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. The Paper Tigers
    Bao’s lighthearted, refreshing approach neither succumbs to whitewashing nor the model-minority myth. The film sticks to the action-comedy basics, which is just fine.
  2. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
    Self-pitying or smug, jaunty or crestfallen, callous or contrite, the movie’s fitful tone is fully yoked to Joaquin Phoenix’s sodden-to-sober lead performance.
  3. Reality Bites
    It takes a spectacular cast to pull off this kind of meandering romantic comedy, and Reality Bites couldn't have done better.
  4. Somewhere Between
    Somewhere Between presents an effortlessly moving but superficial profile of four bright Chinese girls and their adoptive American families.
  5. Rosewater
    Mr. Stewart’s interest in the material is obviously personal, but his movie transcends mere self-interest.
  6. Stranger Than Fiction
    While Stranger Than Fiction traffics in a bit of darkly funny existential anxiety, it also finds room for romantic fantasy and sentimental uplift.
  7. Cairo Time
    The time does pass agreeably enough, and if Cairo Time does not amount to much, it does evoke a wistful state of feeling and a complicated city with enough skill and sensitivity that you wish it had dared more.
  8. Arachnophobia
    The specifics of the spider rampage have been very enjoyably executed by Mr. Marshall and particularly well played by Mr. Daniels, whose dryly self-deprecating manner and underlying decency make him an irresistible hero. Arachnophobia falters only when it becomes too broad, as in a dopey nod to Psycho that captures none of Hitchcock's formal elegance, and in various minor characters who serve as comic grotesques, like the town's potato-chip-munching mortician. 
  9. Damsels in Distress
    Even if it did not have other charms, this peculiar, uneven campus comedy would be worth seeing for the delightful felicity of its dialogue.
  10. Selena
    On its own good-natured terms, Selena' is both pleasant to watch and instructive in familiarizing a movie audience with the Texan-Mexican borderland music known as Tejano.
  11. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
    "Final Reckoning” is flat-out ridiculous, but it’s a model example of blockbuster entertainment at its most highly polished, and I enjoyed it thoroughly, despite its clichés, extravagant violence and gung-ho militarism.
  12. Calm with Horses (The Shadow of Violence)
    The movie tries to convince you that Douglas is better than his worst self and can transcend the dehumanizing degradations in which he’s mired. But not even the filmmakers seem convinced, which may explain why they embrace baroque brutality topped by a dollop of audience-mollifying sentimentality.
  13. A Wolf at the Door
    As a piece of storytelling, A Wolf at the Door may be a tawdry little shocker. But on a visceral level, it is a knife to the gut.
  14. The Gospel According to André
    The director, Kate Novack, has delivered a film that’s detailed and affectionate, but also frustratingly static, making a point not to get in its subject’s way.
  15. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
    A Marvel movie, for sure. But a pretty interesting one, partly because it’s also a Ryan Coogler film, with the director’s signature interplay of genre touchstones, vivid emotions (emphasized by Ludwig Goransson’s occasionally tooth-rattling score) and allegorical implications.
  16. Chevalier
    That this movie — directed by the Canadian filmmaker Stephen Williams and written by Stefani Robinson — leans too mightily on romance to the detriment of exploring more fully his genius feels like a missed opportunity.
  17. Nowhere Boy
    It's a pleasant-enough creation story to revisit, one weighted down by melodrama and lifted up by some rocking tunes.
  18. Turning
    Onstage the Johnsons perform Mr. Hegarty's agreeably lush, intimate and often melancholy piano-based songs, accompanied by a string section.
  19. Desert Hearts
    Desert Hearts has no voice or style of its own. It's as flat as a recorded message from the telephone company.
  20. Legend of the Mountain (1979)
    All these attractions are a necessary balm given that Ho turns out to be a deeply uninvolving character (Mr. Shih mostly smiles, grimaces or looks amazed), a wan placeholder for a character in a narratively thin film that runs over three very leisurely hours.
  21. Queen of Hearts
    When the movie isn’t straining, the go-for-broke performances of Dyrholm and Lindh give it a specific, unusual tension — like the feeling you get when you’ve over-tightened a corkscrew and know the matter around it is about to crumble.
  22. Zathura: A Space Adventure
    In the enchanted limbo between waking and sleeping, Zathura feels both real and unreal, like a dream you could shake off at any moment.
  23. Medusa
    Though dressed in shock-value clothing, Medusa is also a straightforward character study, tackling issues like the scourge of Western beauty standards and the difficulties of leaving an abusive relationship along the way
  24. McEnroe
    There’s a lot more here for tennis fans than you get in average sports documentaries.
  25. The Darjeeling Limited
    The Darjeeling Limited amounts finally to a high-end, high-toned tourist adventure. I don’t mean this dismissively; it would be hypocritical of me to deny the delights of luxury travel to faraway lands. And Mr. Anderson’s eye for local color — the red-orange-yellow end of the spectrum in particular — is meticulous and admiring.
  26. The Peanuts Movie
    The Peanuts Movie may be simultaneously the most charming and the most daring experiment in human genetics ever conducted. At issue is whether the character summaries and back stories of fictional pop-culture figures can be passed from one generation to the next solely through DNA.
  27. Ronin
    Ronin can be watched as appreciatively for its hard-boiled performances as for its visceral excitement.
  28. The Wrecking Crew
    The action in The Wrecking Crew is so good, its fights so brisk and its car chases so lively, that it makes you wish its muscular leads, Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista, had starred in more decent action movies.
  29. Barney's Version
    In spite of Mr. Giamatti's ferociously energetic performance Barney's Version never figures out just who Barney is.
  30. The Swenkas
    Intriguing documentary.
  31. The Creeping Garden
    Throughout, the filmmakers achieve the rare documentary feat of delving into a topic from multiple angles without slathering it in adulation.
  32. Storm Boy
    Storm Boy tries to present itself as a modern fable, where the lessons learned relate directly to present-day concerns over the environment, industrialization and the marginalization of indigenous cultures. But these themes come across as didactic rather than moving.
  33. The Last Tree
    The film feels at times like it is trying to take on too much — plotlines are rushed, relationships feel unearned or not explained. Still, I can’t help but be impressed by Amoo’s attempts to direct a familiar narrative with such a complicated set of questions.
  34. Over the Hedge
    There is no poetry here and little thought.
  35. The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair
    It is a depressing story, certainly, as well as moving, confusing and, at a fast 72 minutes, at once undercooked and overpadded.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Dolemite
    Dolemite remains the Citizen Kane of kung fu pimping movies. [26 May 2002, p.1]
    • The New York Times
  37. The Girl with All the Gifts
    The Girl With All the Gifts doesn’t really venture into new territory, but it does a decent job of reminding us why zombies are so scary, and so interesting.
  38. Cinemania
    It is left for Mr. Heidbreder to offer the fanciest rationalization for their addiction. Asked whether the movies are a substitute for life, he rejects the suggestion that their behavior is pathological and declares that film itself "is a form of living."
  39. Me Without You
    Under its drab contemporary trappings, the movie, is really a Jane Austen-like moral parable in which goodness is rewarded and selfishness punished.
  40. The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me
    Mr. Drake can be rivetingly angry, intense, frenetic, frank and touching.
  41. Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust
    Offers no answers and is all the more moving for it. An honest befuddlement may be the most apt and true response to the world as it is.
  42. Hamlet
    Mr. Scott's is something that must be seen. It is, in a word, compelling.
  43. Too Much Sleep
    Maquiling creates an unusual and intriguing tone somewhere between sharp, deadpan comedy and a soft, dreamy surrealism.
  44. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
    A good piece of work more often than not, and this is one of the few times an actor turned director has chosen to subvert the feel-good genre for his maiden voyage.
  45. The Way I See It
    The movie is impeccably crafted and consistently engaging.
  46. Hipsters
    Who knows if anything remotely resembling the culture of Hipsters really existed? It's a musical, after all. In any case this movie, which won the 2009 Nika (the Russian Oscar) for best picture, is an endearing curiosity that, at 125 minutes, is as badly in need of a trim as the hair of its comically coiffed dandies.
  47. 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.
  48. The Russia House
    As directed by Fred Schepisi and written by Tom Stoppard, The Russia House is confused and dim, far less complex, and even far less fun, than almost any le Carre work yet brought to the screen, excluding The Little Drummer Girl.
  49. Solaris
    Retooled into a sleek pop fable that doesn't bother to connect all its dots, the movie aspires to fuse the mystical intellectual gamesmanship of "2001: A Space Odyssey" with the love-beyond-the-grave romantic schmaltz of "Titanic," without losing its cool. It's a tricky balancing act that doesn't quite come off.
  50. As Good as It Gets
    Wicked, but it works.
  51. The Goebbles Experiment
    A rare and chilling glimpse into a brilliant but toxic mind.
  52. Run
    Despite a script (by Chaganty and Sev Ohanian) that sees no need to flavor its tension with flashbacks or character-fleshing, Run has fun with its ludicrous plot.
  53. No Man of God
    For anyone who has heard audio of Bundy, Kirby’s impersonation will sound chillingly close to the real killer’s deadened, yet at times disturbingly raffish, cadence. Wood is persuasive, too, although Kit Lesser’s script writes the character as a cliché.
  54. Rudo y Cursi
    While the film is lively and engaging, it also, in the end, feels a little thin, largely because it is unsure of how earnestly to treat its own lessons about fate, ambition and brotherly love.
  55. Score: A Film Music Documentary
    In 1993, the documentary “Visions of Light” won critical love for its overview of Hollywood’s classic cinematographers. Matt Schrader’s tidy and informative “Score” lavishes similar adoration on moviedom’s great composers.
  56. Another Body
    Another Body is most persuasive when experts weigh in on the reality-upending aspects of deepfake technology and image-based sex abuse.
  57. Deep Cover
    The ensemble is packed with seasoned acting professionals across the board, who more than sell their drunk scenes and deliver more than a few laughs on their way to redemption.
  58. Sunlight
    A little of Sunlight, which she directs and co-wrote with Allen, goes a long way. But there’s still something to seeing a performer go for broke, purging a character’s shame and despair through a screwy, confessional sense of humor.
  59. Trust
    Though Mr. Hartley's films are richly detailed, there are no frills or grace notes. Such work risks being too blunt, but Trust comes through.
  60. Nancy
    What’s left is a strange, sour tale that’s neither origin mystery nor journey of self-discovery, but a vexing gesture toward damage and delusion that never permits us to peek under its broken heroine’s hood.
  61. Fight Club
    The sardonic, testosterone-fueled science fiction of Fight Club touches a raw nerve.
  62. Outrage
    Not everything is as elegantly executed, including a tiresome, would-be comic subplot involving an African diplomat and a clandestine casino that drags the story down badly and comes close to noxious racial stereotype.
  63. Kawasaki's Rose
    The point of this thoughtful, moving film is that the motives and actions that define human ethics are never simple and that the Communist regime was especially adept at exploiting this complexity for its own ends.
  64. R
    Isn't as hellish as the situation behind bars is portrayed in American movies, some of which are so gory they qualify as prison porn. But it is awful enough.
  65. Fathom
    At times, the doc feels like science-fiction without the fiction. Swap whales for aliens and these two doctors aglow with the thrill of discovery could double for Jodie Foster in “Contact” or Amy Adams in “Arrival.”
  66. The Final Year
    In the final half-hour, things start picking up, not just because of the impending surprise victory of Donald J. Trump and the way these players react to it.
  67. Price Check
    Once Price Check darkens, it loses its comic footing, along with its nerve, and becomes a wishy-washy potpourri of elements that fail to mesh: backing away from its satirical potential, it sputters toward an evasive and unsatisfying ending. Ms. Posey, however, blithely sails above the fray.
  68. Fitting In
    Its revelations about gender, sexuality and identity tend toward the obvious, and sometimes veer into the facile.
  69. Wild Canaries
    Mr. Levine spins a caper that wins you over more through tenacity than through originality.
  70. Sublet
    Though far from the gold standard of “brief encounter” dramas like Andrew Haigh’s “Weekend,” Sublet nevertheless wins you over with its subtle charm and its mellow depiction of two men forging an unexpected connection.
  71. Seasons
    The movie’s cinematographers may hog the limelight, but it’s the sweat of the sound engineers that brings their work to life.
  72. True Stories
    True Stories may well appeal more to those who don't know much about Mr. Byrne's music career than those who do. The soundtrack songs have the catchy simplicity of Talking Heads' most recent and least demanding compositions. And the film's imagery, expertly captured in bold, bright colors by Ed Lachman, will be even more striking to those who find it novel.
  73. Love Life
    It’s more a grief triangle than a love triangle, and a late revelation alters its symmetry, erasing hard-won sympathy for one character.
  74. This Is It
    The on-screen results are weird and watchable, by turns frustrating and entertaining, and predictably a little morbid.
  75. When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism
    [A] dryly funny, enigmatic new work.
  76. Be with Me
    The fact that her story of triumph over unimaginable odds doesn't come freighted with mystical and religious bromides makes it all the more inspiring.
  77. The Way We Get By
    Unfailingly modest and profoundly humane, The Way We Get By profiles three people over 70 whose lives have been changed by a simple act of service.
  78. SHOT! The Psycho-Spiritual Mantra of Rock
    The movie’s approach is gratuitously grandiose.
  79. Somewhere
    The opening shot of Somewhere, Sofia Coppola's exquisite, melancholy and formally audacious fourth feature, prepares you for what is to follow in a characteristically oblique and subtle manner.
  80. 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
  81. Frequency
    What makes Frequency work despite is shamelessness is the surreal aura that imbues almost every scene with a sense of heightened feeling.
  82. The Well
    With a neck-snapping jolt, turns into the scariest exercise in cinematic sleight of hand since "The Blair Witch Project."
  83. Karmen Gei
    Enormously likable, partly because it is aware of its own grasp of the absurd.
  84. In Heaven Underground: The Weissensee Jewish Cemetery
    The sense of place may be expected, but it's also poetic and exquisite.
  85. Birth Story: Ina May Gaskin and The Farm Midwives
    A granola ode to natural childbirth that makes you want to hop into a tub of warm water and start pushing.
  86. All Creatures Here Below
    Its ideas aren’t new, and at times Ruby and Gensan can feel like recognizable symbols of societal failure. What’s different, though, is the performers’ skill in portraying characters whose extreme mutual dependence is touchingly believable, giving no hint of the damage later revealed.
  87. Dracula
    By no means lacking in stylishness; if anything, it's got style to spare. But so many of its sequences are at fever pitch, and the mood varies so drastically from episode to episode, that the pace becomes pointless, even taxing, after a while.
  88. Lost Girls
    There are different ways to describe Garbus’s telling of this mystery: it’s serious, respectful, gravely melancholic. Yet anger best describes the movie’s atmosphere, its overall mood and its authorial tone.
  89. The Wind and the Lion
    An elaborate, expensive‐looking, ludicrously jingoistic historical‐adventure that comes out so firmly in favor of Teddy Roosevelt's “Big Stick” policy, 70 years later, that it could also be a put‐on.
  90. Oxygen
    The premise is simple, but this twist-filled script by LeBlanc gives Laurent ample opportunity to shine. Because of its limited setting, the film hangs on Laurent’s acting ability, and she gamely vaults between elation, terror and determination.
  91. Queen of Glory
    The child of Ghanaian parents herself, Mensah traverses the polyglot turf well, infusing details with astute affection and understated laughs. Even the occasional slapstick proves more sweet than silly.
  92. The Alpinist
    The movie could stand to demystify how some of its most terrifying early shots were filmed. (Later on, we’re told Leclerc agreed to carry a small camera himself to shoot part of a conquest in Patagonia.) But it does capture its subject’s philosophy.
  93. Barbershop: The Next Cut
    The most fascinating — and the most moving — thing about this sprawling, sincere and boisterous movie is its tone.
  94. The Book of Life
    This often beautiful and too-often moribund, if exhaustingly frenetic, feature tends to be less energetic than the dead people waltzing through it.
  95. Save Yourselves!
    The quirky Save Yourselves! is not necessarily a genre reinventor but a good example of how much fun you can have on a non-studio budget.
  96. The Wrecking Crew
    Mostly, it’s hagiography, with stars like Cher and Brian Wilson used as character witnesses to the players’ greatness.
  97. The Page Turner
    A would-be psychological thriller with next to no psychology and shivers instead of thrills, The Page Turner is a nervous-making, lightly amusing vengeance story that owes an obvious debt to Claude Chabrol.
  98. Flanders
    Whether you like or loathe Mr. Dumont’s movies, his unsettling vision of humanity stripped of cultural finery feels profoundly truthful.
  99. The Unbelievable Truth
    Mr. Hartley and his director of photography, Michael Spiller, have made a film that is visually and verbally much richer than its low budget.
  100. The Final Member
    This wonderfully weird documentary pinpoints the desire to preserve fleeting glories.
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