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. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
    Mr. Ritchie tends to flaunt his wares like a store clerk, fawning over the clothes, chairs and cars, and his usual rabbity pace slows to a tortoiselike crawl whenever the actors deliver a lot of words, which gratefully isn’t often. His talent, as he proves repeatedly, is making bodies and cars crash through space.
  4. How to Smell a Rose: A Visit with Ricky Leacock at his Farm in Normandy
    Documentary masters like Mr. Leacock and Mr. Blank have long been drawn to filming other artists, even though the enigma of artistic endeavor may appear to elude portrayal on film. But in How to Smell a Rose, it’s just as important to feel the relationship between these two, with Mr. Leacock as something of a mentor.
  5. God Bless the Child
    Shot with available light, the suburban rambles are portrayed so naturally that it’s hard to believe they are scripted.
  6. Call Me Lucky
    The movie strains to drum up mystery as to the sources of Mr. Crimmins’s rage. When it finally spills the beans, you feel unnecessarily manipulated.
  7. Homme Less
    Mr. Wirthensohn, who has known Mr. Reay since both were models, sees Mr. Reay’s life as a metaphor for the vanishing middle class. But Mr. Reay merely comes across as an aging casualty of Manhattan fashion, vainly chasing his fortune in a fickle industry that prizes youth.
  8. Sneakerheadz
    Rapid editing leaves little time to absorb vocabulary (such as “deadstock,” a new shoe that has never been worn) or intricacies of design.
  9. Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet
    This collection of eight mini-sermons falls flat.
  10. Assassination
    Assassination has sprinkles of wit and a nicely restrained anchor in Lee Jung-jae.
  11. The Runner
    All of the characters here are underwritten, and Mr. Cage and most of the other actors don’t seem to be putting much effort into them.
  12. Cop Car
    It’s an extremely well-lubricated entertainment machine filled with attractive images and wall-to-wall appealing performances.
  13. Ricki and the Flash
    Ricki’s attitudes, and their place in the family and the society she inhabits, are the most interesting part of the movie, or at least they would be if Ms. Cody and Mr. Demme were not so weirdly conflict-averse.
  14. Fantastic Four
    This Fantastic Four, directed by Josh Trank from a script he wrote with Simon Kinberg and Jeremy Slater, feels less like a tale of superhero beginnings than like a very long precredit opening sequence.
  15. The Diary of a Teenage Girl
    The novel is life-specific, but what makes Minnie — on the page and now on the screen — greater than any one girl is how she tells her own story in her own soaringly alive voice.
  16. The Gift
    Underneath it all, The Gift is a merciless critique of an amoral corporate culture in which the ends justify the means, and lying and cheating are O.K., as long as they’re not found out.
  17. Shaun the Sheep Movie
    A charming and clever concoction.
  18. Dark Awakening
    Overabundant diffuse lighting and wide-angle perspectives only compound this horror movie’s deficiencies in plot and dialogue.
  19. Two Step
    This lean character-driven movie has such an acutely observant screenplay that it is easy to empathize with people struggling to make a decent living by hook or crook. Its psychological precision elevates it to something more than a genre piece.
  20. Counting
    A wistful meditation on the world, its beauties, mysteries and injustices.
  21. Jenny's Wedding
    A movie so hopelessly late to the coming-out party that you want to haul everyone connected with it into the 21st century.
  22. I Am Chris Farley
    The story of dependence and excess is sadly familiar — and as with most of its material, I Am Chris Farley doesn’t find a fresh way to tell it.
  23. A LEGO Brickumentary
    A Lego Brickumentary might be a resounding cheer for a brand, but it’s an eye-opener, too.
  24. Paulo Coelho's Best Story
    The title of this biopic, Paulo Coelho’s Best Story, is apt: His own life might well be his greatest work. A pity, then, that the film, directed by Daniel Augusto, doesn’t chronicle his evolution better, leapfrogging among decades instead.
  25. Wild City
    The crisscrossing pursuers and pesky police suggest a watered-down version of the treacheries in “City on Fire.” But the cluttered, unfolding dynamism of Mr. Lam’s action scenes remains resilient when gunplay or knife fights are thrust into street life.
  26. That Sugar Film
    Mr. Gameau’s breezy blend of computer imagery, musical numbers, sketches and offbeat field trips makes the nutrition lessons easy to digest.
  27. 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.”
  28. The Kindergarten Teacher
    The Kindergarten Teacher — the film as well as the character — yearns for different values, for intensity, beauty and meaning. Its sobering lesson is that the search for those things is most likely to end in madness, confusion and violence.
  29. The End of the Tour
    It’s ultimately a movie — one of the most rigorous and thoughtful I’ve seen — about the ethical and existential traps our fame-crazed culture sets for the talented and the mediocre alike.
  30. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
    Sleek and bloated, specific and generic, “Rogue Nation” is pretty much like most of the “Impossible” movies in that it’s an immense machine that Mr. McQuarrie, after tinkering and oiling, has cranked up again and set humming with twists and turns, global trotting and gadgets, a crack supporting cast and a hard-working star.
  31. Listen to Me Marlon
    While its subject means that "Listen to Me” is easy to like, Mr. Riley’s shaping of Brando’s words can make the movie, every so often, difficult to fully embrace.
  32. 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.
  33. A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile
    Even knowing the secret of A Gay Girl in Damascus doesn’t make this documentary any less tense. That’s a testament to Sophie Deraspe, a director who understands how to let a plot unfold.
  34. Dark Was the Night
    The trouble lies in Tyler Hisel’s script, which teems with wheezy conventions.
  35. Big Significant Things
    Big Significant Things is a cute idea in search of substance.
  36. The Vatican Tapes
    The director Mark Neveldine deploys queasy lighting and a trembling score, but his best choice is to let Ms. Dudley stare at us. She conveys unnerving shifts in self-awareness and sinister intent with her eyes.
  37. 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.
  38. Horse Money
    The puzzle-box narrative only grows more hypnotic with repeat viewings. The movie insists on having the audience, like Ventura, pass through madness to reach catharsis.
  39. The Young Kieslowski
    This small, observant movie, directed and written by Kerem Sanga, is the better for not going in predictable directions. A story that you half-expect to turn into a melodrama stays true to the sensibilities of its immature, painfully sincere characters, who are faced with life-changing decisions.
  40. Frank the Bastard
    The indecipherable motivations and half-baked subtexts present formidable challenges to the cast and the audience.
  41. Lucky Stiff
    With songs about shoes and dogs, Lucky Stiff couldn’t be sillier, but Mr. Marsh and especially Ms. James make it an enjoyable curiosity for fans of musical theater.
  42. The Outrageous Sophie Tucker
    The movie isn’t especially well made, yet because Tucker is such a gloriously rich figure — immigrant turned runaway mother turned vaudevillian turned superstar — she renders its formal and aesthetic shortcomings (mostly) irrelevant.
  43. Phoenix
    Never less than intriguing, coolly intelligent and flawlessly paced, Phoenix often feels trapped in the logic of its conceit.
  44. Only You
    Only You is served very well by Ms. Tang (a star of Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution”). Whether playing elated, sorrowful, coy or petulant, she consistently provides the spark the movie could use more of.
  45. Paper Towns
    In the end, what makes Q such a deceptively tricky literary creation — his averageness — is the very thing the filmmakers struggle with, partly because movies of this commercial scale and bottom-line ambition rarely know what to do with ordinary life.
  46. Samba
    Mr. Toledano and Mr. Nakache, who wrote the scattered screenplay, have a well-honed touch for comic beats and a feel for workaday details. That comes in handy when their points about French identity miss the mark, or when the main characters share special moments without really acquiring depth.
  47. Five Star
    Slow and steady, and with remarkable assuredness, Keith Miller’s Five Star plays mean-streets drama in the lowest of keys.
  48. Pixels
    it’s not as original as it wants to be, despite having the able Chris Columbus in the director’s chair.
  49. Southpaw
    The plotting is somehow both flat-footed and operatic in its absurdity. Character arcs are tangled, flattened and foreshortened. Common sense is knocked silly. But Mr. Fuqua has never been a director to let ridiculousness get in the way of visceral action.
  50. Twinsters
    The film has too many fits of uncontrolled laughter and other awkwardness that suggest an unedited home movie, but, in general, Twinsters makes for a heartfelt alternative to a traditional documentary approach.
  51. Famous Nathan
    The movie is choppy and rushed — a bumper-car ride that somehow fits the rough-and-tumble era it recalls.
  52. Lila & Eve
    The main, and perhaps the only, reason to see the revenge thriller Lila and Eve, a shallow, cut-rate “Thelma and Louise,” is for the thunderous lead performance of Viola Davis.
  53. Northern Limit Line
    Striving to dramatize a real-life battle that occurred in 2002 near Yeonpyeong Island in the Yellow Sea, the writer and director, Kim Hak-soon, stirs corn and cliché into a paean to patriotism.
  54. Alléluia
    Alleluia is a fever dream of sex, jealousy and murder whose intensity leaves you spellbound.
  55. Steak (R)evolution
    This informative foodie film is more than just footage of assorted chefs cooking delicious-looking cuts of meat. The tour encompasses breeders, butchers, grazing practices and genetics.
  56. Ardor
    This slow-paced, cut-to-the-bone drama ought to be gripping, especially as the jungle and its beasts make their presence felt. But curiously, Ardor lacks tension, maybe because the actors are playing archetypes: Little is said, and there are few surprises.
  57. A Hard Day
    A kinetically visceral, enjoyable nasty joy ride, “A Hard Day” is pretty much as advertised.
  58. Mr. Holmes
    The film’s plots are soft and flimsy, and they don’t mesh as gracefully as they might, but they do serve as an adequate trellis for Mr. McKellen’s performance, which is gratifyingly but unsurprisingly wonderful.
  59. The Stanford Prison Experiment
    The experiment’s methodologies and meanings have been analyzed endlessly over the years, and the film doesn’t delve deeply into these interpretations and critiques. It doesn’t need to; this stark and riveting version of events speaks for itself.
  60. The Look of Silence
    A painful, profoundly empathetic work of moral reckoning.
  61. Irrational Man
    The horror of where rationalism can lead (the death camps, for one) hangs over Irrational Man and helps hold you as does Mr. Phoenix, even with some bad writing and Mr. Allen’s narrative laxity and lack of interest in how real people live.
  62. Trainwreck
    What’s energizing and exciting about Amy, especially when compared with the sexless cuties populating rom-coms, in which female pleasure is often expressed through shopping, is that her erotic appetites aren’t problems that she needs to narratively solve and vanquish.
  63. Ant-Man
    This film is a passable piece of drone work from the ever-expanding Marvel-Disney colony. It provides obligatory, intermittently amusing links to other corporate properties, serving essentially as a sidebar to the “Avengers” franchise.
  64. Court
    [A] quiet, devastating critique of the antiquated Indian legal system.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Jellyfish Eyes
    It is poorly shot and afflicted by tedious sound (lots of screaming and saccharine music) and inept special effects. It moves with either incomprehensible abruptness or tedious slowness, especially at supposedly suspenseful moments.
  66. SlingShot
    Although independently funded, it was directed by a longtime collaborator of Mr. Kamen’s with the clear purpose of getting the word out about the product.
  67. What We Did on Our Holiday
    A damp-eyed comedy whose banal title isn’t the only thing needing improvement.
  68. Tap World
    It would be better if it had a bit less proclaiming and a bit more nuts-and-bolts information, but still, it’s refreshing to see people bubbling over with enthusiasm for an art that is somewhat out of the mainstream.
  69. Strangerland
    The progressive wrinkles...are both the fascination and the frustration of Strangerland, which strains credulity with its secrets and revelations to facilitate its surprises.
  70. Meet Me in Montenegro
    Though Mr. Holdridge and Ms. Saasen feel genuine, they lack acting chops, and their screenplay’s self-consciousness about romantic clichés plays like a cliché itself.
  71. Mad Women
    This film overstays its welcome and has pacing problems. But its eclectic characters certainly linger.
  72. The Gallows
    The horror movie The Gallows starts with a decent if improbable premise, and it ends with a pretty good jolt. But in between, the film sure wears out the already tired found-footage device.
  73. Stations of the Cross
    As Maria crumples before our eyes, many will find Stations of the Cross heartbreaking and infuriating. Others may laugh out loud at her mother, a walking nightmare of pious, punishing rectitude.
  74. 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.
  75. 10,000 km
    The director’s discipline is remarkable, and also a bit constricting.
  76. Do I Sound Gay?
    Mr. Thorpe’s explorations of a painful subject are an exercise in healing. His discovery of how many gay men share his anxiety and discomfort leads him to greater self-acceptance.
  77. Minions
    The good news is that the minions are more (unconsciously, if perhaps also strategically) in touch with their anarchic side than the typical onesie-wearing crusader, which suits the directors Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda’s well-tuned sense of the absurd.
  78. Self/less
    [An] entirely preposterous, not entirely unenjoyable movie.
  79. Boulevard
    As truthful as it is, Boulevard conveys little insight into characters who are believable and well acted but incapable of change.
  80. Cartel Land
    Mr. Heineman has said that he wanted Cartel Land to feel like a narrative film as much as possible, and to an extent it does. What’s missing is a directorial point of view, including about vigilante groups, the so-called war on drugs, and Mexican and American policies and politics.
  81. Stung
    Mr. Diez, a former effects specialist, skillfully blends viscous textures with cheesy digital flourishes. The screenwriter, Adam Aresty, also earns points for the dialogue’s blithe hit-or-miss humor. But it’s Tilman Hahn’s sound design, with its unsettling buzz, that will burrow most unforgettably into your memory.
  82. Closer to God
    Having painted Victor as a transgressive offender, Mr. Senese backpedals furiously with a coda asserting the potential rewards of genetic manipulation. It isn’t convincing.
  83. Zarafa
    Zarafa may not be the most groundbreaking feat of storytelling, but it does have a giraffe in a balloon.
  84. Stray Dog
    Ms. Granik’s tact and curiosity are remarkable. So is her subject’s openness.
  85. 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.
  86. Jimmy's Hall
    The screenplay is vague not only about politics but also about the history of Jimmy’s unconsummated relationship with his former sweetheart, Oonagh (Simone Kirby), now married, whose wide Susan Sarandon eyes express a wistful sadness.
  87. Amy
    With Amy, Mr. Kapadia isn’t simply revisiting Ms. Winehouse’s life and death, but also — by pulling you in close to her, first pleasantly and then unpleasantly — telling the story of contemporary celebrity and, crucially, fandom’s cost.
  88. Mala Mala
    While affirming the dignity of its subjects, Mala Mala shows there’s little glamour attached to the pursuit of selfhood.
  89. A Poem Is a Naked Person
    This film, commissioned by Mr. Russell and directed by Les Blank, is among other things a strange and gorgeous artifact of its moment. Happily indifferent to the conventions of its genre, it’s neither the record of a concert nor a talking-head-driven biography.
  90. Magic Mike XXL
    Magic Mike XXL boldly flouts pop-cultural conventional wisdom. It’s often said that an explanation of a joke can’t be funny, and that the analysis of pornography is never sexy. But here is a coherent and rigorous theory of pleasure that is also an absolute blast.
  91. Terminator Genisys
    It’s amusing to see identical Arnolds clash like titans, but nobody here seems to have fully grasped that they had another heavyweight in Mr. Clarke.
  92. K'na, the Dreamweaver
    This static movie digs no deeper, but it is important in that it preserves a sliver of civilization and language (with native speakers in small roles) that might not otherwise get global exposure.
  93. Runoff
    The movie’s extreme compression is its biggest failing. The business end is so minimally sketched, you are left wanting to know a lot more.
  94. The Princess of France
    The Princess of France has an appealing lightness and modesty, but it also feels flimsy and thin, like clever scribblings in the margins of a book, fleeting insights in search of form and energy.
  95. A Murder in the Park
    The filmmakers have skillfully laid out a complex and murky story of crime and justice that, more than 30 years on, continues to scandalize.
  96. The Little Death
    The only sketch that’s inspired is the final one.
  97. Fresh Dressed
    Much of this film is told through interviews: Mr. Kani is fascinating and also funny; Mr. Combs is cocksure; and Kanye West is appealingly hyper. (“Being fresh is more important than having money!”) The film is rounded out with great archival footage and, especially in the first half of the film, excellent cartoons by Hectah Arias.
  98. Felt
    This vague, arty horror film from Jason Banker (“Toad Road”), who shares a story credit with his star, Amy Everson, is at once underwritten and overconceptualized.
  99. A Borrowed Identity
    Impressive acting (especially from Mr. Suliman and Yael Abecassis as Yonatan’s mother) enhances this thoughtful drama, directed with a sure hand by Mr. Riklis, a film veteran.
  100. Advantageous
    It’s a kick to see how effectively Ms. Phang has created the future on a shoestring even if she hasn’t yet figured out how to turn all her smart ideas into a fully realized feature.
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