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. Sherlock Gnomes
    Sherlock Gnomes offers more variety than its predecessor. Although still laced with glib pop culture references (wow, a skinny latte) and scored with Elton John tunes in a way that plays like a concession to adults, it has occasional fun ideas, such as rendering the inner workings of Holmes’s mind in hand-drawn black and white.
  2. Summer in the Forest
    Summer in the Forest is an extraordinarily tender documentary that asks what it means to be human. Here, even the most gentle scenes raise mighty questions.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Workshop
    It’s a measure of this film’s stealthy brilliance that it blurs the line between empathy and exploitation.
  4. A Bag of Marbles
    Despite the hardships endured by the characters, nearly every shot seems dappled with nostalgia. The music score is sentimental, with shimmering pianos and trembling strings. But the writing and its attendant characterizations have an undeniable integrity, the particular historical detail offered by the story is not common in films about this era, and the lead performers are moving.
  5. Back to Burgundy
    Mr. Klapisch lingers his camera lovingly over shots of grapes being harvested and stomped, all the while employing story mechanics and flashbacks indelicate enough to suggest the churn of a factory juicer.
  6. What We Started
    What We Started appears to have been conceived with contradictory audiences in mind. On one hand, it tries to present an accessible history of electronic music, starting with its outgrowth from disco, house and techno and continuing through its commercialization and fusion with pop. On the other hand, a subcultural cliquishness creeps into the movie.
  7. Ismael's Ghosts
    As is customary in Mr. Desplechin’s work, there’s a lot of dialogue in Ismael’s Ghosts, but this movie’s nerve endings vibrate most avidly and tenderly in scenes where not a word is spoken.
  8. I Kill Giants
    Magical, subtle, sensitive and touching, I Kill Giants is everything the bombastic “A Wrinkle in Time” is not.
  9. Final Portrait
    Now and then, brisk restaurant visits and slow strolls through a cemetery (an unnecessary foreshadowing, given the movie’s title) ventilate the film, but Final Portrait (adapted from Lord’s 1965 book, “A Giacometti Portrait”) is pretty thin on drama.
  10. Unsane
    Mr. Soderbergh’s quick-and-dirty approach works here better as a conceptual gambit than as an entertainment. What keeps you watching even as the story becomes more off-putting are the actors and Mr. Soderbergh’s filmmaking.
  11. Roxanne Roxanne
    What distinguishes Roxanne Roxanne, a sensitively observed new movie with a dynamite performance by Chanté Adams, is that it marries a traditional hip-hop biopic, a form long dominated by male rappers, with a more idiosyncratic and deeply felt slice of life.
  12. Beauty and the Dogs
    The filmmaking is so striking — and Ms. Al Ferjani so movingly, indefatigably resolute — it’s impossible not to persevere right along with her.
  13. Isle of Dogs
    Time and again, Mr. Anderson pulls you hard into Isle of Dogs. His use of film space, which he playfully flattens and deepens, is one of his stylistic signatures; he likes symmetry and, in contrast to most directors these days, does a lot inside the frame. He’s especially inventive in this movie, and I could watch hours of its noble dogs hanging out, sniffing the air.
  14. Pacific Rim: Uprising
    The movie balances amiable humor and standard believe-in-yourself bromides with better than average action sequences.
  15. Mountain
    The film is limited by its central metaphor, but it is never less than absorbing or original.
  16. Love, Simon
    The emotional resonance may be surprising given the movie’s relentless gloss, but it’s real. The spectacularly charming cast, led by the young Nick Robinson in the title role (who brings a knowing touch of 1980s Matthew Broderick to some of his line readings), puts it all across, including a genuinely crowd-pleasing ending.
  17. Keep the Change
    Keep the Change is not a seamlessly crafted movie, but it’s awfully tenderhearted and thoroughly disarming. It deserves to be widely seen.
  18. Tomb Raider
    There are many ways for a movie to go wrong, and Tomb Raider goes wrong in many of the most obvious: It has a generic story, bad writing, a miscast lead, the wrong director and no fun.
  19. 12 Days
    [A] lucid, focused and adamant documentary.
  20. Dear Dictator
    Simultaneously preposterous and dull, Dear Dictator is the kind of movie where music and wardrobe choices — like the mean girls’ stridently visible underwear — substitute for character.
  21. No Light and No Land Anywhere
    In the scenes that break with banality, there is a zing not only of originality, but of daring.
  22. Ramen Heads
    Over-narrated and self-serious, this documentary allows its good intentions to pave the way to a tepid tale.
  23. Journey's End
    Early screen depictions of World War I, like “The Big Parade” and “All Quiet on the Western Front,” show more passion and visual invention. A rattling sound design and the cinematographer Laurie Rose’s excellent use of low light aren’t enough to make the experience immediate.
  24. Allure
    The filmmakers seem less concerned with telling a story than in convincing the audience (and maybe themselves) that they can handle this provocative and potentially exploitive material they’ve contrived with what’s conventionally considered “appropriate” sensitivity.
  25. Our Blood Is Wine
    Though the movie’s loose, sampling style can leave regions and varieties poorly differentiated, its real stars are the vintners. Young or old, entrepreneur or family-only producer, all are passionate and poetic about their beloved beverage.
  26. Flower
    Cruelly amoral and only marginally credible, Flower is nevertheless wildly entertaining and at times even touching.
  27. Us and Them
    With frothing energy and unfettered vulgarity, Us and Them lances the boil of working-class grievance and watches as the infection spreads to everyone in its path.
  28. Maineland
    Maineland takes up a large and complicated set of topics — the global economy, the shifting relations between East and West, the commodification of American education — and addresses them with understated delicacy.
  29. 7 Days in Entebbe
    What should unfold like an unsettling chapter in a long, tragic story — or a tale of cruelty and heroism — feels more like an old TV show. Everybody is going through the motions.
  30. Shining Moon
    Small and stagy and claustrophobic, Shining Moon is visually rough yet oddly enticing in its experimental awkwardness.
  31. The Forgiven
    When the movie can stay out of its own way, it delivers some powerful scenes, including one in which Blomfeld faces down a would-be assassin (Nandiphile Mbeshu, superb) in a prison shower room. But beyond that, the movie offers conventional gratifications and no surprises.
  32. Itzhak
    We get a brief dip into his family’s past and emigration from Israel, but the filmmaker never digs deeply enough to reveal any other substantial dimension of this man, or her theories about what shaped him.
  33. Hannah
    Rigorously structured and glacially paced, this sophomore feature from Andrea Pallaoro (after his 2015 family tragedy, “Medeas”) is a minimalist portrait of brutal isolation and extreme emotional anguish.
  34. Leaning Into the Wind
    Because time erases or alters Mr. Goldsworthy’s sculptures, movies are the ideal medium to capture them.... The surprise of Leaning Into the Wind is that it’s just as concerned with how time has changed Mr. Goldsworthy.
  35. The Leisure Seeker
    It’s hard to imagine other performers bringing so much to this setup. They give a true impression of two people who have spent their lives together and know how to talk each other.
  36. The Strangers: Prey at Night
    Watching it with a demonstrative crowd in a Times Square theater proved to this former grindhouse devotee that sometimes you can go home again, at least momentarily.
  37. Claire's Camera
    Ms. Huppert’s presence — steady, warm, thoughtful but with a casual air — keeps the entire enterprise classically comedic.
  38. Gringo
    Mr. Oyelowo is without a doubt the best thing in Gringo, supplying the only grace notes in a cacophony of secondhand attitude and facetious overacting.
  39. The Death of Stalin
    The Death of Stalin is by turns entertaining and unsettling, with laughs that morph into gasps and uneasy gasps that erupt into queasy, choking laughs.
  40. Thoroughbreds
    For all the chatter and intrigue, Mr. Finley never settles on a point or theme.
  41. A Wrinkle in Time
    A Wrinkle in Time, faithful to the affirmative, democratic intelligence of the book, is also committed to serving its most loyal and susceptible audience. This is, unapologetically, a children’s movie, by turns gentle, thrilling and didactic, but missing the extra dimension of terror and wonder that would have transcended the genre.
  42. Death Wish
    An imbecilic misfire.
  43. Red Sparrow
    It helps that Ms. Lawrence, like all great stars, can slip into a role as if sliding into another skin, unburdened by hesitation or self-doubt. Craft and charm are part of what she brings to this role, as well as a serviceable accent, but it’s her absolute ease and certainty that carry you through Red Sparrow.
  44. Breaking Point: The War for Democracy in Ukraine
    The filmmakers supply terrifying footage: At civilian rallies, we see nightstick beatings and bloody riots. During military battles, bullets whiz by and explosions shake the cameras. Nerve-racking scenes follow Ukraine’s extraordinarily bold volunteer soldiers.
  45. Souvenir
    The story is as predictable as they come, played out at such a low emotional temperature as to be practically ignorable. Which wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if it offered something else worth paying attention to. Something else besides the endlessly watchable lead actress, that is.
  46. They Remain
    They Remain, directed, edited and scripted by Philip Gelatt, from a short story by Laird Barron, shows that it’s possible to a make an engrossing genre piece on limited resources.
  47. Hondros
    If the movie doesn’t go more than skin deep in interrogating questions about interventions both military and journalistic into the Middle East, it does succeed in opening up Mr. Hondros’s contradiction-filled world.
  48. Midnighters
    As tables turn and turn again — nudged along by a wolfish impostor (Ward Horton) and some creative torturing — the movie allows scant time to ponder each new tack.
  49. The Vanishing Of Sidney Hall
    Handsome cinematography and a highly competent supporting cast — including Michelle Monaghan, Nathan Lane and Alex Karpovsky — can’t save The Vanishing of Sidney Hall, a tortured mystery dripping with pretentiousness.
  50. Goldstone
    Its sociopolitical concerns — primarily around indigenous land rights — are muted and muddled by a script that favors manly grunting and moody looks over clarifying dialogue. Riven with racism and sharp bursts of violence, Goldstone nevertheless has a rough, desolate beauty.
  51. Oh Lucy!
    A movie in which the human comedy is by turns tender, plaintive, heartfelt and joyful.
  52. Submission
    The satire is cautious and the emotions restrained, so that what should be a swirl of lust, ambition, recrimination and bureaucratic absurdity rises only to genteel, nervous laughter and mild discomfort.
  53. Werewolf
    The performers don’t seem like they’re acting at all, which contributes to the film’s unsettling power. The elliptical narrative structure articulates a sad truth of the addict’s life concerning both the challenge and the tedium of making it through to the next fix.
  54. Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?
    The movie, a scorching and rigorous essay on memory and accountability, is neither a profession of guilt nor a performance of virtue. Though his inquiry is intensely, at times painfully personal, Mr. Wilkerson is above all concerned with unpacking the mechanisms of racial domination.
  55. November
    Suffused with sorcery and silvery light, November, written and directed by Rainer Sarnet, is a bizarre Estonian love story — a mishmash of folklore, farm animals and scabrous fun — in which beauty and ugliness fight to the death.
  56. El Mar La Mar
    The result is simultaneously elusive and concrete: abstract cinema that packs a punch.
  57. The Cured
    Anyone digging through the cemetery soil again had better have fresh ideas. The Cured, the debut feature from David Freyne, has roughly two.
  58. Are We Not Cats
    Are We Not Cats is a well-put-together film with a lot of striking imagery, but, as you may have already inferred, something of a specialty item.
  59. Every Day
    The director is Michael Sucsy, who is not always up to the challenges of the knotty material — we live in a world of mainstream movies with clumsy edits, but this one has more conspicuously bad cuts than most.
  60. The Lodgers
    Working with an uneven cast and an undercooked story, Mr. O’Malley hits the horror beats just fine (slam, creak, squeak) without putting a sinister spin on the assorted strange doings. For all the genre exertions, none of this feels the least bit spooky.
  61. Annihilation
    Mr. Garland likes to play with tones, mixing deadpan in with the frights, and later “Annihilation” becomes something of a head movie, swirling with cosmic and menacingly lysergic visions. He keeps the tension torqued throughout this phantasmagoric interlude, sustaining the shivery unease that is one of this movie’s deeper satisfactions.
  62. The Young Karl Marx
    The great virtue of The Young Karl Marx is its clarity, its ability to perceive the way the eddies of personal experience flow within the wider stream of history.
  63. Game Night
    The movie is a pointed reminder that Ms. McAdams is one of cinema’s most accomplished and appealing comic actresses. It’s almost heartbreaking to contemplate how amazing she would be in a new comedy that was more than intermittently O.K.
  64. Honor Up
    For all of its failings, the movie sometimes manages to bring a scary whiff of the street into its sounds and images.
  65. The Housemaid
    The result is a good-looking but overstuffed genre pileup that confuses as often as it compels.
  66. The Party
    The Party is a brittle, unfunny attempt at comedy that features some very fine actors and a lot of empty chatter.
  67. Nostalgia
    A soggy string of Hallmark moments designed to interrogate the value of the objects we cherish, the movie is front-loaded with major stars and squelching with sentiment.
  68. Western
    Western is as precise as a dropped pin on a GPS map, which makes its sense of mystery all the more powerful.
  69. The Boy Downstairs
    How, and in whose apartment, Diana and Ben will confess their emotions is the subject of Ms. Brooks’s pallid dramedy, which leaves its actors looking somewhat stranded, as if waiting for Neil Simon zingers that were never written.
  70. Early Man
    The genius of Early Man is that it cannot possibly be spoiled. The animation is foolproof in its combination of ingenuity and obviousness, and the script obliterates the difference between a laugher and a groaner.
  71. Tehran Taboo
    Subtlety and aesthetic elegance — the jerky animation complements the blunt tone — are not among the film’s virtues. Tehran Taboo aims to expose systemic hypocrisy; in that respect, it is brisk and bracing.
  72. Double Lover
    Double Lover, which Mr. Ozon “freely adapted” from the Joyce Carol Oates book “Lives of the Twins,” spins its influences into a frenzy that ultimately reveals the story to be very much its own thing. And a crazy, and eventually strangely moving, thing it is. As elaborate as its visuals are, the movie is also intimate.
  73. Golden Exits
    Mr. Perry is such a good filmmaker that he can make the embarrassing and the unbearable insistently, fascinatingly engrossing (and often funny).
  74. Fifty Shades Freed
    As popular as this window-fogging franchise has become, its flaccid finale is likely critic proof. But if I can persuade just one of you to bypass its milquetoast masochism and watch the stratospherically superior “9 1/2 Weeks” instead, then I will have done my job.
  75. The Female Brain
    With tender performances and dubious conclusions, this story is best appreciated as an explanation for why people seek out the false comfort of gendered pseudoscience. But by fitting characters into formulas, The Female Brain fails to observe the flexibility of human experience.
  76. Entanglement
    Impressively photographed and perkily paced, Jason Filiatrault’s story never droops quite as much as its lead character, injecting a welcome poignancy that tempers the cuteness.
  77. Becks
    Perhaps recognizing their biggest asset, the directors, Elizabeth Rohrbaugh and Daniel Powell, allow Ms. Hall’s numbers to play out at length... If the screenplay perhaps backs itself into a corner, its irresolution feels true to life.
  78. Permission
    If unwise remarks at a dinner can cast a pall over a longstanding relationship, then a great ending can redeem and even force reconsideration of an otherwise middling film.
  79. Peter Rabbit
    Its story line is clean; the live-action actors, particularly Rose Byrne (as Bea, an artist who paints portraits of the bunnies), bring their onscreen-appeal A game; and the computer-generated animals are charming, albeit lacking in the particular gentle winsomeness of Potter’s originals.
  80. Seeing Allred
    A documentary that’s remarkably engaging despite treating its rough-and-tumble hero with kid gloves.
  81. The Peacemaker
    The movie is a fascinating portrait that is if anything too brief.
  82. The 15:17 to Paris
    Mr. Eastwood, who has long favored a lean, functional directing style, practices an economy here that makes some of his earlier movies look positively baroque. He almost seems to be testing the limits of minimalism, seeing how much artifice he can strip away and still achieve some kind of dramatic impact.
  83. Black Panther
    It wouldn’t be a Marvel production without manly skirmishes and digital avatars. Yet in its emphasis on black imagination, creation and liberation, the movie becomes an emblem of a past that was denied and a future that feels very present. And in doing so opens up its world, and yours, beautifully.
  84. The Cloverfield Paradox
    The actual movie is strangely plain, eyesore-overlit and uselessly frantic.
  85. Winchester
    Despite the typically elevating presence of Helen Mirren, this super-silly feature (the fifth from the Australian brothers Peter and Michael Spierig) stubbornly resists being classed up.
  86. 24 Frames
    24 Frames can’t help but be affecting because it is Kiarostami’s final movie. But it’s intellectually uninvolving, and its technical limitations prove frustrating.
  87. Legend of the Mountain (1979)
    All these attractions are a necessary balm given that Ho turns out to be a deeply uninvolving character (Mr. Shih mostly smiles, grimaces or looks amazed), a wan placeholder for a character in a narratively thin film that runs over three very leisurely hours.
  88. The Music of Silence
    This blah trudge from cradle to stage will be catnip to his fans and Ambien to everyone else.
  89. The Cage Fighter
    The Cage Fighter is not riveting from moment to moment, but Mr. Unay allows the movie’s themes to click into place beautifully toward the end.
  90. Before We Vanish
    Mr. Kurosawa, a prolific and skilled genre master, spins this parable with a light, nimble touch, punctuating heavy passages of exposition with punchy, modest action sequences and snatches of incongruously bouncy music.
  91. In the Intense Now
    Those dreading 50th-anniversary greatest-hits medleys will find solace, enlightenment and surprise in João Moreira Salles’s In the Intense Now, a bittersweet, ruminative documentary essay composed of footage from the era accompanied by thoughtful, disarmingly personal voice-over narration.
  92. Padmaavat
    Mr. Bhansali is painting with a broad brush.
  93. The Opera House
    To its credit, The Opera House, directed by Susan Froemke, only sometimes plays like a fund-raising tool.
  94. Shot in the Dark
    This director isn’t afraid of silence, and he’s prepared to let a quiet moment speak for itself. Attentive viewing is required, and rewarded.
  95. The Last Family
    The tragedies in this family’s life are nearly constant, but Mr. Matuszynski approaches them with a tone that’s matter-of-fact while also partaking in the particular wry irony that has been a hallmark of Polish cinema since the early 1960s.
  96. Like Me
    With little more than the superficial psychology of shallow characters to guide the movie’s squeamish images, Like Me irritates, but it proves unable to provoke more than mild gut reactions.
  97. Please Stand By
    Despite [Fanning's] commitment to the role — and the generally fine supporting performances — this timorous tale sidesteps uncomfortable realities in favor of soothing whimsy and preordained uplift.
  98. West of the Jordan River
    Through interviews with Israeli politicians, and Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank, West of the Jordan River gives voice to peace-seeking residents on both sides of the conflict.
  99. The Clapper
    Mashing limp romance and artless satire into a ludicrously contrived plot, The Clapper lurches from one mirthlessly eccentric scene to another.
  100. Have a Nice Day
    Leisurely and deliberate, intelligent and casually cruel, Have a Nice Day is a stone-cold gangster thriller whose violence unfolds in passionless bursts.
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