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. Places in the Heart
    Robert Benton has made one of the best films in years about growing up American.
  2. Jethica
    At once dryly funny and surprisingly poignant, Jethica uses the paranormal as a metaphor for abusive male behavior. The film’s deadpan perspective and unhurried pacing can diffuse its surprises, but Ohs has an offbeat style that’s fresh and fun.
  3. Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna
    The film’s biggest letdown lies in its cursory tour of who Hutchins was apart from her final hours. Despite testimony from Hutchins’s friends that repeatedly references her artistry, Mason rarely incorporates clips of Hutchins’s cinematography outside “Rust.”
  4. Color Out of Space
    Using shape-shifting as a messy metaphor for sickness and childhood trauma, Stanley and Cage leap so far over the psychological top that they never come back to earth. By the end, my own eyeballs hadn’t changed color, but they must have looked like pinwheels.
  5. District B13
    With backing from the film's producer and co-writer, Luc Besson, the director, Pierre Morel, mounts a breakneck B movie inspired by Hong Kong action extravaganzas, the gritty genre classics of John Carpenter and the Thai neo-kung fu parable "Ong Bak." He hasn't reinvented this particular wheel, but he gets it spinning with delirious savoir-faire.
  6. Cronos
    This film's reflective, even stately style elevates it from the ranks of ordinary stake-through-the-heart vampire dramaturgy, turning it into something much more exotic.
  7. Yellow Rose
    Above all, the music has the greatest staying power — it is the film’s saving grace, just like it is Rose’s during her darkest days.
  8. Warlords
    Epic in scope but intimate in theme, The Warlordsheaves with spectacular battles and the relentless sway of self-interest over conscience.
  9. The Peanut Butter Falcon
    Gottsagen is a disarming performer who creates a sweet and funny character.
  10. Madonna: Truth or Dare
    Truth or Dare is at the very least a potent conversation piece. It can also be seen as a clever, brazen, spirited self-portrait, an ingeniously contrived extension of Madonna's public personality and a studied glimpse into what, in the case of most other pop luminaries, would be at least a quasi-hidden realm.
  11. Double Lover
    Double Lover, which Mr. Ozon “freely adapted” from the Joyce Carol Oates book “Lives of the Twins,” spins its influences into a frenzy that ultimately reveals the story to be very much its own thing. And a crazy, and eventually strangely moving, thing it is. As elaborate as its visuals are, the movie is also intimate.
  12. Epicentro
    Whether Sauper’s travels delivered a cohesive movie this time is debatable, but what he does find is always interesting.
  13. Berlin Syndrome
    Her insistent imagery and sometimes oblique narrative approach don’t always deliver the dividends sought. But the movie identifies Ms. Shortland as a talent to watch.
  14. The Day Shall Come
    A circular firing-squad of full-on crazy, Chris Morris’s The Day Shall Come barges into American counterterrorism tactics with sledgehammer satire and a numbingly repetitive plot.
  15. Summertime
    The most successful sequences are the ones that find new ways of illustrating the meaning of a poem besides lingering on the face of the performer uttering purposefully syncopated and painstakingly intonated lines.
  16. Materialists
    Is heterosexual romance doomed, is the romantic comedy? Those questions swirl with light, teasing provocation in Celine Song’s “Materialists,” a seductive, smartly refreshed addition to an impossibly, perhaps irredeemably old-fashioned genre that was once a Hollywood staple.
  17. Fearless
    Fearless sustains the tradition of ethically inflected Chinese action movies.
  18. I.O.U.S.A.
    Equal parts enlightening and alarming.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    A Cantor's Tale
    The movie is most engaging when following Mr. Mendelson around his old neighborhood, Borough Park, which, we learn, is simply teeming with bakers whose singing is on a par with their knishes.
  20. Portrait of a Garden
    The vision of nature being lovingly tended in Rosie Stapel’s documentary, Portrait of a Garden, is remarkably evocative.
  21. 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.
  22. Reversing Roe
    It’s less interested in rendering a verdict on the morality of abortion than it is in tracing the increasing politicization of the issue.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Farewell, My Lovely
    It's as if someone had put pillow springs, power-steering and a tape deck into a classic racing-car. It is still handsome and it still goes, but it is a handsome mediocrity.
  24. Big Trouble
    It possesses high points you simply don't find in lesser if more consistently funny movies.
  25. War Pony
    A stellar debut.
  26. No Sleep Till
    No Sleep Till is an understated — and somewhat sleepy — film. Its mood of boredom tinged with dread sometimes verges on outright listlessness.
  27. The Phoenician Scheme
    It’s overstuffed, and thus skims and skitters across the surface of everything it touches, only glancing here and there before it’s taking off to the next story beat, the next exquisitely detailed composition.
  28. Louder Than Bombs
    It is possible to admire the craft and sensitivity of Louder Than Bombs without quite believing it. The characters are so carefully drawn that they can feel smaller than life, and the dramatic space they inhabit has a curiously abstract feeling.
  29. Cedar Rapids
    Tim isn't super anything (though he proves heroic), and what makes Cedar Rapids a low-wattage pleasure is its insistence that his ordinariness - with his decency and sense of wonder - is pretty extraordinary.
  30. At the Edge of the World
    This strikingly humane film may function as a prequel to Animal Planet’s “Whale Wars” but is light years ahead in visual clarity and narrative ambition.
  31. Radical
    Despite its foundation in reality, Radical is as by the books as it gets.
  32. Scarred Hearts
    It’s the rare page-to-screen adaptation in which the camera becomes an essential character. The action often unfolds in long shot, with crowded compositions in which the principals are obscured by door frames. Over time, the withholding of conventional editing patterns and the sensitization to subtle changes in camera placement become an analogue for Emanuel’s entrapment.
  33. Cocote
    This is a straightforward story that Mr. de Los Santos Arias, making his fictional feature debut, tells in an ever-changing style, shooting in color and black and white. He also alternates the shape of the frame, mostly toggling between a boxy frame and the wider one most mainstream movies are shown in. Whatever effect was hoped for, this viewer just saw affectation.
  34. Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal
    The gripping documentary Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal shifts the spotlight back to Singer, played in re-enactments by Matthew Modine with dialogue taken directly from wiretaps, to understand how a flip flop-clad former basketball coach rebranded himself as an academic glad-hander for the 1 percent.
  35. Paulina
    Indeed, few satisfying answers arise here. But there’s bravery in asking the questions, and this film knows something about courage.
  36. Tigerland
    Tigerland falls into a common trap of advocacy documentaries, which is to inform on an urgent issue — preserving a species — without a particularly urgent cinematic narrative to match it.
  37. Candy Land
    Written and directed by John Swab, Candy Land is standard grindhouse fare — more serious and less conceptually adventurous than its recent counterparts, Ti West’s “X” and “Pearl” — though not without its fair share of pleasurable nastiness.
  38. Sicilian Ghost Story
    This beautifully realized movie casts a sensitive, secretive spell.
  39. Who Gets to Call It Art?
    This glib, largely uninformative and poorly organized précis of the post-World War II art scene, with its emphasis on New York in the 1960's and the curator Henry Geldzahler, succeeds neither as history nor as art history.
  40. Happy Christmas
    More than in any of his previous films, Mr. Swanberg and his cast have refined a seemingly effortless style of semi-improvised storytelling so natural that it barely seems scripted. Life just happens.
  41. Strayed
    It begins with a montage of devastating black-and-white news clips interwoven with flashes of the flight of a terrified young widow and her two children. After that, the movie softens somewhat, but it never succumbs to sentimentality.
  42. Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie
    This pull-no-punches portrait shocks and amuses with equal frequency.
  43. Afternoon
    Obviously, this is not a film for viewers unfamiliar with Mr. Tsai’s work. But its insistently austere format does suggest a purpose beyond its immediate context.
  44. Relay
    Relay, a slick, sneaky thriller that’s elevated by both the actor and the director, David Mackenzie, makes it clear that Ahmed also has a silent-era performer’s gift for feverish stillness.
  45. Chalk
    This loose-jointed ensemble comedy is funny in a squirm-inducing way.
  46. Violation
    Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli have given their subject matter the focus it deserves, distinguishing themselves as thoughtful, artistic and uncompromising in their shared vision. This female-centered story manages to be gutsy while resisting exploitation — a welcome and nuanced addition to a genre often hobbled by didacticism.
  47. I Will Make You Mine
    The movie accumulates a rueful nostalgia. Soft black-and-white cinematography (by Bill Otto and Carl Nenzen Loven) and low-key humor help offset the limitations of its partly crowd-funded budget, as does the naturalism of the partly improvised performances
  48. Warm Water Under a Red Bridge
    Plays like a nutty psychological mystery.
  49. Gods of Mexico
    This nominal portrait of people isn’t interested in what they have to say.
  50. Lars and the Real Girl
    It’s part comedy, part tragedy and 100 percent pure calculation, designed to wring fat tears and coax big laughs and leave us drying our damp, smiling faces as we savor the touching vision of American magnanimity. It holds a flattering mirror up to us that erases every distortion.
  51. In Pursuit of Silence
    Its arguments range wide without going deep, but its factoids about the medical benefits of hanging out in a forest — and the cognitive costs of a noisy school or hospital — are fascinating and persuasive.
  52. Boy
    This unpretentious comic tale of a youngster's growing relationship with a long-absent father has a surprising rhythmic genius: joy juxtaposed with humiliation, silliness with sadness, fantasy with reality, and none of it formulaic. The editing feels fresh, as does the film.
  53. Handling the Undead
    There are times when the film veers too near the maudlin for comfort, but it always finds its way back to something spare and meaningful.
  54. Tears of the Black Tiger
    The intoxicating madness of Tears of the Black Tiger is in the end too willed, too deliberate, to be entirely divine.
  55. The Fabulous Filipino Brothers
    Every frame is flush with warm, saturated color, and the vibrant quality of the images conveys joyous generosity. The most poignant appeal of this movie is the feeling it creates of being welcomed into a family that radiates all things bright and good.
  56. Claydream
    Evans has made a lively and illuminating tribute, and not always an unduly flattering one.
  57. Thumbsucker
    Mr. Pucci, emerging slowly from behind a stray lock of brown hair, plays Justin's ambiguous transformation with deft understatement. And Mike Mills, who wrote and directed, keeps the film from slipping either into melodrama or facile satire, the two traps into which this genre is most apt to fall.
  58. The Cruise
    As much as Mr. Levitch's voice grates, you can't help but admire the zest for life of this heroically independent but impossibly self-centered crank.
  59. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
    It works well as a visual companion for fans of the author’s work, and as a flawed enigma for everyone else.
  60. Kicks
    The characters have enough dimension to avoid appearing to be symbols of a social tragedy, and the movie’s relative gentleness makes the harsher realities of Brandon’s world all the more distressing.
  61. The Defiant Ones
    A remarkably apt and dramatic visualization of a social idea—the idea of men of different races brought together to face misfortune in a bond of brotherhood — is achieved by Producer Stanley Kramer in his new film, The Defiant Ones.
  62. Inglourious Basterds
    Mostly, though, there is Landa, whose unctuous charm, beautifully modulated by Mr. Waltz, gives this unwieldy, dragging movie a much-needed periodic jolt.
  63. The Mermaid
    While second-guessing the marketing strategies of movie conglomerates is happily not the concern of this reviewer, it does seem a shame that this exhilarating, bizarre, good-hearted, blatantly obvious sci-fi-fantasy-slapstick eco-fable isn’t getting wider fanfare.
  64. Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story
    An enjoyably hokey, big-budget theatrical film with a lot of kicks and the soul of a television movie. It's exactly what it announces itself to be and won't offend (or surprise) anyone...Although "Dragon" has few surprises, it is an entertainingly predictable enterprise.
  65. Never Let Me Go
    Alas, what's missing is the spark of life, the jolt of the unexpected - something beyond tears - to puncture the falseness of a film world, which, by its insistence on its own beauty, obscures the tragedy that the three characters, by their nature, cannot express.
  66. Batman
    It's neither funny nor solemn. It has the personality not of a particular movie but of a product, of something arrived at by corporate decision.
  67. In Another Country
    What the point here might be is a bit more elusive. It may be simply to allow Ms. Huppert, one of the most adventurous actresses in movies, the opportunity to try something new. And that might be enough.
  68. Why Don't You Just Die!
    Sokolov’s debut feature is a clever, bloody as hell, often hilarious virtuoso exercise in excruciating harm-doing among mendacious people.
  69. Babel
    In the end Babel, like that tower in the book of Genesis, is a grand wreck, an incomplete monument to its own limitless ambition. But it is there, on the landscape, a startling and imposing reality. It's a folly, and also, perversely, a wonder.
  70. Man from Reno
    Man From Reno fascinates. It invites you to go back, decipher its clues and discern a grand design, if there is one.
  71. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans
    Mr. Herzog’s film is a pulpy, glorious mess. Its maniacal unpredictability is such a blast that it reminds you just how tidy and dull most crime thrillers are these days.
  72. Unstoppable
    It's the kind of outrageous, excessive flourish that can make Mr. Scott's work so enjoyable in the moment. He doesn't do much, but with a handful of appealing actors in tow, he sure keeps that machine going.
    • The New York Times
      • Posted Dec 14, 2010
  73. Brave
    The tussling between Elinor and Merida is familiar, but while the mother-daughter clashes may make the story "relatable," they drain it of its mythopoetic potential, turning what could have been a cool postmodern fairy tale into another family melodrama.
  74. Eklavya: The Royal Guard
    The main tribute in Guard, however, is to Mr. Bachchan, an aging Bollywood monument (and father of the rising actor Abhishek Bachchan), whose sunken, heavy-lidded eyes, grizzled countenance and noble bearing indisputably convey the presence of a seasoned star.
  75. Wetlands Preserved: The Story of an Activist Nightclub
    Crammed with colorful interviews, digital animation and live performances, this frisky and forthright film by Dean Budnick chronicles a vision of financing social progress with really great tunes.
  76. The Last Time I Saw Macao
    A sly, amusing if underconceptulized and needlessly elliptical inquiry into truth, memory and appearances.
  77. Viva
    It infuses a too-familiar story with so much heart that you surrender to its charm and forgive it for being unabashedly formulaic.
  78. The Birth of Saké
    Mr. Shirai nicely shuffles in the back stories of several workers, and his shots of sky, sea and early morning landscapes could fit amid Hokusai woodcuts.
  79. Rabin in His Own Words
    The obvious problem with its subject-says-all approach is the lack of outside voices and perspective. This is a broad summation of the man, not a critical look at his policies.
  80. Love & Taxes
    If there aren’t many big laughs here, there are enough smiles to make the time pass pleasantly enough.
  81. Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf
    "Five Seasons” is least dull when capturing the artist at his most spontaneous, showing his joy, for instance, at seeing Texas wildflowers. But the director Thomas Piper, whose credits include another documentary that deals with the High Line and a film about the artist Sol LeWitt, never finds a way to convey the excitement of his subject’s innovations.
  82. Scaffolding
    Rife with heavy-handed metaphors — and discussions of metaphors, as befits a movie about a young man studying literature — Scaffolding seems somewhat torn when it comes to telegraphing its own intentions. Its ambiguities of character take a back seat to a trite upshot.
  83. Old Henry
    Old Henry makes a solid, honorable go of proving once again that the foursquare western isn’t dead, though in paying homage to its forebears, it inevitably stands in their very long shadows.
  84. The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future
    The power of Alegría’s feature debut is found not in dialogue or explication, but in the lyrical, magical realist qualities of folklore: disappointed mothers and fathers, sacred animals and cursed rivers, love and forgiveness.
  85. God's Creatures
    God’s Creatures is ultimately a movie about the collision between a mother’s fidelity and her moral conscience, and Watson is terrific at telegraphing how these instincts grind against each other to terrifying ends.
  86. Girlhood
    As spare as the juvenile institution in which much of it was filmed. As you watch it, you wish the film would fill in more of each girl's background.
  87. Undercover Brother
    The one-liners are clever enough and the physical comedy and pop-culture goofing sufficiently dumb and broad to make Undercover Brother, a reasonably pleasant experience.
  88. Redoubt
    Redoubt reaches for intimations and apprehensions of the cosmic.
  89. Enter the Void
    With beauty, mild and sharp jolts, and mesmerizing camerawork, he (Gaspar Noe) tries to open the doors of perception.
  90. The Donut King
    Too sentimental in its final act, “The Donut King” doesn’t quite manage to connect the dots between Ngoy’s financial troubles and the voracious capitalism that enabled his rise. The result is a cheery portrait of immigrant entrepreneurship that lacks political punch.
  91. Only the Animals
    The multiple viewpoints are just a clever, self-satisfied device to deliver stale goods and familiar ugliness with a soupçon of glib class politics.
  92. Eating Animals
    This upsetting documentary offers plenty to chew on.
  93. Revolutionary Road
    "Revolutionary Road" is the kind of great novel that Hollywood tends to botch, because much of it takes place inside the heads of its characters, and because the Wheelers aren't especially likeable and because pessimism without obvious redemption is a tough sell.
  94. Live Free or Die Hard
    Bruce Willis is ready to earn our love again by performing the same lovably violent, meathead tricks as before.
  95. Up for Grabs
    Mr. Wranovics sometimes goes too far in setting up cute situations for filming witnesses' comments.
  96. Censor
    A homage of sorts to the low-budget trash of the period — and a mordantly humorous jab at its excesses — Censor gazes on movie history with style and commitment, but little apparent purpose beyond simulation.
  97. The Dead Zone
    A well-acted drama more eerie than terrifying, more rooted in the occult than in sheer horror.
  98. The Beautiful City
    Only inconsistent pacing and a few minor contrivances that develop late in the film dull its otherwise quietly effective dramatic impact.
  99. Palo Alto
    What tethers the movie and especially April and Teddy is how Ms. Coppola captures that exquisitely tender, moving moment between fragile, self-interested youth and tentatively more outwardly aware adulthood, a coming into consciousness that she expresses through their broken sentences, diverted glances and abrupt turns.
  100. The Opposite of Sex
    What redeems the film's surface bitterness are sharp observations, laceratingly funny dialogue and something Dedee claims to find especially loathsome: a secret heart of gold.
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