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. War Machine
    After a sluggish and chaotic start, War Machine finds its groove and becomes its own thing: a mordant, cleareyed critique of American war-making that is all the more devastating for being affectionately drawn.
  2. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
    Its pleasures are so meager, its delight in its own inventions so forced and false, that it becomes almost the perfect opposite of entertainment.
  3. Buena Vista Social Club: Adios
    It’s not as poetic or immediately enjoyable as the first film. But it is tougher and more analytical, with real challenges embedded in its pleasures.
  4. Drone
    [A] modest, proficient thriller.
  5. Baywatch
    Like its source material, Baywatch is sleazy and wholesome, silly and earnest, dumb as a box of sand and slyly self-aware. It’s soft-serve ice cream. Crinkle-cut fries. A hot car and a skin rash. Tacky and phony and nasty and also kind of fun.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Restless Creature: Wendy Whelan
    The film is both a comeback story and, more profoundly, a coming to terms with aging.
  7. Icaros: A Vision
    You may find this sparse film maddeningly elusive, but chances are you’ll come out of it with your head spinning, in a good way.
  8. Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS
    A mostly impressive array of experts (including, in the movie’s one unfortunate off note, Michael T. Flynn, who was forced to resign as national security adviser) adds to the merciless clarity of this tragic picture.
  9. The Commune
    Tobias Lindholm’s screenplay sacrifices credibility for quirkiness.
  10. The Woman Who Left
    The film makes uncompromising demands on your attention and your empathy. But it is also illuminating and, in its downbeat, deliberate way, exhilarating.
  11. Everything, Everything
    With a pair of irresistible leads and a straightforward love-overcomes-adversity story, Everything, Everything scores a direct hit on the teenage-girl market. Others might find it pretty enjoyable as well.
  12. Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
    It’s a kind of stealth home movie: a portrait of two generations of an immigrant family in the United States.
  13. Wakefield
    The film, scrupulously faithful to its source, is decidedly literary, but not in an especially satisfying way.
  14. The Survivalist
    Impressively lean and rigidly controlled, “The Survivalist” achieves, at times, the primitive allure of a silent movie.
  15. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul
    Unfortunately, the fresh blood has been saddled with a tired story, the family road trip that goes outlandishly awry, and the result is another forgettable film.
  16. Afterimage
    This is an angry, vivid, passionate film.
  17. Legion of Brothers
    You’ll have to wade through several topics to get to the heart of Legion of Brothers, but once you’re there, some intense stories make the effort worthwhile.
  18. Paint It Black
    It’s not an easy movie to embrace, but it lingers.
  19. Alien: Covenant
    The fact that you know more or less exactly what’s coming doesn’t diminish the creepiness, or lessen the jolt when the thing you’re dreading arrives.
  20. The Last Shaman
    How The Last Shaman came to be isn’t discussed in the film, but this documentary might be less disquieting if it had been.
  21. Whisky Galore!
    Gone is the original’s joyful sense of mischief; what’s left is an inoffensive piece of twaddle that never fully appreciates the ineluctable bond between community spirit and a drop of the hard stuff.
  22. Tracktown
    Fact and fiction blend nicely in Tracktown.
  23. The Wedding Plan
    In a complicated role, the excellent Ms. Koler exudes a kind of flighty confidence: For all her nuptial-related anxieties, Michal is completely comfortable with who she is.
  24. Hounds of Love
    It’s a tense, sharply assembled debut feature from Ben Young. Its main problem, though, is that it never answers a basic question: Why are we watching this?
  25. Folk Hero & Funny Guy
    Things meander along to the inevitable blowup scene and a too-easy ending in which all is forgiven and personal growth has occurred, though not for the viewing audience.
  26. The Wall
    The vein-popping mood is ultimately more exhausting than exciting.
  27. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
    Arthur and Vortigern mix it up amid a lot of shenanigans, detours and filler, some bad, some good and all of it disposable.
  28. Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe
    One need not admire Zweig’s writing to recognize the worth of this thoughtful treatment of one of the countless real-life tragedies of 20th-century history.
  29. Urban Hymn
    If Urban Hymn starts with that familiar dynamic, it stays surprisingly fresh thanks to three fine performances and a willingness to be uncompromising.
  30. Get Me Roger Stone
    Topicality is all or at least a large part of the movie’s draw.
  31. Paris Can Wait
    By the time the final meal is devoured, you’ll be wanting nothing so much as an antacid.
  32. Lowriders
    Cars could easily have been the stars of Lowriders, but the film makes them supporting players in a family drama that’s a mix of strong scenes and shopworn ones punctuated by clichés.
  33. Manifesto
    As an oblique examination and critique of political and art history and their various interactions over the 20th century, Manifesto is both witty and provocative. It is not, however, a motion picture for people seeking a plot.
  34. Snatched
    Though this movie ostensibly celebrates the spirit of adventure and openness to experience, it takes no risks and blazes no trails. It’s ultimately as complacent, self-absorbed and clueless as its heroine, and not always in an especially amusing way.
  35. The Drowning
    The Drowning...distinguishes itself by applying a depth of psychological observation that yields a genuinely unsettling vision.
  36. Sacred
    A kaleidoscopic travelogue depicting demonstrations of faith worldwide.
  37. A Woman's Life
    Its images and scenes are suffused by an intensity that seems almost to be a quality of the light and air as they play across Ms. Chemla’s watchful, sometimes inscrutable features.
  38. Another Evil
    An ultra-low-budget ghost story with an off-kilter sensibility that initially intrigues but ultimately fizzles.
  39. Burden
    This is a film unafraid to look at [Burden's] acts, but timid when approaching his ideas.
  40. The Dinner
    Despite frequent flashbacks and Bobby Bukowski’s richly dimensional photography, the movie has a static, stagy look that amplifies the oppressiveness of its increasingly unpleasant exchanges.
  41. Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait
    No commercials are shown during Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait. They would only be redundant. Instead this documentary serves as a feature-length advertisement for the artist, and is about as daring as a billboard for skim milk.
  42. Like Crazy
    An energetic, visually attractive but ultimately irritating comedy-drama.
  43. Ta'ang
    Incorporating his typically arduous, slow-paced style, Mr. Wang doesn’t make things easy for viewers.
  44. Risk
    To some degree in spite of Ms. Poitras’s journalistic intentions — though very much as a consequence of her rigorous honesty — the picture that emerges is complicated, unsettling and intriguingly ambivalent.
  45. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
    It’s tough being a hitmaker who isn’t weighed down by corporate expectations, but for a while, Mr. Gunn does a pretty good job of keeping the whole thing reasonably fizzy, starting with an opener that winks at the audience with big bangs and slapstick.
  46. 3 Generations
    Ray is courageous just for making the decision to change sexes. The film — which, by the way, includes a surprising amount of droll humor — would be better if it trusted the audience to recognize this, rather than piling ordeals worthy of the Labors of Hercules onto its protagonist.
  47. The Lovers
    Falling with a thud between two stools, it has neither the zip nor the zaniness of farce nor the airy vivacity of the best romantic comedies.
  48. Angkor Awakens: A Portrait of Cambodia
    The graphic evidence here, in testimony on camera and in period photographs, is absolutely harrowing.
  49. Take Me
    Parts of it work, but the overall package is never really suspenseful enough to have you on edge or overtly funny enough to be a lark.
  50. Chuck
    Mr. Schreiber has almost no physical resemblance to Wepner, in his heyday a burly, mustachioed redhead. Mr. Schreiber is a terrific actor, however, and he pulls it off. His portrayal works partly because of its understatement.
  51. Mr. Chibbs
    The film, like its subject, frustrates in its inability to focus; there is no deep inquiry into what makes Anderson tick. It’s like skimming a stone across a lake.
  52. Last Men in Aleppo
    This is an essential film, but it is also a terribly dispiriting one.
  53. How to Be a Latin Lover
    The whole enterprise is so fundamentally good-natured and fluffy that it’s sometimes hard to stay annoyed by it.
  54. Boone
    Boone is slightly monotonous, and familiarity may be one cause.
  55. Buster's Mal Heart
    Buster’s Mal Heart is about the making of a madman. It also aspires, with less success, to philosophically query the void at the center of modern life and Christianity’s failure to fill it.
  56. The Circle
    The novel is at its most trenchantly funny when depicting the exhausting nature of virtual social life, and it’s in this area, too, that the movie gets its very few knowing laughs. But it’s plain, not much more than 15 minutes in, that without the story’s paranoid aspects you’re left with a conceptual framework that’s been lapped three times over.
  57. Casting JonBenét
    It’s a handsome package that never transcends the banality of its ideas, most of which involve how different people, including from Boulder, were affected by the case.
  58. One Week and a Day
    It meanders from start to finish, searching for a tone that it never quite finds.
  59. Nise: The Heart of Madness
    It’s a study of courageous innovation against an entrenched medical orthodoxy.
  60. LA 92
    [A] taut and commanding primer.
  61. Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story
    Like flipping through misplaced leaves in a photo book, the documentary maintains a free-flowing tone as it uncovers the work that went into creating some of the indelible scenes in Hollywood history.
  62. Natasha
    Mr. Bezmozgis creates a disturbing portrait of a girl turned calculating and nihilistic by her upbringing, and there is no coyness here.
  63. A Dark Song
    The movie dives into the black arts with methodical restraint and escalating unease.
  64. Rupture
    Dreary, derivative and flat-out dopey, this dragged-out torture tale will disappoint even those whose hearts race whenever they see a female character strapped to a bed.
  65. Bang! The Bert Berns Story
    If you love the music Berns made, you’ll love this movie; if you don’t, I feel for you, but “Bang!” might nevertheless entertain with its dish.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Obit
    It is modest, observant, graceful and nonchalantly witty.
  67. Behind the White Glasses
    At its most enjoyable, Valerio Ruiz’s rambling profile cedes the floor to Ms. Wertmüller, who recalls her creative partnership with her husband, the production designer Enrico Job, and her cultural importance in representing Italy’s south onscreen.
  68. Let It Fall: L.A. 1982-1992
    Teeming with acts both heroic and reprehensible, John Ridley’s wrenchingly humane documentary, Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992, reveals the Los Angeles riots as the almost inevitable culmination of a decade of heightening racial tensions.
  69. The Penguin Counters
    Here’s what sounds like one dud job: calculating bird populations in Antarctica. But here’s what that work has inspired: one swell documentary.
  70. Slack Bay
    As it turns out, modes of farce and fantasy enable Mr. Dumont to pull the rug out from under the viewer in a number of new and upsetting ways. Be prepared.
  71. The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki
    The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki deepens quietly. This is Mr. Kuosmanen’s first feature (he has directed a few shorts), and if he had any rookie jitters you wouldn’t know it.
  72. Unforgettable
    Here, both the director (Denise Di Novi) and the writer (Christina Hodson) are women, yet that doesn’t translate into a reimagining of the tired formula.
  73. Free Fire
    Free Fire is an action movie finely tuned to even the most potentially vicious audiences’ tolerances. It is filled with mayhem, but avoids grisly violence — at least until the finale pulls out some gory, and not inapt, punch lines. Luxuriating in disreputability in all the right ways, the film also contains no shortage of profane verbal wit.
  74. The Promise
    Weighed down by the worthiness of its intentions, The Promise is a big, barren wartime romance that approaches the Armenian genocide with too much calculation and not nearly enough heat.
  75. 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.
  76. Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent
    Throughout, the solitary Mr. Tower maintains an unflappable refinement, dedicated, a college friend says, to “looking for some utopian possibility of living, because that’s what kept the darkness away.”
  77. Citizen Jane: Battle for the City
    Only intermittently stimulating.
  78. Born in China
    The narrative, read by John Krasinski, is kid-friendly in a cloying sort of way, and unpleasant realities like China’s pollution are not mentioned. So as an introduction for children to exotic creatures in picturesque landscapes, the movie is harmless enough.
  79. By the Time It Gets Dark
    By the Time It Gets Dark has clearly been thought through, but it’s so cryptic that it cries out for, if not perfect explanations, perhaps footnotes. It’s so conceptual that it offers little for those not in sync.
  80. 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.
  81. Finding Oscar
    The barbarity described in Finding Oscar is stomach-turning, but moments of courage still shine through in this unsettling yet vital documentary.
  82. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
    It’s less that Mr. Cedar blends realism with absurdity than that he refuses to acknowledge any distinction between them.
  83. A Quiet Passion
    Mr. Davies, whose work often blends public history and private memory, possesses a poetic sensibility perfectly suited to his subject and a deep, idiosyncratic intuition about what might have made her tick.
  84. Mimosas
    At best ambiguous and at worst unfathomable, Mimosas, the sophomore feature from the Spanish director Oliver Laxe, merges harsh reality and offbeat mysticism into a reflection on the tug between our higher powers and baser instincts.
  85. My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea
    An eccentric and lively animated fantasy.
  86. Tommy's Honour
    The performances are desultory, the musical score bullying and the drama — aside from the game-changing placement of inconvenient shrubbery — as predictable as Tom senior’s steadily sprouting beard.
  87. All These Sleepless Nights
    For all its visual and sonic pleasures — see it in a theater with a good subwoofer — All These Sleepless Nights feels simple-minded in its commitment to drift above all else.
  88. Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary
    While the recordings are wall-to-wall, this somewhat busy documentary rarely accords time for simply listening.
  89. Heal the Living
    It’s all just empty calories; what this movie desperately needs is conflict.
  90. Little Boxes
    It avoids the big confrontation or grand statement; doing so allows it to be an effective, if somewhat uneventful, study of the Brooklyn bubble effect.
  91. The Lost City of Z
    There’s much to love in this film, but what lingers are those lapidary details that often go missing in stories about great men, as if they had built the world alone and no child had ever raced down a road waving goodbye as a father disappeared into history.
  92. The Fate of the Furious
    Zoom, crash, repeat with squealing, burning and flaming tires — it’s all predictably absurd and self-mocking, and often a giggle when not a total yawn.
  93. Glory
    The variable incongruities of Glory give it a queasy power uncommon in contemporary cinema. It’s the feel-bad movie of the spring.
  94. The Ticket
    The script is incapable of penetrating the moral thicket that the actors and the cinematographer, Zachary Galler, have so carefully woven.
  95. Colossal
    Colossal has such an easygoing, offhand vibe, and takes such pleasure in its characters’ foibles, that it camouflages its deep subject, which is rage.
  96. Graduation
    Graduation is long and intense, a rigorously naturalistic film that at times feels as claustrophobic and suspenseful as a horror movie. Like Mr. Mungiu’s other work, it is a thriller of sorts, built around an excruciating ethical problem. He is unstinting in his sympathy and unsparing in his judgment.
  97. Queen of the Desert
    Bell is embodied, in a commanding and versatile performance, by Nicole Kidman, who supplies a gravitas and emotional complexity worthy of the woman she plays.
  98. Their Finest
    Their Finest is too understandably serious to be called a romp, yet it has a buoyancy that lifts you and, in Ms. McCrory, a woman who does, too.
  99. Speech & Debate
    Over all, the movie, directed by Dan Harris and featuring name actors like Kal Penn and Janeane Garofalo in small roles, has a focus problem that leaves its humorous moments obscured and its intentions hazy.
  100. The Transfiguration
    Mr. Ruffin must carry the film, projecting interior activity and suggesting information where the script (by Mr. O’Shea) does not. That he imbues the film with a weight greater than its words is a testament to his skill as an actor.
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