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. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
    The film uses the superficial markers of Asian culture and filmmaking without presenting anything unique in its Marvel take on that tradition.
  2. Luca
    It’s about the sometimes risky discovery of pleasure, and it’s a pleasure to discover.
  3. Prey
    Despite a female-empowerment theme and an adversary fairly bristling with fancy weaponry, Prey never builds a head of steam.
  4. Everyone Else
    A sun-kissed German film about a young couple in love and in doubt, might not be perfect, but so much is right and true in this lovely, delicate work that it comes breathtakingly close.
  5. Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
    If Sweet Sweetback is unforgettable, it is also deeply flawed. The acting is mediocre at best. And in depicting women as grotesque, flailing sex machines serviced by the indifferent stud hero, it matches today's gangsta rap in arrogant misogyny.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Seconds
    Its so called science is still fiction, and its lesson is all to apparent to the mature. Its tensions and terrors, however, are genuinely fascinating.
  7. I Am Breathing
    Mr. Platt’s good-humored attitude helps keep the potent material from turning mawkish, and having his perspective also wards off a sense of exploitive voyeurism.
  8. Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff
    Interviews with Martin Scorsese, Lauren Bacall, Kim Hunter and the film editor Thelma Schoonmaker, Powell's widow, among others, are fascinating, though we learn almost nothing about Cardiff's personal life.
  9. Lenny Cooke
    Like the 1994 documentary landmark “Hoop Dreams,” Lenny Cooke measures out the years with a pensive jazz motif, but the film feels comparatively stuck on a couple of notes.
  10. The Man Who Came to Dinner
    A deliciously wicked character portrait and a helter-skelter satire.
  11. 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.
  12. La Moustache
    No matter how serious it becomes, however, La Moustache never forsakes an underlying attitude of high-style playfulness that recalls Hitchcock's cat-and-mouse romantic thrillers.
  13. The Unknown Soldier
    The reckoning with the past, which has occupied West German society since the 1960s, has been painful and divisive, which makes the calm, empirical spirit of this film all the more impressive.
  14. MoviePass, MovieCrash
    Surprisingly, the film goes much further than expected. Streaming services are loaded with documentaries about scammy internet-era companies, but “MoviePass, MovieCrash” finds the barely told story in all the juicy facts.
  15. The Menu
    In service to a gleefully malicious tone, Mark Mylod’s direction is cool, tight and clipped, the actors slotting neatly into characters so unsympathetic we become willing accessories to their suffering.
  16. Holes
    One of the few recent movies I have seen that plunged me into that rare, giddy state of pleasurable confusion, of not knowing what would happen next, which I associate with the reading and moviegoing experiences of my own childhood. But there is no reason that children should have a monopoly on this primal, wonderful experience.
  17. Cookie's Fortune
    Captivating.
  18. Seeking Mavis Beacon
    Seeking Mavis Beacon still goes down smoothly, at least until its conclusion; while other films tie up too neatly, this one could use a bow at all. It helps that Jones and Ross are clever and likable guides.
  19. One Lucky Elephant
    Animal people sometimes say the wackiest things, but here, alas, they never satisfyingly address the ethical questions of what it means to capture and keep wild animals. Happily, while this movie's head may not always be in the right place, its heart is.
  20. Jerichow
    No one in Jerichow is entirely deserving of sympathy, which gives the film a detached, clinical feeling underlined by the director’s habit of observing emotions rather than evoking them.
  21. Rudy
    Rudy shamelessly manipulates the heartstrings and pumps the adrenaline. There are many moments in which it seems like nothing more than a promotional film for Notre Dame...For all its patness, the movie also has a gritty realism that is not found in many higher-priced versions of the same thing, and its happy ending is not the typical Hollywood leap into fantasy...Most important, it has a tough, persuasive performance by Mr. Astin that keeps the role firmly in perspective.
  22. The Big Lebowski
    Watching it amble along is enough of a treat, since the Coens populate this story with oddballs and bowling balls of such comic variety.
  23. King Leopold's Ghost
    Ms. Scott's outrage is palpable, but she has bitten off enough here for a 10-hour television series.
  24. Catch the Fair One
    The nexus of racism, patriarchal power and sexual exploitation gives Catch the Fair One a pulse of righteous anger, and Reis’s charisma — her willingness to show fear as well as resolve — makes Kaylee a magnetic protagonist.
  25. Thank You for Smoking
    Glibly funny and eager to please.
  26. Heretic
    Grant is clearly having a lot of fun in Heretic, and it’s enjoyable watching him go hard here with cold, predatory eyes and a smile that turns from uneasily friendly to straight-up fiendish.
  27. Pete's Dragon
    This sentimental, nearly genteel movie demonstrates there’s a world of difference between invoking magic and conjuring it.
  28. My Brother the Devil
    Nuances of faith, politics and sexual identity enrich what initially presents as a classic good son-bad son tale.
  29. Monkey Shines
    Mr. Romero, who adapted the screenplay from Michael Stewart's novel, wraps up more loose ends than anyone cares about, yet leaves some nagging bits of illogic.
  30. Prevenge
    Prevenge is a brilliantly conceived meditation on prepartum anxiety and extreme grief.
  31. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One
    If all this sounds a bit nuts, dangerously self-indulgent and very of its experimental moment, it is. But it's also highly entertaining and, at moments, revelatory about filmmaking as a site of creative tension between individual vision and collective endeavor.
  32. Trashed
    If we must talk trash, Mr. Irons - assisted by a scientist or two and Vangelis's doomy score - is an inspired choice of guide. Soothing and sensitive, his liquid gaze alighting on oozing landfills and belching incinerators, he moves through the film with a tragic dignity that belies his whimsical neckwear and jaunty hats.
  33. Gebo and the Shadow
    Mr. Oliveira relishes the formality of conversation, and there is great pleasure to be found in listening to the actors and watching the small adjustments of posture and gesture that accompany their words.
  34. Map of the Human Heart
    Far more memorable for the spectacular wildness of its Arctic and Dresden scenes (as photographed by Eduardo Serra) than for its uneven efforts to bind such images together.
  35. Ema
    Whether a melodramatic comment on art and anarchy, or a wild experiment in toxic maternalism, the film feels like a fever that just won’t break.
  36. Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James
    The movie wants the viewer to believe that James didn’t have it easy — and he didn’t. But it can’t skate over the aberrant actions that led to his imprisonment. “Bitchin’” is fascinating and troubling viewing.
  37. Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed
    In the end, with only Hudson to deal with, Kijak gets the big picture.
  38. The Long Walk
    Lawrence’s commitment to authenticity may be laudable (he filmed almost the entire project on the move in Canada), but it’s clear that he was so busy honoring the book, he forgot to entertain the audience.
  39. Factotum
    Like the film itself, Mr. Dillon’s performance works through understatement.
  40. The Good Girl
    There's more to everyone here than we're initially led to think. The Good Girl is like a neurotically charged post-millennial take on the trailer-park comedies that Jonathan Demme once claimed for himself.
  41. Intolerable Cruelty
    Something not seen in movie theaters for a long time: an intelligent, modern screwball comedy, a minor classic on the order of competent, fast-talking curve balls about deception and greed like Mitchell Leisen's "Easy Living" and Billy Wilder's "Major and the Minor."
  42. Intimate Strangers
    Establishes its mood of playful erotic suspense in the first 10 minutes and sustains its cat-and-mouse game between therapist and patient through variations that are by turns amusing, titillating and mildly scary.
  43. Tropic Thunder
    A flashy, nasty, on-and-off funny and assaultive sendup of the film industry.
  44. Disgrace
    Mr. Malkovich is one of the few actors capable of conveying genuine intellectual depth.
  45. The Tracker
    These stylized images by the Australian artist Peter Coad create an aesthetic distance from the cruelty, lending the atrocities the stature of events in a historical mural that freezes the past into an eternal present.
  46. The Birdcage
    An American remake with plenty of new pizazz.
  47. Koch
    Like Walt Whitman, another hard-to-classify embodiment of the spirit of New York, he is contradictory and multitudinous. The hour and a half Mr. Barsky provides might be enough time for a lesser figure. Mr. Koch...needs more.
  48. King Georges
    King Georges feels stretched into feature length, but its ending neatly portrays a man with a fierce personal code who seems to have accepted change.
  49. Love+War
    Love + War chooses to go wide rather than deep, resulting in a movie that, while pleasingly dynamic, offers less psychological insight than the photographs she has gambled everything to take. And perhaps that’s as it should be.
  50. Good Will Hunting
    The script's bare bones are familiar, yet the film also has fine acting, steady momentum, a sharp eye and a very warm heart.
  51. This Is Martin Bonner
    It’s gratifying to see the care taken with his characters, though it would be no betrayal of them for Mr. Hartigan to flesh out their world and their lives further.
  52. Spider-Man: No Way Home
    Her casting as MJ and her expanded role in the series continue to pay off, and Zendaya’s charisma and gift for selling emotions (and silly dialogue) helps give the new movie a soft, steady glow that centers it like a heartbeat as the story takes off in different directions.
  53. Ralph Breaks the Internet
    Somewhere amid the film’s ornate imagery and deliriously irreverent humor, we might begin to realize that we’re watching a terrifying, incisive satire about the ways that a life lived online makes monsters of us all.
  54. Battle for Brooklyn
    A documentary about the unending mess that is the Atlantic Yards project, is unabashedly slanted and as a result will probably be dismissed by those it portrays unflatteringly. That's unfortunate, because this film should be discouraging and dismaying for people on all sides of the project, for what it says about oversize expectations and missed opportunities.
  55. Mozart's Sister
    Nannerl, the subject of at least three novels also titled "Mozart's Sister," is in this film meant to be something more than a chapter in her brother's biography though it's not exactly clear what. Somewhat frustratingly if reasonably, Mr. Féret never settles on whether she was a genius, a martyr, a feminist cause, a disappointed daughter, a resigned woman or all of the above.
  56. October Sky
    Despite its "based on a true story" opening credit, this earnest, nostalgic film has a way of seeming too good to be true.
  57. Mad Dog and Glory
    The great satisfaction of Mad Dog and Glory is watching Mr. De Niro and Mr. Murray play against type with such invigorating ease. Each is the other's straight man, a relationship that is hilariously set up in the initial encounter of the cop and the hoodlum.
  58. War Game
    The first time I saw War Game, it shook me up; the second time, my visceral response was tempered by a skepticism about power that the movie doesn’t invite.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Ring
    An old and rather a thin story, but well told and well acted by Carl Brisson, Ian Hunter and Lilian Hall Davis.
  60. Red Eye
    The casting of the two leads is a nice surprise in Red Eye, as is its modest scale. One of the ironies about the film is that its relatively small-movie feel allows Mr. Craven to focus on the sorts of things - the performances and little bits of business from the extras - that a director like Michael Bay doesn't have time for, partly because he is so busy blowing stuff up.
  61. Trumbo
    Today few would dispute Trumbo's assessment of that very dark period: "The blacklist was a time of evil, and no one who survived it on either side came through untouched by evil."
  62. Eight Men Out
    For Mr. Sayles, whose idealism has never been more affecting or apparent than it is in this story of boyish enthusiasm gone bad in an all too grown-up world, Eight Men Out represents a home run.
  63. Proxima
    Torn between the maternal and the cosmic, the tactile and the unearthly, Proxima feels as unsettled as its heroine.
  64. Nocturama
    Without a real-world correlative for the actions it depicts, Bertrand Bonello’s new film would merely be tedious and pretentious rather than repellent.
  65. Men Go to Battle
    The filmmakers’ bold pushback against the rigid formality of the genre they draw upon doesn’t always deliver. With the exception of Ms. Korine, the performers often seem to have a hard time shaking off the aura of the contemporary. Nevertheless, there’s much of value here.
  66. Travelers and Magicians
    As he did in "The Cup," Mr. Norbu provides a lot of ingratiating comic moments. His Buddhism is the laughing, playful kind, and does not ask the Western audience - for whom the film is clearly intended - to deal with any uncomfortably complex religious issues.
  67. Lorelei
    The film is invested in accurately depicting the details of its character’s lives, but its collection of studied impressions doesn’t coalesce into a coherent final portrait.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Crossing the Line
    So fascinating that Crossing the Line is riveting.
  69. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
    This film has showier stunts than its predecessors, and a better sense of humor. It also has Tina Turner, in chain-mail stockings.
  70. Jim Allison: Breakthrough
    Documentaries about innovative figures don’t always offer correspondingly innovative filmmaking. But even coloring within the lines of conventional biographical storytelling, Jim Allison: Breakthrough provides an accessible introduction to James P. Allison.
  71. Wildcat
    In shaping this narrative, though, Lesh and Frost have left out details that would have deepened and broadened Wildcat.
  72. Eternal Spring
    While the animation gives the documentary some distinction, the narrative can’t entirely shake the sense that this momentous but brief episode is scaled more for a short than a feature.
  73. My Brother Is an Only Child
    A lively minor addendum to the grand tradition of Italian fraternal cinema.
  74. Dolls
    With some staggeringly beautiful photography of cherry blossoms and scarlet autumn leaves, Dolls is so enthralled with its own cinematography that it can't bear to edit itself, and during the autumn and winter segments of the bound beggars' journey, it almost reaches a standstill.
  75. Memory
    Chastain reliably holds the screen even if her performance often feels overly studied rather than lived in, never more so than in her scenes with Sarsgaard, whose delicate, quicksilver expressiveness appreciably deepens both the movie and its stakes. You don’t always believe in Sylvia and Saul as a couple, but Sarsgaard makes you want to.
  76. When Two Worlds Collide
    The issues presented in When Two Worlds Collide are so crucial that it feels churlish to characterize it as a dutiful, and ultimately pedestrian, documentary. There is something evasive about it as well.
  77. Car Wash
    A cheerful, somewhat vulgar, very cleverly executed comedy about what goes on in a single 10-hour period in a Los Angeles car wash.
  78. Tangled
    Tangled is the 50th animated feature from Disney, and its look and spirit convey a modified, updated but nonetheless sincere and unmistakable quality of old-fashioned Disneyness.
  79. Bestiaire
    This may not be a fuzzy wuzzy, warm-and-cuddly song to animals, but in revealing the everyday, sometimes repellent surrealism of the park - where zebras, elephants, camels and ostriches walk among slowly moving cars, and lions bang wildly against their small cages - he forces you to look at the often unseen. It may not be pretty, but it is essential viewing.
  80. 11 Flowers
    Delicate and autobiographical (Wang Han was the director’s name when he was a child, and the story is constructed from his boyhood memories), 11 Flowers clings steadfastly to its youthful point of view.
  81. Red Island
    Red Island is by turns seductively sultry and frustratingly elliptical, with a structure that brings to mind matryoshka dolls, those colorful nesting figurines of differing sizes. For the most part, Campillo introduces these nesting elements just fine; it’s integrating them that proves difficult.
  82. Edge of Tomorrow
    In Edge of Tomorrow, Mr. Liman brings Mr. Cruise’s smile out of semiretirement and also gives him the kind of physical challenges at which he so brilliantly excels.
  83. Three
    When the tension finally does break, the movie goes a little nuts, in venerable Johnnie To tradition. The elaborate, largely slow-motion multifloor action climax is as audacious as anything he has staged and filmed.
  84. The Opportunists
    This is one of the best-photographed pictures of the year, but not ostentatiously so; the look is organic to the less-than-glamorous badlands of Sunnyside, Queens.
  85. Benjamin Smoke
    The film has a richer, more various visual texture than most documentaries, combining still photographs, black-and-white video and Super-8 film, sometimes with wild sound or none at all.
  86. Me & Isaac Newton
    Despite its ultimate lack of intellectual substance, Me and Isaac Newton is still inspiring. All seven of its subjects are fascinating, and most are extremely likable. Mr. Apted has done them all a huge favor.
  87. The Embalmer
    The screenplay evokes this psychosexual power struggle with perfect accuracy and finely tuned performances.
  88. Superstar in a Housedress
    This bright, entertaining movie focuses on Curtis, but it is also a portrait of a scene, whose survivors look back with a mixture of pride and a screwball sense of mischief.
  89. The Zen of Bennett
    In simple, blunt language he exalts "quality," "warmth," "feeling," "truth" and "beauty," without trying to define or elaborate on those concepts.
  90. Wonderstruck
    Mr. Selznick’s emphasis on wonder...can feel bullying, as if he were demanding delight instead of earning it. Yet even as he follows Mr. Selznick’s narrative lead, Mr. Haynes quietly and touchingly makes Wonderstruck his own because the wonder of the film isn’t in its story but in its telling.
  91. An Affair to Remember
    Mr. McCarey's direction is unpropitiously and unaccountably slow. Could it be, too, that a brand of make-believe that was tolerable eighteen years ago, before color and CinemaScope and other intrusions, is just a little discomforting now?
  92. Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes
    This tidy, thoughtful film gets at jazz’s joy and pain.
  93. Rapt
    A solid yet fleet French thriller about a society kidnapping and its shockwaves.
  94. 1985
    Cory Michael Smith’s performance as Adrian is a quiet marvel in a movie that’s superbly acted all around. The film’s intimate consideration of still-enormous issues is intelligent, surprising and emotionally resonant.
  95. Theo Who Lived
    This is a potent, vital film.
  96. Hacksaw Ridge
    Desmond Doss was calm, humble and courageous, qualities Mr. Gibson honors but does not share. It is possible to be moved and inspired by Desmond’s exploits while still feeling that his convictions have been exploited, perhaps even betrayed.
  97. That Thing You Do!
    Mr. Hanks's debut feature, written and directed with delightful good cheer, is rock-and-roll nostalgia presented as pure fizz.
  98. 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.
  99. Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes
    It conveys a credible sense of Ailes’s psychology through the testimony of peers and co-workers who witnessed his ruthlessness firsthand.
  100. Everybody's Everything
    An engaging account of Peep’s life and the alt-music scene.
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