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. Abendland
    It's impossible to know from the movie whether Mr. Geyrhalter believes this paradise needs protecting or whether something in his words - irony, fury, laughter - was lost in translation.
  2. Celeste and Jesse Forever
    While Celeste and Jesse is decidedly conventional in most respects, it's pretty swell as an exploration of a relationship between a man and a woman that's no longer predicated by mutual desire.
  3. Mosquita y Mari
    Ms. Pineda and Ms. Troncoso give wonderfully natural performances in which they convey the impulsiveness and insecurity of adolescence. You are uncomfortably reminded of what it feels like to be 15.
  4. Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film
    This friendly, colorful documentary from Pip Chodorov is not the last word on all the shapes, sizes and languages of experimental film, but rather an introduction brightened by a companionable enthusiasm and an apposite sense of community.
  5. Nobody Walks
    It would be tempting to dismiss Nobody Walks as a trivial erotic divertissement, even more so because it doesn't apply the kind of symbolic gloss found in a '60s film of serial seduction, like Pasolini's "Teorema." Banal as its situation may be, it picks at every scab you may have left over from wounds suffered during the mating games of your youth.
  6. The Green Wave
    By turns frustrating and moving, Ali Samadi Ahadi's documentary The Green Wave, about the Green Revolution in Iran, gets a jolt from footage shot by the people for the people on the people's cellphones.
  7. The Matchmaker
    The efficient approach and tendency toward broad strokes prevent the movie from taking a deep hold, and Mr. Shafir is a hesitant young actor to have at the center. But, like the title character, Mr. Nesher demonstrates a practical intelligence for making basic connections.
  8. Painted Skin: The Resurrection
    That said, this deliciously nutty love story - sample dialogue: "Let me eat this heart, then we can pick azaleas together" - is blindingly gorgeous to look at and exceptionally well acted, at least by the women.
  9. 2 Guns
    Mr. Kormakur sets and keeps up a fast rather than frantic pace that never runs the movie off the rails even when the story nearly does.
  10. The Revenant
    A middling zombie movie elevated by clever writing and gooeylicious special effects, Kerry Prior's Revenant toys with big themes but settles for uneasy laughs.
  11. Teddy Bear
    Mr. Matthiesen has a way of consistently and gently upending expectations, sometimes with humor.
  12. Somewhere Between
    Somewhere Between presents an effortlessly moving but superficial profile of four bright Chinese girls and their adoptive American families.
  13. The Loneliest Planet
    It is gripping and haunting, but also coy and elusive.
  14. The First Time
    Sure, you've seen this story before, but this version has a freshness nonetheless.
  15. Café de Flore
    It must be said that Café de Flore is true to its hyper-romantic belief system. And unlike most movies in the "Touched by an Angel" school of storytelling, it doesn't descend into cheap sentimentality. It may be hokum, but it is sophisticated hokum.
  16. The Details
    Instead of turning soft and squishy, this examination of karma gets tougher as it goes along. Its refusal to settle into a cozy niche may be commercially disastrous, but I take it as a sign of integrity.
  17. A Royal Affair
    A Royal Affair suffers from the richness of the historical material - there is so much going on here - and also, perhaps, from a patriotic desire to treat it reverently. Unfortunately it never fully comes to life.
  18. West of Memphis
    The film is inspiring because it has a semi-happy ending attached to a love story.
  19. A Late Quartet
    It would be shortsighted to dismiss this deeply felt, musically savvy film, set in a refined cultural precinct of Manhattan, as sudsy melodrama.
  20. Minions
    The good news is that the minions are more (unconsciously, if perhaps also strategically) in touch with their anarchic side than the typical onesie-wearing crusader, which suits the directors Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda’s well-tuned sense of the absurd.
  21. Breathing
    As a collaboration Breathing owes much to the balanced compositions, lucid imagery and judicious use of color executed by Mr. Gschlacht, who brought a similarly clear gaze to morally fraught work by other Austrian directors (Götz Spielmann's "Revanche," Jessica Hausner's "Lourdes," Michael Glawogger's "Slumming").
  22. Ornette: Made in America (1985)
    Miss Clarke's methods tend to be as fanciful as Ornette Coleman's are rigorous and abstract, but the collaboration between film maker and subject has its own kind of harmony.
  23. The Ambassador
    Mr. Brugger's portrait of shameless, routine collusion between exploitative foreigners and dysfunctional dictatorships is depressing and undeniable. Unless, that is, The Ambassador is even more of a hoax than it seems to be. This strikes me as plausible, since somebody having this much fun in such proximity to horror may not be completely trustworthy.
  24. The Flying Swords of Dragon Gate
    Surprisingly old-fashioned. It seems to be having an argument with itself: the dazzling but often antiseptic immersiveness of the viewing experience is countered by storytelling suffused with nostalgia for a simpler, messier, livelier period in Chinese film.
  25. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
    A competently made, moderately diverting variation on a genre standard.
  26. Toys in the Attic
    The movie should be manna for anyone who likes animated fantasias without wisecracks, commercials and overwrought warbling about self-actualization, meaning that it's suitable for those who will grow up either to be the next Tim Burton or simply to enjoy his movies.
  27. Detropia
    In this visual caress of postindustrial blight, disintegration has never looked so gorgeous.
  28. Home
    A charming concoction with positive messages for younger children about conquering fears, understanding outsiders and knowing yourself.
  29. Penguins of Madagascar
    The decision to focus on the series’s comic relief has resulted in the loosest and perhaps funniest film of the brand.
  30. How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
    If you’ve spent any time with these characters, it’s hard not to get swept up in the saga, and it’s easy to be moved by the bond between Hiccup and Toothless, who is, in effect, a very loyal dog who can fly and harness the power of lightning bolts.
  31. Radio Unnameable
    The charm of Radio Unnameable is, finally, elegiac. It can make you wish - or, if you're lucky, remember - that you were a sleepless New Yorker in 1967, kept from loneliness by a gentle, soulful voice on the radio.
  32. They Call It Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain
    Robert H. Lieberman, a novelist, filmmaker and professor at Cornell University, took three years to shoot documentary footage surreptitiously during assignments for the United States Embassy and a nongovernment organization. The result is eye-opening and insightful.
  33. Fred Won't Move Out
    Except for a subplot about a missing cat that suggests that Fred may be considerably dottier than he appears, the movie gets almost everything right about the uncomfortable moment when grown children are forced to be their parents' parents.
  34. Three Stars
    The dishes dazzle in Lutz Hachmeister's documentary Three Stars, a cinematic helping of some of the world's finest restaurants - and of their chefs' opinions.
  35. 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.
  36. Tales of the Night
    The narratives - involving princesses, sorcerers, dragons, talking animals - are familiar. But Mr. Ocelot invigorates them with lyricism: silhouettes evoke shadow plays, and often brilliant palettes reflect the cultures presented.
  37. Harvest of Empire
    The filmmakers retain a touching faith that most Americans won't tolerate injustice when they know about it. This film is meant to teach them.
  38. The Iran Job
    This observant documentary avoids pedagogy; it's not always artful, but it has a relaxed, light touch that never topples into pretension.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Wake in Fright (1971)
    Since Outback is a film I mostly admire, I had better allow that it is not without flaws. But they are flaws—in plotting, in Kotcheff's penchant for using five camera positions at a time where one might do—that may be, not overlooked, but safely admitted in a work that really does move from its strengths rather than its weaknesses.
  40. Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Healthcare
    Advocating freedom from a system that "doesn't want you to die and doesn't want you to get well," this hard-hitting film leaves us finally more hopeful than despairing.
  41. The Prosecution of an American President
    There is no mistaking Mr. Bugliosi's conviction, nor the thoroughness of his research, which largely concerns the Bush administration's claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
  42. The Central Park Five
    Measured in tone and outraged in its argument, it is an emotionally stirring, at times crushingly depressing cinematic call to witness. It's also frustrating because while it re-examines the assault on the jogger and painstakingly walks you through what happened to the teenagers - from their arrest through their absolution - it fails to add anything substantively new.
  43. Edge of Tomorrow
    In Edge of Tomorrow, Mr. Liman brings Mr. Cruise’s smile out of semiretirement and also gives him the kind of physical challenges at which he so brilliantly excels.
  44. Jab Tak Hai Jaan
    Even though the film drags, the magic of Bollywood is that this story's muddle of twists only clarifies the urgency behind the undying desires of all concerned parties.
  45. We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists
    The film is most illuminating in showing how democratic practice can still find a new voice and innovative means with each generation. The fascinating efforts of Anonymous can be messy, but so are many freedoms when asserted so boldly.
  46. Bad 25
    Though at times a tad worshipful, the film's tone is ultimately more awed than hagiographic, its commenters too cleareyed and candid to back away from negative publicity or public disenchantment.
  47. Pusher (2012)
    There's an ugly, jittery beauty to Pusher, a very fine British redo of a 1996 Danish movie of the same title.
  48. Long Shot; The Kevin Laue Story
    Mr. Laue is an intriguing subject, smart, affable and with a dry wit.
  49. Bears
    Despite the bracing beauty of the wilderness, and the respite provided by cubs at play, the movie is primarily a sobering treatise on survival.
  50. Girl Walk: All Day
    The result is exhausting but undeniably exhilarating.
  51. North Sea Texas
    Pim's withdrawn demeanor and inability to verbalize his emotions - the character is basically one big ache - make it more challenging than it should be to immerse ourselves in his journey.
  52. Here I Learned to Love
    While the film ends abruptly, leaving you to wonder about the rest of the brothers’ lives, those tales can’t have matched the ordeals of their start.
  53. Closed Circuit
    The director, John Crowley, handles Steve Knight’s snaky script capably, introducing the characters, their backgrounds and the political stakes in bold strokes.
  54. Any Day Now
    An outraged, unblinking depiction of institutionalized homophobia three decades ago, when the prevailing court opinion in adoption cases was that exposing a child to a homosexual environment was harmful. Never mind that nobody else wants Marco.
  55. In Another Country
    What the point here might be is a bit more elusive. It may be simply to allow Ms. Huppert, one of the most adventurous actresses in movies, the opportunity to try something new. And that might be enough.
  56. Dangerous Liaisons (2012)
    Schadenfreude carries a delectable tang no matter the language, and as the history of Hollywood shows, stories about pretty people behaving badly remain reliably alluring.
  57. Generation P
    Delivers a brave, head-spinning commentary on the potency of advertising and the seduction of the soul.
  58. 16 Acres
    A documentary that features forthright interviews with major players and gives a good sense of the infighting and pettiness without getting bogged down in it.
  59. The King (2012)
    An admiring but restrained documentary about Darko Kralj, a Paralympic shot-putter from Croatia. The film is more about what it takes to overcome adversity and recommit to finding meaning in life, terrain that anyone with a disability has to negotiate, athlete or not.
  60. Beware of Mr. Baker
    Mr. Bulger, a former boxer and model before he turned to journalism and then filmmaking, does not let "Behind the Music" sensationalism overwhelm the music itself, which is Mr. Baker's great passion and the only reason anyone should take an interest in him.
  61. King Kelly
    The movie's other master stroke is the artfully unhinged lead performance of Louisa Krause as the despicable King Kelly, a character who would have been ready-made for Tuesday Weld.
  62. Drivers Wanted
    There's an authenticity to Drivers Wanted that seems so true and tough that it overwhelms any standard immigrants-up-from-their-bootstraps theme.
  63. Talaash
    It's very much a Hindi film, but updated and delivered with conviction and style.
  64. Only the Young
    If Mr. Tippet and Ms. Mims weren't such accomplished visual stylists, you might even think that the teenagers shot the documentary themselves, which explains both its appeal and its limitations.
  65. Heleno
    Though powerfully acted and dazzlingly shot (by Walter Carvalho) in heavenly black and white, Heleno is a feverish opera that, like its doomed antihero, loses vitality much too soon.
  66. Off-White Lies
    Poised unwaveringly between gentle comedy and delicate drama, Maya Kenig's Off White Lies keeps a lot to itself. But this narrative withholding, while infuriating at times, presents no real barrier to our engagement with the film's unconventional look at the growing connection between a shy teenage girl and her shiftless father.
  67. Sahkanaga
    A haunting piece of fact-based Southern Gothic free of histrionics, Sahkanaga is a thoughtful, atmospherically heavy study of reactions to an inexplicably inhumane act.
  68. Trashed
    If we must talk trash, Mr. Irons - assisted by a scientist or two and Vangelis's doomy score - is an inspired choice of guide. Soothing and sensitive, his liquid gaze alighting on oozing landfills and belching incinerators, he moves through the film with a tragic dignity that belies his whimsical neckwear and jaunty hats.
  69. My Brooklyn
    My Brooklyn, Kelly Anderson's sensitive study of gentrification in her home borough, is as much personal essay as urban-policy survey.
  70. A Bottle in the Gaza Sea (Une bouteille à la mer)
    Fueled by neither anger nor religious extremism - the director, Thierry Binisti, remains rigidly nonpartisan - "Bottle" is a gentle pairing of youthful idealism and tenacious hope.
  71. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
    It’s a frequently amusing, occasionally hilarious, rarely unpleasant grab bag of mild mockery and inspired lunacy, decked out with cameos from beloved comic performers and random celebrities.
  72. FrackNation
    More than anything, FrackNation underscores the sheer complexity of a process that offers a financial lifeline to struggling farmers.
  73. Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation
    Evokes the flavor of the era just before the music business exploded into a mass-market juggernaut. The film's pleasures are the same ones offered by a sprawling, lavishly illustrated magazine spread.
  74. At Any Price
    If At Any Price overstates its points, they are still worth making. And the hot-wired performances by Mr. Quaid and Mr. Efron drive them home in a movie that sticks to your ribs and stays in your head.
  75. Supporting Characters
    This well-acted film captures a generational and occupational sliver of New York life that rings true.
  76. The Last Gladiators
    [Mr. Gibney] scales down his approach considerably here, generally for the better, rather than extrapolate a theory of violence and everything.
  77. Caesar Must Die
    There’s an elemental, almost primitive quality to the Tavianis’ condensing that, at its most effective, dovetails with the prison’s severely circumscribed material reality, as if the high walls, barred windows and suffocating rooms were manifestations of the characters’ states of mind.
  78. Night Across the Street
    Unlike his precursors Georges Franju and Luis Buñuel, who reveled in the shock of incongruity, Mr. Ruiz took it in stride. His gliding, floating camera could make wild impossibilities look utterly natural. And so it is in Night Across the Street, where the present commingles with the past, and seeming is another way of being.
  79. The Jeffrey Dahmer Files
    If the film’s spare re-enactments are a little awkward, they also smartly repurpose Dahmer’s studied reserve into a meditation on perversion as hypnotic as it is repulsive.
  80. Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder
    As big a bouquet as the film is to Mr. Ferlinghetti, it is also a mash note to City Lights, a cultural touchstone and North Beach landmark.
  81. Hava Nagila: The Movie
    The interviews are mostly good and instructive, but the well-chosen historical footage is better.
  82. The Berlin File
    As soon as The Berlin File takes flight with its exhilarating action set pieces, memories of any muddles evaporate amid the tension and vivid engagement with settings, from courtyards to fields.
  83. Shanghai Calling
    Though Mr. Hsia, a television alumnus who also wrote the script, has created a somewhat predictable story infused with stereotypes old and new, he gains mileage from light humor, buoyant energy and some appealing performers.
  84. Almost in Love
    The actors manage to just sidestep the chummy, self-congratulatory air of showbiz insiders, leaving viewers the pleasure of savoring their invention. No glib answers are offered, but the search proves rewarding.
  85. The Bitter Buddha
    The film’s unvarying lack of drama or direction can be wearing, but the schlubby originality of its subject fully repays the longueurs.
  86. The East
    It may be asking too much of The East — which is, after all, a twisty, breathless genre film — to wish that it would frame the contradictions of contemporary capitalism more rigorously. The movie is aware that they exist, and wishes that they could be resolved more or less happily, which is hard to argue with, though also hard to believe.
  87. About Last Night
    Many of the funniest parts seem to arise spontaneously from Mr. Hart’s uncensored brain and fast-moving mouth. He can swerve from tears to mock outrage to anatomically detailed obscenities faster than just about any other comic performer working today, and in Ms. Hall he has found an excellent match.
  88. Blancanieves
    It communicates the delights of pastiche rather than the thrill of original creation, a secondhand movie love that is seductive but not entirely satisfying.
  89. Greedy Lying Bastards
    Collated for momentum, the film’s many interviews, wide-ranging archival footage and montage of modern ecological disasters form a blunt but carefully positioned instrument. And despite a bit of Michael Moore-style nonsense at the end the tightly edited narrative displays a reach (nine countries) and clarity of composition that hold the attention.
  90. Future Weather
    [A] tiny, beautifully acted movie.
  91. Molly's Theory of Relativity
    Molly’s Theory of Relativity is an intentionally uncomfortable movie to watch. The fifth feature from Jeff Lipsky, this eccentric, often high-pitched family comedy might be described as a surreal, post-Freudian gabfest.
  92. The Silence
    [Mr. Odar] allows the story to unfold at a deliberate pace, emphasizing the psychological nuances of the mystery rather than its procedural details, and using graceful wide-screen compositions and haunting sound design to create a compelling mood of menace, anxiety and sorrow.
  93. The Sapphires
    The raggedness of The Sapphires can’t be separated from its exuberant charm. Like the Sapphires themselves, the film is determined to muscle its way into your heart, which would have to be a lump of gristle to resist it.
  94. Girl Rising
    Though some of the writers inject a force of metaphor and strength of voice, no one would confuse the movie with a short-story collection. But it’s more ambitious and effective at blunting cynicism than most consciousness-raising efforts.
  95. In the House
    In the House weaves a pleasant and clever spell, manipulating the viewer much in the way that Claude plays with Germain.
  96. The Battle of Pussy Willow Creek
    By the time the humor overreaches, escalating into the surreal, you’ve fallen under the movie’s spell. Audacity and invention more than compensate for the deficiencies. Who knows what Ms. Cohen will do next? But it should be interesting.
  97. The Kings of Summer
    The best way to enjoy The Kings of Summer is to view it as a likable comic fantasy dreamed up by filmmakers (Chris Galletta wrote the screenplay) who are close enough to adolescence to infuse their ramshackle story with a youthful, carefree whimsy.
  98. The Bling Ring
    The Bling Ring occupies a vertiginous middle ground between banality and transcendence, and its refusal to commit to one or the other is both a mark of integrity and a source of frustration.
  99. Transcendence
    Transcendence is a dark, lurchingly entertaining pastiche of age-old worries, future-shock jolts, hot-button topics and old-fashioned genre thrills.
  100. Violeta Went to Heaven
    Mr. Wood has created a poignant portrait of an artist unable to escape the stamp of her class or the burdens of aging.
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