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. Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead
    If the movie’s hilariously cruel treatment of the halt and the lame upsets you, you can enjoy the crisp cinematography, operatically repulsive effects and frequently witty dialogue.
  2. Stephen King’s A Good Marriage
    While the director, Peter Askin, employs an all-too-customary suspense arsenal (vertiginous stairway perspectives, foreboding thunderstorms, ominous headlights), Mr. King’s script offers a wealth of behavioral details.
  3. Kelly & Cal
    The performances of Ms. Lewis and Mr. Weston crackle with authenticity. Like a good punk-rock song, this bracingly honest, tough-minded vignette stays true to itself.
  4. Awake: The Life of Yogananda
    The film’s storytelling is straightforward, almost standard-issue, but the story itself is compelling, as is the testimony of devotees.
  5. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
    It contains amusing jokes and has an old-fashioned impulse to tug at heart strings.
  6. Canopy
    The strength of Canopy is its filmmaking. With this haunting work, Mr. Wilson, joined by the talented cinematographer Stefan Duscio and the sound designers Rodney Lowe and Nic Buchanan, has made a promising debut.
  7. Jamie Marks Is Dead
    Temperate in tone but screaming with subtext, Jamie Marks Is Dead climbs above the current glut of supernaturally inclined entertainment by dint of a hushed unease that permeates almost every frame.
  8. Mardaani
    In her pursuit, Shivani pistol-whips perps, performs a flying tackle on a criminal astride a motorcycle, shoots an assassin at point-blank range and stabs an assailant through the hand. Her final confrontation with Walt is a sweaty aria of hand-to-hand martial arts combat.
  9. Once Upon a Time Verônica
    Mr. Gomes remains laudably faithful to his character, and Ms. Guedes’s bodily sense of languor gets across more than any crystal-clear dramatic statement would.
  10. Raja Natwarlal
    Mr. Deshmukh’s setup can be overly fussy — some of the con machinations seem needlessly complicated and hard to follow, or maybe not quite worth following — but his payoff works. And his cast, too, hits the right notes and finds an easy rhythm.
  11. The Humbling
    The movie is too shrewd to qualify as a jeremiad, but underneath the comedy are boiling undercurrents of anger and despair.
  12. I Am Eleven
    Ms. Bailey’s willingness to let the children talk and to let the viewer impose broader meaning elevates it.
  13. The Quitter
    The two leads are so low-key that they almost disappear at times, but The Quitter is a textured, heartfelt drama that achieves its modest goals.
  14. Take Me to the River
    Just keep your eyes on the old folks; they are where the heart — and the sweet soul music — of this movie lies.
  15. Altina
    In Peter Sanders’s sassy documentary Altina... there’s plenty of interesting ground to cover.
  16. Far From Men
    Camus sets the movie’s initial course, but Mr. Oelhoffen resolutely steers it home with political context, historical hindsight, an unambiguous moral imperative and a pair of well-matched performances; put another way, he makes the story his own.
  17. Jackie & Ryan
    It uses a terrific score of bluegrass and old-timey songs, many of them written by Nick Hans, to underscore the connection and to evoke a fundamental American spirit epitomized by traveling musicians with banjos, fiddles and guitars.
  18. The Last Five Years
    In Mr. Jordan’s portrayal of Jamie, this handsome talented musical theater performer (“Newsies”) goes for the jugular in taking down his character and making him insufferable.
  19. 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.
  20. Ned Rifle
    Even if this minor coda plays to an increasingly closed circle of admirers, it gives the trilogy a pleasing, moving symmetry.
  21. Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire in the 60s
    It’s both a credit to, and a shortcoming of, the movie that it suggests an illustrated bibliography. It makes you want to stop watching and, instead, read or reread all of the pieces mentioned.
  22. Art and Craft
    Art and Craft adds fuel to the argument that the art market is a rigged game manipulated by curators and gallerists spouting mumbo-jumbo.
  23. Actress
    Mr. Greene’s impressionistic style and rough, off-center compositions create an atmosphere of intimacy, as if the viewer were being invited to read Ms. Burre’s diary or her mind.
  24. Deadpool
    It’s no surprise that the teams hired to bring a property like Deadpool to the screen know how to keep the machine oiled and humming; it’s the ones who somehow manage to temporarily stick a wrench in the works, adding something human — a feeling instead of another quip — who are worth your attention.
  25. Elsa & Fred
    Ms. MacLaine and Mr. Plummer make an especially compatible match, because his understated portrayal of a despairing misanthrope reins in her scenery-chewing exhibitionism.
  26. Fishing Without Nets
    Fishing Without Nets turns the hijacking drama into a morally murky contemplation of deprivation and desperation.
  27. Hellaware
    The old story of art as a refuge for scoundrels and callow youth is amusing and updated with assorted details.
  28. Björk: Biophilia Live
    As skillful an orchestrator as Björk is, her crescendos and tightly designed wilderness can lose their strength with repetition. But she and her collaborators do make a pretty singing picture with their chosen audiovisual tool set.
  29. Advanced Style
    Advanced Style is undeniably captivating, even uplifting at times. But Mr. Cohen and Lina Plioplyte, the director, present a disconcerting mixed message.
  30. This Ain't No Mouse Music
    It’s Arhoolie’s musicians — Big Mama Thornton, Flaco Jiménez, Michael Doucet of the Cajun band BeauSoleil and others — who are the true stars. I dare you not to tap your feet.
  31. The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin
    The fates of several of the movie’s bitcoin entrepreneurs are unlikely to send viewers rushing to exchange their dollars. But The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin nevertheless functions as an entertaining portrait of the unshakable optimism that governs what’s been called a financial Wild West.
  32. The Supreme Price
    Joanna Lipper’s documentary shapes one country’s recent history into an accessible and tragic family drama.
  33. Waiting for August
    Soft in tone and muted in color, Waiting for August is a child’s-eye view of one family — among many in today’s Romanian economy — rising to the challenge of living without parents.
  34. Bitter Honey
    There is nothing remotely salacious about Bitter Honey, an agonizing documentary examination of polygamy in Bali, Indonesia, from the U.C.L.A. anthropologist Robert Lemelson. There is only vivid evidence of a society that, despite limp efforts at discouraging domestic abuse, remains mired in ancient patriarchy, sanctioning polygamy and, implicitly, often attendant violence.
  35. The Little Tin Man
    At its best, the movie has a sort of sitcom feel, with swift pacing and delivery, and the strong ensemble cast has a natural rapport.
  36. Bad Turn Worse
    A juicy neo-noir like Bad Turn Worse doesn’t have to make total sense to grab you.
  37. Evolution of a Criminal
    Raising significant questions about the psychological effects of poverty on young children, this unsettlingly direct stab at atonement feels genuine.
  38. Watchers of the Sky
    Watchers of the Sky is a film that can dash hopes about humanity but also raise them in depicting the stories of these tireless defenders.
  39. Deepwater Horizon
    The film itself is as much a feat of engineering as a work of art, an efficient machine for delivering intricate data and blunt emotions.
  40. Vacation
    Strengthening of brotherly and marital bonds is the real agenda, of course, but happily the movie never stays on these laugh-killing themes long.
  41. The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga
    This two-track meditation wraps ethereal glimpses of age-old Slavic locales around a fairy tale told through hand-drawn illustrations.
  42. A Requiem for Syrian Refugees
    A Requiem for Syrian Refugees is as powerfully direct as it is unfortunately heavy-handed, with lingering black-and-white close-ups of barbed wire and children’s wide eyes. But the film is eloquent, too, thanks to the voices of the refugees themselves.
  43. Giuseppe Makes a Movie
    Despite the poverty of his collaborators, Mr. Andrews, who seems to live on sardines and rice, doesn’t feel like an exploiter. He calls his friends “beautiful eccentrics,” which aptly describes him, too.
  44. Moana
    There are some touching and amusing zigzags on the way to the film’s sweet and affirmative conclusion.
  45. The Hadza: Last of the First
    Articulate and sympathetic experts, a calmly authoritative narrator (Alfre Woodard), powerfully conversational subtitles and breathtaking scenery enliven the film’s message.
  46. Shazam!
    It’s a nice change of pace for a big-screen mega-comic, if not a revolutionary shift.
  47. Thor: Ragnarok
    Marvel could have gone grimmer, broodier and sterner, but that isn’t its onscreen way; so it has made Thor sunnier, sillier and funnier. It’s a good fit, at least for a while.
  48. Antarctica: A Year on Ice
    The extremes of Antarctica: A Year on Ice might seem routine to fans of nature documentaries, but the photographer and director Anthony Powell produces some dazzling imagery in his droll study of isolation way, way down under.
  49. Warsaw Uprising
    Warsaw Uprising is marred by a fictional audio drama among three characters (two cameraman brothers and an American airman) who provide an unnecessary, distracting and at times amateurish frame to this resourcefully, even wittily, edited tour. But the flaws don’t detract from the film’s casual and calamitous sights.
  50. True Son
    Rough-hewed but naturally inspirational, True Son gains heft from its portrait of a city sharply segregated by race and income.
  51. Happy New Year
    Shah Rukh Khan’s seasoned authority is a steady anchor amid the frantic contrivances.
  52. Comet
    The visions (a meteor shower, Paris) are romantic and lovely, and there’s a sense of commitment to the enterprise that pretty much overcomes the near bathos and proves involving.
  53. Avengers: Endgame
    Settling scores, wrapping up loose ends and taking a victory lap — the main objects of the game this ostensibly last time around — generate some comic sparks as well as a few honest tears.
  54. Captain Marvel
    It’s pretty good fun, and could almost be described without sarcasm as a scrappy little picture, like most of Boden and Fleck’s other work.
  55. Penance
    Mr. Kurosawa expertly modulates an uncanny flow of energies between shame and grief, between venal urges and high-minded moral demands. The women’s travails suggest something that’s part curse, part mythic cycle of guilt and part kaleidoscopic dread.
  56. Merchants of Doubt
    Merchants of Doubt, Robert Kenner’s informative and infuriating new documentary, ought to remind us that the denial of climate change is hardly a joke.
  57. Food Chains
    This emphatic and empathetic documentary (directed by Sanjay Rawal and narrated by Forest Whitaker) presents the plight of our farm laborers as modern-day slavery.
  58. Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets
    A kooky, affectionate tribute that’s happily superficial.
  59. Flamenco, Flamenco
    When a final shot takes us outdoors to the real world, it’s possible to wonder whether a certain spontaneity, or a different kind of energy, has been missing from Mr. Saura’s immaculately vibrant film.
  60. Goodbye to All That
    Goodbye to All That is very evenhanded in assessing its characters’ flaws, and it never sentimentalizes.
  61. Story of My Death
    Mr. Serra has said his film portrays the eclipse of Enlightenment rationality by the violent forces of Romanticism. It’s a tidy overarching conceit, but the film’s lived-in feel does make for one vivid way of imagining shifts in thought.
  62. Predestination
    Mr. Hawke serves as both the narrator and the story’s ballast amid all the woo-woo interludes and disruptions, the puzzle piece you hold and worry about even as the scenery changes and identities shift.
  63. Concerning Violence
    The energy here feels more like that of a lecture than of a film; it’s an analytical tonic that’s potent to the point of bitter.
  64. The Barefoot Artist
    Mr. Holsten, was a maker of the winning 2012 documentary “OC87,” a study of obsessive-compulsive disorder. His gift for portraiture shows only further refinement here.
  65. She's Beautiful When She's Angry
    As filmmaking, “She’s Beautiful” is meat and potatoes: It gets the job done without frills.
  66. Shaun the Sheep Movie
    A charming and clever concoction.
  67. A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
    The film is accessible and often hypnotic on an intuitive level.
  68. An Open Secret
    An Open Secret is affecting, particularly when the victims recount their experiences in voices that crack with emotion or pause with pain. Even if you do look away, hearing them speak is enough.
  69. If You Don't, I Will
    If You Don’t, I Will is a dour, acutely observed comedy about marital boredom that doesn’t glamorize or overdramatize the characters’ angst. Its lived-in performances evoke an excruciating stalemate that can be ended only by a radical break.
  70. A LEGO Brickumentary
    A Lego Brickumentary might be a resounding cheer for a brand, but it’s an eye-opener, too.
  71. 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.
  72. Maidan
    Maidan is a film of scale and immediacy, finding artistry, for better or worse, in bearing witness.
  73. 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?
  74. PK
    Mr. Hirani remains an excellent storyteller, weaving his disparate story strands into a convincing, satisfying whole — a rare Bollywood feat.
  75. It's All So Quiet
    Ms. Leopold’s previous film, “Brownian Movement,” was a stringent, even off-putting study of a delicate-looking doctor who has secret trysts with various men, and her latest feature feels gentler, shot digitally and suffused with the gray shadows of old houses and dim twilights. But it’s just as concerned with the immediacy of desire.
  76. Farewell, Herr Schwarz
    Yael Reuveny’s Farewell Herr Schwarz traces a Holocaust mystery with stumbling curiosity and endearing sincerity.
  77. Killers
    At heart a repulsive slash-and-bash with philosophical pretensions, Killers is classed up considerably by strong acting, a multi-strand plot and a tone that’s both nihilistic and mournful.
  78. When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism
    [A] dryly funny, enigmatic new work.
  79. The Other Man: F.W. de Klerk and the End of Apartheid
    None of this is particularly cinematic (he relies much too heavily on title cards to fill in historical blanks), but it is engaging, mainly because the stakes were so high and the statesmanship so delicate.
  80. Hits
    The gloriously scabrous ending to it all leaves the viewer wishing this talented writer had let it rip earlier.
  81. The Purge: Election Year
    The Purge: Election Year takes itself just seriously enough to provide the expected measure of fun — a blend of aggression, release and relief. A lot of people die, but no one really gets hurt.
  82. Vessel
    Vessel becomes a film not just about abortion but also about activism. It raises provocative questions about the power of laws to police information in an increasingly globalized world.
  83. Joy of Man's Desiring
    As with his other features, brevity — in this case, 1 hour 10 minutes — has a way of making the film seem minor. It’s a little diffuse, but it suggests that Mr. Côté is trying out a sketch, with more experiments to come.
  84. Gangs of Wasseypur
    Although the narrative contains echoes of “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II” — and perhaps “Casino,” in that much of it is structured as a flashback from an assassination attempt — “Gangs” lacks the poetry and character interest of those films.
  85. When Marnie Was There
    The conclusion is rushed and poorly staged, yet the damp caul of loneliness that envelops the film’s early scenes feels moving and true.
  86. The Guitar Mongoloid
    Mr. Ostlund’s 2004 debut, begins as a free-floating portrait of mischief and compulsion — a cousin to Harmony Korine’s “Gummo” that comments obliquely on fascism and violence.
  87. Miss Hill: Making Dance Matter
    The director, Greg Vander Veer, makes this case through the sheer number of people he interviews.
  88. Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine
    In lingering over moody night streets and trembling faces, Ms. Josue has brought this film to the verge of becoming a tear-jerker. But, as epitomized in an extraordinary scene with a conflicted priest, it’s all part of a shared soul-searching that still continues.
  89. Ghostbusters
    Sliding into theaters on a river of slime and an endless supply of good vibes, the new, cheerfully silly Ghostbusters is that rarest of big-studio offerings — a movie that is a lot of enjoyable, disposable fun.
  90. The D Train
    For long stretches, The D Train serves as a commodious vehicle for Mr. Black, who, like the best comic performers, never seems remotely concerned about going too big or risking the audience’s love. He’s a showboat if every so often, more of a steamroller, capable of flattening everyone and everything in his way. Yet he is also adept at conveying emotional and psychological fragility.
  91. Dope
    It’s easy to root for Malcolm, to admire his pluck and share in his enthusiasm. It may be a little harder to buy what he and Dope are selling.
  92. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
    The film is touching and small, but also thoughtful and assured in a way that lingers after the inevitable tears have been shed and the obvious lessons learned.
  93. Best of Enemies
    Is this chronicle of their combat an occasion for nostalgia or a cautionary tale? The film’s perfectly sensible, not entirely satisfying answer is “both.”
  94. Cop Car
    It’s an extremely well-lubricated entertainment machine filled with attractive images and wall-to-wall appealing performances.
  95. Don Verdean
    Its intentions are, to some degree, corrective: It mocks some of the popular corruptions of faith so as to invite the audience to reflect upon what real faith might be.
  96. The Hunting Ground
    What cuts through the filmmaking clutter are the young women and men who share their accounts of abuse by both their attackers and their schools.
  97. Knock Knock
    Knock Knock ends on a not entirely satisfactory note, but delivers a pretty mean genre wallop getting there (with almost zero gore).
  98. Unexpected
    The nuanced performances of Ms. Smulders and Ms. Bean are flawless. Yet the movie’s calm levelheadedness is a subtle detriment. Everything is a little too easy.
  99. What Happened, Miss Simone?
    An often electric, bracingly urgent documentary.
  100. Wild Canaries
    Mr. Levine spins a caper that wins you over more through tenacity than through originality.
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