The New York Times' Scores

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For 20,278 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: 9,380 out of 20278
  2. Mixed: 8,434 out of 20278
  3. Negative: 2,464 out of 20278
20278 movie reviews
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  1. Our Brand Is Crisis
    It’s cute for a while. The stars are pros, and their scenes, often staged so that the characters are within breathing distance of each other, have snap.
  2. Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse
    It’s all too dumb and ribald for most tastes, but if you liked all the zombie comedies that came before, well, here’s another one.
  3. Insiang (1976)
    Mr. Brocka likes to go big and blunt, but in Insiang, he does his strongest work when he delivers his politics quietly.
  4. Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension
    The Paranormal Activity movies have always been about carnival-ride sensations, the narrative through-line secondary. That’s fortunate, because those seeking closure to what continuity there has been will go home mostly disappointed.
  5. India's Daughter
    India’s Daughter is a portrait of a place and time. And for all of its horrors, the movie has a positive message, too: Out of tragedy — and this case is just one of many — can come galvanizing change.
  6. Crumbs
    This debut feature from the Spanish-born director Miguel Llansó can’t claim a coherent mythology, but it has a lo-fi charm and humor.
  7. Suffragette
    Suffragette is an admirably modest movie. It does not quite have the grandeur and force of “Selma,” and the script has a few too many glowingly emotive speeches. The final turns of the tale are suspenseful, but also a bit frantic. But it is also stirring and cleareyed — the best kind of history lesson.
  8. The Pearl Button
    A master of voice-over and metaphor (the title alone has an amazing payoff), [Mr. Guzmán] sifts through essential truths and draws links between Chile’s past and present inhabitants.
  9. The Looking Glass
    The fact that the film’s most resonant and likable portions are those in which nothing actually happens almost too nicely encapsulates why The Looking Glass falls sadly flat throughout much of its running time.
  10. Difret
    Shot in sunny locales, Difret has an earnestness that hovers between plain-spoken and pedestrian, and there are scenes and sequences that just don’t come together as written and edited, no matter how admirable the film’s existence is.
  11. Nasty Baby
    Mr. Silva’s accomplishment is not just in pulling off a jarring plot twist, but in handling a change of tone that turns the movie — and the audience’s assumptions about it — upside down.
  12. Extraordinary Tales
    Harnessing a range of appropriately spooky-oddball narrators and striking visual styles — including graphic novels, early photography and Expressionist painting — the Spanish director and animator Raul Garcia simultaneously honors and reimagines.
  13. I Smile Back
    Sarah Silverman burns through the indie drama “I Smile Back” without making the slightest move to gain our sympathy.
  14. Bone Tomahawk
    Mr. Russell is far from the only reason to see this unexpected low-budget treat, a witty fusion of western, horror and comedy that gallops to its own beat. That rhythm is dictated entirely by the writer and director, S. Craig Zahler, a novelist and musician who flips genre conventions upside-down and cares more about character than body count.
  15. Tokyo Tribe
    "The Warriors” and the “Mad Max” films will come to mind as you watch Tokyo Tribe, and from scene to scene Mr. Sono’s visual inventiveness and sure hand with action stand up to the comparison. The cumulative effect, however, is numbing.
  16. Rock the Kasbah
    Clichéd, enervating, insulting — it’s tough to settle on a single pejorative for Rock the Kasbah, though abysmal might do.
  17. Jem and the Holograms
    There are a few sweet moments early in Jem and the Holograms.... But then the movie’s lumbering, overstuffed, unfocused plot shows up, and whatever high hopes we might have had for this latest exploitation of 1980s nostalgia are slowly ground away.
  18. The Last Witch Hunter
    A smorgasbord of empty calories, the Vin Diesel vehicle The Last Witch Hunter, for all its overstuffed visuals, leaves you hungry. But not for more.
  19. Heart of a Dog
    Heart of a Dog is about telling and remembering and forgetting, and how we put together the fragments that make up our lives — their flotsam and jetsam, highs and lows, meaningful and slight details, shrieking and weeping headline news.
  20. Jason and Shirley
    Flashbacks and fantasy sequences undercut the claustrophobic atmosphere. What’s left is amateurish play acting — pointless for anyone who hasn’t seen “Portrait of Jason” and redundant for those who have.
  21. Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988)
    While the word “feminism” is never uttered in this movie, Jane B. par Agnès V. is an exemplary feminist work, one in which two female artists, self-aware but hardly self-conscious, create beauty by exchanging notes.
  22. The Boy from Geita
    [A] brutally powerful documentary.
  23. Homemakers
    The movie is thin on true narrative, preferring to study Irene without shedding quite enough light on her background or tracking her development.
  24. Field Niggas
    While the movie’s multiple images are never less than numinous, and its rhythms sometimes skirt the strangely seductive, this astonishing movie is the opposite of hypnotic.
  25. Tab Hunter Confidential
    Jeffrey Schwarz’s documentary portrait Tab Hunter Confidential is as mild-mannered and blandly likable as its subject.
  26. All Things Must Pass
    This movie makes you appreciate anew the one-on-one social dimension lost in the music industry’s headlong switch to digital downloads.
  27. 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.
  28. Mi America
    Mi America is not just about a murder case but about how residents of divided communities share a history and deal with one another, sometimes hopefully, always warily.
  29. The Russian Woodpecker
    Whatever the facts, Mr. Gracia’s messily structured film works best as a document of fear in today’s Ukraine and as a kind of ghost story about the Soviet Union.
  30. Truth
    More than most docudramas about fairly recent events, it is so well written and acted that it conveys a convincing illusion of veracity.
  31. Experimenter
    Mr. Almereyda takes Milgram, his work and ideas seriously but doesn’t suffocate them: Despite the story’s freight, the laboratory shocks and Milgram’s insistent melancholia, Experimenter is a nimble, low-frequency high.
  32. The Assassin
    The film is intriguing, but ultimately opaque, a lovely, inert object that offers, in the name of movie love, an escape from so much that is vital and interesting about movies.
  33. 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.
  34. Goosebumps
    More often than not, Mr. Letterman uses his movie as a toy chest of characters more than as a medium, the muggy Mr. Black included.
  35. Crimson Peak
    The film is too busy, and in some ways too gross, to sustain an effective atmosphere of dread. It tumbles into pastiche just when it should be swooning and sighing with earnest emotion.
  36. Beasts of No Nation
    The movie itself is an effective nightmare, and a solid piece of filmmaking, strong enough to make you wish that it could have borne the full weight of the tragedy it set out to depict.
  37. Bridge of Spies
    Like some of Mr. Spielberg’s other recent movies, notably “Lincoln” and “Munich,” this one is a meticulously detailed period piece that revisits the anxieties of the past while also speaking to those of the present. Yet it also feels lighter than those films, less weighted down by accreted history or maybe by a sense of duty to its significance.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    A Ballerina's Tale
    Mr. George chooses to avoid the more heart-wrenching aspects of Ms. Copeland’s tough upbringing, and his presentation of her remarkable comeback is remarkably low on suspense.
  39. Xenia
    Xenia has been called a farce. But it is much more than that. Both the story and the performances are packed with raw emotion.
  40. A Faster Horse
    The tidbits we learn are wrapped in an unabashedly promotional tone that overestimates the global emotional attachment to this car’s muscular mythos. It’s difficult to believe that this tribute comes from the director who showed such delicacy in his appreciation of Jiro Ono’s art.
  41. Unbranded
    What lingers, though, are stirring vistas of the backcountry West, and admiration — for the Aggies’ achievement, Mr. Masters’s imagination and Mr. Baribeau’s skill in chronicling it all.
  42. Poached
    The subject matter is only part of what makes Poached one of the more unsettling documentaries to come along lately. The presentation is also pivotal.
  43. In My Father's House
    The story’s seemingly clear notions of guilt on one side and grievance on the other are gradually nudged in unexpected directions.
  44. Trash
    Trash is a shameless bid to recycle the mystique of “Slumdog Millionaire,” its likable, overrated prototype.
  45. Short Skin
    The film opts for a somber if gentle tone that, given the story, is equally ill suited.
  46. Victoria
    Victoria is a sensational cinematic stunt.
  47. A Woman Like Me
    The rambling, uncertain tone engendered by Ms. Sichel’s striving to align her Buddhist beliefs with the harsh realities of terminal illness also weakens her story’s gravitational pull.
  48. Reversion
    The sci-fi premise that drives the thriller Reversion is probably close enough to being a reality that the movie should raise goose bumps. Instead it’s uninvolving, thanks to uninspired acting and a script that doesn’t take the central idea very far.
  49. Dukhtar
    Its principal merit is the quiet authority of Ms. Mumtaz, who combines a mother’s passionate concern with glimmers of an awakening consciousness.
  50. Knock Knock
    Knock Knock ends on a not entirely satisfactory note, but delivers a pretty mean genre wallop getting there (with almost zero gore).
  51. The Final Girls
    A horror comedy that proves that with the right actors you can make an amusing movie even if a lot of your ideas are borrowed.
  52. Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom
    What Winter on Fire lacks in journalistic detachment it more than makes up for in fidelity to the feelings and motives of the participants. It’s more than just a portrait of terror, anger, desperation and resolve; it communicates those emotions directly, into the bloodstream and nervous system of the audience.
  53. Yakuza Apocalypse
    Mr. Miike’s narrative model is essentially the Kool-Aid commercials of the 1980s: Periodically, somebody new bursts into the room or onto the street, and a fight or something bizarre takes place.
  54. Pan
    The dominant emotion in Pan is the desperation of the filmmakers, who frantically try to pander to a young audience they don’t seem to respect, understand or trust.
  55. Steve Jobs
    Steve Jobs is a rich and potent document of the times, an expression of both the awe that attends sophisticated new consumer goods and the unease that trails in the wake of their arrival.... Mostly, though, it is a formally audacious, intellectually energized entertainment, a powerful challenge to the lazy conventions of Hollywood storytelling and a feast for connoisseurs of contemporary screen acting.
  56. Guilty (Talvar)
    Mr. Khan is this movie’s best weapon. Playing a familiar character type, the world-weary detective, he gives a performance, full of small, sly details, that doesn’t seem familiar at all.
  57. (T)error
    Because of its shortcomings, (T)error serves as evidence of a broken system rather than an indictment of it. Yet such evidence is worrisome and points to a threat to civil rights.
  58. The Forbidden Room
    On one viewing, at least, it is a typically impenetrable Maddin film: zany one minute, pompous the next. Ardent Maddin admirers, of whom I am not one, might discern a grand design of what often feels like a post-Freudian horror comedy.
  59. Keith Richards: Under the Influence
    You certainly feel as if you were getting to know the man as he really is, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re gaining much insight.
  60. Going Away
    It’s a quietly compelling story.
  61. Taken by Storm: The Art of Storm Thorgerson and Hipgnosis
    Roddy Bogawa’s Taken by Storm taps that intimate, thrilling ritual of another era: picking a record in a music store, beguiled by a mysterious album cover before the needle has even dropped.
  62. He Named Me Malala
    It only occasionally delivers the kind of unguarded moment that makes you feel as if you’re getting beneath the media image, and it is not at all interested in discussing broader issues raised by Ms. Yousafzai’s fame.
  63. Brand: A Second Coming
    Brand: A Second Coming wants to tell the story of a man overcoming temptation and trading a shallow approach to life for something more sustaining and profound. It’s undone by its own shallowness, and by the limited appeal of its subject.
  64. Freeheld
    It’s a bummer to see Ms. Page and especially Ms. Moore — who at this point in her career can usually act her way out of any cliché — so badly stranded by a generic script, credited to Ron Nyswaner, and by a director, Peter Sollett, who can’t figure out how to lift his actors and the material above the bad writing.
  65. This Changes Everything
    Moving, humane and unfailingly polite, This Changes Everything presents a Panglossian view of approaching disaster that (according to the film’s publicity notes) seeks to empower rather than to scare. But we should be scared.
  66. Addicted to Fresno
    You can get away with this sort of thing if your humor is sharp, but here it’s mostly sophomoric and rarely surprising.
  67. A Christmas Horror Story
    Unsparingly gory and on occasion actually shock-inducing, it can’t help falling prey to Genre Overreach syndrome, in which horror fans turned horror creators maniacally pile up their favorite terrorizing tropes, as if they’d never get the chance again.
  68. Deathgasm
    In between the rampant four-letter words and the occasional partial nudity are likable attempts at humor — some sweet, some saucy.
  69. Partisan
    The screenwriters, Ariel Kleiman (who is also the director) and Sarah Cyngler, have cut their story loose from any real significance, leaving us with Gregori, who has no discernible political views and no unifying beliefs, even delusional ones.
  70. Northern Soul
    Funny and feisty, gritty and sometimes grim, this first feature from the photographer Elaine Constantine delivers a sweaty snapshot of a very specific time and place.
  71. Sherpa
    An exceptionally absorbing documentary.
  72. Jafar Panahi's Taxi
    Like Mr. Panahi’s cab, his film is equipped with both windows and mirrors. It’s reflective and revealing, intimate and wide-ranging, compact and moving.
  73. Shout Gladi Gladi
    [A] thorough, powerfully straightforward documentary.
  74. Shanghai
    The spectacular international cast... bring a lot of life to the movie’s uncooperative story material.
  75. The Martian
    Mr. Damon’s Everyman quality (he’s our Jimmy Stewart) helps scale the story down, but what makes this epic personal is Mr. Scott’s filmmaking, in which every soaring aerial shot of the red planet is answered by the intimate landscape of a face.
  76. The Creeping Garden
    Throughout, the filmmakers achieve the rare documentary feat of delving into a topic from multiple angles without slathering it in adulation.
  77. Labyrinth of Lies
    It is content to be a chilly, disquieting study of a society in a state of denial until the truth is bared.
  78. The Walk
    Almost magically, The Walk transforms itself into a beguiling caper movie, full of comic energy and nimble ingenuity.
  79. Sleepless in New York
    There’s something woebegone about the film itself as it staggers along, ever in danger of tipping into the abyss inhabited by one of its subjects.
  80. Becoming Bulletproof
    While the scenes shown from “Bulletproof,” the western they complete, are haphazard, that’s of little concern. If you want to see real courage, it’s not in that movie anyway. It’s in this documentary.
  81. Western
    With its evocative landscapes and its non-narrative, cinéma vérité style, Western is a layered, atmospheric chronicle of living traditions like bullfights and rodeos, mariachi bands and Texas two-steps. Yet the film also records the tremors of change.
  82. Wildlike
    The Wildlike landscapes are exhilarating, but when the film works, it’s because of the interiors.
  83. Lost in Hong Kong
    Perhaps because it tries too hard to be too many things, the movie loses its punch.
  84. Misunderstood
    A buoyantly funny, sometimes desperately sad film.
  85. The Keeping Room
    Mr. Barber can work up a fair sense of menace, but he seems to have directed most of the talented cast to speak their lines in a mannered fashion learned from other movies.
  86. Ashby
    Ashby is a movie divided against itself. It’s a comedy afraid of being too funny lest its macho sentimentality seem even more ridiculous than it is, and a drama afraid of appearing too serious lest you dismiss it as hogwash.
  87. Pay the Ghost
    Dan Kay’s filament-thin story, accessorized with flapping vultures and disturbing graffiti, relies entirely on Mr. Cage’s desperate-dad energy.
  88. The Green Inferno
    The film reawakens long-repudiated notions of white supremacy and such, but Mr. Roth is surely not trying to peddle them. He’s merely seeing if he can replicate the formula of the subgenre. And he does, fairly slickly, in fact.
  89. Hotel Transylvania 2
    Some jokes actually work (a GPS-voice gag induced unforced laughter), and the whole thing is amiable and colorful and surprisingly low on body-function gags. It may not kill you to take your kids.
  90. A Brave Heart: The Lizzie Velasquez Story
    The makers of A Brave Heart: The Lizzie Velasquez Story leave a few too many questions unanswered, but their subject’s immense optimism steamrolls through the documentary’s shortcomings. Indeed, there seems to be little this woman can’t vanquish.
  91. Finders Keepers
    Revealing its humanity slowly and a little tardily, Finders Keepers finally does justice to its dueling antiheroes.
  92. Mission to Lars
    Documentaries about disabilities don’t come any smarter or more touching than Mission to Lars, a beautiful sibling road trip tale with a heavy-metal flourish.
  93. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon
    Focusing on the magazine and not its offshoots, the film is uproarious, not for what its many talking heads say but for its astonishing procession of brilliant, boundary-breaching illustrations and captions (augmented by some animation), many of which are as explosively funny today as they were when first published.
  94. Mississippi Grind
    Mississippi Grind itself may be a bit of a throwback to the lived-in, character-driven, landscape-besotted films of the 1970s, but it’s less a pastiche or a homage than the cinematic equivalent of a classic song, expertly covered.
  95. Stonewall
    The feisty, lovelorn Ray is far and away the strongest, most complex character, and Mr. Beauchamp gives him his due, even though too many of his speeches sound like a mix of biographical filler and boilerplate sloganeering.
  96. 99 Homes
    If 99 Homes is a scolding look at a society gone astray, it is also a minor masterpiece of suspense, as tightly wound as “Sicario,” Denis Villeneuve’s white-knuckle drug-war thriller, and almost as brutal.
  97. The Intern
    Mr. De Niro owns the movie from the moment he opens his mouth, and is staring into the camera and right at you.
  98. Office
    The songs in Office aren’t especially memorable. But it’s hard to care too much when you have a director who knows how to create tension by moving the camera and characters even while he’s delivering a nimble political softshoe with filmmaking dazzle.
  99. Veteran
    Mr. Ryoo (“The Unjust,” “The City of Violence”) isn’t known for his sense of humor, but Veteran is amusing throughout, even if the funny scenes are more subdued or go on a beat or two longer than American viewers are used to.
  100. Olvidados (Forgotten)
    While it would be a tall order to fully elucidate this complicated history in two hours, Olvidados is hamstrung by Mr. Bolado’s lack of focused direction and a convoluted plot.
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