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. So B. It
    So B. It aims for an inclusive message. But Mama’s artificiality makes it hard to buy the movie’s themes of acceptance.
  2. Walking Out
    Even when its plot starts to sag, Walking Out remains beautiful to watch.
  3. Paradise
    Paradise is a strikingly shot Holocaust drama that ultimately seems confused about whose story it’s telling or to what end.
  4. Brawl in Cell Block 99
    For one thing, the buildup is so grippingly patient that we’re more than halfway through before the titular battleground is reached. And for another, this painstakingly paced thriller displays an intensity of purpose that makes it impossible to dismiss as well-executed trash.
  5. Dina
    The filmmakers might have cleared up suspicions about their motivations and ethics had they worked them into the narrative.
  6. The Osiris Child
    Given the audacity, gusto and hell-for-leather filmmaking on display, the prospect of subsequent installments does not seem unreasonable.
  7. The Mountain Between Us
    Caught between the harsh demands of a survival story and the emotional beats of a romantic drama, the director, Hany Abu-Assad, grabs hold of neither.
  8. Overdrive
    Overdrive has all the features of a potentially entertaining action B-movie for overgrown boys: gorgeous near-mint vintage cars, rugged male performers, seductive female performers, ravishing European locations. What it doesn’t have is a lot of cinematic adrenaline.
  9. Take Every Wave: The Life of Laird Hamilton
    The documentary stirs up most of its sporadic excitement in the surfing footage, of which there is plenty. The imagery, especially the aerial shots, gives a sense of Mr. Hamilton’s precision and how close he comes to wiping out.
  10. The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson
    There are several strong stories in The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson, a documentary that, in trying to tell them all, takes on too much.
  11. Una
    The scenes that leave Ms. Mara and Mr. Mendelsohn alone are, tellingly, the most interesting and effective ones. Their performances are tightly focused and unflinching; too bad they are surrounded by a lot of heavy-handed, poorly aimed cinematic showing off.
  12. Faces Places
    Faces Places reveals itself as a powerful, complex and radical work.
  13. Chavela
    Those looking to learn the basic outlines of the life of the singer Chavela Vargas could do worse than watch Chavela, but this plodding documentary from Catherine Gund and Daresha Kyi rarely transcends simple biography
  14. Blade Runner 2049
    Mr. Villeneuve’s film, by contrast, is a carefully engineered narrative puzzle, and its power dissipates as the pieces snap into place. As sumptuous and surprising as it is from one scene to the next, it lacks the creative excess, the intriguing opacity and the haunting residue of its predecessor.
  15. Flatliners
    Mr. Schumacher’s movie is more a failed tone poem than a horror picture, and to its credit, this new version, with a trickier script by Ben Ripley and hyper-competent direction from the Swedish filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev improves on it — by making it behave like a horror movie every now and then.
  16. American Made
    Mr. Cruise’s brisk, ingratiating performance — all smiles, hard-charging physicality and beads of sweat — does a lot to soften the edges. But Mr. Liman doesn’t press Mr. Cruise to dig into the character, and the actor mostly hurdles forward in a movie that never gets around to asking what makes Barry run and why.
  17. Pearl Jam: Let's Play Two
    It shares a side of Mr. Vedder his fans will enjoy: the baseball aficionado who fills out a scorecard and treats Wrigley sod as holy ground.
  18. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
    “Mark Felt” is a sharp portrait set against a blurry background, a history lesson that won’t help you on the test. It is possible to savor the crags and shadows of Mr. Neeson’s performance without quite grasping why Mr. Landesman thinks the story is worthy of such somber, serious and sustained attention.
  19. The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin
    The film offers an enlightening glimpse into how the gay experience informed Mr. Maupin’s art.
  20. Abundant Acreage Available
    What some may see as an examination of loss and legacy, others will view as a portrait of psychological coercion: overbearing men riding roughshod over the wishes of a grieving woman.
  21. Lucky
    The accumulation of spot-on performances and long-familiar faces, small-town routines and dusty-worn locations, finally coalesces into a picture that’s greater than the sum of its oft-clichéd parts.
  22. Blood Stripe
    While this worthy film sidesteps clichés — there are no horrid flashbacks or emotional speeches — its spareness occasionally feels planned rather than spontaneous. After a powerful first half, later scenes offer diminishing returns.
  23. Autumn, Autumn
    Though disappointment and loneliness guide its conversations, the movie isn’t bleak; it’s a touching and tender commentary on the need to be seen and the desire to be heard.
  24. Realive
    Like a “Black Mirror” episode combined with a philosophy seminar, Realive has plenty of brains. Yet it has a heart, too, and that adds a surprising amount of emotion to this above-average science-fiction film.
  25. Literally, Right Before Aaron
    The problem here is Mr. Long’s Adam, a twitchy knot of tics and self-pity. He invites our sympathy — especially when contrasted with the smarmy Aaron — but doesn’t really deserve it.
  26. Super Dark Times
    The performances from the film’s young cast members are uniformly excellent, including Owen Campbell as Zach and Charlie Tahan as Josh. But the direction from Mr. Phillips is what makes Super Dark Times unusual.
  27. Different Flowers
    Several scenes have a warm, rosy tinge to them, even during the sisters’ meanest blowups, as if to assure the audience that, for these two, there will always be a reconciliation.
  28. Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives
    Chris Perkel’s reverent documentary Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives is a valedictory for Mr. Davis.
  29. I Am Another You
    Ms. Wang delves further into Dylan’s past. If by the end she probably still puts too much trust in Dylan’s aphorisms, give her credit for recognizing the shortcomings of her footage and correcting course.
  30. Our Souls at Night
    Part of the pleasure of this film, directed by Ritesh Batra (“The Lunchbox”), lies in the rediscovery of what wonderful actors they can be, and how good they are together.
  31. Bugs
    Bugs, an entertaining and eye-opening documentary from Andreas Johnsen, will send moviegoers out with a feeling of culinary adventurousness, eager to sample well-prepared escamoles (ant larvae) or termite queen with mango.
  32. Bobbi Jene
    Enigmatic to an extreme, the documentary Bobbi Jene may interest viewers who are well versed in contemporary dance. All others are on their own.
  33. Unrest
    It powerfully insists on giving a voice to victims whose greatest challenge, apart from their symptoms, is surmounting a world of indifference.
  34. The Force
    The movie may offer an incriminatory catalog of organizational failure, but it also repeatedly shows people trying to make the system work.
  35. Battle of the Sexes
    A glib, enjoyable fictionalization of the 1973 exhibition tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.
  36. Hissein Habre, A Chadian Tragedy
    It’s more of a document than a documentary; calling it cinema seems like an error of categorization.
  37. Victoria and Abdul
    In the shift from comedy to drama the movie goes wobbly.
  38. The King's Choice
    The King’s Choice maintains a sense of intrigue when it sticks to the king’s dealings with the government, but the movie drags when it moves outside of back rooms and deviates from setting up the Bräuer-Haakon showdown.
  39. Loving Vincent
    As the story limps and drags, the viewer also becomes accustomed to the images, and astonishment at the film’s innovative, painstaking technique begins to fade. But its charm never quite wears off, for reasons summed up in the title.
  40. Stronger
    Stronger takes more artistic risks than any other American-made “inspired by true events” picture I can recall.
  41. Hong Kong Trilogy: Preschooled Preoccupied Preposterous
    More of a poem or a city symphony than a documentary, it drifts freely, sometimes frustratingly between captured and fictionalized moments.
  42. Gaga: Five Foot Two
    While it’s possible that the director and cinematographer Chris Moukarbel is good at withholding unflattering material, Gaga comes off well, and credibly so: intelligent, an accomplished craftswoman, a well-mannered collaborator and boss.
  43. The Tiger Hunter
    With a likable cast and a wholesome message about the true meaning of success, The Tiger Hunter might balk at the harsher details of immigrant life, but it has a generosity of spirit that lifts everyone up.
  44. Thirst Street
    Thematically shallow but stylistically rich, Thirst Street is best enjoyed with a hint of its heroine’s willfully superficial vision.
  45. Woodshock
    Unlike their spring 2018 fashion collection, Kate and Laura Mulleavy’s first foray into moviemaking, “Woodshock,” is depressingly dull and terminally inarticulate.
  46. Kingsman: The Golden Circle
    In a movie as happy to resurrect characters as rub them out, nothing is of consequence, and the glibness grows numbing.
  47. The LEGO Ninjago Movie
    The Lego figures are rendered with playful rigor; their limited movements and expressions generate some amusing sight gags. But the physical world they inhabit is more of a generic digital-cartoon space than a snapped-together environment. And the themes they explore are tired, cynical, sub-Disney bromides about family reconciliation and self-discovery.
  48. Alina
    Although the internet and cellphones exist in the movie, there’s a dated quality to the premise.
  49. Woodpeckers
    The lean handsomeness and quiet authority of Mr. Jean is a perfect complement to Ms. Rodríguez’s passionate Yanelly, while the locations — and the presence of actual inmates — underscore the harsh boundaries the lovers struggle against.
  50. The Wilde Wedding
    The soullessness of the enterprise is staggering. Making clichéd, cynical gestures toward romance, Mr. Harris (whose last feature was almost a decade ago) tortured me for a full 96 minutes.
  51. Wetlands
    For some, its atmosphere and intriguing performances will prove worthy of the outing.
  52. Brad's Status
    Brad’s Status at its best is genuinely thought-provoking.
  53. Rat Film
    Equal parts disturbing and humorous, informative and bizarre, Rat Film is a brilliantly imaginative and formally experimental essay on how Baltimore has dealt with its rat problem and manipulated its black population.
  54. Strong Island
    This potent film gives equal weight to complex emotions as well as bare facts. In the same way, it’s not just the story of a man’s death, but also a study of the aftermath.
  55. Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards
    In a scene puzzlingly late in the film, Mr. Blahnik, who apparently still makes samples by hand, walks through his factory and finesses a sensuous heel out of a stump of wood. More of that would have made this confection about a radiant man into something sturdier.
  56. In Search of Fellini
    The movie can shift unevenly from effusive love letter to travel lust to sentimental moment, but that doesn’t break the fantasy.
  57. American Assassin
    The movie, directed by Michael Cuesta from a script by a team of blue-chip writers (Stephen Schiff and Michael Finch are credited, along with Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz), shows more skill than personality.
  58. Indivisible
    The performances of the young actors who play them (actual twins, though not conjoined) are the real miracles here, each one creating a distinct personality.
  59. First They Killed My Father
    It is gorgeous and suspenseful, and it rushes heedlessly into dangerous terrain.
  60. mother!
    Mr. Aronofsky is a virtuoso of mood and timing, a devoted student of form and technique straining to be a credible visionary. But as wild and provocative as his images can be, there is something missing — an element of strangeness, of difficulty, of the kind of inspiration that overrides mere cleverness.
  61. The Future Perfect
    There is gentle comedy here, and a real rooting interest deriving from Ms. Zhang’s committed, never-a-false-note performance. The film’s unusual perspective makes it a distinctive and potentially enriching experience.
  62. EX LIBRIS: The New York Public Library
    In “Ex Libris,” democracy is alive and in the hands of a forceful advocate and brilliant filmmaker, which helps make this one of the greatest movies of Mr. Wiseman’s extraordinary career and one of his most thrilling.
  63. Dayveon
    The diffuse filmmaking style muffles the story’s power.
  64. Wrestling Jerusalem
    Sometimes the effort here is more admirable than exciting.
  65. The Challenge
    Shot in rich, wide-screen color, with minimal camera movements (except when a small camera is attached to a falcon’s restless head) and almost no dialogue, it is detached almost to the point of abstraction.
  66. Company Town
    The documentary Company Town, by Natalie Kottke-Masocco and Erica Sardarian, feels fueled by pure desperation; even the rudimentary qualities of the filmmaking (cheap-looking camera work, poorly punctuated title cards) somehow add to its urgency, as if the movie needed to get its message out by any means necessary.
  67. School Life
    School Life is a loving portrait, primarily, of the inspirational educator couple, who command the respect of their students and always seem to know what a particular child needs to hear.
  68. Boris Without Béatrice
    Denis Côté’s Boris Without Beatrice appears to have something to say about the hubris of the modern business tycoon, but it never coalesces into more than a self-amused goof.
  69. The Good Catholic
    Fortunately, Mr. Spicer’s earnest performance bolsters many of the weaker spots in Mr. Shoulberg’s script.
  70. Year by the Sea
    The movie is not entirely my cup of tea, although it is refreshing in its depiction of diverse, older female characters.
  71. True to the Game
    The direction, by Preston A. Whitmore II, seems hampered by either a lack of resources or a lack of interest.
  72. Nobody's Watching
    Nobody’s Watching addresses immigration issues head on, but it’s more about being set existentially adrift.
  73. Rememory
    A hodgepodge of pseudoscientific twaddle and variously shifty murder suspects, Rememory satisfies neither as science fiction nor as psychological drama.
  74. The Limehouse Golem
    Marrying fact and fiction, Jane Goldman’s seamy screenplay is wildly overstuffed; but the director, Juan Carlos Medina, gives the music hall scenes a rowdy authenticity.
  75. Trophy
    The intimacy of the film’s images and the surprising candor of its participants are disarming: Whatever your initial response, be prepared to re-evaluate.
  76. The Unknown Girl
    The Unknown Girl is as tense as a police procedural, and as mysterious as a religious parable.
  77. Fallen
    Like other fixtures of the Y.A. genre, Fallen is filmed with a professional sheen that sacrifices emotional sincerity for high production values.
  78. Rebel in the Rye
    While Rebel in the Rye isn’t quite as bad as its pile-of-bricks-clunky title suggests, it’s both simple- and literal-minded, less concerned with Salinger’s consciousness or sensibility than with his ostensible ontological status as a Tortured Creative Giant.
  79. Home Again
    For her directorial debut, Home Again, Hallie Meyers-Shyer, Nancy Meyers’s daughter, has made a shabby copy of a Nancy Meyers romantic comedy.
  80. It
    The filmmakers honor both the pastoral and the infernal dimensions of Mr. King’s distinctive literary vision.
  81. White Sun
    It shows how the lingering disputes of war ripple through lives after guns have ostensibly been laid down.
  82. Tulip Fever
    It’s neither a secret masterpiece nor a laughable disaster.
  83. Free in Deed
    Each time the movie edges into mannerism Mr. Harewood and Ms. Dickerson pull you close enough to make it hurt.
  84. Do It Like An Hombre
    The movie flouts its intolerance in an attempt at provocative humor. Unless you laugh at fossils, I have no idea why you should buy a ticket to gawk at this dinosaur.
  85. Dolores
    Peter Bratt, the director, uses an immense amount of historical footage and interviews, arranged with clarity.
  86. Kill Me Please
    Like the teenage girls who monopolize its attention, Kill Me Please is moody, lovely, preening and libidinous.
  87. Unlocked
    I suppose this went down easily enough for me because I grew up with this kind of stuff, and can surrender to it as a kind of cinematic comfort food. But still. For those not so inclined, the entertainment value could conceivably be derived from the brisk, no-nonsense direction by Michael Apted, and the talents of what they used to call “an all-star cast”.
  88. Jesús
    One feels the filmmaker trying hard to work out the inner struggles of his sad but largely unsympathetic characters. But his movie is as miserable and ultimately confounding as it is earnest.
  89. Viceroy's House
    The film carries a trace of the sweep of a great screen epic along with the straightforward, explanatory qualities of mass-audience TV, and is never less than absorbing.
  90. The Layover
    The movie’s notion of fun comes to involve an unclean rest stop, slipped pills and an eminently foreseeable conclusion.
  91. I Do... Until I Don't
    A movie that has neither a coherent point nor an authentic character.
  92. The Teacher
    Ms. Maurery has great fun with the character, a tricky part because Maria nearly always maintains a kindhearted veneer, even at her most venal.
  93. Birth of the Dragon
    Birth of the Dragon is ambitious: it wants to be a character study, an explication of martial arts philosophy and an action picture.... But the film never really gets fully juiced until the climax.
  94. The Villainess
    It’s hard to enjoy the action when you witness its emotional cost, but once Sook-hee starts slashing goons from atop motorcycles, it’s equally impossible to root for the violence to stop.
  95. Beach Rats
    The back-and-forths of the character’s decisions feel real, and Mr. Dickinson’s laconic blankness (you would never guess the actor was British) helps to give the character’s existential crisis a charge. Ms. Hittman is also assured enough to know it can’t be easily resolved.
  96. Bushwick
    The filmmakers feign boldness in tackling national politics, but revert to coyness and caricature when it comes to local matters, gesturing toward a multiculturalism that isn’t even skin deep and sweeping gentrification under the rug.
  97. Tales of an Immoral Couple
    A sweet and affecting story, one that forgoes the awkward moments of teenage romance and offers the possibility of reliving a bit of our youthful amor — if just for the film’s 90-minute running time.
  98. England Is Mine
    With its bleak, yearning tone and defiantly cloudy color palette, “England Is Mine” has a pleasingly granular feel for its era and location. But its imagining of Morrissey as a self-pitying narcissist, a curiously passive intellectual who can’t get out of his own way, soaks the movie in a wearying inertia.
  99. Gook
    The film isn’t perfect — Mr. Chon’s wild camera motions seem more undisciplined than electric — but it does find an angle on the riots that hasn’t been seen much onscreen.
  100. Death Note
    Perhaps stifled by the cultural and commercial clout of its source material (a multimedia juggernaut of books, movies, television shows and a stage musical), Death Note feels rushed and constricted.
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