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. Good One
    Good One is the writer and director India Donaldson’s feature debut, and an astounding one, full of the kind of emotional detail that can only come from personal experience.
  2. Tampopo
    Mr. Itami often strains after comic effects that remain elusive. The most appealing thing about Tampopo is that he never stops trying. A funny sensibility is at work here.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    I Know Where I'm Going!
    This simple story line is developed with considerable imagination, wit and emotional insight into a thoroughly en-joyable and exhilarating romantic experience.
  4. Blow Out
    Yet more important than anything else about Blow Out is its total, complete and utter preoccupation with film itself as a medium in which, as Mr. De Palma has said along with a number of other people, style really is content.
  5. The Magician
    This picture is full of extraordinary thrills that flow and collide on several levels of emotion and intellect. And it swarms with sufficient melodrama of the blood-chilling, flesh-creeping sort to tingle the hide of the least brainy addict of out-right monster films.
  6. Ten
    A work of inspired simplicity.
  7. Playground
    This is the first feature from the writer-director Laura Wandel, and it’s a knockout, as flawlessly constructed as it is harrowing.
  8. Tangerine
    Tangerine encompasses dizzying multitudes — it’s a neo-screwball chase flick with a dash of Rainer Werner Fassbinder — but mostly, movingly, it is a female-friendship movie about two people who each started life with an XY chromosome set.
  9. sex, lies, and videotape
    Astonishing... One of the freshest American films of the decade. [4 Aug 1989]
    • The New York Times
  10. The Remains of the Day
    Looks grand without being overdressed, it is full of feeling without being sentimental. Here’s a film for adults. It’s also about time to recognize that Mr. Ivory is one of our finest directors. [5 November 1993, p. C1]
    • The New York Times
  11. The Tillman Story
    This devastating film persuasively portrays them (Tillman family) as finer, more morally sturdy people than the cynical chain of command that lied to them and used their son as a propaganda tool.
  12. To Be or Not to Be
    In a spirit of levity, contused by frequent doses of shock, Mr. Lubitsch has set his actors to performing a spy-thriller of fantastic design amid the ruins and frightful oppressions of Nazi-in-vaded Warsaw. To say it is callous and macabre is understating the case.
  13. Room
    While it flickers with grace and imagination during its initial half, largely because of Jack, it devolves into a dreary, platitudinous therapy movie in its second, largely because of Ma.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Murder of Fred Hampton
    Although it is unabashedly biased and it is flawed in technical execution, it emerges as a disturbingly somber illustration of some of the ills that beset us and our social system.
  15. Dog Day Afternoon
    Dog Day Afternoon is a melodrama, based on fact, about a disastrously illplanned Brooklyn bank robbery, and it's beautifully acted by performers who appear to have grown up on the city's sidewalks in the heat and hopelessness of an endless midsummer.
  16. An Elephant Sitting Still
    Unsparing as Hu’s anatomy of moral drift may be, there is something graceful in his sympathetic attention to lives defined almost entirely by disappointment and diminished hope. Unlike the titular elephant, the film never stops moving, and by the end, instead of feeling beaten down, the viewer is likely to feel moved as well.
  17. The Wolf House
    The film surprises, with incredible force, in every one of its 75 minutes.
  18. In the Rearview
    The van’s familiar interior has a way of underlining how many other millions across history have had to escape military aggression. Hamela’s work as driver and documentarian reflects that reality while offering a spirit of resilience.
  19. Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé
    I don’t know if it’s entirely possible to be supremely conscious of one’s self and yet be vividly unselfconscious, but that’s where Beyoncé finds herself.
  20. Anatomy of a Fall
    In a sense, Triet has mapped a path to nowhere. You can respect her choice intellectually and still walk away grumbling in frustration.
  21. The English Patient
    A stunning feat of literary adaptation as well as a purely cinematic triumph.
  22. Fallen Leaves
    Fallen Leaves is consistently funny, but its laughs arrive without fanfare. They slide in calmly, at times obliquely in eccentric details, offbeat juxtapositions, taciturn exchanges, long pauses and amiably barbed insults.
  23. Nebraska
    This is a comedy, with plenty of acutely funny lines, a handful of sharp sight gags and a few minutes of pure, perfect madcap. But a grim, unmistakable shadow falls across its wintry landscape.
  24. Like Water for Chocolate
    Food and passion create a sublime alchemy in Like Water for Chocolate, a Mexican film whose characters experience life so intensely that they sometimes literally smolder.
  25. Ordinary People
    A moving, intelligent and funny film about disasters that are commonplace to everyone except the people who experience them. Not since Robert Benton's "Kramer vs. Kramer" has there been a movie that so effectively catches the look, sound and temper of a particular kind of American existence.
  26. Under the Sand
    Mr. Ozon gives the movie to Ms. Rampling, whose performance is like a perfectly executed piano etude, finding precise, impossibly subtle shadings of pleasure, confusion and distress.
  27. Written on the Wind
    The trouble with this romantic picture—among other minor things, including Mr. Stack's absurd performance and another even more so by Miss Malone—is that nothing really happens, the complications within the characters are never clear and the sloppy, self-pitying fellow at the center of the whole thing is a bore.
  28. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
    Spider-Verse achieves the challenging task of building a sequel that not only replicates the charms of the first film but also expands the multiverse concept, the main characters and the stakes, without overinflating the premise or shamelessly capitalizing on fan service.
  29. Stand Clear of the Closing Doors
    A small miracle of a film.
  30. Heavenly Creatures
    Stylish and eerily compelling before it overplays its campy excesses, Heavenly Creatures does have a feverish intensity to recommend it.
  31. Richard III
    For all the talk nowadays about a revival of swank, nothing in contemporary fashion can compete with the glamour of upper-class English life in the 1930's as it is elegantly caricatured in Ian McKellen's updated Richard III.
  32. They Were Expendable
    It is nostalgic, warm with sentiment and full of fight in every foot. It is hard to commend any actor above the rest. Each plays his part well.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Black Narcissus
    Powell and Press-burger may have a picture that will disturb and antagonize some, they also have in Black Narcissus an artistic accomplishment of no small proportions.
  34. Million Dollar Baby
    With its careful, unassuming naturalism, its visual thrift and its emotional directness, Million Dollar Baby feels at once contemporary and classical, a work of utter mastery that at the same time has nothing in particular to prove.
  35. 42: Forty Two Up
    When this hugely ambitious project began, it was a longitudinal study of class divisions among English schoolchildren. But time and persistence have turned it into much more.
  36. Hard Boiled
    Mr. Woo does, in fact, seem to be a very brisk, talented director with a gift for the flashy effect and the bizarre confrontation.
  37. Last Days in Vietnam
    The story is full of emotion and danger, heroism and treachery, but it is told in a mood of rueful retrospect rather than simmering partisan rage.
  38. Krisha
    When Krisha stands in the kitchen, wild-eyed amid all these human sights and sounds, you see a woman overwhelmed by life itself, as well as a movie that is an expressionistic tour de force.
  39. Dawson City: Frozen Time
    Dawson City now enters that time line as an instantaneously recognizable masterpiece.
  40. Shadows
    Shadows is an unfinished picture in every sense of the word. Yet it is fitfully dynamic, endowed with a raw but vibrant strength, conveying an illusion of being a record of real people, and it is incontestably sincere.
  41. Rebecca
    An altogether brilliant film, haunting, suspenseful, handsome and handsomely played.
  42. The Inheritance
    The Inheritance, Ephraim Asili’s debut feature film, beautifully abandons genre to consider questions about community, art and Black liberation.
  43. The Babadook
    The brilliance of The Babadook, beyond Ms. Kent’s skillful deployment of the tried-and-true visual and aural techniques of movie horror, lies in its interlocking ambiguities.
  44. Dead Ringers
    What makes the performance(s) even better is that Mr. Irons invests these bizarre, potentially freakish characters with so much intelligence and so much real feeling.
  45. Little Men
    It’s a subtle movie, alert to the almost imperceptible currents of feeling that pass between its title characters.
  46. Boogie Nights
    The movie's special gift happens to be Mark Wahlberg, who gives a terrifically appealing performance in this tricky role.
  47. The Kids Are All Right
    It is outrageously funny without ever exaggerating for comic effect, and heartbreaking with only minimal melodramatic embellishment.
  48. Welcome to Chechnya
    Welcome to Chechnya is a moving and vital indictment of mass persecution.
  49. The Straight Story
    Switching gears radically, bravely defying conventional wisdom about what it takes to excite moviegoers, Lynch presents the flip side of "Blue Velvet" and turns it into a supremely improbable triumph.
  50. The Great Escape
    There are a few moments when Richard Attenborough as the chief engineer of the whole project demonstrates some impressive strength and poise. But for much longer than is artful or essential, The Great Escape grinds out its tormenting story without a peek beneath the surface of any man, without a real sense of human involvement. It's a strictly mechanical adventure with make-believe men.
  51. What Now? Remind Me
    Gentle on the eyes but stirring to the mind, What Now? Remind Me is an extraordinary, almost indescribably personal reflection on life, love, suffering and impermanence.
  52. Manakamana
    By focusing on such a narrow slice of Nepali life, Ms. Spray and Mr. Velez have ceded any totalizing claim on the truth and instead settled for a perfect incompleteness.
  53. Cave of Forgotten Dreams
    The 3-D is sometimes less than transporting, and the chanting voices in the composer Ernst Reijseger's new-agey score tended to remind me of my last spa massage. Yet what a small price to pay for such time traveling!
  54. Our Land (Nuestra Tierra)
    Drawing attention to the filming technology, Martel implicitly reminds us that Chocobar’s case only came to trial because it was filmed and uploaded to the internet in the first place.
  55. The Big Sleep
    The Big Sleep is one of those pictures in which so many cryptic things occur amid so much involved and devious plotting that the mind becomes utterly confused. And, to make it more aggravating, the brilliant detective in the case is continuously making shrewd deductions which he stubbornly keeps to himself.
  56. King of the Hill
    With warmth, wit and none of the usual overlay of nostalgia, King of the Hill presents the scary yet liberating precariousness of life on the edge.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Carrie
    Mr. de Palma has ordered universal overacting. Piper Laurie does it with considerable grace—the wicked witch in a children's pantomime. The marvel, though, is Sissy Spacek. She makes us perfectly aware that she is overacting, and yet she is very effective. Her hysteria is far too hysterical. Her delight in being taken to the prom is far too radiant. But it moves us.
  58. The Red Turtle
    The Red Turtle practices a minor, gentle magic. It wants you to smile and say, “Ahh,” rather than gasp and say, “Wow.” But somehow the understatement can feel a bit overdone, as if the film were hovering over you, awaiting an expression of admiration.
  59. Hope and Glory
    Hope and Glory has an invitingly nostalgic spirit and a fine eye for the magical details that a little boy might notice.
  60. How to Survive a Plague
    In the words of Mr. Kramer: "The government didn't get us the drugs. No one else got us the drugs. We, Act Up, got those drugs out there. That is the proudest achievement that the gay population of this world can ever claim."
  61. Chasing Coral
    It’s an environmental tragedy of our own making, the film heartbreakingly argues, that has little hope of being reversed without immediate human intervention.
  62. Katrina Babies
    Katrina Babies is deeply personal and thoughtfully political.
  63. Loveless
    With its fastidious framing and angry-tough temperament, Loveless...earns its air of careful foreboding.
  64. Showing Up
    Together, Reichardt and Williams — with little dialogue and boundless generosity — lucidly articulate everything that Lizzy will never say and need not say, opening a window on the world and turning this wondrous, determined, gloriously grumpy woman into a sublime work of art.
  65. In the Bedroom
    When a film as profoundly quiet as In the Bedroom comes along, it feels almost miraculous, as if a shimmering piece of art had slipped below the radar and through the minefield of commerce.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Thin Man
    An excellent combination of comedy and excitement.
  67. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert
    It’s a fan’s dream, to be sure. But in getting so close to a man who has so often been turned into a caricature, “EPiC” goes beyond just the concert: We enjoy both the performance and the man who loved nothing more than to perform.
  68. Barbara
    Barbara is a film about the old Germany from one of the best directors working in the new: Christian Petzold. For more than a decade Mr. Petzold has been making his mark on the international cinema scene with smart, tense films that resemble psychological thrillers, but are distinguished by their strange story turns, moral thorns, visual beauty and filmmaking intelligence.
  69. Of Gods and Men
    Of Gods and Men is supple and suspenseful, appropriately austere without being overly harsh, and without forgoing the customary pleasures of cinema. The performances are strong, the narrative gathers momentum as it progresses, and the camera is alive to the beauty of the Algerian countryside.
  70. The Truth vs. Alex Jones
    The Truth vs. Alex Jones offers a lesson in just how vicious and pervasive conspiracy theories can become and a chilling portrait of how little they may trouble their purveyors.
  71. To Die For
    An irresistible black comedy and a wicked delight. [27 Sept 1995]
  72. One Cut of the Dead
    Ueda’s wonderfully tight script is divided into three acts, with the second and third parts casting the opener in an entirely new light — so much so that I rewatched it as soon as the movie ended.
  73. Museo
    In spite of a meandering story and some fuzzy passages, there is a touch of magic in Museo, a sense of wonder and curiosity that imparts palpable excitement.
  74. Nobody's Fool
    If Nobody's Fool is often heartbreaking in its sense of loss, it is also hopeful in the strength of its emotions and the sheer beauty of its performances.
  75. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
    Curiously exhilarating. Some of this comes from the simple thrill of witnessing something, or rather everything, done well.
  76. Stranger Than Paradise
    The film has no big scenes, and it takes a while to get the hang of it, but once you do, it's as funny as it is wise. The three lead performers are extremely good, never for a second betraying the film's consistently deadpan style.
  77. Bonnie and Clyde
    It is a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredations of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cutups in "Thoroughly Modern Millie."
  78. The Beaches of Agnès
    The images are as delightful, unexpected and playfully uninhibited as Ms. Varda, perhaps the only filmmaker who has both won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and strolled around an art exhibition while costumed as a potato (not at the same time).
  79. Children of Hiroshima
    Mr. Shindo's world is sad and inspiring in familiar ways, but what makes it so memorable is that it is also gorgeous and strange.
  80. West Side Story
    What they have done with West Side Story in knocking it down and moving it from stage to screen is to reconstruct its fine material into nothing short of a cinema masterpiece...In every respect, the recreation of the Arthur Laurents-Leonard Bernstein musical in the dynamic forms of motion pictures is superbly and appropriately achieved.
  81. On-Gaku: Our Sound
    In a world of C.G.I.-everything, “On-Gaku” comes as a refreshing blast from the past.
  82. Raiders of the Lost Ark
    One of the most deliriously funny, ingenious and stylish American adventure movies ever made.
  83. I Saw the TV Glow
    What’s most effective, and staggering, is Schoenbrun’s storytelling, which weaves together half-remembered childhood elements in the way they might turn up in a nightmare, weaving in sounds and lights and colors and the gloriously inexplicable.
  84. Deliver Us from Evil
    Neither sensationalistic nor sentimental, Ms. Berg’s film is clear-sighted, tough-minded and devastating, a portrait of individual criminality and institutional indifference, a study in the betrayal of trust and the irresponsibility of authority.
  85. May December
    Moore and Portman are tremendous, but it’s Melton’s anguished performance that gives the movie its slow-building emotional power.
  86. Maidan
    Maidan is a film of scale and immediacy, finding artistry, for better or worse, in bearing witness.
  87. Say Anything...
    The predictable surface of Say Anything is constantly being cracked by characters who think and talk like real people and by John Cusack's terrifically natural, appealing Lloyd.
  88. Drug War
    The brilliant, unsettling action scenes — ugly, savage, dehumanizing — speak volumes.
  89. The Great Beauty
    A deliriously alive movie, The Great Beauty is the story of a man, a city, a country and a cinema, though not necessarily in that order.
  90. Tall: The American Skyscraper and Louis Sullivan
    The film is useful in part because it is so frankly argumentative. The critical appreciation of art is always advanced more effectively by partisanship than by neutrality.
  91. Cover-Up
    Cover-Up is a model of efficient, engaging documentary filmmaking; it looks good, for starters, and it moves energetically.
  92. April
    April is easy to admire, but Kulumbegashvili’s use of art-film conventions can be wearyingly familiar, especially when the leisurely pace turns to a crawl.
  93. Vitalina Varela
    Vitalina Varela is socially conscious, but dreamlike, elegiac. And an inquiry, too, into the abilities and deficiencies of film as a medium to illuminate human consciousness and experience. It’s essential cinema.
  94. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
    Mr. Sturges as author and director, is thoroughly up to his stinging style in this film. Situations spark, dialogue crackles and his camera works like a playful Peeping Tom. And from all of the actors he gets performances that make them look like inspired comedians.
  95. Happening
    Throughout, Diwan’s gaze remains clear, direct, fearless. She shows you a part of life that the movies rarely do. By which I mean: She shows you a woman who desires, desires to learn, have sex, bear children on her terms, be sovereign — a woman who, in choosing to live her life, risks becoming a criminal and dares to be free.
  96. Patton
    A huge, initially ambivalent but finally adoring, Pop portrait of one of the most brilliant and outrageous American military figures of the last one hundred years.
  97. The Lost Daughter
    Only a superficial reading of The Lost Daughter would describe it as a meditation on the twin tugs of children and career. It is, instead, a dark and deeply disturbing exploration of something much more raw, and even radical: the notion that motherhood can plunder the self in irreparable ways.
  98. Black Mother
    In its poetic, elliptical, concise way, this film makes a grand statement: The black mother is the mother of life itself. And the gaze directed at the black faces and bodies in “Black Mother” is not a male gaze, or a documentarian’s gaze. It is a gaze of love.
  99. The Big Sick
    I fell hard for both Ms. Kazan and Mr. Nanjiani and The Big Sick, which tells a great story with waves of deep feeling and questions of identity and makes the whole thing feel like a breeze.
  100. Argo
    It's a doozy of a story and so borderline ridiculous that it sounds - ta-da! - like something that could have been cooked up only by Hollywood.
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