The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,269 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 20269
  2. Mixed: 8,428 out of 20269
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20269
20269 movie reviews
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  1. Lilly
    With a cringey inspirational tone, the movie weaves in Ledbetter’s advocacy work and court case with moments from her personal life.
  2. Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted
    This fans-only documentary gets bogged down with dull asides.
  3. Clown in a Cornfield
    A lackluster horror movie gets points if the leading villain is a real bugaboo. But the Frendos, alas, look like poser versions of Pennywise, Art the Clown and other, scarier horror bozos.
  4. Juliet & Romeo
    Watching this largely misbegotten movie (which seems to fulfill all of its aspirations with an utterly tacky ending), then, sometimes brought to mind the sardonic Steely Dan tune “Show Biz Kids.”
  5. Summer of 69
    Fortunately, Summer of 69 is a two-hander, and Fineman brings comic chops and genuine feeling to playing the tutor with a heart of gold.
  6. Friendship
    These men are so lonely. Thankfully, in a movie, they’re also really funny.
  7. Lavender Men
    Tonal whiplash — farcical comedy, heavy drama, even a musical number — undermines the film’s emotional stakes. You want a better story for Taffeta, and for Lincoln and Ellsworth, too.
  8. A Desert
    Lynch is a difficult influence to wield responsibly, yet Erkman keeps it largely under control: A Desert, if at times too ambitious, certainly feels distinct.
  9. Electra
    What’s not convincingly nailed by the film’s moody bravado is the grief propelling its flirtatious and fraught quartet toward presumptive tragedy.
  10. Rust
    What is undeniable is that because Rust looks as good as it does, every time riders on horseback appear against a florid sky, it isn’t the characters you think about — it’s Halyna Hutchins.
  11. The Surfer
    If this movie leaves Cage adrift, he doesn’t seem at all uncomfortable about it.
  12. Words of War
    Some deviations are inevitable, but the expository dialogue — and the convention of having Russian characters speak English, with British accents — are distractions. Even so, Politkovskaya’s bravery, and Peake’s commitment to honoring it, is enough.
  13. Bonjour Tristesse
    A work of image and mood, Bonjour Tristesse captures the mythopoetic wonder of an adolescent summer, and the effect is trancelike.
  14. Vulcanizadora
    Spasmodically funny, though hardly a comedy, Vulcanizadora is raw, moving and, briefly, horrifying.
  15. Thunderbolts*
    The only sure thing is that Pugh deepens the material, investing Yelena with real feeling and a lightly detached ironic sensibility that’s reminiscent of Downey’s Stark. Pugh is the best thing to happen to Marvel in a while.
  16. Another Simple Favor
    Another Simple Favor is a two-hour vacation I’m not mad to have taken.
  17. Drop Dead City
    It’s an evenhanded and surprisingly entertaining account of how things got so bad, who was to blame, the way it was fixed (to some degree) and what New York inevitably lost in the process.
  18. Havoc
    Because what Havoc lacks in characters and story, it delivers in two audacious waves of indiscriminate killing that are so bruising and relentless they make the “John Wick” movies look like “Sesame Street.”
  19. April
    April is easy to admire, but Kulumbegashvili’s use of art-film conventions can be wearyingly familiar, especially when the leisurely pace turns to a crawl.
  20. Blue Sun Palace
    It’s often said that New York is a city of neighborhoods, little galaxies contained within themselves, but the truth is more granular: We walk by a dozen massage parlors like the one in Blue Sun Palace every day, and never dream the whole cosmos of human emotion is inside.
  21. On Swift Horses
    It doesn’t always work, but you won’t mind that much, because it’s so beautiful to look at.
  22. Cheech and Chong's Last Movie
    The documentary doesn’t quite cover everything — their collaborations with Joni Mitchell and Martin Scorsese go unmentioned, for example. This is still a rollicking account that will make even non-herbally-inclined viewers root for the fellows.
  23. Magic Farm
    Ingeniously simmering under the folly is a health crisis that has afflicted the agricultural area for decades. This is the film’s joke: If the crew could only get their heads out of their rears, they would uncover a gonzo documentary gold mine.
  24. The Trouble with Jessica
    A critique about the hypocrisies of the righteous upper middle class unfolds halfheartedly, leaving us with performances that might’ve worked better in a sketch comedy scene.
  25. The Accountant 2
    All that counts in The Accountant 2 is that it’s adroitly paced, unburdened by narrative logic (there are almost as many coincidences as corpses) and buoyed by its well-synced, charismatic leads.
  26. Until Dawn
    The director, David F. Sandberg (“Annabelle: Creation”) does an exhausting job moving along a script, written by Gary Dauberman and Blair Butler, that’s made slack by mediocre monsters, muddled time loop stuff and underdeveloped characters who seem straight out of a lesser “Goosebumps” episode.
  27. 1-800-on-Her-Own
    This is the kind of relatively pedestrian musician documentary that’s intended mostly for fans, who will encounter plenty of nostalgia. It’s a vulnerable glimpse at an artist figuring out what the creative life looks like in a world that keeps changing.
  28. Invention
    Invention is committed to finding its own wavelength.
  29. The Legend of Ochi
    The Legend of Ochi is light on story — you kind of know what’s going to happen all the time — and that, coupled with occasionally garbled dialogue, makes it easy to zone out at times. But in its place it serves up a nourishing banquet for the senses.
  30. The President’s Wife
    While Deneuve brings a wonderful blend of neuroses and feigned indifference to her character, the film’s pop-feminist through line dulls the comedy, creating a more conventionally celebratory portrait.
  31. Queens of Drama
    With playful visual flourishes, a willfully garish palette and winks galore (including one to the French feminist writer Monique Wittig), Langlois’s debut has stylistic ambition for days. But it’s not as genre-fluent as “Love Lies Bleeding” and “I Saw the TV Glow,” or as swoon inducing as its volatile couple deserves.
  32. The Shrouds
    A dry macabre humor has long run through Cronenberg’s work, and the uncertainty behind some of his intentions here creates thought-provoking ambiguity.
  33. The Ugly Stepsister
    The movie, adapted by the Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt from the Cinderella story, is the opposite of didactic: Slyly funny and visually captivating (the luscious cinematography is by Marcel Zyskind), its scenes move with ease from gross to gorgeous, and from grotesque to magical.
  34. The Wedding Banquet
    The Wedding Banquet is so charming, and then so unexpectedly moving, that its strengths eventually outweigh the bits of mess.
  35. Sinners
    Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is a big-screen exultation — a passionate, effusive praise song about life and love, including the love of movies.
  36. Pets
    It’s a sweet-tempered film that celebrates the animals we love and seems to have a secondary purpose, too: to convince viewers to support and even develop a love for animal rescue.
  37. Warfare
    The highest praise I can offer Warfare, a tough, relentless movie about life and death in battle, is that it isn’t thrilling. It is, rather, a purposely sad, angry movie, and as much a lament as a warning.
  38. The Amateur
    It felt a bit like the life was draining away from the movie the longer it went on — as if this was more of an imitation of a good movie than an actually good movie. (The technical name for this among critics is a “nothingburger.”)
  39. Drop
    Drop is pleasantly silly and minimally suspenseful.
  40. G20
    Intensions aside, G20 plays well as a silly action movie. I certainly cackled throughout, making it easy to shrug off the incoherence of the conspiracy plot and the obligatory supermom additions.
  41. Thank You Very Much
    Comedy was not really his subject. Laughter wasn’t either. Instead, a few interviewees suggest, it was time — a part of existence we normally take for granted. Kaufman had a preternatural ability to remain unperturbed by time passing, even when his audience became disgruntled, hostile or upset.
  42. The Martial Artist
    Though Pakistan is filmed with a sense of grandeur, Ibby’s return to his cultural roots is rushed and superficial. Khan’s lack of screen presence, toothless mixed martial arts sequences and unintelligible editing further knock the film down.
  43. When Fall Is Coming
    A sleek, modestly scaled entertainment about families, secrets and obligations, it features fine performances and some picture-postcard Burgundian locations.
  44. Eric Larue
    As “Eric LaRue” starts barreling toward an upsetting conclusion, you start to wonder about everything that’s happened earlier in the movie, about what went unsaid and now refuses to stay quiet.
  45. Gazer
    There’s an amusing, low-fi thriller here amid what prove to be too many twists and thickets of cinematic allusion.
  46. A Nice Indian Boy
    In this vibrant addition to cinema’s romantic landscape, love isn’t the only winner: cultural understanding and the freedom to choose your own path triumph as well.
  47. Henry Fonda for President
    The movie convincingly posits that Fonda was, cinematically, the embodiment of America itself. Horwath has gathered a vast amount of archival material from film, television, radio and more to make his case.
  48. Freaky Tales
    High on revolutionary spirit, Freaky Tales is a frisky, frantic pastiche that doesn’t always make sense. . . Yet the visuals are meaty, and the filmmakers (whose last feature collaboration was on “Captain Marvel” in 2019) show considerable affection for their movie’s setting.
  49. Hell of a Summer
    Wolfhard and Bryk don’t relish violence or gore: Hell of a Summer is surprisingly tame, with most of its kills kept tastefully offscreen.
  50. The Luckiest Man in America
    The events, and the mind games, appear to have been goosed for dramatic interest. . . But it is still fun to watch Michael and CBS compete for the upper hand.
  51. A Minecraft Movie
    There’s something almost refreshingly bold in the full-tilt inanity here — in taking a blockbuster budget and embracing idiocy, as if to knowingly say, “I mean, it’s a Minecraft movie.”
  52. Secret Mall Apartment
    Secret Mall Apartment makes a compelling case that the project reverberates through the lives of the artists, and maybe even the city, to this day. Art doesn’t have to be in a museum to be valuable; it doesn’t have to be own-able, repeatable or even make sense to everyone. If it changes a few lives, then it’s changed the world.
  53. Art for Everybody
    Art for Everybody — which is well structured, meticulously researched and revealing, even for a Kinkade-jaded viewer like me — manages to complicate the narrative, thanks in part to sensitive interviews with family and friends, including his wife, Nanette, and their four daughters.
  54. Being Maria
    If the meandering nature of the film makes the psychic fallout seem tonally scattered, it nevertheless conveys the sense that she’s sleepwalking through life — and always fighting to snap out of it.
  55. The Ballad of Wallis Island
    Bereft of chuckles or even a substantial story, this maudlin musical fable never escapes the drag of a lead character with supporting-player energy.
  56. The Friend
    This is a love story, after all, and one with a keen grasp of the mournful, curious glances between its two leads — of how much goes untranslated between them, and how much is conveyed.
  57. Holy Cow
    The low-key charms of the coming-of-age story Holy Cow emerge gradually but steadily.
  58. Viet and Nam
    Quy treats the love affair between Viet and Nam with exquisite tenderness.
  59. Holland
    The film’s unusual backdrop, unresolved subplots and dream-sequence fakeouts are ultimately all distractions from a story that doesn’t make much sense.
  60. Grand Tour
    Beauty is pleasurable, but the film’s use of evocative visuals to focus on storytelling more broadly is what makes it a quiet knockout.
  61. The Penguin Lessons
    While Juan Salvador is a shameless exhibitionist, Coogan’s performance is understated; he conveys Tom’s softening without nudging the viewer too much.
  62. Julie Keeps Quiet
    It’s a film that maintains that Julie’s story is available only when she’s ready to tell it.
  63. A Working Man
    It’s a satisfying cast all the way down.
  64. Death of a Unicorn
    Here, at least, the performers — who include Téa Leoni as Odell’s wife, the very funny Will Poulter as the Leopold son and Anthony Carrigan as a put-upon servant — have the kinds of ductile faces, rubber-band moves and vocal dexterity that can keep even sluggish material moving.
  65. Snow White
    Zegler has enough charm and lung power to hold the center of this busy, overproduced movie with its mix of memorable old and unmemorable new songs.
  66. Misericordia
    Misericordia is film noir with the lights turned on. Even when its characters are working your nerves, it tickles. Guiraudie is playing those nerves like a harp.
  67. Magazine Dreams
    Magazine Dreams bludgeons viewers to show off its sensitivity.
  68. The Alto Knights
    While it’s inevitable that some, maybe many, viewers will find the dual role a distraction, those who hunger for De Niro in mobster mode will get more than their fill.
  69. O'Dessa
    Is a cliché turned on its head still a cliché? “O’Dessa” will keep you wondering, and that counts for something.
  70. Locked
    The performers hold their ground even if the script simply goes through the motions — the car-as-prison may at first come off like a new jam, and yet you’ve definitely seen it all before.
  71. Bob Trevino Likes It
    Any genuine feeling emanates from Lily. Ferreira pitches herself into the trite story line with enthusiasm, and her verve breathes life into even the most leaden lines.
  72. The Assessment
    A sterile drama about state-controlled procreation, “The Assessment,” the first feature from the French director Fleur Fortuné, is visually stark and emotionally chilling.
  73. Ash
    The high-concept sci-fi horror film “Ash,” a hazy story about an amnesiac deep-space explorer who awakens to discover her entire crew was killed, is light on answers but heavy on style.
  74. An Unfinished Film
    Life gets in the way of art all the time, and art can be made out of life. What matters, the movie suggests, is hanging onto one another for dear life.
  75. The Parenting
    The cast is game — especially Cox, who gets to do some over-the-top Linda Blair mugging — but the script, by a “Saturday Night Live” writer, Kent Sublette, is puerile and abrasive, lacking the wit of “Evil Dead” (an obvious influence) and the brio of “Scary Movie.”
  76. The Actor
    Johnson and Stephen Cooney have shaped an unsettling, sorrowful journey from damage to a kind of deliverance.
  77. Young Hearts
    Naturalistic performances and quiet scenes of summertime idling bring to mind Luca Guadagnino’s drama “Call Me By Your Name,” though Young Hearts is a more wholesome, and ultimately more cliché, endeavor.
  78. Who by Fire
    Lesage’s characters may talk a lot, but because he avoids exposition, he ends up overloading the story with dramatically heightened episodes. These keep things simmering, but they often overstate the obvious as much as any telegraphing dialogue might.
  79. Opus
    Whoever Opus is supposed to be sending up, its aim is a bit wide of the mark. But even if the movie’s only real goal is to frighten, it bets far too much on its eventual twists.
  80. The Electric State
    Whereas the book is elliptical in narrative, muted in color palette and melancholy in mood, the movie is obvious, garish and just plain dumb.
  81. The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie
    The movie’s energy doesn’t pay off in dividends of real pleasure. Anarchy has never been so mere as it is ultimately rendered here.
  82. Novocaine
    The violent comedy works most of all through Quaid, who is natural and nimble in embodying the funny paradox of a nebbishy hero who just won’t go down.
  83. Black Bag
    By the time Pierce Brosnan shows up, you may find yourself giggling at the whole meta deliciousness of this enterprise. You may also find yourself feverishly hoping that when it comes time to revive the Bond series, someone has the brains to call Koepp and Soderbergh.
  84. Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna
    The film’s biggest letdown lies in its cursory tour of who Hutchins was apart from her final hours. Despite testimony from Hutchins’s friends that repeatedly references her artistry, Mason rarely incorporates clips of Hutchins’s cinematography outside “Rust.”
  85. CHAOS: The Manson Murders
    This isn’t just about fringe cults on ranches anymore: It’s about social groups, theories about the world, the bubble you float around in on the internet, the candidate you believe in an election.
  86. Rule Breakers
    The director Bill Guttentag and his cast get the can-do spirit at its core, as well as the societal constrictions that make such perseverance especially impressive, but it’s also a story that could have been told with more concision and subtlety.
  87. The Rule of Jenny Pen
    The director remains near-merciless in his approach, never shying away from showing his vulnerable characters (and the tormentor played with twisted relish by Lithgow is, ultimately, as unprotected as any of the others) in states of utter abjection.
  88. Seven Veils
    In short, Seven Veils offers plenty to think about. But fans who mourn that Egoyan’s dramatic instincts have slipped in recent years won’t quite be getting a return to form.
  89. The Empire
    This sci-fi twaddle, soothingly framed by rolling sand dunes and a slash of crystal coastline (dreamily photographed by David Chambille), eventually tests our patience.
  90. Picture This
    For all the potentially crushing challenges Pia faces — losing her business, not living out her dream of being a photographer, alienating her beloved younger sister — Picture This, keeps it light, never letting the sharp edges of potential failure come into focus.
  91. In the Lost Lands
    This lackluster script struggles to build a captivating story to match the allure of its expansive desert setting.
  92. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
    [Nyoni] says all she needs to with each lapidary image, with every resonant silence and with the undaunted power of Shula’s gaze.
  93. There's Still Tomorrow
    There’s Still Tomorrow is set in Rome after World War I, but it unfolds with timeless verve and romanticism.
  94. Queen of the Ring
    It’s a middling entry into the biographical sports movie genre, and the director, Ash Avildsen, cannot resist pummeling his audience with a simplistic girl-power message.
  95. Eephus
    It dwells in some languid liminal space between hangout movie and elegy, a tribute to the community institutions that hold us together, that introduce us to one another and that, in an age of optimized life choices and disappearing public spaces, are slowly fading away.
  96. 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.
  97. My Dead Friend Zoe
    Most of the filmmaking in My Dead Friend Zoe feels workmanlike, proficient and straightforward in its storytelling — a promising feature debut for Hausmann-Stokes. The film’s best feature is its performances from a uniformly excellent cast.
  98. Rats!
    If anything, the onslaught of weirdness is hypnotizing. As a visibly small-scale and local undertaking, the film feels genuinely connected to a vision of working-class Texas and its various characters.
  99. Riff Raff
    Harris and Murray are such reliably engaging screen presences that they provide a few glimmers of entertainment, provided you’re able to set aside the movie’s practically all-encompassing repulsiveness.
  100. Cold Wallet
    The storytelling economy (small cast, one main location) is welcome, but none of the four characters is the sharpest tool in the shed, and whatever insights Hodierne intends on the cutthroat world of crypto remain elusive.
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