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. Crime + Punishment
    Crime+Punishment advances a thorough critique of American law enforcement not by generalizing or speechifying, but by digging into particular lives and circumstances, allowing affected individuals to speak for themselves.
  2. The Happytime Murders
    What holds this patchwork of naughtiness together is some pretty threadbare cloth.
  3. The Rest I Make Up
    Try as it might, sadness still can’t get the best of The Rest I Make Up, a lyrical and lovingly made documentary about the playwright María Irene Fornés, which recalls her career and follows her over several bittersweet years as Alzheimer’s steals her memories.
  4. John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection
    Mr. Faraut’s impressionistic conflation of humor, wonder, horror and sympathy whisks this movie to the deluxe suite of the pleasure palace.
  5. Minding the Gap
    Minding the Gap is more than a celebration of skateboarding as a sport and a subculture. With infinite sensitivity, Mr. Liu delves into some of the most painful and intimate details of his friends’ lives and his own, and then layers his observations into a rich, devastating essay on race, class and manhood in 21st-century America.
  6. Mile 22
    A testosterone cocktail of reactionary sound bites and incoherent action that even Michael Bay might have rejected as too amped, Peter Berg’s Mile 22 makes for an appalling referendum on the state of commercial cinema in 2018
  7. A Whale of a Tale
    A Whale of a Tale is a rambling blend of complaint, tourism and straw-men arguments. What it’s not is persuasive.
  8. Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich
    While you don’t require familiarity with the dozen or so earlier titles to enjoy this one, you do require a sense of humor that’s easily triggered and a gag reflex that isn’t.
  9. We the Animals
    Fragile yet resilient, We the Animals has an elemental quality that’s hugely endearing, using air and water and the deep, damp earth to fashion a dreamworld where big changes occur in small, sometimes symbolic ways.
  10. Memoir of War
    Ms. Thierry plays Marguerite with an understatement that can be enigmatic, seductive, or deliberately confounding. The picture as a whole doesn’t do justice to her committed performance.
  11. Do You Trust this Computer?
    Though the film is heavier on summaries than specifics, its messages are troubling nonetheless.
  12. Notes on an Appearance
    If Mr. D’Ambrose doesn’t quite earn his pretensions, it’s refreshing to see a filmmaker thinking so far outside the box.
  13. Down a Dark Hall
    With each new element, Down a Dark Hall reveals itself, with improbable delight, to be genuinely strange — a movie in which viewers can pick their own pleasure, no two spectators having exactly the same experience.
  14. The Wife
    The Wife pulls off the not inconsiderable feat of spinning a fundamentally literary premise into an intelligent screen drama that unfolds with real juice and suspense.
  15. Alpha
    Mr. Hughes, who for many years cocreated films with his twin brother, Allen, and here makes his solo feature debut, is a sharp and engaged visual storyteller. It’s a pleasure to see him working in expansive wide-screen, a fitting format for his chops.
  16. Juliet, Naked
    Mr. Peretz and the screenwriters (Evgenia Peretz, the director’s sister, is credited along with Tamara Jenkins and Jim Taylor) find an amiable farcical groove, and the actors embrace the ridiculousness of the circumstances without overdoing it.
  17. Cielo
    Ms. McAlpine’s purple musings in voice-over (“the stars tell me to go on a journey in this desert”), and the decision not to identify subjects formally until the closing credits, give the film an unnecessary fuzziness.
  18. Crazy Rich Asians
    Without betraying any overt nostalgia, Crazy Rich Asians casts a fond eye backward as well as Eastward, conjuring a world defined by hierarchies and prescribed roles in a way that evokes classic novels and films.
  19. How It Ends
    it’s a surprisingly O.K. addition to the genre.
  20. The Swan
    Director Asa Helga Hjorleifsdottir never displays the passion that her characters suggest in their stories. If her film ever diverged from its ubiquitous images of misty mountains or its plodding piano score, perhaps its characters’ incessant mythmaking would convey deeper mysteries, inner worlds that are not visible to the eye.
  21. Slender Man
    The most perfunctory horror picture I’ve seen in some time.
  22. Madeline's Madeline
    if Madeline’s Madeline is sometimes unconvincing and frequently unnerving, it is never uninteresting. In its final moments it ascends into heady, almost visionary territory, like a balloon caught in a sudden updraft, and becomes a singular and strange experience.
  23. BlacKkKlansman
    BlacKkKlansman is a furious, funny, blunt and brilliant confrontation with the truth. It’s an alarm clock ringing in the midst of a historical nightmare, and also a symphony, the rare piece of political popular art that works in all three dimensions.
  24. Elizabeth Harvest
    Mr. Gutierrez keeps the viewer in the same state of confusion as Elizabeth, but each surprise, paradoxically, makes the movie less and less surprising as a whole.
  25. Skate Kitchen
    The movie’s disinclination to judge doesn’t deprive it of a point of view. Skate Kitchen is unfailingly compassionate to, and genuinely appreciative of, the people it chronicles.
  26. Dog Days
    On the whole, this picture, which could just as well be titled “Dog, Actually,” is sweeter-than-average treacle.
  27. BuyBust
    Wrapping a political-corruption yarn in a blanket of bullets and blood, the Filipino director and co-writer, Erik Matti, slides visual and textual jokes into the mayhem in ways both sly and blatant.
  28. A Prayer Before Dawn
    Mr. Sauvaire’s approach may not be for everyone, but his skill and audacity are invigorating — and, strangely, liberating.
  29. The Meg
    Unlike “Sharknado,” The Meg doesn’t seem to know how dumb it is.
  30. The Week Of
    While the movie is ultimately more of the same old same old, it is at least not as appallingly sexist and culturally insensitive as “The Ridiculous Six,” Mr. Sandler’s dreaded 2015 Netflix Original western “spoof.”
  31. Father of the Year
    I admit, I laughed. I was also charmed by Bridgit Mendler as Meredith, Ben’s feisty hometown love interest.
  32. Like Father
    Directed by Lauren Miller Rogen, it’s a predictable comedy of reconciliation. But it boasts substantial pleasures, largely on account of the performers.
  33. Christopher Robin
    The contemporary in-jokes are kept to a minimum (O.K., Tigger says “let’s bounce”), and the movie as a whole feels pleasingly old-fashioned.
  34. Milla
    Milla is a major achievement, a film that is at once as delicate as it is strong, a fitting testament to motherhood, to survival.
  35. Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood
    Mr. Tyrnauer surreptitiously hoses away the layers of dirt to reveal the fragility of his subject’s anything-goes hedonism.
  36. King Cohen: The Wild World of Filmmaker Larry Cohen
    Directed by Steve Mitchell, it’s as conventional as Mr. Cohen’s movies are not. Which is O.K. While the filmmaker himself is more interested in telling colorful anecdotes than dredging up the portions of his psyche that inspire him, the anecdotes are colorful indeed.
  37. Never Goin' Back
    By rights, Never Goin’ Back should be a chore to sit through. The jokes are dated, the behavior tasteless and the setups tired. Yet the movie has a ramshackle charm that’s due entirely to its vivacious leads, whose mutual devotion and easy, unlabeled sexuality feels endearingly innocent.
  38. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
    Satire and outrage are easier approaches than the tact and empathy Ms. Akhavan deploys. The Miseducation of Cameron Post, confident in its beliefs and curious about what makes its characters tick, is more interested in listening than in preaching.
  39. Night Comes On
    The actress Jordana Spiro directed Night Comes On and wrote the script with Angelica Nwandu, a spoken-word poet and creator of the incisive gossip website The Shade Room. Ms. Nwandu is also a former client of the foster care system. The result of their partnership is a film that balances penetrating clarity with compassion.
  40. Cocote
    This is a straightforward story that Mr. de Los Santos Arias, making his fictional feature debut, tells in an ever-changing style, shooting in color and black and white. He also alternates the shape of the frame, mostly toggling between a boxy frame and the wider one most mainstream movies are shown in. Whatever effect was hoped for, this viewer just saw affectation.
  41. Gavagai
    This is a high-minded and carefully composed film about, among other things, the inability of words in any language to satisfactorily communicate states of being. There are pleasures and intellectual provocations to be had here. But its attempted effects fall flat a little too often.
  42. The Darkest Minds
    The director, Jennifer Yuh Nelson (“Kung Fu Panda 2,” “Kung Fu Panda 3”), keeps the pace fast and the exposition flowing; the movie is almost comfortingly watchable. In her first live-action feature, she shows a flair for natural light and doesn’t lean too heavily on effects.
  43. The Spy Who Dumped Me
    Ms. McKinnon is too inventive to make the character a standard, zany rom-com sidekick. There is no real precedent for her highly disciplined comic anarchy, but Ms. McKinnon reminds me a little of Peter Sellers in her command of voice, face and body and her ability to turn every scene into a popcorn popper of verbal and physical surprise.
  44. Nico, 1988
    Ms. Dyrholm, photographed frequently in brutally unforgiving close-up, fully captures the faded charisma of the woman whose life reads like a Who’s Who of the New York midcentury art scene.
  45. No Date, No Signature
    A tad overdetermined in its studied, snowballing ambiguities, No Date, No Signature is dramatized with an acute sense of the role of class in Iranian society, and is unfussily well directed, creating visual parallels between the two men.
  46. King of Peking
    It’s a charming, breezy father-son story but also a diverting account of Chinese film and video culture in the 1990s.
  47. The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter
    One wonders why “Whitetail Deer Hunter” chose such a relatively toothless route, but one doesn’t wonder too long, as it’s the kind of movie you forget about 20 minutes after seeing it.
  48. Killer Bees
    The movie is ultimately less about the players or even the engrossingly shot games than the idea of basketball as a tradition, one that imbues lives with meaning and bonds a community.
  49. Damascus Cover
    As one Syrian character tells another, “Timing is everything in this business,” and timing is only one flawed aspect of this uneven movie.
  50. Good Manners
    Swerving from predictable to confounding, dreamy to demented, artful to awkward, this genre-twisting hybrid from Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra links art house and slaughterhouse with unexpected success.
  51. Our House
    While Mr. Burns hasn’t fully digested his influences, he has learned from them. Our House distinguishes itself with its purposeful pacing — the first real jump scare arrives more than a third of the way through — its use of sound and crosscutting, and its wit with household objects, from a turntable to a mechanical calendar.
  52. The Bleeding Edge
    The surgery scenes in The Bleeding Edge are squirm-in-your-seat uncomfortable. But it’s the interviews — watching patients recount agonies they’ve suffered from poorly researched and regulated medical devices — that are hardest to sit through.
  53. Scarred Hearts
    It’s the rare page-to-screen adaptation in which the camera becomes an essential character. The action often unfolds in long shot, with crowded compositions in which the principals are obscured by door frames. Over time, the withholding of conventional editing patterns and the sensitization to subtle changes in camera placement become an analogue for Emanuel’s entrapment.
  54. The Captain
    The Captain, Robert Schwentke’s harrowing World War II psychodrama, isn’t what you would call enjoyable, exactly. More accurately, it compels our attention with a remorseless, gripping single-mindedness, presenting Naziism as a communicable disease that smothers conscience, paralyzes resistance and extinguishes all shreds of humanity.
  55. Puzzle
    Like a bedtime cup of cocoa, Marc Turtletaub’s Puzzle has a soothing familiarity that quiets the mind and settles the spirit.
  56. Hot Summer Nights
    Perhaps this picture’s higher function is to be a calling card. But I don’t know what a calling-card project that demonstrates that its maker can semi-successfully mimic artistically vital but uncommercial directors is supposed to prove. For me, it mostly proved a waste of time.
  57. Teen Titans Go! To the Movies
    It’s an amusing tale for young audiences, ending with the expected messages about friendship and courage. But there are delights for adults as well, particularly in the first half, with sendups of various comic book series (some aimed at DC’s own arch-nemesis, Marvel) and an extra-large supply of spoofs on other movies.
  58. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    There’s a whole lot of everything in the Mission: Impossible — Fallout, an entertainment machine par excellence that skitters around the world and has something to do with nuclear bombs, mysterious threats and dangerous beauties. Mostly, it has to do with that hyper-human Tom Cruise, who runs, drives, dives, shoots, flies, falls and repeatedly teeters on the edge of disaster, clinging to one after another cliffhanger.
  59. 93Queen
    Without denying that these women face discrimination in reaching their goal, the movie shows how its subjects are able to find ways to combine strict observance and progress.
  60. Calibre
    The character dynamics are recognizable in the way they hew to genre conventions. But the details provided in the writing, and by the two leads’ performances, add distinctive details and dimension here. This makes the film’s harrowing action all the more believable.
  61. The Equalizer 2
    Mr. Washington is especially strong when he trusts his director, as he did with Tony Scott and does with Mr. Fuqua. Like all great actors, Mr. Washington commits to the performance, but every so often he also breathes fire, imbuing a scene with such shocking ferocity and bone-deep moral certitude that everything else falls blissfully away.
  62. The Third Murder
    The movie opens with the defendant bashing in the victim’s head and then burning the corpse. A trial seems almost beside the point, a view that the writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda goes on to dismantle with lapidary precision.
  63. Generation Wealth
    Darting from micro to macro and back again, squashing obscene consumption against child beauty pageants and ruinous debt, its structure makes for an unfocused thesis. The through line, though, works, as Ms. Greenfield repeatedly turns her camera on her own family and career choices.
  64. Far from the Tree
    At an hour and a half, the often-inspiring documentary Far From the Tree plays like a companion piece to or a preview for Andrew Solomon’s best-selling 2012 book, which, with notes, runs more than 1,000 pages.
  65. McQueen
    The filmmakers’ emphasis on drama honors the driven personality of their subject, while tracing a fairly conventional glad-rags-to-riches narrative arc.
  66. Pin Cushion
    While Pin Cushion might prove too distressing for some, it’s still peculiarly, undeniably original.
  67. Unfriended: Dark Web
    What’s striking in this movie, apart from an ostentatiously glitchy screen distortion that occurs whenever a denizen of the “dark web” appears on one of the screens within screens, is how credibly its extreme trolling plays.
  68. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
    Ms. Streep’s near total absence leaves a hole Cher is expected to fill. It’s too little, way too late, of course, and because it’s Cher, it’s also too much.
  69. Blindspotting
    This movie, which was written by Mr. Diggs and Mr. Casal, has an energetic-to-the-point-of-boisterous style. Its lively frequency is embedded in the writing, bolstered by Carlos López Estrada’s direction, and kept buoyant by the performers. This particular aspect of the film makes it exciting to watch, but can also be confounding.
  70. Zoe
    In Zoe, the characters, all in their 30s at least (except for the robots, I know, but bear with me), still believe that 100-percent glitch-free everlasting love is a reasonable life goal. It’s this component, even more than the poorly realized sci-fi trappings, that finally make the movie a little insufferable.
  71. To Each, Her Own
    The movie insists on a breezy optimism that skirts glibness, then doubles down on it with a having-it-all finale that’s as ridiculous as it is nervy.
  72. Sunday's Illness
    The often-tense mother-daughter dance of recrimination and forgiveness is spectacularly acted.
  73. 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.
  74. Milford Graves Full Mantis
    You can get a lot of facts about Mr. Graves and his discography on the internet (and I recommend you do). This movie gives you, well, the man’s heart, and it’s a beautiful one.
  75. The Other Side of Everything
    Engrossing despite its daunting scope and tangled politics, The Other Side of Everything offers an uncommon opportunity to view the shifting borders and identities of an entire region through the eyes of the Eastern European intellectuals caught in the turmoil.
  76. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
    Self-pitying or smug, jaunty or crestfallen, callous or contrite, the movie’s fitful tone is fully yoked to Joaquin Phoenix’s sodden-to-sober lead performance.
  77. The Devil's Doorway
    This smart but uneven horror movie has little interest in fun.
  78. Path of Blood
    Watching Path of Blood is frequently a queasy experience, and given the bewildering array of names and complications, not always an illuminating one. But it commands attention as an object lesson in the banality of evil.
  79. The Night Eats the World
    The makeup design and chase scenes are rote, and the little dramatic conflict — arguments over where to hide — traffic in the oldest clichés in the genre.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Siberia
    [A] leaden thriller.
  81. Shock and Awe
    At a time when the current president routinely dismisses the accuracy of reporting, Shock and Awe feels more timely than it might have. It also captures an aspect of journalism not often portrayed: the fear of being wrong when the conclusions of your reporting break from those of your competitors.
  82. What Will People Say
    In a resolute acknowledgment of the oppression that too many young women face at home, the film portrays the family structure as the enforcing unit of feminine docility. Here, love is another form of bondage.
  83. Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation
    The scenes of Dracula befuddled by a mobile phone were familiar; those in which the vampire’s garlic “intolerance” preludes a flatulence joke predictable. Returning a third time as director, Genndy Tartakovsky lends his usual graphic savvy, providing a not-quite-saving grace.
  84. Eighth Grade
    Eighth Grade is a simple story of an unremarkable girl, tenderly and movingly told.
  85. Skyscraper
    There are intermittent pleasures, including Ms. Campbell, who seems ready to transition to a new career phase playing hard-hitting maternal types with Mona Lisa smiles. Mostly, though, Skyscraper is about the movie’s other, far more towering figure: Mr. Johnson, a performer whose colossal physicality is strikingly complemented by a delicate expressivity too rarely seen in contemporary blockbusters.
  86. Gauguin: Voyage to Tahiti
    Content to be yet another great-man biopic, the movie would rather sanitize than probe.
  87. Constructing Albert
    Sibling rivalry is a consistent subtext but only that — Mr. Adrià’s main concern is to create. As it happens, in this generally likable film he is at his most endearing when fixing himself a simple (but indeed delicious looking) grilled ham and cheese sandwich.
  88. Moss
    With its gently twanging score, Moss is a film made in a minor key and its pleasures are minor, too. It passes like a lazy afternoon spent gently high. There’s not much this movie wants to accomplish, but it maintains a mood that sets the mind at ease.
  89. The Citizen
    The film, directed by Roland Vranik from a script by Mr. Vranik and Ivan Szabo, is a careful, compassionate and beautifully acted character drama with a social conscience.
  90. Whitney
    Whitney is too funereal to be a party, too sad, strange and dismaying to cheer. Yet, in its grim, guilt-inducing way, the film works, even on the occasions when it’s working against itself.
  91. Bleeding Steel
    This consistently ridiculous movie, written and directed by Leo Zhang, does offer Jackie Chan mixing it up at a magician’s rehearsal (he pulls a rabbit from a hat) and Jackie Chan kickboxing at the top of the Sydney Opera House.
  92. Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda
    The creative process is notoriously difficult to capture on camera, but by the end of this documentary, you will feel as if you not only understand Mr. Sakamoto intellectually, but also share a sense of the excitement he feels when discovering just the right match of sounds.
  93. A Skin So Soft
    Their narcissism is repellent yet riveting, and Mr. Côté comes at his subjects with an artful, exploratory obliqueness that’s endearingly curious, as if discovering a whole new species.
  94. Under the Tree
    Maintaining an unrelentingly gleeful grip on the film’s tone, Mr. Sigurdsson skillfully whips absurdist comedy and chilling tragedy into a froth of surging hostilities.
  95. Ant-Man and the Wasp
    It’s funny how little things, like personality, can lift a movie. Ant-Man and the Wasp features kinetic action sequences, but what makes it zing is that Mr. Reed has figured out how to sustain the movie’s intimacy and its playfulness, even when bodies and cars go flying.
  96. Fireworks
    The unrealized potential makes the rote line style and stagnant backdrops seem all the blander.
  97. The First Purge
    Even the most ardent fan could find its bluntness uncomfortably timely: In our build-that-wall moment, a story about a government-sponsored plan to cull poor minorities feels less like political satire than current-affairs commentary.
  98. Sorry to Bother You
    Mr. Riley isn’t constructing yet another postmodern playhouse out of borrowings and allusions. He’s building a raft, and steering it straight into the foaming rapids of racism, economic injustice and cultural conflict.
  99. Recovery Boys
    Watching the men as they work, attend 12-step meetings and struggle to repair frayed familial bonds, she unearths moments of raw revelation that quietly highlight our shameful lack of effective help.
  100. Dark River
    Gorgeously photographed by the Brazilian cinematographer Adriano Goldman, Dark River is a raw ballad of doom and damage.
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