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. Batkid Begins
    Marveling without questioning, the movie is content to package the phenomenon and coast on its feel-good wave. Yet, somewhere around the midpoint, I began to wonder who was most thrilled by all this fuss.
  2. Escobar: Paradise Lost
    Nick might usurp most of the screen time, but it’s Mr. Del Toro, face flickering from benevolent to vicious and body heaving with literal and symbolic weight, who seizes the film.
  3. Glass Chin
    Despite an appealing fondness for New York locations and habits, Mr. Buschel and his cinematographer, Ryan Samul, have embalmed their film in style. J. J.’s ostentatious speeches feel like a projection of self-conscious cleverness, and the film’s virtuoso lighting doesn’t always match up to the needs of a scene.
  4. 7 Minutes
    7 Minutes knows exactly what it is: a directorial calling card to the Quentin Tarantino school of blood-bath cinema.... This film is a nasty piece of work.
  5. Max
    As the intrepid kids and the fearless hound unravel a nefarious weapons-dealing scheme, Max finds its sweet spot, leaving behind its overwrought patriotic swagger and settling into the kind of story that would fill a decent hour of television.
  6. The Midnight Swim
    The pieces don’t entirely cohere, but Ms. Smith has a promising sensibility.
  7. A Little Chaos
    Mr. Schoenaerts’s dour André may make conceptual sense, but he leaves a hole in this handsomely mounted costume drama that would have profited from more intrigue and a steamier erotic atmosphere.
  8. Big Game
    Onni Tommila, Mr. Helander’s nephew, has an expressive face and marvelous understatement. And Mr. Jackson has never seemed so unblustery; his scenes with the younger actor have ease and humor.
  9. Ted 2
    Mr. MacFarlane can be funny, but Ted 2 is insultingly lazy hack work that is worth discussing primarily because of how he tries and fails to turn race, and specifically black men, into comedy fodder.
  10. What Happened, Miss Simone?
    An often electric, bracingly urgent documentary.
  11. Any Body Can Dance 2
    For all the movie’s flashy pyrotechnics and pulverizing techno-ish musical numbers, gleaning an emotional pulse can be challenging.
  12. Evaporating Borders
    Despite the urgent subject matter and lyrical touches, it’s a film that needs further layers of complication and texture.
  13. Phantom Halo
    A dark, satisfying work that can be forgiven for the moments it succumbs to Hollywood convention.
  14. Manglehorn
    In truth, it’s less Manglehorn than Mr. Pacino that you warm up to in this film, as so many times before.
  15. Burying the Ex
    The movie’s snap and affection put other recent zombie-related entertainments to shame, and the in-jokes...are a Dante signature. But the freedom of the director’s best work is missing.
  16. The Face of an Angel
    Rambling, frustrating and wholly uninvolving, The Face of an Angel (based on Barbie Latza Nadeau’s nonfiction account of the murder) swarms with ideas that have no place to land.
  17. Hippocrates: Diary of a French Doctor
    Hippocrates unfolds pretty much like an average episode of “ER,” though with more French flag waving and less storeroom romancing.
  18. Infinitely Polar Bear
    In Infinitely Polar Bear, Ms. Forbes hasn’t made a movie about her father’s illness; she’s made one about her father, who, through hard and weird times, clearly helped give her what she needed so that one day she could tell this story.
  19. The Wanted 18
    Even at 75 minutes, it can feel padded with footage whose connection to the central plot is tenuous. But at its best, The Wanted 18 follows a worthy tradition of highlighting absurdities that arise during conflict.
  20. Gabriel
    This film maintains its anxious themes throughout, which makes for some tedious stretches because the tension never breaks. Despite that, or maybe because of it, Gabriel is unexpectedly absorbing.
  21. 3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets
    At the time of a fervent national debate on race and justice, part of what is impressive about 3 ½ Minutes is the cool temperature at which it is often served.
  22. Rubble Kings
    At slightly more than an hour, the film may not be definitive, and its chronology is a little fuzzy. Even so, Rubble Kings is a fascinating, valuable work of social, music and New York history, a celebration of a peaceful revolution by those who helped birth it.
  23. Balls Out
    Besides a clever, blithely ribald script by Bradley Jackson, the movie benefits from a potent “Saturday Night Live”-empowered cast.
  24. Eden
    Restrained but never tentative, remote yet enormously affecting, the movie’s evocation of artistic compulsion is accomplished with confidence and verve.
  25. The Overnight
    The Overnight ends just as it starts to get interestingly messy, tapping into something real and sweetly touching.
  26. 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.
  27. Tentacle 8
    Mr. Chi, making his feature debut with Tentacle 8, lavishes attention on his characters at the expense of the through line binding them.
  28. Inside Out
    Inside Out is an absolute delight — funny and charming, fast-moving and full of surprises. It is also a defense of sorrow, an argument for the necessity of melancholy dressed in the bright colors of entertainment.
  29. The Tribe
    The Tribe deploys an elaborate, rigorously executed conceit in support of a weary, dreary hypothesis: People are awful. That might well be true, but there’s no need to shout.
  30. Hamari Adhuri Kahaani
    The movie may suffer from a surfeit of excesses, but it does have arresting, if overwrought, things to say about domestic abuse in India.
  31. The Wolfpack
    Documentary has a tradition of trafficking in the misery of other people’s lives, so it’s a relief that “The Wolfpack” doesn’t drag you down or offer packaged uplift, but instead tells a strange tale with heart and generosity.
  32. Madame Bovary
    What wildness there is in this Madame Bovary belongs to Ms. Wasikowska, an actress who is frequently more interesting than her material.
  33. Chagall-Malevich
    It’s a literally colorful and playful attempt to portray battlefields of artistic ambition and political struggle. But its dialogue and characters are also written as subtly as a radical manifesto.
  34. The 11th Hour
    Ms. Basinger commits to her disturbed character. But the script (by the director, Anders Morgenthaler) makes Maria’s behavior so reckless — at times, she’s practically begging to be mugged or worse — that we have no chance of sympathizing with her.
  35. The Stranger
    The movie benefits greatly from Mr. Amoedo’s largely steady direction and the uniform acting skills of its Chilean cast (performing in English).
  36. 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.
  37. Set Fire to the Stars
    Set Fire to the Stars barely skims the surface of characters you wish had been given more dimension, but as a snapshot of postwar academia and its pretensions, it exerts a creepy fascination.
  38. Live From New York!
    “Saturday Night Live” deserves much better than the documentary equivalent of what a book editor would surely dismiss as a rushed, careless clip job.
  39. The Yes Men Are Revolting
    The Yes Men Are Revolting, their third film, has a personal poignancy that is missing in the forerunners, “The Yes Men” (2003) and “The Yes Men Fix the World” (2009).
  40. 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.
  41. Jurassic World
    There’s more flab than muscle packed on this galumphing franchise reboot, which, as it lumbers from scene to scene, reminds you of what a great action god Steven Spielberg is. Too bad he didn’t take the reins on this.
  42. United Passions
    United Passions is one of the most unwatchable films in recent memory, a dishonest bit of corporate-suite sanitizing that’s no good even for laughs.
  43. Wild Horses
    The one solid element in Wild Horses is Mr. Duvall’s squinting, stone-faced portrayal of a gruff, crusty patriarch beginning to crumble.
  44. Hungry Hearts
    The film’s initial naturalism is warped by overheated film technique and a dead-ending screenplay.
  45. Freedom
    Freedom does not remotely approach, say, “12 Years a Slave” in its production values or dramatic impact. But it does offer Mr. Gooding, whose weathered countenance is no longer the exuberantly cherubic face featured in “Jerry Maguire.” In its place is something more interesting: a quiet, rugged and arresting conviction.
  46. Doomsdays
    Wrapping an existential question in the random rhythms of the road movie, Doomsdays comes at you sideways, its melancholy catching you off guard.
  47. We Are Still Here
    We Are Still Here will make you scream and make you laugh, and possibly leave you speechlessly gesticulating at a charred zombielike ghost in the background. But the peak moments are too few.
  48. The Nightmare
    While "Room 237" sought evidence for its most outlandish conceits, The Nightmare declines to delve. As the testimonies grow repetitive, the strategy suggests willful ignorance.
  49. Patch Town
    While the results are more creepy than charming — too childish for adults, though not necessarily too dark for children — it is hard to fault Mr. Goodwill for trying.
  50. Charlie's Country
    Unlike those in many art-house releases, this wilderness is not an abstract arena for playing out alienation but a living, breathing land with deep, abiding significance for Charlie and his fellow Aborigines cast adrift.
  51. Testament of Youth
    Testament of Youth, James Kent’s stately screen adaptation of the British author Vera Brittain’s 1933 World War I memoir, evokes the march of history with a balance and restraint exhibited by few movies with such grand ambitions.
  52. Insidious: Chapter 3
    Ms. Shaye gives Insidious more than sufficient reason for a Chapter 4.
  53. Love & Mercy
    Love & Mercy doesn’t claim to solve the mystery of Brian Wilson, but it succeeds beyond all expectation in making you hear where he was coming from.
  54. Spy
    The busy, silly script allows Ms. McCarthy to be her own best sidekick, in effect an entire sketch-comedy troupe unto herself.
  55. Every Last Child
    As the film makes abundantly clear, if left untreated, contagions — of ignorance, fear and conflict — will spread wherever they can.
  56. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
    If fun does not really fit into Roy Andersson’s frame of reference, there is ample pleasure to be gleaned from his formal discipline and his downbeat wit.
  57. Entourage
    You could accuse it of glamorizing the shallow hedonism it depicts, but that charge would only stick if the movie had any genuine flair, romance or imagination.
  58. Unfreedom
    Unspooling with an angry intensity and without a single sympathetic character, “Unfreedom” (originally titled “Blemished Light”) is a hard-line thriller derailed by messy editing and narrative silliness.
  59. Survivor
    The movie makes halfhearted efforts to give Kate and others back stories, but mostly it’s content to follow her as she runs around in subway tunnels, down a staircase and through city streets.
  60. Sunset Edge
    The film uses nonprofessional actors and has a good eye, but more story development and fewer lingering shots of the trash-strewn trailer park would have been an improvement.
  61. Uncertain Terms
    While the movie creates an intriguing emotional space in which characters at the end of their ropes can open up, there’s the distinct sense of a missed opportunity.
  62. Barely Lethal
    This isn’t exactly “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”; it’s more like a film version of a TV series you could comfortably let your tweens watch.
  63. Gemma Bovery
    Think of Gemma Bovery as an airy puff pastry, dripping with honey.
  64. I Believe in Unicorns
    Stretched to 80 minutes, the story (by the director Leah Meyerhoff) almost breaks; that it holds together without compromising its simplicity or emotional authenticity only proves that, contrary to the maxim, you don’t need a gun if you’ve got the right girl.
  65. Tu Dors Nicole
    [A] wonderful, lighter-than-air movie.
  66. The True Cost
    Offering few solutions beyond a single fair-trade fashion company, The True Cost — whose serene interludes compete with sickening recordings of Black Friday shopping riots and so-called clothing haul videos — stirs and saddens. Not least because it’s unlikely to reach the young consumers most in need of its revelations.
  67. Heaven Knows What
    The Safdie brothers capture a density of activity as endemic to the city as it is to Harley’s daily hustle. By tapping into her routines, instead of framing her along solely tragic lines, the filmmakers fashion a diary of experience that’s all the more absorbing.
  68. Results
    The triumph of Results is that it pretends to be loose, lazy and lived-in when it’s actually disciplined, hard-working and in almost perfect shape.
  69. Aloha
    Aloha has too much story and yet not quite enough, and its rhythms are rushed and pokey. It skips like a record playing in the bed of a pickup truck.
  70. San Andreas
    The most disturbing thing about this may be how dull and routine it seems. Computer-generated imagery can produce remarkably detailed vistas of disaster — bridges and buildings collapsing; giant ships flung onto urban streets; beloved landmarks pulverized — but the technology also has a way of stripping such spectacles of impact and interest.
  71. Welcome to this House
    Ms. Hammer’s gauzier sequences notwithstanding, the film’s most commanding image is the housekeeper’s description of the ruthless monasticism Bishop maintained and the compulsive writing she practiced in her studio. Amid excesses and entanglements, that concentration ensured her place in literary history.
  72. Guidelines
    Communicating much with very little, Guidelines (“La Marche à Suivre”) presents a profoundly hopeful view of education as a civilizing force and a haven for transformation. There have been many more eventful high school movies, but rarely one that’s more absorbed in the forming of adults and the shaping of citizens.
  73. Poltergeist
    All in all there’s not much to complain about here, except that — as with a lot of revisited classics — the story’s not as revolutionary as you remember it. For veterans of the 1982 Poltergeist, it’s more like scary but pleasant nostalgia.
  74. The Farewell Party
    For all its sensitivity to the subject, The Farewell Party makes a number of tonal missteps of which the most glaring is the insertion of a musical number that upsets the movie’s otherwise sensible balance between the comedic and the morbid.
  75. Seeds of Time
    Perhaps it’s a hazard tied to a subject, seeds, which are all about potential, but Ms. McLeod’s film feels naggingly diffuse and insufficiently vivid in evoking diversity.
  76. Love at First Fight
    For its first two-thirds, the film, written and directed by Thomas Cailley, seems to be groundbreaking. Then it slides into comforting familiarity.
  77. Aloft
    For all its brooding atmosphere and visual poeticism, the film offers a perspective on the lives of its characters that feels narrow and superficial.
  78. Something Better to Come
    Approach Something Better to Come with the same patience that the filmmaker exhibited in shooting it and you’ll be rewarded. That is, if your definition of “rewarded” includes being dismayed by the bleakness that exists on the edges of prosperity.
  79. (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies
    Because the film doesn’t begin to explore the wider implications of that loss of trust, its findings don’t add up to more than a sardonic gloss on a provocative subject.
  80. Sunshine Superman
    Glorious daredevilry is wrapped in a slowly evolving ache in Sunshine Superman, a bittersweet documentary about Carl Boenish, who looked at very tall things and saw an opportunity to leap.
  81. 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.
  82. The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence)
    A caldron of unspeakable acts and unpalatable language, The Human Centipede 3 takes the bottom-feeding standards of its previous chapters (released in 2010 and 2011) to new lows of debasement.
  83. Tomorrowland
    Its idea of the future is abstract, theoretical and empty, and it can only fill in the blank space with exhortations to believe and to hope. But belief without content, without a critical picture of the world as it is, is really just propaganda. Tomorrowland, searching for incitements to dream, finds slogans and mistakes them for poetry.
  84. The Japanese Dog
    While it lacks the richness of some of Ozu’s masterworks, “The Japanese Dog” steers clear of sentimentality — an impressive feat, given that the title somewhat preciously refers to a toy dog. The movie depicts a hopeful side of Romania, peeking through even Costache’s lonely world.
  85. Güeros
    The story pops and swerves; the images are by turns comical, banal and ravishing; and the result is a briskly shaken cocktail made of equal parts provocation and comfort. You come away with a buzz that is invigorating and pleasantly familiar.
  86. It's Such a Beautiful Day
    Considering that he’s a stick figure, Bill, the main character in It’s Such a Beautiful Day, sure does have a complex internal life. And this animated film by Don Hertzfeldt does an amazing job of making you feel it, in all its sadness, terror and transcendence.
  87. Bombay Velvet
    For much of its first half, Bombay Velvet hums with the kind of energy found in movies by the 1970s American directors....Mr. Kashyap is perhaps too faithful to his Bollywood imperatives, though. In the grand tradition, his film is overlong (149 minutes) and overplotted.
  88. Childless
    There’s solid acting in Childless, but mostly there are words — torrents of them.
  89. Where Hope Grows
    Once the proselytizing takes over, so does the predictability.
  90. Our Man in Tehran
    There’s nothing like hearing a harrowing tale from the people who lived it.
  91. Know How
    Know How is a robust, youthful call to be seen, heard and appreciated — to be a little less invisible.
  92. Dark Star: HR Giger's World
    This disordered portrait seems heavily influenced by its equally jumbled setting.
  93. L for Leisure
    It is possible to admire Mr. Kalman and Ms. Horn’s ambition and at the same time have no idea what they were trying to achieve.
  94. The Connection
    Fetishizing the tired tokens of the American gangster movie, The Connection is a slickly styled, overlong pastiche. Yet its denizens have a retro glamour and the soundtrack a shameless literalness that’s rather endearing.
  95. In the Name of My Daughter
    Mr. Téchiné ’s methodical storytelling covers more narrative ground than the drama requires, sapping the film’s energy.
  96. Every Secret Thing
    [Amy Berg's] instincts about how to pace a true story serve her well with this imaginary one, and so do the performances by Ms. Fanning and especially Ms. Macdonald.
  97. Echoes of War
    The scriptwriters, Kane Senes (who also directed) and John Chriss, keep the family secrets too bottled up, but the actors, who include William Forsythe as the McCluskey patriarch, play it with dark vigor.
  98. Slow West
    The glorious cinematography, by Robbie Ryan, sharply illustrates the disparity between the rugged majesty of the landscape and the savagery of its outlaws and adventurers, who resemble vermin scuttling through the underbrush of a perilous no man’s land.
  99. Good Kill
    Mr. Hawke’s anguished performance gives Good Kill a hot emotional center.
  100. I'll See You in My Dreams
    A modest, quietly touching portrait of an older woman radiantly embodied by Blythe Danner.
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