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. Assassin's Creed
    For an ostensible action movie, the cast spends an awful lot of time standing around and looking lost. I can only guess that they were following their director’s lead.
  2. Patriots Day
    My reservations about such pictures in general were not put to rest by Patriots Day, but this film’s real merits are not easily dismissed either.
  3. Short Stay
    As it drags along, the movie makes you feel trapped in the shoes of someone destined for failure.
  4. Two Lovers and a Bear
    The beauty and absurdity (things also get harrowing) don’t entirely compensate for the overheated romanticism in which the movie is grounded, but they do make Two Lovers and a Bear a nearly singular cinematic trek.
  5. Solace
    Staggeringly silly and visually disordered.
  6. The Wasted Times
    The Wasted Times plays like a movie carved out of a much larger mini-series, whose segments are then shown out of order.
  7. The Hollow Point
    The combined skills of the director, Gonzalo López-Gallego, and his cinematographer, José David Montero, can’t surmount a story that gives us no one to invest in.
  8. Ghostland: The View of the Ju/’hoansi
    This is an engaging movie depicting some sympathetic people, and is ultimately worthwhile. But there’s a one-dimensional quality to Ghostland; Mr. Stadler’s team obviously felt it was more important to record events than to explore conditions.
  9. The Ataxian
    The Ataxian has moments of inspiration, beauty, even euphoria. But its lasting contribution is in making the world a little more familiar with this disease, and a little less lonely for the families struggling against it.
  10. Barry
    The movie’s lived-in realism puts Barry on the ground, rather than in the air, where he experiences the usual coming-of-age agonies and joys.
  11. Neruda
    Mr. Larraín invites us to believe that history is on the side of the poets and the humanists, and that art will make fools of politicians and policemen. But he is also aware, as Pablo Neruda was, that history sometimes has other plans.
  12. Collateral Beauty
    Many of the words that I would like to use to describe this waste of talent and time...can’t be lobbed in a family publication. So, instead, I will just start by throwing out some permissible insults: artificial, clichéd, mawkish, preposterous, incompetent, sexist, laughable, insulting.
  13. Fences
    Even as it properly foregrounds Wilson’s dialogue — few playwrights have approached his genius for turning workaday vernacular into poetry — Fences is much more than a filmed reading. Mr. Washington has wisely resisted the temptation to force a lot of unnecessary cinema on the play.
  14. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
    Plots and subplots are handled with clumsy expediency, and themes that might connect this movie with the larger Lucasfilm mythos aren’t allowed to develop. You’re left wanting both more and less.
  15. Sword Master
    This nostalgic nod to the Chinese magic-and-martial arts genre known as wuxia mixes love story and clan war with equal amounts of silliness and heart.
  16. The Brand New Testament
    Most of the humor is too lighthearted to offend all but the most reverent believers, and the movie’s inventiveness rarely flags.
  17. On the Map
    The movie makes no attempt to engage any current situation, basking instead in a one-dimensional nostalgia.
  18. Slash
    For a movie about proud outcasts, Slash is a little square.
  19. Lost and Beautiful
    Mr. Marcello tells a simple, touching tale that seems to contain a whole cosmos of meaning.
  20. Harry Benson: Shoot First
    The film, by Justin Bare and Matthew Miele, would be better if it spent less time gushing about how great Mr. Benson is and more time confronting some of the questions his approach raises.
  21. Frank & Lola
    Frank & Lola proves more about him than her. That’s partly because of the story, partly because the writer-director Matthew Ross doesn’t have a full handle on it or his actors.
  22. Burn Country
    Mr. Rains, Ms. Leo and Mr. Franco are all so interesting that you wish they had more to bite into. But the film has a transfixing quality nonetheless.
  23. Beyond the Gates
    Getting retro right is harder than it seems.
  24. All We Had
    The best thing about All We Had is Ms. Holmes’s stormy portrayal of a desperate, foolishly trusting woman who rushes from man to man seeking security, only to find herself used and betrayed while her daughter looks on with increasing dismay.
  25. Office Christmas Party
    Sometimes the movie, directed by Josh Gordon and Will Speck, is too obviously just a framework for its stars to deploy goofy schtick, but the overall package is naughty, inappropriate fun.
  26. La La Land
    La La Land succeeds both as a fizzy fantasy and a hard-headed fable, a romantic comedy and a showbiz melodrama, a work of sublime artifice and touching authenticity.
  27. Hogtown
    Hogtown plays like a find from a forgotten archive.
  28. Goodnight Brooklyn - The Story of Death by Audio
    The movie is not boring as such, but because it is a chronicle told almost entirely by the people behind the space (Mr. Conboy being one of them), it is relentlessly personal — there’s no genuine cultural critique.
  29. The Eyes of My Mother
    Unfolding with a minimum of dialogue, Francisca’s maturation from watcher to doer would be laughable if performed with less nuance or photographed with less originality.
  30. The Duelist
    The clichéd story line pursues turgidity with a relentless determination.
  31. Best and Most Beautiful Things
    Ms. Smith does not fit easily into any box, and neither does this thought-provoking film.
  32. Two Trains Runnin'
    This captivating movie, like the blues itself, is at once a recognition of those somber truths and a gesture of protest against them.
  33. Things to Come
    Ms. Hansen-Love surveys the territory with clear eyes, but also with an unmistakable shading of pity and with ideas, in particular about Nathalie’s sexuality and the political compromises of her generation, that seem more like assumptions than insights.
  34. Sky on Fire
    This is a Hong Kong action picture in the classical mode, balancing mayhem with sentimentality, offering up bone-crunching and jaw-dropping set pieces, and pulling out all the stops for a finale teeming with stressful twists and turnabouts — not to mention kicks, punches, gunshots and explosions.
  35. Videophilia (and Other Viral Syndromes)
    While “Videofilia” is tough to absorb in one viewing, it is hard to escape the sense that Mr. Molero has employed his relentless formal invention in service of some fairly banal moralizing about the dangers of strangers and the internet — a warning that seems late for the here and now.
  36. Jackie
    The film has the requisite surface fidelity.... But it also has moments of lightness and strangeness, as well as kinks and sour notes, which strengthen the sense that these are people, not figurines in a dutiful, paint-by-numbers biopic.
  37. SiREN
    The film, directed by Gregg Bishop and released by the Chiller Films horror factory, has a few good special effects, but it’s too noisy and scattershot to be suspenseful.
  38. Man Down
    Mr. Montiel may have had honorable intentions in creating this movie. But what he made is neither a viable work of art nor an effective call to action. It’s a sadistic and ghoulish spectacle.
  39. Pet
    The pace is patient, the acting solid and the special effects emphasize craft over flash as the characters rejigger our perceptions from one scene to the next.
  40. One More Time with Feeling
    Even in the throes of grief, Mr. Cave retains his mystique as a rock shaman.
  41. Dear Zindagi
    This is a movie that drops quotations from Faulkner and Einstein, but it rarely feels pedantic or platitudinous, thanks to the breezy, assured delivery of Mr. Khan.
  42. Old Stone
    Mr. Ma paints a persuasively bleak scene that could use more psychological and philosophical nuance to go with its painstaking grimness.
  43. Bobby Sands: 66 Days
    Mr. Byrne’s film is a sober, evenhanded recapitulation of Sands’s imprisonment and death that places him in a historical context.
  44. Mifune: The Last Samurai
    It’s a brisk and energetic primer for those who don’t know his movies or are ready to watch them again. And it doubles as a history of the chanbara (sword fighting) genre, providing an opportunity to sample clips from seldom-seen or partially lost silent films.
  45. Tank 432
    This British thriller is a high-concept tease that slogs its way through a morass of barely differentiated characters and visuals before reaching an unsatisfying conclusion.
  46. Seasons
    The movie’s cinematographers may hog the limelight, but it’s the sweat of the sound engineers that brings their work to life.
  47. Always Shine
    Always Shine is a deft, assured movie with a sly self-reflexive undercurrent containing commentary on sexism and self-idealization that’s provocative, and sometimes disturbing.
  48. Baden Baden
    It’s very fresh and often very funny stuff, communicated in a direct, unforced style.
  49. Evolution
    It’s an impeccable, creepy and genuinely transporting movie.
  50. Miss Sloane
    Partly because Miss Sloane is more a character study than a coherent political drama, it fumbles the issue it purports to address, and it eventually runs aground in a preposterous ending.
  51. 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.
  52. Moana
    There are some touching and amusing zigzags on the way to the film’s sweet and affirmative conclusion.
  53. Rules Don't Apply
    The wonder of the movie, which Mr. Beatty wrote and directed from a story he wrote with Bo Goldman, is that it is so good-humored. Fools and idiots abound, but demonic, systemic evil does not.
  54. Allied
    It’s not so much a work of art as a triumph of craft, and therefore a reminder of the deep pleasures of old-fashioned technique and long experience.
  55. Bad Santa 2
    Even the profanity has lost its zing in this cut-rate retread, which mostly prompts admiration for how far Mr. Zwigoff ran with one joke.
  56. Off the Rails
    An assured and thoughtful debut.
  57. Magnus
    [An] insipid and uninformative portrait of singularity and obsession.
  58. Life on the Line
    Underappreciated occupations deserve better than the cliché-clogged, utterly predictable Life on the Line, a terrible movie about the workers who keep the electrical grid functioning.
  59. Ne Me Quitte Pas
    Ne Me Quitte Pas...is soberingly adept at portraying the tedium of drunken life. Whether it actually avoids emulating said tedium depends on how engaging you find its two stooges. I was sympathetic without being wholly charmed.
  60. Uncle Howard
    The movie is a deft sort of dual narrative.
  61. The Take
    The movie sweeps you along with a brisk pace and even dashes of humor.
  62. A Street Cat Named Bob
    A savvy exercise in inspirational feel-good cinema lightly seasoned with grit.
  63. Blood on the Mountain
    The film may be one-sided, but if nothing else, it is a reminder that the “coal equals jobs” equation is a serious oversimplification.
  64. Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened
    Because “Merrily” was a musical about the ravages of time on friendship and youthful ideals, the documentary tells parallel stories — one fictional, the other real — of disappointment and disillusion. They give the film a double shot of poignancy.
  65. Ali and Nino
    Asif Kapadia, the director (whose film “Amy” won an Oscar for best documentary), has a fine eye for splendor, as does Gokhan Tiryaki, his cinematographer. Mr. Kapadia’s sense of pacing isn’t as acute.
  66. The Love Witch
    Ms. Biller’s movie, like its heroine, presents a fascinating, perfectly composed, brightly colored surface. What’s underneath is marvelously dark, like love itself.
  67. I Am Not Madame Bovary
    There’s some intriguing social commentary in the Chinese comedic melodrama I Am Not Madame Bovary.... But appreciating it, and the other points of interest in the movie, requires a perhaps unusual amount of patience, or even indulgence.
  68. The Edge of Seventeen
    [Ms. Steinfeld] manages a tricky balancing act, making Nadine simultaneously sympathetic and dislikable.
  69. Bleed for This
    With their scrupulous but unobtrusive attention to pertinent details, Mr. Younger, Mr. Teller and the rest of the cast make Bleed for This more than an inspiring version of Mr. Pazienza’s story; they make it a genuinely interesting one.
  70. Nocturnal Animals
    There’s much to admire in Nocturnal Animals, including Mr. Ford’s ambition, but too often it feels like the work of an observant student.
  71. Manchester by the Sea
    Mr. Affleck, in one of the most fiercely disciplined screen performances in recent memory, conveys both Lee’s inner avalanche of feeling and the numb decorum that holds it back.
  72. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
    With the strange caws and showy displays, these beasties provide a lot of the movie’s easygoing pleasures. The adults are rather less engaging.
  73. The Illinois Parables
    The Illinois Parables is not, strictly speaking, an educational film, but it conveys a unique and precious kind of knowledge.
  74. Notes on Blindness
    The tone of the narration is so wrenchingly honest that the film never lapses into self-pity or relies on mystical platitudes.
  75. Hunter Gatherer
    This amiable look at life on the margins gradually accumulates a melancholy that punctures the drollness.
  76. Shut In
    In this achingly inept thriller, you will see Naomi Watts do what she can to sell a plot of such preposterousness that the derisory laughter around me began barely 20 minutes in.
  77. Iron Moon
    Iron Moon has a slowly mounting, but lingering, impact.
  78. Uncle Kent 2
    Uncle Kent 2, directed (for the most part) by Todd Rohal from Mr. Osborne’s script, is a funnier and more imaginative film than its predecessor, but it’s still what you might call a niche proposition.
  79. USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage
    The film, directed by Mario Van Peebles, brays the story in broad strokes and clichés as if the horror of it didn’t speak for itself, which it most certainly does.
  80. Lazy Eye
    Written and directed by Tim Kirkman (“Dear Jesse,” “Loggerheads”), Lazy Eye has realistic dialogue and believable performances by its stars. But unless you consider subjects like saltwater swimming pools and the movie “Harold and Maude” fascinating topics, “Lazy Eye” has little to say.
  81. Disturbing the Peace
    Their stories are compelling — and persuasive.
  82. Come and Find Me
    The writer-director Zack Whedon toggles his plot between “Out of the Past” and “Three Days of the Condor” with highly mixed results before letting loose with a hilariously unconvincing climactic reveal.
  83. Dreamland
    It’s a smart, understated sex comedy, a description that suggests a certain maturity. You’d never suspect it was the first feature from its director, Robert Schwartzman.
  84. Asperger's Are Us
    Asperger’s Are Us rarely stretches to be funny or poignant or touching, and that makes this documentary all the more of each.
  85. The Anthropologist
    At this point no documentarian can possibly have a fresh take on climate change, right? Wrong. The Anthropologist, a stealthily insightful film by Seth Kramer, Daniel A. Miller and Jeremy Newberger, improbably mixes that topic with a mother-daughter story to produce a distinctive study of change and human adaptability.
  86. National Bird
    [An] elegantly unsettling documentary.
  87. The Monster
    Part of the ticklish enjoyment in The Monster is how the director, Bryan Bertino (“The Strangers”), plays with genre registers and how, after opening with disquieting stillness and an isolated child, he slowly yet surely turns up the shrieks.
  88. Almost Christmas
    The family comedy-drama Almost Christmas is an often disarmingly entertaining picture, in spite of its being a not particularly well-thought-out cinematic contrivance.
  89. Elle
    It’s a psychological thriller, a strangely dry-eyed melodrama, a kinky sex farce and, perhaps most provocatively, a savage comedy of bourgeois manners. Mostly, though — inarguably, I would say — it is a platform for the astonishing, almost terrifying talent of Isabelle Huppert.
  90. Arrival
    Arrival isn’t a visionary movie, an intellectual rebus or a head movie; it’s pretty straight in some respects and sometimes fairly corny, with a visual design that’s lovely rather than landmark.
  91. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
    The satire may be a little too gentle, but there is something disarmingly tender about the way Mr. Lee dramatizes young Billy’s predicament. You may be surprised at how sweet this movie is and also, in retrospect, startled by how bleak its vision turns out to be.
  92. Ivory. A Crime Story
    This roughly constructed yet passionate documentary isn’t shy about showing the massacre of elephants or about calling out the groups implicit in the killings. That bluntness and courage usually overrides the uneven filmmaking.
  93. Dog Eat Dog
    Dog Eat Dog is a movie that wants everyone off its lawn, but only after they’ve had time to appreciate that said lawn is way more nihilistic than their own.
  94. Peter and the Farm
    It is the film’s cosmic dimension that makes it so special.
  95. We Are X
    [A] fascinating and assured documentary.
  96. My Dead Boyfriend
    My Dead Boyfriend desperately tries to look and sound like a quirky indie hit, but that’s not an achievable goal when you have an unlikable lead character indifferently rendered by a name star.
  97. Rainbow Time
    Much of this is funny and even perceptive about the nooks and crannies of adult sexual relationships. It’s also very well acted.... But something feels off.
  98. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
    Ms. Story’s unconventional approach provokes responses that a traditional facts-and-figures discussion might not. Yet the film’s formal abstraction, far from creating emotional distance, is unexpectedly moving.
  99. Trolls
    Exuberant, busy and sometimes funny, DreamWorks Animation’s Trolls is determined to amuse.
  100. Loving
    Mr. Nichols’s most distinct aesthetic choice is the movie’s quietness and the hush that envelops its first scene and that eventually defines the Lovings as much as their accents, gestures, manners and battles.
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