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. A Trick of the Light (1995)
    With its light silent comedy, Mr. Wenders’s film presents movie history as a meeting of the inventive and the inevitable — a playful lark.
  2. Racing Extinction
    It’s the film’s sounds that really wrench. If you’ve ever wondered what a breaking heart sounds like, it’s right here in the futile warble of the last male of a species of songbird, singing for a mate that will never come.
  3. Bonobos: Back to the Wild
    Bonobos: Back to the Wild is an uncomfortable mix of fictionalized account and nature film, but you have to admire the work it documents.
  4. The Man Who Saved the World
    I was just at the right place at the right time,” Mr. Petrov says, a simple truth that becomes shocking when considering the alternative. For that alone, this account of a Cold War near miss deserves a wide audience.
  5. Uncle John
    It’s tantalizing, sublimely creepy stuff that keeps you guessing even after the credits roll.
  6. Songs from the North
    Scattering history lessons and ambiguous imagery amid Ms. Yoo’s engagement with North Koreans, her film implicitly asks: What must they think of us?
  7. Prophet's Prey
    Ms. Berg has created an unnerving, sometimes infuriating documentary. She makes smart choices throughout as she weaves together this chronicle of faith and abuse.
  8. The New Girlfriend
    The New Girlfriend never pretends to be more than what it is, a delicious and frothy fantasia with a teasing erotic frisson.
  9. Cooties
    Though Cooties has a reasonable amount of laughs and frights, and though real teachers may find it an apt allegory for the zombielike charges in their classrooms, it’s not really funny enough to achieve grown-up cachet, and it’s too ugly and violent for younger viewers.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
    The Scorch Trials adds nothing new to the unkillable dystopian genre, but it’s at least less ponderous than its predecessor. The many chases and ludicrous narrow escapes offer respectable doses of adrenaline.
  11. Some Kind of Hate
    It fails to deliver a thrill — not even a shiver, except of revulsion — rendering all that slasher gore downright anemic.
  12. The Cut
    Too many scenes feel routine or clichéd, sometimes even those depicting extreme experiences.
  13. Hellions
    A jumbled third act and an indifferent ending ultimately make Hellions disappointing. But there’s a bit of fun to be had in its opening frights, and in trying to figure out what these costumed little monsters really want.
  14. Captive
    A credit-sequence television clip of Mr. Warren and the real Ms. Smith with Oprah Winfrey makes the entire movie feel like the strangest book infomercial in memory.
  15. Sicario
    Mr. Villeneuve, aided by Taylor Sheridan’s lean script, Roger Deakins’s parched cinematography and Johann Johannsson’s slow-moving heart attack of a score, respects the imperatives of genre while trying to avoid the usual clichés. It’s not easy, and he doesn’t entirely succeed.
  16. Tired Moonlight
    It certainly demands patience (and a forgiving eye) as it experiments with an odd style. Yet it’s also a compassionate look at characters who don’t dwell on life. Instead, they live.
  17. Everest
    Though it assembles a first-rate cast in a story taken from reality, Everest feels icebound and strangely abstract, lacking the gravity of genuine tragedy or the swagger of first-rate adventure.
  18. Black Mass
    Mr. Cooper’s direction is skillful, if overly reliant on borrowed Scorseseisms (especially when it comes to music), and the cast is first-rate, but the film is a muddle of secondhand attitudes and half-baked ideas. It feels more like a costume party than a costume drama.
  19. Peace Officer
    While Peace Officer could offer more information, what is here is disturbing and sometimes eye-opening.
  20. Pawn Sacrifice
    Ultimately, it is only partly about Bobby Fischer. It is equally about us — Americans or any other nationality inclined to put too much importance on chess matches, soccer matches, space races, whatever. It’s about how we manufacture celebrities on scant pretext and then destroy them, or allow them to destroy themselves while we watch.
  21. The Fool
    The Fool is a hard movie to shake.
  22. The Perfect Guy
    Michael Ealy has a very ominous stare and Sanaa Lathan sells her inconsistent character pretty well, but The Perfect Guy is still just a boilerplate stalker story that proceeds more or less as you suspect it will.
  23. Goodnight Mommy
    Unspooling with virtually no music and a seriously unsettling sound design, Goodnight Mommy gains significant traction from small moments.
  24. Wolf Totem
    The landscape and painstakingly trained wolves are the true stars.
  25. Listening
    [A] strained, overheated thriller.
  26. The Moving Creatures
    Mr. Gotardo uses long, slowly unfolding shots and extended close-ups to aid our familiarity with each set of characters — almost by osmosis, we grasp their domestic dynamics, the rhythm of their routines.
  27. Paul Taylor: Creative Domain
    Through it all, Mr. Taylor’s creative mysteries remain intact; a master of the casual and the vernacular (a good way to learn about movement, he says, is to watch football halftime shows), he nonetheless approaches the mystical.
  28. Meet the Patels
    Meet the Patels is a tidy, easygoing documentary in which peripheral players prove more intriguing than its central focus.
  29. Home from Home: Chronicle of a Vision
    Home From Home is imbued with the villagers’ attachment to the land, but while dutifully capturing the period, the film feels less layered than Mr. Reitz’s past work.
  30. Breathe
    Breathe conveys an uncanny insight into the psychology of late adolescence, when lingering childhood fantasies can combust with burgeoning adult sexuality in a swirl of uncontrollable feelings.
  31. The Beauty Inside
    The film, pleasing and inoffensive, often amuses as it wrestles with the nature of familiarity as well as the question of where beauty resides.
  32. 90 Minutes in Heaven
    Rendering a miraculous premise dull, the film seems relatively uninterested in doing more than preaching to the choir.
  33. The Visit
    The director M. Night Shyamalan has a fine eye and a nice, natural way with actors, and he has a talent for gently rap-rap-rapping on your nerves.
  34. A Brilliant Young Mind
    This warm, robust movie ultimately transcends the formulas with which it flirts to become a far more subtle and honest result than a machine-tooled tear-jerker like “The Theory of Everything.” When the film doesn’t try to build up the usual suspense found in movies about competition, you sigh with relief.
  35. Sleeping with Other People
    Ms. Headland has a concept for a latter-day screwball comedy — two romantically challenged friends whose hang-ups create a roadblock to coupledom — but she doesn’t have the jokes or the emotionally textured characters that can fill in that conceit.
  36. Welcome to Leith
    Welcome to Leith wisely resists the kind of gimmickry that might have resulted in a stylistic hybrid of “The Blair Witch Project” or “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
  37. Time Out of Mind
    Mr. Gere is fascinating to observe in this role, partly because he refuses to solicit sympathy, or even attention. Time Out of Mind is an intimate portrait of a man caught between the desire to be left alone and a need for human connection.
  38. Coming Home
    There is terrible pain here, and the main interest of the film is in how the characters respond to it and what their response says about China’s understanding of its recent history.
  39. Contracted: Phase II
    Mr. Mercer’s character doesn’t attract sympathy comparable to that for Ms. Townsend’s (Ms. Lore’s Harper fares better), but there is no holding back on the worms, dermatologic nightmares, venereal-disease metaphors and hints of future sequels. Start stocking up now on the Pepto-Bismol.
  40. Chloe and Theo
    Chloe & Theo is surprisingly amateurish in concept and execution. There’s a line between a narrative that’s deliberately simple and one that’s painfully childish, and it’s not all that fine. But it’s one Chloe & Theo crosses repeatedly.
  41. The Golden Dream
    Buoyed by the wonderfully natural performances of its young leads, La Jaula de Oro is a compelling social-realist drama that owes much to the style of the British social-realist filmmaker Ken Loach.
  42. Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine
    If this isn’t the iPhone of documentaries, it gets its point across, and unlike Mr. Gibney’s Scientology exposé “Going Clear,” this movie has a harder target (albeit with its own devoted following).
  43. The Transporter Refueled
    The Transporter Refueled is crass and nonsensical, but it is hard to hate a movie in which a medical anesthetic is administered with a nightclub fog machine, the weapons include a ringed life preserver, an escape from a moving plane continues by car onto a jetway and the touch-screen banking software appears expressly designed for double-crossing.
  44. Before We Go
    The chemistry makes the movie’s pleasures easy to surrender to, albeit fleetingly.
  45. Dragon Blade
    Dragon Blade is the kind of nutsy maximalist entertainment that isn’t content merely to tap a handful of influences. Instead, it stuffs an entire encyclopedia of dicey ideas (visual, narrative, political) into a blender to create a wacky, eyeball-popping and -glazing extravaganza.
  46. Dirty Weekend
    What’s most curious is Mr. Labute’s kid-glove treatment of the scenario, forgoing real sexual gamesmanship, much less the opportunistic rug-pulling in past films. That baseline of sincerity is refreshing to a point, yet he’s written a fairly weak-tea story of conflicted self-discovery that would make for a mildly engaging evening on the stage.
  47. A Sinner in Mecca
    Mr. Sharma has created a swirling, fascinating travelogue and a stirring celebration of devotion.
  48. Blind
    Blind evokes a dreamy, dour fusion of Charlie Kaufman and Ingmar Bergman. Its few flashes of wry humor are outweighed by mystically beautiful images.
  49. Creep
    The film is remarkable, considering its minimal means and surprising lack of bloodshed, given the genre. Does it stay with you? A little.
  50. A Walk in the Woods
    It is unexpectedly moving and occasionally delightful to spend time with these titans of cinema as they walk and sometimes wobble, delivering words that become meaningful because they’re lucky enough to be spoken by Mr. Redford and Mr. Nolte.
  51. The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution
    What is clear from this sober yet electrifying film is that the power of the Panthers was rooted in their insistence — radical then, radical still — that black lives matter.
  52. Phantom
    The hapless secret agent heroes of Kabir Khan’s revenge thriller Phantom, could have used some pointers before being sent into the field.
  53. My Voice, My Life
    There are few feelings as glorious as spreading your wings onstage for the first time. Ruby Yang captures that rare electricity in her documentary My Voice, My Life, about Hong Kong teenagers who put on a show.
  54. Fever
    Fever doesn’t come to a neat ending and ultimately feels unsatisfying. Before then, though, it’s an intriguing and intelligent update of a true crime still chilling more than 90 years later.
  55. Z for Zachariah
    Maintaining a strict formal allegiance to reserve and restraint, [Mr. Zobel] shapes a dreamily elegant emotional ballet from glances and gestures and subtle shifts in power.
  56. We Are Your Friends
    The action slowly builds and breaks down, with dance beats kicking in periodically. Not much resonates here; it’s all facile entertainment.
  57. Memories of the Sword
    Though rich in period detail, the movie grows tiresome with solemn, protracted soap-operatic encounters laden with glowering stares and tearful outbursts.
  58. When Animals Dream
    When Animals Dream is a beguiling parable of cruelty and the resistance to it. Its special effects are pretty minimal, its scope is modest, and it is, in the end, more touching than terrifying, intent on jolting its audience not with dread but with compassion.
  59. Unsullied
    The actors, including Erin Boyes as another captive, try to infuse their characters with depth, and the cinematographer, Scott Winig, lends the proceedings a professional gloss, especially in nighttime scenes. But their efforts cannot lift the story beyond its thin, lurid premise.
  60. I Touched All Your Stuff
    The filmmakers pop their story’s bubble in a confusing finish, but it all ends up feeling like a mystery novel that simply never revealed the key clues.
  61. 7 Chinese Brothers
    Drifting and sweet, 7 Chinese Brothers (like Mr. Byington’s gentle 2009 love story, “Harmony and Me”) leaves a melancholy but hopeful aftertaste.
  62. Zipper
    The script, by Ms. Stephens and Joel Viertel, though lurching at times into overstatement, is enhanced with worthy if fleeting performances from John Cho and Christopher McDonald as Sam’s colleagues. Ray Winstone, as a journalist, effectively melds sleaze and compassion.
  63. The Second Mother
    The Second Mother goes soft toward the end, defusing its conflicts too easily and inconsequentially.
  64. Queen of Earth
    Ms. Waterston, a Modigliani in motion and often in black, easily holds your attention, but it is Ms. Moss, with her intimate expressivity, who annihilates you from first tear to last crushing laugh.
  65. No Escape
    Directed breathlessly by John Erick Dowdle (“As Above/So Below”), the movie is filled with jittery shots from hand-held cameras, and hurtles along at a pace that is especially helpful in racing past the holes in the paper-thin plot.
  66. Searching for Home: Coming Back From War
    There is little new insight, although the film does create an instructive tension between admiring bravery and sacrifice and being appalled by war itself.
  67. The Mend
    Directing his first feature after some shorts, John Magary digs into his characters with fresh eyes and a sly sense of adventure.
  68. She's Funny That Way
    There’s barely a whiz-bang punch line or smoothly executed setup to be found in a movie that longs to be a sparkling bedroom comedy and winds up a tortured, fizz-free farce.
  69. Some Kind Of Beautiful
    One of the worst films to sport the label “romantic comedy.”
  70. The Iron Ministry
    The Iron Ministry is neither boring nor confining, which is just to say that it’s not a long trip through a faraway country. It’s a work of art — vivid and mysterious and full of life.
  71. Learning to Drive
    As this movie, directed by Isabel Coixet, tracks the deepening friendship between people from different cultures and backgrounds, it acquires an unforced metaphorical resonance.
  72. Youth
    The kidnapping and ensuing complications make for a harrowing spectacle of cruelty and bumbling from which the camera doesn’t shrink.
  73. Being Evel
    The movie overreaches when trying to contextualize Knievel as a hero inspiring the country after Vietnam-Watergate disillusionment. He was simply an all-American self-promoter. But Being Evel largely nails his story.
  74. The Boy
    The Boy, despite remarkable performances and gorgeous imagery, does not sufficiently flesh out its subject.
  75. After Words
    Ms. Harden is fine in a role that requires little, but her character is a lazy stereotype that ought to make real librarians wince.
  76. Digging for Fire
    The film has an appealing honesty and an enjoyably low-key comic style.
  77. Sinister 2
    Despite Mr. Ransone’s goofy charm, Sinister 2 can’t claim the same finesse, substituting pedestrian plotting and a more graphic gore for the original’s restraint.
  78. Hitman: Agent 47
    Dumb as dirt and just as generic, Hitman: Agent 47 trades brains for bullets and characters for windup toys.
  79. American Ultra
    If you go, expect a diverting summer action adventure with occasional laughs, not a diverting stoner comedy with occasional action.
  80. Guidance
    Mr. Mills (drawing on his own experiences and doing triple duty as the director and screenwriter) gives a performance of rancid single-mindedness. It’s a fearlessly unsympathetic role that provides plenty of space for train-wreck humor but almost no wiggle room for redemption.
  81. Grandma
    There is much to praise about this sweet, smart comedy of intergenerational conflict and solidarity.... But honestly, the wonder that is Grandma can be summed up in two words: Lily Tomlin.
  82. Slow Learners
    Only a few scenes fail to draw laughs in a movie that’s unexpectedly smart and consistently amusing.
  83. Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery
    Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery is a case in which a great documentary topic hasn’t yielded a great documentary.
  84. Brothers ... Blood Against Blood
    Although Brothers is a remake of Gavin O’Connor’s 2011 “Warrior,” its plotting, timeouts for montages and a song or two — Kareena Kapoor appears as a spangly item girl, the sole female in a sea of leering chorus boys — are echt Hindi movie. Even more so is its emotional appeal.
  85. One & Two
    The film tries, unsuccessfully, to walk the same eerie, atmospheric trail as “The Village” by M. Night Shyamalan, or any number of Stephen King works.
  86. Rosenwald
    [A] rich and fascinating biography.
  87. Tango Negro: The African Roots of Tango
    Theories that are worth voicing are apparently worth repeating, and beats that sound catchy are sure to be replayed many times.
  88. Air
    Juicy dilemmas are dangled in front of the audience, then disappointingly yanked away.
  89. Big Sky
    The film rests on the attractive but opaque Ms. Thorne, who is not ready for such weight. Commendably, she stretches her acting muscles, but Hazel’s internal struggle remains elusive. Viewers need more to connect with.
  90. People Places Things
    As the movie fizzles, Mr. Clement’s endearing performance breathes what little life is left into a movie that, much like the insufferable Charlie, can’t make up its mind about where to go or how to get there.
  91. Return to Sender
    For most of the way, Return to Sender merges creepy and sexy to good effect, thanks to a close-to-the-vest performance by Rosamund Pike.
  92. Tom at the Farm
    Wildly entertaining, sexy and beautifully shot in the Canadian heartland.
  93. Fort Tilden
    Rarely has a movie so humorously illustrated the meaning of “frenemy.”
  94. Ten Thousand Saints
    If you are one of those people who romanticize the East Village in New York when it was at its grungiest, Ten Thousand Saints might be the movie of your dreams. Even if you’re not, it’s still a very fine film, full of quietly impressive performances and young characters who register as authentic.
  95. Meru
    Blindingly beautiful and meticulously assembled by the award-winning editor Bob Eisenhardt, Meru easily makes you forget that what you are watching is completely bananas.
  96. We Come as Friends
    With an eye for landscapes stunning and hellish, [Mr. Sauper] is the rare documentary filmmaker who not only takes on tough subjects but also explores them with a vivid visual and aural approach.
  97. Prince
    At times tender and at others unflinchingly brutal, this small drama of innocence and temptation could have aimed much higher.
  98. The Great Man
    The filmmaker Sarah Leonor has a keen eye and a gentle, unassuming touch. In The Great Man, she discreetly changes moods and storytelling modes like a pianist sliding her hand down a short, soft glissando.
  99. Mistress America
    Far from romanticizing creativity and the artistic process, Mr. Baumbach’s films portray the world of painters, filmmakers and literati as an overcrowded, amoral jungle of viperish entitled narcissists stealing from one another for fame and profit.
  100. Straight Outta Compton
    The partying is as bland as any all-purpose music video and feels more like another script signpost (and audience-pandering) than a serious attempt to get out what it means to be young, black, gifted, fabulously wealthy and much desired. Mr. Gray does far better when the story edges into heavier, more dappled realms.
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