The New York Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Quo Vadis, Aida?
    The rigorous honesty of Quo Vadis, Aida? is harrowing, partly because it subverts many of the expectations that quietly attach themselves to movies about historical trauma. We often watch them not to be confronted with the cruelty of history, but to be comforted with redemptive tales of resistance, resilience and heroism.
  2. The Lady Vanishes
    If it were not so brilliant a melodrama, we should class it as a brilliant comedy.
  3. Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
    On one hand, this is just cinema. On the other, there’s something about the way that the editing keeps time with the music, the way the talking is enhancing what’s onstage rather than upstaging it. In many of these passages, facts, gyration, jive and comedy are cut across one another yet in equilibrium. So, yeah: cinema, obviously. But also something that feels rarer: syncopation.
  4. In the Same Breath
    If In the Same Breath — the title becomes more resonant with each new scene and shock — were simply about China and its handling (mishandling) of the pandemic, it would be exemplary. But the story that she tells is larger and deeper than any one country because this is a story that envelops all of us, and it is devastating.
  5. Passing
    Together with Thompson and Negga, Hall hauntingly brings to life characters forced to exist in that “not entirely friendly” space, with its cruelties, appearances, ambiguities and hard, merciless truths.
  6. Wojnarowicz
    [An] exemplary documentary.
  7. Petite Maman
    With delicacy, minimal dialogue and lucid, harmoniously balanced images, Sciamma (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) invites you into a world that is by turns ordinary and enigmatic.
  8. Mr. Bachmann and His Class
    This isn’t a heroic-teacher drama about idealism in the face of adversity. It’s an acknowledgment of the hard work of learning, and the magic of simple decency.
  9. Husbands and Wives
    It's also an ensemble piece acted to loopy perfection by a remarkable cast headed by Judy Davis, Sydney Pollack, Mia Farrow, Juliette Lewis, Liam Neeson and Mr. Allen, who's also the writer, director and ringmaster, as well as his own best friend.
  10. Azor
    Written and directed by Andreas Fontana, making a formally precise, tonally perfect feature debut, Azor is a low-key shocker.
  11. Killers of the Flower Moon
    The story’s romance is warmly inviting, and DiCaprio and Gladstone work beautifully together, their different performance styles — Ernest is physically demonstrative while Mollie is reserved — creating a contrapuntal whole.
  12. La Piscine
    Pretty people behaving poorly in beautiful settings is something we don’t see as much of in cinema as we used to. This is a master class in the subgenre, and one of unusual depth.
  13. The Velvet Underground
    As a documentary, it’s wonderfully informative. It’s also a jagged and powerful work of art in its own right, one that turns archaeology into prophecy.
  14. The Power of the Dog
    The Power of the Dog builds tremendous force, gaining its momentum through the harmonious discord of its performances, the nervous rhythms of Jonny Greenwood’s score and the grandeur of its visuals.
  15. Lingui, The Sacred Bonds
    Again and again, Haroun shows you Amina and Maria alone and together, at times exchanging hugs or tenderly bowing their heads toward each other. Every so often, you see each running along a street alone, her clothes fluttering and body straining with effort. He shows feet and braids, a flash of a bared leg, the teasing glimpse of a belly. He shows you women in motion and in revolt, fleeing and escaping and at times running sly, joyous circles around the men in their lives.
  16. Decision to Leave
    From the very first destabilizing moments of this movie, Park dazzles you with the beauty of his images and the intoxicating bravura of his unfettered imagination. And then, just when you think you have found your bearings, he unmoors you yet once more, blowing minds and shattering hearts, yours included.
  17. The Power of Kangwon Province (1998)
    Etched with precision and conveying a world of feeling, The Power of Kangwon Province is the second feature by the South Korean director Hong Sang-soo and one of the best films you can see this year.
  18. Farewell My Concubine
    A vastly entertaining movie. It's also one of such recognizably serious concerns that you can sink into it with pleasure and count it a cultural achievement.
  19. Drive My Car
    Hamaguchi’s touch — delicate, precise, restrained, gentle — overwhelms in increments. His reserve is essential to his visual and narrative approach but also feels like a worldview.
  20. How Green Was My Valley
    Darryl Zanuck, John Ford and their associates at Twentieth Century-Fox have fashioned a motion picture of great poetic charm and dignity, a picture rich in visual fabrication and in the vigor of its imagery, and one which may truly be regarded as an outstanding film of the year.
  21. Nope
    There are some fascinating internal tensions within the movie, along with impeccably managed suspense, sharp jokes and a beguiling, unnerving atmosphere of all-around weirdness.
  22. Happening
    Throughout, Diwan’s gaze remains clear, direct, fearless. She shows you a part of life that the movies rarely do. By which I mean: She shows you a woman who desires, desires to learn, have sex, bear children on her terms, be sovereign — a woman who, in choosing to live her life, risks becoming a criminal and dares to be free.
  23. Lost Illusions
    Giannoli illuminates the dank frenzy of the 19th-century attention economy with an eye on our own post-truth era. Lost Illusions is sensational. Nobody paid me to say that. Well, actually, The New York Times did, but you should believe me anyway.
  24. Hit the Road
    What makes Hit the Road so memorable and devastating is the way it explores normal life under duress.
  25. Fire Music
    This concise but cogent documentary directed by Tom Surgal is crammed with exhilarating sounds, moving reminiscences and stimulating arguments that it is not just music, but vital music.
  26. Intregalde
    Watching it again recently, I now saw a movie that, with humor, tenderness and flashes of filmmaking brilliance, looks at what happens when kindness is tested, masks are dropped and self-interest runs free. It’s all a mess and so are we, which I think is very much to Muntean’s point.
  27. The Humans
    The confessions and tensions are commonplace, but The Humans is never less than high on the terrible power of the mundane.
  28. The Girl and the Spider
    The film demands and rewards repeat viewings; it’s different, and more entrancing, every time.
  29. Great Freedom
    The director Sebastian Meise, who wrote the script with Thomas Reider, tells this story with open feeling and steady, emphatic calm.
  30. Dune: Part Two
    The art of cinematic spectacle is alive and rocking in Dune: Part Two, and it’s a blast.
  31. Playground
    This is the first feature from the writer-director Laura Wandel, and it’s a knockout, as flawlessly constructed as it is harrowing.
  32. Everything Everywhere All at Once
    The movie is a metaphysical multiverse galaxy-brain head trip, but deep down — and also right on the surface — it’s a bittersweet domestic drama, a marital comedy, a story of immigrant striving and a hurt-filled ballad of mother-daughter love.
  33. You Won't Be Alone
    You Won’t Be Alone, the ravishing, wildly original first feature from Goran Stolevski, moves so hypnotically between dream and nightmare, horror and fairy tale that, once bound by its spell, you won’t want to be freed.
  34. X
    X is a clever and exuberant throwback to a less innocent time, when movies could be naughty, disreputable and idiosyncratic.
  35. Forbidden Planet
    If you've got an ounce of taste for crazy humor, you'll have a barrel of fun.
  36. The Sky Is Everywhere
    Too many works aimed at younger age groups ooze with sentimentality or buckle under a condescending tone. Here, in figurative voice-over full of imagery, we receive Lennie’s unbridled imagination and worldview.
  37. Watcher
    One of this century’s most arresting tales of female anxiety.
  38. Descendant
    If you’ve ever wondered what “holding space” looks like in practice, the director Margaret Brown’s deeply attentive documentary Descendant provides moving examples.
  39. All That Breathes
    Neither a nature documentary nor a political lecture, All That Breathes is a subtle, haunting reflection on the meaning of humanity — on the breathtaking kindness and heartbreaking cruelty that define our wounded, intrepid, predatory species.
  40. The Novelist's Film
    A Chekhovian study in small moments and chance encounters, which is to say it is a study of human beings as they really live: ambiguously and without exposition, spontaneously and without tidy motives or resolution.
  41. Babi Yar. Context
    Loznitsa has assembled a wrenching and revelatory collage.
  42. La Mami
    Garvín’s adept camerawork allows the story to unfold so seamlessly in its vérité style, that the film emanates the magic of a scripted drama without revealing any noticeable interference.
  43. Fire in the Mountains
    Its criticisms of patriarchal authority, bureaucratic corruption and superstition in rural India are sharp and unsparing, but its political themes are embedded in a humanism that is at once expansive and specific. The characters don’t deliver a message; their lives are the message.
  44. Aftersun
    It’s hard to find a critical language to account for the delicacy and intimacy of this movie. This is partly because Wells, with the unaffected precision of a lyric poet, is very nearly reinventing the language of film, unlocking the medium’s often dormant potential to disclose inner worlds of consciousness and feeling.
  45. Stars at Noon
    The results are sometimes wobbly, but this much remains stable: No living director better understands the politics of sensuality, the terrible power of light and shadow on skin.
  46. TÁR
    To search the movie for a consistent argument is to miss the point and fall into a category error, misconstruing the extraordinary coup that Field and Blanchett have pulled off. We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art.
  47. War Pony
    A stellar debut.
  48. R.M.N.
    The tame and the wild roam through R.M.N., nipping at its edges, adding visual texture and deepening its themes.
  49. Corsage
    Making Elisabeth interestingly human proves more than enough, a feat that Kreutzer and Krieps accomplish to dazzling effect.
  50. EO
    No movie that I’ve seen this year has moved me as deeply, made me feel as optimistic about cinema or engaged me with such intellectual vigor as “EO,” whose octogenarian genius auteur and all the donkeys who play EO — Hola, Tako, Marietta, Ettore, Rocco and Mela — deserve all the love and the carrots, too.
  51. Funny Pages
    There’s nothing remotely cool about Robert or, really, Funny Pages. That’s because cool is entirely beside the point. What matters is a sensibility, a worldview — what matters is art.
  52. High and Low
    A sizzling, artistic crackerjack and a model of its genre, pegged on a harassed man's moral decision, laced with firm characterizations and tingling detail and finally attaining an incredibly colorful crescendo of microscopic police sleuthing.
  53. Oppenheimer
    “Oppenheimer” is a great achievement in formal and conceptual terms, and fully absorbing, but Nolan’s filmmaking is, crucially, in service to the history that it relates.
  54. Love in the Afternoon
    This grandly sophisticated romance, which Mr. Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond have penned with a courteous nod to a novel by a Frenchman named Claude Anet, is in the great Lubitsch tradition, right down to the froth on the champagne, with a couple of fine additional "touches" that Mr. Wilder may wholly claim.
  55. No Bears
    Panahi, whose courage and honesty are beyond doubt, has made a movie that calls those very qualities into question, a movie about its own ethical limits and aesthetic contradictions.
  56. Women Talking
    The root of Protestantism, after all, is protest — against arbitrary and unaccountable authority in the name of a higher truth. Women Talking reawakens that idea and applies it, with precision and passion, to our own time and circumstances. The women don’t want pity or revenge. They want a better world. Why not listen?
  57. Walk Up
    A conversation falters. Another bottle is opened. Three people share drinks and their universe is completely reordered.
  58. Return to Seoul
    Return to Seoul is a startling and uneasy wonder, a film that feels like a beautiful sketch of a tornado headed directly toward your house.
  59. Polite Society
    It’s a delight that borrows from everything — westerns, musicals, heist capers, horror, Jane Austen and James Bond — to build its writer and director, Nida Manzoor, into a promising new thing: a first-time filmmaker impatient to evolve cultural representation from the last few years of self-conscious vitamins into crowd-pleasing candy.
  60. Huesera: The Bone Woman
    "Huesera" is the type of staggering supernatural nightmare that is as transfixing as it is terrifying.
  61. A House Made of Splinters
    A House Made of Splinters is made with such aching sensitivity that it’s a marvel a camera was used and not some form of mind-meld.
  62. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
    Jeanne Dielman... has been described as minimalist, though I don't see how any film this long and so packed with information could be equated with minimalism as defined in painting. The manner of the film is spare, but the terrible, obsessive monotony of the life it observes is ultimately as melodramatic as, say, Roman Polanski's ''Repulsion.''
  63. The Rules of the Game
    The Rules of the Game is among the most perfectly balanced of films: a movie about discretion that is in every way a model of it.
  64. Playtime
    Jacques Tati's most brilliant film, a bracing reminder in this all-too-lazy era that films can occasionally achieve the status of art.
  65. A Thousand and One
    In A Thousand and One, [Rockwell] packs a great deal into her filmmaking, which bristles with looks, gestures, bodies in breakneck motion and expressionistic jolts of color that — like Gary Gunn’s gorgeous score — complicate and deepen the outwardly simple story.
  66. The Holdovers
    There’s a sharpness to the comedy, some attitude and freshness, some wisdom. That maybe comes, in part, from the kids looking a little older than their characters are. It also comes from Payne’s emotional finesse.
  67. The Last Autumn
    By the time we get to the film’s closing scenes . . . this modest documentary becomes something epic — a microcosm of the eternal cycles of life.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    20 Days in Mariupol
    20 Days in Mariupol, a relentless and truly important documentary, engulfs us in the initial ferocity of Russia’s siege of a city whose name has become a byword for this war’s inhumanity: My Lai, Srebrenica, Aleppo, Mariupol.
  69. You Hurt My Feelings
    This is a work of discipline and structure. It’s a situation comedy in the best, classical sense: These people’s ethical problems are sometimes ours. I’ve been Beth. I’ve been Don. And I had to watch half of what they’re dealing with through my fingers.
  70. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
    Exquisite use of close-ups, fluid editing and a deeply observant sound design renders Mack’s story tactile but also poetic, making plain that the salt here is the stuff of tears, the stuff of sorrows and of joys.
  71. Earth Mama
    There are moments in Earth Mama, a drama about motherhood at its most fragile, when the movie’s quiet intensity seems to settle in your chest, as if a heavy stone had been placed over your heart.
  72. Tótem
    Totem is a coming into consciousness story about a child navigating realms — human and animal, spiritual and material — that exist around her like overlapping concentric circles. Yet even as the story’s focus sharpens, what matters here are the characters: their emotions and worried words, how they hold it together and fall apart, their individual habits and shared habitat.
  73. Therapy Dogs
    Watching its sequences, you can feel both the immediacy of each moment and the nostalgia that’s already seeping in — each snippet of life becoming, by the minute, just a flicker in the teenagers’ minds, like the flashes in the film’s montages, immortalizing their youth before it’s lost to time’s grasp.
  74. Orlando, My Political Biography
    Preciado’s superpower in this warm, generous movie is that while he speaks brilliantly to the cages of identity, he sees — and shares — a way out of them. He talks and listens, he exhorts and confesses. He insists on pleasure, speaks to happiness, invites laughter and opens worlds. Here, joy reigns supreme, and it is exhilarating.
  75. Limelight
    Neither comedy nor tragedy altogether, it is a brilliant weaving of comic and tragic strands, eloquent, tearful and beguiling with supreme virtuosity.
  76. Trenque Lauquen Parte I
    The pleasure lies in the telling — the invention of fictions, the performance of emotions — rather than in the details of plot. Once you lose yourself in the thickets of “Trenque Lauquen,” you won’t want to be found.
  77. Trenque Lauquen Parte II
    The pleasure lies in the telling — the invention of fictions, the performance of emotions — rather than in the details of plot. Once you lose yourself in the thickets of “Trenque Lauquen,” you won’t want to be found.
  78. The First Slam Dunk
    The flashbacks are well-written and add off-the-court dramatic interest, but it’s the basketball action that is the movie’s claim to excellence. Expertly staged and beautifully rendered using a combination of computer-generated imagery and traditional hand-drawn animation, it’s often so spectacular that I am eager to watch again.
  79. Our Body
    Simon’s belief in the interconnectedness yet singularity of the varied patients is palpable. She rewards our patience with a deeper understanding of our bodies and ourselves.
  80. Pictures of Ghosts
    Love suffuses Pictures of Ghosts, a cleareyed, deeply personal and formally inspired rumination on life, death, family, movies and those complicated, invariably haunted places we call home.
  81. Monster
    Lovingly detailed and accented by an aching score from Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died in March, Monster is one of the finest films of the year, and its structure — like its circle of characters — carries secrets that can only be unraveled through patience and empathy.
  82. Occupied City
    Time is stretched differently in Occupied City and passes far more quickly than you might imagine, despite the running time. Some of this has to do with the fluidity of McQueen’s filmmaking and how the disparate parts build power cumulatively. Much of this, though, has to do with how McQueen approaches the past.
  83. The Taste of Things
    In a phenomenological way, The Taste of Things captures the joy of variety injected into mere existence: savory and sweet, hot and sour, juice and cream and astringency are not required for pure subsistence, but the rich range of taste we have created in our daily meals says something about human longings not easily put into words.
  84. Woman of the Year
    It's as warming as a Manhattan cocktail and as juicy as a porterhouse steak.
  85. Lakota Nation vs. United States
    This stunning film, directed by Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli, interleaves interviews of Lakota activists and elders with striking images of the Black Hills and its wildlife, historical documents and news reports, clips from old movies and other archival footage to extraordinary effect, demonstrating not only the physical and cultural violence inflicted on the Lakota but also their deep connection to the Black Hills, the area where Mount Rushmore was erected.
  86. White Heat
    The Warners have pulled all the stops in making this picture the acme of the gangster-prison film. They have crammed it with criminal complications—some of them old, some of them glittering new—pictured to technical perfection in a crisp documentary style. And Mr. Cagney has played it in a brilliantly graphic way, matching the pictorial vigor of his famous "Public Enemy" job.
  87. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
    The movie is overflowing with ideas — about history, capitalism, cinema, representation — but it also tests your patience before amply rewarding it.
  88. Evil Does Not Exist
    It’s far rarer when a movie, as this one does, speaks to everyday life and to the beauty of a world that we neglect even in the face of its calamitous loss.
  89. The Beast
    This shamelessly ambitious epic is about, among other things, civilizational collapse and existential retribution, yet it is held together by something delicate.
  90. Mami Wata
    It’s a tightly controlled vision that, like many parables, induces a sense of the suddenly, viscerally new — in the look of a figure against the ocean, or the words of a mother telling her child to run — in what we’ve seen before and have always known.
  91. Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus
    For the fan, it’s an intensely moving experience. But even for the viewer without much knowledge of Sakamoto’s work, “Opus” holds its own as the rare cinematic space for contemplation.
  92. All of Us Strangers
    Haigh is a tremendously lyrical filmmaker, and All of Us Strangers unfolds in a space that seems like a dream, or a hallucination, pulsing with the rippling soul rush of love turning a life from monochrome to full color.
  93. Hit Man
    It’s radiant and loose and confident, the kind of movie that you can just tell was a blast to make, which makes it a blast to watch. As our overstuffed big-budget era starts to falter, let’s hope they start making movies like this again.
  94. Janet Planet
    Janet Planet is a tiny masterpiece, and it’s so carefully constructed, so loaded with details and emotions and gentle comedy, that it’s impossible to shake once it gets under your skin.
  95. Songs of Earth
    It’s an altogether extraordinary film, one I’ve thought about often since I first saw it, and I’m delighted that it’s playing in theaters — the immersive nature of the sounds, music and landscapes are worth experiencing with the full concentration a cinema affords.
  96. The Trial (El Juicio)
    Crafted entirely out of the televised 1985 trial of Argentina’s military junta, The Trial lays bare horrific crimes while showing the courage of victims, survivors and their families.
  97. Still Film
    Writer-director James N. Kienitz Wilkins’s “Still Film” is a stunning, acute critique of the regressive artistic sensibilities that plague contemporary Hollywood.
  98. Menus Plaisirs - Les Troisgros
    There’s individual genius in the Troisgros kitchens, no doubt, but also enormous collaborative effort, which makes the documentary a nice metaphor for filmmaking itself. “Everything is beautiful,” a visibly moved Michel says of his estate; the same holds true of this deeply pleasurable movie.
  99. The First Year (1972)
    Guzmán’s documentary is a people’s microhistory of a nation in transition.
  100. Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé
    I don’t know if it’s entirely possible to be supremely conscious of one’s self and yet be vividly unselfconscious, but that’s where Beyoncé finds herself.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »