The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,269 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 20269
  2. Mixed: 8,428 out of 20269
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20269
20269 movie reviews
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  1. Oh, Canada
    Schrader’s approach to this material — it’s his second movie based on a novel by Banks, the first being “Affliction” (1998) — is fascinating, a filmmaker’s translation in every sense of the word.
  2. The End
    The End is about one version of the end of the world, and about how the people who could have prevented it might feel when they get there. But to watch it is to think about yourself, at least if you have a conscience, and to ponder the sort of cognitive dissonance you live with every day.
  3. Y2K
    Jaeden Martell, Julian Dennison and Rachel Zegler, as the teens tasked with thwarting the apocalypse, make charming heroes — but it’s Mooney himself, as the loquacious stoner Garret, who is the film’s dopey MVP.
  4. The Girl with the Needle
    The Girl With the Needle is most intriguing when it lingers in its disturbing fictions, which come to life with exceptional style.
  5. The Order
    The movie is more effective as a grim, involving cop thriller than it is as an ostensible statement on the Order’s reverberations in the present.
  6. The Return
    Less an epic poem than a showcase for two of cinema’s finest actors, The Return is visually bleak and emotionally gripping.
  7. Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story
    Reeve’s bond with his fellow actor Robin Williams also makes up one of the documentary’s meatiest threads, adding depth to the character study.
  8. Queer
    [Lee] may have been Guadagnino-ized, and much about what makes him tick, his past and his art, remains obscured. Yet in Craig’s ravaged charisma you do see someone who’s ready to blow open other doors of perception.
  9. Beatles '64
    Watching the band in the Plaza Hotel and fans in the streets, hoping to catch a glimpse of their idols, you can’t help but get swept up in a 60-year-old fervor.
  10. Nutcrackers
    The film gets better whenever Stiller recedes into the background, but the movie’s insistence on Michael’s redemption story as the main narrative thread hurts it. It’s impossible to care too much about this pompous, uptight, strangely boring guy. Especially because we know how his story will end.
  11. Queens
    In this case, thematic focus is bit of a buzz kill, pulling an otherwise unique portrait onto generic grounds.
  12. Sweethearts
    This direct-to-streaming bauble benefits from two leads whose charm effortlessly outshines the material.
  13. Moana 2
    Squint your eyes against the specifics, and the odyssey tends to deliver a mood that fluctuates along a scale of benign to bright.
  14. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
    The Seed of the Sacred Fig asks us to enter a family’s story, but also to acknowledge that we are part of it. We’re extras in the background, no matter how far away we are. For Rasoulof, the world he’s created is far from theoretical. The consequences have been, too.
  15. Night Is Not Eternal
    It’s the rare truly nuanced political documentary that is likely to challenge every viewer’s perspective — not because it tries to see all sides of an issue and leaves the viewer suspended in confusion, but because its point of view feels radically outside of convention, beholden to no one.
  16. Spellbound
    It isn’t fair to say that “Spellbound” lacks musical or visual invention. Zegler can belt out a song, and the evil storm that transmogrified the royals is pleasingly lo-fi. (It looks like a scribble-scrabble twister.) But the magic feels distinctly, almost insultingly poached.
  17. Gladiator II
    Like Scott’s filmmaking in this pleasurably immersive spectacle — with its foreign ancients and mentalities, exotic animals and equally unfamiliar calls to human nobility — Washington’s performance has skill, intensity and absolute confidence.
  18. Sabbath Queen
    [A] fascinating look at the act of questioning yourself and your family, your surroundings and your decisions.
  19. The Piano Lesson
    What’s great about the movie is its performances. John David Washington brings fire to his role, matched by Deadwyler’s coolly furious resolve. Jackson’s role has him mostly observing, but he’s a magnetic presence. And Fisher is phenomenal, embodying a character who seems oblivious and a little dense but, it turns out, is more than meets the eye. Still, as a film, The Piano Lesson is the weakest of the Denzel Washington-produced Pittsburgh Cycle.
  20. A Photographic Memory
    It’s a film that captures the unsettling sensation of reaching middle age, knowing the length of the road ahead is uncertain but certainly shorter than it’s ever been, and not being able to see past the age your parent was upon death.
  21. The Black Sea
    Grounded by Harden’s natural and loosely charming performance, Khalid treats his nightmare scenario with an alternating sense of anxiety and buoyant, joshing can-do attitude.
  22. Bread & Roses
    While the immediacy of the storytelling may blur out precise details, it excels at building stakes.
  23. Ernest Cole: Lost and Found
    The result is an elegantly wrought documentary that pulls off the trick of leaving viewers sated yet also craving more.
  24. Flow
    The animals act like real animals, not like cartoons or humans, and that restraint gives their adventure an authenticity that, in moments of both delight and peril, makes the emotion that much more powerful. With the caveat that I’m a cat lover, I was deeply moved.
  25. Joy
    This is one of those pictures where the actors outdo the conventional material they are given to work with.
  26. Out of My Mind
    The director, Amber Sealey, and the strong cast keep things grounded, though, honoring the serious undercurrents while having some fun.
  27. Porcelain War
    Impressively, nearly everything was shot by the documentary’s subjects. Yet although their double duty is an awful fact of life in Ukraine, the film lurches between its varying components and tones.
  28. A Traveler's Needs
    This is his third overall feature with Huppert, who adds drollery and an air of mystery. And there is just enough intrigue this time — one motif involves the difficulty of translating a work by Yoon Dong-ju, a Korean poet who died in 1945 after being imprisoned in Japan — to suggest hidden depths.
  29. Witches
    If all women behaving badly can be summed up as witchy, then Sankey’s documentary too often works like a game of associations.
  30. Wicked
    Despite its bumps, the movie is consistently amusing simply because it is “The Wizard of Oz” and it’s fun watching colorful, off-kilter characters singing, dancing and sometimes flying through the air (without a superhero suit).
  31. The World According to Allee Willis
    I think the real story of The World According to Allee Willis isn’t just about Willis: It’s about the community that she formed, the friendships and relationships she maintained, and the way that art, imagination and love can make a life.
  32. All We Imagine as Light
    One of the pleasures of Kapadia’s filmmaking is that she’s inviting you to discover her characters on their terms, which means embracing the inner and outer rhythms of their lives.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Luther: Never Too Much
    The fulcrum of the film is heartbreak — ours, not his — that someone responsible for shaping the universal feeling of falling in love never experienced it himself.
  34. Martha
    “Martha” feels like a far more comprehensible key to Stewart — who has been the subject of speculation, fascination, jokes that turn cruel and plenty of schadenfreude — than half a century of media attention has managed to find.
  35. Juror #2
    Eastwood has explored systemic injustice before, including in “Changeling” and “Richard Jewell.” This is a stronger movie than those two by far, and if this one proves, as rumors have it, that it’s his last as a director, he is going out with a bang.
  36. Dream Team
    Nothing about Dream Team is very serious, and it would be a waste of time to force meaning onto it. But that’s not a mistake; it’s the whole idea.
  37. Red One
    It’s all a particularly egregious piece of commercial slop — just a little too expensive and passable to qualify for being so bad it’s sort of fun.
  38. Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes
    The documentary Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes is an official portrait that nevertheless offers some insights into how one of Hollywood’s most recognizable and irreplaceable star personas evolved.
  39. Emilia Pérez
    From the start, the movie hooks you because of its abrupt turns, how it veers into places that, tonally, narratively and emotionally, you don’t expect. Yet while Audiard has productively combined classic genres and present-day sensibilities before, even the more personal, confessional numbers here add little more than novelty.
  40. Hot Frosty
    Everyone involved knows exactly what movie they’re making — especially Craig Robinson as the hilarious town sheriff.
  41. Larger Than Life: Reign of the Boybands
    Disappointingly, the documentary prioritizes historical play-by-plays over deeper analysis, spending much of its running time tracing the influence of one boy band on the next. These stories rarely intersect in a way that builds a meaningful or compelling perspective, which might leave viewers asking, what’s the point?
  42. Youth (Homecoming)
    We’re drawn into their world, and that’s what makes the “Youth” movies so appealing: the takes are very long, and we get to dwell inside the frame.
  43. Hippo
    Like a stubborn toddler zipping his mouth shut while stomping his feet, “Hippo” manages to be noisily aggravating while saying nothing at all.
  44. Meanwhile on Earth
    Small and strange, Meanwhile on Earth seduces with its soft, barren beauty (the chilled cinematography is by Robrecht Heyvaert) and Dan Levy’s surreal score.
  45. The Last Rifleman
    Corny, yes. But charming, too.
  46. Christmas Eve in Miller's Point
    "Miller’s Point” is a Christmas movie more invested in atmosphere, and the qualities of wintry light, than in holiday cheer — and that somehow makes it all the more warm.
  47. Small Things Like These
    Murphy, fresh off his “Oppenheimer” Oscar win, is both producer and star of this film. His performance is unsurprisingly searing and nuanced, especially since Bill is not much of a talker.
  48. The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
    The movie manages to provide moments of witty dialogue while moving forward with its spiritual duties.
  49. Heretic
    Grant is clearly having a lot of fun in Heretic, and it’s enjoyable watching him go hard here with cold, predatory eyes and a smile that turns from uneasily friendly to straight-up fiendish.
  50. Bird
    There’s a wealth of lovely performances in Bird, including Adams, who holds the film together by slowly taking on tenderness as it progresses. But the two poles of the movie are Rogowski and Keoghan, who radiate precisely opposite energies.
  51. Elevation
    Directed by George Nolfi (“The Adjustment Bureau”), Elevation is distinctive not for its innovations in form or narrative — it’s got nothing new to offer — but for the anxieties and attitudes it telegraphs.
  52. Pedro Páramo
    Where this rich, metaphysical text might have come alive in dreamlike abstraction, Prieto and his screenwriter, Mateo Gil, instead content themselves with a prestige Western on terra firma — grave, good-looking and uninspiring.
  53. Meet Me Next Christmas
    In recent years Netflix has become a factory for B-rate Christmas movies, with the occasional cheap comfort to be found in its manufactured holiday romances. This bizarre concoction, not so much.
  54. The Graduates
    Peterson’s script is frustratingly single-note and occasionally bends toward unearned sentimentality. Still, The Graduates feels true to its milieu; its emotional clarity impressive given the loaded subject matter and the film’s subdued style.
  55. After: Poetry Destroys Silence
    The director hasn’t found a rhythm or pace to lend momentum to this exploration of disparate material.
  56. Here
    Don’t force a plot to emerge. Better to experience “Here” like open-eyed meditation, nodding at connections and ideas so fragile they’d disintegrate if said aloud.
  57. Youth (Hard Times)
    Shot in a present-tense vérité style, it stitches together micro-stories into a larger narrative in which negotiation can’t undo exploitation.
  58. Lost on a Mountain in Maine
    “Lost on a Mountain” never fully achieves its complicated halcyon aims.
  59. A Real Pain
    A Real Pain is a fluidly blended amalgam of pleasing, approachable subgenres, including an odd-couple buddy flick, a consciousness-raising road movie and a charged family melodrama.
  60. Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat
    In making Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, the director Johan Grimonprez used every instrument cinema affords. His documentary is rhythmic and propulsive, with reverberating sound and images juxtaposed against one another to lend more meaning. The result, in a word, is marvelous.
  61. Chasing Chasing Amy
    Rodgers, a sheepish and at times bewildered guide, seems ill-equipped to reconcile Adams’s reflections with his admiration for Smith and “Chasing Amy,” and instead pivots the story to focus on his own personal and professional evolution.
  62. The Gutter
    In addition to ridiculous — think the Wayans brothers’ parody pictures, or “Napoleon Dynamite” (that movie’s director, Jared Hess, is an executive producer here) — the humor is almost uniformly broad.
  63. Absolution
    Wrapped in drab visuals and a doomy atmosphere, Absolution paints a world where lowlifes rule and neither doctors nor priests can be trusted. Yet there are moments when the beatdowns pause and a misty melancholy shines through.
  64. Blitz
    The movie bears comparisons to Dickens, both for George’s plight and for the depiction of class divides across a war-torn London. But there is something else going on narratively here. For one, McQueen makes a point of integrating into the film what is rarely seen in movies of this sort: a sharp depiction of racism among Londoners, the enraging sort that has so calcified it still surfaces when people are just trying to survive.
  65. Dahomey
    Most interestingly, we listen in on young Beninese as they discuss the wider repercussions in an open forum. . . It’s a rich conversation that rapidly lays out the controversies and bigger issues at stake.
  66. Conclave
    With pomp and circumstance, miles of scarlet cloth and first-rate scene-stealers, the movie snakes through the marbled corridors of Vatican City, pauses in bedchambers as cold as mausoleums and tunnels into the deepest secrets of the human heart. It’s quite the journey, and as unpersuasive as it is entertaining.
  67. Your Monster
    Your Monster, while falling short of the Critic’s Pick status that Jacob vociferously covets for his show, has its charms, namely the backstage intrigue, onstage songs by the Lazours (of the current Off Broadway musical “We Live in Cairo”), and a disarming lead in Barrera.
  68. La Cocina
    The film’s epic finale feels stagy — while these real-life frustrations are anything but.
  69. Magpie
    A lean, mean revenge thriller that knows exactly what it’s about, Magpie has little originality but an invigorating clarity of purpose.
  70. My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock
    Cousins’s attuned eye and ear keep us interested afresh in the Hitchcock magic.
  71. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
    A rare and beautiful thing: a moving documentary that excavates the question of the “real” in a profoundly humanistic and unconventional way.
  72. Memoir of a Snail
    The world that Elliot creates is so strangely beautiful that it’s fun to look at. Plus, the end of “Memoir of a Snail” redeems its flights into tedium by giving us a reason to have watched them.
  73. Black Box Diaries
    The movie’s intimacy is appealing; on occasion, it can be claustrophobic. Black Box Diaries is, at heart, a first-person account, and while it’s successful on those terms, it’s finally more emotionally engaging than intellectually satisfying.
  74. Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
    At this point in time, Springsteen is the world’s greatest living entertainer, full stop. “Road Diary,” a new documentary directed by Thom Zimny, offers dynamic proof for this argument.
  75. Venom: The Last Dance
    Hardy voices both reedy Eddie and gravelly Venom and his roiling one-man-band of a performance continues to be the only reason to keep up with the films.
  76. Family Pack
    The game itself is so good. I’m not sure the movie understands why.
  77. Allswell in New York
    If few of the melodramatic plot lines wrap up by the end, at least the members of the ensemble cast commit to their roles with naturalistic gusto.
  78. Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara
    “Fanatical” is both a truly appalling story and a peek into something darker and more sinister about the way social groups form and evolve — and devolve, too — when the internet mediates it all.
  79. Union
    Union is as interested in intra-union disputes as it is in the fight writ large. But the external obstacles are clear as well.
  80. Exhibiting Forgiveness
    Forgiveness may not be about making nice. Filling in a painful gap may not lead to tidy reconciliation. Still, something true will appear. Kaphar may be new to feature filmmaking, but that’s some grown wisdom.
  81. Goodrich
    Keaton’s an old pro at getting audiences to love a well-intentioned jerk, and the script gets good chuckles out of his inconsiderate attempts at generosity.
  82. High Tide
    With his exceptionally lived-in performance, Pigossi brings Lourenço’s heartbreaking emotions to life, making even the script’s contrivances feel natural.
  83. Nocturnes
    The moths remain a puzzle of data that awaits analysis. Dutta and Srinivasan’s understated approach shows research and nature in action without pretending to make a forest give up its secrets.
  84. Rumours
    Sporadically ingenious, occasionally chilling and entirely bonkers, Rumours sees Maddin (writing and directing with his longtime collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson) abandoning his more familiar black-and-white, silent-film aesthetic for vibrant color.
  85. Woman of the Hour
    As a drama, Woman of the Hour is effective and infuriating.
  86. The Line
    If the movie’s portrayal of rivalrous (and homoerotic) hypermasculinity doesn’t always seem original, it is nevertheless realized with seriousness and vigor.
  87. Brothers
    For a road-trip buddy comedy, a greater crime than being unfunny is perhaps, amid all of the shenanigans, being dull. That is partly the feeling one is left with in the R-rated movie Brothers, which, even with an A-list cast, seems to move on autopilot through all of its pit stops.
  88. Smile 2
    Smile 2, directed by Parker Finn, is more thematically ambitious than the original, which also allows Finn to stage more satisfyingly ridiculous kills and ramp up its air of delirium
  89. Anora
    This is a story of wealth, and power, and what love can and can’t overcome. But it’s also about something far more heart-rending: what it means to be accustomed to being looked at one way, and then experiencing, out of the blue, what it feels like to actually be seen.
  90. Lonely Planet
    For this to work, the relationship needs a certain element of inevitability and comfort. Theirs is stilted.
  91. Pavements
    The low-key and never very mainstream Pavement seems like the last band that would get this treatment, and that’s the joke. But it also makes the band the perfect subject for what Pavements is slyly doing, and quite brilliantly, too.
  92. Separated
    If Separated is likely too straightforward — too much of a conventional issue documentary — to be remembered as one of Morris’s richest films, it is not as if the director has abandoned his sense of profound absurdity.
  93. Patrice: The Movie
    While Jetter and Wickham’s political fight is not resolved as of the end of the movie, the thread in which Jetter works to raise money for the new van she needs to commute affordably to her job has a crowd-pleasing finish.
  94. The Menendez Brothers
    To the extent the film has appeal, it is of the tabloid variety.
  95. Daytime Revolution
    The movie’s quiet star is Douglas himself. Whether gently asking a tense Rubin about his upbringing, or helping Ono with her “box of smiles,” Douglas’s kindness and intellectual curiosity are more compelling than any political argument.
  96. Bad Genius
    Despite the film’s aims at spiky commentary, the class rebellion mostly serves as the thin wrapping to, at best, a middling heist movie that loses some of the punchy tension of the original’s getaway sequences. At its worst, it’s no more than a teenage soap opera.
  97. Piece By Piece
    Piece By Piece sidesteps feeling rote by doing something that seems, frankly, bizarre. That it works at all is a product of the quirky form fitting the subject well. It’s chaotic, sure. But that’s the fun of it.
  98. We Live in Time
    Almut’s ambitions give her spark and grit, and they make the character appealingly contemporary, as does Pugh’s vibrancy and emotionally charged performance. The actress handles the shifting periods and deepening drama adroitly, even when the filmmakers begin selling out her character.
  99. The Apprentice
    The only news here — and, really, the greatest surprise — is how thoroughly this ribald, at times predictably unflattering movie humanizes its protagonist, a classic American striver.
  100. Mad About the Boy: The Noel Coward Story
    The documentary’s biggest challenge is shaping Coward’s biography into a satisfying roller coaster of highs and lows.
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