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. Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
    The film could be described as Exhibit A in a study of media celebrity and collective forgetfulness in the age of information overload.
  2. Sex
    Sex is a curious movie, with a mix of moods and intentions that are, by turns, inviting and seriously off-putting.
  3. Body Double
    It's sexy and explicitly crude, entertaining and sometimes very funny. It's his most blatant variation to date on a Hitchcock film ("Vertigo"), but it's also a De Palma original, a movie that might have offended Hitchcock's wryly avuncular public personality, while appealing to his darker, most private fantasies.
  4. You Go to My Head
    Until its surprisingly effective ending, You Go To My Head keeps its drama under the skin. Like an animal in captivity, Bafort, who is also a model, slinks and lounges with long-limbed grace; but it’s Cvetkovic who holds the movie steady, giving Jake a secretive, worn gentleness that’s tinged with tragedy.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Romeo and Juliet
    A lovely, sensitive, friendly popularization of the play.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Here Comes Mr. Jordan
    However you look at it, "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" is rollicking entertainment.
  7. Time After Time
    A movie that's as sweet as it is clever, and never so clever that it forgets to be entertaining.
  8. Lion
    As a purely emotional experience it succeeds without feeling too manipulative or maudlin. I mean, it is manipulative and maudlin, but in a way that seems fair and transparent. Still, it isn’t quite satisfying.
  9. The September Issue
    This entertaining, glib movie is about the maintenance of a brand that Ms. Wintour has brilliantly cultivated since she assumed her place at the top of the editorial masthead in 1988 and which the documentary’s director, R. J. Cutler, has helped polish with a take so flattering he might as well work there.
  10. Fresh Dressed
    Much of this film is told through interviews: Mr. Kani is fascinating and also funny; Mr. Combs is cocksure; and Kanye West is appealingly hyper. (“Being fresh is more important than having money!”) The film is rounded out with great archival footage and, especially in the first half of the film, excellent cartoons by Hectah Arias.
  11. Beeswax
    Beeswax, at first glance a modest, ragged slice of contemporary life, turns out to be a remarkably subtle, even elegant movie.
  12. Amour Fou
    it can be a strategically off-putting movie yet one that also steals under your skin scene by scene and through Ms. Schnoeink’s slowly revealing performance as an ill-fated heroine turned future biographical footnote.
  13. Cinderella Man
    Lightly stained a nicotine brown and topped by two male actors who could steal a movie from a basket of mewling kittens and an army of rosy-cheeked orphans, the film is as calculating and glossy a hard-luck tale as any cooked up on the old M-G-M lot.
  14. The Last Lions
    A worthy, intensive labor of love that took years to shoot and edit, and it's also more gripping than a lot of recent Hollywood thrillers.
  15. I Went Down
    I Went Down owes much of its novelty to steering clear of Irish movie stereotypes and instead showing off a spare and quizzical indie spirit.
  16. The Accidental Getaway Driver
    Despite comic touches, the story stays in the shadows of heart-to-heart talks and ruminations, with contemplative cinematography that sets faces like gems in the darkness and conjures heady visions of Long in Vietnam.
  17. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
    Satire and outrage are easier approaches than the tact and empathy Ms. Akhavan deploys. The Miseducation of Cameron Post, confident in its beliefs and curious about what makes its characters tick, is more interested in listening than in preaching.
  18. Rocketman
    The point of Rocketman isn’t self-aggrandizement. It’s fan service of an especially and characteristically generous kind.
  19. The Cooler
    Luckily this picture is rescued from cliché by the quality of the acting, and Mr. Kramer wisely gives the actors room to work.
  20. Buffalo '66
    Cool, stark compositions and the occasional audacious visual trick give Buffalo '66 a memorable look even when its narrative enters the occasional uneventful stretch.
  21. Eating Raoul
    It is full of smiles, punctuated here and there by marvelously unseemly guffaws, but most of the time it works its little wonders quietly.
  22. Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt
    Here, as in so many other documentaries about troubled musicians, the word genius is casually tossed around. But does every unstable, self-destructive artist defiantly living on the edge qualify for that description? In Van Zandt's case, maybe yes.
  23. Giorni e nuvole
    A brave film simply for daring to portray a nightmare lurking in the minds of middle-aged workers, people who might fear a film that addresses their insecurities this bluntly.
  24. Frontrunners
    Polite, detached documentary in which there are no highs or lows. Politically and emotionally, the movie's thermostat remains at medium cool.
  25. Head Games
    Head Games gains credibility and power from compassion for athletes and respect for their accomplishments. But it also tries to open the eyes of sports lovers to dangers that have too often been minimized and too seldom fully understood.
  26. Hannah Arendt
    Hannah Arendt conveys the glamour, charisma and difficulty of a certain kind of German thought.... The movie turns ideas into the best kind of entertainment.
  27. The Little Bedroom
    The Little Bedroom is a gentle, melancholy drama so pale and tentative that its very colors appear washed away by grief.
  28. The American Nurse
    If the film is workmanlike at times, it is also elegantly cleareyed.
  29. Fatima
    If the movie, loosely based on two books by Fatima Elayoubi, tells a familiar story of immigrants struggling to make something of themselves in an alien culture (Fatima speaks some French but reads only Arabic), it does so in a tone that is kindhearted but clearheaded, and the performances are low-key and believable.
  30. The Little Hours
    The Little Hours is saved from ignominy by two brief standout performances.
  31. Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary
    While the recordings are wall-to-wall, this somewhat busy documentary rarely accords time for simply listening.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Escape from the Planet of the Apes
    Nobody is going to believe it, but I must say anyway that Don Taylor's Escape From the Planet of the Apes is one of the better new movies in town, and better in a genre—science-fiction—that at the crucial middle level where the history of movies is made, if not written, has recently been not so much bad as invisible.
  33. Diamond Island
    As with a dream, you can parse what you’ve watched for meaning or just savor what you’ve seen. For this compassionate film, either way works fine.
  34. Meantime
    The first hour is given to aimless glimpses of aimless existences, and the second, in which Colin finds a sort of deliverance, is contrived in concept and awkward in execution.
  35. Kubrick by Kubrick
    Most of Kubrick’s 13 features have been analyzed exhaustively already, and Kubrick by Kubrick doesn’t offer much that will surprise even mild obsessives. Still, it is interesting to hear Kubrick express ideas that run counter to conventional wisdom.
  36. Monsoon
    The ambience doesn’t register with full force, or do the heavy lifting entrusted to it. Monsoon finally tips over the line that separates minimalism from a not-fully-developed movie.
  37. Transhood
    With so much ground to cover, the scenes’ shortness can feel unsatisfying and even occasionally facile. Though conversations between parents and their children are designed to be emotional beats, there’s a peculiar staginess that comes off as jarring at times.
  38. Wildhood
    The quiet candor with which Hannam addresses issues of masculinity, and how it intersects with an Indigenous and queer identity, elevates this otherwise conventional story.
  39. Roh
    Symbolism overshadows characterization, or any sense of motive for that matter, nevertheless Roh succeeds as a spine-tingling baffler, hitting at nerves we can’t quite articulate but feel all the same.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming
    Mr. Arkin and Mr. Reiner meet and the comedy takes off in wild flight.
  41. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
    A less sentimental, wish-fulfilling approach to Mexican American identity, gay self-discovery and Reagan-era Texas will wait for another day. Until then, fans of “Heartstopper”-style slow-burn romance will eat up this tender film’s subtle charms.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The One That Got Away
    If not a milestone, The One That Got Away adds up to a consistently good tingler.
    • The New York Times
  43. Decorado
    Vázquez’s deadpan directorial style, which occasionally swerves into grim spoofs of Looney Tunes-style antics, perfectly suits the animated dystopia.
  44. Duplicity
    Superior entertainment, the most elegantly pleasurable movie of its kind to come around in a very long time.
  45. The Painted Veil
    Whether through craft or constitution, Mr. Norton invests Walter with a petty cruelty that makes his character’s emotional thaw and Kitty’s predicament all the more poignant.
  46. The Outside Story
    The film, which was written and directed by Casimir Nozkowski, sets an easy pace to match Charles’s mild ennui. The only problem is that the movie doesn’t supplement its lack of stakes with style or substance.
  47. Evil Dead Rise
    Lee Cronin, who directed Evil Dead Rise with many more colors of bodily fluid, is a meticulous creator of stunning shots. His camera doesn’t move. It dances, shifting, spinning, occasionally knocked on its side like a running back in a collision.
  48. It
    The filmmakers honor both the pastoral and the infernal dimensions of Mr. King’s distinctive literary vision.
  49. Trading Places
    It's a big, lavishly staged farce that aims to please even those who favor sophisticated screwball comedy, a genre to which it is greatly indebted.
  50. Funny Games
    Funny Games observes the family's excruciating terror and suffering with the patient delight of a cat luxuriantly toying with a mouse that it is in the process of slowly killing. Posing as a morally challenging work of art, the movie is a really a sophisticated act of cinematic sadism. You go to it at your own risk.
  51. Peepli Live
    The writer-director Anusha Rizvi, making her feature debut, shoots her story efficiently and with visual panache, but after a compelling setup her script runs out of juice.
  52. Digging for Fire
    The film has an appealing honesty and an enjoyably low-key comic style.
  53. Black Gold
    One of the most disquieting (and challenging) statistics is left for last: if Africa's share of world trade increased by only one percentage point, it would generate $70 billion a year, five times what the continent receives in aid. Who wouldn't want that?
  54. Cold Souls
    In this attractive, smart-enough, finally un-brave movie Ms. Barthes peeks at the dark comedy of the soul only to beat a quick, pre-emptive retreat.
  55. How to Build a Girl
    Like a stone skipping on water, How to Build a Girl leaps from raunchy to charming, vulgar to sweet, earthy to airy-fairy without allowing any one to settle. Yet it’s so wonderfully funny and deeply embedded in class-consciousness . . . that it’s tonal incontinence is easily forgiven.
  56. Four Quartets
    Fiennes brings the fire, yet the air around him remains unmoved, even by his embers.
  57. A Shock to the System
    Andrew Klavan's screenplay, adapted from a novel by Simon Brett, comes up with funny lines now and then, but it never has any clear idea whether it is a black comedy, a satire or maybe even a psychological study of a serial killer.
  58. Tuesday
    Without much to distract from the three central characters, Tuesday can feel overlong and a little claustrophobic. Yet this compassionate fairy tale works because the actors are so in sync and the imagery — as in one shot of the bird curled like an apostrophe in a dead woman’s tear duct — is often magical.
  59. Butterfly Tongues
    Delicate, quietly devastating.
  60. Look Back in Anger
    The fury and hate that John Osborne was able to pack into a flow of violent words in his stage play, Look Back in Anger, are not only matched but also documented in the film that the original stage director, Tony Richardson, has made from that vicious play.
  61. White Building
    The film’s loose plotting and secondary character development can leave a few too many hanging threads, but its sense of place is so palpable you can almost smell the smoky city markets, the sweat, the hormones.
  62. The Sleeping Beauty
    The pleasures of Ms. Breillat's work are its commitment and seriousness and its raw, sometimes very funny perversity: she's lets everything hang out, without apologies.
  63. Just Another Love Story
    It may not go anywhere in particular, but it is as exciting as a trip through a well-equipped, scary fun house.
  64. I Am Jane Doe
    Without these balancing voices, I Am Jane Doe coalesces into a steamroller of pain that squashes our ability to see beyond its wounded families.
  65. The Vigil
    Keith Thomas’s slim but effective The Vigil milks terror from a minimalistic setup, relying on the shapes we make out with squinted eyes in the shadows.
  66. My Psychedelic Love Story
    [A] heady, fascinating movie.
  67. Life During Wartime
    It is all perfectly dreadful and at times appallingly funny. Mr. Solondz winds thin tendrils of narrative around the dinner-table conversations, and allows everyone a chance to be earnestly foolish, unguardedly selfish and also, almost by accident, cruelly honest.
  68. The Girl
    As tadpoles morph into frogs, and fears are conquered, The Girl delivers a satisfying, sun-dappled fable about the kindness of strangers and the cruelty of peers.
  69. Tahrir: Liberation Square
    Far from imposing clarity on the historic gatherings, Tahrir embraces the thrill and uncertainty of popular action. In some ways resembling old-fashioned vérité, Stefano Savona's chronicle aims to plunge you into the crowds and clamor.
  70. A Life in Dirty Movies
    Wiktor Ericsson’s A Life in Dirty Movies outlines this filmmaker’s work reasonably well, but, somewhat surprisingly, truly hits home with a heartwarming look at Mr. Sarno’s relationship with his wife, Peggy.
  71. General Magic
    General Magic is engaging, but there’s a tougher, tighter film in here struggling to get out.
  72. Q Ball
    As a sales pitch for an undeniably popular program, Q Ball (filmed in 2018) builds a crescendo of hope and good will. Anyone seeking a more substantive conversation on life beyond the basket, however, will have to look elsewhere.
  73. Papicha
    Marked by a fierce vitality and vivid emotional authenticity, Papicha thrives on the heat of Nedjma’s anger and the glorious bond among the mostly young female performers.
  74. East of the Mountains
    In a star’s turn, Skerritt reveals the tiniest fissures of vulnerability in his unfaltering portrayal of a cardiologist who is ailing and grieving — and fed up with both.
  75. The Unknown Known
    The film is a cat-and-mouse game in which each player thinks he’s the cat, making it both thrilling and disconcerting to watch. It is also a nature documentary about behavior at the very top of the imperial food chain and a detective story about the search for a mystery that is hidden in plain sight.
  76. I Am Greta
    It’s a bit of a blur, but Thunberg strikingly upends the stereotype of the young innocent as poster girl.
  77. The Ignorant Fairies
    The acting is impeccable, and the intentions are serious and noble, but the affection it elicits stops short of love, and its coziness never risks true intimacy.
  78. Small Time Crooks
    In this sweet, funny wisp of a movie, Mr. Allen shucks off his fabled angst and returns in spirit to those wide-eyed days of yesteryear, before Chekhov, Kafka and Ingmar Bergman invaded his creative imagination.
  79. Ride with the Devil
    Dramatically skimpy, even though the movie stirs together themes of love, sex, death and war.
  80. Monster's Ball
    The raw intimacy of some of the scenes -- whether they take place at a diner, in the death house or in the bedroom -- is breathtaking.
  81. The Pawnbroker
    Remarkable...[a] most uncommon film, which projects a disagreeable subject with power and cogency.
  82. Kill Me Please
    Like the teenage girls who monopolize its attention, Kill Me Please is moody, lovely, preening and libidinous.
  83. Melody Time
    Walt Disney has let his animators and his color magicians have free rein in his latest cartoon package-picture, Melody Time. And again, as in Make Mine Music! he has come up with a gaudy grab-bag show in which a couple of items are delightful and the rest are just adequate fillers-in.
  84. Penguins
    [A] beautiful but frustratingly shallow Disneynature documentary.
  85. Operation Avalanche
    There’s a headlong temerity to Mr. Johnson’s style that places the dippy thrill of moviemaking front and center, revealing a director (and a character) so high on his power to misrepresent reality that a future in politics seems all but assured.
  86. Fire in Babylon
    It all adds up to an entertaining 88 minutes, despite the film's ramshackle construction and its once-over-lightly approach to political, cultural and athletic history.
  87. Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel
    Dizzily enjoyable documentary.
  88. Julia
    Julia is an apt tribute to a life well-lived and well-fed.
  89. Bill W.
    Names and events are ticked off in rapid succession, and the big, and fascinating, question of what role spirituality played receives cautious attention at best. Nonetheless, Bill W. offers a trove of information for non-A.A. members through the life of a man whose dedication has helped others understand their own.
  90. High Plains Drifter
    Part ghost story, part revenge Western, more than a little silly, and often quite entertaining in a way that may make you wonder if you have lost your good sense. The violence of the film (including a couple of murders by bull-whipping) is continual and explicit. It exalts and delights in a kind of pitiless Old Testament wrath.
  91. This Is Not Berlin
    This Is Not Berlin so wants to evoke a time and a place that the backdrop engulfs the characters like a supernova.
  92. The Dry
    The many red herrings and the dark-secret finale recall the reliable, compulsive appeal of a page-turner, although the tensions don’t always feel fully translated to the rhythms and demands of a film.
  93. What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy
    While these men aren’t accountable for the actions of their fathers, they are obligated to recognize the truth of what happened. To see one of them deny that truth is difficult to watch, and just as hard to look away from.
  94. Kill It and Leave This Town
    The grim film feels excavated from the subconscious: The coarse illustration style, with its frazzled, stray lines, emphasizes the bleakness of the images.
  95. Blockers
    It features a casually diverse cast and is openly, at times dutifully, feminist, with you-go-girl speeches that sound as if everyone involved had tried too hard to be decent. Funny and enlightened would have been better.
  96. Serendipity
    It seems best to view Serendipity as one component of a much bigger project (a book on Nourry’s work with the same title was published in 2017) — a body of work in which life and art are inseparable.
  97. Daytime Revolution
    The movie’s quiet star is Douglas himself. Whether gently asking a tense Rubin about his upbringing, or helping Ono with her “box of smiles,” Douglas’s kindness and intellectual curiosity are more compelling than any political argument.
  98. La Grazia
    It’s enjoyable to be back in Sorrentino’s richly detailed and stylized universe, with all its enchantments and individualized, warm-blooded characters.
  99. Green Book
    There’s not much here you haven’t seen before, and very little that can’t be described as crude, obvious and borderline offensive, even as it tries to be uplifting and affirmative. And yet! There is also something about this movie that prevented me from collapsing into a permanent cringe as I watched it. Or rather, two things: the lead performances.
  100. The Animal Kingdom
    Narrative ambiguity can be fruitful but also a cop-out, as too many would-be art films tediously demonstrate. Here, though, the movie’s vagueness dovetails with both François’s and especially Émile’s confusion, and importantly, it also serves as a counterpoint to their unshakable love for Lana.
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