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. The Lovers and the Despot
    Despite its flaws and will to kitsch, The Lovers and the Despot has enough enigmas and chills to merit a look, even if some of its spookier moments involve cinephilia rather than the usual weapons of mass destruction.
  2. Audrie & Daisy
    Audrie & Daisy is strongest when it investigates what it regards as shortcomings of justice, for reasons technical and implied.
  3. Chicken People
    Will fluffy, poodlelike chickens replace cats on the internet? Maybe not, but these chicken people, with deep connections to their birds, make for a fun and at times astonishing film.
  4. Seed: The Untold Story
    Seed: The Untold Story is one of those documentaries that get you riled up about a situation but leave you feeling that nothing significant can be done about it.
  5. The Jazz Loft According to W. Eugene Smith
    The bohemian paradise of this environment had a dark side, and the movie doesn’t give it short shrift. Nevertheless, a genuine exhilaration holds throughout.
  6. The Age of Shadows
    The Age of Shadows might tempt another filmmaker to dwell on issues or delve deeper into its characters’ hearts. Yet, for this director, exposition can’t hold a candle to elegantly staged shootouts. And who can blame him. He knows his strengths.
  7. Storks
    This film, directed by Nicholas Stoller and Doug Sweetland, is a harmless enough way to occupy a youngster for an hour and a half. It’s just not especially rich in extraordinary characters or moments.
  8. 1000 Rupee Note
    A parable about the contagious nature of corruption and the curse of dirty money, 1000 Rupee Note asks, How valuable is a windfall to people who live their lives largely without money?
  9. My Blind Brother
    It’s made watchable by an appealing cast.
  10. I.T.
    John Moore, the director, and Dan Kay and William Wisher, the screenwriters, don’t have anything new to add to that familiar dynamic.
  11. Queen of Katwe
    In Ms. Nair’s hands, Phiona’s story has a richness and unpredictability that separates it from other, superficially similar movies. It also has the buoyant, cleareyed feel for the particulars of culture and place that is among this director’s great gifts.
  12. The Magnificent Seven
    The new movie is as moth-eaten as the serapes strewn through the 1960 film, but there’s no denying the appeal of the image of Mr. Washington riding a horse, shooting a Colt and leading a posse of vigilantes to save a mostly white Western town.
  13. Tanna
    Despite its best efforts, Tanna drifts into a mode of exoticism that renders it an ultimately frustrating experience.
  14. Silicon Cowboys
    Silicon Cowboys prizes the human drama behind business events, much as in “The Social Network” or “Steve Jobs.” Those films, too, pretended that technology was the star. But they knew that people were the real story.
  15. Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?
    Everybody involved with the awful comedy Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?... owes Aristophanes an apology. It’s one thing to borrow a guy’s premise; it’s quite another to transform it into something this unwatchable.
  16. Finding Altamira
    In Antonio Banderas, Mr. Hudson has a winning de Sautuola of personal modesty, scientific integrity and paternal warmth.
  17. Hillsong - Let Hope Rise
    “He can move the mountains.” “I was blind but now I see.” Those lines are but drops in the torrent of clichés saturating Michael John Warren’s narcotizing documentary Hillsong — Let Hope Rise.
  18. Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four
    "Southwest of Salem” proceeds with what have become sobering tropes for true-crime documentaries: a defendant saying she didn’t realize she needed a lawyer; outsiders explaining how they grew convinced of a miscarriage of justice.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dancer
    In Dancer, Mr. Polunin’s suffering may be on display, but too little of his artistry.
  20. A Family Affair
    By the jaw-dropping climax (an argument over a family portrait), and the film’s not-entirely unpredictable denouement, you aren’t sure whether you are witnessing an investigative family chronicle or an act of revenge.
  21. The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years
    The way to watch is to ignore the image burnishing and just feel the moment.
  22. The Vessel
    The Vessel is a modest, but not maudlin, parable of hope about mustering the strength to vigorously plunge again into life’s uncertainties after a devastating loss.
  23. Miss Stevens
    Ms. Rabe’s beautifully balanced performance reminds you that people never really grow up.
  24. Operation Avalanche
    There’s a headlong temerity to Mr. Johnson’s style that places the dippy thrill of moviemaking front and center, revealing a director (and a character) so high on his power to misrepresent reality that a future in politics seems all but assured.
  25. Cardboard Boxer
    Mr. Church fully inhabits the character, making the most of Willie’s dented moral sense and his many limitations. But the film constructs some too-perfect solutions to problems and manipulates our emotions.
  26. Blair Witch
    The acting and filmmaking are too crude to make you care about what happens to any of them, even though you know pretty much exactly what that will be.
  27. Snowden
    Mr. Stone has made an honorable and absorbing contribution to the imaginative record of our confusing times. He tells a story torn from slightly faded headlines, filling in some details you may have forgotten, and discreetly embellishing the record in the service of drama and suspense.
  28. Bridget Jones's Baby
    Despite an abundance of mostly tepid jokes that keeps the comedic tone at a quiet simmer, Bridget Jones’s Baby doesn’t jell. Ms. Zellweger floats through the picture, charming but strangely detached from her suitors.
  29. Command and Control
    The film effectively recreates the sense of confusion over how to try to contain the leak and what might happen if the fuel ignited.
  30. When the Bough Breaks
    There’s not an ounce of suspense in any of this, because you’ve seen it all before, and the director, Jon Cassar, seems uninterested in veering from the well-established formula.
  31. The Apostate
    The Uruguayan director Federico Veiroj’s leisurely comedy-drama The Apostate has its charms, though the story (and its hero) could benefit from a tarter approach.
  32. Landfill Harmonic
    The story behind “Landfill Harmonic” is so good that even some imperfect filmmaking can’t hold it back.
  33. Defying the Nazis: The Sharps' War
    Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War is a generic documentary about two people who were anything but. Yet even when the film wanes, its subjects still come across as remarkable.
  34. Come What May
    The depredations of the Nazis are depicted in a way that will make viewers want to declare war on Germany anew. But Come What May is also too pretty of a movie. It is often sentimental and, worse, schematic.
  35. Starving the Beast
    As an overview of the issues, the history and the players, Starving the Beast makes a powerful survey course, a prerequisite for further studies.
  36. The Wild Life
    The Wild Life is pretty to look at, with its skies and ocean, calm or stormy, and it has a driving soundtrack. But the story lacks that extra layer of complexity and meaning that parents can appreciate.
  37. London Road
    The artifice of the form works something wondrous with the material, highlighting the generic nature of our response to extreme violence.
  38. For the Love of Spock
    This film nimbly straddles biography and “Trek” valentine (Adam is a longtime television director), but also recounts the fraught if ultimately devoted ties between Adam and Leonard.
  39. Ithaca
    Ms. Ryan’s muted approach may be what we’ve come to expect of looks back at this period — nostalgia always comes with a lot of browns and grays, and with plenty of voice-over (in this case, Marcus’s letters to Homer). But she executes the formula well.
  40. Cameraperson
    Cameraperson isn’t a work of journalism or advocacy. It’s a scrapbook, a found poem assembled out of scraps and snippets of truth. And it is, above all, an act of showing rather than telling.
  41. Author: The JT LeRoy Story
    "Author” is most interesting — and least self-aware — as a study in the gullibility and narcissism of the celebrity class.
  42. As I Open My Eyes
    As I Open My Eyes is best when it observes the fraught but loving mother-daughter relationship between Hayet and Farah.
  43. Kicks
    The characters have enough dimension to avoid appearing to be symbols of a social tragedy, and the movie’s relative gentleness makes the harsher realities of Brandon’s world all the more distressing.
  44. Other People
    Other People tries to lighten its heavy load with mixed results.
  45. Brother Nature
    Every new generation has to learn the lesson: Comedy success on the small screen doesn’t guarantee the same on the big screen. If anything, it guarantees the opposite.
  46. Demon
    Mr. Wrona is very good at thickening the air with mystery, and right from the start he slips in enigmatic details and figures — the prowling bulldozer, a keening woman, a scowling man — that disturb the ordinary scene. Like pebbles dropped in water, these disturbances create concentric circles that spread, disrupting everything.
  47. Transpecos
    Though rife with implausibilities, Transpecos is fortified by strong acting and a location whose desolate beauty is a gift to Jeffrey Waldron’s serene camera.
  48. Sully
    The movie is economical and solid, and generally low-key when it’s not freaking you out. That it unnerves you as much as it does may seem surprising, given that going in, we know how this story ends. But Mr. Eastwood is also very good at his job, a talent that gives the movie its tension along with an autobiographical sheen.
  49. The 9th Life of Louis Drax
    It’s not clear whether The 9th Life of Louis Drax is deliberately inconsistent or merely an example of confused filmmaking. One thing is certain, however: It sure leaves an unpleasant aftertaste.
  50. Skiptrace
    Skiptrace settles for a warmed-over plot, tedious fight sequences and humor that’s heavy on crotch jokes and pratfalls.
  51. Yoga Hosers
    Some of Mr. Smith’s prior work made me laugh so hard that I cried; Yoga Hosers made me want to cry for different reasons.
  52. Max Rose
    The writer and director, Daniel Noah, creates no space for the story’s darker corners, or for his star to delve beneath the surface of Max’s depression and anger. Then again, who cares? It’s Jerry Lewis, so everyone can just shut up.
  53. The Academy of Muses
    While eavesdropping on these academics, you may be captivated by their exchanges while frustrated by their stasis while curious about their lives. Indeed, there are several ways to look at these scenes. But all you really have to do is listen.
  54. Antibirth
    In his director’s statement, Mr. Perez, who also wrote the script, says he sought to fashion a story “that would confuse and bludgeon the audience.” My comrade and I will sip, silently nod and, with a strange kind of awe, agree: This filmmaker succeeded.
  55. Equal Means Equal
    Broader than it is deep, Equal Means Equal still drills down into enough specific issues to shock us afresh.
  56. Morgan
    Dipping no more than a toenail in the philosophical waters surrounding personhood, the movie is at once ideologically vague and maddeningly self-serious.
  57. White Girl
    We’re all familiar with the term contact high, but not with its antithesis. Because it is so believable, White Girl is a contact bummer that’s hard to shake.
  58. Zoom
    Mr. Morelli mixes live-action and animated scenes to good effect. He doesn’t have time to give his characters depth, but there’s pleasure in figuring out how they connect and pondering the movie’s modest themes.
  59. Kickboxer: Vengeance
    Sure, the new action workout Kickboxer: Vengeance — a reboot of a foot-fighting franchise from the 1980s and ’90s — follows a tiresome martial-arts movie formula. But amid the hoary conventions are agreeable inklings of an alternate sensibility.
  60. The Light Between Oceans
    As a drama about adult responsibility, selfishness and moral obligations, however, it never wavers in its commitment to examine what it means to raise a child.
  61. The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger
    The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger is a challenging, sometimes poignant engagement with the man and his work.
  62. Mechanic: Resurrection
    If not for Mr. Jones, “Resurrection,” while competently edited, would be devoid of humor, an area where Mr. Statham has shown promise in the past.
  63. Mia Madre
    Love, death, cinema — they’re all there in Mia Madre, bumping up against one another beautifully.
  64. Hands of Stone
    Hands of Stone...is absolutely a boxing movie. A corny and sometimes clumsy one, it scatters pleasures here and there, Mr. De Niro’s alert performance among them.
  65. Dying to Know: Ram Dass & Timothy Leary
    It’s less a social history than a commercial for alternative healing.
  66. I Am Not a Serial Killer
    Mr. Records (the child actor in “Where the Wild Things Are”) is nimble and unsentimental in playing a character who is playing at normal, supported by a solid cast in a well-filmed indie that doesn’t let its low budget get in the way of some true chills.
  67. Floyd Norman: An Animated Life
    The humble Mr. Norman is always ready with a laugh, and it’s tough not to smile yourself when he reaches for a pencil and starts drawing. When that happens, it’s redundant to say he’s special. Anyone can see it.
  68. Blood Father
    Mr. Gibson makes a persuasive derelict John Wayne with a loose, energetic performance, finely tuned comic timing and an amused, self-aware “Lethal Weapon” glint.
  69. Fatima
    If the movie, loosely based on two books by Fatima Elayoubi, tells a familiar story of immigrants struggling to make something of themselves in an alien culture (Fatima speaks some French but reads only Arabic), it does so in a tone that is kindhearted but clearheaded, and the performances are low-key and believable.
  70. Complete Unknown
    Complete Unknown is a curious hybrid, teetering between a thriller and a romance only to land in a nebulous spot that is neither.
  71. Don't Breathe
    It will probably please fans of this simple genre with its solid suspense, murky lighting and “gotcha!” scares.
  72. The Intervention
    Despite her script’s omissions...Ms. DuVall juggles the emotional dynamics with fluid editing and light comic touches. The skilled cast members must flesh out their characters, and the unselfconscious Ms. Lynskey, who invites the audience’s mockery and ends up with its sympathy, is the revelation.
  73. The Hollars
    Too much happens too quickly in The Hollars for the story to be credible, but the film has some likable qualities, among them the fun of seeing actors in unexpected roles.
  74. In Order of Disappearance
    Revenge is the theme and cheeky is the tone of In Order of Disappearance, a delicious Norwegian film full of icy landscapes and icier hearts.
  75. Is That You?
    A bittersweet and lovely little movie.
  76. Level Up
    Unlovely and uninvolving, Level Up is a running-man cocktail of brutality spiked with low-level humor.
  77. The Sea of Trees
    Mr. Van Sant has always had a sentimental streak — reaching some kind of apogee with “Restless,” in 2011 — but a better script might have replaced literalness with the emotional intelligence that the film badly needs.
  78. Southside with You
    Mr. Tanne has clearly made a close study of his real-life inspirations, yet his movie is soon hostage to the couple’s history. His characters feel on loan and, despite his actors, eventually make for dull company because too many lines and details serve the great-man-to-be story rather than the romance.
  79. Happy Hour
    If Happy Hour doesn’t quite deliver all it promises, that may only be because it promises quite a lot.
  80. Kate Plays Christine
    The film’s method of circling around its subject, then closing in at the end, feels coy and withholding, as if Mr. Greene reserved the few juiciest moments for last.
  81. Making a Killing: Guns, Greed, and the NRA
    Making a Killing generates a disgust that can’t be shaken.
  82. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World
    The internet is an elusive quarry. It’s a marvel and a menace, a banal fact of life and a force for incalculable change. But it’s also less the subject of this captivating, uneven film than an excuse for its director to add to his collection of memorable faces and voices.
  83. Spa Night
    The film is a contemplation of the loneliness, tension and anxiety of outsiders pursuing a piece of the American dream.
  84. The People vs. Fritz Bauer
    Mr. Kraume captures the glances and motions that lay bare a character’s thoughts. He’s fond of the gruff and curmudgeonly Bauer, yet sentimentality is scarce while the double-crossings are surprising and the dry humor is welcome.
  85. Imperium
    Nate’s journey is used primarily to show us the variations in extremist groups and how they might accomplish something drastic like set off a dirty bomb; his inner turmoil takes a back seat. The movie works just fine as a straightforward thriller, though.
  86. Ixcanul
    More than a fable about the clash of tradition and modernity, Ixcanul is finally a painful illustration of the ease with which those who have can prey on those who don’t.
  87. Kampai! For the Love of Sake
    [A] crisp if feather-light documentary.
  88. Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV
    This spinoff from the story of a magical kingdom besieged by an evil empire is too ludicrous for words.
  89. Spaceman
    The effort is commendable, but the execution is rocky.
  90. Ben-Hur
    Overseen by a director not known for his human touch and lacking a name star, except for Mr. Freeman, Ben-Hur feels like a film made on the cheap, although it looks costly.
  91. War Dogs
    [Todd Phillips] delivers an entertaining tale, especially when one or both men have to travel from their home base in Florida to overseas hot spots to correct their ineptitude.
  92. Kubo and the Two Strings
    The action is gorgeously fluid, the idiosyncratic 3-D visual conceits (including floating eyeballs undersea) are startling, and the story and its metaphors resolve in unexpected and moving ways.
  93. Morris from America
    There is plenty of drama in a teenager’s everyday life — no need to sensationalize — and Morris From America feels true to both the pleasures and the frustrations of its title character.
  94. A Tale of Love and Darkness
    There are many lovely and memorable moments in this film, which is in every way the opposite of a vanity project. If anything, Ms. Portman seems constrained by her own modesty, by a justified but nonetheless limiting reverence for her source material.
  95. Mohenjo Daro
    Mr. Roshan, an appealing dancer, works hard to twinkle his way into our affections and make Sarman something more than a cardboard hero. He can’t, but the effort is appreciated.
  96. When Two Worlds Collide
    The issues presented in When Two Worlds Collide are so crucial that it feels churlish to characterize it as a dutiful, and ultimately pedestrian, documentary. There is something evasive about it as well.
  97. Disorder
    Like its hero, Disorder has plenty of technique but not enough purpose.
  98. My King
    The movie’s ability to express, with directness and humor, the insecurities of intimacy — most remarkably during the couple’s first night together — is a delight.
  99. Joshy
    Mr. Baena (who, with David O. Russell, wrote the tricky 2004 “I ♥ Huckabees”) is more accomplished than many microbudget filmmakers, and the looseness with which he imbues the middle section of Joshy is deceptive, creating a sense that the necessary emotional crash might not actually occur.
  100. Abortion: Stories Women Tell
    What Ms. Tragos succeeds in illustrating is that if you take away the signs and listen to the stories, there is little difference between women on opposite sides of the debate — at least in the region she covers.
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