The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. 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.
  2. The Offence
    The revelations explode predictably, like the ingredients of a 24-hour cold capsule, but the dramatic impact is real while one is watching it.
  3. Cadejo Blanco
    Had the film leaned more intentionally into the interior lives of its characters rather than positioning itself as a thriller, it may have been a more satisfying watch.
  4. Nightmare Alley
    Del Toro is a world builder, but he can have a tough time bringing his creations to life, which is the case here despite the hard work of his fine cast. The carnival is diverting, and del Toro’s fondness for its denizens helps put a human face on these purported freaks. But once he’s finished with the preliminaries, he struggles to make the many striking parts cohere into a living, breathing whole.
  5. The Hoax
    It is for the most part a jumpy, suspenseful caper, full of narrow escapes, improbable reversals and complicated intrigue. But it has a sinister, shadowy undertow, an intimation of dread that lingers after Irving's game is up.
  6. Belladonna of Sadness (1973)
    Belladonna of Sadness is compulsively watchable, even at its most disturbing: The imagery is frequently graphic, and still, after over 40 years, it has the power to shock.
  7. Who Killed the Electric Car?
    A murder mystery, a call to arms and an effective inducement to rage, Who Killed the Electric Car? is the latest and one of the more successful additions to the growing ranks of issue-oriented documentaries.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Outsourced
    In its modest way, Outsourced may be unique: a charming culture-clash romance that could be taught in business schools.
    • The New York Times
  9. Rotting in the Sun
    Rotting in the Sun is sharpest when exploring the two men’s love-loathe connection because Silva threads a provocatively fuzzy line between fascination for and irritation with Jordan and, by extension, Firstman himself.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Journey from the Fall
    The film depicts one family's endurance in sturdy, old-movie style, with sweeping camerawork, a monumental and occasionally intrusive orchestral score, gorgeous yet forbidding natural vistas and enough shocking tragedies, brazen escapes and crowd-pleasing acts of defiance to fuel several action-adventure pictures.
  11. Fados
    This veteran Spanish director has, in his latest, created both a tribute to an art form and a performance archive.
  12. Pauline and Paulette
    Rather than assaulting you with self-congratulatory tears, it leaves you with a bittersweet glow of wisdom and an appreciation of the small triumphs and difficult labors of love.
  13. Tosca
    For the most part, it works beautifully as a movie without sacrificing the integrity of the opera.
  14. Our Father
    Poignant though it is, the movie is the opposite of depressing. There is too much life in it.
  15. Yom Yom
    An interesting, elusive hodgepodge of comedy, melodrama and implicit allegory, lighted by occasional sparks of formal bravado.
  16. Audition
    The picture is about victims -- but it's also a great, sick rush with a kicker on the level of "The Vanishing."
  17. Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry
    Going Upriver is a small, valuable contribution to the continuing project of sorting out and making sense of Vietnam, a war that, among other things, opened a fissure at the heart of American liberalism that has yet to heal.
  18. Pellet
    As blunt as it is in depicting child abuse, El Bola is a movie steeped in an ambiguity that lends its conflicts a symbolic resonance.
  19. Teddy Bear
    Mr. Matthiesen has a way of consistently and gently upending expectations, sometimes with humor.
  20. Sisters
    A good, substantial horror film with such a sense of humor that it never can quite achieve the solemnly repellent peaks of Roman Polanski's "Repulsion."
  21. Lethal Weapon 2
    Before it skids out of control in the final sequence, the film is so careful to preserve its successful comic-action formula that it follows the most basic law of sequels. If you liked ''Lethal Weapon,'' you'll like Lethal Weapon 2; it's almost as simple as that.
  22. I Am Divine
    I Am Divine doesn’t dwell on Milstead’s growing pains. It is an aggressively upbeat show-business success story that focuses on his self-reinvention.
  23. Studio 54
    The movie is a fast account that is sometimes a tad facile in its analysis of a cultural moment. But as Mr. Schrager’s personal too-much-too-soon story, it’s compelling.
  24. Wuthering Heights
    The grunts and howls seem every bit as mannered as the florid diction of Olivier and Oberon, perhaps even more so. Their artifice, like Brontë's own, was overt, whereas Ms. Arnold strives to disguise hers in the trappings of authenticity. And as a result, the impact - the grandeur, the art - of Wuthering Heights is diminished.
  25. Only Human
    A vigorously paced modern screwball comedy written and directed by the husband-and-wife team Dominic Harari and Teresa De Pelegrí, explores family values, and Leni and Rafi's mismatched cultural backgrounds, with a refreshingly light touch.
  26. 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.
  27. 21 Grams
    You won't come out unaffected, because the depths of intimacy that the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu plumbs here are so rarely touched by filmmakers that 21 Grams is tantamount to the discovery of a new country.
  28. The Cat Returns (2002)
    As it is, it’s the best non-Miyazaki, non-Takahata Ghibli feature. A girl prevents a cat from getting crushed by a truck and gains favor with a nocturnal kingdom of hipster felines, in a story with echoes of Alice in Wonderland and the novels of Haruki Murakami.
  29. Merchants of Doubt
    Merchants of Doubt, Robert Kenner’s informative and infuriating new documentary, ought to remind us that the denial of climate change is hardly a joke.
  30. Martin Margiela: In His Own Words
    It is a poem about the ways in which the speed and ubiquity demanded by the internet have squeezed certain creative wells dry, perhaps irreparably.
  31. Ted K
    The film is a tad reductive, leaning too heavily on currently fashionable explanations for why lonely white men resort to violence. But Stone makes up for it with some magnificently eerie moments.
  32. The Lady in the Van
    In Ms. Smith’s tough, levelheaded performance, Mary is an irascible termagant full of batty notions clutching on to life as best she can. She is hard to like, and that’s good.
  33. The Letter: An American Town and the 'Somali Invasion'
    Mr. Hamzeh's film is responsible and intelligent, though, and important as a record of a disturbing incident.
  34. Eyes Wide Open
    Its scrupulous, humane sympathy gives this small, sorrowful film a glow of insight and a pulse of genuine, openhearted curiosity.
  35. Queen to Play
    In small but significant ways, Queen to Play defies expectations. It dangles the possibility of an affair between Hélène and Kröger in games that the film likens to courtship rituals in a classic screwball comedy.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Bellboy
    A generous—some might even say gratuitous—proportion of the anecdotes are devoted to mild shaggy dog jokes, with a subdued audience chuckle as the kindest response. Mr. Lewis' devotees may find the comedian disappointingly restrained.
  37. Caramel
    You are likely to remember this charming film, directed by Nadine Labaki, less for its gently comic, mildly melodramatic plot than for its friendly and inviting atmosphere.
  38. Save the Green Planet!
    At once a sick comedy, a bile-raising thriller and a genre pastiche, Save the Green Planet is a welter of conflicting tones, dissonant moods and warring intentions.
  39. Rampart
    A sun-scorched noir, Rampart tells a familiar story with such visual punch and hustling energy that it comes close to feeling like a new kind of movie, though it's more just a tough gloss on American crime stories past.
  40. The Painting (Le Tableau)
    This is a sweet adventure story for children. (Surely, American parents can deal with the bare breasts of one talking painting.) For adults it is short on narrative sophistication but visually a true objet d’art.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Poseidon Adventure
    Though tensions slacken and credibility is strained here, realistic technical effects make the stricken ship and the efforts of its survivors to escape a fairly spellbinding adventure.
  42. Your Friends & Neighbors
    The web of lies, failures and brutal revelations here is strong stuff, and it's the work of an original filmmaker who takes no prisoners.
  43. The Other City
    The film's most vivid presence is seen but barely able to speak: Jimmy, a gay man in his 30s dying at Joseph's House, an AIDS hospice. Anyone who has kept a deathbed vigil will relate to his suffering and his family's, and perhaps arrive at a sense of just how universal this epidemic truly is.
  44. The Student
    Pitched somewhere between allegory and documentary, the film looks at its characters in a dispassionate, almost deadpan way. They’re something more than specimens under glass but something less than fully rounded people.
  45. Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back
    The art is the star and Ms. Axelrod features plenty of it. She also outlines a knowing path through Mr. Cattelan’s career, leaving just enough room to have you wondering if the artist is more of a con man than a genius.
  46. MATANGI/MAYA/M.I.A.
    The documentary elicits some viewer indignation on her behalf, but overall, it’s not a very inspired piece of work. While it depicts M.I.A.’s bristling at being called a terrorist advocate, it never wholly clarifies her specific political aims.
  47. Emergency Declaration
    Emergency Declaration, a piercing thriller from the South Korean writer-director Han Jae-rim, manages to deliver excitement and melodrama out of a ludicrous story line.
  48. Swan Song
    The story here is about more than just the ballet: It’s about the people who are stepping into the spotlight.
  49. Alone
    This minimalist survival thriller unfolds with such elegant simplicity and single-minded momentum that its irritations are easily excused.
  50. I Swear
    Jones has turned a life into a hackneyed survivor’s story with cartoon villains, cardboard saints, pretty scenery, mewling piano notes and expedient, drama-goosing epiphanies.
  51. Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe
    “Do the Universe” knows it won’t change the world, or precincts outside it. But the abundance of not entirely cheap laughs that this movie — which is best watched over a plate of nachos — delivers is therapeutic.
  52. Late Night
    Every time you think Late Night is settling into familiar tropes — about workplace politics, mean bosses, long marriages, fish out of water, bootstraps and how to pull them — it shifts a few degrees and finds a fresh perspective.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sacco and Vanzetti
    The movie's meat-and-potatoes style seems less a failure of imagination than a means of putting in the foreground its intriguing subject matter.
  54. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
    Radcliffe is winningly guileless in his performance, twitching his costume-y eyebrows and mustache like gentle bunny ears even as he lip-syncs “Another One Rides the Bus” with such commitment that his neck veins nearly pop.
  55. Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry
    “Blurry” isn’t triumphant, strictly speaking. Instead, it relies on the accretive power of the mundane. It moves forward without narration, and sometimes without narrative rhythm — often it feels almost observational, like a nature film.
  56. The Duellists
    A film that satisfies not because it sweeps us off our feet, knocks us into the aisles, provides us with visions of infinity or definitions of God, but because it is precise, intelligent, civilized, and because it never for a moment mistakes its narrative purpose.
  57. City Slickers
    A comedy that's cheery, earnest, harmless and almost totally lacking in bite. City Slickers ambles along lackadaisically, incorporating birth, death, casual wisecracks and a running gag about two ice-cream moguls who pride themselves on knowing the right flavor for any occasion. Each of these things seems to be given equal weight.
  58. Knife + Heart
    This movie packs in plenty of cinema acrobatics and spectacle without ever feeling out of control, even as it morphs into a far-fetched whodunit.
  59. Ginger Snaps
    Because the characters are so well established -- Ms. Perkins is particularly good as the shy, resentful Brigitte -- the film can have fun with its own premises without turning into an empty camp exercise.
  60. I Don't Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman
    Ms. Lambert’s film builds nicely, staying in tune with the ordinariness and intimacy explored in Ms. Akerman’s boldly rendered films.
  61. Clerks
    [Smith] also has an uncommonly sure sense of deadpan comic timing.
  62. RoboCop
    Paul Verhoeven, a Dutch director ("Soldier of Orange"), doesn't let the furiously futuristic plot get in the way of the flaming explosions, shattering glass and hurtling bodies.
  63. Cat's Eye
    Cat's Eye is pop movie making of an extremely clever, stylish and satisfying order.
  64. The Boys in the Band
    The ensemble is superb, and each member has at least one standout moment, but the movie rides on the shoulders of Parsons, as Michael, the host of the party.
  65. Lady in White
    Here are the bones of an ordinary ghost story. But the writer and director Frank LaLoggia brings them to life with exceptional vitality.
  66. Life of Riley
    Life of Riley is neither especially profound nor riotously funny. An element of caricature is palpable in the performances but restrained.
  67. 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.
  68. Shanghai Blues
    “Blues,” playing now in a 40th anniversary restoration, is a constant charmer. Watching it is a buoyant experience even when the humor is a bit tasteless, including a bit involving mistaken sex partners during a blackout.
  69. Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation
    the connections drawn in Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation are sufficiently instructive that watching and listening to these writers is also, in a way, like hearing one author in stereo.
  70. Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue
    The movie is an affecting group portrait and also a complex and subtle piece of literary criticism.
  71. Remembering Every Night
    Ghosts linger, cameras linger. This is pensive, slow-slow cinema, like Bela Tarr with color but less compositional heft or, sometimes, clarity.
  72. Belén
    The film weaves a surprising amount of history into a procedural framework. It’s eye-opening, even though it’s hitting the same old beats.
  73. All About Nina
    It’s hard not to root for Nina, even if this prickly, intriguingly difficult character becomes considerably less interesting as the story progresses and the dialogue veers toward the therapeutic
  74. Fantastic Fungi
    A charming blend of science and conjecture, Fantastic Fungi wants to free your mind.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Murder!
    Although the final scenes in Murder...do not live up to many that have gone before and there is a strange absence of true psychology in these closing stretches, there are episodes in this picture that are possessed of considerable merit.
  76. A Town Called Panic
    ATown Called Panic is an adventure story as fast-paced and exciting as any currently in theaters.
  77. Hellbender
    While the result is a mostly-compelling tale of matriarchal megalomania, occasionally this group composition feels more like a jumble.
  78. Under the Volcano
    A film that is especially impressive for the courage, intelligence and restraint with which it tackles an impossible task...What it can do, and does to such a surprising degree, is to bring the characters to life and offer fleeting glimpses into the heart of Mr. Lowry's tragedy.
  79. About Baghdad
    The inexplicable use of split screens and multiple images does little to bolster the power of the speakers' testimony. If anything, the technique is distracting. Material as emotionally and intellectually challenging as this requires no gimmicks at all.
  80. The Old Guard
    I’m not usually someone to hope for sequels, but I guess if you live long enough …
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cimarron
    It gives a wonderfully impressive idea of the early days in the territory, from the time the hordes of persons on horseback, in wagons and on foot make the dash to lay out their claims on the signal of a pistol shot, to the gradual improvements that come to Osage as years go by.
  82. Golden Voices
    Job tensions hammer at the fault lines of the couple’s marriage, but the movie maintains an understated “I love ya, tomorrow” tone. A pleasant sit — the kind of picture that’s moving, but not too moving.
  83. Only the River Flows
    The filmmaker has a gift for disorientation — a chilling cut connects a scene of a pregnancy ultrasound to Ma Zhe flipping through slides of murder evidence — that partly compensates for the muddiness of the plot.
  84. !Women Art Revolution
    These interviews form the backbone of !W.A.R., and like the film, they're passionate, contentious, funny, sincere, politically attuned.
  85. Contagion
    Soderbergh's smart, spooky thriller about a thicket of contemporary plagues - a killer virus, rampaging fear, an unscrupulous blogger - is as ruthlessly effective as the malady at its cool, cool center.
  86. Fido
    It won't make you bleed, just howl.
  87. Almost There
    This first feature from Dan Rybicky and Aaron Wickenden demonstrates that these documentary filmmakers might do well to think more like journalists sometimes.
  88. Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song
    The documentary’s account of the song’s fate, indebted to Alan Light’s book “The Holy or the Broken,” is a fascinating study in the mechanics and metaphysics of pop-culture memory.
  89. The School of Flesh
    Watching this handsomely filmed, deftly edited but rather dry movie, you keep imagining the juice that a director like Pedro Almodovar could have squeezed out of the same story.
  90. Adanggaman
    The narrative motion is tricky; first it canters, then shifts into a heady, quick gallop. What's most fascinating about Adanggaman are the scenes that feel like anecdotal rest stops but that are actually building into a nuanced and engrossing whole.
  91. Mein liebster Feind - Klaus Kinski
    Serves as an eloquent coda to their unforgettable creative partnership.
  92. Pieces of April
    Hedges's intelligent and touching farce, Pieces of April, makes an important contribution to a small and insignificant subgenre: Thanksgiving Day failure. It does so by raising the bar.
  93. 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.
  94. The Ugly Stepsister
    The movie, adapted by the Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt from the Cinderella story, is the opposite of didactic: Slyly funny and visually captivating (the luscious cinematography is by Marcel Zyskind), its scenes move with ease from gross to gorgeous, and from grotesque to magical.
  95. Faults
    While Faults glances at the narcissism of cult leaders, its most penetrating investigation is into the root emptiness within disciples, the desperate hunger to relinquish personal initiative.
  96. Bad Santa
    Takes all the Christmas season's bad vibes and converts them into an achingly funny and corrupt dark comedy.
  97. Waking Sleeping Beauty
    A sly retrospective exercise in corporate self-congratulation masquerading as an insider’s tell-all.
  98. It Might Get Loud
    For rock geeks of any age or taste, the lore in this documentary will be catnip.
  99. Killing Them Safely
    Mr. Berardini’s packed documentary makes its case early and often, perhaps too often, but it’s more chilling than your average issue film.
  100. 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.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »