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. Pain and Glory
    A great deal happens in Pain and Glory, just not ritualistically and not at top volume. Its agonies are tempered, its regrets hushed, its restraint powerful.
  2. Russian Ark
    A magnificent conjuring act, an eerie historical mirage.
  3. The Farthest
    For any believer in humankind’s instinct to transcend boundaries, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes, and the NASA team that produced them, inspire awe. The Farthest, a dazzling documentary written and directed by Emer Reynolds, illustrates why.
  4. Genèse (Genesis)
    The film may be maddening as a character study, and it could damage an ionizer with its air of self-importance, but its experiments in form and tone are highly original.
  5. Gomorrah
    Part of what's bracing about Gomorrah, and makes it feel different from so many American crime movies, is both its deadly serious take on violence and its global understanding of how far and wide the mob's tentacles reach, from high fashion to the very dirt.
  6. Familiar Touch
    In the end, Familiar Touch reveals itself to be less about the agonies of change than in the concessions we make to feel closer to our loved ones and ourselves.
  7. To Be and to Have
    The interest of To Be and to Have, though, is not sociological: it is not really about the French educational system, rural life or even the way children learn. It is, rather, the portrait of an artist, a man whose work combines discipline and inspiration and unfolds mysteriously and imperceptibly.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Eraserhead
    A murkily pretentious shocker.
  9. Withnail and I
    Bracing...Withnail and I isn't social history. It's about growing up, almost as if by accident. It's also genuinely funny.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. I Vitelloni [re-release]
    Full of brilliantly executed coups de théâtre, showing the director's natural flair for spectacle.
  14. Medium Cool
    A film of tremendous visual impact, a kind of cinematic Guernica, a picture of America in the process of exploding into fragmented bits of hostility, suspicion, fear and violence.
  15. Attica
    There is a fascination in hearing about the logistics of the riot and just how surreal events were for the prisoners.
  16. Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters
    The intercutting between vintage footage of the Jones/Zane company and the student production, as well as footage from another contemporary production of the piece — shot with an onstage intimacy that recalls the in-the-ring segments of Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull” — make for an unusually lively documentary experience.
  17. Three Colors: Blue
    Blue doesn't seduce the viewer into its very complex, musically formal arrangements. The narrative is too precious and absurd. The interpretation it demands seems dilettantish.
  18. 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.
  19. In the Mood for Love
    Probably the most breathtakingly gorgeous film of the year, dizzy with a nose-against-the-glass romantic spirit that has been missing from the cinema forever.
  20. Mulholland Dr.
    By surrendering any semblance of rationality to create a post-Freudian, pulp-fiction fever dream of a movie, Mr. Lynch ends up shooting the moon with Mulholland Drive.
  21. Fire at Sea
    Fire at Sea occupies your consciousness like a nightmare, and yet somehow you don’t want it to end.
  22. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    There’s a whole lot of everything in the Mission: Impossible — Fallout, an entertainment machine par excellence that skitters around the world and has something to do with nuclear bombs, mysterious threats and dangerous beauties. Mostly, it has to do with that hyper-human Tom Cruise, who runs, drives, dives, shoots, flies, falls and repeatedly teeters on the edge of disaster, clinging to one after another cliffhanger.
  23. F for Fake
    A charming, witty meditation upon fakery, forgery, swindling and art, a movie that may itself be its own Exhibit A.
  24. Cléo from 5 to 7
    Another French film that fairly glitters with photographic and cinematic "style," yet fails to do more than skim the surface of a cryptic dramatic theme.
  25. Grizzly Man
    Mr. Herzog is also no ordinary filmmaker. It is the rare documentary like Grizzly Man, which has beauty and passion often lacking in any type of film, that makes you want to grab its maker and head off to the nearest bar to discuss man's domination of nature and how Disney's cute critters reflect our profound alienation from the natural order.
  26. Goldfinger
    What they give us in Goldfinger is an excess of science-fiction fun, a mess of mechanical melodrama, and a minimum of bedroom farce...It is good fun, all right, fast and furious, racing hither and yon about the world as Double-Oh Seven pursues the intrigues of a mysterious financier named Goldfinger.
  27. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
    Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a powerful and pungent reminder of the necessity of art, of its sometimes terrible costs and of the preciousness of the people, living and dead, with whom we share it.
  28. Level Five
    Its themes are a bit nostalgic and some of its technology looks dated, but there is nothing else in theaters now that feels quite as new.
  29. Robot Dreams
    To describe the plot — a dog and a robot are best friends, until they aren’t — the film sounds pitifully small. But the world inside it feels huge, a sprawling landscape of joy and heartbreak and mixed emotions and stinging dead ends.
  30. One False Move
    Mr. Franklin delivers the kind of symmetry, surprise and detail that easily transcend the limits of the genre.
  31. 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.
  32. En el Séptimo Día (On the Seventh Day)
    “En el Séptimo Día” pulls off the tricky feat of feeling utterly natural as it ratchets with the mechanics of drama and suspense.
  33. Jane
    Jane will delight those familiar with Ms. Goodall and provide a vibrant introduction for newcomers.
  34. Walk Up
    A conversation falters. Another bottle is opened. Three people share drinks and their universe is completely reordered.
  35. Jaws
    If you think about Jaws for more than 45 seconds you will recognize it as nonsense, but it's the sort of nonsense that can be a good deal of fun, if you like to have the wits scared out of you at irregular intervals.
  36. We Are the Best!
    There is hardly a shortage of movies about rock ’n’ roll, but there are few as perfect — which is to say as ragged, as silly, as touching or as true — as We Are the Best!.
  37. Spartacus
    It is a spotty, uneven drama in which the entire opening phase representing the basic-training program in a gladiatorial school is lively, exciting and expressive, no matter how true to history it is, and the middle phase is pretentious and tedious, because it is concerned with the dull strife of politics.
  38. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese
    Dylan was interested in how movies stop time, but he also told Ginsberg that he wanted “to be entertained,” adding, “If I see a movie that really moves me around I’m totally astounded.” To watch Rolling Thunder Revue is to understand what he meant.
  39. Small Axe: Education
    McQueen, who attended one of these schools, uses this small, hopeful story to illustrate how one generation, by means of an ingenious workaround to bigotry, fought to secure the future of the next.
  40. About Endlessness
    Each shot is a kind of sight gag, a visual and philosophical joke with absurdity in the setup and sorrow in the punchline. But this time, more of the jokes are one-liners, in which the premise and the payoff are one and the same.
  41. Nomadland
    Nomadland is patient, compassionate and open, motivated by an impulse to wander and observe rather than to judge or explain.
  42. Hope
    Raw, melancholy and unquestionably mature, Hope understands that some wounds may never be healed. Even so, it takes a brave movie to hold that stance until its very last second.
  43. My Journey Through French Cinema
    Its explanatory title doesn’t begin to convey just how exhilarating or inspiring a documentary this truly is, and how excellent a trip this well-respected French director takes you on.
  44. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
    The animation is a marvel - all the more so because the most demanding sequences seem almost casually tossed off. The world of Wallace and Gromit is one of the few genuinely eccentric places left in the movies, a place where lumpy, doughy characters achieve a peculiar dignity in spite of their grotesque features and the ridiculousness of their circumstances.
  45. About Elly (2009)
    About Elly is gorgeous to look at. The ever-changing sky and sea lend it a moodiness so palpable that the climate itself seems a major character dictating the course of events; the weather rules.
  46. The Diary of a Teenage Girl
    The novel is life-specific, but what makes Minnie — on the page and now on the screen — greater than any one girl is how she tells her own story in her own soaringly alive voice.
  47. Lincoln
    Go see this movie. Take your children, even though they may occasionally be confused or fidgety. Boredom and confusion are also part of democracy, after all. Lincoln is a rough and noble democratic masterpiece - an omen, perhaps, that movies for the people shall not perish from the earth.
  48. Elena
    Post-Soviet Russia in Andrei Zvyagintsev's somber, gripping film Elena is a moral vacuum where money rules, the haves are contemptuous of the have-nots, and class resentment simmers. The movie, which shuttles between the center of Moscow and its outskirts, is grim enough to suggest that even if you were rich, you wouldn't want to live there.
  49. All Is Lost
    The ancient Greeks believed that character should be revealed through action. I can’t think of another film that has upheld this notion so thoroughly and thrillingly. There is certainly no other actor who can command our attention — our empathy, our loyalty, our love — with such efficiency.
  50. The Banshees of Inisherin
    The Banshees of Inisherin might feel a little thin if you hold it to conventional standards of comedy or drama. It’s better thought of as a piece of village gossip, given a bit of literary polish and a handsome pastoral finish.
  51. Love & Friendship
    At times, most often when Mr. Bennett is onscreen, Love & Friendship is howlingly funny, and as a whole it feels less like a romance than like a caper, an unabashedly contrived and effortlessly inventive heist movie with a pretty good payoff.
  52. Hereditary
    The film, Mr. Aster’s debut feature, is engaging, unsettling and unpredictable, generating a mood of anxious fascination punctuated by frequent shocks and occasional nervous giggles. But I also found it a bit disappointing.
  53. Listen to Me Marlon
    While its subject means that "Listen to Me” is easy to like, Mr. Riley’s shaping of Brando’s words can make the movie, every so often, difficult to fully embrace.
  54. The Fugitive
    Turns out to be a smashing success, a juggernaut of an action-adventure saga that owes noithing to the past. To put it simply, thi is a home run.
  55. Gideon's Army
    Gideon’s Army is a bare film with no narrator and a minimal soundtrack. That’s all it needs to grab you by the throat.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Incredible Journey
    About as gentle, warm and lovely a color movie as any pet owner could wish at least, for the kids.
  57. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
    [Nyoni] says all she needs to with each lapidary image, with every resonant silence and with the undaunted power of Shula’s gaze.
  58. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
    A thorny masterpiece.
  59. Odd Man Out
    A most intriguing film.
  60. Maria Full of Grace
    Sustains a documentary authenticity that is as astonishing as it is offhand. Even when you're on the edge of your seat, it never sacrifices a calm, clear-sighted humanity for the sake of melodrama or cheap moralizing.
  61. Shakespeare in Love
    Shakespeare meets Sherlock, and makes for pure enchantment in the inspired conjecture behind Shakespeare in Love.
  62. Fateless
    It represents something stranger and, to those of us with only a secondhand or thirdhand knowledge of that history, more disturbing: a survivor's conviction that there were aspects of the experience itself that can only be described as beautiful.
  63. Happy as Lazzaro
    A rich sense of mystery pervades this movie. You succumb to its strangeness the way that a child is enveloped in a bedtime story, trusting the teller even when you don’t fully understand the tale or know where it’s going.
  64. Caught by the Tides
    A tour de force that is at once an affecting portrait of a people in flux and a soulful, generous-hearted autobiographic testament from one of our greatest living filmmakers.
  65. The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
    If there's one movie that ought to be studied by military and civilian leaders around the world at this treacherous historical moment, it is The Fog of War, Errol Morris's sober, beautifully edited documentary portrait of the former United States defense secretary Robert S. McNamara.
  66. 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.
  67. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
    Encountered in an appropriately exploratory frame of mind, it can produce something close to bliss.
  68. Brokeback Mountain
    Mr. Ledger magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character. It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn.
  69. The Kid with a Bike
    A quietly rapturous film about love and redemption.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Mutiny on the Bounty
    The weird and wonderful history of H. M. S. Bounty is magnificently transferred to the screen in Mutiny on the Bounty, which opened at the Capitol Theatre yesterday. Grim, brutal, sturdily romantic, made out of horror and desperate courage, it is as savagely exciting and rousingly dramatic a photoplay as has come out of Hollywood in recent years.
  71. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
    Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse contains a vital element that has been missing from too many recent superhero movies: fun.
  72. Blue Jean
    The film’s most impressive quality is its nuanced understanding of how political circumstances create different spheres of life.
  73. The Tragedy of Macbeth
    There is no comfort in Coen’s vision, but his rigor — and Washington’s vigor — are never less than exhilarating.
  74. Particle Fever
    Particle Fever is a fascinating movie about science, and an exciting, revealing and sometimes poignant movie about scientists.
  75. Tarnation
    Certainly one of the strangest and most interesting movies of the year, and I suspect that in years to come a number of other strange and interesting movies will show traces of its influence.
  76. Microcosmos
    Unless the viewer has ever been inside an anthill, Microcosmos is sure to reveal a strange and transfixing secret universe, one in which even the physics of splashing raindrops looks suddenly new.
  77. Flow
    The animals act like real animals, not like cartoons or humans, and that restraint gives their adventure an authenticity that, in moments of both delight and peril, makes the emotion that much more powerful. With the caveat that I’m a cat lover, I was deeply moved.
  78. Murderball
    The evenness of its emotional pitch almost incidentally helps the film become an unusually deep exploration of sports, machismo and the competitive spirit.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Life Itself
    Life Itself is a work of deftness and delicacy, by turns a film about illness and death, about writing, about cinema and, finally, and very movingly a film about love.
  80. The Shape of Water
    The Shape of Water is partly a code-scrambled fairy tale, partly a genetically modified monster movie, and altogether wonderful.
  81. Rewind
    For the director, putting family members on camera clearly had a therapeutic value. Witnessing that unburdening feels almost ancillary, even intrusive. But Rewind could only be made by this filmmaker in this way, and that gives it an unsettling fascination.
  82. Caché (Hidden)
    While this film can seem politically simplistic, it is nonetheless psychologically astute, and more complicated than it at first appears.
  83. The King and the Mockingbird
    In its humor, its fairy tale origins and the characters’ rounded features, it plays more like a vintage Disney work, only nimbler and freer.
  84. Bisbee '17
    Even though Bisbee ’17 depicts a wholesome and harmonious community undertaking, it is a profoundly haunted and haunting film. What we are witnessing is not the commemoration of a past disaster but its reanimation. Every important thing this movie is about is still alive.
  85. Adam's Rib
    Of Adam's Rib we might say, in short, that it isn't solid food but it certainly is meaty and juicy and comically nourishing.
  86. Dirty Harry
    The pleasures of this movie are abundant. The pacing is as swift as a speeding bullet. There are wonderfully evoked lived-in San Francisco locations... And there are splendid set pieces that showcase the perpetually-underrated Don Siegel's great skill a director. This film is efficient, unpretentious and much wittier and more stylish than your average cop movie.
  87. All About My Mother
    It weaves life and art into a rich tapestry of love, loss and compassion.
  88. Moneyball
    It's hard to imagine anyone but Mr. Pitt in the role. He's relaxed yet edgy and sometimes unsettling.
  89. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
    In many respects Ceausescu turns out to be as much the author of this brilliant documentary as the director, Andrei Ujica, who waded through more than 1,000 hours of filmed state propaganda, official news reports and home movies to create a cinematic tour de force that tracks the rise, reign and grim fall of its subject.
  90. Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters
    With marvelous discipline, Mr. Shapiro crams a wealth of material into a tight 77 minutes, smoothly communicating the group effort required to achieve the perfect shot.
  91. Resurrection
    Strange describes the world of “Resurrection,” as does entrancing, tender, surprising, mournful and, at times, mystifying; it too is a labyrinth of a kind, one that Bi has filled with abrupt turns, elusive figures and shattering moments.
  92. Rushmore
    It's too smart to be maudlin.
  93. The Duke of Burgundy
    In the end there is nothing especially campy about “The Duke of Burgundy,” which neither mocks its heroines nor the breathless, naughty screen tradition to which they belong. It’s a love story, and also a perversely sincere (and sincerely perverse) labor of love.
  94. The Tsugua Diaries
    A work that possesses both the whimsy and fearlessness of a student project and the technical vibrancy of a veteran’s opus.
  95. My Golden Days
    My Golden Days is a memory movie, a story told through a glass darkly.
  96. The Wind Will Carry Us
    Its effects seem more like those of a poem or a piece of music than a movie. Requires the reverent darkness and communal solitude of a theater.
  97. What the Constitution Means to Me
    Schreck succeeds in widening her autobiographical play into a paean for basic fairness: The American Constitution, admired as it is, fails to protect all of us from violence and discrimination.
  98. Night Is Not Eternal
    It’s the rare truly nuanced political documentary that is likely to challenge every viewer’s perspective — not because it tries to see all sides of an issue and leaves the viewer suspended in confusion, but because its point of view feels radically outside of convention, beholden to no one.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    A Tale of Two Cities
    Directed by Jack Conway, the picture is a compelling expansion of Dickens's story of the French Revolution, with the central role of Sidney Carton, a disreputable lawyer, memorably projected by Ronald Colman. [14 Feb 1999, p.6]
    • The New York Times
  100. Force Majeure
    This brilliant, viciously amusing takedown of bourgeois complacency, gender stereotypes and assumptions and the illusion of security rubs your face in human frailty as relentlessly as any Michael Haneke movie.
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