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. Lemon
    Reviewing Lemon feels like taking a sucker’s bet, treating the film with a reverence it never even asks for.
  2. Leap!
    Leap! remains peppy as it sets its bar at a low-to-medium height then cheerfully clears it.
  3. Polina
    If this film’s directors, Valérie Müller and the French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj, don’t offer much overt material on Polina’s inner life, it’s because they don’t have to: the point of Polina, and this movie, is that her dancing is her being.
  4. Clash
    Clash turns into a full-fledged horror movie, albeit one without the fake comfort of a supernatural or science-fiction pretext. It’s just man’s inhumanity to man, in full sway.
  5. Crown Heights
    Like its protagonist, sensitively and shrewdly played by Lakeith Stanfield, the film is soft-spoken and thoughtful, with sweet, lyrical touches that alleviate some of the grimness without blunting the cruelty and injustice of what happened.
  6. Whitney: Can I Be Me
    A surprisingly conventional, dutifully respectful behind-the-scenes portrait of Whitney Houston’s rise and struggles with fame and drugs before her death at 48.
  7. Walk with Me
    Sometimes dreamy but mostly dissatisfying, “Walk With Me” offers no clarity for the curious. We can enjoy the meditative mood, but understanding its underpinnings would require more than this idyll of silence and stillness provides.
  8. Sidemen: Long Road to Glory
    “Sidemen” is about more than just legacy. Blessed with extensive interviews with their buoyant subjects (all three of whom died in 2011 within months of one another), Mr. Rosenbaum and his producer Jasin Cadic shape a narrative of professional insecurity and personal resilience.
  9. Shot Caller
    Shot Caller effectively conveys the vise grip of Jacob’s options, but that doesn’t make it less ludicrous from scene to scene.
  10. Marjorie Prime
    There’s more going on in this movie’s 90-plus minutes than in many summer blockbusters nearly twice its length.
  11. 6 Days
    With a barrage of title-card identifications, 6 Days can feel closer to a re-enactment than a thriller. To the extent that the movie has a political angle, it’s perhaps gratuitously jingoistic.
  12. California Typewriter
    This quirky, obsessive documentary is about so much more than broken keys and busted type wheels. It’s really about how we create art.
  13. Patti Cake$
    Ms. Macdonald is quite simply a revelation, capturing the reflexive self-confidence and defensive diffidence of the millennial generation with sneaky sincerity and offhand wit.
  14. Liza, Liza, Skies Are Grey
    The question of whether the couple will consummate their relationship isn’t a sufficient source of tension.
  15. The Queen of Spain
    The Queen of Spain, a light ensemble romp from the veteran director Fernando Trueba, has fun with movie lore even as it pillories Hollywood’s deal-making with the Francisco Franco regime in the 1950s.
  16. Logan Lucky
    Logan Lucky is a terrific movie. That’s a matter of skill, and maybe also of luck. But mostly it’s a matter of generosity.
  17. The Hitman's Bodyguard
    It occupies its genre niche — the exuberantly violent Euro-action movie-star paycheck action comedy — without excessive cynicism or annoying pretension.
  18. The Wound
    Mr. Trengove shoots the film in intimate wide-screen, getting in close to the performers as their characters tamp down explosive feelings, often letting the spectacular landscapes behind them break down into soft-focus abstractions. His direction is perfectly judged up to and including the shudder-inducing ending.
  19. The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature
    The jokes are thin, the computer animation is wanting and the inane plot is a series of set pieces strung together.
  20. Good Time
    Sometimes it flaunts its clichés...and other times it cloaks them in rough visual textures and jumpy, bumpy camera movements, so that a rickety genre thrill ride feels like something daring and new. It isn’t. It’s stale, empty and cold.
  21. Whose Streets?
    This is direct and frequently powerful filmmaking that doesn’t much care about meeting my aesthetic standards.
  22. Planetarium
    Tidiness isn’t crucial, but watching Planetarium often feels like making contact with fragments of a great three-hour movie.
  23. The Only Living Boy in New York
    Allan Loeb’s script is glib and grating.
  24. The Trip to Spain
    Though the spaces between the funny voices are filled with verdant hillsides and vanilla beaches that stretch the length of the frame, there’s an occasional sour edge to the comedic sparring.
  25. The Farthest
    For any believer in humankind’s instinct to transcend boundaries, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes, and the NASA team that produced them, inspire awe. The Farthest, a dazzling documentary written and directed by Emer Reynolds, illustrates why.
  26. Annabelle: Creation
    As with last year’s “Lights Out,” [Sandberg] proves a master of the flash-scare, a nifty choreographer of precipitous timing and striptease visuals. But he’s also adroit with more leisurely horrors.
  27. 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.
  28. Nocturama
    Without a real-world correlative for the actions it depicts, Bertrand Bonello’s new film would merely be tedious and pretentious rather than repellent.
  29. Pilgrimage
    Pilgrimage raises a question or two about unexamined beliefs and religious zeal. Those questions, as well as all that blood, won’t appeal to everyone. But those who can stomach them will receive some dark rewards.
  30. In This Corner of the World
    As our window into a world lost to violence, Suzu gives us the chance to see rabbits in rivers, though her rosy view obscures history’s shadows with a preponderance of golden light.
  31. The Nile Hilton Incident
    The trouble with the movie — and it’s significant — is that Mr. Saleh is so keen to survey Egypt’s dysfunction that his pacing wanes. It’s possible to admire each scene and still see this film, in its entirety, as in need of some serious sharpening.
  32. A Taxi Driver
    The film climaxes with a breathless escape from Gwangju, as Kim and Hinzpeter elude government vehicles with the aid of other cabdrivers. But most impressive is Mr. Song, who persuasively conveys a working stiff’s political awakening.
  33. The Glass Castle
    It’s both too tidy and too messy, and at the same time neither quite wild nor quite sensible enough.
  34. Machines
    The ideological charge leveled for decades at this strain of filmmaking is that such eye-catching tableaus romanticize poverty, but prettified squalor has become sadly familiar in global documentary filmmaking. In Machines, even at barely more than an hour, the style leads to diminishing returns.
  35. After Love
    Not unlike an expensively tattooed panhandler, the couple elicit only a skeptical kind of sympathy.
  36. The Incredible Jessica James
    This is Ms. Williams’s movie, and she owns it.
  37. It's Not Yet Dark
    Painful to watch and uncomfortably intimate at times, perhaps by design, It’s Not Yet Dark could have been very dark indeed.
  38. 68 Kill
    It’s a little amazing how a story so guilty of gross-out violence can retain a share of comic innocence.
  39. Armed Response
    The possibilities are intriguing, but the characters are underdrawn, and the pacing lags.
  40. The Battleship Island
    Though Mr. Ryoo’s taste for heightened theatricality threatens his story’s credibility at times, there is no denying his skill with a large-scale action set piece.
  41. Brave New Jersey
    The film’s narrative simplicity can be charming or frustrating, depending on your feelings about awkward dialogue and overreacting actors.
  42. Icarus
    Mr. Fogel could be considered either daring or foolhardy for his initial plan. But his work with Dr. Rodchenkov is levelheaded, and his documentary illuminating.
  43. Chronically Metropolitan
    One longs to praise Mr. Manrique for attempting a serious-minded story in this, his first feature. But there needs to be a real reason to embrace it, rather than what’s on this screen.
  44. 4 Days in France
    While Mr. Reybaud has exemplary artistic confidence and an interesting vision, this is a movie that in many ways defines or justifies the “not for everybody” critical hedge.
  45. Fun Mom Dinner
    All four actresses have a natural chemistry and manage to give some inner dimensions to these otherwise archetypal characters.
  46. Step
    The film’s success is directly dependent on the personalities — and achievements — of the young women highlighted. Despite the narrative gaps, Ms. Lipitz excels at putting across those personalities.
  47. Kidnap
    The greatest strength of Kidnap is that it casts the maternal instinct as a primordial will to enact violence.
  48. The Dark Tower
    About the only thing holding it together is Idris Elba, whose irrepressible magnetism and man-of-stone solidity anchors this mess but can’t redeem it.
  49. Wind River
    An actor before he was a screenwriter, Mr. Sheridan clearly spent a lot of his time learning about filmmaking on movie sets; his direction is assured throughout.
  50. Columbus
    The existence of a debut as confident and allusive as Columbus is almost as improbable as the existence of Columbus, Ind., where the movie is set.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, the Colours of Life
    In the end, “Water and Sugar” proves the best view of Di Palma is still the gaze from his own eyes.
  52. Turn It Around: The Story of East Bay Punk
    While zine-style animated sequences and VHS taped interviews enliven the pace, the documentary is burdened by too much minutiae. Not every scar earned at a concert deserves to be immortalized in a documentary.
  53. Sled Dogs
    It’s easy to fall in love with the animals in Sled Dogs. It’s thornier to sift through the words of the handlers and mushers — many of whom seem to genuinely care for the dogs — and determine how pervasive abuse is in dog-sledding ventures.
  54. The Last Face
    As well meaning as this movie is, it is also a turgid, muddled one.
  55. The Last Dalai Lama?
    A surplus of wisdom and benevolence radiates from The Last Dalai Lama?.
  56. I Dream in Another Language
    The story is not without interest, and it touches on a couple of worthwhile themes: cultural erasure and the way religious and provincial prejudices can suppress love. But its treatment of these subjects is perhaps undercut by its conventionality.
  57. From the Land of the Moon
    Ms. Cotillard can be magnetic even when playing an unplayable character, but when Gabrielle falls for a veteran (Louis Garrel, who has perfected the facial expression of someone looking for another conversation), the chasm between her abilities and her co-star’s is mountainous.
  58. An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
    In a summer movie landscape with Spider-Man, a simian army waging further battle for the planet and Charlize Theron as a sexy Cold War-era superspy, it says something that one of the most compelling characters is Al Gore.
  59. Imperfections
    Most of the movie’s pleasures come from Ms. Kull, a better actress than the one she plays, and the convolutions of the plot, which has a few good feints and dodges.
  60. Menashe
    For sure, this funny and tender film prompts cheerful smiles, but sometimes they turn melancholy.
  61. Strange Weather
    A case of excellent actors’ straining to elevate a contrived screenplay.
  62. Person to Person
    While Mr. Defa’s dialogue mostly flows naturally from Mr. Coopersmith, it can seem too self-aware and precious in the other characters’ mouths.
  63. Brigsby Bear
    Mr. Mooney, currently cutting it up on “Saturday Night Live,” manages the twists and tonal fluctuations in Brigsby Bear beautifully.
  64. The Emoji Movie
    To add to the pain and despair of the experience, The Emoji Movie is preceded by a short, “Puppy,” featuring the characters from the “Hotel Transylvania” animated movies. It is also idiotic.
  65. Atomic Blonde
    As she does, Ms. Theron locks down your attention immediately, holding you with her beauty and quiet vigilance.
  66. Detroit
    The film’s struggle against simplification — against the sentimentality, wishful thinking and outright denial that defines most Hollywood considerations of America’s racial past — is palpable, almost heroic, even if it is not always successful.
  67. Women Who Kill
    The humor is dry and the acting deadpan in Women Who Kill, a comedy that plays it droll and is all the funnier for it.
  68. Escapes
    Mr. Fancher’s movie love and way of spinning a yarn to its near-breaking point — one detour opens onto another — dovetail nicely with the cinephilia and playfulness that characterize Mr. Almereyda’s movies.
  69. Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World
    If you couldn’t name two Native American musicians at the beginning of the documentary, you’ll remember at least a half-dozen after the end. And it’s a good bet you’ll be searching for their albums, too.
  70. Romeo Is Bleeding
    The portraits drawn of these young people frequently feel half-finished.
  71. The Pulitzer at 100
    Although produced independently, this documentary, directed by Kirk Simon, plays as if the Pulitzers were presenting an award to themselves.
  72. The Midwife
    Because it is a French film, or rather the kind of French film that wants to serve its sentimentality with a dollop of prestige, The Midwife doesn’t offer an entirely shameless version of the “dying free spirit imbues uptight caretaker with a new lust for life” scenario.
  73. Landline
    For all the profanity and naughty behavior, it has the timid, ingratiating vibe of a television sitcom, sticking to safe and familiar emotional territory.
  74. Killing Ground
    Certainly, the senselessness of bloodshed may be Mr. Power’s point. But with this setup, such a message is all but muted.
  75. Mister Universo
    Ms. Covi and Mr. Frimmel’s Mister Universo is a disarming and humane picture, an unexpected delight.
  76. The Untamed
    Mr. Escalante is an exceptionally deft and subtle realist, and you sometimes feel, in “Heli” and even more so in The Untamed that he is drawn to extremity partly out of boredom with his own skill.
  77. 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.
  78. The Girl Without Hands
    The result is a dazzlingly imaginative movie about survival.
  79. The Fencer
    The director, Klaus Haro, films the proceedings involvingly enough.... But the movie is almost relentlessly predictable and formulaic — a story of one man’s refusal to conform that dutifully hits all its marks.
  80. Amnesia
    Amnesia, Mr. Schroeder has said, is a story partly based on his mother, who refused to speak German, so perhaps it’s no surprise that it’s strongest when it focuses on Martha, a character Ms. Keller inhabits gracefully.
  81. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
    To say that “Valerian” is a science-fiction epic doesn’t quite do it justice. Imagine crushing a DVD of “The Phantom Menace” into a fine powder, tossing in some Adderall and Ecstasy and a pinch of cayenne pepper and snorting the resulting mixture while wearing a virtual reality helmet in a Las Vegas karaoke bar. Actually, that sounds like too much fun, but you get the idea.
  82. First Kill
    The movie, directed by Steven C. Miller, doesn’t hold a lot of surprises, but there is worse terror-in-the-woods fare out there — rather a lot of it, in fact.
  83. The Black Prince
    A dramatic life does not necessarily a dramatic film make.
  84. Becoming Bond
    On the whole, Becoming Bond is sufficiently winning that you might even forgive its chapter titles, each one a worse-than-the-previous play on a James Bond-associated phrase
  85. Midnight Return: The Story of Billy Hayes and Turkey
    The movie is at its most entertaining when detailing the making of “Midnight Express” and the contentious personalities involved.
  86. Dunkirk
    Dunkirk is a tour de force of cinematic craft and technique, but one that is unambiguously in the service of a sober, sincere, profoundly moral story that closes the distance between yesterday’s fights and today’s.
  87. 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.
  88. Santoalla
    Santoalla ends with the mystery solved. The threads that remain hanging imbue this peculiar story of paradise lost with a tragic resonance.
  89. Our Beloved Month of August
    The whole turns out to be less than the sum of its elegantly constructed and cleverly uncategorizable parts.
  90. The Wrong Light
    In the end, The Wrong Light is an engrossing cautionary tale teaching one of philanthropy’s oldest lessons: Caveat emptor.
  91. Birthright: A War Story
    Birthright: A War Story packs a powerful message: that reproduction has become perilous for women in America.
  92. Almost Sunrise
    We’re left once again feeling we’ve had only a glimmer of illumination on a vexingly complex problem.
  93. Lady Macbeth
    Mr. Oldroyd boxes Katherine in his attractive visuals, imprisoning her as her male relatives do. Yet his intellectual distance also turns her into a specimen, a pinned butterfly turned taxidermy beast.
  94. False Confessions
    There is little to recommend here, even for Huppert completists who follow her anywhere.
  95. Footnotes
    The songs are unmemorable and the choreography less than twinkle-toed, but the lyrics are a delight.
  96. Blind
    The film, directed by Michael Mailer, wanted to be a steamy romance, but it ended up leaden and occasionally laughable.
  97. Wish Upon
    The splatter is deployed cautiously and sometimes wittily, the story moving briskly from wishes granted to costs exacted with the help of familiar faces (including a warm Sherilyn Fenn as Clare’s surrogate mother) and a sympathetic lead.
  98. Chasing Coral
    It’s an environmental tragedy of our own making, the film heartbreakingly argues, that has little hope of being reversed without immediate human intervention.
  99. Endless Poetry
    The images in Endless Poetry are arresting and sometimes disturbing, but there is an earnest commitment to ecstasy and authenticity that renders moot any question of offensiveness or exploitation.
  100. I Am the Blues
    Less of a solemn pilgrimage than a folksy visit, this film is a chance to set a spell, watch longtime musicians play and boast and reflect about their lives on and off the road.
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