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 Dark Horse
    The movie partly resists the temptation to follow a predictable feel-good route to a fairy-tale ending. That said, it has enough conveniently timed little triumphs to send up warning signs.
  2. No Home Movie
    If you let it, No Home Movie invites you in first with its intimacy and then its deep feeling.
  3. 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.
  4. I Don't Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman
    Ms. Lambert’s film builds nicely, staying in tune with the ordinariness and intimacy explored in Ms. Akerman’s boldly rendered films.
  5. Everybody Wants Some!!
    Everybody Wants Some!! is more than just nostalgic. It’s downright utopian, a hormonal pastoral endowed with the innocent charm of a children’s book. There are plenty of movies about lust-addled youth, but it’s unusual to find one that feels truly wholesome.
  6. Baskin
    This proudly derivative genre exercise will not be to every taste (or stomach), but the director, Can Evrenol, shows a certain knack for tension and for framing viscera in wide screen, even if his cutting is sometimes too quick.
  7. Valley of Love
    This movie is finally only about Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu, and that’s enough.
  8. I Saw the Light
    Part of what defeats Mr. Abraham and may help explain why Mr. Hiddleston’s performance, however appealing, never gets below the surface, is that Williams is one of those artists whose eloquence is expressed through his work.
  9. April and the Extraordinary World
    Influences aside, the movie so teems with delightful detail and has such an exuberant sense of play that it feels entirely fresh.
  10. Get a Job
    At its sloppy heart, this is meant to be an affirming movie, but the filmmakers could have taken a cue from one line of dialogue: “Don’t just feel special. Be special.”
  11. Jane Wants a Boyfriend
    The diagrammatic script, by Jarret Kerr, has wit but could sometimes use more nuance. But there are tasty performances.
  12. Born to be Blue
    In Mr. Hawke’s extraordinary performance, this glamorous enigma becomes a credible, if pathetic character who lives for only two things: to play the trumpet and to shoot heroin.
  13. They're Watching
    The storytelling becomes muddled in the middle, and the suspense doesn’t build as well as it ought to, but the winking undercurrent keeps the film watchable.
  14. Fastball
    This appealing documentary makes you understand why aficionados regard baseball as a form of poetry.
  15. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2
    The comedy is forced, the drama nonexistent and the actors melt into a yapping clan that seems to go everywhere en masse — a gesticulating blob of upraised shoulders and upturned palms.
  16. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
    It is about as diverting as having a porcelain sink broken over your head.
  17. Thank You for Playing
    If nothing else, it’s evidence that the digital age has opened up new ways to work through grief.
  18. The Birth of Saké
    Mr. Shirai nicely shuffles in the back stories of several workers, and his shots of sky, sea and early morning landscapes could fit amid Hokusai woodcuts.
  19. Everything Is Copy
    Digging into the psychological space between her wildly public life and intensely private death, Everything Is Copy is a pickle slathered in whipped cream. Just like its subject.
  20. Take Me to the River
    Mr. Sobel’s film skates past any persuasive sense of motivation.
  21. Sweet Bean
    The movie, beautifully shot and acted, earns its ultimate sense of hope by confronting real heartbreak head-on, and with compassion.
  22. A Space Program
    As a tribute to NASA, A Space Program is rich in the core elements that have always propelled humanity’s flights of fancy: imagination and the right tools.
  23. The Preppie Connection
    This film fails even to evoke the ’80s in costumes, soundtrack or other atmospherics.
  24. Ktown Cowboys
    The film doesn’t have the focus, pacing or plotting of the best of such bromance tales.
  25. Krisha
    When Krisha stands in the kitchen, wild-eyed amid all these human sights and sounds, you see a woman overwhelmed by life itself, as well as a movie that is an expressionistic tour de force.
  26. The Confirmation
    The pleasures are modest but rewarding in Bob Nelson’s character study The Confirmation.
  27. The Brainwashing of My Dad
    Feels as if it’s arriving late to its discoveries and, given the current political climate, as if it’s only scratching the surface.
  28. The Clan
    The cleverest and most troubling aspect of the film is its empathy.
  29. The Program
    The Program, much to its detriment, concentrates almost exclusively on the history of the doping effort.
  30. My Golden Days
    My Golden Days is a memory movie, a story told through a glass darkly.
  31. The Bronze
    Ms. Rauch (who wrote the film with her husband, Winston Rauch) nails the portrayal admirably under Bryan Buckley’s direction. But that doesn’t mean Hope is anyone you want to spend almost two hours with.
  32. Pee-wee's Big Holiday
    Like the Muppets and the Simpsons, Pee-wee Herman seems not to age. But in his new Netflix movie, Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, he does take things down a notch; he’s less frenetic and more reactive.
  33. Midnight Special
    The charm and audacity of this film lie in the way it blends the commonplace and the bizarre.
  34. The Divergent Series: Allegiant
    A story that kicked off two years ago at a reasonable gallop has now slowed to barely a limp.
  35. Miracles from Heaven
    Until it delivers an eye-rolling scene near the end, Miracles From Heaven is an unexpectedly effective tear-jerker. More surprising still, that late diversion doesn’t negate much of the movie’s early sincerity.
  36. Fireworks Wednesday (2006)
    As with Mr. Farhadi’s other films, every detail of speech and body language resonates.
  37. The Young Messiah
    For all the healing here — the revived include a bird, an ailing uncle and a blind man — The Young Messiah performs no miracles.
  38. The Perfect Match
    The scenarios and their attendant psychologies are utterly conventional, but the characters and cast are appealing in equal measure.
  39. Rise of the Legend
    Mr. Peng has charisma, though his moves are less convincing than those of an earlier Fei.... But “Legend” does offer the hefty authority of Mr. Hung, who at 64 can still — almost — hit, kick and do wire work with the best of them.
  40. Remember
    Christopher Plummer puts on a master class in acting, and his director, Atom Egoyan, delivers one in audience manipulation in Remember.
  41. Hyena Road
    Refreshingly free of jingoism, that detachment unfortunately winds up working against the movie, which doesn’t engage emotionally.
  42. Creative Control
    Concocted with heaps of style but only a smattering of substance, Benjamin Dickinson’s sophomore feature, Creative Control, is as brittle and unwelcoming as its characters’ surroundings.
  43. Marguerite
    Marguerite overstays its welcome by at least 20 minutes. What redeems it is Ms. Frot’s subtle, deeply compassionate portrayal of a rich, lonely woman clutching at an impossible dream until reality intrudes.
  44. Me Him Her
    Mr. Landis’s sensibility, which combines sitcom jokiness with mumblecore sentimentality, tends to be more grating than amusing in Me Him Her, though scattered moments will make you laugh.
  45. About Scout
    About Scout is another entry in the “charming road movie” genre, one that banks a little too heavily on charm and not enough on story.
  46. Boom Bust Boom
    A remarkably enjoyable, and sometimes very funny, documentary about a frightening topic.
  47. Lolo
    Many little touches in the film reflect the offbeat hand of Ms. Delpy. But she sells herself short by not giving the mother-son conflict a bit of a sharper edge beyond Lolo’s awfulness.
  48. The Brothers Grimsby
    Mr. Cohen just seems off his game in “Grimsby,” and it may be that the movie’s high concept proved too constricting for someone who has done some of his best work (as in the “Borat” film) with a looser, more episodic format.
  49. 10 Cloverfield Lane
    Sneakily tweaking our fears of terrorism, 10 Cloverfield Lane, though no more than a kissing cousin to its namesake, is smartly chilling and finally spectacular.
  50. Eye in the Sky
    A grim, suspenseful farce in which unpredictable human behavior repeatedly threatens an operation of astounding technological sophistication.
  51. Hello, My Name Is Doris
    Indirection can be a beautiful tool in comedy and so it is in “Hello, My Name Is Doris,” which uses this funny, outwardly ridiculous character to tell a simple story about a love that rarely speaks its name, including in movies: that of an older woman for a much younger man.
  52. City of Gold
    City of Gold transcends its modest methods, largely because it connects Mr. Gold’s appealing personality with a passionate argument about the civic culture of Los Angeles and the place of food within it.
  53. Here Come the Videofreex
    A concise and informative documentary.
  54. White Lies
    Quiet, graceful, stately and infused with slow tension, Dana Rotberg’s White Lies unfolds with inexorable weight.
  55. Road Games
    The cast doesn’t quite succeed in keeping the suspense fresh throughout the story’s left turns.
  56. They Will Have to Kill Us First
    Johanna Schwartz’s miraculously hopeful documentary, They Will Have to Kill Us First: Malian Music in Exile, delivers a vibrant testimony of resilience under oppression.
  57. The Boy and the Beast
    Mr. Hosoda is skilled with fight scenes, and his settings — the pastel-hued Jutengai and the drab Shibuya, evoked at times with surveillance-camera perspectives and crowd-paranoia angles — are impressive. But the characterizations and conflicts here are strictly generic
  58. Cemetery of Splendor
    The mood Mr. Weerasethakul conjures is all the more extraordinary when you consider that the movie’s premise, in the hands of almost any other director, would be used to build some kind of horror movie.
  59. Colliding Dreams
    A swift primer that favors breadth over depth, the movie saves some hopeful notes for the end.
  60. Trapped
    Trapped is not a balanced analysis of the abortion debate; it makes its sympathies clear. But it is a powerful and persuasive rendering of a corner of women’s health care under siege.
  61. The Wave
    The filmmakers (the script is by John Kare Raake and Harald Rosenlow Eeg) cook up the sort of unpleasantness that turns the better disaster pictures, like this one, into nail-biters.
  62. Ava's Possessions
    Though at times pleasingly quirky, the story is too slackly written and insipidly photographed to entertain.
  63. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
    As written by the TV veteran Robert Carlock, Kim’s rise-and-fade arc is sympathetically rendered, with humor and the urgency of an underhand pitch.
  64. London Has Fallen
    Will this hard-luck president again defy death while his stoic sidekick vanquishes the nasty, uncivilized terrorists? It’s hard to care when a movie is this formulaic and moronic.
  65. Knight of Cups
    In Knight of Cups, as in “To the Wonder,” the deployment of beauty strikes me as more evasive than evocative.
  66. Emelie
    Working from Richard Raymond Harry Herbeck’s script, Mr. Thelin plays with genre clichés without upending them, and the results are more creepy than scary.
  67. Zootopia
    Funny, smart, thought-provoking — and musical, too.
  68. 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.
  69. Virus of Fear
    Ventura Pons’s stagy drama Virus of Fear tries to walk a thin line about its volatile subject — child sexual abuse — as it weighs a man’s possible innocence against a mob’s rage. But its attempts at ambiguity work against it.
  70. Marguerite & Julien
    The excruciating experience of Marguerite & Julien need only be endured by viewers with an obsessive interest in the least constructive aesthetic currents in contemporary French cinema.
  71. Paul Verhoeven's Tricked
    As ever, the paradox of Mr. Verhoeven’s style is that it seems to wallow in tastelessness and transgression even as he remains one of the most classical movie craftsmen.
  72. A Strange Course of Events
    Mr. Nadjari, who wrote the screenplay with Geoffroy Grison, may have been intending a minimalist character study, but even so, he has abdicated his responsibility: Too much of this family drama is left to the audience to fill in.
  73. Like for Likes
    Relationships unfold with a bright, glossy and antiseptic sentimentality in Park Hyun-gene’s Like for Likes, which brings abundant social media usage to shopworn rom-com contrivances.
  74. The Last Man on the Moon
    You already know the history told in The Last Man on the Moon, but this story just never grows old.
  75. King Georges
    King Georges feels stretched into feature length, but its ending neatly portrays a man with a fierce personal code who seems to have accepted change.
  76. Jack of the Red Hearts
    Jack of the Red Hearts is so good-hearted it doesn’t want to leave audiences without a glimmer a hope.
  77. Backtrack
    The film is part psychological thriller, part horror movie, and the horror elements deliver some solid frights. Mr. Brody isn’t asked to stretch much, but he does his usual thing adroitly.
  78. Eddie the Eagle
    This film doesn’t seem to trust the inherent likability of his story. The director, Dexter Fletcher, and the writers, Sean Macaulay and Simon Kelton, load it up with tropes that actually make it less endearing.
  79. Gods of Egypt
    If Gods of Egypt were any worse, it might be a masterpiece.
  80. Triple 9
    Mr. Hillcoat wears his nihilism easily and persuasively (his films include “The Road”), so his weird bids at mordant comedy feel as forced as they are ill-considered.
  81. The Mermaid
    While second-guessing the marketing strategies of movie conglomerates is happily not the concern of this reviewer, it does seem a shame that this exhilarating, bizarre, good-hearted, blatantly obvious sci-fi-fantasy-slapstick eco-fable isn’t getting wider fanfare.
  82. Forsaken
    A starry father-son pairing is largely squandered in Forsaken, an old-school western that is a little too old school for its own good.
  83. Rolling Papers
    It’s full of discussion points but lets them go by undiscussed.
  84. We Are Twisted F***ing Sister!
    The movie tells an incomplete version of the band’s story...but provides a comprehensive and sometimes harrowing portrayal of the grind a working bar band in the 1970s had to endure to get by.
  85. The Witch
    With a gentle rap-rapping, Mr. Eggers intensifies the shivers with art-film moves, genre shocks and an excellent cast that includes a progressively rowdy menagerie.
  86. Diamond Tongues
    The prickly tone is a difficult balancing act, and Diamond Tongues may settle for being a softer-hearted film than its most cynical scenes portend. But it has a palpable affection for Toronto’s cultural scene and for Ms. Goldstein.
  87. Risen
    If you drink every time you’re reminded of Monty Python’s 1979 Judean jaunt, “Life of Brian,” you might just make it through to the end.
  88. Snowtime!
    It is aimed at younger children and includes pretty songs, but it doesn’t soft-pedal anything. Its low-key story is about friendship, but it’s also about loss, which should leave pint-size viewers with plenty to think about.
  89. Embrace of the Serpent
    Viewed largely through the aggrieved eyes of a shaman whose tribe is on the verge of extinction at the hands of Colombian rubber barons in the 19th and 20th centuries, Embrace of the Serpent, a fantastical mixture of myth and historical reality, shatters lingering illusions of first-world culture as more advanced than any other, except technologically.
  90. Race
    If Race is a standard inspirational biopic that exalts the legend of an athletic hero, at least it doesn’t soft-pedal the racism that Owens encountered at every turn.
  91. Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong
    The two stars are attractive, and Emily Ting, who wrote and directed, makes the city look great, but during their endless strolling Ruby and Josh never get much beyond shallow banter.
  92. Bad Hurt
    Throughout, the filmmakers live up to the movie’s title. But as the story comes to a close, they opt to wrap it in comforting cliché, and they turn a miserable but credible viewing experience into a confounding one.
  93. Fitoor
    Based, sometimes loosely, sometimes carelessly, sometimes pointlessly, on “Great Expectations,” the Hindi movie Fitoor is at all times more Bollywood than Dickens.
  94. Cabin Fever
    Who benefits from the existence of this film? Certainly not the largely bland ensemble of post-adolescent actors cast as the leads, who here can scarcely be called characters. Possibly the day players essaying those stock grotesques, who retain the air of being hungry for work.
  95. Touched With Fire
    Touched With Fire is an actor’s field day, and both Mr. Kirby and Ms. Holmes boldly meet the challenge of playing bright, high-strung artists struggling with depression.
  96. Glassland
    There’s much in the movie to admire until it runs headlong into a stone wall.
  97. Mountains May Depart
    Mr. Jia’s approach means that you have to do a certain amount of interpretive work, though mostly you just have to pay attention and be a little patient. If you do, you will notice that Mountains May Depart is a movie of threes: its main characters, moments in time, narrative sections, historical symbols and even aspect ratio come in triplicate.
  98. A War
    The conclusion would be chilling if it weren’t so reserved. For Denmark, the film, an Oscar nominee in the foreign-language category, might seem quietly radical, but Mr. Lindholm errs too far on the side of quiet.
  99. How to Be Single
    This reheated “Sex and the City” adventure flops, even with Leslie Mann and Rebel Wilson hard at work being funny.
  100. Zoolander 2
    Zoolander 2 has enough plots for several movies. They are so jammed together that they more or less cancel each other out.
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