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. Dying to Know: Ram Dass & Timothy Leary
    It’s less a social history than a commercial for alternative healing.
  2. A Taxi Driver
    The film climaxes with a breathless escape from Gwangju, as Kim and Hinzpeter elude government vehicles with the aid of other cabdrivers. But most impressive is Mr. Song, who persuasively conveys a working stiff’s political awakening.
  3. The Wasp
    There’s not much in terms of social commentary beyond the obvious. Still, the tension between the two women comes across, at times rivetingly, because of Harris and Dormer.
  4. The Drop
    Mr. Roskam’s direction is gratifyingly loose. He lets the story, which is really the least interesting part of the movie, more or less take care of itself, allowing us to savor pungent morsels of dialogue and bits of low-key actorly showboating.
  5. The Company Men
    The movie is realistic enough to make all corporate climbers, but especially men over 50, quake in their boots. If you are what you do, what are you if you're no longer doing it?
  6. Chicago 10
    Brett Morgen’s semi-animated, semi-documentary attempt to make the ’60s cool for a new generation of kids, does the opposite. It is a narrow, glib dollop of canned history, an affirmation of received thinking rather than a challenge to it.
  7. The Wild Thornberrys Movie
    Bland but harmless.
  8. Goyangileul butaghae
    As it abruptly crosscuts among the five friends, it fails to lend the characters' individual stories enough dramatic resonance to make us care about them.
  9. Divided We Fall
    The filmmakers explore not only the banality of evil, but also the banality of goodness, and the ridiculousness, as well as the tragedy, of their collision.
  10. Kill Bill: Vol. 1
    Mr. Tarantino is an irrepressible showoff, recklessly flaunting his formal skills as a choreographer of high-concept violence, but he is also an unabashed cinephile, and the sincerity of his enthusiasm gives this messy, uneven spectacle an odd, feverish integrity.
  11. Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself
    Like its humor, the film's sentiment sneaks up on you, and so does the dramatic reversal that makes it something more than a collection of wry anecdotes.
  12. Salvador
    The main characters tend to be either grotesques or stereotypes, who keep getting into incoherent arguments, composed largely of variations on America's favorite epithet...For a movie with pretensions to laying out political realities, the colorful Salvador is black and white.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Death of a Gunfighter
    The general tone, and point — festering hatred — is simply not enough to make the picture matter, although Mr. Widmark almost single-handedly does. Tough, laconic, squinty-eyed and moving around deceptively like a tired, middle-aged panther, he gives this characterization a scorching vibrancy.
  14. Martha
    “Martha” feels like a far more comprehensible key to Stewart — who has been the subject of speculation, fascination, jokes that turn cruel and plenty of schadenfreude — than half a century of media attention has managed to find.
  15. One Life
    In trying to capture this almost stoic modesty, the film, directed by James Hawes, falls into a dramaturgical trap.
  16. 3 Backyards
    Mr. Mendelsohn's ability to evoke a child's-eye view of a suburban environment is the most seductive element in a movie whose primary attraction is an atmosphere so heady that you can almost taste it.
  17. 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.
  18. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
    Its speedy, funny, happy-sad spirit is so infectious that the movie makes you feel at home in its world even if the landscape is, at first glance, unfamiliar.
  19. The Go-Getter
    Mr. Hynes, who wrote the screenplay, seems well aware of the challenge of breathing fresh life into a familiar formula. Much of the dialogue is so quirky it sounds overheard instead of scripted. The performances are correspondingly spontaneous.
  20. Fear(s) of the Dark
    Shot in luminous whites, pulsing blacks and gorgeous grays, the stories explore sexual insecurity, rural superstition and sociopolitical anxieties with an inventiveness that's seldom scary but never less than mesmerizing.
  21. Operation Filmmaker
    Although Ms. Davenport pushes the analogy between this modest rescue operation with America’s invasion of Iraq a bit too forcefully, she nonetheless makes her point with persuasive, touching candor.
  22. A League of Their Own
    Though big of budget, A League of Their Own is one of the year's most cheerful, most relaxed, most easily enjoyable comedies. It's a serious film that's lighter than air, a very funny movie that manages to score a few points for feminism in passing.
  23. Fahrenheit 11/9
    Mr. Moore recognizes an affinity he shares with the president — also a showman. So he is in a nearly unique position to shame the viewer with a frank perspective on how Mr. Trump used his extrovert side to make citizens complacent about the less savory aspects of his character.
  24. Happiest Season
    The movie practically vibrates with its own meta tension.
  25. Get Duked!
    The scenery is pretty and the actors appealing enough to almost excuse the thinness of the material.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Performance
    The film progresses by what I imagine a series of electro‐shocks to be like, but a shock treatment administered not by a therapist but by a misprogrammed computer.
  27. Framing Agnes
    The documentary reminds its audience that it’s impossible to truly know people based on their responses to medical interviews. But this approach unfortunately prevents the film from achieving either catharsis or understanding.
  28. The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
    Children who revel in clean-cut heroes, villains given to spells and incantations and the kind of special effects that breathe life into mandrake root, ships' figure-heads, centaurs, griffins and statues of Kali (always a deity beloved of evil forces) will probably find it a happy concoction for passing a rainy afternoon.
  29. Above and Beyond
    These fond recollections of derring-do hail from a different era, and the movie’s one-sided view of history is bound to start arguments. The film is best appreciated as a straightforward testimonial: old war buddies’ hurrah against anti-Semitism.
  30. The Passengers of the Night
    It’s an inviting, paradigmatic story of female self-discovery and empowerment, so it’s too bad that the movie’s hold on you proves far less firm than Gainsbourg’s.
  31. The Outfit
    Sometimes, all you need in a movie is a great actor — well, almost all. Certainly Rylance’s presence enriches The Outfit, a moderately amusing gangster flick that doesn’t make a great deal of sense.
  32. Cha Cha Real Smooth
    I didn’t believe a single second in Cha Cha Real Smooth, but the movie isn’t trying to convince you of anything. It just wants you to like it. It wants you to smile, nod in recognition, shed a tear or two and feel good about yourself for liking it. It’s an exemplar of American indie entertainment at its most canned and solipsistic.
  33. Crazy Love
    The overall vibe is morbidly entertaining, though something of a downer, partly because it's unclear if Mr. and Mrs. Pugach know that they are such sick puppies, partly because it's unclear if Mr. Klores cares that they are.
  34. Song of Lahore
    If all of Song of Lahore were as exciting as its ending, you’d need an hour afterward to catch your breath. It’s not, yet despite a lackluster start, this documentary redeems itself by the finale.
  35. Eva Hesse
    It’s like a comprehensive exhibition catalog or a thorough critical essay — an indispensable aid to understanding and appreciating a fascinating artist.
  36. Our Souls at Night
    Part of the pleasure of this film, directed by Ritesh Batra (“The Lunchbox”), lies in the rediscovery of what wonderful actors they can be, and how good they are together.
  37. Man Up
    Man Up, a destined-for-romance story in the spirit of “You’ve Got Mail” and “Sleepless in Seattle,” has just enough edge to distinguish it from a Lifetime movie. It also has Lake Bell and Simon Pegg, versatile and likable actors who help the mild story considerably.
  38. The Exploding Girl
    The Exploding Girl can also make you feel bad about wishing that she were just a little more interesting.
  39. Dayveon
    The diffuse filmmaking style muffles the story’s power.
  40. Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love
    While Broomfield’s films often take a sardonic, close-to-cynical tone, “Marianne & Leonard” is admiring, affectionate and a little awe-struck.
  41. Starter for 10
    Starter for Ten offsets its rite-of-passage clichés with relaxed performances and an extremely likable lead.
  42. 22 July
    Fiction that hews close to fact, the movie is serious and meticulous, yet hollow.
  43. Stephen Curry: Underrated
    There’s little in “Underrated” that comes across as spontaneous. That may be because Nicks didn’t discover much that feels fresh. Or it may be that the project, like Curry today, doesn’t have anything to prove.
  44. The Good, the Bad, the Weird
    The ever reliable, rubber-faced Song Kang-ho plays Tae-goo, the train robber, and gives the film what little comic spark it has.
  45. The Elephant Queen
    Young viewers could certainly handle a few more harsh facts. Yet The Elephant Queen sets out, first and foremost, to use a narrative to build compassion. And here, a good story is as effective as a shout.
  46. The Bridges of Madison County
    Limited by the vapidity of this material while he trims its excesses with the requisite machete, Mr. Eastwood locates a moving, elegiac love story at the heart of Mr. Waller's self-congratulatory overkill.
  47. Kurt Cobain About a Son
    It’s hard to know who the audience might be for the documentary oddity Kurt Cobain About a Son, but I bet its subject, the guy who’s still being called on to entertain us even after his death, would have hated it.
  48. Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator
    A skillfully organized account of Mr. Rogowski's life and of the sport's boom period. But despite the earnest testimony of two former girlfriends, the movie maintains a chilly distance from its subject.
  49. Intimacy
    If Intimacy does anything well, it portrays desperation, in many different forms.
  50. The Cuckoo
    There are subtitles to reduce everything to simple English declarative sentences. This gives the viewer a decidedly unfair advantage over the characters: we can understand what they cannot and are invited to laugh at their mutual incomprehension.
  51. Adorenarin doraibu
    Mr. Yaguchi's film is so brazenly cheerful and charmingly engineered that even the sourballs in the cast are sucked in.
  52. Monsieur Ibrahim
    The two central performances help the lesson go down easily, and Mr. Duperyon's unassuming, slightly ragged realism gives the movie a sweet, lived-in charm. Mr. Sharif, grizzled and white-haired at 71, has lost none of the charisma that made him an international movie star in the 1960's, and Mr. Boulanger, in his first feature film, shows impressive self-assurance.
  53. Changing Lanes
    It is so dishonest that the title Changing Lanes can just as well refer to the cheaply contrived turns in the film.
  54. Itzhak
    We get a brief dip into his family’s past and emigration from Israel, but the filmmaker never digs deeply enough to reveal any other substantial dimension of this man, or her theories about what shaped him.
  55. Hitler's Children
    Quiet, simple and soaked in sorrow, Hitler's Children takes a stripped-down approach to an emotionally sophisticated subject.
  56. The Black Godfather
    Because one of this Netflix documentary’s producers is Avant’s daughter, Nicole A. Avant, and both she and her husband, Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s head of content, appear as talking heads, this overlong love-in sometimes plays like an illustrated conflict of interest. But the anecdotes are gold.
  57. Magpie
    A lean, mean revenge thriller that knows exactly what it’s about, Magpie has little originality but an invigorating clarity of purpose.
  58. Carry-On
    While the picture doesn’t break any new genre ground, it has several jaw-dropping set pieces, including an incredibly physical fight inside a speeding car. Collet-Serra’s staging is excellent throughout.
  59. Ong Bak
    Mr. Jaa, blessed with astonishing muscle definition and a stoical, sensitive face, clearly has the potential to be an international action movie star, and Ong-Bak feels like the start of a scrappy, potent franchise.
  60. Do Not Resist
    The film doesn’t unearth anything that hasn’t already been voiced, and it could use more details on the scope of the phenomenon. But with more police shootings in the headlines just in the past few days, it’s nothing if not timely.
  61. We Live in Public
    From the ample evidence, Mr. Harris’s own life in public was a bust. Ms. Timoner sees him as a cautionary tale as well as a visionary.
  62. Sightseers
    Working from a script by Ms. Lowe and Mr. Oram, Mr. Wheatley continues in the same bludgeoning, amusingly if dubiously deadpan fashion for what soon feels like an overextended joke.
  63. The Pink Cloud
    Even as the lockdown accelerates intimacy and conflict between the protagonists, their actions feel inconsequential compared with the greater world outside.
  64. The Milk of Sorrow
    The Milk of Sorrow is constrained by a rarefied screenplay and a near-mute central performance.
  65. Uncertain Terms
    While the movie creates an intriguing emotional space in which characters at the end of their ropes can open up, there’s the distinct sense of a missed opportunity.
  66. The Harder They Fall
    Samuel makes the most of his formidable cast. If anything, he may be overgenerous. The narrative sometimes flags so that everyone can get in a few volleys of the salty, pungent dialogue on the way to the next round of gunplay or fisticuffs.
  67. Compliance
    A slow-motion punch to the groin. As such, it's fitting that one of our first sights is a large "NO" stenciled in the parking lot of a fast-food joint in suburban Ohio: as the film progresses, the word becomes a silent mantra for viewers who can't quite believe what they're seeing.
  68. A Dry White Season
    Dry White Season is no less predictable than its predecessors, but its frankness and sincerity matter more than its fundamental bluntness.
  69. Swept Away
    Swept Away is less a film about ideas than about previous commitments, for which neither character can be held completely accountable. The enormous appeal of the comedy has to do with the way, briefly, each character, is able to overcome those commitments.
  70. Infamous
    Less a parable of literary ethics than a showcase of literary personality, and it is in the end more touching than troubling.
  71. Star Trek Beyond
    The nerd in me wants a bit more rigor, a bit more plausibility underneath the exuberant fakery. Maybe in the next episode.
  72. A Sinner in Mecca
    Mr. Sharma has created a swirling, fascinating travelogue and a stirring celebration of devotion.
  73. Martin
    In this splattery George A. Romero movie from 1977, the title character is not your typical vampire. In fact, he may not be a vampire at all. I mean, did Count Dracula ever need hypodermic needles (for sedation) or razor blades? Mr. Romero, the director who gave the world the ravenous 20th-century zombies of Night of the Living Dead, plays around with the possibility that Martin is just certifiably psychotic.
  74. The Origin of Evil
    Abounding with nasty women, The Origin of Evil could have easily been flattened by the weight of a feminist objective. Untethered from such neat messaging, this decadent murder-movie takes the online credo, “be gay, do crimes,” and runs with it — to delicious results.
  75. Icarus
    Mr. Fogel could be considered either daring or foolhardy for his initial plan. But his work with Dr. Rodchenkov is levelheaded, and his documentary illuminating.
  76. BuyBust
    Wrapping a political-corruption yarn in a blanket of bullets and blood, the Filipino director and co-writer, Erik Matti, slides visual and textual jokes into the mayhem in ways both sly and blatant.
  77. Primo Levi's Journey
    Vividly impressionistic and delightfully curious.
  78. Gloria
    It has its charms but not for a minute is it believeable, and it's certainly never embarrassingly moving in the schmaltzy way of such slick Hollywood kidflicks as Paper Moon and even The Champ. [01 Oct 1980, p.19]
    • The New York Times
  79. North Country
    That the film works as well as it does, delivering a tough first hour only to disintegrate like a wet newspaper, testifies to the skill of the filmmakers as well as to the constraints brought on them by an industry that insists on slapping a pretty bow on even the foulest truth.
  80. Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him?)
    The point of it is not, in the end, to explain him or solve the mystery of his life, but rather to spend time in his company and understand why he is someone to be missed.
  81. Bullhead
    Part character study, part crime thriller, Bullhead is the impressive but deeply flawed first feature written and directed by Michael R. Roskam.
  82. The Night
    The repetition of the visions and the film’s deliberate pace gives the audience too much time to guess which betrayals haunt Babak and Neda, and this lack of emotional suspense hampers the horror.
  83. The Luckiest Man in America
    The events, and the mind games, appear to have been goosed for dramatic interest. . . But it is still fun to watch Michael and CBS compete for the upper hand.
  84. The Business of Being Born
    A passionate ground-level examination of home childbirth.
  85. Mutt
    These features of city life feed a sense of realism, as does the film’s warmly-lit and intimately framed cinematography. But that realism here is exhausting, even if it is well-intentioned — by the film’s end, even Feña seems ready to escape from the trial of his packed plotlines.
  86. Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict
    Ms. Vreeland has paced her documentary well, a chapter to each era, with hundreds of beautiful images spanning decades of artists, galleries, parties, scenes. She also makes good use of interviews Guggenheim gave to a biographer a couple of years before her death in 1979.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Cotton Club
    The Cotton Club is not a complete disaster, but it's not a whole lot of fun. It just runs on and on at considerable length, doing obligatory things, being photographically fancy but demonstrating no special character, style or excitement.
  88. Like Crazy
    Largely a conventional, wan affair, despite its art-cinema flourishes.
  89. Terms and Conditions May Apply
    The title of Terms and Conditions May Apply is unlikely to excite, but the content of this quietly blistering documentary should rile even the most passive viewer.
  90. My Love, Don't Cross That River
    Many of the passages in this gentle film may be universal, but the love here is extraordinary.
  91. Equity
    Equity pulls off a difficult balancing act with an elegance that should not be underestimated. It turns its unflappable gaze on a maddeningly complex reality and transforms it into a swift, clear and exciting story.
  92. Art and Craft
    Art and Craft adds fuel to the argument that the art market is a rigged game manipulated by curators and gallerists spouting mumbo-jumbo.
  93. The Hunger Games
    Again and again Katniss rescues herself with resourcefulness, guts and true aim, a combination that makes her insistently watchable, despite Mr. Ross's soft touch and Ms. Lawrence's bland performance.
  94. A Housekeeper
    Fits squarely into a Gallic tradition of wistful, worldly-wise comedies that reflect on the weakness of the flesh.
  95. The War Zone
    The actor Tim Roth makes a fierce, disturbing directorial debut with a film that treats incest as something worse than a terrible secret.
  96. In My Skin
    As unrelenting an exploration of isolation and dissociation as Roman Polanski's "Repulsion."
  97. The Yes Men
    Diverting if heavily padded, this is the newest addition to an increasingly crowded field of political nonfiction films and certainly the easiest viewing.
  98. Jump Tomorrow
    The sweetness at the core of the raggedy low-budget romantic comedy Jump Tomorrow is hard to resist.
  99. Così ridevano
    The movie is powerfully acted. Mr. Lo Verso's passionate, fiery-eyed Giovanni is an incandescent star turn by an actor with world class charisma.
  100. Chain Camera
    Filtered through tears, laughter and affection, the results -- are touching and fascinating though, by their nature unilluminated by dispassionate analysis.
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