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. The Third Murder
    The movie opens with the defendant bashing in the victim’s head and then burning the corpse. A trial seems almost beside the point, a view that the writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda goes on to dismantle with lapidary precision.
  2. Heartbeat Detector
    The rather lost-looking Mr. Amalric, most recently seen on screens giving his left eyeball a furious workout in “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” maintains a suitably funereal mien throughout.
  3. Land Ho!
    At times, Colin and Mitch’s trip to Iceland feels like a lark, for them and for the filmmakers. Yet there’s no denying the deepening effect of a movie in which two older men, with their creases and sags, white and thinning hair, inhabit so much screen time.
  4. Songs My Brothers Taught Me
    You come at the story, such as it is, as a visitor from the outside world, picking up information as the movie goes along. This approach impedes comprehension, and at moments you may be tempted to sit back and not try to make the pieces fit. For those unwilling to make the effort, Songs My Brothers Taught Me has other rewards.
  5. Thank You for Your Service
    If, like its characters, Thank You for Your Service sometimes struggles to balance staying strong with wearing its heart on its sleeve, it makes an emotional plea in a direct, effective way.
  6. To Die Like a Man
    For all its melodrama To Die Like a Man is a not a tearjerker. Its gaze into the void is as unblinking as that of the H.I.V.-positive 60-year-old hustler in Jacques Nolot's even more hard-headed film, "Before I Forget."
  7. 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.
  8. Let the Canary Sing
    This violent franchise has rarely felt so assured, so relaxed and knowingly funny. If Bad Boys: Ride or Die means that Smith, post-slap, will remain a bad boy for life, there are worse punishments to endure.
  9. Language Lessons
    The twists in the story are meant to raise the emotional stakes, but they have the opposite effect, undermining the credibility of the premise. The harder the movie leans into its own cleverness, the more it exposes itself as a diverting but ultimately unconvincing exercise.
  10. Europa Report
    Banishing showy effects and cheap scares, the Ecuadorean director Sebastián Cordero has meticulously shaped a number of sci-fi clichés — from the botched spacewalk to the communications breakdown — into a wondering contemplation of our place in the universe.
  11. Romántico
    This modest, unassuming documentary about an illegal Mexican immigrant living in San Francisco is a case study of a life defined by poverty.
  12. Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press
    Just because Nobody Speak has a timely message doesn’t make it an ideal messenger.
  13. Archangel
    From its flickering, inky cinematography to its wavering late 1920's-style sound track, to Veronkha's kohl-eyed vampish look, the movie is an expert parody of a period movie style.
  14. Walking and Talking
    Concentrating on the fine-tuned trivia that fuels so much television comedy, it also creates two bright, appealing heroines and watches them face life's little insults with fresh, disarming humor.
  15. The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie
    The movie’s energy doesn’t pay off in dividends of real pleasure. Anarchy has never been so mere as it is ultimately rendered here.
  16. Separate Tables
    The characters here are all misfits—people who have not quite been able to adjust their own inadequacies and terrors to the hard realities of life. And it is in the revelation of these people to a more or less brilliant extent that the fascination and satisfaction of this picture lie.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jailhouse Rock
    Presley fans may not like the idea of his being a churlish, egotistical wonder boy of television and the screen for a good half of the picture.
  18. The Last Mogul
    More history lesson than dirt-digging expedition, and makes illuminating viewing for anyone curious about how the movies get made - information that is sometimes more interesting than the movies themselves.
  19. The Willoughbys
    Though it tends to feel disjointed as a whole, The Willoughbys thrives when it embraces its grim plot and lets mischief reign.
  20. The Secret Life of Words
    The exquisitely coordinated performances elicit an empathy as powerful as anything I can remember feeling in a recent film.
  21. Fort Bliss
    Ms. Myers too often tells rather than shows, and she doesn’t have the cinematic skill set to transform her idea into a fully satisfying movie, especially at this low-budget level.
  22. Shanghai Ghetto
    The film uses standard techniques to tell its tale -- videotaped interviews with survivors interspersed with newsreel images from the period -- but does so with integrity and attention to detail.
  23. Vision: From the Life of Hildegard Von Bingen
    Vision offers a hard-headed view of 12th-century religiosity in which church politics and money conflict with the characters' asceticism. It portrays Hildegard as a passionate humanitarian and a lover of nature.
  24. Avengers: Infinity War
    Where you end up may not be where you thought this was going. The final act, including the post-credits sting (to infinity and beyond, as it were) brings a chill, a darkness and a hush that represent something new in this universe.
  25. A Vigilante
    Daggar-Nickson gestures in certain directions, but for the most part she avoids deeper, troubling questions about retribution and violence. Instead, she concentrates on the genre basics, as in the movie’s admirably hard-core final face-off.
  26. Maps to the Stars
    It takes a perverse effort of will to love “Maps to the Stars.” It’s a little too chilly, and in some places too easy. But you may find yourself drawn back to it, and retracing its route from the familiar to the uncanny, from entertainment to revulsion, from dream to nightmare.
  27. Two Pianos
    Looking for rational behavior, especially in a crucial flashback, is pointless. To the extent that Two Pianos coheres, it is in a way that might be described as musical.
  28. Fletch
    An enjoyable paperback of a film, a lightweight, breezy experience that, by never pretending to be anything more than what it is, disarms criticism.
  29. True Confessions
    Marvelously well-acted...Quite simply it's one of the most entertaining, most intelligent and most thoroughly satisfying commercial American films in a very long time.
  30. Girl Model
    That stink, like iffy contracts and child labor laws, remains unexplored. Filled with blind eyes and unspoken agreements, Girl Model opens a can of worms, then disdains to follow their slimy trails.
  31. Boom Bust Boom
    A remarkably enjoyable, and sometimes very funny, documentary about a frightening topic.
  32. Juniper
    Predictably, their relationship softens up, but the film nevertheless maintains some of its prickly charm, in no small part because of the feisty Rampling, whose ice-queen persona here straddles bone-dry humor and withering tragedy.
  33. F1: The Movie
    An enjoyably arranged collection of all the visual attractions and narrative clichés that money can buy, “F1” is very simply about the satisfactions of genre cinema and the pleasures of watching appealing characters navigate fast, exotic cars that whine like juiced-up mosquitoes. It’s also about the pleasures of that ultrasmooth performance machine, Brad Pitt.
  34. John Wick
    Harboring few ambitions beyond knock-your-socks-off action sequences, this crafty revenge thriller delivers with so much style — and even some wit — that the lack of substance takes longer than it should to become problematic.
  35. An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
    In a summer movie landscape with Spider-Man, a simian army waging further battle for the planet and Charlize Theron as a sexy Cold War-era superspy, it says something that one of the most compelling characters is Al Gore.
  36. The Way, Way Back
    The Way, Way Back has the charm of timelessness but also more than a touch of triteness. Its situations and feelings seem drawn more from available, sentimental ideas about adolescence than from the perceptions of any particular adolescent.
  37. The Americanization of Emily
    Here is a film that not only gives the charming Miss Andrews a chance to prove herself irresistible in a straight romantic comedy but also gets off some of the wildest brashest and funniest situations and cracks at the lunacy of warfare that have popped from the screen in quite some time.
  38. Joy Ride
    Some of the material feels fairly standard, as they share misfit upbringings and showbiz gossip, but each veteran comedian lends an unpredictable element through self-deprecating candor.
  39. The Desert Bride
    A road movie of sorts, it steers clear of melodrama or sentimentality, but it also never risks hitting anything.
  40. Sometimes I Think About Dying
    A movie like this one, reserved and a little mysterious, can be unnerving. Occasionally it feels as if Sometimes I Think About Dying is a bit too withholding, dragging down the story it has to tell. But there’s a lot here to like.
  41. Chef
    [A] shallow but enjoyable all-American morality play.
  42. Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer
    Those swayed by the argument in Client 9 that some of the rich and powerful whom Mr. Spitzer crusaded against might have exploited his stupidity should find all this enthralling. Others might just remember the hubris.
  43. Detropia
    In this visual caress of postindustrial blight, disintegration has never looked so gorgeous.
  44. House of Wax
    The major causes for anxiety presented by this film are in the savagery of its conception and the intolerable artlessness of its sound. It is thrown and howled at the audience as though the only purpose was to overwhelm the naturally curious patron with an excess of brutal stimuli.
  45. Missing Link
    What’s missing from the movie, for all its technical skill, is simply inspiration — that extra touch of wit or imagination that might elevate it from a pleasant diversion to a rare sighting.
  46. Why We Fight
    Mr. Jarecki forcefully, if not with wholesale persuasiveness, argues that our business is specifically war.
  47. Dream Horse
    This sports underdog story, which is based on true events, has several features endemic to the genre. But Dream Horse, an unabashed crowd-pleaser directed by Euros Lyn, earns its smiles and cheers.
  48. Friedkin Uncut
    The documentary also reminds viewers of why Friedkin has earned this tribute. For all his career ups and downs, he has remained devoted to making genuinely challenging and exciting work, and has succeeded more often than not. The documentary serves as a strong incitement to dig into it.
  49. Women Without Men
    With its intense chiaroscuro and meticulous manipulation of color that ranges from stark black and white to richer, shifting hues in scenes set in a metaphorical orchard, the film surpasses even Michael Haneke's "White Ribbon" in the fierce beauty and precision of its cinematography (by Martin Gschlacht).
  50. Tales from the Golden Age
    The strongest tales embrace a strain of barnyard humor that is matched by the robust performances of actors who convey an earthy jocularity. The movie doesn't shy away from comparing these hardy, weather-beaten rustics to their livestock.
  51. Anita
    Anita is an important historical document about an event that prompted a larger cultural conversation about sexual harassment. But, perhaps more important, it conveys Ms. Hill’s journey from an accuser alone to an activist who shares with, and listens to, others.
  52. The Lesson
    The plot undermines the film’s power. At the end you may be impressed at the skill on display, but you may also wish that you were more fully moved by the spectacle of a soul laid bare and transformed.
  53. Active Measures
    This formidable film is sometimes zealous to a fault: The credits cite more than 200 sources of archival material, from The Washington Post to YouTube channels. It’s a lot to take in, as names and numbers zip by, yet missing some of its points may be healthy. To explore every moment is to risk overdosing on outrage.
  54. Down Terrace
    However persuasively acted, this mélange of cinéma vérité, slapstick and murder - whose story has a lot in common with the recent Australian gangster film "Animal Kingdom" - has too many narrative gaps for its pieces to cohere satisfactorily.
  55. On Golden Pond
    Mr. Fonda gives one of the great performances of his long, truly distinguished career. Here is film acting of the highest order, the kind that is not discovered overnight in the laboratory, but seems to be the distillation of hundreds of performances.
  56. Journey to the West
    Mr. Chow has perhaps achieved more sustained and elaborate adventures, but he hits a sweet spot of comedy that never grows too self-aware or forgets the value of a good, clean demon whomping.
  57. Twister
    Hurtling pace, by-the-numbers character development and exotic science. Tornado-chasing suddenly takes on a sex appeal not usually associated with horrendous storms.
  58. Sophie's Choice
    Thanks in large part to Miss Streep's bravura performance, it's a film that casts a powerful, uninterrupted spell.
  59. Avalon
    A generous and touching film that is essentially smaller than its own sweeping ambitions, a crowded and skillfully drawn landscape from which no oversize figures emerge. Affection and memory are the forces that give Avalon its vibrancy, but they are also its limitations.
  60. 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.
  61. The Harvest
    There may be little to give you the collywobbles, but there’s quite a lot to enjoy, with Ms. Morton heading the list. Swaddled in thick cardis and shapeless scrubs, she makes Katherine a well of overanxious care and castrating comments.
  62. Stations of the Cross
    As Maria crumples before our eyes, many will find Stations of the Cross heartbreaking and infuriating. Others may laugh out loud at her mother, a walking nightmare of pious, punishing rectitude.
  63. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
    It's good, canny-dumb fun.
  64. The Innocent
    The entertainment value of The Innocent lies not in the actual heist — which amounts to little more than a shipment of caviar at a truck stop — but in its lighthearted comedy, its by-the-numbers romance plot and its relatable family drama grafted onto an absurd premise.
  65. With God on Our Side: George W. Bush and the Rise of the Religious Right in America
    Our turbulent political climate is so clogged with the instant hysteria demanded by the chattering class to keep its voice in shouting condition that a sedate documentary examining the long-term weather patterns is a welcome respite from the noise.
  66. Won't Anybody Listen
    Mr. Kelemer captures the sad textures of the Rogala brothers' lives with an appropriate balance of sympathy and detachment.
  67. Theeviravaathi: The Terrorist
    Sivan has accomplished something extraordinary: he has given political extremism a human face.
  68. Son of the Bride
    May be as exhaustive a study of one man's midlife crisis as has ever been brought to the screen. But as the movie lopes along, exhaustive becomes exhausting.
  69. The Black Balloon
    Ms. Collette’s Maggie is the film's prime mover. This wonderful Australian actress, who hasn't a shred of vanity, virtually disappears into the complicated characters she plays, and Maggie is one of the strongest.
  70. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
    Though hobbled by an obviousness that dampens any suspense, this sensitive, environmentally concerned movie is most successful when steeped in the particularities of its location.
  71. The Party's Just Beginning
    Gillan plays her messy, mournful role with unfussy integrity. The movie does not stray beyond the borders of the modest character study, but within those parameters, it’s accomplished and impressively straightforward.
  72. Timecrimes
    The Spanish writer and director Nacho Vigalondo has audacity to spare. Constructing a looping, economical plot and directing like a fire marshal in a flaming building, he conjures urgency and disorientation from the thinnest of air.
  73. Yentl
    The best thing about Yentl is its earnestness. It may resemble a vanity production from afar (or at close range, too, for that matter), but even at its kitschiest it seems to be heartfelt. That goes a long way, though not far enough, toward saving the film from its own built-in difficulties.
  74. Friends with Money
    Greatly appealing if not especially adventurous, either for its director or for her admirers.
  75. Enola Holmes
    The film is successful in balancing these broad themes with our heroine’s adventures, and that is due in large part to the work of Brown, whose energetic performance breathes new life into the Holmes creative world.
  76. My Friend Dahmer
    This film is sensitively wrought. It’s credible in its evocation of mid-’70s suburbia. The acting is excellent throughout, and Ross Lynch in the role of Dahmer elicits genuine sympathy for an increasingly lost but not yet monstrous soul. But in abandoning the subjective perspective of the graphic novel, My Friend Dahmer feels a little lacking in purpose.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Casting About
    A solid documentary about how art is made.
  78. Hair
    A rollicking musical memoir, as much a recollection of the show as of the period, a film that has the charm of a fable and the slickness of Broadway show biz at its breathless best.
  79. Mad Detective
    If the insanely inventive and entertaining Mad Detective weren't so weird -- and in Cantonese -- hordes of action geeks would be lining the block to see it.
  80. Bethlehem
    Bethlehem is emphatically political, as perhaps any movie about warring Israelis and Palestinians must be. Yet its ideas are more complex than is suggested by either its schematic story or fast-moving genre elements.
  81. Sex and Broadcasting
    Professionally comfortable with improvising, the D.J.s make for affable company, and it’s amusing to watch radio from behind the scenes. But a tinge of melancholy also hovers over the movie.
  82. Jesús
    One feels the filmmaker trying hard to work out the inner struggles of his sad but largely unsympathetic characters. But his movie is as miserable and ultimately confounding as it is earnest.
  83. Come True
    Like “Our House” (2018), Burns’s underseen feature debut, Come True is superior throwback horror marred mainly by familiarity and, in this case, an ending that feels like a tease.
  84. Omen
    The film’s frenetic world-building eventually becomes numbing, in part because the uneven human dramas — each one offers a vague message about marginalization — lose momentum in all the commotion.
  85. A Quiet Place: Day One
    It is at its very best whenever Nyong’o’s face fills the screen, like the postapocalyptic heroine of a silent movie. What she can do with relatively little is simply astonishing, and you absolutely believe in both Samira’s despair and her determination. Nyong’o has created a woman whose life force can never be fully extinguished.
  86. Crime 101
    Like lovingly warmed leftovers, it has its satisfactions: a charismatic cast, evocative Los Angeles location work, the sort of granular details on diamond couriering and insurance valuation that might give impressionable viewers ideas.
  87. My Cousin Vinny
    My Cousin Vinny is easily the most inventive and enjoyable American film farce in a long time, even during those extended patches when it seems to be marking time or when it continues with a running gag that can't stay the distance. The film has a secure and sophisticated sense of what makes farce so delicious.
  88. X2: X-Men United
    Mr. Singer and his collaborators grasp that comic books, for all their obligatory fights and explosions, are at bottom about their brave, troubled, impossibly muscled characters.
  89. Red Obsession
    Red Obsession, a little too stuffed for its nearly 80 minutes, may already be dated, since China’s wine fever has cooled recently. Still, the movie raises legitimate concerns about the cultural and economic implications of status-minded overconsumption.
  90. Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers
    A febrile blend of facts, liberal outrage and emotional manipulation (like his colleague Michael Moore, Mr. Greenwald knows the visual power of a grieving mother), Iraq for Sale has an us-versus-them sensibility that’s extremely effective.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    It Came from Outer Space
    Merely mildly diverting, not stupendous.
  92. Delirious
    Tom DiCillo’s angry comedy Delirious subjects modern celebrity culture to a microscopic examination that shows the toxic virus of fame squirming and multiplying under its lens.
  93. Big River Man
    As his attention to detail and beauty shots prove, Mr. Maringouin has a terrific eye: he brings you close to Mr. Strel, sometimes within panting distance, without forgetting the larger, lovelier world.
  94. Stripes
    The chief thing it counts on is a built-in appreciation of the Murray sense of humor, which is growing ever more refined as Mr. Murray proceeds with his movie career. Mr. Murray hasn't yet reached the point at which his routines can be sustained for more than 10 minutes at a time. But he has achieved a sardonically exaggerated calm that can be very entertaining.
  95. Miracle
    Framed by scenes of weeping, the narrative does not entirely pull itself into a satisfying arc, but the film nevertheless unfolds with dexterity and suspense.
  96. Paranormal Activity
    A crudely made, half-clever little frightener that has become something of a pop-culture sensation and most certainly the movie marketing story of the year.
  97. Theater of War
    Because this is also a document of an actress actually at work, much of the movie's pleasure comes from watching another brilliant performance take shape as Ms. Streep tries out different line readings, gestures and poses in her search for Mother Courage.
  98. We the Parents
    Mr. Takata deserves praise for refusing to oversimplify the situation, although his film doesn’t always bring the conflict fully to life.
  99. While We Watched
    The documentary is less an inspiring tale than a sobering wake-up call.
  100. No Time to Die
    The overall vibe — a look that is both opulent and generic; a tone that mixes brisk professionalism with maundering self-pity; an aggressive, exhausting fusion of grandiosity and fun — is more superhero saga than espionage caper.
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