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. Maze Runner: The Death Cure
    The director, Wes Ball, knows how to move his camera around a futuristic medical compound, and the filmmaking brio — especially the sights of Earth’s last city, shot in Cape Town — mitigates the eye rolls prompted by the plot.
  2. Forever My Girl
    The director, Bethany Ashton Wolf, who adapted the screenplay from, yes, a romance novel by Heidi McLaughlin, can concoct some Hallmark-greeting-card-quality shots, but has little flair for piecing them together. The lead actors are very pretty.
  3. Tall: The American Skyscraper and Louis Sullivan
    The film is useful in part because it is so frankly argumentative. The critical appreciation of art is always advanced more effectively by partisanship than by neutrality.
  4. The Banishment
    The first two-thirds are an extraordinary slow burn that provides ample time to admire Mr. Zvyagintsev’s talent with the wide frame. The movie is marred by an unsatisfying resolution, which has a coyness better suited to literature.
  5. Mama Africa: Miriam Makeba
    Like many biographical documentaries, it resembles a lengthy highlight reel of crucial events from its subject’s life, without much in the way of style or perspective.
  6. Den of Thieves
    The film is generous with action and twists, even if some don’t track. For January, a month Hollywood reserves for dogs, this is an admirably weird movie.
  7. A Ciambra
    Mr. Carpignano has a shrewd sense not only of the character’s psychology, but also of the audience’s expectations, and our tendency to confuse realism with magical thinking.
  8. 12 Strong
    For devotees of cinematic blowouts and dedicated students of screen masculinity (like me), 12 Strong is premium, Grade A catnip. Directed by the newcomer Nicolai Fuglsig, it is generally watchable, if unsurprisingly easier on the eyes than on the ears or brain.
  9. The Road Movie
    The camera offers no protection; it only provides a witness. Fortunately for audiences, it’s more pleasurable to witness anarchy than it is to experience it.
  10. Mary and The Witch's Flower
    The spell Mr. Yonebayashi casts is effective, but also ephemeral. It’s minor magic.
  11. Mom and Dad
    Mr. Taylor offers up nothing but glitchy editing and bad vibes.
  12. Kangaroo
    This film isn’t always pretty, but its message is necessary.
  13. The Final Year
    In the final half-hour, things start picking up, not just because of the impending surprise victory of Donald J. Trump and the way these players react to it.
  14. Small Town Crime
    The Nelmses don’t make enough of their more intriguing ideas (Mike’s familial history) and end up right where you expect they would, bang bang. But Mr. Hawkes keeps you tethered, whether he’s navigating the movie’s uneven tones or peeling down one of cinema’s lonely highways in a muscle car so lovingly shot it deserves a co-star credit.
  15. Beuys
    Even if you don’t need Beuys justified or explained to you, the movie is an exhilarating portrait of a unique truth-teller.
  16. Proud Mary
    Ms. Henson, ever simmering, takes Mary’s moral conundrum very seriously. Her expressive eyes and nuanced body language work well for the character; she can put across a major change in attitude just by shifting a hip. The script, though, doesn’t give her a whole lot of material with which to credibly enact her character’s crisis.
  17. What Lies Upstream
    Is “What Lies Upstream” persuasive in all respects? No. Will it make you think twice about what’s gone unnoticed in your tap water? Absolutely.
  18. Dim the Fluorescents
    Mr. Warth, who wrote the screenplay with Miles Barstead, creates a flawed tale of female friendship and the artist’s everlasting struggle. Unfortunately, Dim the Fluorescents can’t keep its story together.
  19. The Commuter
    It’s not even very good as a genre exercise, and can’t always keep track of which genre muscles it wants to flex. For a while it’s a locked-room mystery. Then it’s a runaway-train thriller.
  20. My Art
    My Art invests far too much in the conceit. (The re-creations look like unfunny “Airplane!” parodies.) Part of the problem is that Ms. Simmons has surrounded herself with more interesting actors, including a scene-stealing Parker Posey.
  21. Saturday Church
    It is a disarmingly and consistently sensitive movie that remains engaging even when its reach sometimes exceeds its grasp.
  22. Freak Show
    Mr. Lawther is sympathetic and appealing as Billy, but Ms. Styler seems to mistake broad strokes for stylistic daring, and her colorful but diffuse movie never jells.
  23. Bitter Money
    It’s not clear that the director quite found what he was looking for.
  24. Humor Me
    The movie never gets too deep, which is half of its charm. The other half involves the low-key comic performances by a stellar cast including Annie Potts and Bebe Neuwirth.
  25. Abe & Phil's Last Poker Game
    The medical tidbits, however awkwardly presented, are the most distinctive aspects of the script. The flat direction, alas, is not the work of a filmmaker.
  26. Acts of Violence
    This dopey action thriller harks back to grindhouse pictures of the ’70s and ’80s, although it’s too tasteful, if that’s the word, to consistently exploit the more lurid implications of its sensationalist scenario.
  27. Lover for a Day
    There are times when the characters — and their director — surprise and genuinely delight.
  28. Vazante
    By the end, it’s hard not to wish that Ms. Thomas had traded a bit of her art-film drift for something more direct.
  29. The Insult
    There is something undeniably exhilarating about the film’s honest assessment of the never-ending conflict between decency and cruelty that rages in every nation, neighborhood and heart.
  30. Paddington 2
    Mr. King and his excellent team of actors and animators spin good writing and seamless digital effects into Rococo children’s entertainment. The gags don’t accumulate; they tessellate.
  31. Dark Meridian
    Chases, shootouts and showy camera moves are executed deftly enough, but given the frugal trappings, they play as overambitious — an attempt to make a storage tank of lemonade from one lemon.
  32. Devil's Gate
    It’s not good, but it could pass muster among midnight-movie enthusiasts or curious stoners.
  33. Django
    The finale enlivens an otherwise staid biopic, but whether the film has earned a moment of uplift is unclear.
  34. The Green Fog
    As a chronicle of how San Francisco has changed over the years — and as a salute to the city’s role as a back lot for masters like Erich von Stroheim and Howard Hawks — The Green Fog is a wonder of excavation and urban history. What it says about Hitchcock is more ambiguous.
  35. In the Land of Pomegranates
    A tough and cleareyed look at how things are, rather than how we want them to be.
  36. Blame
    Blame is earnest but underdeveloped. At the same time, it’s overdetermined and often overplayed.
  37. In Between
    In Between, Ms. Hamoud’s debut feature, is an unusually welcoming and engaging film, inviting you to become a part of the circle of friends it depicts with such energy and warmth. For that reason, it can also be frustrating.
  38. Anatomy of a Male Ballet Dancer
    In retrospect, the sheer amount of gush in the movie, all the praise and feverish shouts of bravo, underscores the limits of affirmational documentaries. It is also a reminder that a movie’s meaning is made (and remade) by its viewers, not just its content.
  39. Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool
    Landing lightly on the loneliness of fame and the ravages of aging, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool is a fond farewell to a distinctive talent. Yet I couldn’t help wishing it had spent less time anticipating Grahame’s death and a little more illuminating her life.
  40. In the Fade
    The ending is puzzling, when it wants to be devastating, and the political and personal sides of the story, rather than illuminating each other, fight to a stalemate. Ms. Kruger, however, who won the best actress award at Cannes in May, leaves a vivid, haunting impression.
  41. Phantom Thread
    On first viewing, the captivating strangeness of the mood and the elegant threading of the plot are likely to hold your attention, but later you can go back to savor the lustrous colors, the fine-grained performances and the romantic mystery that holds the whole thing together.
  42. All the Money in the World
    All the Money in the World revs up beautifully, first as a thriller. But while the kidnapping is the movie’s main event, it is only part of a story that is, by turns, a sordid, desperate and anguished tragedy about money.
  43. Molly's Game
    It is hard not to wonder how this movie might have turned out if Mr. Sorkin had decided his protagonist was as much a weasel as the one he wrote for “The Social Network,” another story of an American striver. It’s hard not to wonder, too, how this story might play if its protagonist wasn’t a woman who, as this movie sees it, needed so much male defending.
  44. Father Figures
    Distinguished mainly by its overqualified cast and lack of inspiration, Father Figures can’t decide whether it’s a gross-out comedy or an uplifting tale of brotherly love; it embraces the worst of both worlds.
  45. A German Life
    A German Life is likely to be the last new movie of its kind: a documentary that presents contemporary testimony from someone who witnessed the inner workings of the Nazi high command.
  46. Along With the Gods: The Two Worlds
    Story clarity and emotional depth tend to evaporate amid the visual pyrotechnics.
  47. Crooked House
    The superb cast provides mild pleasures, as do some aspects of the elaborate mystery itself. And that’s all, folks.
  48. Hangman
    Hangman is riddled with holes — blank spaces, if you will.
  49. Drawing Home
    A mild film, Drawing Home could use an electrical charge, or an undercurrent of urgency. The pacing is uneven, and the movie feels slow in spots and too long overall, even though it lacks detail that would have enriched it. An internet search offers a fuller idea about the real lives of the subjects.
  50. Happy End
    It has an uncommonly strong ensemble cast...but the movie belongs to Mr. Trintignant.
  51. Downsizing
    Downsizing is an ambitious movie about the value of modesty, and its faults are proportionate to its insights. I sort of wish it felt like a bigger deal, but maybe that’s my problem.
  52. Bright
    You’ll find beatings, shootouts, car crashes, awkward analogies and a measure of buddy badinage in “Bright,” but true enchantment is in short supply.
  53. The Post
    As a filmmaker, Mr. Spielberg invariably comes down on the side of optimism; here, that hopefulness feels right. It also feels like a rallying cry.
  54. Hostiles
    Hostiles itself wants to be both a throwback and an advance, not so much a new kind of western as every possible kind — vintage, revisionist, elegiac, feminist. What makes the movie interesting is the sincerity and intelligence with which it pursues that ambition, heroically unaware that the mission is doomed from the start.
  55. Pitch Perfect 3
    With a plot as unfocused as its freshly graduated characters, the shaggy Pitch Perfect 3 gets by on karaoke logic: What makes for a good time isn’t the song you sing, but the company you keep.
  56. The Greatest Showman
    An amusement park version of P.T. Barnum is fine, as far as that goes, but if you are going to aim for family-friendly fun, you need to get the fun part right.
  57. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
    The performances by Mr. Johnson, Mr. Hart and Mr. Black seem informed by the conviction that if they amuse themselves, they will also amuse others. They are not entirely wrong, but they are also not sufficiently right.
  58. Permanent
    As the parents, Mr. Wilson and Ms. Arquette seem just about as tired as the characters they’re playing. As Auralie, Ms. McLean is appealing and fresh-faced and could do well in a better coming-of-age movie in a few years.
  59. Soufra
    Crisply directed by Thomas Morgan, the film depicts a succession of challenges facing Ms. Shaar, a smart, understated and tenacious entrepreneur.
  60. Birdboy: The Forgotten Children
    Its enchantments are dark, its ideas somber and brutal.
  61. Sundowners
    Closure may be missing, but at least glimpses of promising Canadian performers are in abundant supply.
  62. Desolation
    Working a low body count and a slow burn, Desolation is a decent short film that’s been unwisely expanded to feature length.
  63. The Rape of Recy Taylor
    The miracle, though, is that the movie isn’t a diatribe. Its voices...are gentle and persuasive, using the horrific details of the rape and its aftermath as ballast to stabilize a heart-wrenching history of systemic injustice.
  64. The Ballad of Lefty Brown
    While Mr. Moshé’s ambitions can be frustratingly modest, he does know that — however fraudulent the genre’s myths — the image of a man riding a horse into the sunset is in our cinematic DNA.
  65. Beyond Skyline
    I did admire this movie’s near-lunatic genre-hopping.
  66. Killing for Love
    Marcus Vetter and Karin Steinberger’s sprawling documentary probably dives into the weeds too quickly and could have used a tighter edit. Still, drawing on a wealth of courtroom video, the film lays out a persuasive argument for reasonable doubt.
  67. Ferdinand
    Ferdinand, the new computer-animated adaptation from Carlos Saldanha (the “Ice Age” movies), speaks to its own time in a different way, dutifully adhering to the template for contemporary children’s films while avoiding much personality or distinction
  68. Miss Kiet's Children
    As in Nicolas Philibert’s similar French documentary “To Be and to Have” (2002), the relative absence of conflict in the interactions between a seasoned teacher and wonderful pupils grows tedious at feature length, and there is — presumably by design — relatively little meat on this documentary’s bones.
  69. Just Getting Started
    In spite of the charm and discipline of the stars, the jokes misfire and the scenes creak and stumble.
  70. Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi
    Yes, the latest “Star Wars” installment is here, and, lo, it is a satisfying, at times transporting entertainment. Remarkably, it has visual wit and a human touch, no small achievement for a seemingly indestructible machine that revved up 40 years ago and shows no signs of sputtering out (ever).
  71. Foxtrot
    The writer and director Samuel Maoz (“Lebanon”) has an exacting eye. The framing is meticulous; soon it’s also very purposefully working your nerves.
  72. Hollow in the Land
    Alison closely resembles Jennifer Lawrence’s character in “Winter’s Bone,” another self-sufficient young woman whose family and community turn against her. This movie is not as tense, but it gets close thanks to Ms. Agron’s resolute performance and the movie’s hostile small town setting.
  73. Bullet Head
    Is Bullet Head good? In truth, it’s drab, derivative and more than slightly silly, but it’s tough to dislike like a movie that proceeds as if the 1990s cycle of Quentin Tarantino knockoffs never ended and that uses the prospect of gory canine violence in service of loud and persistent pro-dog cheerleading.
  74. Quest
    I’ve rarely seen a movie about citizenship as quietly eloquent as Quest.
  75. Kaleidoscope
    Or maybe not: Committing completely to Carl’s wobbly perceptions, the filmmakers mire us in a hackneyed swamp of narrative uncertainty.
  76. I, Tonya
    As I, Tonya skips here and there and thickens the plot, it becomes increasingly baffling why the filmmakers decided to put a comic spin on this pathetic, dispiriting story. No matter how hard the movie tries to coax out laughs, there’s little about Ms. Harding, her circumstances or her choices that skews as funny.
  77. Bill Frisell: A Portrait
    The movie is at its liveliest when it depicts Mr. Frisell making his distinctive sound with a variety of colleagues. And, fortunately, Ms. Franz includes a lot of such footage.
  78. The Disaster Artist
    It’s a divertingly funny movie, but its breeziness can also feel overstated, at times glib and a bit of a dodge.
  79. Big Time
    Clearly, the architect and the filmmaker are tight, which does not entirely benefit Big Time.
  80. Rosa Chumbe
    The women’s missteps seem to come straight out of a cautionary morality play. And the movie’s dismal outlook even extends to the dimly-lit cinematography. It doesn’t need a miracle to see the light. It needs a full pardon.
  81. Sins of the Flesh
    No doubt subtleties have been lost in translation, but the film is best viewed as an overripe, noir-tinged tragedy.
  82. 32 Pills: My Sister's Suicide
    The more Hope’s own obsession grows, the more involving the movie gets, even as it raises ethical questions about its making — and about those who continue to watch.
  83. The New Radical
    It’s possible to fully, and vehemently, disagree with Mr. Wilson and Mr. Taaki yet still see their points. That can make The New Radical unsettling. It also makes it a film worth watching.
  84. The Dancer
    This movie, which stars Stéphanie Sokolinski, the French musician known as Soko, in the role of Fuller, only comes alive during the dance sequences.
  85. Voyeur
    Choosing not to delve too deeply into the mind of either man — or to question Mr. Talese’s journalistic ethics and less-than-scrupulous fact-checking — the directors are content to mostly watch as each vies for control of the movie, and his legacy. It’s an entertainingly desperate joust, playing out beneath defiantly unattractive lighting.
  86. The Shape of Water
    The Shape of Water is partly a code-scrambled fairy tale, partly a genetically modified monster movie, and altogether wonderful.
  87. Love Beats Rhymes
    The script by Nicole Jefferson Asher toggles between sharp observations about wordcraft and some “Dynasty”- or Tyler Perry-level soap operatics. RZA’s direction lacks visual personality, but he keeps the narrative moving and elicits strong performances from his cast.
  88. The Tribes of Palos Verdes
    The Malloys’ filmmaking never rises to the level of the actors’ nuanced performances. The actors are energized, but the camera enervates.
  89. Shadowman
    This intense documentary shows a driven creator walking the walk, so to speak, in the most perverse fashion possible. The story is both repellent and strangely inspiring.
  90. The Other Side of Hope
    The deadpan style of the acting functions as a vaccine against sentimentality, but there is no doubting the sincerity of this movie’s motives or the effectiveness of its methods.
  91. Wonder Wheel
    Wonder Wheel, Woody Allen’s latest movie, is one of his more unfortunate contributions to cinema.
  92. Loveless
    With its fastidious framing and angry-tough temperament, Loveless...earns its air of careful foreboding.
  93. AL DI QUA
    However worthy or political its intent, Al Di Qua is too overwrought to seem anything but trivializing.
  94. Naples '44
    It seems less a full-fledged movie than a trailer for a book.
  95. Eric Clapton: A Life in 12 Bars
    As a musical biography, this comes up short; it plays substantially better as a story of recovery and recovered integrity.
  96. Cuba and the Cameraman
    In part because of its political blind spots, Cuba and the Cameraman is captivating. (Whatever you think of Mr. Alpert’s perspective, it’s interesting.) But it’s mostly worth watching because of human stories like these.
  97. Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story
    Ms. Dean relates Lamarr’s ventures, those onscreen and off, with savvy and narrative snap, fluidly marshaling a mix of original interviews and archival material that includes film clips, home movies and other footage.
  98. Call Me by Your Name
    Call Me by Your Name is less a coming-of-age story, a tale of innocence and loss, than one about coming into sensibility. In that way, it is about the creation of a new man who, the story suggests, is liberated by pleasure that doesn’t necessarily establish sexual identity.
  99. Brimstone & Glory
    The film, accompanied by a percussive score from Benh Zeitlin and Dan Romer (both wrote the music for “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” which Mr. Zeitlin directed), has a wandering attention span and grows monotonous even at barely more than one hour.
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