The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,280 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: 9,381 out of 20280
  2. Mixed: 8,435 out of 20280
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20280
20280 movie reviews
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  1. Remote Area Medical
    Remote Area Medical, a documentary about the nonprofit organization of that name, certainly shows you what they look like, in blunt, tooth-decaying detail. But beyond that, it maddeningly refuses to take a stand or explore the questions it raises.
  2. The Farewell Party
    For all its sensitivity to the subject, The Farewell Party makes a number of tonal missteps of which the most glaring is the insertion of a musical number that upsets the movie’s otherwise sensible balance between the comedic and the morbid.
  3. Francofonia
    It’s a work of art that troubles the conscience, in part because it suggests, both by default and by design, that no art is innocent, and that its preservation, like its destruction, depends on the operation of power.
  4. The Space Race
    A theme running through the interviews is that for the U.S. government, sending a Black astronaut to space was more a matter of propaganda than racial justice.
  5. Drinking Buddies
    Drinking Buddies, Joe Swanberg’s nimble, knowing and altogether excellent new film, refuses to dance to the usual tune.
  6. The Theory of Everything
    Yes, The Theory of Everything has a different emphasis. But like so many cinematic lives of the famous, it loses track of the source of its subject’s fame.
  7. 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
    An icy-cool study of violence both mediated and horribly real.
  8. Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)
    Instead of seriously investigating corruption, money laundering and the buying of politicians, Manda Bala would rather spend its time showing slimy brown frogs slithering over one another as they are dumped from one container into another.
  9. The Descent
    What follows is a sensationally entertaining escalation of frights, the kind that make you wiggle and squirm as you alternately laugh at your own gullibility and marvel at the filmmaker's cunning and craft.
  10. Rana's Wedding
    Ms. Khoury, often filmed in close-up, gives a deeply sensitive, unsentimental performance, and the feelings that crowd on her face (sometimes more than one at a time) run the gamut from despair to ambivalence to hysterical frustration to tenderness and joy.
  11. The Yes Men Fix the World
    If the Yes Men’s antics have a lot in common with the stunts of Sacha Baron Cohen and Michael Moore, they are executed more in the spirit of dry amusement than as showboating, gotcha moments.
  12. A Perfect World
    A deeply felt, deceptively simple film that marks the high point of Mr. Eastwood's directing career thus far.
  13. Dogman
    Social realism in a symbolist key, Dogman is at times more pleasurable to look at than to experience.
  14. The Road
    The dead are unquiet and the living are terrified in The Road, a powerfully atmospheric blend of ghostly encounters, horrific situations and missing-persons mysteries from the Philippine director Yam Laranas.
  15. Unicorns
    Hardy peels back the layers to reveal Luke’s sexual awakening so viscerally that it’s easier to overlook the film’s narrative shortcuts.
  16. Dawn of the Dead
    I was able to sit through only the first fifteen minutes of Dawn of the Dead.
  17. Cam
    Cam is more successful as an oddly feminist tale of gutsy self-reliance than as a fully developed drama.
  18. Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
    A noirish psychodrama simmering with ambiguities, the film cleverly toys with our perception by loosening our heroine’s grip on reality.
  19. Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember
    A fine and loving memorial that preserves his charm, his intellect and his splendid body of work.
  20. Sunshine
    Leaves you with a sense of quiet, chastened grace.
  21. Rain
    The visual beauty of the film, rather than distracting from the troubling story, makes it more troubling still.
  22. Mesrine: Killer Instinct
    It makes for continuously riveting, visceral entertainment that evokes a Gallic "Scarface" without the drugs.
  23. Get On Up
    Like its gyrating, spasmodic staccato beats, Get On Up refuses to stand still. It whirls and does splits and jumps, with leaps around in time and changes in tempo that are jarring and abrupt and that usually feel just right.
  24. Blitz
    The movie bears comparisons to Dickens, both for George’s plight and for the depiction of class divides across a war-torn London. But there is something else going on narratively here. For one, McQueen makes a point of integrating into the film what is rarely seen in movies of this sort: a sharp depiction of racism among Londoners, the enraging sort that has so calcified it still surfaces when people are just trying to survive.
  25. I Like Killing Flies
    Mr. Mahurin is obviously enchanted by his subject, but he never gets past his delight to say anything of real, sustaining interest.
  26. Letters from Baghdad
    There’s much historical material here that’s of high interest, and Ms. Swinton’s performance of Bell’s letters convey Bell’s skills as a writer, but the movie is ultimately too conceptually labored for its own good — or that of its subject.
  27. Big Sonia
    Sonia is a powerful subject, but Big Sonia brings little perspective to her story.
  28. Donnie Darko
    It's this compulsion to solder melancholy to weightlessness that constantly trips up the movie; Mr. Kelly doesn't have the assurance to pull off such a difficult feat.
  29. The Great Buster: A Celebration
    The film presents a compact, tactful biography and also a valuable explication of the Keatonesque in its most sublime varieties. Coming ahead of a digital restoration of Keaton’s major films, it serves as both a primer and refresher, as well as a promise that he will not be forgotten.
  30. Bliss
    This consistently gripping, visually intoxicating film stands as a landmark of contemporary Turkish cinema.
  31. American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein
    Because it is a film, American Radical can only begin to sketch the complicated historical and political debates that engage Mr. Finkelstein and his detractors, but it allows both sides to make their cases.
  32. Tomorrow
    It’s refreshing to see concrete solutions at work, many of them at the grass-roots level. And the optimism of those countering ineffective politicians and big business is infectious.
  33. Gazer
    There’s an amusing, low-fi thriller here amid what prove to be too many twists and thickets of cinematic allusion.
  34. The Brink
    Fast-moving, tightly packed, at times unnervingly entertaining.
  35. The Boys of Baraka
    The Boys of Baraka is so rich that you wish there were more of it.
  36. Shazam!
    It’s a nice change of pace for a big-screen mega-comic, if not a revolutionary shift.
  37. Ghostbusters
    However good an idea it may have been to unleash Mr. Murray in an ''Exorcist''-like setting, this film hasn't gotten very far past the idea stage. Its jokes, characters and story line are as wispy as the ghosts themselves, and a good deal less substantial.
  38. Our Brand Is Crisis
    Boynton's Our Brand Is Crisis, which chronicles the entire election-strategizing process in scrupulous detail, will pack a punch with even the most informed viewer.
  39. Games of Love and Chance
    A graceful and sympathetic look at how the lives of teenagers intersect with a work of literature.
  40. Tikkun
    There is no denying the film’s uncanny power or its visual discipline. It’s a luminous puzzle with a few pieces missing.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dracula
    With Mr. Browning's imaginative direction and Mr. Lugosi's makeup and weird gestures, this picture succeeds to some extent in its grand guignol intentions.
  42. The Damned
    The Damned is shaped as a wistful and laconic study of the minutiae of survival. Though billed as his first fiction film, it wobbles tantalizingly on a permeable line between narrative and documentary.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Crime Wave
    Mr. de Toth's tour is a brisk, pictorial one, honeycombing the shadowy metropolitan fringes and byways where vigilant police sift a gallery of chameleonic habitués. But this canvas narrows considerably, at times unconvincingly, in appraising the plight of Mr. Nelson.
  44. Mrs Henderson Presents
    Watching this reasonably funny, professionally assembled calculation is a little like snuggling up in front of the television with a mug of hot cocoa and a warm blanket. Those who prefer their drinks and recreation spiked would do well to look elsewhere.
  45. Into the West
    Picturesque and warm-hearted, Into the West moves enjoyably toward the inevitable family reconciliation, and an ending with a supernatural spin. Along the way, it manages to sustain a high level of interest, thanks to fine acting and plenty of local color. [17 Sep 1993, p.C17]
    • The New York Times
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Now, Voyager
    For all its emotional hair-splitting, it fails to resolve its problems as truthfully as it pretends. In fact, a little more truth would have made the film a good deal shorter.
  47. Banel & Adama
    As Sy continues obliquely gesturing at meaning, you remain engaged but also find yourself wishing that all these many desperate pieces fit together more coherently.
  48. The Room Next Door
    Often movies ask what makes life worth living; this one asks what makes life worth leaving. It is a controversial subject, both in the movie and in the real world, and the film doesn’t treat it lightly.
  49. Sworn Virgin
    Although Ms. Rohrwacher captures Mark’s uncertain, shifting physicality, the movie doesn’t always succeed in getting inside the character’s head.
  50. Light Sleeper
    At its best, Light Sleeper is merely theoretical. Most of the time, though, it is artificial and laughably unbelievable. Even the dark, gritty Manhattan locations don't add authenticity.
  51. Rocky
    The problem, I think, comes back to Mr. Stallone. Throughout the movie we are asked to believe that his Rocky is compassionate, interesting, even heroic, though the character we see is simply an unconvincing actor imitating a lug.
  52. The Swan Princess
    Loosely based on the legend that inspired "Swan Lake," and blatantly borrowing the formula of Disney's "Beauty and the Beast," this animated musical turns out to be funny and enchanting on its own. Directed by Richard Rich, who started an animation company after 14 years at Disney, "The Swan Princess" makes first-rate copying seem like a good idea.
  53. The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector
    Creepily riveting.
  54. L'Immensità
    In dreams, he imagines himself and his mother as glamorous figures in a monochrome variety-show spectacle, poignant bouts of movie-magic that underscore both Andrew’s innocence and his sharpening intuition: Freedom, for the both of them, will mean upending reality itself.
  55. The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble
    To be sure, this loosely structured story needs a stronger outline; you’ll often wish for clarifying details on the group’s programming and its unfamiliar instruments. But then the music will play, and you’ll think this film wants for nothing.
  56. Fort Tilden
    Rarely has a movie so humorously illustrated the meaning of “frenemy.”
  57. Double Dare
    Thin but pleasantly diverting documentary
  58. The Motel
    Michael Kang's small, perfectly observed portrait of Ernest Chin (Jeffrey Chyau), a Chinese-American boy who lives and works in a dingy downscale motel operated by his mother, captures the glum desperation of inhabiting the biological limbo of early adolescence.
  59. Vesper
    A wistful beauty and a delicately imaginative sense of craft set Vesper apart from most post-apocalyptic stories.
  60. Yossi & Jagger
    If the situation has all the ingredients of a shrill, tearful melodrama, the filmmaker, working from a taut screenplay by Avner Bernheimer that doesn't waste a word or a gesture, keeps the emotional lid firmly in place.
  61. Prisoners
    Prisoners is the kind of movie that can quiet a room full of casual thrill-seekers. It absorbs and controls your attention with such assurance that you hold your breath for fear of distracting the people on screen, exhaling in relief or amazement at each new revelation
  62. I Love Boosters
    Too many elements of Riley’s sophomore feature hang like excess fabric from what would otherwise be a stunning, smart ensemble.
  63. Year of the Dog
    It's funny ha-ha but firmly in touch with its downer side, which means it's also funny in a kind of existential way.
  64. Batman Begins
    Conceived in the shadow of American pop rather than in its bright light, this tense, effective iteration of Bob Kane's original comic book owes its power and pleasures to a director who takes his material seriously and to a star who shoulders that seriousness with ease.
  65. The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros
    Directed by Auraeus Solito from a screenplay by Michiko Yamamoto, Maximo has charmed film festival audiences from Sundance to Jerusalem with its refreshingly blasé handling of homosexuality, its amiable actors and its delicacy of milieu. Credit, above all, the talented Mr. Lopez, whose effortless charisma buoys the movie even when it goes heavy with contrivance.
  66. Earth Days
    A sedate chronicle of the highs and lows of the environmental movement, Earth Days is less a rousing call to action than a bittersweet stroll down memory lane.
  67. Bad Company
    Frank, sympathetic approach to the awkward age.
  68. Rhythm 'n' Bayous: A Road Map to Louisiana Music
    Documents of a flourishing below-the-radar culture, often involving older musicians who won't be around much longer, they are archival records as well as entertainments.
  69. The Tao of Steve
    Can't redeem the moves toward its predictable happy ending. But the movie has a protagonist who has a great time getting there.
  70. Hamlet
    New York becomes a complex character in this vital and sharply intelligent film.
  71. Quills
    Occasionally becomes pretentious and shrill -- sometimes Mr. Wright isn't aware that his material is so good that he doesn't need to comment on his characters.
  72. Cure
    The final scene is a piece of cunning visual wit that makes you realize how artful and sneaky Cure, has been beneath its clinical, deadpan surface.
  73. Amélie
    There is no denying that Amélie is, to paraphrase its title, fabulous.
  74. Empathy
    The director's seriousness and intelligence are evident, but so is her satisfaction in displaying them, and the movie has a self-indulgent, undisciplined tone that nearly obscures its provocative ideas.
  75. Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?
    As this smart, hard-bitten woman with an eighth-grade education pursues her quest, the documentary portrays the debate between connoisseurship and science as a culture war.
  76. Bal
    It has no musical soundtrack (and barely any dialogue), only a quiet, unforced, organic rhythm. And those spellbinding images. Like the viewer, Mr. Kaplanoglu is quite happy to let nature do the talking and cast a lyrical, mysterious spell.
  77. The Last Circus
    Brilliant, bizarre, dazzling and utterly demented, The Last Circus views Franco-era Spain through the crazed eyes of two clowns doing battle for the love of one magnificent woman.
  78. The Yellow Sea
    A rush of a movie from South Korea that slips and slides from horror to humor on rivers of blood and offers the haunting image of a man, primitive incarnate, beating other men with an enormous, gnawed-over meat bone.
  79. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
    This history is too recent to seem dry, and the film gets an added emotional punch from interviews with former tenants, whose memories mix fondness with anger and loss.
  80. Exit Elena
    Using mostly amateur performers and improvised dialogue, Mr. Silver has created a profoundly awkward riff on dysfunction that’s uneventful but not unrewarding.
  81. Herblock: The Black & the White
    It’s fortunate that the cartoons on display are such instantly satisfying works of popular genius, because, despite its subject, “Herblock” shows how even an edifying talking-heads documentary bumps up against the limitations of the format.
  82. Fatal Assistance
    A potent, persuasive and quietly furious documentary.
  83. Bird People
    There are plot twists, and then there is what Ms. Ferran does here, which is to transform — impetuously, improbably and altogether marvelously — this somber, realistic tale into something else entirely.
  84. The Widowmaker
    The Widowmaker is commendable in that although it is a work of advocacy, it gives an array of opinions.
  85. Song from the Forest
    This nonjudgmental documentary moves between New York City and the rain forests of the Central African Republic, where Mr. Sarno primarily lives. Both places are tugs of war between abundance and lack.
  86. A Murder in the Park
    The filmmakers have skillfully laid out a complex and murky story of crime and justice that, more than 30 years on, continues to scandalize.
  87. Our Last Tango
    German Kral’s documentary Our Last Tango is a combination of things, all fascinating.
  88. 'Til Madness Do Us Part
    This overlong (nearly four hours) but sporadically extraordinary portrait of a forgotten corner of society may be tough going even for fans of forbidding cinema.
  89. Chapter & Verse
    The movie’s wide-screen framing, ruthless plot reversals and say-what-you-mean writing sometimes recall a master of socially conscious cinema from another era, Sam Fuller. But this is a picture with its own strong voice.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Winning
    Probably the best-rounded and most appealing personalized film of this kind ever made.
  91. Lady Boss: The Jackie Collins Story
    The dishiness is fun, but Lady Boss is most penetrating when it lifts the carapace of glamour Collins had constructed, both as alter ego and as armor against her critics.
  92. My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To
    This may be dark fodder for a family project, but the result is a visually striking meditation on obligation and complicity.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Niagara
    The producers are making full use of both the grandeur of the Falls and its adjacent areas as well as the grandeur that is Marilyn Monroe. The scenic effects in both cases are superb.
  94. Werner Herzog - Radical Dreamer
    The movie also provides a smart primer on the “New German Cinema” Herzog helped bring into being during the 1960s.
  95. Witches
    If all women behaving badly can be summed up as witchy, then Sankey’s documentary too often works like a game of associations.
  96. Theater Camp
    Clearly, the actors feel their characters in their bones.
  97. Standard Operating Procedure
    A big, provocative and -- it goes without saying -- disturbing work, though what makes it most provocative is that its greatest ambitions are for its own visual style.
  98. Star Trek: First Contact
    The series now lacks all of its original stars and much of its earlier determination. It has morphed into something less innocent and more derivative than it used to be, something the noncultist is ever less likely to enjoy.
  99. I Love You, Man
    A fitfully funny comedy.
  100. Where's My Roy Cohn?
    Where’s My Roy Cohn?” is most interesting for the questions it doesn’t explicitly ask. Those have to do with not with Cohn’s blatant amorality, but with the moral compromises of the elite who tolerated his company and found uses for his talents.
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