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. Far from the Madding Crowd
    The most obvious thing to say about Far From the Madding Crowd is also the most bizarre, given the source material. It’s buoyant, pleasant and easygoing. That’s a recommendation of sorts, and also an expression of disappointment.
  2. Sleepwalk with Me
    These episodes, some staged as surreal dream sequences, inject this otherwise prosaic-looking movie with a visual pizazz that makes Sleepwalk With Me more than just a glorified stand-up act.
  3. Pleasantville
    Ingenious fantasy.
  4. Tales from the Gimli Hospital
    It is a strange piece of work.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Blackmail
    It is a murder story based on a play by Charles Bennett and in spite of its many artificial situations and convenient ideas it possesses a dramatic value that holds the attention.
  6. The Perfect Candidate
    The movie’s lived-in acting and unhurried pace make it a better-than-palatable viewing experience.
  7. The Bergman Trilogy
    Intimate, compelling film.
  8. Requiem for a Dream
    Be warned: it's a downer, and a knockout.
  9. Separate Lies
    The movie is so busy constructing its labyrinthine plot that it often forgets to plumb the souls of its characters.
  10. No One Knows About Persian Cats
    The film is careful to avoid explicit political statement, but its reticence makes its critique of the Iranian regime all the more devastating.
  11. Where the Wild Things Are
    With Where the Wild Things Are Jonze has made a work of art that stands up to its source and, in some instances, surpasses it.
  12. Fallen Angels
    Fallen Angels certainly abounds in visual pizazz, clever in jokes and trendy pop references, but such things can carry a movie only so far.
  13. Paint It Black
    It’s not an easy movie to embrace, but it lingers.
  14. Kékszakállú
    Even seasoned defenders of cryptic formalism may find it amorphous. The characters are never named, the camera work is static, and little that’s conceptually interesting materializes.
  15. Little Fish
    Once you’re swept up in Emma and Jude’s romance — it’s not hard, even though the montages veer a little too precious — the skimmed-over science matters little. This is sci-fi rooted more in feelings than fact. Its resonance is similar to “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” though it’s arguably antithetical in plot.
  16. Run & Jump
    Run & Jump is as real and messy as life itself.
  17. All My Friends Hate Me
    Dancing on the line between funny and menacing, the ingenious script (by Stourton and Tom Palmer) is a tonal tease, a limbo where every joke has a threatening edge and every “Just kidding!” only increases Pete’s unease.
  18. Animals
    Mr. Schiffli shoots in a fluid style, tweaking colors and focus to register changes in perception and feeling. Anxiety dissolves in sunshine and dreamy music, gathers up again in darker colors and more dissonant sounds and then winds up to a pitch of panic.
  19. Ingrid Goes West
    Ingrid Goes West comes close to saying something sharp about how social media promotes envy and the illusion of connectivity, but when a comedy chooses such an obvious target, it should have the courtesy to aim from an oblique angle.
  20. The Breaking Ice
    The setting is rife with metaphoric potential, and it is here that Chen falters as a director.
  21. In Search of Beethoven
    The best thing about In Search of Beethoven, Phil Grabsky’s biography of the composer, is the company he brings along on the hunt.
  22. Blood Brother
    A stirring documentary directed with narrative depth and unguarded heart.
  23. As It Is in Heaven
    This low-budget debut by Joshua Overbay cooks a surprising amount of tension from the barest minimum of ingredients.
  24. Revoir Paris
    Even as Winocour piles on too many complications, she retains an appreciable astringency — call it a sense of emotional realism about what it means to actually survive — that keeps bathos at bay. Together with the superb Efira, she earns your tears honestly.
  25. RBG
    Directed by Betsy West and Julie Cohen, the film is a jaunty assemblage of interviews, public appearances and archival material, organized to illuminate its subject’s temperament and her accomplishments so far.
  26. Indigo Girls: It's Only Life After All
    The film is especially good about contextualizing the band’s emergence in the midst of condescension (at best) from the mainstream media.
  27. Roman de gare
    A thriller, a murder mystery and a somewhat self-conscious literary puzzle. All of that is entertaining enough, if a bit preposterous and overdone, but the twists and convolutions of the film’s beginning and end enable a middle that is dizzying domestic comedy.
  28. Earth
    A powerful and disturbing reminder of how a civilization can suddenly crack under certain pressures.
  29. Carnage
    Ms. Gleize, through a series of oblique, half-comic scenes and meticulous, rhyming visual compositions, offers up an elegant, discursive essay on carnality and carnivorousness -- on sex, death, meat and the ravening hunger for companionship.
  30. WTC the First 24 Hours
    A meditation on the scale of a catastrophe so enormous that all the assembled resources seem paltry and inadequate.
  31. Carandiru
    Exudes a throbbing flesh-and-blood intensity so compelling that it's impossible to avert your eyes.
  32. Twin Falls Idaho
    An eerily effective film...Twin Falls Idaho has style, gravity and originality to spare.
  33. A Woman Is a Woman
    It is the work of a master -- of more than one, for that matter. Mr. Godard, who once called it "my first real film," was showing the obsession with, and mastery of, cinematic technique that would make him one of the culture heroes of the 1960's.
  34. Shadow of the Vampire
    At once wildly metaphorical and distressingly literal-minded, Shadow of the Vampire tries, with mixed success, to be scary, funny and profound all at once.
  35. Collateral
    Pitched between interludes of anxious intimacy and equally nerve-shredding set pieces, Collateral scores its points with underhand precision.
  36. The Third Wife
    It’s too cool for melodrama and too pretty for politics, and the drama of May’s experience occupies a middle ground between pity and indignation.
  37. The Survivor
    While Levinson is not working from his own history as in “Diner” or “Avalon,” The Survivor, partly because of its subject matter and postwar milieu, feels of a piece with those overtly personal films. Whatever its flaws, it’s powerful.
  38. Eternal Beauty
    For the first half-hour or so of Eternal Beauty, Roberts and Hawkins take an unusual and intermittently illuminating approach to depicting mental illness. . . . But the movie doesn’t keep up its good work.
  39. House of Sand and Fog
    The nearly flawless execution of a deeply flawed premise.
  40. Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D
    The film is an unabashed promotion for space exploration.
  41. Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams
    Throughout Grbavica the desire to forget and the need to remember are at loggerheads. At Sara’s school the psychological wounds of the war are being handed down to her generation through the separation of heroes and nonheroes. Fathers pass their weapons down to their sons. Even as you leave a war behind, you bring it with you.
  42. Billie
    If Billie gives short shrift to its subject’s artistry while underscoring her life’s squalor, it still offers pockets of valuable insight.
  43. The Tenant
    The film is superbly acted by Mr. Polanski, Mr. Douglas and Miss Winters, who might not be entirely convincing as a Parisian concierge in a realistic film, but who fits into this nightmare perfectly.
  44. Lourdes
    One of the pleasures of this intelligent, rigorously thoughtful, somewhat sly film is that it takes place in the space between the inexplicable (no explanation is possible) and the unexplained (enlightenment might be around the corner).
  45. Testament
    Miss Littman, who directed and was co-producer of Testament, gives its individual scenes a very realistic air, even if the film's overall conception is sometimes strained.
  46. Clockers
    Beyond its grit and nonchalance, this story has a resigned, reflective, hard-earned wisdom that's unusual in an American film about such familiarly lurid subject matter. It's even more unusual in a film by Spike Lee.
  47. Starry Starry Night
    Crammed with color and imagination, every one of Jake Pollock's gorgeously photographed images feels timelessly suspended between innocence and awareness.
  48. The Mighty Quinn
    The Mighty Quinn is an entertaining, touristy sort of movie that manages to be lighthearted without being soft in the head.
  49. #Female Pleasure
    [An] illuminating if one-sided overview of the myriad ways in which women’s sexuality is controlled and subjugated.
  50. Things Change
    An enchanted lark about wiseguys and those hustlers who think they are wiseguys, but aren't.
  51. Kusama - Infinity
    Kusama — Infinity, while conventionally structured, provides ample, illuminating access to an artist’s way of thinking and working.
  52. Manhattan Murder Mystery
    Although Manhattan Murder Mystery struggles with its own contrivances, it achieves a gentle, nostalgic grace and a hint of un-self-conscious wisdom. Those who appreciate the long, daring continuum of Mr. Allen's work will be glad to find him simply carrying on.
  53. Don't Breathe
    It will probably please fans of this simple genre with its solid suspense, murky lighting and “gotcha!” scares.
  54. Neshoba
    This film is a document of hope, progress and idealism but also a reminder that the deep springs of bigotry and violence that fed a long, vicious campaign of domestic terrorism have not dried up.
  55. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
    The technical minutiae, the solemn silliness and the preachy tone occasionally sounded here...are all essential to the Star Trek mystique. Whatever it is, it seems durable beyond anyone's wildest dreams. And Mr. Nimoy, by injecting some extra levity this time, has done a great deal to assure the series' longevity.
  56. 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.
  57. You're a Big Boy Now
    The charm of his picture lies in the casual kookiness of his characters, plus the random and childlike unreality of the lovely, fragile, dead-panned Miss Deneuve.
  58. Beyond the Gates
    Though less reassuring and not as dramatically coherent as "Hotel Rwanda," it still packs a hard punch.
  59. Training Day
    Mr. Washington's dry-ice grandeur -- the predator's reflexes contrasting with a pensive mouth -- deserves regard, and his powerhouse virtuosity will almost guarantee him an Oscar nomination.
  60. Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger
    Its powerful narratives leaves you with the strong suspicion that the whole story has not yet been told.
  61. I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story
    This film, by Dave LaMattina and Chad Walker, reminds us that even the most omnipresent cultural phenomena were created by someone, usually through a combination of hard work and happenstance.
  62. Strongman
    Though filming his hulking hero off and on for nine long years, he (Levy) has created a work that feels remarkably out of time, a snapshot of a man - and a relationship - running in circles.
  63. Aliens of the Deep
    A visual adventure worthy of that much degraded adjective, awesome.
  64. Makala
    To ponder the colonial implications of a French director exoticizing a Congolese man whose family eats rats for meals is to realize that a movie can be heartwarming and heartless at once.
  65. Bagdad Cafe
    Bagdad Cafe is too slow-paced to work as a comedy, and its screenplay manages simultaneously to be both shapeless and pat.
  66. Mayor of the Sunset Strip
    Keeps its claws carefully retracted. That's probably for the best, since the documentary still leaves a bitter aftertaste.
  67. You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!
    The young cast proves deft with the film’s clever script, by Alison Peck (based on the 2005 novel by Fiona Rosenbloom), and the director Sammi Cohen indulges the virgin-mojito passions of preteens while avoiding nostalgia, thankfully.
  68. Blinded by the Light
    These songs have the power to move, inspire, make you dance. For the first time in my experience of Springsteen, they made me want to hide under my seat.
  69. Home
    Home brilliantly illuminates the invisible damage inflicted by years of deprivation. When survival hinges on trusting no one but yourself, the kindness of strangers can seem too good to be true.
  70. The Sky Turns
    The overall effect is one of lulling beauty and immersion in the landscape and culture - certainly enough to carry you through the film - but also an irritating sensation of being led by the nose through Ms. Álvarez's highly aestheticized ruminations.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Johnny Got His Gun
    Insistent virtue, without ideas, becomes demagoguery.
  72. Come As You Are
    It softens the cruder edges of the original, but the candor with which Erik Linthorst’s script regards the characters’ sexual desires — coupled with the winning performances of the actors — leavens any sentimentalism.
  73. A Prince
    That passion could bloom in such spontaneous and unexpected forms is part of this enigmatic film’s potency.
  74. Sketches of Frank Gehry
    This absorbing documentary, the first directed by Sydney Pollack, is a modest undertaking, offering glimpses of the architect and his work rather than a full-scale portrait or catalogue raisonné.
  75. The Big Picture
    Paul is not a sociopath like Tom Ripley, and the movie does not convey the same diabolical Hitchcockian sense of being manipulated by a slightly sadistic master puppeteer. As the story sprawls across the screen, it darts from one incident to the next as though it were inventing itself as it goes along.
  76. Pasolini
    The blend of pornography and humor, obnoxiousness and elegance, sweetness and cruelty reminds you that this is, above all, an Abel Ferrara movie. And the splendor of Pasolini lies in its essentially collaborative nature.
  77. Breath
    Mr. Baker does nice work with the actors — his open-faced young leads are sincere, appealing, believable — and there’s a lot to like about Breath, including its attention to natural beauty and to how surfing can become a bridge to that splendor.
  78. Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
    The focus of this bizarre Finnish fairy tale - as black as anything the Brothers Grimm could have dreamed up - is a sinister old codger who chews off ears and whose demon minion kidnaps innocent children. Ho ho no!
  79. The Woman Who Loves Giraffes
    Blessed with a trove of 16-millimeter film footage captured during this yearlong adventure, the director, Alison Reid, uses it as the foundation for a far-ranging story of scientific discovery, sexual discrimination and environmental alarm.
  80. Yes, God, Yes
    Burdened by a silly R rating that may deter the very youngsters who are likely to enjoy it most, Yes, God, Yes (written and directed by Karen Maine) fights back with an appealing lead and an overwhelmingly innocent tone.
  81. 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.
  82. In July
    Mr. Akin pursues his happy, silly love story without embarrassment, and In July is ultimately more endearing than irritating.
  83. Tape
    In portraying this threesome, Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard and Uma Thurman give the most psychologically acute performances of their film careers.
  84. Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop
    By and large Mr. Hoch's portrayals are as harsh and authentic as a police photograph, but an occasional touch of sentimentality creeps in.
  85. An Injury to One
    Revels in directorial assertiveness, including an omniscient narrator and an intrusive use of slick, magazine-style graphics to identify characters and spell out slogans.
  86. Elite Squad: The Enemy Within
    The carnage, although explicit and frequent, is not grotesquely overdone. But except for Mr. Moura's Nascimento, the movie doesn't have the same richness of characters. Psychologically he is the whole show; the rest are stereotypes.
  87. Videoheaven
    The observations range from the incisive to the grandiose, and at nearly three hours, Videoheaven could stand a tighter edit.
  88. Black Book
    Black Book works only if you take it for the pulpiest of fiction, not a historical gloss, its stated claims to "true events" notwithstanding.
  89. Lucky Grandma
    The director Sasie Sealy’s feature debut has style and keenly observed visual humor. Each scene is paced as perfectly as a punchline.
  90. Girls Trip
    Girls Trip adds complexity to the picture by bringing in class, even as it dispatches with whiteness, showing it the door so that these women can find themselves while rediscovering the power and pleasures of sisterhood.
  91. Ed Wood
    If Ed Wood has a major failing, it's the lack of momentum. Wood's career had nowhere to go, and to some extent the film has the same problem.
  92. Next Goal Wins
    In some ways, this is just another underdogs-go-for-it sports movie. In others, it is as sensitive and observant as an Edith Wharton novel.
  93. The Way He Looks
    This winning movie — directed by Daniel Ribeiro, making his feature debut — dexterously weaves the social challenges of adolescence into a story of broader self-discovery.
  94. A Walk on the Moon
    Even when it turns turbulent, the film sustains its warm summer glow, and makes itself a conversation piece about the moral issues it means to raise.
  95. Little Man Tate
    As directed by Ms. Foster, the film has a kind of purity of purpose and control that is very rare in mass-market movies. It avoids a lot of sentimental nonsense. It is also sparely (and well-) written by Scott Frank.
  96. What Happened Was...
    In performance, as in the rest of this film, Mr. Noonan only haltingly captures what he seeks.
  97. The Saint of Second Chances
    The movie was directed by Morgan Neville (“20 Feet From Stardom”) and Jeff Malmberg (“Marwencol”), and is a tad more fanciful than their prior work. But fancy is a good fit for the Veecks, it turns out.
  98. Florence Foster Jenkins
    Ms. Streep is a delight, hilarious when she’s singing and convincingly on edge at all times.
  99. Splash
    Splash could have been shorter, but it probably couldn't have been much sweeter. Only purists will quibble with the blissfully happy ending, which has the lovers swimming through a shimmering underwater paradise that is supposed to be the bottom of the East River.
  100. Dragonslayer
    Seamlessly dovetailing style and subject, Dragonslayer, a poetic and affectionate portrait of the professional skateboarder Josh Sandoval.
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