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. Ordinary Miracles: The Photo League's New York
    Extremely likable and has value as a historical document specifically because it includes snippets from a dozen later-life interviews with Photo League members like Rosalie Gwathmey and Mr. Engel.
  2. The Last Christeros
    Mr. Meyer adheres to a cinema of broad experience by casting rugged but uninspiring nonprofessionals and focusing on the rebels’ long, lonely struggle rather than on triumph and tactics.
  3. Evergreen: The Road to Legalization
    This record of Washington State’s battle over Initiative 502, which legalized possession of small amounts of recreational marijuana in 2012, is predictably loaded with rancor. The battle isn’t over whether pot should be legalized, but to what extent.
  4. Mr. X
    Though Ms. Louise-Salomé’s film strikes a potentially irritating pose as a kind of artistic séance — shrouding interviewees in shadow, conjuring up clips with the drifting rhythm of the unconscious — it delivers articulate insights and has an elegant construction.
  5. Homme Less
    Mr. Wirthensohn, who has known Mr. Reay since both were models, sees Mr. Reay’s life as a metaphor for the vanishing middle class. But Mr. Reay merely comes across as an aging casualty of Manhattan fashion, vainly chasing his fortune in a fickle industry that prizes youth.
  6. The King of Staten Island
    The King of Staten Island is one of those 10-block-radius life slices whose smallness and intimacy ought to be a virtue. But the movie seems afraid of itself.
  7. Blackboard Jungle
    As a straight melodrama of juvenile violence this is a vivid and hair-raising film.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    American Murder: The Family Next Door
    Popplewell’s film presents the Watts story as more than a crime story. It is a thematic film about marriage and the deception of social media, as well as a piercing examination of domestic violence constructed with care and undeniable craft.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Horror of Dracula
    Perhaps the constant hunt for hemoglobin is slowing our villain down, for this time there are strong indications that the once gory plot is showing definite signs of anemia.
  10. As Tears Go By (1988)
    Easily summarized, the plot is entirely secondhand.
  11. HAIKYU!! The Dumpster Battle
    Though “The Dumpster Battle” is squarely aimed toward fans of the series, it has charms that may lead new viewers to the anime (streaming on Crunchyroll and Netflix) to follow the story from the beginning. Because even if crows and cats battling in a dumpster doesn’t appeal to you, there’s still the promise of watching good athletes play a good game — and that’s worth a seat in the bleachers.
  12. Drop Dead City
    It’s an evenhanded and surprisingly entertaining account of how things got so bad, who was to blame, the way it was fixed (to some degree) and what New York inevitably lost in the process.
  13. Sovereign
    Sovereign is most intriguing for its subtle, if incomplete observations of the more complicated realities of both sides of the law that inform and ripple from Jerry’s paranoid world.
  14. The Ides of March
    Somehow, the film is missing both adrenaline and gravity, notwithstanding some frantic early moments and a late swerve toward tragedy. It makes its points carefully and unimpeachably but does not bring much in the way of insight or risk.
  15. Shortcomings
    The movie is funny and touching, with a star-making performance by Min and a script full of lovely, self-aware little touches . . . But it’s shot like a sitcom — flat, shiny, perfunctory — and structured like one, too, with quip-heavy vignettes that resolve in pat conclusions.
  16. Guinevere
    Affectionately told ...beguiling.
  17. Tesla
    You might not learn everything there is to know about Tesla — that’s what the internet is for — but you will nonetheless feel illuminated by his presence.
  18. A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
    hough the picture is wrenching, at times devastating, it leaves you with that buoyant feeling of having encountered a raw, authentic work of art.
  19. Enemy of the State
    It has a hurtling pace, nonstop intensity and a stylish, appealing performance by Will Smith in his first real starring role.
  20. Poison
    Poison, which won the grand prize as the best fiction work at this year's Sundance Film Festival, is an imaginative film that, like the infectious Tom Graves, is eventually overwhelmed by its ambitions. The movie needs to evoke more than the ghost of Genet to give it resonance.
  21. The Great Hack
    If the paranoia level could probably withstand a slight reduction, much of the movie feels utterly credible.
  22. FernGully: The Last Rainforest
    Ferngully is more run-of-the-mill than its subject matter might indicate. The main characters are disappointingly ordinary, with the exotic Crysta sounding very much like someone who spends time at the mall.
  23. Watermarks
    A moving documentary that approaches the Holocaust from a fresh, intimate perspective.
  24. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
    The punchy little flourishes that load this English gangster film with attitude are perfectly welcome, because there's no honest, substantial part of the movie they can hurt.
  25. Flow: For Love of Water
    Irena Salina's astonishingly wide-ranging film is less depressing than galvanizing, an informed and heartfelt examination of the tug of war between public health and private interests.
  26. Runaway Train
    What is well worth watching here, much more so than the train itself, is Jon Voight, who gives a fiery performance in an unusually hard-edged role.
  27. The Perks of Being a Wallflower
    The results are likable, unsurprising and principally a showcase for the pretty young cast, notably Mr. Miller, who brings texture to his witty if sensitive gay quipster.
  28. In the Aisles
    Imagine a Kaurismaki with less humor and a slower pace, and you’ll have a sense of how singular yet insubstantial In the Aisles ultimately appears.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Cincinnati Kid
    A respectably packaged drama of a young card sharp, played by Steve McQueen, with a capable enough cast, that pungently projects the machinations and back-room temperatures of the side-street professional gambling world and little else.
  30. Strange Harvest
    The film is naturalistic enough to be convincing and sick enough to be disturbing, even if the acting falls scattershot on the persuasiveness scale.
  31. The History of Future Folk
    It may not make much sense in a brief plot summary, but it makes perfect, daffy sense on the screen.
  32. Lady Chatterley's Lover
    Magee and Clermont-Tonnerre’s adaptation emphasizes the romance of Lawrence’s book over the radicalism of his vision. This Lady Chatterley’s Lover is faithful to the novel, while also revealing how safe, how domesticated, it has become.
  33. Tom at the Farm
    Wildly entertaining, sexy and beautifully shot in the Canadian heartland.
  34. The Circle
    The sense of an invisible world being revealed is more potent than the film’s fairly standard portrayal of closeted life.
  35. The Last Starfighter
    Though it is occasionally talky, and though its plot takes a while to crank up, The Last Starfighter, directed by Nick Castle, is more often than not good-humored, bent on action and even touching. [13 July 1984, p.C5]
    • The New York Times
  36. Jesus, You Know
    Tells the truth where it counts most: in its unblinking exploration of one of the most private of human experiences.
  37. London River
    Rachid Bouchareb's tidy little two-character film, London River, demonstrates how great acting can infuse a banal, politically correct drama with dollops of emotional truth.
  38. Southwest of Salem: The Story of the San Antonio Four
    "Southwest of Salem” proceeds with what have become sobering tropes for true-crime documentaries: a defendant saying she didn’t realize she needed a lawyer; outsiders explaining how they grew convinced of a miscarriage of justice.
  39. Diamond Hands: The Legend of WallStreetBets
    It’s a zippy, entertaining approach that offers a surprising degree of insight into the psychology that produced the GameStop phenomenon. Investors played with serious money, but their mind-set was a farcical dive into hyperspace — a week of gambling in a cyber-Vegas that, for some, was worth the hangover.
  40. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her
    Although the novelty of this repetition and Mr. Benson’s adjustments pull you in like a new puzzle, his actual ideas — about people, their stories and how to tell those stories — turn out to be fairly straight.
  41. Buena Vista Social Club: Adios
    It’s not as poetic or immediately enjoyable as the first film. But it is tougher and more analytical, with real challenges embedded in its pleasures.
  42. A Master Builder
    As both an actor and a playwright, Wallace Shawn, at his most audacious, goes for the jugular, but in sneaky roundabout ways.
  43. Music from the Inside Out
    Daniel Anker's profound and moving documentary Music from the Inside Out reflects upon such abstractions, capturing the power of the creative process in an uncommonly perceptive and inspiring way.
  44. Garbo: The Spy
    Edmon Roch has a great story to tell in Garbo the Spy, and he recounts it with the flair of a Hollywood spy movie: "Garbo" is dramatic, entertaining, even funny in parts.
  45. Minnie and Moskowitz
    Mr. Cassavetes's use of exaggerated slapstick gestures to underscore the loneliness and fears of his characters is more interesting in theory than funny or moving in actual fact.
  46. 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.
  47. Fastpitch
    Intelligent, insightful, touching.
  48. Ivansxtc
    Contrived as this may sound, Mr. Rose's updating works surprisingly well. -- the story's sympathetic, tragic sense of the fragility of individual dignity is, if anything, made even more haunting in this version.
  49. Veer-Zaara
    If Veer-Zaara were an American television movie, it would be embraced as fabulously trashy.
  50. Garden State
    Small, smart, off-kilter comedy.
  51. Sia, the Dream of the Python
    In trying to reproduce the griot's tone, Mr. Kouyaté rejects psychological nuance and dramatic shading: this is a tale that advances quickly and boldly, peopled by deliberately one-dimensional characters.
  52. Bite the Bullet
    A big, expensive Western that doesn't contain one moment that might be called genuine.
  53. The Green Prince
    If The Green Prince sustains the tension of a well-executed thriller, it is achieved at the cost of a dispassionate objectivity.
  54. Saint of 9/11
    The movie's steadily elegiac tone precludes it from creating a more lively, idiosyncratic portrait of a man who, by many accounts, was a wonderful raconteur whose gift of gab was complemented by a rollicking sense of humor.
  55. Proteus
    An incomplete portrait of a complicated man.
  56. The Myth of the American Sleepover
    What Mr. Mitchell gets splendidly right in this quiet, observant film, is the unsteady mixture of sophistication and naïveté that is central to the modern American teenage way of being in the world.
  57. More Than the Rainbow
    Mr. Wechsler’s film might be loose to a fault, but Mr. Weber’s work yields its share of gratifying, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it New York moments.
  58. Departures
    Departures is still tender and winsome, with graphic-novel-style animation lightening the load, but is ultimately punishing in tone. It lives by a truth that might ring familiar for gay men particularly: Humor that cuts deep is a form of survival.
  59. The Year My Parents Went on Vacation
    The performances are charming and convincing, and Mr. Joelsas does a good job of conveying Mauro’s loneliness and confusion as well as his playfulness. The Year My Parents Went on Vacation may not be terribly fresh or original, but its warm, sweet, nostalgic tone is hard to dislike.
  60. Water Lilies
    Water Lilies is a nice, watchable, attractive, minor work. What it lacks is a sense of purpose, a commitment not just to its characters but also to its own reason for being.
  61. Unforgivable
    Unforgivable isn't one of Mr. Téchiné's greatest achievements, but it's engrossing even when its increasingly populated story falters, tripped up by unpersuasive actions, connections and details.
  62. Cut Throat City
    The reversals the characters suffer across the movie’s running time are epic, and the movie’s finale unfolds to genuinely startling effect.
  63. Long Shot
    Long Shot isn’t going to save the romantic comedy, but it’s an adrenaline shot of pure pleasure to the genre’s failing heart.
  64. Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus
    Sebastián Silva is extremely perceptive about body language, and the characters’ physical presences are as revealing as their words. The performances give you an almost uncomfortable sense of proximity.
  65. Freaky
    Vaughn and Newton prove remarkably effective at selling the benefits of their alternate packaging. Their efforts, however, are too often diluted by the film’s lazy plotting and Millie’s hackneyed emotional baggage.
  66. The Legend of Ochi
    The Legend of Ochi is light on story — you kind of know what’s going to happen all the time — and that, coupled with occasionally garbled dialogue, makes it easy to zone out at times. But in its place it serves up a nourishing banquet for the senses.
  67. Schultze Gets the Blues
    It's a good thing the movie has so little dialogue, because when it talks, the words dilute its almost surreal visual spell, and the fructose turns to saccharine.
  68. Visual Acoustics
    It’s about lovely photographs of graceful buildings and those who can afford the real estate. But it does pay proper respect to a deserving artist.
  69. Alice's House
    Chico Teixeira’s languid, libidinous Alice’s House is the best argument against marriage and motherhood to appear in many a year.
  70. Girl Asleep
    As it seesaws between Greta’s conscious and unconscious minds, the movie begins to feel like a waking dream.
  71. 1984
    This 1984 is not an easy film to watch, but it exerts a fascination that demands attention even as you want to turn away from it. That the Orwell tale still works so well - and this version works far better than the 1956 film adaptation - also makes it apparent that the novel was always more cautionary in its intentions than prophetic.
  72. Furious 7
    There will no doubt be better movies released in 2015, but Furious 7 is an early favorite to win the prize for most picture.
  73. Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood
    Mr. Tyrnauer surreptitiously hoses away the layers of dirt to reveal the fragility of his subject’s anything-goes hedonism.
  74. Aquí y Allá (Here and There)
    If the intent was to keep the characters here just as anonymous as most migrant workers are to prosperous people in the United States, it succeeds: Pedro and his family remain mere sketches. If, however, the aim was a more meaningful portrait of hardship and aspiration, the film is merely underdone. It's no secret that life in many places is hard.
  75. Upgrade
    Upgrade is an energetic, superficially slick, latter-day B-movie of the “but dumb” category. That is, it’s kind of like “RoboCop,” but dumb, and also like “Ex Machina,” but dumb.
  76. Gotta Dance
    The dancers are prone to feel-good sound bites, but Ms. Berinstein also takes the time to draw out their back stories, making for a sweet group portrait of ordinary folks who found a late splash of fame.
  77. The Rose
    BY the time you realize what's wrong with "The Rose," it will have you hooked anyhow...The Rose has an earnest, affecting character at its core. Even at its most preposterous, it never feels like a fraud.
  78. Ponyboi
    Gallo’s star-making turn pushes back against this version of hypermasculinity, reshaping genre conventions that have privileged rigid gender binaries. Watching Gallo carve out space for Ponyboi is its own kind of powerful assertion.
  79. The Boy Who Could Fly
    A gentle and affecting film that ought to charm older children while also holding their parents' interest,
  80. Brothers of the Head
    A fake documentary that barely lets on that its fiction, this devilishly clever film tells the story of conjoined twins who create a minor sensation in Britain on the eve of punk rock.
  81. 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.
  82. Private Parts
    Thanks to sharp editing and surprisingly strong comic timing, the film puts less emphasis on the Stern raunchiness than on how his wilder routines make listeners drive off the road.
  83. The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle
    A beautifully told story, with sincere and vigorous performances, and with a solid and richly atmospheric production to lend its interest and fascination.
  84. Patti Cake$
    Ms. Macdonald is quite simply a revelation, capturing the reflexive self-confidence and defensive diffidence of the millennial generation with sneaky sincerity and offhand wit.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Death at a Funeral
    There’s no dearth of rude humor on screens right now, but Death at a Funeral stands apart because its characters -- mostly reserved upper-middle-class British folk who have gathered to bury a patriarch -- are determined to keep a stiff upper lip no matter what.
  86. The Surfer
    If this movie leaves Cage adrift, he doesn’t seem at all uncomfortable about it.
  87. Moscow on the Hudson
    It seems unfinished, not yet thought through. Even the title doesn't quite fit, since the New York City that Vladimir discovers is far more densely populated by Southern blacks, Latin Americans, Western Europeans, Orientals and Indians from India than by Russians. It sounds as if it were one of those titles around which a screenplay was eventually composed.
  88. While You Were Sleeping
    This is a formula film, but it has the kind of good cheer and fine tuning that occasionally give slickness a good name.
  89. Yiddish Theater: A Love Story
    The film is by turns cranky, funny, wistful and resolute.
  90. Misunderstood
    A buoyantly funny, sometimes desperately sad film.
  91. Ma
    Alternately sexy and silly, galvanic and gentle, MA is best enjoyed as a slide show of visual blessings and, sometimes, bafflements.
  92. Wild Life
    Kris and Doug’s moving love story should be the emotional foundation of the documentary, but it’s edited in a bit too late. Paradoxically, however, we also crave more scenes of their individual transitions from bohemians to business titans.
  93. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
    It’s tough being a hitmaker who isn’t weighed down by corporate expectations, but for a while, Mr. Gunn does a pretty good job of keeping the whole thing reasonably fizzy, starting with an opener that winks at the audience with big bangs and slapstick.
  94. Farewell, My Queen
    Benoît Jacquot's tense, absorbing, pleasurably original look at three days in the life and lies of a doomed monarch.
  95. Deep Cover
    Deep Cover eventually degenerates into so much gratuitous violence that "kill" sounds like the most-used verb in the screenplay's last stages. The screenplay's frequent emphasis on homophobic insults is another unfortunate touch.
  96. The Connection
    Fetishizing the tired tokens of the American gangster movie, The Connection is a slickly styled, overlong pastiche. Yet its denizens have a retro glamour and the soundtrack a shameless literalness that’s rather endearing.
  97. The Life of Chuck
    Ejiofor fills in Marty with dabs of personality and a sense of decency that suggests that while humanity is lost, not every individual is. It’s too bad the movie doesn’t stick with Marty, who warms it up appreciably.
  98. Pianomania
    Although there's more romance in "Buck," a classic American survivor story in the triumphant individual vein, in Pianomania the very dry, very accomplished Mr. Knüpfer makes engaging company both because he keeps enviable company and because he's a full-on geek, though one possessed by pianos.
  99. Carol Channing: Larger Than Life
    A preternatural self-confidence and buoyancy infuse every syllable out of Ms. Channing's mouth in this entertaining film.
  100. Jealousy
    Mr. Garrel’s method goes beyond realism to achieve a kind of psychological intimacy that is rare and, in its low-key, meandering way, tremendously exciting.
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