’s own words) to play in full.
  52. Superman Returns
    It's hard to see what the point is beyond the usual grandiosity that comes whenever B-movie material is pumped up with ambition and money.
  53. Weathering with You
    The pace is sometimes so rapid that you scarcely have time to look, much less admire the translucent sheen of a plastic garbage bag or the meticulous lettering on a beer can (“Since 1978”). That’s to Shinkai’s purpose. As streets, homes, rooms and faces hurtle by, a textured world emerges detail by detail, one that looks like life yet is also expressionistic.
  54. Men in Black
    Dryly clever.
  55. Infinity Pool
    Surreal, sophisticated and sometimes sickening, Infinity Pool suggests that while the elder Cronenberg might be fixated on the disintegration of our bodies, his son is more concerned with the destruction of our souls.
  56. Blindsight
    Featuring exceptional people doing extraordinary things, Blindsight is one of those documentaries with the power to make you re-examine your entire life -- or at least get off the couch.
  57. Good Hair
    Spirited, probing and frequently hilarious, it coasts on the fearless charm of its front man and the eye-opening candor of its interviewees, most of them women.
  58. Pi
    As smart as it is, Pi is awfully hard to watch. Filmed with hand-held cameras in splotchy black-and-white and crudely edited, it has the style and attitude of a no-budget midnight movie.
  59. Dances with Wolves
    Mr. Blake's screenplay and Mr. Costner's direction of it are, with the exception of three memorable sequences, commonplace. The film is painstakingly composed of small details of frontier and tribal life that should be riveting. Most of the time they aren't.
  60. Czech Dream
    When they discover they've been made fools of, they accept this performance event with surprising equanimity. There is a lot of grumbling but no riot. They get the joke.
  61. Tony Manero
    More than an indelible portrait of a sociopath with the soul of a zombie, Tony Manero is an extremely dark meditation on borrowed cultural identity.
  62. The Mouth of the Wolf
    The Mouth of the Wolf will haunt you.
  63. The Bitter Buddha
    The film’s unvarying lack of drama or direction can be wearing, but the schlubby originality of its subject fully repays the longueurs.
  64. Food Evolution
    With a soft tone, respectful to opponents but insistent on the data, Food Evolution posits an inconvenient truth for organic boosters to swallow: In a world desperate for safe, sustainable food, G.M.O.s may well be a force for good.
  65. Presumed Innocent
    Alan J. Pakula has directed an intense, enveloping, gratifyingly thorough screen adaptation of Mr. Turow's story. Mr. Pakula, who also co-wrote the film with Frank Pierson, is well suited to the job of conveying both the story's suspense and its underlying sobriety.
    • 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.
  67. Fanny: The Right to Rock
    What the movie showcases best from its subjects, then, is the humor and ease of women who have survived a lifetime of setbacks and strife. Fanny has already proven itself — what’s left is for us to enjoy its growing catalog.
  68. Northern Lights
    When the film's focus is on labor history, remembered or recreated, it is extremely moving. Fortunately this is most of the time.
  69. Piggy
    Pereda, who also wrote the script, is not afraid of psychological and moral ambiguity: It’s obvious that she is on Sara’s side — the bullying scenes are much harder to watch than the bloody ones — but she also knows that shame, guilt and secrecy fester into messy situations and messy people.
  70. The Outrun
    The movie gets dangerously close to being overwrought. But Ronan’s restraint keeps it truthful, even when she’s screaming, or crying, or blacking out. In the end, it mostly aches, and aches, and aches.
  71. Wreck-It Ralph
    Manages to be touching as well as silly, thrilling and just a bit exhausting. The secret to its success is a genuine enthusiasm for the creative potential of games, a willingness to take them seriously without descending into nerdy pomposity. I am delighted to surrender my cynicism, at least until I've used up today's supply of quarters.
  72. First They Killed My Father
    It is gorgeous and suspenseful, and it rushes heedlessly into dangerous terrain.
  73. Power
    The point isn’t the data, but the spider-web nature of the argument; seemingly disparate things (labor strikes, slave patrols, the removal of Indigenous Americans from their land) are drawn together in “Power,” which becomes an act of pattern recognition. It is not easy viewing, but it’s a strong introduction to a topic that seems freshly relevant every day.
  74. ParaNorman
    Far more than Norman's adventure, which takes him from home to a cemetery and deep into his town's history, what pulls you in, quickening your pulse and widening your eyes, are the myriad visual enchantments - from the rich, nubby tactility of his clothes to the skull-and-bones adorning his bedroom wallpaper.
  75. Let It Rain
    Needlessly complicated, life already has more than enough petty dramas. Let It Rain may not be funny in a ha-ha sense, but it gave me an amused open-mouthed appreciation of life’s absurdities, including unanticipated nuisances like bad weather.
  76. Luce
    To say that it unfolds like a play is both accurate and undersells how gorgeously it has been rendered for the screen.
  77. The Rocket
    What gives this movie its sting is that, despite Mr. Mordaunt’s insistent attempts at uplift, death hovers over this story at every single moment.
  78. Sign 'o' the Times
    Prince, whose ties to soul and jazz are clearer than ever before, whose willingness to embrace different musical forms seems to grow all the time, has never cast a stronger spell.
  79. Christmas Eve in Miller's Point
    "Miller’s Point” is a Christmas movie more invested in atmosphere, and the qualities of wintry light, than in holiday cheer — and that somehow makes it all the more warm.
  80. A People Uncounted
    Much of this movie is composed of survivors who give harrowing accounts of their experiences, and their warnings about rising ethnic hatred in Europe should not be ignored. But those seeking to learn in depth about, say, the dialects and traditions of the Roma should look elsewhere.
  81. Welcome to Sarajevo
    Yet this film, for all its apparent immediacy, winds up less affecting than a more poetic or roundabout approach might be.
  82. Being Evel
    The movie overreaches when trying to contextualize Knievel as a hero inspiring the country after Vietnam-Watergate disillusionment. He was simply an all-American self-promoter. But Being Evel largely nails his story.
  83. Paul Williams Still Alive
    Mr. Williams's quiet integrity trumps Mr. Kessler at every turn. Self-aware and articulate, with a modesty born from confidence, he persistently uses the film to extol - and demonstrate - the rewards of recovery. His conviction brings necessary moral weight to Paul Williams: Still Alive, which transcends caricature to emerge an impressive personal testament.
  84. The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
    Moving and maddening in almost equal measure, Brian Knappenberger’s The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz is a devastating meditation on what can happen when a prescient thinker challenges corporate interests and the power of the state.
  85. Extra Ordinary
    While Extra Ordinary overextends its ghosts-are-blasé conceit, Higgins and Ward are appealing leads, and the movie has plenty of charming moments, such as Rose watching an episode of her dad for guidance.
  86. Only the Brave
    Under its slick, schematic surface, this tale of aspiration and redemption at least offers moments of genuine feeling.
  87. The Tunnel
    The film convincingly portrays the devastating, life-altering hardships and restrictions that the residents of the divided Berlin endured.
  88. Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia
    Heavily seasoned with epigrams worthy of Oscar Wilde, this entertaining documentary portrays Vidal as a pessimistic political prophet with streaks of paranoia and misanthropy, but a truth teller nonetheless.
  89. The Search for General Tso
    Mr. Cheney’s movie, while teasing at times, does its celebrating and debunking in mild-mannered fashion, making points without seeming to try to score them.
  90. Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds
    This film rests on the fact that Mother Earth is always being called on by other worlds in the forms of comets, meteorites and asteroids — and it’s about as transportive as documentaries get.
  91. Breaking a Monster
    What’s troubling is the film’s slow and steady exposure of a music business machine that gobbles up individuality and spits out a sellable package.
  92. Dark Money
    Ms. Reed has taken on a vital story in Dark Money, which is why it’s frustrating that her storytelling isn’t better. Some introductory text or explanatory narration would have better helped historically ground viewers, who need to juggle a lot of information.
  93. Tell Them Who You Are
    Near the beginning of the movie, the younger Wexler admits that the film is his attempt to get closer to his father. This sense of personal mission helps make Tell Them Who You Are the richest documentary of its kind since Terry Zwigoff's "Crumb."
  94. Hellboy
    Mr. del Toro lets loose with an all-American, vaudevillian rambunctiousness that makes the movie daffy, loose and lovable.
  95. Goldie
    Woods, remarkably comfortable in her first film role, gives Goldie a steel spine and a feisty resourcefulness, her moments of vulnerability rare, but essential.
  96. Sleepless in Seattle
    Not since "Love Story" has there been a movie that so shrewdly and predictably manipulated the emotions for such entertaining effect.
  97. Radio Unnameable
    The charm of Radio Unnameable is, finally, elegiac. It can make you wish - or, if you're lucky, remember - that you were a sleepless New Yorker in 1967, kept from loneliness by a gentle, soulful voice on the radio.
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