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. A River Runs Through It
    A River Runs Through It, Mr. Redford's beautiful and deeply felt new movie, puts him in an entirely new category as a film maker.
  2. Out of Darkness
    Unfolding entirely in a fictional language (which the actors deliver with fluid conviction), and enriched by lovingly rendered practical effects, this first feature from Andrew Cumming pairs its minimalist narrative with the maximum of atmosphere.
  3. Dear Diary
    As both a skillful director and a lovable oddball, [Moretti] commands interest. It's easy to follow him anywhere.
  4. Swimming to Cambodia
    Mr. Gray's feature-length monologue brings people, places and things so vibrantly to life that they're very nearly visible on the screen.
  5. Kisses
    Kisses may strike you as either ingeniously magical or insufferably cute, depending on your taste. But more than the story, which circles back on itself, the natural performances of its young stars, Shane Curry and especially Kelly O'Neill, nonprofessional actors, lend the movie a core of integrity.
  6. Honeydripper
    Honeydripper is agreeable, well-intentioned and very, very slow. Sadly, it illustrates the difference between an archetype and a stereotype. When the first falls flat, it turns into the other and becomes a cliché.
  7. Ne Zha 2
    The writer-director Jiao Zi uses equally expansive storytelling and visuals to deliver an epic, fantastical hero story about power hierarchies and the fall of institutions.
  8. The Double
    It never quite rises to the full potential of its theme or fully inhabits its intricately imagined space. It’s cool but not haunting — a brainteaser rather than a mindblower.
  9. Semi-Tough
    A funny film that is as much satire as parody, as much about our time as it is about some of our more bizarre culture heroes.
  10. Soni
    Ayr does not offer any tension-releasing catharsis, making his film efficiently disquieting in its own unassuming manner.
  11. Citizens Band
    Citizen's Band, is so clever that its seams show. Mr. Demme's tidiest parallels and most purposeful compositions are such attention-getters that the film has a hard time turning serious for its finale, in which characters who couldn't communicate directly come to understand one another at long last.
  12. Face to Face
    Bergman creates a stunning picture not only of personal anxiety but also of the fury that may exist just below the surface of any perfect state.
  13. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter
    A delicate, haunting study of a woman who has in several senses lost her way.
  14. The Turning Point
    The Turning Point is entertaining, not for discovering new material, but for treating old material with style and romantic feeling that, in this day and age, seem remarkably unafraid.
  15. Rafiki
    This is a love story for the time, not for the ages.
  16. The Beauty Academy of Kabul
    Liz Mermin documents the hilarious, moving and sometimes fractious meeting of diametrically different cultures, one that has suffered unimaginable horrors and one that believes a good perm is the answer to everything.
  17. I Remember Me
    An intrepid sleuth, Ms. Snyder seems to have left no stone unturned in her search for answers.
  18. Etoiles: Dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet
    The cinematic equivalent of sampling goodies from a spartan tastings menu in which the entrees, desserts and appetizers are confusingly jumbled together.
  19. Memories of Tomorrow
    Memories of Tomorrow finally understands that the real victim of this terrible affliction is the partner left behind.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Method
    The sum total of this gamesmanship is a suspenseful, funny film that touches on a corporation’s responsibility to society, the price of ambition, the persistence of workplace sexism, the destructive competition between women, and why it’s a good idea to take an extra shirt to your next interview.
  21. Night on Earth
    With this, his fourth commercially released feature, Mr. Jarmusch again demonstrates his mastery of comedy of the oblique. He seems to see his characters through a telescope, while attending to their talk with some kind of long-range listening device. Everything that is seen and heard is vivid and particular, but decidedly foreign. Meanings are elusive. Themes can be supplied by others. He's also becoming an increasingly fine director of actors.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    The Last House on the Left
    The party who wrote this sickening tripe and also directed the inept actors is Wes Craven.
  23. French Connection II
    The concerns of French Connection II are not much different from those of old Saturday-afternoon movie serials that used to place their supermen in jeopardy and then figure ways of getting them out. The difference is in the quality of the supermen and in their predicaments.
  24. Brats
    The film’s through-line of woundedness is by turns touching, irritating and occasionally illuminating.
  25. Just Mercy
    Just Mercy is saved from being an earnest, inert courtroom drama when it spends time on death row, where it is opened up and given depth by two strong, subtle performances, from Foxx and Rob Morgan.
  26. The Place Beyond the Pines
    The three-part story, spread over nearly two and a half hours, represents a triumph of sympathetic imagination and a failure of narrative economy. But if, in the end, the film can’t quite sustain its epic vision, it does, along the way, achieve the density and momentum of a good novel.
  27. Notting Hill
    The movie has lots of glossy charm even if Ms. Roberts and Grant seem less like lovers than members of a support group for the desperately attractive.
  28. Lust for Life
    Both the script and the performance of this picture have a striking integrity in putting forth the salient details and the surface aspects of the life of van Gogh.
  29. Purple Butterfly
    Mr. Lou synthesizes a wide range of styles and influences - from "Casablanca" to Wong Kar-wai - resulting in a movie that, for all its haunting strangeness, seems curiously familiar.
  30. Woodpeckers
    The lean handsomeness and quiet authority of Mr. Jean is a perfect complement to Ms. Rodríguez’s passionate Yanelly, while the locations — and the presence of actual inmates — underscore the harsh boundaries the lovers struggle against.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times
    The movie's main theme, no surprise, is the struggle of The Times to survive in the age of the Internet. But it does little to illuminate that struggle, preferring instead a constant parade of people telling the camera how dreadful it would be if The Times did not survive. True, of course, but boring to the point of irritation after five or six repetitions.
  32. The Rescuers Down Under
    The mice themselves are enjoyably dowdy, comfortable throwbacks to a time before earth-shattering conquests were the sine qua non of children's entertainment. The film's action sequences, on the other hand, provide the dizzying heights and spectacular exploits to which live-action audiences are by now well accustomed, and they seem derivative despite the ingenuity of the animators.
  33. Lethal Weapon
    The film is all fast action, noisy stunts and huge, often unflattering close-ups, but it packs an undeniable wallop.
  34. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
    There is a lot of violence, but not much action; a plot involving vengeance, jealousy and double-crossing, but not a great deal of suspense.
  35. Some Kind of Hero
    A very engaging, loose-limbed sort of comedy. It's written, directed and acted with amiability, which doesn't disguise the bitterness immediately beneath the surface but, like Eddie himself, absorbs it.
  36. TINY: The Life of Erin Blackwell
    The combination of “Streetwise” and “Tiny” belongs on a short list with “Boyhood,” the “Up” documentaries and “Hoop Dreams” as exemplars of time-capsule filmmaking.
  37. The Five Devils
    Smell is perhaps the most opaque of the five human senses; the one that’s hardest to put into words. No wonder it’s key to the uncanny intrigues of the film, part queer love story, part supernatural psychodrama, by the French director Léa Mysius.
  38. The Cool School
    The Cool School, is, well, cool, but it’s also fairly parochial.
  39. Beatriz at Dinner
    This is neither a simple satire of privilege nor a mock-provocative comedy of diversity and its discontents. It’s about a clash of values, about unresolvable contradictions. Or to put it another way, about good and evil.
  40. The Shining
    Meticulously detailed and never less than fascinating, The Shining may be the first movie that ever made its audience jump with a title that simply says "Tuesday."
  41. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
    The second Star Trek movie is swift, droll and adventurous, not to mention appealingly gadget-happy. It's everything the first one should have been and wasn't.
  42. Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
    This is by far the best film in the more recent trilogy, and also the best of the four episodes Mr. Lucas has directed. That's right (and my inner 11-year-old shudders as I type this): it's better than "Star Wars."
  43. Paris
    There are enough intersecting characters from different classes and backgrounds in Paris to evoke the city as a complex, healthy organism, whose parts are all connected. If it is too lighthearted to show the actual political and economic machinery behind it, its celebration of how well that machinery works produces a pleasant afterglow.
  44. Fratricide
    Every so often, Mr. Arslan cuts to Kurdistan, where a group of women wander the barren landscape, a Greek chorus gone astray in a film gone amiss.
  45. Animals and More Animals
    What emerges is less the celebration of an institution than a picture of man's relationship to nature that is every bit as beguiling as a Rousseau.
  46. Anonymous Club
    Barnett muses on the contradiction of how, in one performance, she might be “vivid and alive” and in the next “distant,” even though she’s going through the same motions with each show.
  47. Superman
    As both a story on its own and a prequel to a whole bunch of others, this movie must introduce us to a variety of characters we’ll meet later, and it does it without feeling too much like fan service or exposition.
  48. Queens of the Dead
    It’s all meant to be viewed through the lens of camp, that increasingly diluted and all-too-broad category that here feels more like an excuse for the film’s flat construction than an aesthetic approach. Though you’ll get a few laughs out of its cast.
  49. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
    Mr. Pitt is himself a supernova luminary, of course, and part of the attraction of this film is how his celebrity feeds into that of his character, adding shadings to what is, finally, an overconceptualized if under-intellectualized endeavor.
  50. Fracture
    The screenwriters, Daniel Pyne and Glenn Gers, hit the customary thriller notes with a touch of humor, and the director, Gregory Hoblit (who worked similar terrain in "Primal Fear"), arranges those notes into a catchy, insistent rhythm.
  51. Departures
    Overlong, predictable in its plotting and utterly banal in its blending of comic whimsy and melodramatic pathos.
  52. This Filthy World
    John Waters is darned entertaining as he delivers a monologue that annotates his scandalous movies and encompasses assorted other subjects that interest or annoy him.
  53. Seeing Allred
    A documentary that’s remarkably engaging despite treating its rough-and-tumble hero with kid gloves.
  54. Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent
    Throughout, the solitary Mr. Tower maintains an unflappable refinement, dedicated, a college friend says, to “looking for some utopian possibility of living, because that’s what kept the darkness away.”
  55. Inequality for All
    Mr. Reich ties together his talking points with a reasonable-sounding analysis and an unassuming warmth sometimes absent from documentaries charting America’s economic woes.
  56. Ghost Stories
    Managing to feel at once painfully slow and bafflingly truncated, this creaky triptych of not-so-scary tales is a tame curiosity of movie nostalgia.
  57. One Life
    The latest production from the BBC Natural History Unit is a typically eye-catching, years-in-the-making chronicle of animal life that is tainted by the urge to anthropomorphize.
  58. Santoalla
    Santoalla ends with the mystery solved. The threads that remain hanging imbue this peculiar story of paradise lost with a tragic resonance.
  59. El Crimen Perfecto (The Perfect Crime)
    Mr. Toledo's performance as the shallow and cowardly, yet strangely sympathetic Rafael is a wonder of comic timing, while Ms. Cervera is unforgettable as Lourdes, the ugly duckling who becomes not a swan, but a monster.
  60. No No: A Dockumentary
    As this smart and sympathetic profile shows, Dock Ellis didn’t need a no-hitter, stoned or otherwise, to define himself; he was his own best work.
  61. The Valet
    If you love to hate the superrich, The Valet, a delectable comedy in which the great French actor Daniel Auteuil portrays a piggy billionaire industrialist facing his comeuppance, is a sinfully delicious bonbon.
  62. 12 O'Clock Boys
    12 O’Clock Boys packs more life into its 72 minutes than many longer documentaries do.
  63. People Places Things
    As the movie fizzles, Mr. Clement’s endearing performance breathes what little life is left into a movie that, much like the insufferable Charlie, can’t make up its mind about where to go or how to get there.
  64. Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That!
    As for the authorial conceit - assembling the movie from giddy, spastic, amateur photography captured from every part of the arena - at best it yields energetic perspectives on the show, at worst it looks like a cellphone video camera having an epileptic seizure.
  65. Santitos
    Disarmingly endearing.
  66. Reykjavík
    Feels as though it is not about much, but it is so well acted that the lassitude becomes a part of the atmosphere.
  67. The Italian Job
    Feels a like smooth, exciting whoosh down a ski slope.
  68. The Inheritance
    As the relentlessly morose movie shows, a corporate hero is not the same thing as a humanitarian; in many ways, he's the antithesis.
  69. Come Undone
    Ultimately, Come Undone isn't a movie about homosexuality, depression or family dynamics. For a gay coming-out story, its sexual politics are extremely muted.
  70. Protagonist
    Jessica Yu’s enthralling documentary exploration of people with obsessive needs for control and self-mastery.
  71. The New Black
    Ms. Richen elucidates an entire spectrum of views, from actively egalitarian to reactively homophobic.
  72. Before You Know It
    There’s much sympathy but little tension in P J Raval’s new documentary.
  73. Bikes vs Cars
    Breezy, intelligent, diffuse but uncluttered, Fredrik Gertten’s documentary Bikes vs Cars could be called a tale of congestion-plagued cities.
  74. Never Say Never Again
    As directed by Irvin Kershner, Never Say Never Again has noticeably more humor and character than the Bond films usually provide. It has a marvelous villain in Largo.
  75. Hondros
    If the movie doesn’t go more than skin deep in interrogating questions about interventions both military and journalistic into the Middle East, it does succeed in opening up Mr. Hondros’s contradiction-filled world.
  76. 14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible
    In widening its aperture — from the ascents to visits to Purja’s childhood home as well as brief dives into Nepal’s history — “14 Peaks” expands a genre often focused on the feats of individuals to celebrate lessons about vast dreams and communal bonds.
  77. Never Look Away
    Never Look Away bristles with half-formed thoughts and almost-heady insights, and hums with an ambition that is exasperating and exhilarating in equal measure.
  78. Jurassic Park
    It becomes less crisp on screen than it was on the page, with much of the enjoyable jargon either mumbled confusingly or otherwise thrown away.
  79. Neighbors
    Neighbors is not a great film and does not really aspire to be. It is more a status report on mainstream American movie comedy, operating in a sweet spot between the friendly and the nasty, and not straining to be daring, obnoxious or even especially original. It knows how to have fun. How very grown-up.
  80. War Dance
    War/Dance, in spite of its slickness, is an honorable, sometimes inspiring exploration of the primal healing power of music and dance in an African tribal culture.
  81. Jude
    With Christopher Eccleston as Jude and Kate Winslet of ''Sense and Sensibility'' as his great love, Sue Bridehead, and with convincing evocations of 19th-century England from locations in Edinburgh and the north of England, Jude remains a handsome if gravely flawed film.
  82. Top Secret!
    Top Secret! comes nowhere near ''Airplane!'' but in its own cheerful, low-pressure way, it's about as amiable an entertainment as you will find this summer.
  83. Noah
    Mr. Aronofsky’s earnest, uneven, intermittently powerful film, is both a psychological case study and a parable of hubris and humility. At its best, its shares some its namesake’s ferocious conviction, and not a little of his madness.
  84. Crimes of the Future
    Despite the morbid laughs and the beatific smile that can light up Saul’s face like that of St. Teresa of Ávila, Crimes of the Future feels like a requiem. Cronenberg has always been a diagnostician of the human condition; here, he also feels a lot like a mortician.
  85. Small Town Crime
    The Nelmses don’t make enough of their more intriguing ideas (Mike’s familial history) and end up right where you expect they would, bang bang. But Mr. Hawkes keeps you tethered, whether he’s navigating the movie’s uneven tones or peeling down one of cinema’s lonely highways in a muscle car so lovingly shot it deserves a co-star credit.
  86. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
    The director Tom Gormican, who wrote the script with Kevin Etten, gets the job done, churning the nonsense. There are no surprises other than the movie is watchable and amusing, though it’s too bad Gormican didn’t let Cage and Pascal just go with the absurdist, shambolic flow.
  87. The Nightmare
    While "Room 237" sought evidence for its most outlandish conceits, The Nightmare declines to delve. As the testimonies grow repetitive, the strategy suggests willful ignorance.
  88. Black Widow
    Despite the intriguing opening sequence, which involves shootings, a jet and a family escape, Black Widow, directed by Cate Shortland, lags, unsure of how to proceed with the story.
  89. Whip It
    You might, nonetheless, want to see this movie, even -- or maybe especially -- if you have seen “Billy Elliot” or “Bend It Like Beckham.” Familiarity is not always a bad thing, and if the script, by Shauna Cross, piles sports movie and coming-of-age touchstones into a veritable cairn of clichés, the cast shows enough agility and conviction to make them seem almost fresh.
  90. In the Basement
    Ulrich Seidl’s raw portrayals of ordinary people have been criticized as unflattering and wallowing in abjection. But occasionally, as in his newest, In the Basement, the director can make you wonder whether the problem doesn’t lie with his films but with everyone else’s.
  91. The Most Dangerous Year
    While The Most Dangerous Year can be intensely personal — Knowlton speaks of the pain she felt watching visitors to a strawberry festival sign the petition for the anti-transgender ballot measure — it is primarily an informational documentary, not a film with artistic pretensions. But it makes its case effectively.
  92. The Other Story
    The surfeit of subplots muddles the message.
  93. Merchant Ivory
    Like many documentaries of this sort, “Merchant Ivory” opts to be a survey without a thesis — informative, even engaging, but lacking an argument that might drive the documentary itself forward.
  94. Dick Tracy
    Dick Tracy has just about everything required of an extravaganza: a smashing cast, some great Stephen Sondheim songs, all of the technical wizardry that money can buy (plus the knowledge of how and when to use it), and a screenplay (credited to Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr.) that observes the fine line separating true comedy from lesser camp.
  95. Z for Zachariah
    Maintaining a strict formal allegiance to reserve and restraint, [Mr. Zobel] shapes a dreamily elegant emotional ballet from glances and gestures and subtle shifts in power.
  96. Beat Street
    Designed for everybody who still hasn't had his or her fill of break dancing, or who doesn't yet understand that break dancing, rap singing and graffiti are legitimate expressions of the urban artistic impulse.
  97. Problemista
    Problemista, which Torres wrote, directed and stars in, reveals a new willingness to tell a relatable story with a riveting sketch of an honest-to-goodness person.
  98. Go Down Death
    Rather than distressed retro photography, or Guy Maddin mash-up fantasias, the movie’s often deadpan episodes feel like something out of one-act theater
  99. American Woman
    The performances are excellent, and Ingelsby’s dialogue largely rings true. But while the movie is indeed considered and conscientious, it’s also careful. It doesn’t risk going over any edges itself. And it shows more than a few instances of fussy and telegraphing Conspicuous Direction.
  100. You Can Live Forever
    You Can Live Forever sticks to a fairly common coming-of-age trajectory.
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