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. Stir of Echoes
    Another thriller that packs a spooky wallop as it conjures an unseen world within reach.
  2. The Fisher King
    What emerges, in the end, are a clever premise that has been allowed to go awry and several performances that are lively and unpredictable enough to transcend the confusion. Mr. Bridges, always a fine intuitive actor, has never displayed a greater range.
  3. An Ideal Husband
    Life at the top has rarely looked or sounded more fabulously elegant.
  4. Fahrenheit 9/11
    While Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 will be properly debated on the basis of its factual claims and cinematic techniques, it should first of all be appreciated as a high-spirited and unruly exercise in democratic self-expression.
  5. Berlin Babylon
    Babylon is about architecture as a balm, and this is a particularly good time for such a film.
  6. Die Hard 2
    It will surprise no one who saw the first ''Die Hard'' that the heart and soul of the new film is Bruce Willis, who this time is even better.
  7. Hellaware
    The old story of art as a refuge for scoundrels and callow youth is amusing and updated with assorted details.
  8. Blaze
    Blaze has been beautifully photographed by Haskell Wexler in the soft, lulling colors of the Louisiana countryside, against which Ms. Davidovich's amusingly garish costumes stand out as markedly as they're meant to. The costumes, by Ruth Myers, are particularly good, with ice-cream-colored suits for Mr. Newman that allow him to dominate the film visually just as surely as he dominates it dramatically.
  9. The Wall
    The photography is often lovely, and Ms. Gedeck convincingly portrays a woman who as the ordeal stretches on month after month seems to be gradually losing her individuality and blending into the landscape.
  10. The China Hustle
    In the case of The China Hustle, a documentary may simply be the wrong delivery mechanism for a byzantine exposé that cries out for detailed news reporting.
  11. Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
    Like one of those machines that can inhale a car and spit out a tidy cube of squashed components, Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles is a near-indigestible lump of clips and quips and snipped opinions.
  12. Halloween
    This isn’t a wisecracking, tongue-in-cheek picture: Green wants us to believe in his Bogeyman, and Curtis is his ace card. Leaving no room for winks or giggles, she makes Laurie’s long-festering terror the glue that holds the movie together.
  13. Synecdoche, New York
    To say that Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now.
  14. Edge of Seventeen
    The movie gets the music, the clothes and the tone of the teen-age culture of that era exactly right.
  15. Kite
    Patang ("The Kite"), Prashant Bhargava's first feature, has a lovely, unforced quality. That's because Mr. Bhargava lets his story, set during the annual kite festival in Ahmedabad, India, tell itself, unfolding slowly as he follows filmmaking's most basic and most sinned-against dictum: Show, don't tell.
  16. Charlie Wilson's War
    More of a hoot than any picture dealing with the bloody, protracted fight between the Soviet Army and the Afghan mujahedeen has any right to be.
  17. Canvas
    A movie that rings emotionally true, despite structural contrivances and dim, washed-out color.
  18. The Take
    Occasionally the visuals seem overly stylized, but Mr. Furman knows enough to showcase his stars’ unvarnished performances.
  19. Garbage Dreams
    Garbage Dreams records the tremblings of a culture at a crossroads.
  20. Ip Man 2
    Choreographed by the film martial-arts veteran Sammo Hung, the fights are spectacularly designed and performed, relying more on muscle and skill than wirework.
  21. Stuck Between Stations
    There are no easy payoffs in Stuck Between Stations, but the chemistry of its stars is reward enough.
  22. 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.
  23. Alive Inside
    Neither the value of music nor the deficiencies of certain nursing homes are tough to debate. But a documentary that never leaves any doubt about what comes next, while single-mindedly stumping for a cause presented as unique, is also not terribly interesting as a film.
  24. The Nightingale
    The virtues of understatement and restraint are vividly apparent in Philippe Muyl’s The Nightingale.
  25. Parched
    Despite the appalling circumstances and events it depicts, the movie’s plain and unstinting affection for its lead characters gives Parched a frequently buoyant tone.
  26. Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid
    A genial, gently mocking, brilliantly executed spoof that may offend the purists but which should delight the buffs.
  27. Eagles of the Republic
    Saleh’s tangled plotting has more verve than his pacing or visual sense. But the movie’s portrait of collaboration can’t help but induce a shudder.
  28. The Stanford Prison Experiment
    The experiment’s methodologies and meanings have been analyzed endlessly over the years, and the film doesn’t delve deeply into these interpretations and critiques. It doesn’t need to; this stark and riveting version of events speaks for itself.
  29. The Little Stranger
    The twisting and cracking of the British class system is always fascinating to observe, and The Little Stranger traces the details of its chosen moment of social change with precision and subtlety, and with its own layers of somewhat dubious nostalgia.
  30. 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.
  31. The Armstrong Lie
    More glaringly than most sports documentaries, The Armstrong Lie reinforces the sad truth that the adage “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game” doesn’t apply to professional sports. Maybe it never did. Winning is everything.
  32. Take the Money and Run
    Allen has made a movie that is, in effect, a feature-length, two-reel comedy—something very special and eccentric and funny.
  33. 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.
  34. Meadowland
    The setup is a scriptwriting gimme — if your central couple lose a child, practically any subsequent behavior is justifiable — but the actors sell what they’re given quite effectively.
  35. The Idea of You
    More than once, I was struck by how authentically 40 Solène seemed to me — a woman capable of making her own decisions, even ones she thinks might be ill-advised — and how weirdly rare it is to see that kind of character in a movie.
  36. Melancholian 3 huonetta
    The film is a requiem for the living as well as for the dead.
  37. Sansón and Me
    The film is an unusually layered look at how the combination of privation, misplaced familial loyalty and just plain rotten luck can make the immigrant experience in America a nightmare.
  38. Victim/Suspect
    The film, which examines cases in which sexual assault survivors are charged with false reporting, is the rare entry whose revelations feel cogent, earned and memorable.
  39. A Private Life
    The intrigue is far-fetched and surprising — this is one movie you can’t write in your head — and delivered with increasing winks and charm.
  40. 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.
  41. Sammy and Rosie Get Laid
    Mr. Frears and Mr. Kureishi have composed Sammy and Rosie as if they were building a giant bonfire in a mock celebration of the achievements of contemporary British society and, by extension, of the civilized world. They throw everything on -love, death, sex, politics, violence. A lot of stuff doesn't easily burn, but there's also plenty that does.
  42. The Last Duel
    The movie is weirdly entertaining, but the world it presents, despite its flourishes of comedy, is cold, hard and unforgiving.
  43. 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.
  44. Rosenwald
    [A] rich and fascinating biography.
  45. Alice Sweet Alice
    Mr. Sole, whose first feature this is, knows how to direct actors, how to manipulate suspense and when to shift gears: the identity of the killer is revealed at just that point when the audience is about to make the identification, after which the film becomes less of a horror film than an exercise in suspense.
  46. Invention
    Invention is committed to finding its own wavelength.
  47. My Bodyguard
    My Bodyguared is a sweet little movie about characters who really seem to be people, and that sort of verisimilitude is rarer than it ought to be nowadays.
  48. Reflections in a Golden Eye
    The shame of it is that this conclusion is so anticlimactic and banal, because there is so much in the picture that seems to be leading to -- certainly prepares us to expect -- much more.
  49. 2 Days in Paris
    Audacious as it is, the movie is also a little scary.
  50. Juliet, Naked
    Mr. Peretz and the screenwriters (Evgenia Peretz, the director’s sister, is credited along with Tamara Jenkins and Jim Taylor) find an amiable farcical groove, and the actors embrace the ridiculousness of the circumstances without overdoing it.
  51. Man Bites Dog
    A grisly sick joke of a film that some will find funny, others simply appalling. On one level, it is an in-joke about movie making, since one reason given for Ben's rampage is the need to steal enough money to make the documentary. On another level, the film satirizes real-life television shows that purport to take viewers into the thick of the action. It suggests how profoundly the presence of the camera affects events, and thumbs its nose at the very notion of documentary objectivity.
  52. Last Days
    One of this year's indisputably great films.
  53. Life and Debt
    Offers the clearest analysis of globalization and its negative effects that I've ever seen on a movie or television screen.
  54. A Decade Under the Influence
    Has the undiscriminating temperament of a fan, blithely placing Mr. Coppola's magnificently made "Godfather" on the same plane as Mr. Hopper's slapped-together, and today all but unwatchable, "Easy Rider."
  55. Cremaster 3
    If Cremaster 3 is an innovative artwork that has been credited with breaking down the distance between sculpture and film, is it also a great movie? Probably yes.
  56. Better Luck Tomorrow
    Mr. Lin makes the anxious grasping of these kids for some kind of emotional turf -- their own need to shatter the stereotypes that bind them -- the heart of Better Luck Tomorrow, a scenario that keeps the movie's blood racing.
  57. The Business of Strangers
    With an intensity that few movies have mustered, The Business of Strangers makes you feel the acute loneliness of it all.
  58. Young Adam
    The narrative scheme, the brooding period atmosphere, the understated score (by David Byrne) and the precision of the acting also make the story seem more interesting than it is.
  59. Finding Neverland
    A handsome-looking film about the writer and his unripe inspirations, the actor Johnny Depp neither soars nor crashes, but moseys forward with vague purpose and actorly restraint.
  60. Jay Kelly
    Inevitably, the results do not quite cohere narratively or tonally. But the film still has a strange, old-fashioned charm. You can’t really imagine anyone other than Clooney playing Jay, but Sandler is equally good; he brings a pathos to Ron, a man who has perhaps loved not wisely but too well.
  61. Rabbit à la Berlin
    Teasing and shrewd, Rabbit à la Berlin is a floppy-eared fable about the uneasy trade-offs between liberty and security.
  62. United Red Army
    The stilted and awkward physical and vocal performances in combination with the visually flat cinematography bring to mind the look, sound and visual texture of American daytime soaps, an association that perversely makes the movie more and more watchable.
  63. 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.
  64. Re-emerging: The Jews of Nigeria
    “Re-emerging” can be pedestrian as filmmaking, though it remains interesting as long as it remains in Nigeria.
  65. Fame High
    Fame High, a timely plug for arts education, does what its subjects hope to do: it opens our hearts and entertains with truth.
  66. Dislecksia: The Movie
    The film’s primary mission is to destigmatize dyslexia, and it achieves that admirably, presenting technical material with a light touch and compassion.
  67. Björk: Biophilia Live
    As skillful an orchestrator as Björk is, her crescendos and tightly designed wilderness can lose their strength with repetition. But she and her collaborators do make a pretty singing picture with their chosen audiovisual tool set.
  68. Les Cowboys
    Unfolding with a reticence that’s occasionally confusing, Les Cowboys presents a suggestive, almost abstract take on terror and the generational toxicity of bigotry.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    To Each His Own
    To Each His Own spins dangerously on the brink of bathos but it seldom spills over into that treacherous chasm for more than a fleeting scene or two, thanks to a screen play which artfully dodges complete morbidity.
  70. Kill Boksoon
    Beneath the gore that ensues is a story about understanding.
  71. Haywire
    Once the talking stops and the action begins, her professionalism is very much in evidence and exciting to watch. And yet, somehow, it cannot quite relieve the tedium of a movie that is too cool even to pretend that there is anything worth fighting about.
  72. After Everything
    White and Monroe demonstrate natural chemistry, and they discretely suggest the private experiences of their characters, the youthful doubts that can’t be extinguished by passion. In unpretentious fashion, After Everything portrays the bittersweetness of a first love that blooms in crisis.
  73. Tales of the Rat Fink
    Depending on your age, sex and mechanical inclinations, Tales of the Rat Fink will convince you that Mr. Roth should either have been canonized or smothered at birth.
  74. Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation
    Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation, directed by Barak Goodman, uses the perspective of nearly 50 years’ hindsight to demonstrate anew how the festival was both a mess and a miracle, and implicitly argues that it was a good deal more miracle than mess.
  75. The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52
    Neither slick nor propulsive, The Loneliest Whale gently combines aquatic adventure and bobbing meditation on our own species’s environmental arrogance.
  76. XXY
    If XXY is imagistically too programmatic (a scene of carrots being sliced is typical of its Freudian heavy-handedness) and devoid of humor, it never seems pruriently exploitative. It sustains an unsettling mood of ambiguity that lingers long after the final credits.
  77. Fresh
    A wickedly funny cannibal romance and dazzling feature debut from the director Mimi Cave.
  78. Kink
    A fascinating profile of the online pornography provider Kink.com.
  79. As You Are
    Much of the movie, from its attempts to capture the confusing exhilaration of youthful experience to its predictable progressive character dynamics, is labored.
  80. The New Radical
    It’s possible to fully, and vehemently, disagree with Mr. Wilson and Mr. Taaki yet still see their points. That can make The New Radical unsettling. It also makes it a film worth watching.
  81. Perfect Blue
    With smarter dialogue, it might have made a fascinating film.
  82. Marvin's Room
    This film often fumbles, but it finally tugs at the heartstrings all the same.
  83. Spoor
    Spoor is sensationally atmospheric. . . . The structure, though, seems counterproductively, even confusingly, elliptical, and the timing of flashbacks muddles the point of view. This is a whodunit that plays tricks with the “who.”
  84. Silent Running
    Silent Running is no jerry-built science fiction film, but it's a little too simple-minded to be consistently entertaining.
  85. Meduzot
    The film’s spirit is refreshingly playful and sweet.
  86. Annette
    Annette masters its own paradoxes. It’s a highly cerebral, formally complex film about unbridled emotion.
  87. Chappaquiddick
    Whether or not events actually unfolded this way, the story the film tells is an interesting and complicated character study, with something to say about the corrosive effects of power and privilege on both the innocent and the guilty.
  88. 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.
  89. Good Morning, Vietnam
    Good Morning, Vietnam, directed by Barry Levinson (Diner, Tin Men) succeeds in doing something that's very rare in movies, being about a character who really is as funny as he's supposed to be to most of the people sharing the fiction with him. It's also a breakthrough for Mr. Williams, who, for the first time in movies, gets a chance to exercise his restless, full-frontal comic intelligence.
  90. Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont
    The unabashedly sentimental film is a juicy morsel for the great British actress Dame Joan Plowright, who endows Mrs. Palfrey with stoic charm and decency.
  91. Korengal
    The sequel is much more than a collection of outtakes from the first film, augmented by footage shot later.
  92. A Faithful Man
    [A] low-key, engaging comedy.
  93. Sanctuary
    The writing (by Micah Bloomberg, a creator of the 2018-20 TV series “Homecoming”) is so sharp, the acting so agile and the cinematography (by Ludovica Isidori) so inventive that what could have been a stuffy experiment in lockdown filmmaking is instead a vividly involving battle of wills.
  94. The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie
    The movie itself triumphs by similar means; it is a marvel of unleashed childishness, like a birthday party on the edge of spinning out of control.
  95. The Ninth Day
    Succeeds in illuminating an almost unimaginably dark story.
  96. Lynch
    It’s precisely the worshipful feel of Lynch -- including scenes in which the camera points up at Mr. Lynch from what seems to be the floor, as if it were a faithful dog -- that makes the movie so sweet and so appealing. It’s like watching a schoolgirl crush unfold, through a glass darkly.
  97. An Affair of Love
    Clearly, this is an affair to forget.
  98. The Flower of Evil
    Wanders rather than moves chillingly toward its climax.
  99. Open Range
    Mr. Costner's relentless, root-canal humorlessness turns what might have been an enjoyable B-picture throwback into a ponderous drag.
  100. Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment
    Inventing Our Life is a fascinating introduction to a movement scrambling to adjust enough to guarantee a future, without severing all ties to its principled past.
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