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. Eureka
    Ultimately, the film feels a bit misshapen.
  2. Praying with Lior
    Patiently and delicately, Ms. Trachtman teases out the tricky dynamics of a family dealing with a disabled child.
  3. Dragonslayer
    Dragonslayer has pacing problems, and its special effects tend to be more overpowering than helpful. But it also has a sweetness and conviction that amount to a kind of magic.
  4. The Housemaid
    An admiring, clever remake of Kim Ki-young's legendary film of the same title from 1960, this version, directed by Im Sang-soo, is at once more explicit than the original and less kinky.
  5. The President's Last Bang
    Tight, sober and strangely comical.
  6. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
    Highlighting the wacky while playing down the distasteful, Marie Losier's playful profile of the English musician and artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and his second wife, Lady Jaye, takes a lighthearted look at the things they did for love.
  7. The Age of Consequences
    The information here is compelling and frightening, but the movie is ham-handed.
  8. Vazante
    By the end, it’s hard not to wish that Ms. Thomas had traded a bit of her art-film drift for something more direct.
  9. Primer
    At a certain point, Mr. Carruth's fondness for complexity and indirection crosses the line between ambiguity and opacity, but I hasten to add that my bafflement is colored by admiration.
  10. The Girl on the Train
    The film can be described as a character study or a fictionalized slice of terribly real life. Mostly, though, it is an inquiry into the mysteries of other people.
  11. Four Lions
    A shockingly hilarious, stiletto-sharp satire directed by Chris Morris and written by a squad of British wits.
  12. Rustin
    Every so often an actor so dominates a movie that its success largely hinges on his every word and gesture. That’s the case with Colman Domingo’s galvanic title performance in Rustin.
  13. The Falcon and the Snowman
    A very curious though effective entertainment, a scathing social satire in the form of an outrageously clumsy spy story told with a completely straight face.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Opera
    Inspired by Argento’s own frustrations with directing a production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth, Opera replaces the supernatural with the sexual, leaving room for a conversation about the link between sexual and artistic impotence. [25 Oct 2018]
    • The New York Times
  15. Into Eternity
    There is something apocalyptically awful about Onkalo, to be sure, but the impulse behind it is noble, and the installation itself has an undeniable grandeur.
  16. The Good Thief
    The ultimate caper, a work of brazen ebullience.
  17. The Pleasures of Being Out of Step
    This succinct documentary sticks smoothly to its beat.
  18. I Was at Home, But
    In I Was at Home, but…, the German director Angela Schanelec seems to have taken her ideas and stashed them deep in a private vault. Every so often, though, she cracks open this movie — with a line, an image, a snatch of a song — offering you fugitive glimpses of an intensely personal world.
  19. 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.
  20. Monsters and Men
    Turning black-white conflict into a laudably complex wash of gray, Mr. Green (inspired in part by a conversation he had with a police officer about the 2014 death of Eric Garner) favors reason over outrage. The political heat rises but the movie stays cool, its smooth, smart climax in keeping with its levelheaded tone.
  21. Gladiator
    Grandiose and silly.
  22. S#x Acts
    The movie’s observations of the wolf pack mentality of privileged teenage boys who view every conquest as proof of their prowess is casually devastating.
  23. Bluebird
    On one level, Bluebird is a bitter slice of life about hardy, stoic New Englanders battling the elements and a crumbling regional economy. On another, it’s a poetic meditation on the human struggle to make sense of a cruel and indifferent universe.
  24. The Divine Order
    The Divine Order effectively illustrates how peer pressure can influence the political process. Collective silence, whether it’s from women unwilling to publicly press for their rights or men afraid to voice agreement with their wives for fear of looking weak around co-workers, proves more of an obstacle than any opponent. That message gives Ms. Volpe’s lark a timely edge.
  25. Moon
    The film's ideas are interesting, but don't feel entirely worked out, and Mr. Rockwell's intriguingly strange performance (or performances) is left suspended, without the context that would give Sam's plight its full emotional and philosophical impact. The smallness of this movie is decidedly a virtue, but also, in the end, something of a limitation.
  26. The Sentinel
    Although the thriller aspect of "La Sentinelle" doesn't quite add up, the film is still an absorbing, psychologically resonant portrait of French student life. As directed by Desplechin, the attractive young cast hardly seems to be acting.
  27. 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.
  28. Band Aid
    Both leads are excellent together, and the movie is good at showing how Anna and Ben push each other’s buttons.
  29. The Captain
    The Captain, Robert Schwentke’s harrowing World War II psychodrama, isn’t what you would call enjoyable, exactly. More accurately, it compels our attention with a remorseless, gripping single-mindedness, presenting Naziism as a communicable disease that smothers conscience, paralyzes resistance and extinguishes all shreds of humanity.
  30. Scout's Honor: The Secret Files of the Boy Scouts of America
    Knappenberger does, thankfully, make space for survivors to share their own accounts, and their vulnerability lends authority to an otherwise anonymous film.
  31. Forgetting Sarah Marshall
    Does not entirely play by the established conventions of its genre. Its willingness to explore states of feeling and modes of behavior that tamer romantic comedies never go near is decidedly a virtue, though this same sense of daring and candor also exposes its limitations.
  32. Bottle Rocket
    A mildly facetious tone limits Anderson's film to the lightweight, but the collective enthusiasm behind this debut effort still comes through. What's best about Bottle Rocket is not the laid-back pranks that inflate its story to feature length but the offbeat elan with which that story is told.
  33. Home
    Home is, as with so many family stories, also something of a disaster movie: the walls shudder and crack, and eventually so do the people inside them.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Night They Raided Minsky's
    Unlike "Funny Girl," the screenplay is rich, not in stereotypes (mothers, accents), but in anecdotes, and there is a wonderful confrontation between Jason Robards, as a slick, sleazy burlesque entertainer, and the owner of a restaurant, "a man from principle," over an order of bagels, which are thrown, one by one, to the floor, with rage and elegance.
  35. American Promise
    Race is raised as a possible reason for Idris’s and Seun’s problems, and then other potential determinants (a learning disorder, illness) are introduced. But the filmmakers don’t engage with these life events and issues: They just line them up as if their significance were transparent.
  36. Dead Man's Wire
    When Dead Man’s Wire ends with footage of the real Kiritsis and Hall, it is hard not to conclude that a much crazier, livelier film could have been made.
  37. The Wild One
    Although the reality of it goes soft and then collapses at the end, it is a tough and engrossing motion picture, weird and cruel, while it stays on the beam.
  38. Concrete Cowboy
    The movie’s convincing accretion of detail and its affectionate fictionalization of an actual subculture are disarming.
  39. Avatar: The Way of Water
    I’m curious, and inclined — as I was in 2009 — to give this grand, muddled project the benefit of the doubt. Cameron’s ambitions are as sincere as they are self-contradictory. He wants to conquer the world in the name of the underdog, to celebrate nature by means of the most extravagant artifice, and to make everything new feel old again.
  40. Snow Angels
    For a film full of murder, jealousy and fatalism, Snow Angels feels curiously small and anecdotal, and its impact diminishes as it nears its terrible conclusion.
  41. Summer of Sam
    This film, like the dazzling but many-tentacled "He Got Game" before it, makes up in fury much of what it lacks in form.
  42. Harmony and Me
    Despite the film’s sketchy aesthetic and barely animate lead, its tone is carefully contrived: I’ll wager no one in your circle is as dryly funny or spontaneously surreal as Harmony’s nonsupport group.
  43. The New Rijksmuseum
    The film dwells on the logistical and bureaucratic details of the process, and if it does not exactly write a fresh chapter in the history of art, it stands as an exemplary study in the sociology of art administration.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Cactus Flower
    The picture moves around comfortably in nice color, against some authentic Manhattan exteriors. But it is primarily the verve and skill of the performances, the pungent air of sexual chemistry and the peppery good humor that make the movie so diverting.
  45. Lord of the Flies
    A curiously flat and fragmentary visualization of the original.
  46. Kid 90
    If the unremarkableness of the moments captured in Moon Frye’s footage is refreshing, it also makes for a somewhat insipid film.
  47. The Blackening
    The Blackening comes with a horror movie’s requisite skittish and stalking camerawork, its creaks and breath-holding hushes, its gore and payback. But it is the friends’ flee, fight, freeze — or throw under the bus — banter that makes the film provocative fun.
  48. Light of My Life
    It’s not original, but it is enlivened by some artful touches and two excellent performances.
  49. Naked Lunch
    For the most part this is a coolly riveting film and even a darkly entertaining one, at least for audiences with steel nerves, a predisposition toward Mr. Burroughs and a willingness to meet Mr. Cronenberg halfway.
  50. Dig Two Graves
    Hunter Adams’s Dig Two Graves is that rare chiller conjuring eeriness and dread without defaulting to abundant gore or flagrant nudity.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Super Fly
    The film's gut pleasures are real, and there are a lot of them. But, they always connect with one another in a world so precisely, cruelly, excitingly balanced that there is no movement without countermovement, no pressure without a greater pressure in return.
  52. The Flamingo Kid
    Even if The Flamingo Kid comes out of sit-com country, the character and the performance effortlessly rise above their origins.
  53. Demon Slayer -Kimetsu no Yaiba- The Movie: Infinity Castle
    It could take a lifetime, or at least the sustained attention of an aficionado, to untangle all the lore. But the themes — solidarity and self-interest, allegiance and betrayal, love and loathing — are easy to follow. For the casual fan, the chief reason to seek out “Infinity Castle” is for its visuals, which position passionately emotive characters over impressionistic backdrops.
  54. Other People
    Other People tries to lighten its heavy load with mixed results.
  55. Thirteen Days
    Kevin Costner is suitably flinty in 13 Days, a competent, by-the-numbers recreation of the events surrounding the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
  56. Ha-Chaverim Shel Yana
    No more than a sentimental little comedy.
  57. Ghosts of the Abyss
    Whether he's working in nonfiction or science fiction, Mr. Cameron remains an artist of great instinctive power. In Ghosts of the Abyss, he uses every means of probing that modern science has put at his disposal -- electronic, mechanical, sonic -- only to find that the tragic reality of the Titanic, its myths and its meanings, remain tantalizingly beyond his reach.
  58. Almost Peaceful
    It takes talent to make audiences care about ordinary people doing ordinary things, just as it takes guts to end a movie with something as corny as the sounds of children playing.
  59. Interiors
    Though the movie looks beautiful, the elegant style occasionally works against it, showing it up. This happens in a striking close-up of Miss Keaton, sitting alone on a photogenically windswept ocean beach as she is supposed to be thinking sensitive poet-type thoughts. Yet the image is empty. It's not the actress. It's not the director, whose close-ups of Miss Keaton in Annie Hall burst with love, pride and affection.The movie that contains the image fails to invest it with any associations whatsoever.
  60. Kung Fu Panda 2
    Accomplishes the depressingly familiar mathematical trick of being both more and less than its predecessor.
  61. Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?
    Mr. Siegel is no Cassandra: retaining the waggish tone of his previous documentary, "The Real Dirt on Farmer John" (released in 2007), he balances the doom-talking heads with cute animation and characters like Yvon Achard, a French "bee historian" who caresses the swarm with his elaborately styled facial hair.
  62. Robot and Frank
    Frank Langella plays so many variations on cute and crotchety and with such suppleness - he's by turns a charming codger, a silver fox and a wise graybeard - that his performance comes close to a saving grace.
  63. Slither
    While Slither sometimes feels like a monster-mash, what makes it work is how nimbly it slaloms from yucks to yuks, slip-sliding from horror to comedy and back again on its gore-slicked foundation.
  64. At Close Range
    At Close Range is never boring. There's something bold about the film's wealth of imagery, but it also so overstates the material of the screenplay that it eventually annihilates both it and the story, which might possibly have been moving and terrifying. This just looks like fancy movie making.
  65. Manny & Lo
    It's the kind of story that leaves viewers with a warm glow.
  66. Vox Lux
    Vox Lux is an audacious story about a survivor who becomes a star, and a deeply satisfying, narratively ambitious jolt of a movie.
  67. Children of Invention
    A modestly scaled, quietly effective independent movie about a struggling single mother and her two children.
  68. Future Weather
    [A] tiny, beautifully acted movie.
  69. In Bruges
    Mr. Gleeson, Mr. Farrell and especially the late-arriving and welcome Mr. Fiennes have great fun rummaging around inside Mr. McDonagh’s modest bag of tricks.
  70. That's Entertainment, Part II
    Part 2 has been compiled with the kind of intelligence and affection that allow us to get some purchase on the Hollywood history made by M-G-M without spending our whole lives at the job.
  71. Ned Rifle
    Even if this minor coda plays to an increasingly closed circle of admirers, it gives the trilogy a pleasing, moving symmetry.
  72. Brigsby Bear
    Mr. Mooney, currently cutting it up on “Saturday Night Live,” manages the twists and tonal fluctuations in Brigsby Bear beautifully.
  73. Running on Empty
    Running on Empty works best when it plays upon emotions generated by the Popes' unique predicament, something that it often does rather shamelessly. It helps that Sidney Lumet has directed the film in a crisp, handsome style that diminishes the maudlin or unlikely aspects of its story, even when they threaten to intrude.
  74. The Vessel
    The Vessel is a modest, but not maudlin, parable of hope about mustering the strength to vigorously plunge again into life’s uncertainties after a devastating loss.
  75. Phantom of the Paradise
    Phantom of the Paradise is an elaborate disaster, full of the kind of facetious humor you might find on bumper stickers and cocktail coasters.
  76. Over the Edge
    A lot of Over the Edge is awkwardly acted and motivated, but it is staged with such vivid efficiency and concern that, as you watch it, you are frequently caught halfway between a giggle and a gasp.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Secret Agent
    It is a defect of the screen narrative that all the spies seem to be continually engaged in melodramatic shadow boxing and that the authors, who couldn't have been Mr. Maugham, never really make out a case for the necessity of spying and never convince you that there is anything in Geneva worth spying on. But there are scattered high-lights.
  78. Been Rich All My Life
    An admiring portrait of the Silver Belles, a troupe of veteran Harlem tap dancers between the ages of 84 and 96, is a valuable historical document and a useful how-to movie about making the most of old age.
  79. Nocturnal Animals
    There’s much to admire in Nocturnal Animals, including Mr. Ford’s ambition, but too often it feels like the work of an observant student.
  80. Russian Dolls
    The shallowness of this idealized depiction of European cultural homogeneity is largely camouflaged by the comfortable fit of its director's sensibility with the actors' likable, lived-in performances. An apt alternative title for Russian Dolls might be "Lovers Without Borders."
  81. Night Call
    The film may be sticking to a familiar template, in which a regular Joe gets sucked into an underworld, but Blanchard’s snappy direction and the great mileage he gets out of the city’s nooks and crannies bumps it up the crime-action totem pole.
  82. Framing John DeLorean
    Framing John DeLorean doesn’t fully answer its own central question, and leaves several others hanging as well. As frustrating as this can be in hindsight, the movie, while it’s playing, is unfailingly engrossing.
  83. Bolt
    What keeps Bolt fresh is an unaffected exuberance, a genuine sense of fun, that is expressed above all through obsessive attention to craft.
  84. In Search of Mozart
    An adamantly linear, myth-busting stride through a prodigiously talented life.
  85. The Well Digger's Daughter
    There are times in The Well-Digger's Daughter, a once-upon-a-time French film about love, family and the seductive beauty of the Provençal countryside, when the story's sweetness nearly makes your teeth ache.
  86. Elevate
    Mr. Fall, a former scout for the Dallas Mavericks, founded the Seeds Academy to nurture his countrymen. His conviction, level gaze and firm eloquence instill pride, drive and determination in his players. Mr. Fall, a coach on the court and in life, is the real champion here.
  87. Bananas
    Any movie that attempts to mix together love, Cuban revolution, the C.I.A., Jewish mothers, J. Edgar Hoover and a few other odds and ends (including a sequence in which someone orders 1,000 grilled cheese sandwiches) is bound to be a little weird—and most welcome.
  88. Looking for a Lady with Fangs and a Moustache
    At least for the uninitiated, the drift of the filmmaking seemed to fall short of the transcendence envisioned by its story.
  89. T2 Trainspotting
    Playing with memory — the characters’ and our own — allows Mr. Boyle and his cinematographer, Anthony Dod Mantle, to conjure some of the movie’s loveliest, most melancholy images.
  90. This Is the End
    The film, at its phoned-in worst and also at its riotous best, has a terminal feeling. It suggests that a comic subgenre based on the immaturity, sexual panic and self-mocking tendencies of men who should be old enough to know better has reached its expiration date.
  91. My Old School
    Its fascination with Brandon becomes a kind of credulity, a willingness to accept uncritically the mystifications of a proven liar.
  92. The Door in the Floor
    Surely the best movie yet made from Mr. Irving's fiction. It may even belong in the rarefied company of movies that are better than the books on which they are based.
  93. Sound of My Voice
    A smart, effectively unsettling movie about the need to believe and the hard, cruel arts of persuasion.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Blood of a Poet
    While the various imaginery episodes shown on the screen, to the accompaniment of microphone comment by M. Cocteau himself, reinforced by English titles for those unfamiliar with French, have a certain fascination, especially for persons interested in film technique, they are hardly calculated to set the Hudson River on fire.
  95. It Came from Kuchar
    A valuable and intelligent introduction and tribute to their anarchic, uncompromising and absolutely peculiar genius.
  96. Fatal Attraction
    Mr. Lyne takes a brilliantly manipulative approach to what might have been a humdrum subject and shapes a soap opera of exceptional power.
  97. Steel City
    Mostly Mr. Jun's script is sharp, and Laurie Metcalf, James McDaniel, America Ferrera and Raymond J. Barry in supporting roles help keep the tale mesmerizing, in a small-scale sort of way.
  98. Mondovino
    Smart, sincere and sloppy film.
  99. Fellini: I'm a Born Liar
    Mr. Pettigrew's affection for Fellini and his films animates this documentary and limits its appeal.
  100. Decasia
    Nothing more -- and nothing less -- than a collage of decaying, decomposing nitrate film stock...The unexpected thing is that its dying, in this shower of black-and-white psychedelia, is quite beautiful.
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