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. Fly Away
    Taking a coolheaded approach to hot-button issues, Fly Away overcomes its neatly bow-tied ending with strong performances (including Greg Germann as a sensitive neighbor) and a spare, intelligent script.
  2. The Cold Lands
    The Cold Lands feels as if it were just taking hold when it reaches the end of the road.
  3. Cowboys
    The observant nature of this character drama offers Zahn in particular the opportunity to expand into new territory. He hasn’t lost the spaciness that once made him a lovable comedic sidekick, but here fatherhood endows that same charm with pathos, even tragedy.
  4. Take Me Out to the Ball Game
    For all its high spots, however, the show lacks consistent style and pace, and the stars are forced to clown and grimace much more than becomes their speed. Actually, the plotted humor is conspicuously bush-league stuff. Don't be surprised if you see people getting up for a seventh-inning stretch.
  5. Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story
    Generous in spirit and nimble in technique, this riveting documentary about the Republican operative (who died of a brain tumor in 1991) reveals a scrappy genius rife with contradictions.
  6. Megan Leavey
    If the conclusion doesn’t bring a tear to your eye, you’re way too cynical.
  7. The Bling Ring
    The Bling Ring occupies a vertiginous middle ground between banality and transcendence, and its refusal to commit to one or the other is both a mark of integrity and a source of frustration.
  8. Dinosaur 13
    Dinosaur 13 may not be the best documentary, but as a scientific soap opera, it’s a doozy.
  9. The Report
    However crucial and opportune in its truth-seeking and depictions of political trickery (Burns could hardly have known his film would plop into theaters alongside the impeachment hearings for President Trump), The Report is too often dramatically frozen, its emotions stubbornly internal.
  10. Bronx Gothic
    Given the aesthetically confrontational nature of the piece, one can understand why Mr. Rossi did not attempt an undiluted cinematic translation of the complete Bronx Gothic. But something about his approach (which I assume was approved by Ms. Okpokwasili, as she is one of the movie’s executive producers) feels, finally, like an evasion.
  11. Causeway
    Causeway is both thin and heavy-handed, its plot overly diagramed and its characters inadequately fleshed out. The burden of making it credible falls disproportionately on Henry and Lawrence, superb actors who do what they can to bring the script’s static and fuzzy ideas about pain, alienation and the need for connection to something that almost resembles life.
  12. You Don't Nomi
    If not revelatory, You Don’t Nomi is likely to persuade viewers that “Showgirls” is more than a “bare-butted bore,” as Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times 25 years ago.
  13. Bronco Billy
    The best and funniest Clint Eastwood movie in quite a while.
  14. After Love
    Not unlike an expensively tattooed panhandler, the couple elicit only a skeptical kind of sympathy.
  15. The Pirates of Penzance
    The Pirates of Penzance has been made into a cheerful movie, but it isn't nearly as deft or distinctive here as it was on stage.
  16. Tales of the Night
    The narratives - involving princesses, sorcerers, dragons, talking animals - are familiar. But Mr. Ocelot invigorates them with lyricism: silhouettes evoke shadow plays, and often brilliant palettes reflect the cultures presented.
  17. The Midwife
    Because it is a French film, or rather the kind of French film that wants to serve its sentimentality with a dollop of prestige, The Midwife doesn’t offer an entirely shameless version of the “dying free spirit imbues uptight caretaker with a new lust for life” scenario.
  18. Q & A
    The dialogue is often brutally comic, and individual scenes cut deep. Yet the narrative finally becomes almost impenetrable. The focus that the director would have demanded of another writer is lacking here.
  19. Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise
    Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise covers so much ground that it’s usually easy to forgive the filmmakers for not digging deeper. This is a documentary interested in breadth rather than depth, and on those terms it succeeds.
  20. The Trigger Effect
    Directed with a spare look and exceptional crispness and precision, The Trigger Effect ultimately falls back on the familiar, especially in its banal ideas of how Matt and Annie are changed by their experience. But during the three-day emergency that it describes, this cleverly made film sustains a spooky intensity and an insinuating, utterly confident style.
  21. The Forger
    Peren is clever to favor mischief against a backdrop of gloom, but in doing so she draws a frustrating distance between her subject and the audience.
  22. The Informant!
    It is Mr. Soderbergh’s insistence on seeing the A.D.M. scandal as a collective tragedy rather than as another white-collar crime that gives the movie force, resonance, feeling.
  23. Crimson Peak
    The film is too busy, and in some ways too gross, to sustain an effective atmosphere of dread. It tumbles into pastiche just when it should be swooning and sighing with earnest emotion.
  24. Cyrano
    From the moment Cyrano enters the action, his charisma and intelligence are on splendid display, and Dinklage — jaunty, melancholy, sly — takes possession of the movie. But that means that the argument on which the drama depends is over before it has even begun.
  25. The Two Faces of January
    There’s a mystery here, some thrills and blood, but mostly there are beautiful people and the kind of human hunger that devours everything and everyone in sight.
  26. The Great Museum
    The Great Museum, in comparison, feels like a cursory guided tour.
  27. A Woman, a Part
    Touching on issues of artistic survival and the porous boundary between work and pleasure, Ms. Subrin, an accomplished visual artist and filmmaker, sifts addiction, celebrity and the plight of the aging actress into something rarefied yet real.
  28. Nureyev
    Nureyev, directed by the brother-and-sister team of Jacqui Morris and David Morris, suffers from a common documentary-film problem: great story, not-so-great storytelling.
  29. The BFG
    There are delights on display, but not many surprises...The BFG is a different kind of movie, and Mr. Rylance’s face and body have been enhanced and distorted by digital sorcery, but his unique blend of gravity and mischief imbues his fanciful character with a dimension of soul that the rest of the movie lacks.
    • The New York Times
      • Posted Jun 30, 2016
  30. The Kid Who Would Be King
    The action is creatively staged, without ever getting too intense or scary for young viewers. And the script balances humor, pathos and wish fulfillment as it portrays Alex’s rise from mopey dreamer to confident warrior, without overdoing the mythic portent.
  31. Shaft
    Shaft is not a great film, but it's very entertaining.
  32. The Dog Doc
    For audiences who don’t mind being jealous of sick dogs, The Dog Doc is a thought-provoking look at what is missing from modern medicine — for animals and for people.
  33. Users
    This negotiation between techno-pessimism and techno-fetishism is at the heart of Users, though Almada’s scattered movie struggles to keep them in balance; her broad, rhetorical voice-over is a poor match for the complexity of the film’s images.
  34. Diggers
    A quintessential American independent movie, Diggers isn't going to change the history of cinema. But it has integrity. It feels like life.
  35. Crash
    So what kind of a movie is Crash? A frustrating movie: full of heart and devoid of life; crudely manipulative when it tries hardest to be subtle; and profoundly complacent in spite of its intention to unsettle and disturb.
  36. Tommy
    Mr. Russell's Tommy virtually explodes with excitement on the screen. A lot of it is not quite the profound social commentary it pretends to be, but that's beside the point of the fun.
  37. The Danish Girl
    It’s impossible not to be moved by Lili’s self-recognition and by her demand to be recognized by those who care most about her. But it’s also hard not to wish that The Danish Girl were a better movie, a more daring and emotionally open exploration of Lili’s emergence.
  38. Game Night
    The movie is a pointed reminder that Ms. McAdams is one of cinema’s most accomplished and appealing comic actresses. It’s almost heartbreaking to contemplate how amazing she would be in a new comedy that was more than intermittently O.K.
  39. The Woman with the 5 Elephants
    It's an interesting story, well told, though Mr. Jendreyko overworks some documentary fallbacks: gnarled fingers, the view from a moving train.
  40. Don Jon
    [A] deceptively sincere movie about masculinity and its discontents that Mr. Gordon-Levitt, making a fine feature directing debut, shapes into a story about a young man's moral education.
  41. White Palace
    No more convincing on screen than it was on the page. But it is greatly helped by the presence of Mr. Spader, who was apparently born to play life-denying, icy-veined young heroes, and especially Ms. Sarandon, who has made a career out of coaxing such characters out of their buttoned-down ways.
  42. Colors
    Though it all comes together, most tragically, at the conclusion, Colors is less notable for its plot than for its chilling urgency and its sense of pure style.
  43. So Close
    With the exception of some of the battles, which have the angry desperation of Mr. Yuen's inspired martial-arts choreography, Close is a nominal effort.
  44. The Eye
    Rarely has the basic nature of visual perception seemed so frightening.
  45. Voices of Iraq
    If this film cannot claim to represent the political "truth" about the war - what film could? - it certainly provides a broad glimpse of daily life in Iraq.
  46. Bend It Like Beckham
    Its cheery inoffensiveness, though, is in some ways disappointing.
  47. El bonaerense
    Powerful sweat-stained swatch of Argentine neo-realism.
  48. The Prestige
    Stuffed with hard-working actors, sleek effects and stagy period details, The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan from a script he wrote with his brother Jonathan, is an intricate and elaborate machine designed for the simple purpose of diversion.
  49. King Kelly
    The movie's other master stroke is the artfully unhinged lead performance of Louisa Krause as the despicable King Kelly, a character who would have been ready-made for Tuesday Weld.
  50. Kaepernick & America
    The verbal analysis here isn’t always profound — one interviewee trots out the banal phrase “the conversation we should be having” — but the narrative as presented in archival footage (Kaepernick did not sit for an interview for this film) is exemplary.
  51. Double Take
    Although it is composed mainly of archival footage and touches on a great many actual events, Double Take, as you may already have gathered, is not quite a documentary. It is, instead, a meditation on a series of loosely related themes drawn together, somewhat tenuously, by the familiar yet elusive sensibility that Hitchcock brought to Hollywood and then to American television.
  52. POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold
    Even more amusing than "Super Size Me," the documentary that put Mr. Spurlock on the moviemaking map in 2004.
  53. Judy
    Mostly, Judy offers the familiar spectacle of one star playing another. Zellweger’s performance is credible, with agitated flutters and filigreed touches, though it leans hard on Judy’s tremulous fragility, as if she were a panicked hummingbird. The take is also cautious, too comfortable; it never makes you flinch or look away.
  54. I.Q.
    The nice thing about I.Q. is that its intelligence doesn't stop at the title. In a romantic comedy that mingles brilliant physicists with auto mechanics, everybody manages to seem smart.
  55. Better Nate Than Ever
    [Tim Federle's] leads deliver hearty performances that elevate the movie, particularly once we’ve had time to adjust to the gusto of Wood, whose wired performance has the flavor of Hugh Jackman’s exuberance squeezed into an espresso cup.
  56. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die
    It’s actually when the film returns to the main, quest-driven plot that the film lags, particularly around the middle; there’s just not enough interest among the team members and the action to sustain narrative tension, and the film feels like it loses its drive.
  57. Wonka
    The movie is overly busy, as these kinds of eager-to-please diversions tend to be, and at two hours it overstays its welcome.
  58. Kung Fu Killer
    Mr. Chen, who teamed with Mr. Yen for the superior “Bodyguards and Assassins,” scatters references to Hong Kong martial arts classics. But while he has impressive fists of fury in both Mr. Yen and Mr. Wang, Kung Fu Killer lacks the brio and spice of its ancestors.
  59. The Judge
    Though voices both welcoming and hostile to women judges are represented, Ms. al-Faqih’s likely Sisyphean battle to reach her position feels insufficiently underlined.
  60. Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap
    This is a film that does sweat the technique, with at times illuminating and spirited results.
  61. 306 Hollywood
    A family portrait that plunges into what will strike many viewers as T.M.I. territory, the documentary 306 Hollywood makes for morbid, at times insufferable viewing. But its solipsism is part of its message.
  62. Truth
    More than most docudramas about fairly recent events, it is so well written and acted that it conveys a convincing illusion of veracity.
  63. Disorder
    Like its hero, Disorder has plenty of technique but not enough purpose.
  64. Bad Roads
    The four wartime stories in “Bad Roads” fall short on delivering any meaningful insight into the nature of conflict, relying instead on moments of lackluster tension and shock value that greatly overstay their welcome.
  65. Family Law
    Delicate, bittersweet comedy.
  66. Parents
    The satire of the 50's is more bland than biting, dependent on authentically garish costumes and sets. And when the horror-film scenes begin to intrude on normal life (what is hanging from the cellar ceiling, anyway?) Mr. Balaban can't make the dark elements seem comic enough to mesh with the rest of this nightmarish joke.
  67. Elegy
    The problem with Elegy has nothing to do with faithfulness and everything to do with interpretation. The film is an overly polite take on a spiky, claustrophobic, insistently impolite novel.
  68. Shepard & Dark
    The film points toward a rich and complicated story that only partly makes it onto the screen.
  69. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
    If the filmmakers opt to make only light statements about junk food, obesity and solid waste, they at least leave the audience sated on a single serving of inspired lunacy.
  70. Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You
    Effective topical entertainment, we are reminded, rarely comes without creative conflict.
  71. October Country
    October Country feels at once personal and objective, a fascinating hybrid of two important tendencies in the modern documentary.
  72. In Fear
    Economical in the extreme — but without appearing cash-poor — this tightly wound thriller proves that minimal resources can sometimes produce more than satisfying results.
  73. Carancho
    At heart an unlovely love story illuminated by sudden flares of violence, the film reeks of hopelessness and moral destitution, offering its lovers few means of escape.
  74. The Hip Hop Project
    Giving "inspirational" a good name, Matt Ruskin's vibrant and soulful documentary The Hip Hop Project sets its universal message to an inner-city beat.
  75. SherryBaby
    What distinguishes the film from its many peers is the quality of Ms. Collyer’s writing -- which rarely reaches for obvious, melodramatic beats -- and the precision of Ms. Gyllenhaal’s performance. She treats the character neither as a case study nor as an opportunity to show off her range, but rather as a completely ordinary and therefore arrestingly complicated person.
  76. Dark City
    So relentlessly trippy in a fun-house sort of way that it could very easily inspire a daredevil cult of moviegoers who go back again and again to experience its mind-bending twists and turns. Although its story doesn't add up when you analyze it afterward, the movie does take you on a visually arresting ride that offers many unsettling surprises right up to a sentimental sunburst of an ending that has a paranoid undertone.
  77. Landline
    For all the profanity and naughty behavior, it has the timid, ingratiating vibe of a television sitcom, sticking to safe and familiar emotional territory.
  78. Stardust
    Michelle Pfeiffer is Lamia, as deliciously evil a witch as the movies have ever invented.
  79. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
    As a cultural artifact, Talladega Nights is both completely phony and, therefore, utterly authentic. Or, to put it differently: this movie is the real thing. It's finger lickin' good. It's eatin' good in the neighborhood. It's the King of Beers. It's Wonder Bread.
  80. The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun
    Despite some pretty seasonal photography and evocative scenes of the nuns’ rigorous daily rituals, which involve many hours of prayer, The Monastery is a flighty, disorganized film with a blurry timeline and a wandering attention span.
  81. Two Women
    Impressive, unsettling, deeply felt film.
  82. Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story
    Fascinating but somewhat repellent.
  83. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
    A photographer for magazines like Vanity Fair and GQ, as well as a veteran director of commercials, Mr. Jones brings a trained eye to this, his first documentary. The low gray skies of Chicago prove once again to be a boon to photography, and the city has seldom looked better than it does here, in its chilly, minimalist beauty.
  84. Tattoo
    A grim, disquieting mood piece.
  85. Margarita Happy Hour
    Ms. Chaiken isn't much interested in melodramatic plot developments. Her talent lies in an evocative, accurate observation of a distinctive milieu and in the lively, convincing dialogue she creates for her characters.
  86. Trembling Before G-d
    Director Sandi Simcha DuBowski latches on to a provocative subject and invests it with a compelling tenderness.
  87. Hermanas
    A perceptive and beautifully acted drama.
  88. Delhi Belly
    It also shows, perceptively and often sweetly, a broader slice of young, urban, educated life in India as the three deal with careers, love and happiness.
  89. Letters from the Big Man
    The woman in Christopher Munch's lovely, delightfully idiosyncratic Letters From the Big Man, resplendent with its own dense forests and cloudy Oregon days, has already fallen to earth and is looking for a way back up or maybe just forward. She gets help from a sasquatch.
  90. Stink!
    Sensible and unnerving, Stink! is likely to incite, at the least, a purging of Axe body spray from adolescent boys’ bedrooms.
  91. Wedding Doll
    Mr. Gilady, a documentarian making his fiction feature debut as a writer and director, over-stacks the deck with this belabored if artfully shot story.
  92. The Reagan Show
    Reagan’s legacy remains a live and contentious issue. His name is still routinely invoked, on the left and the right, with reverence and rage. The Reagan Show helps attach a face to the name, but it doesn’t accomplish much more than that.
  93. Cheech and Chong's Next Movie
    The lines, like the movie itself, don't scan perfectly, but they are funny in the knowing, cheerfully bigoted way of Cheech and Chong's brand of comedy...Cheech and Chong's Next Movie is casual, slapdash and rude, and it's frequently hilarious in the way of some intense but harmless confrontation between eccentrics on a street corner.
  94. The Road Movie
    The camera offers no protection; it only provides a witness. Fortunately for audiences, it’s more pleasurable to witness anarchy than it is to experience it.
  95. Valley Girl
    The characters and their jargon are occasionally amusing, but there's no action, no conflict, no overwhelming satire and nothing to jolt them out of their lethargy.
  96. Rolling Thunder
    The movie has some good things, but in the way it has been directed by John Flynn it moves so easily and sort of foolishly toward its violent climax that all the tension within Charlie has long since escaped the film.
  97. The Gospel of Eureka
    Favoring the superficial over the substantive, The Gospel of Eureka keeps skirting opportunities to excavate experience.
  98. Emanuel
    The movie is primarily an act of bearing witness that does not ask to be judged on conventional filmmaking terms.
  99. Cities of Last Things
    As the full picture comes into focus, the narrative can tend toward the trite. The chief pleasure of the movie is the 35-millimeter cinematography of Jean Louis Vialard.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dead Ringer
    Uncommonly silly little film, but it is great fun to watch.
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