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 Lobster
    Cruelty and humor are nestled like spoons in a drawer. Mr. Lanthimos’s method is to elicit an appreciative chuckle followed by a gasp of shock, and to deliver violence and whimsy in the same even tone. “The Lobster” is often startlingly funny in the way it proposes its surreal conceits, and then upsettingly grim in the way it follows through on them.
  2. A Monster with a Thousand Heads
    A Monster With a Thousand Heads will make your blood boil.
  3. The Family Fang
    Mr. Bateman’s direction of the actors is especially sensitive in this and other tricky scenes, showing a delicacy with emotional textures that isn’t always matched by the story, especially when Annie and Baxter speak in therapeutic clichés.
  4. Bridgend
    Everything’s in service of the images in Bridgend, a stylishly shot, eerily scored and moodily acted film that wants for nothing but a plot. Depending on how you like your movies, this is either a walkout or a must-see.
  5. Those People
    The director, Joey Kuhn, making his feature debut from his own script, has created fairly credible and sympathetic characters, despite the 1-percenter milieu.
  6. Elstree 1976
    "Star Wars” fans will, of course, love this film, but it’s also a thought-provoking exploration of the dawning of our current age.
  7. Beautiful Something
    The movie is in dire need of character development and a wider social context.
  8. Phantom of the Theatre
    By the end, the accelerating plot twists and turns — love, obsession, family obligations, personal honor — become tangled and knotted; a few threads are simply ignored or discarded.
  9. Mothers and Daughters
    Mothers and Daughters is full of recognizable stars and heartfelt conversations. Unfortunately, it’s largely devoid of the kind of character development that can give such conversations real impact.
  10. Dheepan
    [Mr. Audiard] makes popcorn movies disguised as art films, and vice versa. Dheepan is a bit like a Liam Neeson revenge-dad action thriller directed by the Dardenne brothers. I mean that in the best possible way.
  11. Rabin in His Own Words
    The obvious problem with its subject-says-all approach is the lack of outside voices and perspective. This is a broad summation of the man, not a critical look at his policies.
  12. Being Charlie
    The movie’s refusal to abandon commercial formulas and examine its characters’ inner lives suggests that the director’s years inside the Hollywood bubble may have prevented him from recognizing the degree to which independent films and television are already overrun with deeper, more sensitive explorations of addiction and recovery.
  13. The Offering
    The Offering, a muddled horror film, falls over itself incorporating as many genre elements as possible. The result is the cinematic equivalent of combining every paint color on a canvas: a murky mess.
  14. Belladonna of Sadness (1973)
    Belladonna of Sadness is compulsively watchable, even at its most disturbing: The imagery is frequently graphic, and still, after over 40 years, it has the power to shock.
  15. Mad Tiger
    The movie is obviously heartfelt, but the directors, Jonathan Yi and Michael Haertlein, never turn this motley crew into compelling characters.
  16. Dark Horse
    Dark Horse is a canny package that uses the classic structure of the sports-underdog story to deliver a glowing ode to community pride and the merits of collective action over individual gain.
  17. Captain America: Civil War
    This very crowded, reasonably enjoyable installment in the Avengers cycle...reveals, even more than its predecessors, an essential truth about the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s not so much a grand science-fiction saga, or even a series of action-adventure movies, as a very expensive, perpetually renewed workplace sitcom.
  18. Sin Alas
    Mr. Chace does his finest work with Mr. Padrón, and together director and actor create a portrayal of a man who, even as he’s stirred to action, seems increasingly burdened by his sentimental education.
  19. A Bigger Splash
    The world that Mr. Guadagnino creates is at once seductive and aspirational, and another reminder that movies have always excelled at stoking consumer desires.
  20. Baaghi
    Because the filmmakers have given their characters labels (rebel, guru, villain) instead of personalities, the movie’s bid for epic resonance feels particularly hollow.
  21. Older Than Ireland
    It’s often said that the Irish, blessed with the gift of gab, can be splendid raconteurs. You’ll find generous evidence to that effect here. And a bit of poetry as well.
  22. The Man Who Knew Infinity
    Mr. Irons handily hits the emotional beats, as does Mr. Patel.
  23. Special Correspondents
    There’s nothing wrong with the type of movie Special Correspondents wants to be. The problem is that Mr. Gervais doesn’t appear capable of making a good version of it.
  24. L'Attesa (The Wait)
    The performances are vivid and moving, but there is ultimately less to this well-made, impeccably acted film than meets the eye. Its meticulousness is to some degree a flaw, an evasion of nearly every variety of human messiness.
  25. Bourek
    Viewers...are unlikely to be more than marginally amused by its fair-to-middling acting, enervated plot and forcibly diverse group of drifting souls gathered on the fictional Greek island of Khronos.
  26. Sacrifice
    Dowling’s direction, while competent, also trots out every cliché that a 90-minute movie can contain.
  27. Pali Road
    A lot of the weight of selling the story falls on Ms. Chen, and she’s not entirely up to the challenge, but Mr. Lim is able to build suspense anyway.
  28. Papa: Hemingway in Cuba
    Bob Yari’s Papa: Hemingway in Cuba is more artifact than art.
  29. Dough
    Dough is sweet, often funny and always nonthreatening, a movie for those who wish the intractable realities of the world would just disappear.
  30. A Beautiful Planet
    It’s appealing to adults and accessible to younger viewers. And it delivers an environmental message that is strong and serious while remaining encouraging and optimistic. That’s important to hear. The rest is just amazing to watch.
  31. The American Side
    If the self-consciousness can be charming, it also prevents The American Side from becoming fully its own film.
  32. Ratchet & Clank
    It has little story to tell and few ideas to offer. Just a great deal of product to sell.
  33. Mother's Day
    The movie, a goopy, glossy mess with 10 times more respect for contrived sentimentality than for film grammar, is bereft of genuinely amusing jokes — Mr. Marshall really had some nerve naming his autobiography “Wake Me When It’s Funny.”
  34. Transfixed
    For sure, there are plenty of humorous moments here. But that underlying sadness is the most affecting aspect of the film.
  35. Viktoria
    As more and more perfect shots drift by, the reality of the characters and their relationships dissipates, and we’re left with just picturesque moods.
  36. Viva
    It infuses a too-familiar story with so much heart that you surrender to its charm and forgive it for being unabashedly formulaic.
  37. Fassbinder: To Love Without Demands
    The access to Fassbinder that the relationship provided was a boon to the film, but a disadvantage as well because the close-up view results in a patchy portrait rather than a coherent biography.
  38. Keanu
    As the genre machinery chugs along, the bang-bang begins to overwhelm the movie, and the underlying critique gives way to a what-me-worry shrug.
  39. Eva Hesse
    It’s like a comprehensive exhibition catalog or a thorough critical essay — an indispensable aid to understanding and appreciating a fascinating artist.
  40. Love Thy Nature
    Even when it could be specific, Love Thy Nature isn’t.
  41. Keepers of the Game
    There are heroic adults here.... There is also deft editing, artful camerawork and effective music in abundance.
  42. We the People: The Market Basket Effect
    The tale, ripped from the headlines, is stirring, even if the repeated rally scenes and aerial views of the region grow stale.
  43. Tale of Tales
    Strip away the smatterings of sex and globs of gore, and children would really get a kick out of Tale of Tales, Matteo Garrone’s colorful and kinky exploration of what women want. And what men will do to give it to them.
  44. Sworn Virgin
    Although Ms. Rohrwacher captures Mark’s uncertain, shifting physicality, the movie doesn’t always succeed in getting inside the character’s head.
  45. Nina
    Ms. Mort’s writing lacks psychological texture, and her direction generates little intensity, or even continuity.
  46. Men & Chicken
    The movie’s grave commitment to its own quirkiness is admirable, I suppose. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to recommend it.
  47. The Meddler
    Affable, earnest and humanly scaled, The Meddler is the kind of entertainment that the studios used to supply by the boatload and that now tends to show up on the small screen.
  48. A Hologram for the King
    It takes an actor with the finesse of Tom Hanks to turn a story of confusion, perplexity, frustration and panic into an agreeably uncomfortable comedy.
  49. Hockney
    When it deepens its intellectual focus, Hockney begins to lose coherence, with rushed sequences that cover his stage designs, his landscapes and his experiments with photography.
  50. Elvis & Nixon
    Despite Mr. Shannon and Mr. Spacey, who appear to be having a fine time working off each other, the meeting is anticlimactic.
  51. Compadres
    Compadres tries to be a lighthearted cross-border buddy film, and sometimes it succeeds. But consistency is a problem — it doesn’t hit those humorous high notes often enough, and when it’s not in the comedic groove, it’s muddy.
  52. The Huntsman: Winter's War
    Its badness is not extreme, but exemplary: It’s everything wrong with Hollywood today stuffed into a little less than two hours.
  53. How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can't Change
    A one-word assessment of this documentary: Tough. As in, tough to watch. Tough to consider. Tough to ignore.
  54. Streit's: Matzo and the American Dream
    Despite much talk of diversity and tradition, Mr. Levine has little fresh to say about gentrification issues or documentary storytelling.
  55. Echo Park
    An understated and often charming film.
  56. Wedding Doll
    Mr. Gilady, a documentarian making his fiction feature debut as a writer and director, over-stacks the deck with this belabored if artfully shot story.
  57. Sky
    This expressionistic portrait of the American West is an oddity that only a director from another country could have conjured.
  58. Sing Street
    The charms of Sing Street should not be underestimated. Partly because its manner is unassuming and its story none too original...it’s easy to overlook Mr. Carney’s ingenuity and sensitivity.
  59. New York New York
    Its tightly shot scenes never reveal much context, and the rather cryptic subtitles can lead a viewer to mistaken conclusions until the identities and motivations of the characters click into focus.
  60. Our Last Tango
    German Kral’s documentary Our Last Tango is a combination of things, all fascinating.
  61. Rio, I Love You
    Tourism is what it has to sell.
  62. The Measure of a Man
    Mr. Lindon’s physically reserved, inward turn as Thierry (wrinkled brow, downcast eyes) dovetails with Mr. Brizé’s restrained realism.
  63. My Big Night
    Thanks to his editor, Domingo González, Mr. de la Iglesia skillfully keeps these many balls in the air, a palpable affection for his players seeping through.
  64. An Eye for Beauty
    A low point in the director’s career, this sleek chilly film isn’t acted so much as posed.
  65. The First Monday in May
    The movie is sloppy.
  66. Colonia
    It somehow manages to feel more like a Hallmark Channel romance than like a serious film.
  67. 13 Cameras
    Yes, it’s an exploitative sort of filmmaking, but Mr. Zarcoff keeps it fairly restrained for most of the way. You know things will end badly for someone, and perhaps everyone. The ominousness just keeps building.
  68. Above and Below
    Mr. Steiner’s tightly interconnected documentary, with transporting shots, visits people on the margins in the United States.
  69. The Adderall Diaries
    Spouting stiltedly clichéd dialogue...the actors struggle to sell their characters. Only Mr. Harris eventually succeeds, conveying, in a single speech, what it must be like to be the parent of an addict.
  70. Green Room
    Once the violence starts, Green Room settles into horror movie logic, becoming steadily more gruesome and less terrifying as the body count grows. You know some people are going to die, and figuring out who and in what order feels more like a brainteaser than like a matter of deep moral or emotional concern.
  71. Criminal
    Ariel Vromen has directed a decent, fast-paced action movie, and Mr. Costner is enjoyable to watch as Jerico Stewart.
  72. The Jungle Book
    While this The Jungle Book is lightly diverting, it is also disappointing, partly because it feels like a pumped-up version of Disney’s 1967 animated film, with more action and less sweetness. It also feels strangely removed from our moment.
  73. Barbershop: The Next Cut
    The most fascinating — and the most moving — thing about this sprawling, sincere and boisterous movie is its tone.
  74. Class Divide
    What Class Divide does exceptionally well is capture the sense of change at warp speed.
  75. Havana Motor Club
    [A] serviceable but slightly drawn-out documentary.
  76. Mr. Right
    Ms. Kendrick — whether playing daffy, amorous, insightful or indignant — carries the movie. And her surprising shades of grit don’t hurt, either.
  77. The Invitation
    If the movie works as well as it does, it’s because Ms. Kusama can coax scares from shadows, silences and ricocheting looks.
  78. 11 Minutes
    You could call Mr. Skolimowski, who is 77, an old dog, and while the multistranded, chronologically intricate narrative conceit of 11 Minutes isn’t exactly a new trick, it’s one he pulls off with devilish panache and startling impact.
  79. Demolition
    Mr. Gyllenhaal’s strong performance still doesn’t add enough substance to a film that is hollow at the center. It’s mostly the fault of Mr. Sipe, who seems to believe that saying nothing is saying something.
  80. Louder Than Bombs
    It is possible to admire the craft and sensitivity of Louder Than Bombs without quite believing it. The characters are so carefully drawn that they can feel smaller than life, and the dramatic space they inhabit has a curiously abstract feeling.
  81. Neon Bull
    Neon Bull is a profound reflection on the intersection of the human and bestial.
  82. Look at Us Now, Mother!
    For a movie that promises an “epic journey” to explore a family’s “long-buried suffering,” it’s strangely unsatisfying, and eventually wearisome, to find that this clan is deeply troubled perhaps only in the eyes of its filmmaker.
  83. High Strung
    The dialogue may be dire, but the dancing is delightful.
  84. One More Time
    This is a story full of people being miserable, humorless and selfish, despite having been given a lot in life, and they’re pretty much the same at the end of it as they were at the beginning.
  85. Hardcore Henry
    Its dour eccentricity gives Hardcore Henry a potency above and beyond that of standard-issue show-off action fare. That doesn’t mean it’s not still obnoxious, though.
  86. The Boss
    The movie is funny without being much good; mostly, it’s another rung on Ms. McCarthy’s big ladder up. It’s a fitful amalgam of bouncy and slack laughs mixed in with some blasts of pure physical comedy and loads of yammering heads. There isn’t much filmmaking in it, outside of Ms. McCarthy’s precision comedic timing and natural screen presence.
  87. Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt
    Ms. Ushpiz is determined to rescue her subject from the banality of biography. The details of Arendt’s childhood, education, romantic life and professional activity are not ignored, but they nearly always illuminate her ideas.
  88. H.
    A clever film written and directed by Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia, H. keeps the viewer watchful, waiting for it to splatter into a familiar horror plot or spin off into an alien abduction.
  89. Marinoni: The Fire in the Frame
    A chronicle of obsession ought to provide some insights.
  90. Darling
    Mickey Keating’s horror outing Darling manages to conjure an effectively unsettling miasma.
  91. The Girl in the Photographs
    This sad slasher is as lacking in scares as in ideas.
  92. Too Late
    Mr. Hauck’s affection is apparent in every frame, yet outside of an occasionally clunky line or show-offy moment (O.K., sometimes it’s more occasional than just occasionally), he rarely allows it to alter his aim. That aim is to make a modern noir. That aim is true.
  93. Notfilm
    A charming, earnest, sometimes ungainly mixture of history, criticism and high-minded gossip, Notfilm testifies to an almost inexhaustible fascination with the pleasures and paradoxes of cinema.
  94. Standing Tall
    Mr. Paradot’s performance is so viscerally intense that there is no escaping its force.
  95. The Flight Fantastic
    Is the film a bit self-promotional? Sure, but it’s enjoyable nonetheless.
  96. Catching the Sun
    One notion underlying Shalini Kantayya’s winning documentary, Catching the Sun, is that solar power is not only a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels but can also effectively curtail unemployment.
  97. Kill Your Friends
    A richly satisfying poison-pen letter to the music industry.
  98. Afternoon
    Obviously, this is not a film for viewers unfamiliar with Mr. Tsai’s work. But its insistently austere format does suggest a purpose beyond its immediate context.
  99. Miles Ahead
    Does it matter that stretches of Miles Ahead — a gun-rattling, squealing-tire car chase included — came out of the filmmakers’ imagination rather than Davis’s life? (Mr. Cheadle shares script credit with Steven Baigelman.) Purists may howl, but they’ll also miss the pleasure and point of this playfully impressionistic movie.
  100. Francofonia
    It’s a work of art that troubles the conscience, in part because it suggests, both by default and by design, that no art is innocent, and that its preservation, like its destruction, depends on the operation of power.
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