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. Le bossu
    Mr. de Broca's film is full of durable cinematic pleasures: a little sex, a lot of sword fighting and a plot that combines heady passion with complicated political intrigue.
  2. Go Tigers!
    Never disrespectful. It leaves you liking and even admiring the people of Massillon for their spunk and their passionate commitment to carrying on a hallowed tradition.
  3. Sunshine State
    Creates a cinematic mosaic of American lives unprecedented in its range, balance, subtlety and even-handedness.
  4. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
    It is, all in all, a rambunctious and inspired ride in which the Coen brothers' voracious fascination with the arcana of American popular culture and their whiz-kid inventiveness reach new heights of whimsy.
  5. People Say I'm Crazy
    Very well edited by Laura C. Murray and set to an effective score by the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, People Say I'm Crazy is a small film but an extremely affecting one.
  6. The Amazing Catfish
    If there’s a certain depth missing in The Amazing Catfish, the film brings forth the small-scale pleasures and poignancy of an ambling short story.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Opening Night
    Opening Night is a reminder of what has made Mr. Cassavetes's films so appealing, and of what can make them so maddening, too. For all its length -- nearly two and three-quarter hours -- it's a relatively thin example of the director's work, but a mischievous and inviting one, too.
  8. She Paradise
    Though Nestor’s understated performance is powerful at times, one leaves the film not fully satisfied, wanting for a stronger arc.
  9. The Travel Companion
    There is charm in the film’s allusions to New York City indie filmmaking, like the crew member who fibs that he’s shooting a mayonnaise commercial. But that specificity does not extend to Simon and Bruce’s bond, which consists of parallel play or the odd story about getting too stoned.
  10. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein
    Most of the comic invention in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is embraced in the idea and the title. The notion of having these two clowns run afoul of the famous screen monster is a good laugh in itself. But take this gentle warning: get the most out of that one laugh while you can, because the picture...does not contain many more.
  11. Climax
    Even though the techniques are immersive — plunging you into a disorienting reality that mirrors the drug-fueled frenzy you are witnessing — the effect is also curiously distancing.
  12. The Towering Inferno
    Movies like The Towering Inferno appear to have been less directed than physically constructed. This one is overwrought and silly in its personal drama, but the visual spectacle is first rate. You may not come out of the theater with any important ideas about American architecture or enterprise, but you will have had a vivid, completely safe nightmare.
  13. Wendell & Wild
    The story lines feel far-flung and disconnected, and the limits and rules of this world’s magical logic are at turns underdeveloped and inconsistent. Though the movie has a delightfully raucous rock ’n’ roll sensibility, the dialogue lacks the wit and punch to match.
  14. Solitary Man
    A sharp, small-scale comedy of male misbehavior that turns out to be one of this dreary spring’s pleasant cinematic surprises.
  15. Bastards
    The story grips you entirely even if Ms. Denis’s worldview here finally feels like a tomb: terrifying, pitiless, inevitable.
  16. Shallow Grave
    A sky-high level of misanthropy overwhelms his film in ways that prove more sour than droll, despite the presence of skillful actors and a bizarrely enveloping plot.
  17. The Bank Job
    The workmanlike title The Bank Job is a nice fit for this wham-bam caper flick.
  18. Finding 'Ohana
    A Gen Z crusade, hyper-aware of its Indiana Jonesian influences, is an entertaining conceit. But the plodding pace of Jude Weng’s film, along with its shabby dialogue, distracts from the more emotionally intricate subplot of the mother returning home to her father after her husband’s death.
  19. Little Voice
    Horrocks's phenomenal mimicry of musical grande dames...makes a splendid centerpiece for the otherwise more ordinary film built around it.
  20. Nathalie...
    Anne Fontaine's seductive film Nathalie is mostly about French star power and sex, so it's somewhat surprising that it is also subtle and intriguing.
  21. Talk to Me
    The result is a movie that offers uplift without phoniness, history without undue didacticism and a fair number of funny, dirty jokes.
  22. Nuclear Nation
    This modest film observes evacuees from Futaba, a small town near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, making do in their temporary shelter. Partly because this version of the movie was drastically edited to 96 minutes from 145, it feels sketchy and disjointed.
  23. The Reports on Sarah and Saleem
    Alayan’s light directorial touch can make the storytelling seem overly straightforward. But his tight control over the proceedings becomes clear in a closing shot that elegantly encapsulates the film’s complexities.
  24. The Birth of a Nation
    The movie, uneven as it is, has terrific momentum and passages of concentrated visual beauty. The acting is strong even when the script wanders into thickets of rhetoric and mystification. And despite its efforts to simplify and italicize the story, it’s admirably difficult, raising thorny questions about ends and means, justice and mercy, and the legacy of racism that lies at the root of our national identity.
  25. Arthur
    Arthur is a terrifically engaging, high-spirited screwball comedy about Arthur's more or less accidental salvation, largely through the love of a good, very poor but equally daffy young woman named Linda Marolla (Liza Minnelli).
  26. Tears of Gaza
    Woven together, these monologues of bereavement and confusion, illustrated with images so terrible they repel rational explanation, form a tapestry of human misery that's impossible to shake off.
  27. Narcissister Organ Player
    Narcissister’s background in stagecraft, movement and rhythm serves her well as a filmmaker: Far from a conventional autobiography, Narcissister Organ Player always offers something to catch your eye or ear.
  28. Even the Rain (Tambien la Lluvia)
    Splendidly panoramic. The scenes of Columbus's arrival and of his imperialist and religious sloganeering, and of the carnage he wreaks, have a grandeur and a force reminiscent of Terrence Malick films. The segments about the chaotic water riots have a documentary immediacy.
  29. The Death of Dick Long
    The Death of Dick Long, until it meanders into a semisincere dramatic dimension, manages to pack in a good number of laughs for a significant amount of time.
  30. Young Man with a Horn
    If you have a sneaking affection for 1950-ish, made-to-measure movies, there are pleasures to be found in Young Man With a Horn.
  31. Are We Good?
    Part of the accomplishment of Feinartz’s film, which at times comes across as too deferential, is that it fitfully succeeds in cracking his shell.
  32. Idiotka
    The American dream gets a quirky wardrobe upgrade in Idiotka, a lightweight but winning comedy that feels like a Netflix movie’s indie cousin.
  33. Huda's Salon
    Where Abu-Assad falters is in turning Huda into a didactic mouthpiece for the very themes that Reem’s tribulations, filmed up-close with a jerky camera, convey effortlessly.
  34. Blink
    Blink keeps escaping any pat framing to tap into a deeper ache.
  35. William Eggleston in the Real World
    Mr. Eggleston proves the polished granddaddy who, early on, recognized beauty in a garish wasteland. In this accomplished look at a storied career, he instructs - without words - how to see all that is hauntingly familiar.
  36. Femme
    The film avoids a cut-and-dried triumphalism for something more slippery and, perhaps, more meaningful, too.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Steal a Pencil for Me
    What makes Ms. Ohayon’s movie special is its recognition that epic horrors don’t erase private dramas.
  38. Spider-Man: Far from Home
    The high-school comedy bits of “Far From Home,” while not especially original, have a sweet, affable charm.
  39. Tell Me Who I Am
    Their moment of resolution at the end is very moving, but the movie also testifies that while love and forgiveness can ameliorate suffering, it can’t really wipe it all away.
  40. Space Station 3D
    If nothing else, Space Station 3-D is a film that agoraphobics and claustrophobics can agree on. Members of both groups should stay home.
  41. Friday Night
    As much as the story, based on a novel by Emmanuèle Bernheim, has the irresistible earmarks of the kind of high-toned bodice-ripper at which the French excel, its cinematic realization is oddly gawky and tepid.
  42. Zero Day
    What gives the movie its power is that even the most innocuous scenes in the boys' lives are shadowed by dread.
  43. Collateral Damages
    The most moving aspect of Collateral Damages is the firefighters' sense of brotherhood and duty to their jobs. It is expressed matter-of-factly, without a shred of smugness or superiority, almost with embarrassment.
  44. The Elephant in the Living Room
    Fair to a fault, "Elephant" omits what could be considered crucial voices - like lawmakers, the Humane Society (which helped finance the film) and mental-health professionals - in its attempt to understand those who believe their particular beast is as harmless as a kitten. At least until it rips someone's face off.
  45. Sparrows Dance
    Mr. Buschel, armed with an ear for diverting dialogue and actors who know how to sell it, somehow makes it all work.
  46. Out in the Dark
    Even though the plot defies credibility at several points, Out in the Dark is gripping.
  47. The Seven Five
    A movie like The Seven Five has only minor use as a historical document; its principal function is to package gonzo tales of bad behavior into commercial entertainment that plays down the real suffering behind those stories.
  48. The Challenge
    Shot in rich, wide-screen color, with minimal camera movements (except when a small camera is attached to a falcon’s restless head) and almost no dialogue, it is detached almost to the point of abstraction.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Bloody Mama
    What hoists the picture into real substance toward the home stretch is an eerie and fascinating by credible sequence with the Barker clan holding as captive a blindfolded millionaire, strongly played by Pat Hingle.
  50. The Living Desert
    Mr. Disney's earnest people have done a remarkable job of collecting some extraordinary footage and his editors have assembled it well for excitement and fascination, more than for education.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Arabesque
    Producer-director, Stanley Donen, apparently goes on the theory that in a chase movie the plot should only be used as a framework, for visual entertainments. Arabesque provides those, all right—Op photography, lush décor, gimmicky locations and hairraising pursuits. And, of course, Sophia Loren, a stunning bit of animated scenery who is not called upon to act but to Dior.
  52. Citizen Penn
    Sean Penn’s work in Haiti after its devastating 2011 earthquake continues to this day. And this new documentary Citizen Penn is a revealing, engaging chronicle of the actor’s activism.
  53. Ginger & Rosa
    Ms. Fanning, who is younger than her character, shows a nearly Streepian mixture of poise, intensity and technical precision. It is frightening how good she is and hard to imagine anything she could not do.
  54. Raising Arizona
    Like "Blood Simple," it's full of technical expertise but has no life of its own... The direction is without decisive style. [11 Mar 1987, p.C24]
    • The New York Times
  55. The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden
    The Galapagos Affair would be a much stronger film were it not padded with the dull reminiscences and speculation of the settlers’ descendants.
  56. Live Flesh
    A richly detailed tale of passion, perfidy and revenge adapted from a typically tricky Ruth Rendell novel.
  57. 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.
  58. Depraved
    Making the most of his limited budget, not unusual for the prolific Fessenden, he has produced possibly his most coherent and visually polished work to date. The makeup effects and lead performances are excellent, and Fessenden’s signature cheek (two strip-club employees are called Stormy and Melania) never tips into silliness.
  59. Slacker
    The members of Mr. Linklater's cast, most of whom are non-professionals, are so amazingly effective that it's hard to believe they didn't make up their own lunacies.
  60. Echo In the Canyon
    The delight of Echo in the Canyon is in the delicious details its subjects impart.
  61. Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon
    The movie, more often than not, has the look and feel of an edgy music video, which wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if it weren’t also oddly boring.
  62. The Armor of Light
    Not every point of view portrayed in the film will sit well with each viewer, but Mr. Schenck and Ms. McBath do their utmost to act in good faith.
  63. The Sentence
    By making you feel deeply for his sister and her children, Valdez has fashioned his film to make the lapses less glaring.
  64. 25th Hour
    If 25th Hour does not quite work as a plausible and coherent story, it produces a wrenching, dazzling succession of moods.
  65. The Hidden
    The movie is mostly a series of automobile chases through Los Angeles, but there is also some humor.
  66. The Fault in Our Stars
    Though it is a tragic love story, it is also a perfect and irresistible fantasy.
  67. Knightriders
    Though Knightriders is absurd when you get right down to it, its absurdities are often fun and far less offensive than the solemnities that Mr. Boorman has dished up at far greater expense.
  68. Welcome to Me
    By turns touching, amusing and genuinely disturbing, it defies expectations and easy categorization, forgoing obvious laughs and cheap emotional payoffs in favor of something much odder and more interesting.
  69. The Last Family
    The tragedies in this family’s life are nearly constant, but Mr. Matuszynski approaches them with a tone that’s matter-of-fact while also partaking in the particular wry irony that has been a hallmark of Polish cinema since the early 1960s.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Inferno
    The movie's distinguishing feature is not the number or variety of horrible murders, but the length of time it takes for the victims to die. This is a technique that may have been borrowed from Italian opera, but without the music, it loses some of its panache.
  71. Europa
    Although the actual story of Zentropa is the stuff of an ordinary thriller, that plot is the only conventional aspect of a film that is an almost impudently flashy and knowing exercise in post-modern cinematic expressionism.
  72. See You Then
    The chemistry of its stars gives the movie a curious magnetism that is almost enough to forgive its flaws.
  73. 21 Jump Street
    It wants to be fun and, to a perhaps surprising extent, it is. Largely forsaking the sweet multiculturalism of the original for white-dude bromance, and completely abandoning earnest teenagers-in-crisis melodrama in favor of crude, aggressive comedy, this 21 Jump Street is an example of how formula-driven entertainment can succeed.
  74. Greener Grass
    A deadpan take on suburban hell — I hesitate to call it a comedy, black or otherwise — the movie takes competitiveness to such excruciatingly surreal lengths that every would-be joke feels agonizingly strained.
  75. Redbelt
    A satisfying, unexpectedly involving B-movie that owes as much to old Hollywood as to Greek tragedy.
  76. Vodka Lemon
    The thicket of relationships that the director, Hiner Saleem, has created and weaves his cast and camera through is so invitingly hotblooded and crowded with hilariously melodramatic incident that the snowbanks are not nearly as forbidding as they initially seem.
  77. Kinyarwanda
    Dry but thoughtful drama.
  78. A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile
    Even knowing the secret of A Gay Girl in Damascus doesn’t make this documentary any less tense. That’s a testament to Sophie Deraspe, a director who understands how to let a plot unfold.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Cocoanuts
    Fun puts melody in the shade in the audible pictorial transcription of the musical comedy The Cocoanuts.
  80. Held for Ransom
    Should you be willing to overlook certain intrinsic difficulties, Held for Ransom is a surprisingly thoughtful hostage drama given the blunt meatheadedness of its title.
  81. The Man I Love
    The Man I Love is both silly and depressing, not to mention dull.
  82. Selah and The Spades
    Selah and the Spades shimmers with youthful promise, both in front of the camera and behind it.
  83. The Same Storm
    It’s a well-intentioned gesture of solidarity that tries so desperately to be relatable, it feels alienating.
  84. Diciannove
    If the dearth of character development is a gag, Diciannove doesn’t offer much of a punchline. But Tortorici’s filmmaking is stylish enough to make even the slipperiest sequences pop.
  85. Fair Game
    Things worked out between Joe and Valerie, and for their real-life models, who are now the subjects of a terrifically entertaining movie. But that does not mean that justice was done, or that truth prevailed.
  86. Good Morning, Night
    At times Good Morning, Night feels as claustrophobic as the apartment itself, and you may feel that the director is handling his volatile material with a bit too much delicacy. But the movie's atmosphere is a curious mixture of obliqueness and intensity.
  87. The Greatest Night in Pop
    While the making of the song was partially detailed in its long-form video, there’s plenty of new, engaging, and sometimes eyebrow-raising anecdotal material here.
  88. Falling from Grace
    In the end, "Falling From Grace" is more a series of separate reflections than a sustained story. But Mr. Mellencamp does bring out the naturalness of his actors, and he has assembled a large and believable cast.
  89. World's Greatest Dad
    With a merciless acuity this nihilistic comedy ridicules collective grief and the news media's cynical marketing of inspirational uplift after a death.
  90. Dead of Winter
    Brian Kirk, the director, has a good feel for this formidable, intimidating setting; the viewer appreciates its beauty while maintaining a keen sense of how awful it would be to get stranded there.
  91. Around the World in 80 Days
    It makes like a wild adventure picture and, with some forty famous actors in "bit" roles, it also takes on the characteristic of a running recognition game. It is noisy with sound effects and music. It is overwhelmingly large in the process known as Todd-AO. It runs for two hours fifty-five minutes (not counting an intermission). And it is, undeniably, quite a show.
  92. The Old Oak
    In place of magical thinking and a happy ending, The Old Oak serves up something harder: a meditation on hope.
  93. Guncrazy
    Taking Mr. Bright's excellent screenplay, Ms. Davis, whose background is in music videos, has made a remarkably rich melodrama with a strong narrative line and vivid characters. There's no waste space in this movie. Every second of its 97 minutes counts.
  94. Permanent Vacation
    It's a must-see for anyone who shares the belief that Mr. Jarmusch is the most arresting and original American film maker to come out of the 1980's.
  95. Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel
    The film avoids providing too much context, a choice that contributes to the spectral atmosphere. The directors aren’t after a news piece; they’re just listening to voices that continue to echo in the corridors.
  96. The Deepest Breath
    We learn precious little about the personal lives of these impressive individuals. When it comes to what drove them, how they associated with others or how they dealt with danger, The Deepest Breath offers only surface-level observations.
  97. Circle of Friends
    Another nice thing about Circle of Friends is that it escapes a happily-ever-after scenario to provide more bite and toughness than it first promises.
  98. Whirlybird
    Drawing on an amazing video stockpile from the 1980s and ’90s, Whirlybird is an editing feat.
  99. Teen Titans Go! To the Movies
    It’s an amusing tale for young audiences, ending with the expected messages about friendship and courage. But there are delights for adults as well, particularly in the first half, with sendups of various comic book series (some aimed at DC’s own arch-nemesis, Marvel) and an extra-large supply of spoofs on other movies.
  100. Romantics Anonymous
    Romantics Anonymous might vaporize if the director and the actors didn't have such easy command over the tone of this singularly Gallic fairy tale. If you added a dozen songs and brought it to the stage it would be completely at home.
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