The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,278 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: 9,380 out of 20278
  2. Mixed: 8,434 out of 20278
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20278
20278 movie reviews
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  1. Septembers of Shiraz
    It’s a movie whose good heart is outweighed by its heavy hand.
  2. Three
    When the tension finally does break, the movie goes a little nuts, in venerable Johnnie To tradition. The elaborate, largely slow-motion multifloor action climax is as audacious as anything he has staged and filmed.
  3. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
    Hunt for the Wilderpeople takes a troika of familiar story types — the plucky kid, the crusty geezer, the nurturing bosom — and strips them of cliché. Charming and funny, it is a drama masquerading as a comedy about an unloved boy whom nobody wants until someone says, Yes, I’ll love him.
  4. Free State of Jones
    Mr. Ross consulted some of the leading experts in the era...and has done a good job of balancing the factual record with the demands of dramatic storytelling. The result is a riveting visual history lesson, whose occasional didacticism is integral to its power.
  5. The Phenom
    The director and writer, Noah Buschel, has no fresh insights to add to the well-worn dynamic and doesn’t give the actors or the audience much to work with.
  6. Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words
    It’s a fantastic collage that the filmmaker, Thorsten Schütte, uses to illuminate not only Zappa (who died of cancer in 1993), but also the cultural upheavals that defined his time.
  7. Wiener-Dog
    Mr. Solondz’s eye for the petty hypocrisies and delusions of American life has lost some of its sharpness, and he flails at flabby targets — avant-garde art, campus “political correctness” — in ways that sometimes carry an ugly whiff of racial and sexual bigotry.
  8. Right Now, Wrong Then
    Contemplating both tales in succession can induce a far from unpleasant sense of vertigo, a feeling of standing at the edge of an abyss of wide-open philosophical questions and deep psychological mysteries.
  9. The Neon Demon
    The Neon Demon is hot garbage that dares you to call it offensive. In addition, it’s offensive.
  10. The Shallows
    Mr. Collet-Serra’s busy visual style, which uses a lot of fast-cutting, willy-nilly variations between slow and fast motion, and illogical but vivid point-of-view shots, seems at least somewhat apt under the exhilarating circumstances.
  11. Swiss Army Man
    Impossible to categorize, this stunningly original mix of the macabre and the magical combines comedy, tragedy, fantasy and love story into an utterly singular package that’s beholden to no rules but its own.
  12. Clown
    [A] glib and repellent exercise in “can you top this” genre opportunism.
  13. Nuts!
    The movie culminates in a cinematic coup de grâce bold enough to spin your head — one that gives the movie an entirely new dimension.
  14. Parched
    Despite the appalling circumstances and events it depicts, the movie’s plain and unstinting affection for its lead characters gives Parched a frequently buoyant tone.
  15. Department Q: A Conspiracy of Faith
    The closing scene of “Faith,” beautifully blunt, ends it on the perfect note. Sure, you could point out a few shortcomings here and there. But those sins are easy to overlook.
  16. Department Q: The Absent One
    The Absent One finds Mr. Kaas as watchable as before, though a few well-intentioned attempts to lighten up his character — an orphaned cat is brought in, a speech about his motivations is given — are clumsily executed, and instead divert from his terse and magnetic personality.
  17. Department Q: The Keeper of Lost Causes
    The film, directed by Mikkel Norgaard (who’s borrowed a thing or three from David Fincher) and first released in Denmark in 2013, often focuses on research rather than on gunplay, yet somehow it still feels filled with action. That’s a testament to its lead actors.
  18. Argentina
    For the non-Argentine audience, though, more context would have helped these wonderful songs and dances tell the nation’s story.
  19. Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made
    The documentary, directed by Jeremy Coon and Tim Skousen, revisits those tender years and what came after with a lot of obvious enthusiasm and not an ounce of critical distance, as if they too were just two more friends playing along.
  20. Tickled
    [Mr. Farrier] and Mr. Reeve see the humor, but they also see the pathos — because it’s all fun and giggles until someone gets hurt.
  21. Cosmos
    It is possible to appreciate Mr. Zulawski’s perverse ingenuity, and to miss his eye and voice, without quite succumbing to the strenuous charms and overcooked provocations of Cosmos.
  22. Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story)
    Bang Gang goes out of its way to avoid stereotyping. Where a Hollywood equivalent would almost certainly punish George, “Bang Gang” refuses to designate clear-cut heroes and villains.
  23. Central Intelligence
    An odd-couple caper of staggering dopeyness that makes you long for the snap and sizzle of the buddy movies of the 1980s.
  24. Seoul Searching
    Seoul Searching is rude, funny, silly and poignant. Above all, it’s kind; Mr. Lee understands that belonging is a feeling that many of us may never experience.
  25. My Love, Don't Cross That River
    Many of the passages in this gentle film may be universal, but the love here is extraordinary.
  26. Land and Shade
    In Land and Shade, the setting holds more interest than the plot: a fable-like, elemental story that sketches its characters too faintly to develop much power.
  27. Finding Dory
    What “Dory” lacks in dazzling originality it more than makes up for in warmth, charm and good humor.
  28. 'Til Madness Do Us Part
    This overlong (nearly four hours) but sporadically extraordinary portrait of a forgotten corner of society may be tough going even for fans of forbidding cinema.
  29. Germans & Jews
    Part psychology seminar and sociology course, “Germans & Jews” finds its sharpest insights as it examines the stress of communication, when both sides are so hyper-aware of the past that it hinders what’s said in the present.
  30. Last Cab to Darwin
    Smartly directed by Jeremy Sims, this sweet-hearted film mostly manages to avoid triteness even as it casually packs an emotional punch.
  31. Tikkun
    There is no denying the film’s uncanny power or its visual discipline. It’s a luminous puzzle with a few pieces missing.
  32. Diary of a Chambermaid
    Ms. Seydoux’s triumph is her skill at imbuing Célestine with an almost angelic radiance that clashes with her underlying coarseness.
  33. Puerto Ricans in Paris
    The longtime friends Mr. Guzmán and Mr. Garcia have an unforced chemistry. But the effective jokes land too rarely. You’ll be ready to leave when the trip is over.
  34. Therapy for a Vampire
    It has little bite and not nearly enough laughs or thought.
  35. The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble
    To be sure, this loosely structured story needs a stronger outline; you’ll often wish for clarifying details on the group’s programming and its unfamiliar instruments. But then the music will play, and you’ll think this film wants for nothing.
  36. Len and Company
    Len and Company...never strains for profundity. Instead, it savors observational subtleties, especially in Mr. Ifans’s assured performance. For a baby-boomer-meets-millennial family drama, that’s plenty.
  37. Genius
    It’s dispiriting to see a movie about interesting real-life characters reduce them to clichés, making them less vivid, less fascinating, less charismatic than they must have been.
  38. De Palma
    Like any good work of criticism, De Palma will be catnip for passionate fans while also serving as a primer and a goad for the skeptical and the curious. Mr. De Palma is remarkable company — witty, insightful and neither unduly modest nor overbearingly vain.
  39. Be Somebody
    The Japanese have a term for a certain type of character in manga (comic books) and anime: bishonen — pubescent in appearance, devoid of facial hair, sensitive, unthreatening. That would be Mr. Espinosa.
  40. King Jack
    For everyone who ever had a close call as an adolescent and kept it from the grown-ups, King Jack will hit you where you live. The same for everyone who’s been pummeled by a bully or been left vulnerable by releasing a graphic selfie into the textosphere.
  41. Now You See Me 2
    Everything is supersized and preposterous, but Mr. Chu, with two films in the “Step Up” franchise under his belt, is undaunted by crowds and confusion.
  42. The Conjuring 2
    The Conjuring 2 does everything you want a sequel to do. It’s as well made as the original, but the location and the story are different enough that it’s not just the same thing all over again.
  43. Call Her Applebroog
    Beth B is not out to deliver a comprehensive biography. Instead, she achieves a vivid snapshot of a still-vital artist late in a still-purposeful life.
  44. Careful What You Wish For
    A film that tries to be both titillating and suspenseful but is neither.
  45. Warcraft
    Probably the best way to experience Warcraft, a generally amusing and sometimes visually arresting absurdity, is stoned. If watching the big screen through a cannabis cloud isn’t your idea of a good movie time, though, I suggest that you do what I did and just go with the incoherent flow.
  46. From Afar
    In withholding biographical information about the characters, the movie supplies just enough material to prompt you to fill in the blanks.
  47. The God Cells
    The film, awkward and amateurish, is by Eric Merola, and at least it’s useful in explaining the differences among the various types of stem cells that are being explored for medical treatments.
  48. The President
    The Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf (“A Moment of Innocence,” “Kandahar”) is not known for his kineticism, but The President — which he has suggested is his comment on the Arab Spring — has surprising urgency and sweep.
  49. The Thoughts That Once We Had
    Even if you don’t recognize the majority of the unidentified clips assembled here, or the quotations that divide and guide them, the fascination they exert is all their own.
  50. Gurukulam
    While the beauty of the setting is nourishing, without a narrative structure, the disjointed scenes raise questions.
  51. Art Bastard
    For philistines mystified by the value attached to so many artworks that to an untrained eye look worthless, Mr. Cenedella comes across as a reassuring voice of sanity.
  52. Andron
    If it were at all original, Andron would be merely a bad movie poorly executed. That it is instead a knockoff of “The Hunger Games” and “The Maze Runner” makes it all the more condemnable.
  53. The Fits
    The miracle of the movie is that, like Toni, it transcends blunt, reductive categorization partly because it’s free of political sloganeering, finger wagging and force-fed lessons. Any uplift that you may feel won’t come from having your ideas affirmed, but from something ineluctable – call it art.
  54. Time to Choose
    Charles Ferguson’s latest documentary, Time to Choose, is a sobering polemic about global warming that balances familiar predictions of planetary doom with a survey of innovations in renewable energy technology that hold out some hope for the future.
  55. Approaching the Unknown
    If Approaching the Unknown isn’t entirely satisfying, Mr. Strong reaches high with his portrayal of the unraveling of a man who believes survival is a matter of engineering.
  56. The Final Master
    The characters and the actors playing them are appealing, and the fight scenes have a lot of moxie, not to mention a lot of steel-slinging.
  57. The Wailing
    I was so invested with Jong-gu and his family that as the suspense, violence and worse ratcheted up, I was not merely scared, but heartbroken. An overly literal bit of business at the end slightly undermines the film. As a whole, though, The Wailing is the hard stuff. Handle with care.
  58. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows
    This movie is, it happens, easier to sit through than the 2014 film. The 3-D action, overseen by the director Dave Green, is not wholly incoherent. The production values (showcasing new mutants and many gear-heavy extra-dimensional machines undreamed of in any actual engineering philosophy) are ultrashiny. And there are even a couple of amusing, albeit unmemorable, sight gags and one-liners.
  59. Me Before You
    This floppy British romance, directed by Thea Sharrock and adapted by Jojo Moyes from her best-selling novel, sits at the point where tedium, ridiculousness and heartfelt sentiment converge, separated by an all-but-imperceptible distance.
  60. The Witness
    A re-creation of the night, with an actress playing the screaming victim while Mr. Genovese observes, is harrowing.
  61. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
    “Popstar” takes aim at everything that is artificial and plastic in contemporary pop in a spirit of love rather than spite. It’s a celebration of the curious authenticity — the innocence, the sweetness, the guiltless pleasure — of music whose badness is sometimes hard to separate from its genius.
  62. Presenting Princess Shaw
    Yes, the documentary is undeniably uplifting. But …
  63. The Idol
    Mr. Abu-Assad’s pop filmmaking is resolutely simple in its approach and efficiently sentimental.
  64. Chevalier
    [Ms. Tsangari's] inquiry stops short of the hearts of these men, and she seems content to dramatize some of the sad, ridiculous and tender ways that boys will be boys.
  65. As I AM: The Life and Times of DJ AM
    “As I AM” rockets through its subject’s life, teeming with testimonials from the superstar producer-D.J.s Mark Ronson and Paul Oakenfold, among many others. And then it ends, leaving you spent. And wistful.
  66. Holy Hell
    Mr. Allen has made an engrossing and tense documentary, though his insider knowledge is sometimes a hindrance.
  67. Jia Zhangke, A guy from Fenyang
    The movie’s most moving sequence is near the end, when Mr. Jia discusses his father, who faced awful hardships during the Cultural Revolution.
  68. The Ones Below
    Toward the end, Mr. Farr employs familiar cinematic sleights of hand, but with a finely calibrated touch.
  69. Princess
    Thanks to Ms. Haas’s truly remarkable lead performance (she was 16 at the time of filming) and Ms. Shalom-Ezer’s nuanced dialogue, Adar’s journey finally feels more like one of empowerment than victimization.
  70. To Life
    There is a delicate beauty to this movie and its visual composition.
  71. X-Men: Apocalypse
    For every lively moment, there’s a reminder that the franchise is tiring.
  72. Alice Through the Looking Glass
    The best and maybe the only way to appreciate Alice Through the Looking Glass is to surrender to its mad digital excess and be whirled around through time and space in a world of grotesque overabundance.
  73. Unlocking the Cage
    Part courtroom drama, part rumination on what separates human beings from other animals, the film is above all a sympathetic portrait of an advocate.
  74. A Moment of Silence
    This ambitious documentary, by Ferdinando Vicentini Orgnani, is largely pleasing to the eye, and it pays close attention to the eloquent activists at its core. Journalists of every stripe provide context, perhaps more than we can digest.
  75. Welcome to Happiness
    Welcome to Happiness is an airy fantasy of a film, cute but also frustrating. It’s a little too determined to be eccentric.
  76. ma ma
    Penélope Cruz is an Oscar-winning actress we don’t see often enough in prominent leading roles. So how disappointing to find her having to carry Julio Medem’s florid Ma Ma, a melodrama only glancing at profundity.
  77. Maggie's Plan
    Ms. Miller’s choices are hard to argue with. She steers gracefully through a zigzagging plot, slowing down for quiet, contemplative stretches and pausing for jokes that are irrelevant but irresistible. She finds a tricky balance of farce, satire and emotional sincerity, a way of treating people as ridiculous without denying them empathy.
  78. Weiner
    Infuriating and depressing but rivetingly watchable.
  79. Manhattan Night
    Unlike the juicy, overripe prose in the novel from which it was adapted, Mr. DeCubellis’s screenplay is utterly lacking in style. Mr. Brody captures his character’s attitude, but the colorless screenplay robs the character of literary imagination.
  80. Kaili Blues
    As lovely as the movie is to look at (and the final scene is exceptionally wonderful), it’s too oblique to concentrate its energies and sharpen its focus.
  81. Almost Holy
    A good example of how a charismatic figure doesn’t automatically generate a deep or compelling documentary.
  82. The Other Side
    Whatever genre it belongs to, The Other Side is powerful and disturbing.
  83. The Angry Birds Movie
    The kids of today deserve better. So do I, come to think of it.
  84. Phantom Detective
    Our hero’s quest, however — updated to the 1980s, when the country’s corporations enjoyed unprecedented government benefits — never ignites, mostly because of Mr. Lee’s acting deficits.
  85. Pervert Park
    To be sure, nothing in this film is easy to hear. But that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be said, and learned from.
  86. Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising
    Proudly crass and amiably dumb, Nicholas Stoller’s gag-crammed sequel essentially takes the bones of the 2014 original and gives them a gender flip.
  87. The Nice Guys
    This is a dumb movie pretending to be smart, even as it wants you to believe the opposite. Still, dumb can be fun.
  88. Los Sures (1984)
    It’s a must see for those interested in both the history of Lost New York and the power of nonfiction cinema.
  89. The Trust
    The script, by Adam Hirsch and Benjamin Brewer, is full of both humor and menace, giving the actors plenty to work with. That makes for an enjoyably slow buildup to an unexpected ending.
  90. Paths of the Soul
    The movie so upends the traditions of documentary and narrative filmmaking that “dramatizes” may be inaccurate — the filmmakers followed the real pilgrims for a full year, after all. But the movie is so well made and engaging that such distinctions will make little difference to the viewer.
  91. Kill Zone 2
    If there’s one rewarding thing about many Hong Kong action directors, it’s that they rarely dawdle in getting to what fight fans have come for: bracing shootouts and high-impact fisticuffs and footwork.
  92. I Am Wrath
    The script, besides being full of bad-guy clichés, doesn’t give the actors enough opportunities to work up a buddy rapport, though the glimmers of it that they are permitted are promising.
  93. Cash Only
    I must have breathed while watching Cash Only. But it sure felt as if I didn’t. This brutal and severe film has that effect.
  94. High-Rise
    The retro-futurist production design is gorgeously awful, the cast is awfully gorgeous, and the dystopian setting is explored with an appropriately Ballardian blend of suavity and aggression. But onscreen, High-Rise is curiously inert. The themes don’t resonate, and the story lags and lumbers.
  95. Last Days in the Desert
    Whether or not you accept the tenets of Christianity, Last Days in the Desert, Rodrigo García’s austere depiction of the temptations of Christ, offers a quietly compelling portrait of the human side of Jesus.
  96. Pelé: Birth of a Legend
    The film’s director of photography, Matthew Libatique, makes “Pelé” more than an eye-moistening anthem for a built-in global audience.
  97. What We Become
    What We Become is a very pretty movie with a very dark heart. The payoff is brutal, but earned.
  98. 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.
  99. Money Monster
    Money Monster begins with a jolt of satire, proceeds through a maze of beat-the-clock exposition and lands on a surprisingly gentle, sentimental note.
  100. Sunset Song
    Like most of Mr. Davies’s films, Sunset Song makes you see the world through his sorrowful eyes. He is a die-hard romantic, whose acute sensitivity to the passage of time conveys a bittersweet awareness of the fragility of beauty, which, for him, is synonymous with melancholy.
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