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. Liyana
    By addressing strife in Africa in a roundabout way, Liyana breaks free of the heaviness that can weigh down an issue-based documentary.
  2. The Happy Prince
    Suffused with a sentimentality that Wilde himself would have deplored, The Happy Prince is narratively mushy and meandering. Yet, beneath the prosthetics, there’s genuine pathos in Mr. Everett’s portrayal of a man bitterly aware that his talents are unreliable armor against the perceived sin of his homosexuality.
  3. Wobble Palace
    Every moment is as cringe-worthy and creative as Eugene’s floating toupee. Movies about the millennial moment are multitudinous, but Wobble Palace is special: a sendup of broke-artist types that shimmers with abashed affection.
  4. Await Further Instructions
    While most movies of this type simply peter out, “Instructions” maintains such an unswerving commitment to its dark purpose that its final, gorgeously tenebrous images will leave you wobbly for days.
  5. Above and Beyond: NASA's Journey To Tomorrow
    This is not a spectacular picture, but it’s an informative and heartening one that might make a good double feature with “First Man,” the forthcoming fictionalized blockbuster about Apollo 11.
  6. Shine
    A big heart and a blunt plot run through Shine, a movie whose story is there mostly just to usher in a dance sequence or an earnest speech.
  7. Trouble
    Trouble makes a whole lot of noise without saying very much. The direction is wooden and the cinematography dull, leaving the solid cast (including Julia Stiles as a daffy clerk and Jim Parrack as her knuckle-dragging boyfriend) to shoulder the weight.
  8. Venom
    Ultimately, the ingratiating eccentricities of Venom aren’t enough to really distinguish the movie from its superhero-movie brethren as it devolves into the usual expensive orgy of sound, fury and wisecracking.
  9. Wajib
    Ms. Jacir is a thrifty filmmaker; there’s nothing frilly in this movie. But she is also a sensitive and imaginative and resourceful one.
  10. Private Life
    Though it is poignant and funny in nearly equal measure, the most remarkable aspect of Private Life may be its lack of noticeable exaggeration. Ms. Jenkins is working at the scale of life, with the confidence that the ordinary, if viewed from the right angle, will provide enough drama and humor to sustain our interest.
  11. A Crooked Somebody
    Often uncomfortable and all the better for it, A Crooked Somebody doesn’t mind watching its characters squirm a little. That’s tough for them but good for us in this highly enjoyable thriller.
  12. Viking Destiny
    A bit of low-budget Nordic nonsense that only makes you appreciate the visual finesse and rowdy discipline of the History channel’s “Vikings.”
  13. Bayou Caviar
    Like a boxer who doesn’t know when to quit, Bayou Caviar goes on a bit long, then rallies — in this case with an agreeably cynical closing image.
  14. Studio 54
    The movie is a fast account that is sometimes a tad facile in its analysis of a cultural moment. But as Mr. Schrager’s personal too-much-too-soon story, it’s compelling.
  15. The Hate U Give
    Ms. Stenberg, Mr. Hornsby and others in the ensemble (including Regina Hall as Starr’s mother, Lisa) are more than capable of exploring their characters’ depths, but a wonky script gets them only so far.
  16. A Star Is Born
    This latest and fourth version is a gorgeous heartbreaker (bring tissues). Like its finest antecedents, it wrings tears from its romance and thrills from a steadfast belief in old-fashioned, big-feeling cinema. That it’s also a perverse fantasy about men, women, love and sacrifice makes it all the better.
  17. Moynihan
    If anything, Moynihan leaves you wanting to watch more of the man. Perhaps too immersed in numbers for politics and too much of a dabbler for academia, he was also a showman — and therefore a natural movie subject.
  18. The Great Buster: A Celebration
    The film presents a compact, tactful biography and also a valuable explication of the Keatonesque in its most sublime varieties. Coming ahead of a digital restoration of Keaton’s major films, it serves as both a primer and refresher, as well as a promise that he will not be forgotten.
  19. All About Nina
    It’s hard not to root for Nina, even if this prickly, intriguingly difficult character becomes considerably less interesting as the story progresses and the dialogue veers toward the therapeutic
  20. Summer '03
    Vacant in emotion and in cinematic perspective, the movie looks back 15 years but struggles to make an impression longer than 15 minutes.
  21. Monsters and Men
    Turning black-white conflict into a laudably complex wash of gray, Mr. Green (inspired in part by a conversation he had with a police officer about the 2014 death of Eric Garner) favors reason over outrage. The political heat rises but the movie stays cool, its smooth, smart climax in keeping with its levelheaded tone.
  22. Black '47
    Since this is a rare feature film to treat the Irish famine, it’s a little odd that it tilts so heavily toward a genre exercise. But as a genre exercise, it’s pretty potent.
  23. 306 Hollywood
    A family portrait that plunges into what will strike many viewers as T.M.I. territory, the documentary 306 Hollywood makes for morbid, at times insufferable viewing. But its solipsism is part of its message.
  24. Bad Reputation
    The movie chronicles music industry tales of glory and failure. These are dishy, but more interesting is Ms. Jett’s rock ‘n’ roll heart. The stories of how she mentored younger bands are moving.
  25. Cruise
    Contrary to his delicious downer of a first film, the terrific “Big Fan,” Mr. Siegel doesn’t venture into risky areas here. He’s content to have these characters hang out in cars or at a diner while chewing the scenery and checking their beepers. If you came of age in the 1980s, that’s enough to enjoy.
  26. Free Solo
    Despite a somewhat soft middle section, Free Solo is an engaging study of a perfect match between passion and personality.
  27. Smallfoot
    The movie, directed by Karey Kirkpatrick, has just enough wit and visual invention to get by. (The “Bad Santa” team of John Requa and Glenn Ficarra are among those credited with the story.) But for all the hints of darkness around its edges, the film is ultimately like its heroes: cuddly, cute and harmless.
  28. MATANGI/MAYA/M.I.A.
    The documentary elicits some viewer indignation on her behalf, but overall, it’s not a very inspired piece of work. While it depicts M.I.A.’s bristling at being called a terrorist advocate, it never wholly clarifies her specific political aims.
  29. Scaffolding
    Rife with heavy-handed metaphors — and discussions of metaphors, as befits a movie about a young man studying literature — Scaffolding seems somewhat torn when it comes to telegraphing its own intentions. Its ambiguities of character take a back seat to a trite upshot.
  30. The Old Man & the Gun
    How much intensity and suspense can you drain from a movie about cops and robbers without having the thing collapse into anecdote and whimsy? The Old Man & the Gun kind of does just that, but it’s hard to mind too much.
  31. Hold the Dark
    The movie keeps moving, the story keeps flowing, but these images — which feel suspended between cinema and still photography — create a pause in the action that your anxious imagination can’t help but fret over. That’s especially true because Mr. Saulnier’s images are often in service of spooky, blood-drenched tales.
  32. Night School
    The plot zigs and zags and sometimes accelerates in the direction of genuine hilarity...only to downshift into sloppy, easy jokes and gags.
  33. Colette
    Colette is an origin story, a tale of metamorphosis rather than of already formed greatness. What interests Mr. Westmoreland is how a self-described country girl became a woman of the world, a transformation that in its deeper, more intimately mysterious registers remains out of reach of this movie and of the hard-working Ms. Knightley.
  34. Call Her Ganda
    Call Her Ganda (“ganda” means “beautiful” in Tagalog) remains commendable for its focus on the case, and for its insistence that the crime against Ms. Laude not be forgotten.
  35. Assassination Nation
    Often it feels like reading a Twitter thread of ideas and hashtags, rather than watching a movie. Yet the final act, a “Purge”-like blood bath to the tune of vengeance, is aesthetically arresting.
  36. Love, Gilda
    Love, Gilda is a very affectionate reminder of her brief and brilliant career, a heartfelt love letter whose title might be more accurate without the comma.
  37. Fahrenheit 11/9
    Mr. Moore recognizes an affinity he shares with the president — also a showman. So he is in a nearly unique position to shame the viewer with a frank perspective on how Mr. Trump used his extrovert side to make citizens complacent about the less savory aspects of his character.
  38. Tea with the Dames
    I would not have minded a bit if the dames were given twice the amount of time this trim film allowed.
  39. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
    The movie has the pleasingly demented texture of early Tim Burton. It bears the logo of Steven Spielberg’s Amblin company and is seen from a Spielbergian child’s-eye view.
  40. The Song of Sway Lake
    The film seems unclear on how to unpack all its baggage, but the sense of detail and place carry the day.
  41. The Last Suit
    An unfortunately contrived Holocaust drama that labors under the delusion that the subject matter lends itself to uplift.
  42. Quincy
    The movie alternates between the present, with Mr. Jones on the go, and a retrospective of his life and career, narrated by the man himself. His hardscrabble early years on the South Side of Chicago are scary; his triumphs from the earliest points of his career onward are exhilarating; the racism he is obliged to endure throughout is infuriating.
  43. The Sisters Brothers
    Despite Mr. Audiard’s embrace of contemporary norms that would have been out of place in a Wayne western — the amusingly deployed coarse language, the shots to the head and sprays of blood — he isn’t attempting to rewrite genre in The Sisters Brothers, which is one of this movie’s virtues, along with its terrific actors and his sensitive direction of them.
  44. Life Itself
    Unreliability is a fascinating and tricky conceit for novelists and filmmakers. It should not be confused with bad writing. There is a lot of that here, and also, to confuse matters further, a lot of good acting.
  45. Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable
    Informative but not overwhelming, it blends biography and appreciative analysis in 90 brisk, packed minutes.
  46. Mandy
    The movie’s imagery is consistently unearthly; its pacing has a magisterial weight. Call it pulp Tarkovsky, maybe.
  47. Letter from Masanjia
    It’s an important story, made more intense by its tight focus.
  48. Museo
    In spite of a meandering story and some fuzzy passages, there is a touch of magic in Museo, a sense of wonder and curiosity that imparts palpable excitement.
  49. A Simple Favor
    Mr. Feig handily manages the mood and scene shifts, using regular laughs to brighten the deepening dark. By far his smartest move was to give Ms. Kendrick and Ms. Lively room to create a prickly intimacy for their characters, a bond that’s persuasive enough to push the story through its more forced moments.
  50. The Land of Steady Habits
    Even though Anders and the people around him can be sorted into recognizable types (a fault, mostly of Mr. Thompson’s book), they are also amusing and awful in ways that can feel disconcertingly real.
  51. Bel Canto
    A movie that, for all its operatic allusions and actorly expertise, feels dismayingly passionless.
  52. American Chaos
    It was a prescient plan. Mr. Stern, a longtime Democrat, vowed to listen closely, and he seems to have kept his word. Though he doesn’t mask his expressions — usually astounded, though never mocking — he’s a genial interviewer, empathic, he says, even if he can’t be sympathetic.
  53. Don't Leave Home
    Don’t Leave Home is a frustratingly befuddled movie that’s nevertheless fascinating.
  54. Science Fair
    Thanks to its lovable subjects, Science Fair nails the presentation, but its research is only surface deep.
  55. Hale County This Morning, This Evening
    The filmmaker’s poetic logic is inextricable from his consciousness of race and community, and of his function and potential as an artist grappling with his own circumstances and those of the people he’s depicting. “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” is not a long film, but it contains whole worlds.
  56. The Children Act
    The movie finally punts on grappling with its ambiguities. The finale feels functional rather than haunting.
  57. The Predator
    The frat house atmosphere eventually gives way to tedious bloodletting. In that regard, The Predator hasn’t evolved at all.
  58. I Think We're Alone Now
    A haunting first half can’t offset the absurd ending of I Think We’re Alone Now, a post-apocalyptic tale with a late plot twist that feels as if it comes out of left field. And right field. And center field, the stands and the dugout, too.
  59. Where Hands Touch
    The stridently theatricalized violence is horrific only because it’s so abjectly manipulative. By the end of the movie, my jaw felt unhinged from dropping so often.
  60. The Public Image Is Rotten
    Even if you’ve scratched your head over Mr. Lydon’s TV ad work and other efforts to maintain a professional life in recent years, this affectionate and frank movie can elicit newfound admiration for a slightly mellowed iconoclast.
  61. Reversing Roe
    It’s less interested in rendering a verdict on the morality of abortion than it is in tracing the increasing politicization of the issue.
  62. White Boy Rick
    Squint and you can sometimes make out the bigger, more complex stories in White Boy Rick, including those of a great city violently brought low; of fragile communities left to fail and rot; and of a legal system that seems permanently broken. Too often, though, the movie traffics in genre clichés and the usual suspects.
  63. Lizzie
    Lizzie isn’t perfect — the pacing can flag, and the lovely Kim Dickens, as Lizzie’s older sister, barely registers — but Ms. Sevigny’s intelligence and formidable control keep the melodrama grounded. Her empathy for Borden, whose fragile constitution belies a searing will, is palpable, as is the sense of inescapable peril surrounding the two female leads.
  64. To All the Boys I've Loved Before
    Ms. Johnson directs the picture with an assurance that matches that of her plucky protagonist.
  65. Sierra Burgess Is a Loser
    There’s sharp dialogue throughout.
  66. Peppermint
    Peppermint is a belabored exercise in lazily constructed déjà vu, without the grit or stylized ham of predecessors it so baldly steals from.
  67. Hal
    It’s a consistently engaging trip. Ms. Scott has assembled a nice, fairly well-rounded group to testify on her subject’s behalf, including people who were part of Ashby’s foundational years in Hollywood — most important, the director Norman Jewison.
  68. The Apparition
    Mr. Lindon, who carries his powerful masculinity with canny reserve, is superb as a man inquiring into a faith he had previously thought had nothing to do with him. But Ms. Bellugi is a real find; she inhabits her character, who, even as she hides her secrets, is so genuinely beatific that you can hear it in her breathing.
  69. Kusama - Infinity
    Kusama — Infinity, while conventionally structured, provides ample, illuminating access to an artist’s way of thinking and working.
  70. Five Fingers For Marseilles
    In stylish and entertaining fashion, Five Fingers for Marseilles looks over the South African countryside and finds fresh vistas for the western genre.
  71. I Am Not a Witch
    The film is perhaps overly repetitive in emphasizing Shula’s inability to escape exploitation, but the story is put across with formal confidence and real originality.
  72. Nelly
    The character Ms. Émond and Ms. Mackay create is not likable, but is puzzling in an engrossing way. I am not sufficiently familiar with Ms. Fortier’s work to weigh in on how accurately this film represents it, but as an act of complex homage, “Nelly” gets to a few interesting places.
  73. Blaze
    The usual sequence of ballad-of-a-tormented-artist verses plays out: early promise; success and betrayal; redemption and death. What pulls against the relentless momentum of biography is the sweet inertia of life, a lot of which is spent drunk, in bed, on the road, hanging out with friends or all of the above.
  74. The Nun
    The franchise has proved to be a reliable if variably elegant “boo” machine; the same applies here. Specters and hallucinations appear without consistent narrative logic. Characters veer off separately when teamwork might reduce brushes with demons or death.
  75. Bisbee '17
    Even though Bisbee ’17 depicts a wholesome and harmonious community undertaking, it is a profoundly haunted and haunting film. What we are witnessing is not the commemoration of a past disaster but its reanimation. Every important thing this movie is about is still alive.
  76. Destination Wedding
    All right, then, let’s rip off the Band-Aid: Destination Wedding is torture. And not just because this would-be romantic comedy is grating, cheap-looking and a mighty drag: it also turns two seasoned, likable actors into characters you’ll want to throttle long before the credits roll.
  77. Let the Corpses Tan
    A formalist experiment that soon devolves into a mannerist indulgence.
  78. Pick of the Litter
    In short, Pick of the Litter makes for unexpectedly suspenseful (and perhaps not entirely reputable) viewing.
  79. Active Measures
    This formidable film is sometimes zealous to a fault: The credits cite more than 200 sources of archival material, from The Washington Post to YouTube channels. It’s a lot to take in, as names and numbers zip by, yet missing some of its points may be healthy. To explore every moment is to risk overdosing on outrage.
  80. A Paris Education
    Mr. Civeyrac leads Étienne into anxious imitations of the past, and the possibility of making art fueled by the present never materializes.
  81. The Little Stranger
    The twisting and cracking of the British class system is always fascinating to observe, and The Little Stranger traces the details of its chosen moment of social change with precision and subtlety, and with its own layers of somewhat dubious nostalgia.
  82. Kin
    Kin is insufferable, self-seriously combining shut-in nerdiness with wannabe macho pyrotechnics. It’s Bro Cinema in all the worst imaginable senses of the term.
  83. Reprisal
    Even those inclined to sympathize with that premise politically may feel insulted by the plot hole-a-palooza offered here to support it.
  84. Prototype
    The film is relentlessly eye- and ear-filling, sometimes to the point of irritation. It’s a puzzle of strange pleasures, a nerve-racking way of recalibrating how to look at the screen and the world outside the screen. Go if you’re feeling super adventurous.
  85. Inventing Tomorrow
    By framing the movie as a multipronged narrative that eventually culminates in the big event of the fair itself, it risks prosaicness. But the subjects are winning and heartening, and their mission is one you just can’t take issue with.
  86. Operation Finale
    It’s a story very worth telling, told pretty well, with self-evident virtues and obvious limitations. Viewers who see it out of a sense of duty will find some pleasure in the bargain. Call it the banality of good.
  87. The After Party
    The movie is relentlessly fluffy.
  88. Support the Girls
    Mr. Bujalski, who wrote as well as directed, doesn’t lean on shocks and big moments to spark tension or spur the narrative. A fine-grain realist, he creates modest, layered worlds and identifiably true characters, filling them in with details borrowed from life rather than the multiplex.
  89. Makala
    To ponder the colonial implications of a French director exoticizing a Congolese man whose family eats rats for meals is to realize that a movie can be heartwarming and heartless at once.
  90. Arizona
    As the movie wears on, one suspects that the writer Luke Del Tredici and the director Jonathan Watson aren’t crafting an indictment of toxic masculinity, but an invitation to take some sadistic enjoyment in it, without consequences.
  91. The Bookshop
    Wistful but never sentimental, it quietly turns the fortunes of one little store into a comment on the fate of many.
  92. An L.A. Minute
    That such a woebegone project attracted such a largely first-rate cast is peculiar but not inexplicable; sometimes the urge to bite the hand that feeds you overwhelms your quality control filter.
  93. Blue Iguana
    In absence of either good humor or good set pieces, Blue Iguana is a heist gone bust.
  94. Searching
    The combination of clever concept reflecting the prevalence of screens in everyday life, and the pleasure of watching a typically underused Mr. Cho take on a meaty lead role make Searching a satisfying psychological thriller.
  95. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
    Mr. Newell directs with sensitivity and the occasional invention; the movie has an almost tactile appreciation of period detail, as when Juliet sets to writing, the camera lingers on her onionskin typing paper. The cast is impeccable.
  96. Extinction
    There are a lot of dark corridors, and the characters do quite a bit of ducking and crouching. Mr. Young handles it reasonably well, but I was struck by an unavoidable truth: These scenes of suspense and scare excel on a large screen, in a reasonably crowded theater.
  97. What Keeps You Alive
    True horror fans will forgive its shortcomings since they serve the greater good of gorgeous gore and stunningly staged scenes.
  98. Hot to Trot
    While the movie makes a winning case for the passion of its subjects, it bears hints of smoothed-over complexities.
  99. Maison du Bonheur
    Ms. Bohdanowicz’s self-interrogation is clearly important to her art, but I think she worries too much, at least where this subject is concerned. Her hostess, a model of charm, good humor and senior wisdom, is a movie unto herself.
  100. Papillon
    Mr. Hunnam isn’t yet a movie star, and given current industry trends (big-studio cartoons, superhero flicks, etc.) might never get that chance. His talent is for quiet, unshowy moments, not leading-man grand gestures and important speeches.
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