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. The Philadelphia Story
    Provided you have a little patience for the lavishly rich, which these folks are, you should have great fun at The Philadelphia Story. For Metro and Director George Cukor have graciously made it apparent, in the words of a character, that one of the "prettiest sights in this pretty world is the privileged classes enjoying their privileges." And so, in this instance, you will too.
  2. The Third Man
    Mr. Reed has brilliantly packaged the whole bad of his cinematic tricks, his whole range of inventive genius for making the camera expound. His eminent gifts for compressing a wealth of suggestion in single shots, for building up agonized tension and popping surprises are fully exercised. His devilishly mischievous humor also runs lightly through the film, touching the darker depressions with little glints of the gay or macabre. [3 Feb 1950, p.29]
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Shadow of a Doubt
    You've got to hand it to Alfred Hitchcock: when he sows the fearful seeds of mistrust in one of his motion pictures he can raise more goose pimples to the square inch of a customer's flesh than any other director of thrillers in Hollywood.
  6. Notorious
    One of the more remarkable things about Notorious is that it hasn't seemed to age; if anything, it grows more timely. [26 Oct 1980, p.17]
    • The New York Times
  7. Charm City
    The film captures up close the way violence transforms neighborhoods and families with an immediacy that transcends headlines or sensationalism.
  8. The King and I
    Every bit of the humor and vibrant humanity that flowed through the tender story of the English school-teacher and the quizzical king is richly preserved in the screen play that Ernest Lehman has prepared.
  9. Rope
    Rope is not merely a stunt that is justified by the extraordinary career that contains it, but one of the movies that makes that career extraordinary.
  10. In Fabric
    The film spaces out several nasty and effective frights. And as its narrative seems to deliberately devolve into a dissociative dream, even the funny material hits with a choke in the throat.
  11. Shadow
    A martial-arts movie landmark, as strong in its performances as it is spectacularly novel in its violence.
  12. What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire?
    The movie unfolds impressionistically. To call it a portrait of collective resilience is accurate, but that description shortchanges its richness on both human and historical scales.
  13. Dumbo
    The most genial, the most endearing, the most completely precious cartoon feature film ever to emerge from the magical brushes of Walt Disney's wonder-working artists!...A film you will never forget.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Victory Through Air Power
    Through a brilliantly Technicolored array of maps and diagrams, Mr. Disney and his artists have animated de Seversky's ideas with a clarity which could never be achieved simply through the spoken word...On purely cinematic terms "Victory Through Airpower" is an extraordinary accomplishment, marking it as it were a new milestone in the screen's recently accelerated march toward maturity.
  15. Pinocchio
    It still is the best thing Mr. Disney has done and therefore the best cartoon ever made.
  16. Cinderella
    Whoever engineered the sequence of the pumpkin transformation in this film—the magical change to coach and horses—deserves an approving hand. And the scene in which Cinderella blows soap bubbles—opalescent globes full of fragile reflections and rainbow colors—is one of the cleverest animations yet seen. To the fellows who dreamed up these fancies we are heartily grateful, indeed. They have sprinkled into Cinderella—along with sugar and wit—some vagrant art.
  17. Amazing Grace
    You get both the most lovely gaze a professional camera’s ever laid upon Aretha Franklin and some of the mightiest singing she’s ever laid on you. The woman practically eulogizes herself. Don’t bother with tissues. Bring a towel.
  18. Fantasia
    Fantasia is simply terrific—as terrific as anything that has ever happened on a screen.
  19. 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.
  20. Victor Victoria
    It stars Julie Andrews, Robert Preston and James Garner, each giving the performance of his and her career in a marvelous fable about mistaken identity, sexual roleplaying, love, innocence and sight gags, including one that illustrates the dangers of balancing yourself on a champagne bottle on one finger within the range of a singing voice that shatters glass.
  21. Give Me Liberty
    Give Me Liberty is a jolt of a movie, at once kinetic and controlled. It’s an anarchic deadpan comedy that evolves into a romance just around the time the story explodes. It has moments of unembellished realism as well as a fictional story line that runs through the bedlam.
  22. The Last Black Man in San Francisco
    Mostly, the movie has a cascade of images and ideas, reference points and glimpses of everyday beauty that flow and swirl and, over time, gather tremendous force.
  23. The Souvenir
    The Souvenir feels like a whispered confidence, an intimate disclosure that shouldn’t be betrayed because it isn’t really yours.
  24. American Factory
    Complex, stirring, timely and beautifully shaped.
  25. One Child Nation
    Soul-baring and furious, the documentary One Child Nation takes a powerful, unflinching look at China’s present through its past.
  26. True Confessions
    Marvelously well-acted...Quite simply it's one of the most entertaining, most intelligent and most thoroughly satisfying commercial American films in a very long time.
  27. By the Grace of God
    By the Grace of God is a rarity: An important film that’s also utterly inspired.
  28. Synonyms
    Furious, brilliant, exhausting, Synonyms is the story of a man in self-imposed exile.
  29. Varda by Agnès
    It’s a perfect introduction and a lovely valediction.
  30. Catch-22
    The most moving, the most intelligent, the most humane--oh, to hell with it!--it's the best American film I've seen this year.
  31. The Burial Of Kojo
    The Burial of Kojo is a near-virtuoso work, a feast of emotion, nuance and beauty, and a startling feature directing debut.
  32. The Chambermaid
    The film’s style is austere — there are few camera movements and no musical score — but its visual wit and emotional sensitivity lift it above the minimalist miserablism that drags down so many well-meaning films about modern workers. After you’ve seen it, the world looks different.
  33. Honeyland
    The opening minutes of Honeyland are as astonishing — as sublime and strange and full of human and natural beauty — as anything I’ve ever seen in a movie.
  34. Suburban Birds
    The spectacular feature-directing debut of Qiu Sheng.
  35. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese
    Dylan was interested in how movies stop time, but he also told Ginsberg that he wanted “to be entertained,” adding, “If I see a movie that really moves me around I’m totally astounded.” To watch Rolling Thunder Revue is to understand what he meant.
  36. The Serengeti Rules
    In mirroring the gaze of his professorial subjects, Brown rewards audiences with a film that happily weds the scientific and the cinematic.
  37. Prizzi's Honor
    From start to finish, this exhilarating adaptation of Richard Condon's phantasmagorical and witty novel -set inside the world of the Mafia - ascends, plunges and races around hairpin curves, only to shoot up again and dive over another precipice. [14 June 1985, p.C8]
    • The New York Times
  38. Bacurau
    In this sensational genre whatsit, a town finds itself fighting for its very existence. (Good thing Sônia Braga lives there.)
  39. Pain and Glory
    A great deal happens in Pain and Glory, just not ritualistically and not at top volume. Its agonies are tempered, its regrets hushed, its restraint powerful.
  40. Parasite
    Bong’s command of the medium is thrilling. He likes to move the camera, sometimes just to nudge your attention from where you think it should be, but always in concert with his restlessly inventive staging.
  41. Beanpole
    This is only the second feature from the sensationally talented Russian director Kantemir Balagov (who was born in 1991), and it’s a gut punch. It’s also a brilliantly told, deeply moving story about love — in all its manifestations, perversity and obstinacy.
  42. Shane
    Shane contains something more than beauty and the grandeur of the mountains and plains, drenched by the brilliant Western sunshine and the violent, torrential, black-browed rains. It contains a tremendous comprehension of the bitterness and passion of the feuds that existed between the new homesteaders and the cattlemen on the open range.
  43. The Apartment
    Mr. Wilder has done more than write the film. His direction is ingenious and sure, sparkled by brilliant little touches and kept to a tight, sardonic line.
  44. Stagecoach
    Here, in a sentence, is a movie of the grand old school, a genuine rib-thumper and a beautiful sight to see.
  45. Anatomy of a Murder
    It is the best courtroom melodrama this old judge has ever seen.
  46. The Band Wagon
    Joined with the equally nimble talents of Fred Astaire. Jack Buchanan and Cyd Charisse and some tunes from the sterling repertory of Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, this literate and witty combination herein delivers a show that respectfully bids for recognition as one of the best musical films ever made.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Bang the Drum Slowly
    A simply marvelous cinematic experience.
  48. The Personal History of David Copperfield
    Restructuring some story arcs and jettisoning others, Iannucci and his collaborator, Simon Blackwell, have created a souped-up, trimmed-down adaptation so fleet and entertaining that its cleverness doesn’t immediately register.
  49. Marriage Story
    It’s funny and sad, sometimes within a single scene, and it weaves a plot out of the messy collapse of a shared reality, trying to make music out of disharmony. The melody is full of heartbreak, loss and regret, but the song is too beautiful to be entirely melancholy.
  50. About Endlessness
    Each shot is a kind of sight gag, a visual and philosophical joke with absurdity in the setup and sorrow in the punchline. But this time, more of the jokes are one-liners, in which the premise and the payoff are one and the same.
  51. The Long Goodbye
    It's great fun and it's funny, but it's a serious, unique work.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Mutiny on the Bounty
    The weird and wonderful history of H. M. S. Bounty is magnificently transferred to the screen in Mutiny on the Bounty, which opened at the Capitol Theatre yesterday. Grim, brutal, sturdily romantic, made out of horror and desperate courage, it is as savagely exciting and rousingly dramatic a photoplay as has come out of Hollywood in recent years.
  53. Frenzy
    Watching Frenzy is like riding a roller coaster in total darkness. You can never be quite sure when you're going to start a terrifying new descent or take a sudden turn to the left or right. The agony is exquisite.
  54. First Cow
    First Cow is fundamentally a western: It takes up questions of civilization, solidarity and barbarism on the American frontier. And like many great westerns it critiques some of the genre’s foundational myths with bracing, beautiful rigor, including the myth of heroic individualism.
  55. Vitalina Varela
    Vitalina Varela is socially conscious, but dreamlike, elegiac. And an inquiry, too, into the abilities and deficiencies of film as a medium to illuminate human consciousness and experience. It’s essential cinema.
  56. Rashomon
    Much of the power of the picture—and it unquestionably has hypnotic power—derives from the brilliance with which the camera of Director Akira Kurosawa has been used. The photography is excellent and the flow of images is expressive beyond words.
  57. Martin Eden
    The true miracle of this film is how Marcello translates both London’s scabrous tone and his lush, character-revealing prose into pure cinema. Lines have been plucked from the novel, yet even at its wordiest, the film is never weighed down by the burden of faithfulness.
  58. América
    This is an exemplary, moving, show-don’t-tell record of family tenacity.
  59. Saint Maud
    Folding sexual arousal and religious ecstasy into a single, gasping sensation, Saint Maud, the feature debut of the director Rose Glass, burrows into the mind of a lonely young woman and finds psycho-horror gold.
  60. Exotica
    Exotica may not be as perfectly formed as some of Mr. Egoyan's earlier work. Because Thomas's subplot is not as intriguing as the scenes in the club, the stories take too long to merge. But the flaws are minor. Mr. Egoyan continues to build an important, uncompromising career.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Treasure Island
    A grand and glorious entertainment. Six or 60, the spectator is bound to be caught up in the magic of this thrilling quest for fabulous wealth.
  62. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
    Burl Ives, Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Judith Anderson, Jack Carson and two or three more almost work and yell themselves to pieces making this drama of strife within a new-rich Southern family a ferocious and fascinating show. And what a pack of trashy people these accomplished actors perform!
  63. Carnal Knowledge
    More than any other film Nichols has made, Carnal Knowledge reminds me of his stage work at its best, particularly of the highly stylized Luv in which low comedy techniques were employed to illuminate material that might otherwise seem too cruel, or too anti‐heroic for a dramatic medium.
  64. Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin
    To elaborate as Chatwin did, Herzog implies, is a legitimate response to places that can’t help but exert a strong pull on the imagination. And of course, the truth-and-a-half principle figures heavily in Herzog’s own art — of which this film is a particularly outstanding example.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Little Women
    The film begins in a gentle fashion and slips away smoothly without any forced attempt to help the finish to linger in the minds of the audience. Little Women is just as honest in its story as Jo's nature.
  66. Never Rarely Sometimes Always
    In “Never Rarely,” the hurdles to an abortion are as legion as they are maddening and pedestrian, a blunt political truism that Hittman brilliantly connects to women’s fight for emancipation.
  67. Palm Springs
    Pain is a necessary ingredient in any successful comedy. The trick, which Barbakow and Siara seem to have mastered on their very first try, is to find the misery of the right kind and intensity, to imply tears that match the laughter.
  68. Dick Johnson Is Dead
    Pitched artfully between the celebratory and the elegiac, it is an inarguably serious documentary with light, surrealistic flourishes that, at times, veer into exuberant goofiness.
  69. The Forty-Year-Old Version
    It revels in the pleasure and struggle of creative work. This comes through in the rambunctiousness of Radha’s students, in her belated appreciation of her mother’s paintings, in shots of street murals and sonic scraps of freestyle rhyming — in pretty much every frame of a film that, like its heroine, is grumpy, tender, wistful, funny and combative. Also beautiful.
  70. The Green Knight
    The Green Knight is always interesting — and occasionally baffling — but at the end it rises to a swirling, feverish pitch of feeling and philosophical earnestness.
  71. The Father
    At once stupendously effective and profoundly upsetting, The Father might be the first movie about dementia to give me actual chills.
  72. Smooth Talk
    A remarkably fine film about the muddle of emotions that separates the child from the adult.
  73. Memoria
    Every scene unfolds with quiet, meticulous clarity, but Weerasethakul’s luminous precision only deepens the mystery.
  74. The Trip to Bountiful
    Horton Foote's funny, exquisitely performed film adaptation of his own play, directed for the screen by Peter Masterson. The Trip to Bountiful is almost as unstoppable as Carrie Watts.
  75. My Twentieth Century
    My 20th Century, a new Hungarian film written and directed by Ildiko Enyedi, is a number of wondrous things. It's a bracing combination of wit, invention, common sense and lunacy. It's a gravely comic meditation on civilization at the turn of this century. It's also about light and shadow and electricity, Thomas Alva Edison, movies and what it's like to be Hungarian in a world where no one is quite sure where Hungary is.
  76. The Uprising
    Turning the Arab Spring into an invented revolution even as it presents specific incidents from an actual one, The Uprising demands an active viewer. Throughout, there are multiple things to consider.
  77. Yankee Doodle Dandy
    As warm and delightful a musical picture as has hit the screen in years, a corking good entertainment and as affectionate, if not as accurate, a film biography as has ever—yes, ever—been made.
  78. Collective
    The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice. But as Collective lays out with anguished detail and a profound, moving sense of decency, it takes stubborn, angry people — journalists, politicians, artists, activists — to hammer at that arc until it starts bending, maybe, in the right direction.
  79. The Wolf House
    The film surprises, with incredible force, in every one of its 75 minutes.
  80. Great Expectations
    Somehow, the fullness of Dickens, of his stories and characters—his humor and pathos and vitality and all his brilliant command of atmosphere—has never been so illustrated as it is in this wonderful film, which can safely be recommended as screen story-telling at its best.
  81. Taste of Cherry
    Exquisite.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The 39 Steps
    By comparison with the sinister delicacy and urbane understatement of The Thirty-nine Steps, the best of our melodramas seem crude and brawling.
  83. The Green Pastures
    Naïve, ludicrous, sublime and heartbreaking masterpiece of American folk drama.
  84. Oliver Twist
    A superb piece of motion picture art and, beyond doubt, one of the finest screen translations of a literary classic ever made.
  85. Au Revoir les Enfants
    It's a work that has the kind of simplicity, ease and density of detail that only a film maker in total command of his craft can bring off, and then only rarely.
  86. The Seventh Seal
    A piercing and powerful contemplation of the passage of man upon this earth. Essentially intellectual, yet emotionally stimulating, too, it is as tough—and rewarding—a screen challenge as the moviegoer has had to face this year.
  87. River City Drumbeat
    Though the movie does include footage of drum performances, it doesn’t move at the clip of sticks on snares. Instead, the film listens for this community’s heartbeat, finding its steady pulse just as expected: healthy and strong.
  88. Time
    Substantive and stunning, the documentary Time delivers on the title’s promise of the monumental as well as the personal.
  89. Z
    An immensely entertaining movie -- a topical melodrama that manipulates our emotional responses and appeals to our best prejudices in such satisfying ways that it is likely to be mistaken as a work of fine -- rather than popular -- movie art.
  90. David Byrne’s American Utopia
    Some filmed stage shows die on the screen from a sheer lack of visual energy and invention. Lee, a master of the art, uses cinema’s plasticity to complement this production, making it come alive in two dimensions.
  91. True Grit
    A marvelously rambling frontier fable packed with extraordinary incidents, amazing encounters, noble characters and virtuous rewards.
  92. One Night in Miami
    Malcolm’s manner can be didactic, but One Night in Miami is anything but. Instead of a group biopic or a ready-made costume drama, it’s an intellectual thriller, crackling with the energy of ideas and emotions as they happen.
  93. Gunda
    Sublimely beautiful and profoundly moving, it offers you the opportunity to look — at animals, yes, but also at qualities that are often subordinated in narratively driven movies, at textures, shapes and light.
  94. God of the Piano
    Rarely does a debut feature showcase a talent so fully formed. This is a remarkably potent film.
  95. Small Axe: Lovers Rock
    Electric and alive as few films are, Lovers Rock will make you giddy with longing for a pleasure we’ve been too long denied: The singular rush of being one with a beat and a roomful of possibilities.
  96. Supernova
    It’s rare to see a cinematic drama executed with such consistent care as Supernova, written and directed by Harry Macqueen and starring Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci. And here, that care pays off to devastating effect.
  97. Beginning
    Rarely has a film made me so painfully, viscerally aware of the impotence of spectatorship — of the dubious remove from which we watch suffering.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    David Copperfield
    The most profoundly satisfying screen manipulation of a great novel that the camera has ever given us.
  99. Raining in the Mountain (1979)
    This is spectacular, exhilarating entertainment. One might be moved to say, corny as it sounds, “All hail King Hu.”
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