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. First Position
    An appealing, largely upbeat documentary about young ballet dancers duking it out.
  2. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
    After a decade in development, the project that made it to the screen is a noisy, pixelated smash-and-zap that does manage to capture the spirit of play.
  3. Pusher
    Mr. Refn may yet have justification for boasting about his natural talent. There is one magnificent scene in Pusher... Maybe Mr. Refn's next film will take us into that emotional territory.
  4. The Final Master
    The characters and the actors playing them are appealing, and the fight scenes have a lot of moxie, not to mention a lot of steel-slinging.
  5. Gimme Danger
    Gimme Danger is still plenty entertaining and includes many moments of foaming-at-the-mouth musical fury.
  6. Sirens
    The ending, in which the reunited Sirens play before an enthusiastic crowd, is heart-tugging and rousing, even for non-metal heads.
  7. Arco
    Like a cross between a Studio Ghibli joint and “Interstellar,” Arco, by the French comic-book artist turned filmmaker Ugo Bienvenu, strikes a lovely balance between fantastical kid-friendly wholesomeness and real-world bleakness.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Life of Reilly
    Built around “Save It for the Stage,” a one-man stage show by Charles Nelson Reilly, a showbiz gadfly and Tony Award-winning theater director.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Wolf Man
    The wolf man is left without a paw to stand on; without any build-up either by the scriptwriter or director, he is sent onstage, where he, looks a lot less terrifying and not nearly as funny as Mr. Disney's big, bad wolf.
  10. Fantastic Voyage
    All I can tell you is it is quite a trip. Fortunately, all of the voyaging is done in the northern hemisphere.
  11. LifeHack
    By putting us inside the internet, Corrigan makes their insular world feel uncomfortably close to ours.
  12. I Served the King of England
    The performance of Mr. Barnev, who has the poker face and agility of a silent clown, defines the style of a film whose timing and physical comedy look back to 1920s slapstick.
  13. The Meaning of Life
    Monty Python's the Meaning of Life is funny but, being unreasonable, I wish it were funny from start to finish.
  14. Gangs of New York
    This is historical filmmaking without the balm of right-thinking ideology, either liberal or conservative. Gangs of New York is nearly a great movie. I suspect that, over time, it will make up the distance.
  15. Felicia's Journey
    Visually, and in its soundtrack of overlapping voices, the film sustains a mood of heightened consciousness.
  16. The Rookie
    Scene by scene, The Rookie does a better job of capturing the rhythms and rituals of the playing field and the electricity that flows between a team and its fans than well-regarded baseball films like "Field of Dreams" and "The Natural."
  17. Nowhere in Africa
    Despite a shaky narrative focus and dramatic reticence, its journey is consistently absorbing.
  18. The Vertical Ray of the Sun
    An oblique, vaguely sorrowful study in domestic emotion, structured around the small eruptions of feeling -- tenderness, anger, and joy -- that punctuate the slow serenity of daily life.
  19. A Beautiful Mind
    The movie can -- indeed, should -- be intellectually rejected, but you can't quite banish it from your mind.
  20. Slow West
    The glorious cinematography, by Robbie Ryan, sharply illustrates the disparity between the rugged majesty of the landscape and the savagery of its outlaws and adventurers, who resemble vermin scuttling through the underbrush of a perilous no man’s land.
  21. Barry
    The movie’s lived-in realism puts Barry on the ground, rather than in the air, where he experiences the usual coming-of-age agonies and joys.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Mister Roberts
    It is loaded to the gunwales with screamingly funny scenes which, in several instances, are visual improvements on the play.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Let It Be
    The very helter‐skelter, unstudied nature of the picture provides a revealing close‐up of the world's most famous quartet, playing, relaxing and chatting.
  24. A Compassionate Spy
    The general impression given by this warm, low-key film is that the spying was a simple act of pacifism. Countervailing voices are faint and few; anyone seeking more vigorous pushback will have to look elsewhere.
  25. Post Mortem
    The sweep and energy of historical drama are notably missing from this grim, intense, mordantly comic little film.
  26. The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years
    The way to watch is to ignore the image burnishing and just feel the moment.
  27. Your Sister's Sister
    The film's late swerves into melodrama and the neighboring region of farce feel panicky and pandering. The subtlety of the performances - Ms. DeWitt's in particular - is sacrificed for easy laughs, shallow tears and a coy trick ending. Just when it was starting to get interesting.
  28. Midsommar
    Despite all the time he lavishes on Dani and Christian’s relationship, which is drawn along stereotypical gendered lines (consuming female need that becomes devouring), the couple remains instructively uninteresting. That’s the case despite Pugh.
  29. Un Flic (re-release)
    The forcefulness and mystery of Mr. Melville's direction often generate an urgency that keeps the film from feeling vague. [30 Nov. 1979]
  30. He Never Died
    The humor in Mr. Krawczyk’s script is deliciously subtle, as it has to be when your lead character is a man of few words; a viewer might easily spend the first half of the movie not even realizing it’s there.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Imitation of Life
    A gripping and powerful if slightly diffuse drama which discussed the mother love question, the race question, the business woman question, the mother and daughter question and the love renunciation question.
  32. The Crow
    It is a dark, lurid revenge fantasy and not the breakthrough, star-making movie some people have claimed. But it is a genre film of a high order, stylish and smooth.
  33. The Stepfather
    The Stepfather is too often disappointingly thin.
  34. Groundhog Day
    That glimmer of recognition is what makes Groundhog Day a particularly witty and resonant comedy, even when its jokes are more apt to prompt gentle giggles than rolling in the aisles.
  35. It's All So Quiet
    Ms. Leopold’s previous film, “Brownian Movement,” was a stringent, even off-putting study of a delicate-looking doctor who has secret trysts with various men, and her latest feature feels gentler, shot digitally and suffused with the gray shadows of old houses and dim twilights. But it’s just as concerned with the immediacy of desire.
  36. Grand Prix
    It's razzle-dazzle of a random sort, but it works.The big trouble with this picture is that the characters and their romantic problems are stereotypes and clichés.
  37. Koyaanisqatsi
    Koyaanisqatsi is an oddball and - if one is willing to put up with a certain amount of solemn picturesqueness - entertaining trip.
  38. The Dark and the Wicked
    Pitiless in its intent, and hopeless in its sense of sorrowful dereliction, The Dark and the Wicked fully earns its horrifically distressing final scenes.
  39. The Woodsman
    What is more remarkable is that he (Bacon)has found a way, without the slightest hint of vanity or ostentation, to convey the inner life of a man who is almost entirely shut down.
  40. Society of the Snow
    The material is fundamentally gripping, and parts of it are tough to resist . . . But Society of the Snow is a perverse movie to watch the way most people will see it — on Netflix, in the comfort of their homes, with a refrigerator nearby.
  41. Summertime
    This is a film about the struggle for sexual freedom and women’s rights, and also about the power of region, class and custom in the lives of its characters.
  42. Die My Love
    Submerged in Grace’s overheated, claustrophobic, tedious, maddening reality, we are drowning, just like her. It is full-body immersion cinema.
  43. Is This Thing On?
    If “Is This Thing On?” is sometimes too careful for its own good, it is also deeply trusting of its leads, whose faces, under the scrutiny of Matthew Libatique’s merciless close-ups, reveal the hurt the couple is unable to verbalize.
  44. Shame
    How can visual pleasure communicate existential misery? It is a real and interesting challenge, and if Shame falls short of meeting it, the seriousness of its effort is hard to deny.
  45. Bull
    The film’s rejiggered timeline is a little hard to follow, but the climax swings for the fences and shows an unashamed verve for tale-telling that warms the cockles.
  46. Akeelah and the Bee
    The innate suspense and charm of the spelling bee, along with a trio of crack performances, turn what is in essence a formulaic sports picture into something more satisfying: an underdog tale that manages to inspire without being sappy.
  47. Crazy Horse
    Mr. Wiseman's particular genius has always been to convey, through judicious editing and dogged filming, the tedium, busyness and quiet intensity of group labor.
  48. Brick
    It's all so seamy, sordid, lurid and shocking! And dull, despite a noirish gloss of wide-angle cinematography and a jaundiced, smoggy color scheme.
  49. Doctor Strange
    The space-and-time warping and mirrored realities in Doctor Strange are a blast. They’re inventive enough that they awaken wonder, provoking that delicious question: How did they do that?
  50. Death and the Maiden
    Mr. Polanski's brilliance with the camera turns Ariel Dorfman's well-meaning but pretentious play about human rights into a harrowing experience.
  51. Watcher
    One of this century’s most arresting tales of female anxiety.
  52. The Suicide Squad
    The violence is the most consistently inventive part of the whole package, though it grows tiresome in its thudding repetition. Like the story’s superficial finger-wagging at American wrongs, the brutality is both decorative and ritualistic.
  53. Ghost Town
    A misanthropic dentist, a roguish ghost and a zany Egyptologist: as these unlikely companions scamper around Manhattan in the buoyant comedy Ghost Town, they resurrect the spirits of classic movie curmudgeons like W. C. Fields and such romantic comedians as Cary Grant and Carole Lombard in Woody Allen territory.
  54. The Lottery
    Ignoring critical issues like financial transparency, Ms. Sackler sells her viewpoint with four admirable, striving families, each of whose tots could charm the fleas off a junkyard dog.
  55. Agrarian Utopia
    The mood is not one of misery, but of quiet, weary endurance punctuated with moments of joy.
  56. The Heart Machine
    This New York drama in some ways finds new names for age-old insecurities among men and women, though it doesn’t entirely deliver on its promising buildup.
  57. Eagles of Death Metal: Nos Amis (Our Friends)
    The vivid recollections of the attack by survivors, including Mr. Hughes, take over the film midway through, and the friendship story line never quite re-establishes itself.
  58. Pressure Cooker
    Pressure Cooker belongs to the honorable if overpopulated genre of inspirational films (both documentaries and features) dedicated to the proposition that one committed, passionate teacher can make all the difference in the lives of disadvantaged students.
  59. Fantasy Life
    For a movie about two people going through a wobbly patch, Fantasy Life glides with a sneaky storytelling ease.
  60. The Day After
    The Day After, one of three films this prolific director brought to festivals in 2017 (another one screened in Berlin in February), is an especially elegant presentation of some of his [Mr. Hong’s] characteristic concerns.
  61. Escapes
    Mr. Fancher’s movie love and way of spinning a yarn to its near-breaking point — one detour opens onto another — dovetail nicely with the cinephilia and playfulness that characterize Mr. Almereyda’s movies.
  62. Tiny Furniture
    Tiny Furniture is at times more pleasurable to think about than it is to watch, more of a conceptual coup than an enjoyable experience.
  63. Bringing Out the Dead
    An intense, volatile film full of sorrow and wild, mordant humor.
  64. The Sheep Detectives
    Not only is The Sheep Detectives delightful, but it’s funny and emotionally complex and, dare I say, unusually deferential toward the noble sheep, frequently cast as brain-dead losers in cinema’s barnyards (Shaun notwithstanding).
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Air Guitar Nation
    The movie's wild performances and droll humor are tough to resist.
  66. The Closet
    Veber's giddy social comedy The Closet finds more delicious, chortling fun in the spectacle of obsequious hypocrisy than any movie I've seen in ages.
  67. Journey to the Sun
    An incisive drama about a waking nightmare.
  68. Mostly Martha
    Extremely enjoyable, though a few degrees shy of perfection.
  69. Walk the Line
    There is no way a feature-length movie could do justice to such bounty, and Walk the Line settles for the minimum.
  70. Six Degrees of Separation
    Mr. Schepisi's directorial vigor wins out over his film's skittishness. This version may horrify purists, but it winds up working entertainingly on its own broader, flashier terms.
  71. When Marnie Was There
    The conclusion is rushed and poorly staged, yet the damp caul of loneliness that envelops the film’s early scenes feels moving and true.
  72. Pusher III: I'm the Angel of Death
    The atmosphere is so thick, the talk so assured, the performances so disciplined and the fear so fearsome, that Mr. Refn’s final iteration of his pattern achieves the hard, bright light of an archetype from hell.
  73. Control
    A tour de force of grime, fluorescence and destinationless velocity, is more concerned with atmosphere than meaning.
  74. Terri
    What lifts Terri above its peers is not the plight of its protagonist or the film's sympathy for him, but rather the care and craft that the director, Azazel Jacobs, has brought to fairly conventional material.
  75. Dormant Beauty
    If Dormant Beauty does not rank among Mr. Bellocchio’s best movies, it nonetheless still occasionally shows him at his best. His eye for the latent beauty and evident absurdity of Italian life remains acute, as does his appreciation for vivid performance.
  76. The Storms of Jeremy Thomas
    The whole effort comes across more as an advertisement for Thomas’s genius — and Cousins’s obsession with him — than a true portrait of a discerning producer of outsider cinema.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Obit
    It is modest, observant, graceful and nonchalantly witty.
  78. Amer
    What does it all mean? Less than meets the eye. Amer is a voluptuous wallow in recycled psychosexual kitsch.
  79. Daylight
    Not one for climactic endings or predictable histrionics, the director, David Barker (who wrote the script with Ms. Meierhans and Mr. Godere), sticks to the stylistic template of his debut feature, "Afraid of Everything," which was filmed in 1999. Preferring the tease over the tell, his films coax us into looking beneath the surface. What we find is mostly up to us.
  80. Rosemead
    In its march toward resolution, “Rosemead” never falters in its compassion, and asks the same of us.
  81. Nas: Time Is Illmatic
    Despite some conventional moves here and there and a weakness for the cult of genius, the documentary sustains that uneasy mood cast by Nas’s expression as a child on the “Illmatic” cover, sobered by experience and wisdom before his time.
  82. Match Point
    The gloom of random, meaningless existence has rarely been so much fun, and Mr. Allen's bite has never been so sharp, or so deep. A movie this good is no laughing matter.
  83. Still Alice
    The test of realism in a movie like this — the thing that would separate it from a conventional, made-for-television disease melodrama — is whether you can imagine lives for the secondary characters when they aren’t on screen. Still Alice lacks that kind of thickness.
  84. Late Night with the Devil
    The result is a nasty and delicious, unapologetic pastiche with a flair for menace. I had a blast.
  85. Sound of Noise
    What follows is a character study mixed with outlandish crime procedural. Everyone's quite serious about the joke, without a moment of Adam Sandler-style "look at how cute we are" that would only dilute the film's appeal. Sound of Noise is a dry treat - a solid, self-aware cult pleasure.
  86. A Space Program
    As a tribute to NASA, A Space Program is rich in the core elements that have always propelled humanity’s flights of fancy: imagination and the right tools.
  87. Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
    Ms. Didion’s triumph, as a writer and a human being, has been to take the age for what it is, to pinpoint how she saw it, and to stick it out.
  88. My Donkey, My Lover & I
    My Donkey, My Lover & I is yet another story about a woman who ventures out into the wild and finds herself. But to the writer and director Caroline Vignal’s credit, this low-key romantic French comedy proves friskier and more idiosyncratic than its reliance on this trope of feminist empowerment would suggest.
  89. Siddharth
    Its portrayal of impoverished, careworn people barking at one another and protecting their territory in a daily struggle is bracingly hardheaded.
  90. Everyone Is Lying to You for Money
    Even if you’re confused or mystified by the whole concept of cryptocurrency, the movie is a pretty solid introduction to how it works. More important, it explains why people got into it in the first place.
  91. Truly Madly Deeply
    Truly, Madly, Deeply should be enchanting, but it isn't. Everyone pushes too hard, especially Mr. Minghella, the writer and director. There are a few amusing lines and a lot of terrible ones, including Nina's overwrought response, early in the film, when her sister wants to borrow Jamie's cello: "It's like asking me to give you his body!"
  92. The Talent Given Us
    The strange and delightful Talent Given Us is a movie that shouldn't work but does rather remarkably.
  93. My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea
    An eccentric and lively animated fantasy.
  94. Manifesto
    As an oblique examination and critique of political and art history and their various interactions over the 20th century, Manifesto is both witty and provocative. It is not, however, a motion picture for people seeking a plot.
  95. Strictly Ballroom
    Baz Luhrmann's Australian film Strictly Ballroom is, in short, pure corn. But it's corn that has been overlaid with a buoyant veneer of spangles and marabou, and with a tireless sense of fun.
  96. Surfwise
    Doug Pray’s wonderfully engaging look at love and family and the relentless pursuit of happiness, personal meaning and perfect waves.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
    Ms. Jordan lets a few subjects contradict the image of Mr. Smith as martyr, but the overall tone is worshipful verging on reductive. You come away impressed by Smith's charisma, versatility and integrity, while also wondering if a man so abrasively self-important could have made such playful art.
  98. The Back of the World
    Each of these stories is terribly sad and terribly moving in its own right. Yet the film that Mr. Corcuera has spun around them only increases the viewer's sense of helplessness and passivity. No solutions are suggested, no actions are proposed, no reflection is invited. The misery of these people becomes just another voyeuristic spectacle, to be consumed and forgotten.
  99. Step Into Liquid
    Like his father, Mr. Brown has the magical ability to take his public on a two-hour vacation. It's the next best thing to being there, and you don't need to worry about sand in your beer.
  100. Mulan
    A film that not only breaks the cross-dressing barrier but also ratchets up the violence level for children's animation.
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